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"content" : "<div dir=\"ltr\" style=\"text-align:left\"><span style=\"clear:left;color:#0000ee;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"></span><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-W1Tf0HgrUoo/TqX6agpgmyI/AAAAAAAAAWg/jcwv0P2rOLk/s320/IMG_0115.JPG\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"480\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-W1Tf0HgrUoo/TqX6agpgmyI/AAAAAAAAAWg/jcwv0P2rOLk/s640/IMG_0115.JPG\" width=\"640\"></a></div><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cfr8TvbSdpY/TqX6a-pwjKI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uj-NcPs7-M8/s320/IMG_0114.JPG\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"480\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cfr8TvbSdpY/TqX6a-pwjKI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uj-NcPs7-M8/s640/IMG_0114.JPG\" width=\"640\"></a></div><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cfr8TvbSdpY/TqX6a-pwjKI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uj-NcPs7-M8/s1600/IMG_0114.JPG\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><br></a><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cfr8TvbSdpY/TqX6a-pwjKI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uj-NcPs7-M8/s1600/IMG_0114.JPG\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><br></a></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2508512514605530857-7279222850605431439?l=afrch.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Ghana's population explosion",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.22.2/7827?ns=guardian&pageName=Ghana%27s+population+explosion%3AArticle%3A1649960&ch=Global+development&c3=Guardian&c4=Global+development%2CGhana+%28News%29%2CAfrica+%28News%29%2CWorld+news%2CPopulation+%28News%29%2CEnvironment&c5=Unclassified%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CEthical+Living&c6=John+Vidal&c7=11-Oct-21&c8=1649960&c9=Article&c10=Feature&c11=Global+development&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FGlobal+development%2FGhana\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"></div><p>As the world population hits 7 billion, John Vidal returns to the country of his birth to find the midwife who delivered him and to see how Ghana is dealing with a leap from 4 million to more than 25 million people</p><p>Sometime in 1947 or 1948, King Jorbie Akodam Karbo I summoned one of his young unmarried daughters to the palace at <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawra\" title=\"\">Lawra</a>. The all-powerful ruler of the small kingdom in the far north of what is today Ghana, but was then the Gold Coast, told the girl she must go to Accra, the capital of the colony. She was to learn to be a midwife and return to teach others, so helping to prevent the many childbirth deaths that were taking place in the community.</p><p>You can imagine her trepidation at leaving. The journey of around 600 miles south would have taken many days in the weekly post bus. The girl knew no one, none of her family had ever been to a city or seen the sea, and she would have barely seen a car, let alone a white person. She stayed in a boarding house and learned to nurse at the colony's principal hospital, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korle_Bu_Teaching_Hospital\" title=\"\">Korle Bu</a>.</p><p>At around the same time, another young woman, my mother, set off on what was to be an equally adventurous journey, from Liverpool to Accra by boat. My father was to be the last in a long line of West African colonial administrators, and, like the princess, Mum knew no one in Accra. She had barely met a black person, and knew only that the Gold Coast was a dangerous place because of malaria and other tropical illnesses.</p><p>The two women struck up a friendship in January 1949 after my mother, remarkably for the time, chose to give birth not in Accra's private European hospital but at Korle Bu, the public African hospital. Mum never told me the name of her midwife, but used to say I had been born with the help of the "beautiful daughter of the King of Lawra", who "had her teeth filed to sharp points that made me think she was a cannibal". Having me at Korle Bu, she said, was not just an act of faith in the new Africa then emerging with powerful independence movements after the second world war, but also a pragmatic decision. "You got a better standard of care there!" she would say.</p><p>The women never met again. Within a few years, we had moved to Nigeria and the King of Lawra's daughter had left Accra.</p><p>With the <a href=\"http://www.unfpa.org/pds/trends.htm\" title=\"\">world's population officially hitting 7 billion</a> this week, just 12 years after reaching 6 billion, I went back to Accra to try to understand the massive explosion in human numbers that has been largely responsible for Ghana's development since I was born, and that will, for good or else, determine its future. In those 60 years, the world's population has grown by two new Chinas and an India combined; Ghana has doubled and doubled again from around 4 million people to <a href=\"http://ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=202483\" title=\"\">more than 25 million</a>. It is projected to keep growing to around 50 or even 60 million people by 2050.</p><p>How will this small country, which is seen as one of the economic and social success stories of Africa but which is in most parts still desperately poor, cope with twice as many people in just over a generation? Clutching a birth certificate, some old black and white photos of the houses we lived in, a description of the princess with filed teeth who delivered me, and a tourist map, my plan was to find my midwife's family and to trace the roots of Ghana's population explosion through the places that we knew.</p><p>Clearly, the city to which the two women travelled in the late 1940s is unrecognisable today. Accra was then about the size of Stoke or Shrewsbury. Now it sprawls 30 or more miles from the old town centre, throwing up new slums and suburbs every year. A 1948 census estimated 4,113,345 people and 3,035,125 goats in the whole country. There were fewer than 2,500 Europeans and only 84 doctors, of whom just 17 were Gold Coast Africans.</p><p>What hits you hardest, though, is not Accra's size today but the fact that everyone is young. It is rare to meet anyone over 40. Officially, 3% of Ghana's population is over 60, but these are mostly invisible people. In fact, more than one in three people are under 14, and the country is adding nearly 500,000 children a year.</p><p>My questions started at Korle Bu hospital, in 1949 a collection of quite grand, collonaded buildings, these days Ghana's premier teaching hopsital. My old maternity ward is still there, now sponsored by Latex Foam, but most births take place in a purpose-built six-storey baby factory built in the 1960s. A young Accravian mother-to-be now has a choice of giving birth in nearly 20 private and public hospitals and clinics in the city. If the family has $5,000, she can stay in what is effectively a five-star hotel. If poor, as the vast majority are, she may have to share a bed or sleep on the floor at Korle Bu. Every day 35 babies are born there.</p><p>\"That's 12,000 babies a year from this one hospital,\" says Professor Samuel Obed, head of obstetrics and gynaecology, who says that Ghana's population explosion has been a triumph of modern midwifery, prenatal and maternal care. He puts the success down partly to people such as the young princess of Lawra who learned so well how to deliver babies and teach others. \"The vast increase in the number of people in Ghana today is entirely due to the efforts made to stop birth mortalities. I put it down to better education. As more people get a formal education, so they see the need to have proper prenatal care. Many women in the past never went for prenatal care. Now 95% in Ghana do. Back in 1949, it was only available to a very few people.</p><p>"In your mothers's time here, everything was still left to nature. People used to offer a libation or they would pray when they gave birth. You lived or you died in childbirth. It was very risky. A lot of people died. That is why in Ghana new mothers wear white. Birth is seen as a victory.</p><p>\"Your nurse probably came here at a very young age. She would have been one of the first generation of northerners to have a formal education.\"</p><p>The population explosion puts immense strains on the health service, he says, with nearly half the hospital's resources being spent on childbirth and the rest on illnesses related to malaria. "Everything comes down to money. We need to re-equip one operating theatre to take care of caesarean births. We need more nurses... The explosion in numbers is not going to go away. Women are having fewer children, but they are surviving and there are more and more families. It's cultural. If a couple have no children, you will have the in-laws round their necks. Pressure to have children is not going to abate."</p><p>\"Everyone used to have big families in your mother's day,\" says Felicia Darkwah, a retired teacher born in 1926 and typical of the wealthy, land-owning, educated Ghanaians who took over from the British at independence in 1957.</p><p>I met her in the sitting room of 47 Seventh Avenue, the first house we lived in in Accra. Most of the other houses in the street have since been pulled down and rebuilt as embassies, banks or private executive residences. They hide behind high walls and razor wire, are guarded night and day, and can cost as much as anything in Chelsea, London. But number 47 is almost unique. Still owned by the government, its grounds have been divided up for three other houses, but it has barely changed. The rosewood parquet floors are the same but now lifting, the ceiling fans have rusted a bit and been augmented by air conditioning, but the pre-independence bungalow with its tin roof is intact, lived in for the past 24 years by Felicia, her Cambridge-educated <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agronomy\" title=\"\">agronomist</a> husband and two of their children and their families. (One is now a very high-ranking government official who is fearful of being identified.)</p><p>"I am one of 13 children," Felicia says. "That was a small family for the time. My uncle's daughter, Animeh, died the other day and she had 100 children and grandchildren. I've known people with far more."</p><p>There seems to be a rule of thumb among educated Ghanaians that each generation has about half the number of children as their parents. Felicia had five children, and her children have two or three each. \"I don't think anyone needs to bother about the numbers in Ghana as long as we work hard,\" she says. \"We can produce enough food but the speed of growth is difficult.\"</p><p>I show her the pictures of my father's office, a young white man surrounded by more than 50 Africans. "This face looks familiar… and that one," she says.</p><p>Next week the UN will warn that the world population could spiral not to 8 billion or 9 billion people as demographers expected in the 1980s, but to 10 billion, or even 16 billion after 2100 if countries do not control their populations soon. And while it will be the rich whose consumption of goods is likely to destabilise the climate and global food supplies, it will be the very poorest countries of Asia and Africa that will be left to cope with inevitable large-scale environmental degradation, the explosion of slums, pressure on health and education services, and the reality of living in a world without enough food and water for all.</p><p>Of all the continents, Africa will see the greatest changes in the next 40 years – 11 countries in the world have fertility rates above six babies per woman and nine of them are there. Sub-Saharan Africa's population was around 100 million in 1900, 750 million in 2005 and the latest UN projections suggest it will level off at over 2 billion after 2050.</p><p>West Africa will be at the centre of this tidal wave of births. Nearby Nigeria, now with 150 million people, is expected to have 600-725 million before numbers start to tail off in 40 years. And far from reducing fertility rates, some countries', such as Mali's, are still rising.</p><p>Space is not the problem for Ghana or most other African countries. The continent is physically big enough to fit China, India and the US in its boundaries, and it can grow enough food for itself and for others. But a rapid, huge population increase linked to deep poverty in ecologically fragile, nearly landlocked countries such as Chad, Niger, Ethiopia and Mali terrifies planners and <a href=\"http://populationmatters.org/\" title=\"\">demographers</a> the world over.</p><p>In Niger, a few hundred miles east of Ghana, two in three people are under 20, women have an average of more than seven children and only 5% of adults use any form of contraception. If its current growth rate of 3.3% per year remains unchanged, by 2050 it will have 56 million inhabitants, from under 15 million today. It is already one of the poorest countries in the world, it is intensely vulnerable to climate change and is experiencing regular food crises.</p><p>Other west African countries, such as Burkina Faso, traditionally saw their youths migrating to other countries to relieve pressure on environments, but Ghana, growing at less than 2% a year, is much better off, says Marilyn Aniwa, head of the <a href=\"http://www.uaps-uepa.org/home/\" title=\"\">Union for African Population Studies</a>: "Hunger will not be the problem here. Contraception is still not widely used, but the country has land, water and space enough to double in numbers.</p><p>"But population is not about the numbers of children. It's about environment, rapid urbanisation, wellbeing and human rights. These are the areas that have not been addressed in the same way as midwifery and prenatal care. Development has not kept up with the numbers. What has been left behind is the social aspects."</p><p>You can't just pin all the problems on African governments, say demographers. Back in the 1970s, family planning was high on their and western political agendas, but in the 1980s countries such as Ghana were treated by the IMF and Britain as laboratories for enforced economic reforms and debt programmes. Contraception and family-planning programmes, just beginning to have an effect, were sidelined. The free market economy pushed on Africa may have worked for the cocoa farm and gold field owners of Ghana, but there was far less money for health and education. The result was a rapidly growing, ill-educated, fast-breeding generation living in a technically richer but more unequal country where people knew how to save children dying at childbirth but were not able to look after their long-term interests.</p><p>"The danger is that we now revert to how we were 30 or 40 years ago," says Emmanuel Ekaub, a Cameroonian demographer. "Maternal mortality is worsening across Africa again. Poverty is worsening again, and the cities and planners cannot cope."</p><p>Five minutes down the road from 47 Seventh Avenue is 9 Second Circular Road, a brutish two-storey house built by the colonial government in 1950 for my father and his young family. In those days it was exclusively for elites. Nothing changes. Now the road is reserved, it seems, for diplomats, judges, bankers, government ministers and people with £300,000 to spend on an apartment.</p><p>But number 9 stands empty behind a concrete wall. A large tree has grown right outside the front door, the gardens, laid out in the English cottage style of the 1950s, are overgrown, and a high court judge and his daughter live in what were the servants' quarters to the side.</p><p>Number 9 is still owned by the government but it hides a dark secret. No one wants to live there when they hear that, in 1982, it was the scene of Ghana's most notorious political murder. A military junta, led by <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rawlings\" title=\"\">Sergeant Jerry Rawlings</a>, had seized power months earlier and there was a curfew in place, but on the evening of 30 June a death squad called on Cecilia Koranteng-Addo, a high court judge who was living here and, at the time, breastfeeding her baby. She was abducted, along with three others, and their bodies were later found riddled with bullets. The \"enemies of the revolution\", as Rawlings called them, were never caught.</p><p>In fact, number 9 is squatted. Two lads, who call themselves D.Jen and D.Beal from "X-tribe", have stuck their pictures to the wall of the old living room. "Fuck U Mother Fucker" someone has scrawled. There are cigarette butts, bottles of cheap South African wine, and a bedroll and TV in the old cloakroom.</p><p>\"What Ghana's population explosion has done is suck young people into the city,\" says Aniwa. \"They live in kiosks, old shipping containers, anywhere they can find. Some live in incomplete houses. New suburbs and townships like Gbawe, Sowutum amd Ashiaman are sprouting.\"</p><p>\"Urbanisation will inevitably go to another level in the next 20 or 30 years,\" says Delali Badasi, a researcher at the Regional Institute for Population Studies at Accra University. \"The average young person does not want to live in rural areas. They are all leaving to come to the cities. The slums will increase. We can't even house people today. The problem is the speed of change.\"</p><p>Opinions are sharply divided among economists about the advantage of having a younger population and youthful workforce. According to the government, 250,000 young women and men enter the job market every year, but the formal sector is able to employ fewer than 5,000 of them. "A rising population will support local firms and inspire foreign investment, but unless the youth have jobs and social betterment is achieved, the risk of social uprising is profound," says Simon Freemantle, Standard Bank Africa's senior analyst. "There is a real risk of social instability if the disgruntled youth feel left out."</p><p>We had sent a message north to tell King Puowele Karbo III in Lawra that we were trying to track down the family of the young princess who had delivered a white baby back in 1949. But that had been several weeks ago and we had received no reply. So, with a long journey ahead, warnings of bandits and no idea of what would greet us at the other end, we, too, set off in some trepidation.</p><p>It takes at least two days to reach Lawra from Accra. We flew 400 miles to Tamale, found an old banger and a driver, and travelled the last 200 miles along some of the worst roads in Africa, passing the great Bole national park with its elephants and baboons, villages with names such as Tuna and Ya, and shops called The Forgive And Forget Chemical Drug Store. The land is mostly flat and, this being the end of the rainy season, quite green.</p><p>Late in the evening we presented ourselves at the palace, a rambling collection of low buildings, some built underground, a courtyard dominated by two enormous marble graves and several flagpoles. We were greeted by the king's brother, who said he knew we were coming because our car made an unusual sound. We arranged to meet the family the next day.</p><p>When you have an audience with King Karbo, you must bring libations, in this case two bottles of gin. He greeted us from his throne, animal skins strewn at his feet and pictures of his ancestors on the walls. "We believe that we have identified the woman your mother knew," he said. "She was one of the first ladies from the north of Ghana to be sent to Accra for training. My father believed we needed a trained midwife because so many children were dying under the traditional childbirth system. It was a very important mission. The whole community depended on her."</p><p>The concept of children in a place such as Lawra 60 years ago was pretty relaxed. They defined men's social standing, they were needed to increase wealth, they were assets to work the fields and fetch water, but numbers did not matter. A man did not look after them, and no one actually knew how big families were.</p><p>In retrospect, it would seem that King Karbo I, Puowele's father, was on a mission to populate Ghana singlehandedly. When he died in 1967, the family tried to count his offspring. "I did a population census of him in 1970," says the king. "We counted about 70 daughters and 35 sons. He left 39 widows. I could not count them all. Our children are many, and traditionally we don't count them. We don't actually know how many he had – he never counted them. He tried keeping records, but it didn't work."</p><p>Today, says Puowele, children are no longer seen as an asset. He has eight, his brother, an international athlete and recently retired university lecturer, five. \"The trend is downwards. Nowadays the demands [on families] are great. You are in deep shit if you have too many. So you go for quality rather than numbers.\"</p><p>If his father had been responsible for so many births, and his relative had devoted her life to saving children as a midwife, Puowele could be said to have played a major role in Accra's rise from a small town to a megalopolis. He was national director of planning in the city, and devoted a lifetime to trying to control the tide of young people heading to the cities from places such as Lawra.</p><p>"Yes, Accra is a mess," he concedes. "We just could not control the population. We created a green belt, we planned reservoirs to stop flooding, we planned for oil, but the [politicians] refused to implement these things." He and his colleagues even considered building a new capital city to take pressure off Accra. "We looked at Abuja, the purpose-built capital of Nigeria. You can build a city from scratch, but if you do not change behaviour, it will be the same as the old one."</p><p>Lawra survived by traditionally exporting its youths to Accra and the south, to the gold mines and coffee plantations. "Women here still have eight to 10 children, but these days they are living. We are the stubborn ones, who refused to die."</p><p>Even so, Lawra is testament to what happens if people overuse resources and approach their ecological limits as is happening across large parts of west Africa. "Our environment has suffered badly from the pressure of numbers," the king says. "Our natural resources are diminishing. Our forests are being cut down. We can no longer find the herbs we used to use. The river bed is now silting up because we are farming close to the banks of the river. There used to be a gap between the villages, but now they are joining up. We cannot capture rainfall in the increasingly long, dry spells. Climate change is taking place."</p><p>But Lawra's future, he says, is not bleak at all. Like most Ghanaians, he loves children and believes that, if planned better and given a fair wind, the country's burgeoning population will be the key to its future prosperity. "We will have to diversify, yes. We will learn new things. But we are still confident in the future. Lawra will become a city, with all its social problems."</p><p>He turns the conversation back to the princess. "I can tell you she is our auntie. Your mother was very observant to see she had chiselled teeth. Her name is Stella Yeru, or Mrs Kuortibo. She had four children, two of whom are living now. The boy is a tax inspector at Tamale. She filled a void. She paid her dues. She worked in Lawra and all the other big hospitals in the region. She would have trained very many people. It was very rare in those days for a woman to work in public service like her. We can think of no other women like her. She was a pioneer. If you worked under her, you had no place if you were lazy."</p><p>Out of the blue, the king then asked if I would like to meet her. I was flabbergasted. Stella must now be in her mid-80s and I had not expected her still to be alive, let alone there. "But she is very old. She is bedridden and has forgotten everything," he warned.</p><p>We find a very frail old lady lying in her bed on the veranda of the house she had had built just outside the palace walls. She was beautifully, even ceremonially dressed, but was very weak and clearly near the end of her life. Her son, Anthony, had come to be with her.</p><p>I held her hand as her helper told her that I had come from London because she had delivered me at Korle Bu hospital in Accra all those years ago.</p><p>"Yes, I remember the white woman," she said in a thin voice that spoke loudly across the generations.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ghana\">Ghana</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/africa\">Africa</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/population\">Population</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/johnvidal\">John Vidal</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/%7Eah/f/tnjfgs37ucnl649hfpb0neurik/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fglobal-development%2F2011%2Foct%2F21%2Fghana-population-explosion\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"280\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"100%\"></iframe></p>"
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"content" : "Inspired by Samuel Obour’s post The ‘Devil’ on our roads I’ve finally decided to spill the beans on my experience at a Ghanaian driving school. I had never driven a car before but I did go to motorbike training school in the UK and took a test. Much of the advice I was given by [...]<img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=grahamghana.wordpress.com&blog=11949077&post=1467&subd=grahamghana&ref=&feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\">"
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"title" : "“Just Trying to Get Better Cellphone Reception”",
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"content" : "<p>Dear ineffectually disguised intruder, dear<br> close call way out of turn, could you not have<br> thought of a better excuse when the police<br> doing Segway rounds caught you— having just<br> cleared the jutting-out branch of the maple,<br> having just jimmied the second floor front<br> windows of the neighbor, the ones that open<br> into atrium space clear from the balcony above<br> to the floor below? You didn’t know about<br> the thirteen foot drop, the jumble of plants<br> in pots by the door, the sharp cacophony<br> of broken terra cotta. Obviously you<br> had other things in mind— art work<br> in expensive frames on the wall;<br> a bedroom safe, shiny jewelry, small<br> appliances, cash found in a drawer:<br> anything, anything else but <em>that</em>.</p><p>—<a href=\"http://www.luisaigloria.com\">Luisa A. Igloria</a><br> 10 10 2011</p>"
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"title" : "The End of Refrigeration",
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"content" : "\n\n<p>The last refrigerator we had lasted about 20 years. Sometime around year 15 it finally blew out a condenser or a coil or whatever it is that makes refrigerators produce coldness and we paid $400 to have it fixed. <img align=\"right\" style=\"border:1px solid black;margin:20px 20px 15px 30px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/blog_ge_board_0.jpg\">A few years later it broke again and we bought a new one.</p>\n<p>This one broke after eight years. But not because of a condenser or a coil or something comprehensibly structural. The repair guy took about five seconds to diagnose the problem: it stopped working because the \"main board\" blew out. That's it on the right. Now, maybe I'm off base on this because it's been so long, but this looks like a butt simple design to me. One small custom chip, some relays, a transformer, a couple of heat sinks, and a bunch of passive parts. Maybe a build cost of $20-30 or so? But GE's price to me was $250, plus $150 for the 20 minutes it took to pull out the old one and swap in the new one.</p>\n<p>Paying $400 for a big piece of physical gear plus a couple hours of labor didn't bother me. Paying $400 for a primitive circuit board and a few minutes to plug it in does. The repair guy laughed good-naturedly when I mentioned this. \"All the computer guys say the same thing,\" he told me. He even knew what I was going to say about the board before I said it. Our neighborhood is lousy with electrical engineers and other high tech weenies.</p>\n<p>Bottom line: $400 because a $2.02 <a href=\"http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/technologies/electromechanical/relays/power-relays/Pages/3734225-832A-1C-S-12VDC-VDE.aspx\">Song Chuan 832 Series 30 A SPDT 12 VDC Through Hole General Purpose Heavy Duty Power Relay</a> burned out. So here's your economics question for the day: Did I stimulate the economy today? Or this an example of the broken refrigerator fallacy? Or did most of my consumption spending leak out to China? Please phrase your answers in the form of a koan.</p>\n\n<div><a href=\"http://motherjones.com/node/132807#disqus_thread\" title=\"Jump to the comments of this posting.\">Comments</a> | <a href=\"http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/end-refrigeration#dsq-new-post\">Post Comment</a></div><div><span><a href=\"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherjones.com%2Fkevin-drum%2F2011%2F08%2Fend-refrigeration&title=The+End+of+Refrigeration\" title=\"Digg this post on digg.com\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/modules/patched/service_links/images/digg.png\" alt=\"Digg\" title=\"\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></a> </span><span><a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherjones.com%2Fkevin-drum%2F2011%2F08%2Fend-refrigeration&t=The+End+of+Refrigeration\" title=\"Share on Facebook.\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/modules/patched/service_links/images/facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" title=\"\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></a> </span><span><a href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherjones.com%2Fkevin-drum%2F2011%2F08%2Fend-refrigeration&title=The+End+of+Refrigeration\" title=\"Submit this post on reddit.com.\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/modules/patched/service_links/images/reddit.png\" alt=\"Reddit\" title=\"\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></a> </span><span><a href=\"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherjones.com%2Fkevin-drum%2F2011%2F08%2Fend-refrigeration&title=The+End+of+Refrigeration\" title=\"Thumb this up at StumbleUpon\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/modules/patched/service_links/images/stumbleit.png\" alt=\"StumbleUpon\" title=\"\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></a> </span></div>"
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"title" : "A footnote on novel H1N1",
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"content" : "<p>A couple years ago, I wrote a post about the <a href=\"http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353\">H1N1 “swine flu”</a> outbreak, talking a bit about the mechanics of the virus and how it could be hacked. Today I read an <a href=\"http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110728/full/news.2011.447.html\">interesting tidbit in Nature</a> referencing <a href=\"http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6044/850\">this article in Science</a> that is a silver lining on the H1N1 cloud. </p>\n<p>You know how every flu season there’s a new flu vaccine, yet somehow for other diseases you only need to be vaccinated once? It’s because there’s no vaccine that can target all types of flu. Apparently, a patient who contracted “swine flu” during the pandemic created a novel antibody with the remarkable ability to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A. A group of researchers sifted through the white blood cells of the patient and managed to isolate four <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_cell\">B cells</a> that contain the code to produce this antibody. These cells have been cloned and are producing antibodies facilitating further research into a potential broad-spectrum vaccine that could confer broad protection against the flu.</p>\n<p>For some reason I find this really interesting. I think it’s because at a gut level it gives me hope that if a killer virus did arise that wipes out most of humanity, there’s some evidence that maybe a small group of people will survive it. Also, never getting the flu again? Yes, please! On the other hand, this vaccine will be a fun one to observe as it evolves, particularly around the IP and production rights that results from this. Who owns it, and who deserves credit for it? Does the patient that evolved the antibody deserve any credit? What will be the interplay between the researchers, the funding institutions, the health industry and the consumer market? Should/can the final result or process be patented so that ultimately, a corporation is granted a monopoly on the vaccine (maybe there’s already a ruling on this)? Should we administer the resulting vaccine to everyone, risking the forced evolution of a new “superstrain” of flu that could be even deadlier, or should we restrict it only to the old, weak, and young? While these questions have been asked and sometimes answered in other contexts, everyone can relate to suffering through the flu, so perhaps the public debate around such issues will be livelier. </p>"
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"title" : "The Physics of a Sad Balloon",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/upload/2011/08/the_physics_of_a_sad_balloon/sm_balloon_long_ribbon.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"582\" alt=\"sm_balloon_long_ribbon.jpg\">My birthday was two months ago, and SteelyKid's was the weekend before last, so we've had balloons running around the house for a good while now. Meaning that when I came into the library yesterday, I saw the sad little image on the right: a half-deflated Mylar balloon floating at about chest height.</p>\n\n<p>Now, the first thought of a normal person on seeing this would be \"Why didn't we throw this away a while ago?\" My thought, since I've been on a bit of an everyday physics kick for a little while now, was \"Hey, physics!\"</p>\n\n<p>\"What do you mean?,\" you ask. \"What physics is there in the sad balloon? It floats because it's still got some helium in it, making it lighter than air. It's elementary buoyancy-- even SteelyKid probably understands that.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"Ah, I reply, but why is it floating <em>at that height</em>?\" I reply. \"After all, if it was really lighter than air, it should keep going up until it's not lighter than air any more-- until the density of the air outside matches the density of the air inside. But I can assure you that our ceilings are not nearly high enough for the air density to vary appreciably over the height of a first-floor room.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"Hmmm....\" you reply. \"Hey, physics!\"</p>\n\n <a href=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/08/the_physics_of_a_sad_balloon.php\">Read the rest of this post...</a> | <a href=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/08/the_physics_of_a_sad_balloon.php#commentsArea\">Read the comments on this post...</a><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/uncertainprinciples/~4/sRHEcZGINfM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Teju Cole and Nostalgia",
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"content" : "I heart this guy. His next work is non fiction, set in Eko, describing my city. He reads from it in this clip. It is such a powerful and evocative extract I want to get on a plane and return to my country. He has made me so homesick.<div>\n<br></div><div><i>Me I like my country,</i></div><div><i>My country very good o,\n<br></i></div><div><div><i>Everything dey for my country,</i></div><div><i>So let us join hands and make Nigeria greater.</i></div><div><i>\n<br></i></div><div>It was a song we used to sing when I was younger. Do you remember this one?</div><div>\n<br></div><div><i>O eba, O eba,</i></div><div><i>When shall I see dodo </i></div><div><i>Ireti give us food o,</i></div><div><i>When I think of Egusi and Iyan, </i></div><div><i>I will never forget pomo.</i></div><div><i>\n<br></i></div><div>And this one</div><div>\n<br></div><div><i>There are seven rivers in Africa,</i></div><div><i>Nile, Niger, Senegal, Congo, Orange, Limpopo, Zambezi,</i></div><div><i>Azikiwe, Mohammed, Tafawa Balewa</i></div><div><i>White man don take the crown from us. </i></div><div>\n<br></div><div>Anyways, here is the reading that sparked off all this nostalgia.</div>\n<br><iframe width=\"480\" height=\"400\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/b6FtpAhpkZA\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7525024318966536302-8151619793755346119?l=authorsoundsbetterthanwriter.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Against cool stethoscope placement",
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"content" : "<div><div style=\"font-weight:bold\">Objective</div><div>To determine whether the “cool” or circumcervical placement of the stethoscope when not in use is as efficacious as the traditional placement in terms of transfer time to the functional position.<br><br></div></div><div><div style=\"font-weight:bold\">Methods</div><div>Measurement of time taken by 100 health care professionals in each group to transfer stethoscope to functional position.<br><br></div></div><div><div style=\"font-weight:bold\">Results and interpretation</div><div>The cool group was much slower than the traditional group, despite their younger years. This wasted time could translate into a substantial financial burden on Canada's health care system. ...<br><br>Assuming that 80% of these health care practitioners use the cool position and each of them uses his or her stethoscope 20 times on average per day, or 4800 times per year, then the time wasted per year could be as much as 273 869 hours (71.32 х 0.8 х 5200). At an average hourly earning of $75, the annual cost would be approximately $20.5 million. With the current shortage of health care resources, it might be advisable for the respective provincial ministries of health to consider appointing “stethoscope police” to enforce a return to the traditional placement. We do have some concerns, however, that the costs generated by the resultant bureaucracy would negate any positive financial benefit to the health care system.<br></div></div><br>Traditional<br><img src=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC80581/bin/10FF1A.jpg\"><br><br>Cool<br><img src=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC80581/bin/10FF1B.jpg\"><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">--William Hanley and Anthony Hanley, <a href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC80581/?tool=pubmed\">\"The efficacy of stethoscope placement when not in use: traditional versus 'cool',\"</a> Canadian Medical Association Journal. HT: AL</span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8488318894246769506-5159719969410854142?l=jamesjchoi.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "How do you spell ‘Britney Spears’?",
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"content" : "<p><em>I’ve been under the weather for the last couple of weeks, which has prevented me from doing most things, including blogging. Luckily, I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder almost ready to go. I spent a bit of time today finishing it up, and so here it is. A look at the fascinating world of spelling correction for artist names.</em></p>\n<p> <br>\n<a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/britney-spears-google-search-1.png\"><img style=\"margin-right:10px\" title=\"britney spears - Google Search-1\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/britney-spears-google-search-1.png?w=300&h=166\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"166\"></a>In today’s digital music world, you will often look for music by typing an artist name into a search box of your favorite music app. However this becomes a problem if you don’t know how to spell the name of the artist you are looking for. This is probably not much of a problem if you are looking for U2, but it most definitely is a problem if you are looking for Röyksopp, Jamiroquai or <a title=\"Britney Spears misspellings at google\" href=\"http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html\">Britney Spears</a>. To help solve this problem, we can try to identify common misspellings for artists and use these misspellings to help steer you to the artists that you are looking for.</p>\n<p><strong>A spelling corrector in 21 lines of code<br>\n</strong>A good place for us to start is a post by Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) called ’<a href=\"http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html\">How to write a spelling corrector</a>‘ which presents a fully operational spelling corrector in 21 lines of Python. (It is a phenomenal bit of code, worth the time studying it). At the core of Peter’s algorithm is the concept of the <a title=\"wikipedia edit distance\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance\">edit distance </a> which is a way to represent the similarity of two strings by calculating the number of operations (inserts, deletes, replacements and transpositions) needed to transform one string into the other. Peter cites literature that suggests that 80 to 95% of spelling errors are within an edit distance of 1 (meaning that most misspellings are just one insert, delete, replacement or transposition away from the correct word). Not being satisfied with that accuracy, Peter’s algorithm considers all words that are within an edit distance of 2 as candidates for his spelling corrector. For Peter’s small test case (he wrote his system on a plane so he didn’t have lots of data nearby), his corrector covered 98.9% of his test cases.</p>\n<p><strong>Spell checking Britney<br>\n</strong>A few years ago, the smart folks at Google posted a list of<a title=\"britney spears spelling corrections\" href=\"http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html\"> Britney Spears spelling corrections</a> that shows nearly 600 variants on Ms. Spears name collected in three months of Google searches. Perusing the list, you’ll find all sorts of interesting variations such as ‘birtheny spears’ , ‘brinsley spears’ and ‘britain spears’. I suspect that some these queries (like ‘Brandi Spears’) may actually not be for the pop artist. One curiosity in the list is that although there are 600 variations on the spelling of ‘Britney’ there is exactly one way that ‘spears’ is spelled. There’s no ‘speers’ or ‘spheres’, or ‘britany’s beers’ on this list.</p>\n<p>One thing I did notice about Google’s list of Britneys is that there are many variations that seem to be further away from the correct spelling than an edit distance of two at the core of Peter’s algorithm. This means that if you give these variants to Peter’s spelling corrector, it won’t find the proper spelling. Being an empiricist I tried it and found that of the 593 variants of ‘Britney Spears’, 200 were not within an edit distance of two of the proper spelling and would not be correctable. This is not too surprising. Names are traditionally hard to spell, there are many alternative spellings for the name ‘Britney’ that are real names, and many people searching for music artists for the first time may have only heard the name pronounced and have never seen it in its written form.</p>\n<p><strong>Making it better with an artist-oriented spell checker<br>\n</strong>A 33% miss rate for a popular artist’s name seems a bit high, so I thought I’d see if I could improve on this. I have one big advantage that Peter didn’t. I work for a music data company so I can be pretty confident that all the search queries that I see are going to be related to music. Restricting the possible vocabulary to just artist names makes things a whole lot easier. The algorithm couldn’t be simpler. <em>Collect the names of the top 100K most popular artists. For each artist name query, find the artist name with the smallest edit distance to the query and return that name as the best candidate match</em>. This algorithm will let us find the closest matching artist even if it is has an edit distance of more than 2 as we see in Peter’s algorithm. When I run this against the 593 Britney Spears misspellings, I only get one mismatch – ‘brandi spears’ is closer to the artist ‘burning spear’ than it is to ‘Britney Spears’. Considering the naive implementation, the algorithm is fairly fast (40 ms per query on my 2.5 year old laptop, in python).</p>\n<p><strong>Looking at spelling variations<br>\n</strong>With this artist-oriented spelling checker in hand, I decided to take a look at some real artist queries to see what interesting things I could find buried within. I gathered some artist name search queries from the Echo Nest API logs and looked for some interesting patterns (since I’m doing this at home over the weekend, I only looked at the most recent logs which consists of only about 2 million artist name queries).</p>\n<p><strong>Artists with most spelling variations </strong><br>\nNot surprisingly, very popular artists are the most frequently misspelled. It seems that just about every permutation has been made in an attempt to spell these artists.</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Michael Jackson</strong> - <em>Variations</em>: michael jackson, micheal jackson, michel jackson, mickael jackson, mickal jackson, michael jacson, mihceal jackson, mickeljackson, michel jakson, micheal jaskcon, michal jackson, michael jackson by pbtone, mical jachson, micahle jackson, machael jackson, muickael jackson, mikael jackson, miechle jackson, mickel jackson, mickeal jackson, michkeal jackson, michele jakson, micheal jaskson, micheal jasckson, micheal jakson, micheal jackston, micheal jackson just beat, micheal jackson, michal jakson, michaeljackson, michael joseph jackson, michael jayston, michael jakson, michael jackson mania!, michael jackson and friends, michael jackaon, micael jackson, machel jackson, jichael mackson</li>\n<li><strong>Justin Bieber</strong> – <em>Variations</em>: justin bieber, justin beiber, i just got bieber’ed by, justin biber, justin bieber baby, justin beber, justin bebbier, justin beaber, justien beiber, sjustin beiber, justinbieber, justin_bieber, justin. bieber, justin bierber, justin bieber<3 4 ever<3, justin bieber x mstrkrft, justin bieber x, justin bieber and selens gomaz, justin bieber and rascal flats, justin bibar, justin bever, justin beiber baby, justin beeber, justin bebber, justin bebar, justien berbier, justen bever, justebibar, jsustin bieber, jastin bieber, jastin beiber, jasten biber, jasten beber songs, gestin bieber, eiine mainie justin bieber, baby justin bieber,</li>\n<li><strong>Red Hot Chili Peppers</strong> – <em>Variations:</em> red hot chilli peppers, the red hot chili peppers, red hot chilli pipers, red hot chilli pepers, red hot chili, red hot chilly peppers, red hot chili pepers, hot red chili pepers, red hot chilli peppears, redhotchillipeppers, redhotchilipeppers, redhotchilipepers, redhot chili peppers, redhot chili pepers, red not chili peppers, red hot chily papers, red hot chilli peppers greatest hits, red hot chilli pepper, red hot chilli peepers, red hot chilli pappers, red hot chili pepper, red hot chile peppers</li>\n<li><strong>Mumford and Sons</strong> – <em>Variations: </em>mumford and sons, mumford and sons cave, mumford and son, munford and sons, mummford and sons, mumford son, momford and sons, modfod and sons, munfordandsons, munford and son, mumfrund and sons, mumfors and sons, mumford sons, mumford ans sons, mumford and sonns, mumford and songs, mumford and sona, mumford and, mumford &sons, mumfird and sons, mumfadeleord and sons</li>\n<li><strong>Katy Perry - </strong><em>Even an artist with a seemingly very simple name like Katy Perry has numerous variations</em>: katy perry, katie perry, kate perry, kathy perry, katy perry ft.kanye west, katty perry, katy perry i kissed a girl, peacock katy perry, katyperry, katey parey, kety perry, kety peliy, katy pwrry, katy perry-firework, katy perry x, katy perry, katy perris, katy parry, kati perry, kathy pery, katey perry, katey perey, katey peliy, kata perry, kaity perry</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Some other most frequently misspelled artists:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Britney Spears</li>\n<li>Linkin Park</li>\n<li>Arctic Monkeys</li>\n<li>Katy Perry</li>\n<li>Guns N’ Roses</li>\n<li>Nicki Minaj</li>\n</ul>\n<div><strong>Which artists are the easiest to spell?</strong></div>\n<div>Using the same techniques we can look through our search logs and find the popular artists that have the fewest misspelled queries. These are the easiest to spell artists. They include:</div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Muse</li>\n<li>Weezer</li>\n<li>U2</li>\n<li>Oasis</li>\n<li>Moby</li>\n<li>Flyleaf</li>\n<li>Seether</li>\n</ul>\n</div>\n<div><strong>Most confused artists:</strong></div>\n<div><strong></strong>Artists are most easily confused with another include:</div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>byran adams - ryan adams</li>\n<li>Underworld – Uverworld</li>\n</ul>\n<div><strong>Wrapping up</strong></div>\n<div>Spelling correction for artist names is perhaps the least sexiest job in the music industry, nevertheless it is an important part of helping people connect with the music they are looking for. There is a large body of research around <a href=\"http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,30&q=context+sensitive+spelling+correction\">context-sensitive spelling correction</a> that can be used to help solve this problem, but even very simple techniques like those described here can go along way to helping you figure out what someone really wants when they search for ‘Jastan Beebar’.</div>\n</div>\n<br> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/3419/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=musicmachinery.com&blog=6500426&post=3419&subd=musicmachinery&ref=&feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p></p><p><strong>I. A Terribly Attractive Man</strong></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979853714\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/qaddafi_small_web-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Muammar Qaddafi\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I probably first heard the name Qaddafi on the radio, from NPR, an always present background noise in my childhood. But the name only acquired meaning when I heard it uttered by my Great Aunt in a stage whisper to my mother: “That Mr. Qaddafi is terribly attractive!” She hissed, more than once. The A’s in Mr. Qaddafi’s name were flattened as with Sir John Gielgud intoning, “Mr. Gandhi.” My Great Aunt was well over six feet tall, a raven-haired beauty in her day, and a force to be reckoned with at all times. I imagine her commenting on the physical loveliness of Mr. Qaddafi while running her hand along her pearls, her dark eyes flashing naughtily, her lower jaw jutting out to make an emphatic point in her native lockjaw. I must have been around ten years old, and she in her lower seventies. The fact that such whispered pronouncements were not meant for my ears, though fully audible, was brought home to me by the many unsuitable stories she liked to tell my mother at that same volume. Most memorable of these was a lengthy narrative from her youth about being greeted by a surly abortionist clad in a bloodstained apron after climbing a narrow tenement staircase in New York when she sought to terminate an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Sitting a few feet away with a book opened in my lap, I always pretended to read as she stage-whispered one startling story after the next on winter’s evenings when we went to dine at her house.</p>\n<p>Over the years I paid little attention to Qaddafi though his name gained additional accretions of meaning in my mental inventory. He was not just terribly attractive, but was also the insane dictator who harbors terrorists, sleeps in a tent, and wraps himself in flamboyant robes. It was not until the current uprising began that I began to pay closer attention– already an Egyptian revolution addict, I was sprawled on my voyeur’s divan hoping for another drama to unfold that would be just as thrilling and edifying as Egypt. As things began to go poorly, and as the situation became more confusing and our Peacemaker-in-Chief began to play drone video games with the Qaddafis, I started to look for more information about Libya. The tweets and articles of Libyan author Hisham Matar were compelling, and I ordered his 2006 novel <em>In the Country of Men</em>. </p>\n<p>Thence began one of the most difficult reading experiences I have undertaken in a long time. <em>In the Country of Men</em> is beautifully written, spare and precise, and it does the novel a great disservice to speak of it as merely a source text for insight into the Qaddafi regime and the history undergirding the current situation in Libya. But the portrait painted of the pervasive and chilling influence of a powerful dictator is disturbing beyond belief and does much to dispel the <em>opera buffa</em> caricatures of Qaddafi in the Western media. This is, indirectly, and through the eyes of a narrator looking back on his childhood, a portrait of how a shrewd and powerful man managed to effectively infiltrate the homes, families and consciousnesses of his people so effectively that he was capable of shattering family units, neighborhoods, communities. </p>\n<p>Two scenes stand out. One, in which the narrator, a child, watches the interrogation of a family friend and neighbor that <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979869644\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/hisham-matar_web-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Hisham Matar\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>is being televised. As with most transmissions on Libyan state TV, this program is bracketed by static images of pink flowers. Brutality nests in a soothing field of blossoms. It is said, the narrator observes, that the Guide has his own controls of the broadcasting system, and can switch on and off the images that his people see in their living rooms. The other scene features a phone call. There are more often than not, it seems, people listening in on phone conversations. But they are not merely mutely recording calls. They sometimes interfere, speak up, persuade. During one conversation between the narrator and a comrade of his father’s, a third voice insinuates itself into the conversation making remarks about the beauty of the narrator’s mother and asking questions about her alcoholism. These are just two of many examples of how the regime tampers with the lives and mental health of its citizens. This psychological control seems almost more devastating than the aggressive brutality of the state. Almost, but not quite. State TV also broadcasts executions of ‘traitors’ of the regime. Haplessly sitting in one’s living room, one can suddenly be subjected to the sight of a physically tortured human hanging to death while a stadium-full of people cheers its support. </p>\n<p>It took me months to read this short novel because I could not bear the narrative tension. The way in which the story unfurled, the family unit disintegrated, and the state became more powerful than ever felt inevitable but worth avoiding as a reader. The palpable psychological control of Qaddafi’s regime makes one experience the suffocation and dismantling of the characters in a most uncomfortable fashion. This is the man that NATO is ineffectually attempting to take out, that rebels have shown great bravery in attacking. He is not a clown in a tent, he is a military mastermind in a bunker. There’s no doubt that he planned for, even expected the current turn of events. After reading <em>In the Country of Men</em>, it’s hard not to wish for his annihilation. And yet.</p>\n<p><strong>II. A Missed Opportunity</strong></p>\n<p>As a child, I was often seated at dinner parties next to an elderly gentleman with whom most other guests did not wish to converse. It was clear that he, a bit dull, and I, a child, were being pushed off into corner dead spaces so as not to ruin the flow of conversation. This gentleman was married to a younger woman whose sparkling wit and snappy repartee were a must at any smart dinner table. And thus her husband had to be tolerated. In anticipation of this recurring arrangement, my mother began to coach me in the car rides to dinner: “He enjoys history. Ask him what his favorite historical event was.” “He likes to play golf, ask him how is day on the course went.” I don’t remember his responses, or even if I got up the courage to ask him any of these questions. Last month, on the death of his wife (he had died years before), I learned from her obituary that he had been a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. This fact would have meant nothing to me at the time, but now I felt confronted with an enormous missed opportunity. I have so many questions for him now.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979214527\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/zia_herring_web-296x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Pas de Deux\" width=\"296\" height=\"300\"></a>When recently reading Mohammed Hanif’s <em>A Case of Exploding Mangoes</em>, I could not help but wonder if guests at the American Embassy’s terrible barbecue that the author imagines so vividly now sigh over the opportunities they missed by avoiding chatting with that crashing bore Osama bin Laden. In Hanif’s telling, bin Laden is a maladroit guest who lists about unsuccessfully trying to strike up conversations with important people. He is a teetotaling version of Peter Sellers in <em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063415/\">The Party</a></em>, with the dénouement of his role in this particular party occurring many years later and extra-textually. </p>\n<p>History is rife with Frankensteinian examples of the United States going to spectacular lengths to destroy the monsters it has gone to spectacular lengths to create. While bin Laden was one such monster, General Zia, the central focus of <em>Mangoes</em>, appears not to have been, to the discredit of our government. Zia, the planter of many ghastly seeds that continue to bear fruit to this day (among these fruits, the system which was able so handily to harbor Mr. bin Laden in his twilight years), Hanif weaves a <em>Murder on the Orient Express</em>-like web of motivations for the assassination of Zia, wherein the actual crashing of the aircraft that carried him was merely one of many knife-thrusts to his by then barely beating heart. None of his would-be assassins is American, however, and Very Important Americans go down with him when his plane crashes.<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979213931\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/hanif_hatchet-298x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Mohammed Hanif as a lad\" width=\"298\" height=\"300\"></a> Indeed, Zia is even infested by an internal army of tapeworms that could conceivably have taken him down. The godly stature of dictators lends them a very real air of immortality it seems, and their Rasputinish ability to escape death adds to the mythos that surrounds their persons. General Pervez Musharraf, for example, happily trots out story after story of his own nine lives in his memoir.</p>\n<p>In Maria Vargas Llosa’s <em>The Feast of the Goat</em>, it takes a carload of assassins, each of whom harbors a hair-raising revenge motive, to gun down General Trujillo as he drives to an evening’s assignation. The assassins are backed not only by the United States and the Catholic church but also by members of Trujillo’s own inner circle. The car, the driver, and the General are riddled with bullets, but Vargas Llosa has also imagined Trujillo as afflicted with prostate problems and impotence, conditions which are destroying his ability to satisfy his legendary libido. The truly awful dénouement, which is not his assassination, is a rape and deflowering by the impotent dictator of a young girl, offered up to him by an out-of-favor vassal. Vargas Llosa seems to imagine this moment as both a tribute to Trujillo’s numerous sexual victims and a metaphor for the way in which the old man was able to continue to screw over his people long after his real power was gone. </p>\n<p><strong>III. A Brand New Kind of Poetry\t</strong></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979772368\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/pinochet-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Augusto Pinochet\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>It is the peculiar challenge faced by the artist that he must continually come up with ideas that are wholly new and original. Yet once he is successful, he must also conform to expectations of his distinctive imprimatur. One of the dangers of fame, my father always likes to say, is that you can end up ‘doing yourself,’ by which he means that artists cursed with fame and renown run the risk of feeding public expectations by producing art that is imitative of their own most successful works. With fame, the works of Joe Smith become Joe Smithesque, pastiches of that Joe Smith style we’ve all come to know and love. </p>\n<p>A similar challenge is faced by torturers. How to be creative enough to extract new information from detainees? To truly break a person’s spirit? What if the victim is jaded? Has seen and heard it all? What if he is even desensitized to torture? And furthermore, to combine these two propositions, how does a novelist write about torture in a manner that is uniquely horrifying but not the stuff of horror films? How does a creative writer create a creative torturer that shakes his complacent reader to the core but does not cause that reader to drop the book in revulsion? There will be humiliation, physical pain, rows of instruments, dark fetid chambers covered with disturbing stains. Some regimes will have particular trademark features to their torture regimens: ‘the chair,’ ‘the clamps,’ etc. As with the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one’s initial horrified reaction can become dulled and desensitized. It’s natural to push our reaction to a psychologically acceptable position where we will not be in a position to feel tormented by disturbing information. </p>\n<p>In succession I read <em>A Case of Exploding Mangoes, In the Country of Men, The Feast of the Goat</em>. Each one featured at least a modicum of torture. <em>The Feast of the Goat</em> featured a whole lot of torture. Just about enough torture to make it tortuous to read about the torture. I recall reading somewhere (Wikipedia, perhaps?) that Vargas Llosa included a great deal of realistic torture in his novel about Trujillo as an antidote to the tendency among Latin American fabulists to use magical realism to discuss the excesses of dictatorial regimes. Vargas Llosa chose instead to use regular realism to discuss these things. The result is both disturbing and strangely dull; there’s just a touch of Human Rights Watch report about the pacing of the narrative. Virtually every assassin and conspirator implicated in the murder of Trujillo is hunted down, incarcerated and tortured. Each torture is documented, as is each death. The narrative is part fiction and part accounting. It eventually wears thin, though the novel clearly serves a particular purpose that has nothing to do with creative work.</p>\n<p>I later, on the advice of a friend who learned I was reading lots of novels about torture, read a slim novel by Naguib Mahfouz called <em>Karnak Café</em>. The novel concerns the habitués of a cafe in Cairo under the regime of Nasser. The narrator observes the slow crumbling of a social circle of young students as they are imprisoned, tortured and released in several rounds of purges of ‘enemies’ of the revolution. Eventually the social circle, reduced in its numbers, is reconstituted, the bonds between its members badly damaged. One day the man who has tortured them all, their direct torturer, appears in the cafe himself. In the interim, he too has been arrested and tortured. He is no longer part of the regime; through experience, he has become one of them. They are jaded, all of them, and they accept him with a strange equanimity. An encounter that one might imagine to be fraught and horrifying feels almost flat.</p>\n<p>The strange flatness of affect in parts of <em>The Feast of the Goat</em> and <em>Karnak Café</em> make the not magical realism but certainly<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapata/5979771862\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/bolano-300x297.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Roberto Bolaño\" width=\"300\" height=\"297\"></a> not conventional realism of Roberto Bolaño an excellent antidote. In Bolaño’s short novel <em>Distant Star</em> set during the beginning of the Pinochet regime in Chile, a character appears in a group of young poets who promises that he will totally change the nature of Chilean poetry. [Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD] The character turns out to be a bright young regime apparatchik and torturer whose wholly original poetic interventions include arresting most of the poets, murdering the most attractive women poets, sky-writing portions of <em>Genesis</em> in Latin for admiring crowds of fascist regime supporters, and creating an installation of photographs and poems documenting his torture and murder of women poets. Bolaño’s off-the-wall imagining of a revolutionary poet who uses torture and death as his art perfectly captures the torturer’s conundrum by marrying it to the conundrum of the writer or artist. How to create a signature style that is utterly new yet clearly one’s own? 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"title" : "Recipe #85: Ghana's famous "red-red"",
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"content" : "Any visitor to Ghana will likely be introduced to one of the recipes most popular with foreigners: "red-red," the name of an (appropriately) red stew, served with ripe plantains, aka "red plantains." The "red" also refers to the (red) palm oil used to prepare the stew. Because I'm quite fond of tomatoes, I use tomato paste in mine, which further enhances its color. "Red-red" (don't you love the"
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"title" : "The Township That Is My City",
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:justify\">Small and cramped. Nestled in the plains that have become farcical industry and stagnant development. Houses and factories, shops and public latrines all intertwined in a regrettable mix sprawling for miles and miles... or kilometers if you will. </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span><br></span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span>Organised and disorderly. Haphazardly </span>scattered on even and slanted surfaces; on hills and in valleys, securely nestled on vast plains and annually sinking in secluded swamps. No space too small, no area to cramped. </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><br></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Home is where it can be put up before the Assembly is aware in the township that is my city.</div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><br></div><div><br></div>"
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"title" : "The madness of crowds: Kate Middleton’s dress",
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"content" : "<p>What psychologists term the “availability error” is prominent in so many different forms throughout our mental life that it’s debatable whether this constitutes a form of delusion at all. Still, some examples are so egregious that unpicking them may help us in the general direction of better mental hygiene.</p>\n<p>A few weeks ago a serviceably pretty young woman went to a big ugly house to meet a handsome man who happens to be the president of America, and his mildly steatopygic wife. For the occasion, the young woman slipped on a fairly nondescript dress. In due course, when photographs of this prettyish woman wearing said dress appeared in the papers, there was a frenzy as thousands upon thousands of crazed punters attempted to log on to the website of the British high-street label Reiss to buy it.</p>\n<p>Put simply, the availability error consists in judging by the first thing that comes to mind; in this case, we can summarise the thought processes of the wannabe Reiss-buyers thus: Kate Middleton is wearing that dress and looks good, therefore if I put on that dress I will look good as well. We could elaborate, because undoubtedly there is a further murkier tier to such unreasoning: Kate is wearing that dress, therefore, if I wear that dress, one day I will be queen of England (as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Bongo-Bongo Land, etc), hobnob with the Obamas, wear diamonds the size of pigeons’ eggs – and so on.</p>\n<p>A variation of the availability error that I’ve discussed in this column before, in connection with my propensity – or otherwise – for urinating into the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, is the halo effect. The halo effect implies that if one person has a single, very obvious, characteristic, the rest of his or her attributes are invariably perceived in the light of it. This is why – despite all evidence to the contrary – good-looking people are often viewed as sagacious, amusing, possessed of phenomenal ball control, and so forth.</p>\n<p>Ms Middleton is no film-star beauty, nor has she ever done anything in her short life worthy of note save part her thighs for the heir to the throne, then marry him. Be that as it may; paradoxically, her approachable, girl-next-door vibe becomes incorporated into her halo, so that potential dress-buyers formulate syllogisms of this sort: “All girl-next-door types wear mid-range fashion labels, Kate Middleton is wearing a mid-range fashion label, therefore Kate Middleton is a girl next door.” This conclusion won’t necessarily sell that many £175 Shola dresses (the Reiss design that Middleton wore to meet the Obamas), but it will, of course, sell the object – the Windsors – to their subjects, at a time when the populace might well resent the spectacle of hereditary multibillionaires lording it over them without even minimal concessions to such coalition virtues as choice and fairness.</p>\n<p>The use of the availability error and the halo effect by advertisers is nothing new – when I was a kid, there was a scare to the effect that big corporations were pushing their product by inserting subliminal imagery into feature films. The rumour was that, for a split second during some parched scene of Lawrence of Arabia or another, an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola was flashed up on screen, ensuring that, come the intermission (remember them?) everyone would rush to the foyer and begin guzzling down the sinister sarsaparilla.</p>\n<p>In fact, most advertisers have no need for such subterfuge – they can openly supply the imagery and we will subliminally influence ourselves. Thus shampoos provoke orgasms, mobile phones collapse cities like packs of cards and cars . . . Well, cars morph into just about everything imaginable and then chomp up the road. Do I believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with this? Yes, I think there may be.</p>\n<p>Take Chinese Elvis. He runs a not terribly successful restaurant on the Old Kent Road, and once or twice during the evening’s sittings he emerges from the kitchen dressed as the King to sing “Suspicious Minds” or “Heartbreak Hotel”. He doesn’t look a bit like Elvis, and he certainly doesn’t sound like him, but such is the potency of the late rock monarch’s halo effect that, even years after his death, it can still garrotte the unsuspecting. In fairness to Chinese Elvis, he’s only helping to sell his food – which isn’t too bad – but it remains a bizarre aspect of contemporary commerce that stuff can now be sold not only by the famous, but also by their impersonators – and how mad is that?</p>"
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"title" : "King of Kelewele: Recipe #53",
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"content" : "Today is my son-in-law's first official Father's Day (his Kumiwah is 3+ months old), and this post is dedicated to him. <br>I have frequently mentioned my own love of kelewele, a wonderful Ghanaian snack. Koranteng, however, is a a real kelewele connoisseur. The international wedding quilt we assembled for him and Abena in 2005 included a square from Ghana featuring his beloved plantain favorite."
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"title" : "The Origins of Money: 1. Cows and Shells",
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"content" : "<p>BBC Radio 3 talk by me (15 minutes) 13 June 2011, 22: 45</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011vh2c\">Listen here</a></p>\n<p>The written text may be found below, but look at this description by the producer:</p>\n<p>“Money. You don’t know where it’s been,<br>\nBut you put it where your mouth is.<br>\nAnd it talks.” (Money, by Dana Gioia)</p>\n<p>The history of money stretches back some 11,000 years. There have been certain key moments in its development and each essay tells their story and the resonance that these revolutionary blips have had ever since.</p>\n<p>1. Cows – round about 9,000BC cattle were first domesticated. Soon after they became units of exchange and thus the idea of money was born: cows became cash on legs. And they still are – in certain parts of Africa commodities (especially brides) are priced in cows. Professor Keith Hart explores the early examples of money as part of an economy of living persons and things.</p>\n<p>In the rest of the series, Essayists explore: the emergence of the very first banks; the setting of inter-regional and international standards; how the very first coins helped also foster abstract thought; and the appearance of the first forms of paper money in ancient China.</p>\n<p>Series Producer: Paul Kobrak.</p>\n<p>This was written before I was commissioned to write the essay, but I could not shake Paul from his belief that contemporary practices in Africa and the Pacific are evidence of the early history of money nor that money is a commodity whose origins lie in barter. It means that a century of academic ethnography has not dislodged the ideology of unilinear evolution. I tried to insert more about the contemporary crisis of the money system, but this was excised. The line in every sense had to be maintained. I still managed to keep some of the message in what I read and the notion of “an economy of living persons and things” was added to the notice. But if ever evidence were needed of anthropologists’ collective failure to dispel the idea of “primitive” money from the public imagination, this is it. And why would they listen to us if we refuse to engage with questions of world history?<span></span></p>\n<p><strong>Cows and shells</strong></p>\n<p>As soon as I was old enough, I was given three pence a week pocket money. I was a regular customer at Mrs. Hewitt’s sweet shop. She reserved my favourites for me and sometimes gave me extra measure. When she sold the shop, she introduced her regulars to the new owner. “This is Keith and he likes wine gums, pear drops and liquorice allsorts.” It was a time of rationing, following the Second World War. So, in addition to my three pence, which bought two ounces of sweets, I handed over a coupon entitling the bearer to that quantity. One day when I was five, my mother announced that sugar rationing was over. From now on, people could buy as many sweets as they liked. I rushed to Mrs. Hewitt’s and ordered sweets up to the limit of my imagination, three bags of two ounces each. “That will be nine pence, please.” “But I only have three pence. They said you could now have as much as you like.” “Well, you need the money too.” And that is how I learned the bitter lesson that money, at least the stuff I grew up with, is also a rationing device. Markets are democratically open to anybody. All you need is the money.</p>\n<p>Since then, I’ve been obsessed with getting to know what money really is and how to get round its restrictions. I became an anthropologist in part to explore alternatives to the money system. But why would we be interested in the origins of money today? Because it is changing dramatically before our eyes. If money is the ground on which we stand, the financial shocks of the last three years have vividly brought home how shaky that foundation is. The physical substance of money is giving way to bits whizzing around cyberspace; personal credit is now available on terms that were unimaginable a few years ago; and we read about vast sums of money being created and disappearing overnight. So what is happening to money? Where did it come from and where is it going? Here I will look at some things that have been described as “primitive money” and are still in use: cows in Africa and shells in Melanesia. They don’t tell us where our money comes from, but they do help us gain a broader understanding of what money is and what it does.</p>\n<p>*****</p>\n<p>But of course we all know where money came from. Our remote ancestors started swapping things they had too much of and others wanted. But it wasn’t always easy to find someone who wanted what you had and had what you wanted. For many natural products, the timing of supply and demand does not coincide. So some objects became valued as tokens to hold for use in future exchanges. It might be salt or ox-hides, but especially precious metals. Gold, silver and copper were scarce, attractive, useful, durable, portable and divisible. Barter’s limitations were lifted as soon as sellers would accept these money tokens, knowing that they could use them later. The money stuff succeeded because it was the supreme barter item, valued not only as a commodity, but also as a means of exchange.</p>\n<p>All this is a myth of course, but what does it tell us? It tells us that money is a real thing and a scarce commodity. That it is more efficient and originated in barter. When Adam Smith first told this story, he claimed that the “Wealth of Nations” resulted from the slow working out of a deep-seated propensity in human nature, “to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another”. He went on,</p>\n<p>“It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.”</p>\n<p>At least Smith acknowledged a degree of social complexity in these transactions: the idea of contract, private property (mine and yours) and equivalence (fairness), none of which could plausibly be traced to the non-human world. His latter-day successors have not shown similar modesty, routinely claiming that behaviour in Wall Street is driven by impulses that are not just eternally human, but shared with the animals too, or at least the primates. Listen to Nicholas Dunbar in his book, <em>Inventing Money</em>:</p>\n<p>“In chimpanzee communities, individuals exchange gifts (such as fruit or sexual favours) within a group to cement alliances, and punish those who attempt to cheat on such mutually beneficial relationships. Anthropologists believe that early humans started trading in much the same way. The word they use to describe this behaviour is ‘reciprocity’ and our personal relationships work on this basis.”</p>\n<p>That’s quite a lot of metaphysics piled onto the observation that chimps sometimes pleasure each other and pass on the odd bit of fruit. Two claims are being made here: that private property is natural, therefore inevitable; and that it underpins most other important things in our lives. Adam Smith seems almost cautious in comparison.</p>\n<p>*****</p>\n<p>The first time I arrived in the market square of a West African village, I saw four beefy men dragging a young woman by the hair, kicking and screaming. “It’s alright”, said my companion, “they’re just her brothers”. She was married to an old man with many wives, a major political figure; she had run away several times with her lover; the old man demanded his bride-wealth back – the standard payment of four cows to his wife’s lineage; but her brothers had already spent the cows on a marriage and they didn’t want to break their alliance with him; so this was a public affirmation of their commitment to the marriage.</p>\n<p>Modern capitalist economies base the accumulation of wealth on production of inanimate things for sale. Traditional African economies had as their object the production of human life. So cattle were used to secure the reproduction of kin groups through marriage. When Europeans first saw women being exchanged for cows, they thought they were being bought. In fact, bride-wealth consists of animal tokens whose payment secures the marriage and allows the recipients to find another woman to replace the one they had lost. They are rationing coupons more than money. The power of this custom is still strong, even in South Africa, where it is known as <em>lobola</em>. The growing African middle class there, when choosing between an expensive marriage payment and the purchase of a new house or car, often opt for the former, even though it places them in substantial debt. Of course, throughout Africa today, cash payments are often substituted for transfers of livestock.</p>\n<p>In these societies, animals were traditionally the main means of saving and accumulation. The word for interest is sometimes “water” on the analogy of a loan of cattle. If a cow has offspring while on loan, the borrower, when returning its mother, kept the calf as a reward for having watered them. Note that the interest was paid to the borrower who did the work! Cattle are thus a source of increase, a store of wealth and a means of payment in marriage and for other large debts. They are not a standard of value or a medium of exchange, since very little can be measured by them or exchanged for them. Most people are reluctant to sell them just for cash, much as we would prefer to replace a car with another one rather than sell it to pay our debts.</p>\n<p>In recent decades, the fastest-growing sector of world trade has been in services such as entertainment, education, media, software and information. This trend makes the economy more about what people do for each other (services) than the physical objects that make up their material livelihood. After early industrialization, the predominant focus of the world economy is reverting to the development of human beings. We have a lot to learn from the human economies of Africa, where people always had priority over things and cows still have some, if not all of the properties of modern money.</p>\n<p>*****</p>\n<p>As an anthropologist, I have been inspired by a famous exchange after the First World War between the founders of modern anthropology in Britain and France concerning whether shell valuables circulating in Melanesia were money or not. The basic positions on “primitive money” have never been expressed more clearly. Bronislaw Malinowski published <em>Argonauts of the Western Pacific</em> in 1922, when the year’s hit movie was <em>Nanook of the North</em>, a tale of Eskimo resilience in the face of a harsh environment. After the slaughter of the trenches, the old imperialist story about “our” mission to civilize “them” lay in tatters. So, when Malinowski produced his account of native adventurers, heirs to the tradition of noble heroes, his story found a receptive audience.</p>\n<p>The <em>kula</em> ring of the Trobriand Islanders and their neighbours provided an allegory of the world economy. Here was a civilization spread across many small islands, each incapable of providing a decent livelihood by itself, that relied on international trade mediated by the exchange of precious ornaments. There were no states, money or capitalists and, instead of buying cheap and selling dear, the trade was sustained by an ethic of generosity. <em>Homo economicus </em>was not only absent, but upstaged by comparison, revealed as a shabby and narrow-minded successor to a world the West had lost.</p>\n<p>Malinowski was adamant that <em>kula</em> valuables – arm-shells and necklaces circulating in opposite directions — were <em>not</em> money in that they did not function as a medium of exchange and standard of value. But his French contemporary Marcel Mauss, in his celebrated essay, <em>The Gift</em>, held out for a broader approach:</p>\n<p>“On this reasoning…there has only been money when precious things…have been really made into currency – namely have been inscribed and impersonalized, and detached from any relationship with any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state that mints them… One only defines in this way a second type of money — our own”.</p>\n<p>Mauss believed that the limits of society must be extended to become ever more inclusive. Society has to be made and remade, sometimes from scratch. On a diplomatic mission or a first date, we give prsents. The<em> kula</em> valuables enable inter-island exchange by forming partnerships between the persons who guarantee the peace. For Mauss this made them a kind of money, if not of the impersonal kind we are familiar with. Heroic gift-exchange is designed to push the limits of society outwards. No society is ever economically self-sufficient. In addition to setting social limits at the local level, a community must also extend its reach abroad. This is why money in some form and the markets it makes possible are universal.</p>\n<p>Now money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas in fact it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. As a token of society, it must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but highly variable. The <em>kula</em> canoe expeditions were dangerous and magical because their crews were temporarily outside the realm of normal society. Neoliberal globalization and the digital revolution in communications have led to a rapid expansion of money and markets in recent decades. Society has been extended beyond its national limits, becoming more unequal and more unstable in the process. Reliance on the pound sterling and the barter myth of money’s origins will not help us find solutions. We need to rethink what money is for and what we might do with it. Other traditions, such as those of Africa and the Pacific, may show us how to make any future economy more human.</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:left\"><p> <a href=\"http://twitter.com/home/?status=The+Origins+of+Money%3A+1.+Cows+and+Shells+http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2F3c2v6dr\" title=\"Post to Twitter\"><img src=\"http://thememorybank.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/en/twitter/tt-twitter.png\" alt=\"Post to Twitter\"></a> <a href=\"http://twitter.com/home/?status=The+Origins+of+Money%3A+1.+Cows+and+Shells+http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2F3c2v6dr\" title=\"Post to Twitter\">Tweet This Post</a></p></div>"
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"content" : "<p>I assume they have all read the same book, because they use the same outline, start-up CEOs I mean. It has two parts. The opening, and the gonna have a revolution bit.</p>\n<p>First the prolog:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Open with how grateful you are for the ideas and help the host (and/or the most powerful people in room) provided in starting your firm. But, don’t explain why. Leave that a mystery to hook your audience. Set the hook “i’ll get back to that.” Note how this reframes the usual thanks to the host for inviting you. Note you don’t need to know these people, but you should have done your homework and be familiar with their ideas, papers, books, failures and achievements – certainly there is something in there you can use.</li>\n<li>Introduce your founding myth. The characters in the founding myth should be drawn from a sacred category, e.g. mom, family, your tribe, citizens, the profession of your audience. Populism can work. Customers is kind of a weak form populism. Nine times out of ten these stories seem to involve a mention of family. The pain the product resolves is introduced here, as felt by this representative of sacred/worthy group. This works for a few reasons. First off banishment from home is the usual kick off of any fairy tale: so this make your audience comfortable. Secondly it draws our their empathy, everybody cares about mom. It also makes you out to be a caring person so the audience begins to identify with you.</li>\n<li>Introduce the broad themes of value generation. It’s good if at this point you can begin to introduce yourself as the agent of resolving the problem previously introduced. Your frustration at being unable to aid those in need. This is becomes the quest in the classic story template.</li>\n<li>Start to tempt the audience. Letting them glimpse the solution. Letting them glimpse an artifact or a prototype at this point can be good, but don’t show it to them! This creates an appetite; which if can heighten by delay. This might be a mistake if overplayed, I’ve noticed audiences that stop listening as they attempt to catch a glimpse of the hidden product.</li>\n<li>Finally notch up the frustration at lack of resolution both for you as hero, and for your homie.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>That end’s the prolog. Now this is a VC funded start-up; so we need a industry game changing story. That prolog doesn’t provide that. In a story telling frame you now want to introduce the evil king (current industry structure) and how your firms innovative addition is going be the revolution. At this point we are shifting out of the fairy tale frame and into revolutionary group forming. You want to create in the audience a desire to join the revolution.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tell story of current industry structure. This structure must frustrate, bewilder, and/or anger you – our hero. Done right you will not need to say it, but your audience will see how the glimpses of a solution you gave before foreshadow the resolution of these issues. At this point you must have quantitative data; at least charts. Trend lines, preferably exponential, illustrating how it is only going to get worse. A bit of casual social science about why it’s in the culture of the evil kings is good at this point.</li>\n<li>This, or just after the next step, is a good point to resolve the quesiton of what you learned from your those powerful people in the room, it shouldn’t be the whole answer – it should be an addition to the core.</li>\n<li>Now you can finally reveal the solution, but though not the demo or the prototype. You can and probably should be rational, and quantitative.</li>\n<li>Now double the bet. Make it clear that the pain your addressing is felt so widely that there is broad demand for a new paradigm. Clarify why your solution enables it.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>That fits most of the stories I’ve heard. Occasionally there is another element. Notice how that story is buyer facing; but it is good if you have additional bit that talks about how you have unique supply side advantages. The lamest form of this is a single patent or research result. In the story telling metaphor this is part where our hero picks up his band of uniquely talented buddies – the brother who can swallow the sea, the cat that talks, the cloak of invisibility. Weaving these into the story is tricky. Too much too early and the audience figures out what your doing too soon – which leads to their minds wandering and then they make up objections. But it’s cool if you can get them into the story early and the mystery of how your going to use that cofounder, or that unusual technology can suddenly become clear as you reveal your answer. The other reason to get your supply side advantages into the narrative is so you can have charts that show how this revolution is inevitable and timely.</p>\n<p>Timely is good because it answers the objection – why hasn’t anybody done this before? Inevitable is good because it creates urgency to move now; before the revolution/wave – and it’s wealth generating power – breaks.</p>\n<p>That framing is another standard framework. You want to get a population (this industry) to move you build them a golden bridge (your solution) and set fire to their village. You need to make clear that the problem your solving scales up to being so serious and widespread that the industry is soon going to be on fire.</p>\n<p>I was surprised at first that nobody every goes back and explains how their Mom has now been made happy. But that’s actually obvious, this is a start-up and the story’s not over yet.</p>"
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"title" : "gil scott-heron ronald reagan and john wayne - b movie deadwood culture",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\t\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5772948418/\" title=\"gil scott-heron ronald reagan and john wayne - b movie deadwood culture\"><img src=\"http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2025/5772948418_a93c6d825e_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"178\" alt=\"gil scott-heron ronald reagan and john wayne - b movie deadwood culture\"></a></p>\n\n<p>My favourite urban griot, Gil Scott-Heron, is sorely missed. Here we find him in peak satire mode in the Deadwood saloon in the company of the embodiment of nostalgic myth-making, John Wayne, and the pale imitation of B-movie lore that America settled for, Ronald Reagan (or the Hollyweird Ronald the Ray-Gun as Gil would so quotably put it). <br>\n<br>\nDig <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ipWM3DWe4\" rel=\"nofollow\">The B movie theory</a>:<br>\n<br>\n"The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.<br>\n<br>\nThey want to go back as far as they can – even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of <a href=\"http://www.iraqtimeline.com/graphics/bushcarrier.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow\">the man in the white hat</a> or <a href=\"http://www.president-bush.com/missionaccomplished.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow\">the man on the white horse</a> - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment – someone always came to save America at the last moment – especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan – and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at – like a "B" movie..."<br>\n<br>\nI put it this way four years ago at the height of the George W. Bush years:<br>\n<br>\nWe are living in a moment where nostalgia is key, we're anesthetizing ourselves with cowboy politics, selective amnesia and worse, when we'd rather have John Wayne. And Baghdad and New Orleans are not the only ones who can testify to that insight. <br>\n<br>\nGil Scott-Heron is one the great satirists, punctuating his critique with a melodious line and a soulful groove. It's uncanny how he does it, that you can't help but nod your head, tap your feet and laugh out loud even as you want to cry at what he is saying. His body of work is heroic, his prescience altogether scary.<br>\n<br>\nBut it is hard living as a canary in a mineshaft, if no one is listening and home is where the hatred is, can it be a surprise if there only remain fractured pieces of a man? Dig: I too might drown myself in fugitive spirits.<br>\n<br>\nAnyway let's kick some urban griot poetry around this joint. Or should we call it soul food?</p>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\t\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5772408577/\" title=\"gil scott-heron ronald reagan and john wayne - b movie\"><img src=\"http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2189/5772408577_475f925dd8_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"178\" alt=\"gil scott-heron ronald reagan and john wayne - b movie\"></a></p>\n\n<p>My favourite urban griot, Gil Scott-Heron, is sorely missed. Here we find him in peak satire mode in the Deadwood saloon in the company of the embodiment of nostalgic myth-making, John Wayne, and the pale imitation of B-movie lore that America settled for, Ronald Reagan (or the Hollyweird Ronald the Ray-Gun as Gil would so quotably put it). <br>\n<br>\nDig <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ipWM3DWe4\" rel=\"nofollow\">The B movie theory</a>:<br>\n<br>\n"The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.<br>\n<br>\nThey want to go back as far as they can – even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of <a href=\"http://www.iraqtimeline.com/graphics/bushcarrier.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow\">the man in the white hat</a> or <a href=\"http://www.president-bush.com/missionaccomplished.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow\">the man on the white horse</a> - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment – someone always came to save America at the last moment – especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan – and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at – like a "B" movie..."<br>\n<br>\nI put it this way four years ago at the height of the George W. Bush years:<br>\n<br>\nWe are living in a moment where nostalgia is key, we're anesthetizing ourselves with cowboy politics, selective amnesia and worse, when we'd rather have John Wayne. And Baghdad and New Orleans are not the only ones who can testify to that insight. <br>\n<br>\nGil Scott-Heron is one the great satirists, punctuating his critique with a melodious line and a soulful groove. It's uncanny how he does it, that you can't help but nod your head, tap your feet and laugh out loud even as you want to cry at what he is saying. His body of work is heroic, his prescience altogether scary.<br>\n<br>\nBut it is hard living as a canary in a mineshaft, if no one is listening and home is where the hatred is, can it be a surprise if there only remain fractured pieces of a man? Dig: I too might drown myself in fugitive spirits.<br>\n<br>\nAnyway let's kick some urban griot poetry around this joint. Or should we call it soul food?</p>"
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"title" : "GIL SCOTT-HERON / Gil Scott-Heron Classic Mixtape",
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"content" : "<img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20rip%2001.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron rip 01.jpg\" title=\"gil scott-heron rip 01.jpg\"> <br>By now, I presume most music lovers are aware that Gil Scott-Heron died (around 4pm, Friday, May 27, 2011 in New York City). Tons of memorials and tributes are pouring in from all over the globe. Gil truly touched people worldwide.<br><br>We at BoL have featured Gil numerous times over our nearly six years of our website’s existence (we started June 18, 2005). We not only were full of praise for Gil, we also asked hard questions, painful questions. Gil was not only a man of contradictions, he was also deeply honest about contradictions including his own shortcomings.<br><br>Here is a list of some of our Gil Scott-Heron write-ups on BoL: <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2010/02/01/gil-scott-heron-sade-%E2%80%9Cwhat%E2%80%99s-new-mixtape%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">GSH-1</font></a>, <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2007/10/21/gil-scott-heron-%E2%80%9Cblue-collar%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">GSH-2</font></a>, <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2006/05/07/gil-scott-heron/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">GSH-3</font></a>, <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2006/05/07/gil-scott-heron-%E2%80%9Cpieces-of-a-man%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">GSH-4</font></a>, and <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2006/01/01/gil-scott-heron-%E2%80%9Cbeginnings%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">GSH-5</font></a>.<br><br>I don’t expect people to read all the previous postings, and furthermore, we don’t intend to repeat ourselves here just to add more words to the pile of testimonials. But there is one point I would like to make: Gil Scott-Heron was a major composer in addition to being a masterful performer.<br><img width=\"343\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"515\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron rip 02.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron rip 02.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20rip%2002.jpg\"> <br>I call this Mixtape Gil Scott-Heron Classic Mixtape not because it features the most famous or even most impressive Gil Scott-Heron songs. For example “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is not included, nor is there even one of the numerous versions of “The Bottle.” And I’m sure people are going to wonder how in the world I could not include “Is that Jazz” or “Inner City Blues.” And for those who like to party-hardy, or maybe just to dance until they drop, I’m sure you think I’m positively lame for not including “Angel Dust” or especially for skipping over “Johannesburg.” But there is a reason for my madness of excluding popular songs.<br><br>Some of the songs included here are rarities in Gil’s copious catalogue. Plus, some of these versions are not the studio recordings but live performances of diverse provenance. I had three little guidelines in mind. I assumed that over the next week or so you would be able to hear the major hits from a plethora of online and radio sources. Therefore I didn’t feel any pressure to assemble a greatest-hits Mixtape.<br><img width=\"343\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"227\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron rip 05.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron rip 05.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20rip%2005.jpg\"> <br>In addition, I wanted to highlight Gil as both a poet and a composer by including a wide range of his work. I’m sure that the majority of people will be hearing the poem <b>“Jose Campos Torres”</b> for the first time. I’ve included <b>“The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)”</b> especially for those who have never heard Gil live, especially Gil in his prime at the top of his game both fully in control of his faculties and in full synchrony with his audience. <br><br>Many people may not be aware that Gil wrote as many ballads as he did, after all Gil was often characterized as fiercely political but he also wrote some of the most tender love songs you ever want to hear. In a couple of cases, most notably<b> “Morning Thoughts”</b> Gil was the master of merging the personal and the political in ways that seamlessly transitioned from romance to revolution within three minutes or less.<br><br>Finally, I had a not so obvious goal in mind. In this time of mourning and grief about Gil’s transition from the land of the living, I wanted to put together a Mixtape that encourages us to be optimistic about our ability to create a better world, our ability to live better and more beautiful lives.<br><img width=\"344\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"231\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron rip 03.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron rip 03.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20rip%2003.jpg\"> <br>Gil had the ability to be serious without being grim, to come hard and at the same time be funny as hell. I wanted to put listeners in a reflective mood that hopefully would encourage and inspire action.<br><br>I believe we should celebrate and commemorate Gil Scott-Heron not only by listening to his music but also by making this world a better place—a place of peace, sincerity, and of humane resolution of inevitable social contradictions.<br><br>The last time I saw Gil Scott-Heron in New Orleans was at the Essence Festival, I believe it was July 2008. I went mainly because I thought that might be my last chance to see him perform. Reviews and photographs from that period were not encouraging about both his health and the quality of his performances (or, for that matter, even showing up for a scheduled gig). While that performance was not the best of Gil Scott-Heron and the set-up in what was called the Super-lounge (there was no seating, so you had to stand, and as you might imagine, it’s hard to "lounge" standing up) was not conducive to a relaxed set, still Gil was in good spirits and the performance was much, much better than I expected.<br><br>The last time I saw Gil perform was March 2010 at the National Black Writers Conference in Brooklyn, New York. Talib Kweli opened the show, and Gary Bartz was a back up musician for Gil. Although the set was short, Gil was great. And now a year later he’s gone. <br><br>Gil gifted us with a cornucopia of beautiful music, vibrant, meaningful, inspirational sounds and vibrations.<br><img width=\"342\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"192\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron rip 04.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron rip 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20rip%2004.jpg\"> <br>Through his recorded music, yesterday, today and tomorrow, Gil lives. Gil Scott-Heron lives.<br><br><b>—Kalamu ya Salaam</b><br><br><br><br><u><i><b>Gil Scott-Heron Classic Mixtape Playlist</b></i></u><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2001.jpg\"> <br>01 <b>“Message To The Messengers”</b> – <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSpirits-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000000GRC%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781025%26sr%3D8-7&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Spirits</font></a></i><br><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 02.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 02.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2002.jpg\"> <br>02 <b>“Jose Campos Torres”</b> – <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMind-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000056VIS%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781071%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">The Mind Of Gil Scott-Heron</font></a><br></i><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 03.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 03.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2003.jpg\"> <br>03 <b>“Pieces Of A Man”</b> –<i> <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPieces-Man-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000005MLZ%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781186%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Pieces Of A Man</font></a></i><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2004.jpg\"> <br>04 <b>“Peace Go With You, Brother”</b> – <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWinter-In-America%2Fdp%2FB002U9NKYM%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781239%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Winter In America</font></a></i><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 05.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 05.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2005.jpg\"> <br>05<b> “Cane”</b> – <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSecrets-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB0027ST8WE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781348%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Secrets</font></a></i><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 06.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 06.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2006.jpg\"> <br>06<b> “Alien (Hold On To Your Dream)”</b> - <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FAnthology-Gil-Scott-Heron-Brian-Jackson%2Fdp%2FB0009UBXUC%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781411%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Anthology: Messages </font></a></i><br><br><img width=\"305\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"221\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 07.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 07.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2007.jpg\"> <br><i>Live at The Bottom Line </i><br>07 <b>“Almost Lost Detroit” </b><br>08<b> “Winter In America” </b><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 02.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 02.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2002.jpg\"> <br>09 <b>“The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)”</b> – <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMind-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000056VIS%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781071%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">The Mind Of Gil Scott-Heron</font></a><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2001.jpg\"> <br><i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSpirits-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000000GRC%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781025%26sr%3D8-7&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Spirits</font></a></i><br>10 <b>“Give Her A Call”</b><br>11 <b>“The Other Side, Part I” </b><br>12 <b>“The Other Side, Part II” </b><br>13 <b>“The Other Side, Part III” </b><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2004.jpg\"> <br>14 <b>“Peace Go With You, Brother”</b> – <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWinter-In-America%2Fdp%2FB002U9NKYM%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781239%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Winter In America</font></a></i><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 01.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2001.jpg\"> <br><i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSpirits-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000000GRC%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781025%26sr%3D8-7&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Spirits</font></a></i><br>15 <b>“Work For Peace”</b><br>16 <b>“Don`t Give Up” </b><br><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 17.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 17.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2017.jpg\"> <br>17 <b>“Must Be Something”</b> - <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FFirst-Minute-New-Day-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000005ZD1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781556%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Midnight Band The First Minute </font></a></i><br><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2004.jpg\"> <br>18 <b>“A Very Precious Time”</b> - <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWinter-In-America%2Fdp%2FB002U9NKYM%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781239%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Winter In America</font></a></i><br><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 19.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 19.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2019.jpg\"> <br>19 <b>“Save The Children”</b> – <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMinister-Information-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB0000040LJ%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781640%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Minister of Information </i></font></a><br><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2004.jpg\"> <br><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWinter-In-America%2Fdp%2FB002U9NKYM%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1306781239%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Winter In America</font></a><br>20 <b>"Your Daddy Loves You” </b><br>21 <b>“Song For Bobby Smith” </b><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 22.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 22.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2022.jpg\"> <br>22 <b><font color=\"#000000\">“Beginnings (The First Minute Of A New Day)"</font></b> – <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSouth-Africa-Carolina%2Fdp%2FB004720JTE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781693%26sr%3D8-3&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><i><font color=\"#cc0000\">From South Africa To South Carolina</font></i></a><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 23.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 23.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2023.jpg\"> <br>23 <b>“Better Days Ahead”</b> – Live In London<br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 24.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 24.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2024.jpg\"> <br>24 <b>“Morning Thoughts”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FReflections-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB000024QBI%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781769%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><i><font color=\"#cc0000\">Reflections </font></i></a><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 22.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 22.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2022.jpg\"> <br>25 <b>“A Lovely Day”</b> – <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSouth-Africa-Carolina%2Fdp%2FB004720JTE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781693%26sr%3D8-3&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><i><font color=\"#cc0000\">From South Africa To South Carolina</font></i></a><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 05.jpg\" alt=\"gil scott-heron classic mixtape cover 05.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gil%20scott-heron%20classic%20mixtape%20cover%2005.jpg\"> <br>26 <b>“A Prayer For Everybody/To Be Free”</b> - <i><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSecrets-Gil-Scott-Heron%2Fdp%2FB0027ST8WE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1306781348%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Secrets</font></a></i><br><br><br>"
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"title" : "What The Game's Been Missing: Spoken Monologues",
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"content" : "Music is like sex. You have to ease into it.<br><br>\n\nAnd like sex, the best music is made when you and the musician have a little time to get to\nknow each other. Too often, artists are forced to have the musical equivalent of a hook up,\nmade to shave their songs into three-minute (three-and-a-half-minutes, if they are lucky) quickies of radio-ready\nmusic to satisfy the insatiable hunger of labels, stations, and fans. What this really means is\nthat artists don't have time properly lure their listeners, instead giving them a momentary flash in\nthe pan rather than a smoldering slow burn.\n\n\n \nAn age-old trick for extending soul songs (for your pleasure) was the spoken monologue. Before guest rappers or spoken word poetry breaks filled the world of R&B, the monologue was a\nform of aural foreplay, drawing the listeners into the singer's world. The build-up caused by this\nextraneous exposition made you feel as if you knew the person who was talking to you through\nyour radio. Crazy, yes, but think about it. You could have been that friend listening to a homeboy complain about his\nwoman, as is the case in <b>Bobby Womack</b>'s <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbbZ_k1Z8gU\">\"If You Think You're Lonely Now.\"</a> Or you could have been the\nhomegirl silently eavesdropping in on <b>Shirley Brown</b>'s <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZssL3nr6JZg\">\"Woman to Woman\"</a> conversation.\n<br><br>\nThe spoken monologue could even have been a deliciously vengeful dig at a lover caught cheating. Take, for\nexample, the quintessential (and utterly comical) monologue from \"The Rain\" by <b>Oran \"Juice\" Jones</b> who gave us a front row seat to this hood soap opera.<br><br>\nFirst, he set up his lover with a honeytrap:<br><br><i>\n\nHey, hey, baby, how ya doin'? Come on in here.<br>\nGot some hot chocolate on the stove waiting for you.<br>\nListen, first things first, let me hang up the coat.<br>\nYeah, how was your day today?<br>\nDid you miss me?<br>\nYou did? Yeah? I missed you, too</i>.<br><br>\n\nThen he went in for the kill:<br><br><i>\n\nI missed you so much I followed you today.<br>\nThat's right! Now close your mouth, 'cause you cold busted!</i><br><br>\n\nFrom there, he went on to elaborate how he COULD have showed his ass:<br><br><i>\n\nMy first impulse was to run up on you and do a Rambo.<br>\nWhip out the jammy and flat blast both of you.<br>I didn't wanna mess up this 3700 dollar lynx coat.<br>\nSo instead, I chilled. That's right. Chilled</i>.<br><br>\n\nAnd <i>then </i>he exacted his revenge:<br><br><i>Then I went to the bank. Took out every dime.<br>\nAnd then I went and cancelled all those credit cards. Yeah. </i><br><i>All your charge accounts. Yeah.<br>I stuck you up for every piece of jewelry I ever bought you! </i><br><i>Yeah, that's right, everythang! Everythang.<br>Nah, don't go, don't go, don't go lookin' in that closet.</i><br><i>'Cause you aint got nothing in there.</i><div><i>Everything you came here with is packed up and waiting for you in the guest room. </i><br><i>That's right. What was you thinking about? Huh?</i><br><i>What was you trying to prove? Huh?<br>You was with the Juice!<br>\nI gave you silk suits, Gucci handbags, blue diamonds.<br>\nI gave you things you couldn't even pronounce!<br>Now I can't give you nothin' but advice.<br>\nCause you still young. That's right, you still young.</i><br>\n<i>I hope you learned a valuable lesson from all this.<br>You know. Gon find somebody like me one of these days.<br>\nUntil then, you know what you gotta do?</i><br><br>\n\nFinally, he let his old girl know what time it is:<br><br><i>\n\nYou gotta get on outta here with that alley-cat-coat-wearing,\nhush-puppy-shoe-wearing crumbcake I saw you with. <br>\nCause you\ndismissed!<br>\nThat's right, silly rabbit, tricks are made for kids, don't you know\nthat?<br>\nYou without me like corn flake without the milk! <br>\nThis my world!<br>\nYou' just a squirrel trying to get a nut! <br>\nNow get on outta here. <br>\nScat! Don't touch that coat!</i><br><br>\n\n\n<iframe width=\"480\" height=\"390\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/9dZW1C3neao\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\n<br><br>\n\nIndeed, you should not touch the coat, nor should you cross the all-powerful Oran \"Juice\" Jones. If\nyou couldn't tell by the sheen on his suit in the video, he is a powerful man and will not tolerate\nalleycats disrespecting his sexy. And how do you know this? Because he told you. He didn't sing it. He didn't rap it. He didn't try to sugarcoat it with a poem. He descended from his pedestal of musical glory to give the audience the nitty gritty, and\nthat's real.\n<br><br>\nPerhaps the best known instance of a singer breaking it down so that it will forever be broke was in <b>Lenny Williams</b>' classic, <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbzkwLWK-Ps\">\"Cause I Love You.\"</a> Torn beyond belief at losing his woman, he went into explicit detail about the lovesick trance he found himself in (\"I knocked on your door, and\nmy knocks went unanswered.\" \"I watched TV until the TV went off.\") upon finding that she was\nnowhere to be found. Listening to Williams cuts straight to the heart-meat, and you literally feel\nhis cries of \"oh-Oh-oh-Oh-oh-Oh-OH\" wrack through your body. That kind of passion doesn't\nhappen in less than two minutes. It is a papable tension, built up by the honeyed words and\nyearnings of a lovelorn singer making his case for redemption by using a dose of real talk to titillate the\naudience's emotional core.\n\n<br><br>\n\n\n</div>"
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"title" : "Vlisco Dazzling Graphics Fashion Show",
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"content" : "For six months in my life, I pursued a Fashion Design Dream. That was a long time ago. I don't remember the last time I tried designing anything for myself but deep down, that passion still flickers.<br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5758044678/\" title=\"_MG_9478 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5222/5758044678_af4053e582_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"_MG_9478\"></a><br>This Vlisco Fashion Show was just to showcase their new collection of designs and I was privileged enough to get a front seat from where I could steal a few shots. I wasn't the official photographer. I was there as a guest.<br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5757501217/\" title=\"_MG_9468 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2387/5757501217_7b9ec57939_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"_MG_9468\"></a><br>Enjoy the pictures and do have a great A.U Day :)<br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5757504651/\" title=\"_MG_9523 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2287/5757504651_afc7bdbc50_b.jpg\" width=\"533\" height=\"800\" alt=\"_MG_9523\"></a><br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5757502943/\" title=\"_MG_9489 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3501/5757502943_2e090b9460_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"_MG_9489\"></a><br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5758046338/\" title=\"_MG_9493 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5149/5758046338_417a5f6a74_b.jpg\" width=\"533\" height=\"800\" alt=\"_MG_9493\"></a><br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5757504223/\" title=\"_MG_9509 by Nana Kofi Acquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5068/5757504223_d3c2f2350a_b.jpg\" width=\"533\" height=\"800\" alt=\"_MG_9509\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1392769759109690709-2563739172912707395?l=nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "\"You Might Also Like:\" Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~akilzer/\">Ann Kilzer</a>, <a href=\"http://randomwalker.info/\">Arvind Narayanan</a>, <a href=\"http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/\">Ed Felten</a>, <a href=\"http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/\">Vitaly Shmatikov</a>, and I have released a new <a href=\"http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jcalandr/papers/ymal-oakland11.pdf\">research paper</a> detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon in addition to evaluating a synthetic system using data from the Netflix Prize dataset. The results demonstrate that temporal changes in recommendations can reveal purchases or other transactions of individual users.</p>\n<p>To help users find items of interest, sites routinely recommend items similar to a given item. For example, product pages on Amazon contain a \"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought\" list. These recommendations are typically public, and they are the product of patterns learned from all users of the system. If customers often purchase both item A and item B, a collaborative filtering system will judge them to be highly similar. Most sites generate ordered lists of similar items for any given item, but some also provide numeric similarity scores.</p>\n<p>Although item similarity is only indirectly related to individual transactions, we determined that temporal changes in item similarity lists or scores can reveal details of those transactions. If you're a Mozart fan and you listen to a Justin Bieber song, this choice increases the perceived similarity between Justin Bieber and Mozart. Because similarity lists and scores are based on perceived similarity, your action may result in changes to these scores or lists.</p>\n<p>Suppose that an attacker knows some of your past purchases on a site: for example, past item reviews, social networking profiles, or real-world interactions are a rich source of information. New purchases will affect the perceived similarity between the new items and your past purchases, possibility causing visible changes to the recommendations provided for your previously purchased items. We demonstrate that an attacker can leverage these observable changes to infer your purchases. Among other things, these attacks are complicated by the fact that multiple users simultaneously interact with a system and updates are not immediate following a transaction.</p>\n<p>To evaluate our attacks, we use data from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon. Our goal is not to claim privacy flaws in these specific sites (in fact, we often use data voluntarily disclosed by their users to verify our inferences), but to demonstrate the general feasibility of inferring individual transactions from the outputs of collaborative filtering systems. Among their many differences, these sites vary dramatically in the information that they reveal. For example, Hunch reveals raw item-to-item correlation scores, but Amazon reveals only lists of similar items. In addition, we examine a simulated system created using the Netflix Prize dataset. Our paper outlines the experimental results.</p>\n<p>While inference of a Justin Bieber interest may be innocuous, inferences could expose anything from dissatisfaction with a job to health issues. Our attacks assume that a victim reveals certain past transactions, but users may publicly reveal certain transactions while preferring to keep others private. Ultimately, users are best equipped to determine which transactions would be embarrassing or otherwise problematic. We demonstrate that the public outputs of recommender systems can reveal transactions without user knowledge or consent.</p>\n<p>Unfortunately, existing privacy technologies appear inadequate here, failing to simultaneously guarantee acceptable recommendation quality and user privacy. Mitigation strategies are a rich area for future work, and we hope to work towards solutions with others in the community.</p>\n<p>Worth noting is that this work suggests a risk posed by any feature that adapts in response to potentially sensitive user actions. Unless sites explicitly consider the data exposed, such features may inadvertently leak details of these underlying actions.</p>\n<p>Our paper contains additional details. This work was presented earlier today at the <a href=\"http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/\">2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy</a>. Arvind has also <a href=\"http://33bits.org/2011/05/24/you-might-also-like-privacy-risks-of-collaborative-filtering\">blogged about this work</a>.</p>"
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"title" : "The Liar, Our Witch and my Wardrobe",
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"content" : "Sometimes I am just completely blind sided by Ghana. There are moments when I am busy minding my own business, living my little expat life within the confines of this African republic, and culturally I trip over something that just has me reeling.<br><br>And then I remember that despite my hard drives full of pirated American TV series that fill us with the ultimate superficial each weekday evening, and the goat cheese in my salad, made with imported iceberg lettuce; this is NOT North America, and this little capsule called our home is situated squarely within an entirely different world.<br><br>There are undercurrents that pulsate just below the surface in Ghana, in my office, in my yard, in the strangers who pass me on the street. And there are moments when they peek out, when that reality faces me. At those times I am never prepared.<br><br>Last night I was bopping around my humid kitchen, wearing my Hello Kitty pyjama set, with my freshly washed hair tied up; I was dishing up our supper plates, anxious to head back into the relative cool of the living room to watch some mind numbing TV series.<br><br>“Madam” came the low voice from the pool of darkness beyond my kitchen window.<br>“Eric?” (assuming it was our gardener, (term used very loosely) who lives at the back of the house).<br><br>“Madam, I believe you are busy but I need to speak to you. Very important, very urgent. I beg.”<br><br>I begrudgingly put down my ladle and agreed to meet Eric around the side of the house.<br><br>So we met, I in cartoon pants with brightly coloured kittens scattered about my legs, opening the sliding doors, the bright and cool mixing with the dark heat. Eric stood glumly almost out of sight on the veranda.<br><br>“Yes Eric, what is wrong?” – I of course, assuming there would be a long winded story of medical or other woe, and a plea for money. But this was a different problem altogether.<br><br>Eric shifted and stuttered and said Madam a few times.<br><br>“It’s about Gilbert” (our cook and cleaner who has worked for the company over 12 years).<br><br>“Yes Eric?! What about Gilbert?” <a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lttlQsEyEm0/TckkGmyjeyI/AAAAAAAACDw/cGWZq722lu8/s1600/Nkonde-lower_zaire-nail-fetish-doll.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px;width:212px;height:320px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lttlQsEyEm0/TckkGmyjeyI/AAAAAAAACDw/cGWZq722lu8/s320/Nkonde-lower_zaire-nail-fetish-doll.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><br><br>“Well Madam, he is disturbing me in ways you won’t understand. In fact, it is very serious.”<br><br>“Ok, well you tell me and I’ll see what I can do” (me, clueless)<br><br>“Madam, in fact, he has been trying to… trying to… well he has been determined to kill me spiritually”.<br><br>Silence.<br><br>My first instinct is to laugh, which probably won’t go over well. I can see the shiny sweat on Eric’s forehead, reflecting the light from behind me. He is very serious.<br><br>“Madam, maybe these things you cannot understand. But even physically, he has been doing things. I am having so many challenges in life. Josephine has gone (this was Eric’s girlfriend, who was always way out of his league in my opinion), and Gilbert even today, he…. Well I must confess there was a problem in this house today”<br><br>Eric went on to explain that Gilbert had called a certain driver and started to talk to him loudly about how Eric had not been pulling his weight around the house, implying he was useless, and ‘damaging’ his name. Eric then came out of his room and they argued. Gilbert is a liar and possibly a witch?!<br><br>I was really not sure why the two of them would be arguing, nor what I was expected to do. But mostly I was pinching myself, wondering if really, I had been called out to hear that one of my staff was trying to kill the other spiritually. Juju. Again. This theme keeps reappearing.<br><br>And it’s not just among the relatively uneducated. Making that assumption would be to miss the undercurrent and remain completely oblivious to how this society functions.<br><br>I got up this morning with last night’s event freshly in my mind. I greeted Gilbert who was busy making eggs and saw Eric through the window. He was wielding a machete, and hacking away at the overgrown weeds. He gave me a look. His eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed. And he nodded. As if we had shared something… as if I should now understand… Yet I just smiled and carried on as the shallow obruni I am.<br><br>I arrived at work, thinking I’d left behind the sinister world of magic cooks and revengeful gardeners… and then I saw <a href=\"http://vibeghana.com/2011/05/10/npp-mp-mills-used-magic-ring-to-win-presidency/\">this</a>. <br><br>A respected Member of Parliament in Ghana’s opposition party, on Ghana’s most popular morning television talk show this week, has claimed he has ‘conclusive evidence’ that the current president, John Atta-Mills, used a magic ring to win the election. He apparently wore the ring only during the election campaign – never before and never after. That is the only proof needed apparently. So there it is. Juju. Things I’ll never understand.<br><br>Eric left me with one final comment/warning as we parted ways at my sliding door last night.<br><br>“Madam- there are other things. When you go away Gilbert brings his own things to wash at your house. He delays in doing your things. And madam, I just want to say, THAT IS THE MAN WHO MAKES YOUR FOOD.”<br><br>And he wandered off pensively into the night.<br><br>And there I stood. I looked down. Hello Kitty smiled innocently back up at me. And I acknowledged that I who knows nothing, will have to resign myself to that fact.<br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-we62uEDQ8BY/TckjZukeG6I/AAAAAAAACDo/bBo0EMKfw0k/s1600/fetish.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:638px;height:436px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-we62uEDQ8BY/TckjZukeG6I/AAAAAAAACDo/bBo0EMKfw0k/s400/fetish.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Above - a table at a fetish market - selling ingredients for magic brews and curses...."
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"content" : "<p></p><p><strong>I.</strong> </p>\n<p>Rudolph says to the sheriff,<br>\n“For five long years you’ve tried.<br>\nAnd you can search as long as you like,<br>\nyou can try with all your might,<br>\nbut I’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.<br>\nI’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.” </p>\n<p>Sheriff says to Eric Rudolph,<br>\n“Through caves and abandoned mines,<br>\nWe’ll search through scraps and the old feed sacks.<br>\nIn every old place you could hide.” <br>\n – Ballad of Eric Rudolph, Michael Holland (2008)</p>\n<p><em>For a time, Mr. Rudolph’s success as a fugitive reframed the conflict, from criminal vs. the law to local boy vs. federal intruders. It made him a celebrated underdog, with T-shirts being sold bearing the phrases “Run Rudolph Run” and “Hide and Seek Champion.”</em><br>\n – New York Times, April 9, 2005</p>\n<p>Eric Rudolph <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/national/09rudolph.html?sq=eric%20rudolph&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print&position=\">disappeared</a> for five years in the United States. He planted bombs and killed civilians at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, family planning clinics, and a gay club in 1998 and then, went on the run. It was hard to believe, sitting in the States, that someone can disappear like that. We were all in the known universe. I don’t believe at his capture, much was made of him. John Ashcroft called him “the most notorious American fugitive”. This was in 2003. The coverage, which I followed, didn’t make any connection between Rudolph and terrorism or between the plausibility of local help and Rudolph’s long evasion. Rudolph belonged to some other America – not the one where on May 1st, 2003 George W. Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” and where John Ashcroft was busy <a href=\"http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr022403.html\">busting potheads</a>. Rudolph was some lingering story – one about battles long over. His acts, his flight, his evasion or his capture had little to offer us.</p>\n<p><strong>II.</strong></p>\n<p><em>Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world</em>…<br>\n – New York Times, May 2, 2011. </p>\n<p>It is wrong to claim that Osama b. Laden was irrelevant long before he was killed. He wasn’t. He represented, and represents, hundreds of thousands of lives lost since December 2001 when US forces reportedly failed to capture or kill him. He disappeared for the next decade but that absence was filled with wars in Iraq and Pakistan – wars waged on the heads of civilians, among urban centers, and at the cost of trillions. Just the technological developments of killing from the skies accomplished in this decade are mind or moral numbing. No, Osama b. Laden was never irrelevant and he was never off the script. Sure, George W. Bush or Pervez Musharraf told us that the battle was now bigger, the stakes higher and the cost greater, but they were empty words. The deaths of September 11th, 2001 and the destructions that followed hold us accountable – to remember that the cost of those lives began in a bid for this one life. So, we must deal with that life and the narratives it spawned. NYT claims that he was a “hero in much of the Islamic world”. The obituary moves on, and we are left with that “fact”. What are we to make of it? Heroes, after all, were gods and immortals. </p>\n<p><strong>III.</strong></p>\n<p><em>The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” </em><br>\n- New York Times, May 2, 2010. </p>\n<p>I recently spoke at a conference in Chicago about teaching South Asia critically and I concluded with: </p>\n<blockquote><p>To tell the story of America’s entangled history with South Asia is the first and most basic step in teaching South Asia critically. Elihu Yale, who lived and worked in India for nearly three decades with the British East India Company from 1670 to 1699 donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods- Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India – laying the foundation of their first building. The first seated chair of Sanskrit emerged at Yale. In 1800 when Alexander Dow negotiated yet another treaty with the Sindhi Mirs to establish ports and harbors on the Arabian Sea, he specifically noted that Americans were to kept out of Sindh. The1856 Guano Islands Act passed by Congress claimed for the United States any “unclaimed” island with sufficient supplies of bird waste (to be used as fertiliser by American farmers) by any American entrepreneur, and this annexation to be defended by the US Navy. The list of island territories annexed, claimed or contested – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, and so on – is long and scattered around the globe. But that act of Congress is also part of the legal framework that created Guantanamo Bay and that enables drone assassinations in “remote frontier” regions of Pakistan where there “is no rule of law”. The opium trade network which sustained the East India Company coffers in the mid-19th century by supplying Bengal-raised opium to China was remitted through American cotton and that money seeped right into the Southern slave economy.</p>\n<p>These entanglements disrupt the teleologies of postcolonial study in the United States, and they complicate the relationship of the academic to the funding bodies, to the region, and to the student. The politics of provincializing Europe are all too evident but the necessity to provincialize America bears laying out. We must look at the American state-war on the Native American populations – decreed explicitly by the post-Civil War Congress. We need to look at the barbary Muslim pirates in whose encounters American power first went ashore. We need to look at the American imperial gaze that stretched out towards the West and called it the open Frontier and sought to settle it, sought to categorize its people, its histories, build ethnographic portraits of the good Indians and the bad Indians. It is of utmost importance to our understanding of the American engagement with the Tribe post 2005 that we recall the work of John Wesley Powell and the Bureau of American Ethnology. We need to pay as much attention to Locke, Jefferson, Whitman, Turner, Wilson as we do to Hegel or Heidegger or Bentnick or Curzon.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The “Indians” or the “hostiles” as they were once named remain an indelible part of our national myth. The myopia we extend out to the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan exists in North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma. We have programmed forgetfulness in our civic and political lives. We have enabled our academic lives to non-entities in the public sphere. </p>\n<p><strong>IV.</strong></p>\n<p><em>I go myself, as agent of the British Government, to a Court of the language and manners of which I am utterly ignorant, and to accomplish that of which the most sanguine have no hope. It is simply a matter of duty</em> .<br>\n- James Abbott, <em><a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=toIEAAAAQAAJ\">Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburgh</a></em> (1843)</p>\n<p>Abbottabad was named to memorialize the service of Sir James Abbott, commissioner of the Hezara region. One can say that he became immortal.</p>\n<p><strong>V.</strong></p>\n<p><em>So I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes, airports, military bases, and anything else that is of great value but doesn’t shelter innocent civilians. If it happens to be the wrong country, well, too bad, but it’s likely it did something to deserve it anyway. Or would in the future. And its leaders, as well as other troublemakers, would get the message: Terrorism is too costly a game.</em></p>\n<p>President Clinton says we should be cautious about placing blame or taking action. OK. But when the time comes for punishment, it wouldn’t be an eye for eye. That’s just a swap. We should take both eyes, ears, nose, the entire anatomy. That’s how to make a lasting impression.<br>\n – Mike Royko, April 21, 1995, Chicago Tribune</p>\n<p>Salman Rushdie wants <a href=\"http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-02/salman-rushdie-pakistans-deadly-game/\">Pakistan to be declared a terrorist nation</a> and expelled from the “comity of nations”. To Rushdie a 6 ft 4in man wandering around a country of 5 ft 8in plebeians without getting noticed is inconceivable and, hence, the entire 180 million must pay the price. They were all in the know. Keeping mum even as drones kept killing their lots; even as the Taliban kept blowing up hotels, police compounds, intelligence agency offices, shrines and hospitals; even as the US kept endorsing and supporting dictatorial power over them; even as the US kept funding their military to the tune of tens of billions while “non-humanitarian aid” was pegged to a billion or so; even as an earthquake and a flood shook their geography loose. The millions of Pakistan kept their quiet, maybe giggling in anticipation of whenever Uncle Sam would catch them in the act. Now they have been caught! The ISI knew! This validates all the drones missiles! It means MORE DRONE MISSILES! Yeah. That is what it means. They were all in it, Rushdie. Every stinking lying one of them. </p>\n<p>Royko wrote what I quote above after the Oklahoma City Bombing. I remember that morning. I was ironing my clothes for my night shift at the restaurant. I remember Connie Chung breathlessly telling me that men of Middle Eastern hue had been seen fleeing the scene. She was literally out of breath: The war in the Middle East has finally come to the United States. Royko was similarly shocked and convinced. It wasn’t important that almost immediately the call had went out to look for white caucasian suspects. <a href=\"http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=11412\">Later</a>, in October 2001, we kept hearing that Timothy McVeigh got his training or his weapon or something from Iraq. Royko’s wish came true – we got both ears, nose, the entire anatomy. Maybe Rushdie’s wish would come true as well. Who remembers Geronimo anyways?</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?i=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?i=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=dN5A7N3Z_LU:RRiioet-qDM:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chapatimystery/~4/dN5A7N3Z_LU\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some Harvard Boys",
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"content" : "<p>It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).</p>\n<p>He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.</p>\n<p>There at the bottom of the front page of the <em>Financial Times</em> was a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35f5a62a-98d0-11da-aa99-0000779e2340.html#ixzz1HcbG7tI2\">story</a> that no one else had that day, or any other – a scoop. It turned out that Porter and his friend Daniel Yergin and the consulting firms which they had respectively co-founded and founded, Monitor Group and Cambridge Energy Research Associates, had been working for a year on a plan to diversify the Libyan economy away from its heavy dependence on oil. Their teams had conducted more than 2,000 interviews with “small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs as well as Libyan and foreign business leaders.” (Both men are better-known as celebrated authors: Porter for <em>Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors</em><em> and The Competitive Advantage of Nations</em>, Yergin for <em>The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power</em> and <em>The Commanding Heights: the Battle for the World Economy</em>.)</p>\n<p>The next day Porter would <a href=\"http://www.isc.hbs.edu/pdf/2006-0209_Libya.pdf\">present</a> the 200-page document they had prepared in a ceremony in Tripoli. Gadhafi himself might attend. The <em>FT</em> had seen a copy of the report, which envisaged a glorious future under the consultants’ plan. If all went well, it said, then by 2019 – the 50th anniversary of the military coup that brought Col. Gadhafi to power – Libya would have “one of the fastest rates of business formation in the world,” making it a regional leader contributing to the “wealth and stability of surrounding nations.”</p>\n<p>From Cairo, the <em>FT</em>’s William Wallis reported:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The Harvard project is part of the efforts of Saif al-Islam, the colonel’s son, to restore Libya’s international legitimacy after his father’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction and Tripoli’s agreement to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie aircraft bombing.</p></blockquote>\n<p>A year later, in February 2007, <em>BusinessWeek</em> trumpeted the relationship, <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2007/gb20070220_956124.htm\">first </a>on the eve of another Porter lecture on the “New Dawn” in Tripoli, then <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_11/b4025061.htm\">again</a> a month later. The Cambridge, Mass., firm that Porter had started fifteen years before with seven other HBS professors had become. <em>BW</em> reported, “deeply engaged in overhauling the Mediterranean petro-state.” It wasn’t clear, the magazine noted, that partial bank privatization and “mini-MBAs” for some 250 emerging leaders would prevail over statism and red tape.</p>\n<p>We now know that Gadhafi’s son bribed his way into his PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE); that Monitor Group had been paid to help him write his dissertation there (much of which apparently turns out to have been <a href=\"http://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Plagiarism\">plagiarized</a>, anyway); that the Libyan government was paying Monitor $250,000 a month for its services; that, according to <em>The New York Times</em>, Libya’s sovereign wealth fund today owns a portion of Pearson PLC, the conglomerate that publishes the <em>Financial Times</em> and <em>The Economist;</em> that the whole deal quietly fell apart two years later.</p>\n<p>Sir Howard Davies resigned earlier this month as director of the LSE after it was disclosed he had accepted a ₤1.5 million donation in 2009 from a charity controlled by Saif Gadhafi.</p>\n<p>It turns out that Monitor also proposed to write a book boosting Gadhafi as “one of the most recognizable individuals on the planet,” promised to generate positive press, and to bring still more prominent academics, policymakers and journalists to Libya, according to Farah Stockman of <em>The Boston Globe</em>. She did a banner job of pursuing the details she found in <a href=\"http://www.libya-nclo.com/Portals/0/pdf%20files/A%20Proposal%20for%20Expanding%20the%20Dialogue%20around%20the%20Ideas%20of%20Muammar%20Qadhafi.pdf\">A Proposal For Expanding the Dialogue Surrounding the Ideas of Moammar Khadafy</a>, a proposal from Mark Fuller in 2007 that a Libyan opposition group posted on the Web.</p>\n<p>Among those enlisted were Sir Anthony Giddens, former director of the LSE; Francis Fukuyama, then of Johns Hopkins University; Benjamin Barber, of Rutgers University (emeritus); Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab; Robert Putnam and Joseph Nye, both former deans of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nye received a fee and wrote a <a href=\"http://www.tnr.com/article/tripoli-diarist?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true\">broadly sympathetic account</a> of his three-hour visit with Gadhafi for <em>The New Republic</em>. He also told the <em>Globe</em>’s Stockman he had commented on a chapter of Saif’s doctoral dissertation. (When <em>The New Republic</em> scolded Nye earlier this month, after <em>Mother Jones</em> magazine <a href=\"http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/libya-qaddafi-monitor-group\">disclosed</a> the fee, Nye replied that his original manuscript implied that he had been employed as a consultant by Monitor, but that the phrase had been edited out).</p>\n<p>Connoisseurs of the consultant’s art will relish Monitor’s 2007 proposal, with its elaborate plan to write and sell a book about Gadhafi as a world-historical figure to a major publisher, and its hints of prospective visits from Cass Sunstein, future constitutional adviser to President Barack Obama (“positive preliminary conversation”) and Nelson Mandela. No memo dated before Porter’s February 2006 appearance in Tripoli has surfaced yet. An earlier <a href=\"http://libya-nclo.com/Portals/0/pdf%20files/Monitor2.pdf\">letter of understanding</a>, dated May 2006, stated that “Monitor is not a lobbying organization.”</p>\n<p>But the lobbying law may be involved, as <a href=\"http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/01/us-consulting-group-working-for-libya-did-not-register-as-foreign-agent\">noted</a> earlier this month by Paul Blumenthal, of the Sunlight Foundation.. Last week Monitor <a href=\"http://www.monitor.com/AboutUs/News/tabid/56/ctl/NewsDetail/mid/653/CID/20112403105223135/CTID/2/L/en-US/Default.aspx\">acknowledged</a> it may have a problem with the Foreign Agents Registration Act and hired an outside counsel to advise its internal investigation. Chances are we’ll hear more about this.</p>\n<p>Curiously enough, Porter’s name didn’t appear in the <em>Boston Globe</em> account until the twelfth paragraph under the headline “Local Consultants Aided Gadhafi/Cambridge firm tried to polish his image”, well below the continuation of the article on an inside page. Stockman’s account of Porter’s explanation is worth quoting in full.</p>\n<blockquote><p>Monitor’s work in Libya began when Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor who is among the country’s top theorists on management strategies, received a call from Saif Gadhafi around 2001, according to Porter. Saif, a western-leaning doctoral student who US officials hoped would become the next leader of Libya, asked for his expertise to help change Libya’s battered, Soviet-style economy.</p>\n<p>Porter met Saif and several Libyan ministers in London but said he could not help until Libya resolved the issues that had earned it international condemnation, including the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The terrorist attack killed all 259 passengers and crew and 11 villagers.</p>\n<p>“I remember telling Saif, ‘We can’t do anything until you settle your dispute with the rest of the world,’” Porter recalled in a recent interview.</p>\n<p>In the next few years Libya offered compensation to the Lockerbie victims and gave up its nuclear weapons program, putting it on a path of normalize relations with the United States.</p>\n<p>So in 2005, Porter agreed to be a senior adviser on a program, to lay out a blueprint for reforms.</p></blockquote>\n<p>He told the <em>Globe</em>’s Stockman he ended his personal involvement in later 2007, after he realized “that the reforms were going nowhere when a person who opposed them was appointed head of the group charged with implementing them.”</p>\n<p>Why did a couple of guys as smart at Porter and Yergin become involved in such a mug’s game? It is always possible that Porter thought really thought Saif Gadhafi was full of promise as a democratic reformer when they met. (Today Saif is back in Tripoli, vowing to fight “to the last bullet.”) It is possible that Porter thought the Bush administration would welcome the access to Libyan business that he and Yergin gained through their project. Nicholas Negroponte’s brother John was, after all, Director of National Intelligence from 2005-07.</p>\n<p>It’s true, too, that Harvard University was in no way institutionally involved. After its mission to advise the Russian government on behalf of the US State department collapsed in 1997 amid a welter of conflict of interest charges, Harvard closed its Institute for International Development. After losing a long court battle, and partly as a consequence of it, the university relieved Lawrence Summers of his presidency (but made him a university professor) and revoked economics professor Andrei Shleifer’s endowed chair.</p>\n<p>But Porter is also a <a href=\"http://www.harvard.edu/about/university_professors.php\">university professor</a>, one of just twenty who hold Harvard’s highest honor. Monitor consultants and journalists writing about the Libyan program have indiscriminately brandished the Harvard name. How can he have been so personally reckless?</p>\n<p>I’ve followed Porter’s <a href=\"http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/12.07/01-michaelporter.html\">career</a> with interest for twenty-five years. Some part of the explanation for his interest in Libya surely has to do with a nearly boundless sense of personal efficacy. A fine student-athlete – an All-American golfer for Princeton in 1968 – Porter graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering and then moved easily into technical economics at Harvard, managing a rock band in his spare time.</p>\n<p>The 1970s were a time of great ferment in theories of industrial organization. As Harvard undergraduates, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer honed their wits in A. Michael Spence’s advanced micro course, before Gates went out into the world to found Microsoft. By the end of the decade, Porter decided his competitive advantage lay in codifying the latest understandings for corporate executives. Three spectacular business best-sellers followed.</p>\n<p>Porter became a rising star in the Reagan administration; a frequent consultant to governments around the world in the 1990s; proprietor (with Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University), of a Global Competitiveness Report; a peripatetic adviser to corporations large and small; and, by 2000, the single most famous professor at the Harvard Business School. He advised presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2007. <a href=\"http://www.isc.hbs.edu/stateprofiles.htm\">Here</a> he is addressing the National Governor’s Association last month about budget balancing.</p>\n<p>But there is also all that Libyan oil and money. The sovereign wealth fund at its peak was worth $70 billion or so, all of it operating under the indirect control of Saif Gadhafi. Income from Libya’s oil production is as much as $40 billion a year. The US eased its sanctions on Libya in April 2004, permitting US companies to bid on Libyan oil and gas for the first time in twenty years, <a href=\"http://web.archive.org/web/20080614195109/http:/www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Libya/Oil.html\">sparking considerable interest</a> in a country whose plentiful reserves can cost as little as $1/bbl to lift. Libya’s “new dawn” would be well lubricated, in any event. Porter and Yergin signed on to coach the country less than a year later.</p>\n<p>In a statement last week, Monitor wrote that “just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya.” That was certainly true in Cambridge. What dissenting Libyans in Tripoli witnessed was a parade of well-paid visitors flattering their half-mad dictator, and a <a href=\"http://feb17.info/news/monitor-group-planned-training-for-khadafy%E2%80%99s-security-apparatus-in-libya\">squad of Harvard-connected consultants</a> bent on creating a National Security Organization for the government, designed to augment the existing security apparatus with a new corps of MBA-trained personnel officers.</p>\n<p>I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Porter to give some evidence of contrition about his mission to Tripoli. Sir Howard Davies may have resigned as director of the LSE (“The short point is that I am responsible for the school’s reputation and that has suffered”), but being a Harvard professor apparently means never having to say you’re sorry. Perhaps instead the university will find some way to rein in on its professors’ more self-serving ambitions.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/share_save\">Share/Bookmark</a> </p>"
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"content" : "So The Wife and I were blessed with a baby girl yesterday. A bundle of joy, 6 and a half pounds of loveliness, we couldn't be more elated. We'll have the outdooring (naming ceremony) in due course. Like all new parents, it's all about change, lots of change to our life, and an abundance of love. <br><br>The Wife had also been labouring to deliver her book manuscript to the publisher and, in the race between baby and book, our child barely won by two nagging footnotes, it was a close run thing, you know. The one was all sweetness and the other is to be titled, Bitter Roots. My own role was minor: a shoulder to rest on, a hand to squeeze, a chauffeur, cheerleader, cook and a proud husband - oh, and a copy editor.<br><br>I expect to be spending lots of quality time with the new addition to the family so blogging and everything else will be fitful at best, and diaper-constrained for certain. In mitigation, I've written <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/1037202940/\">a whole lot already</a> over the past 6 years and even have some toli queued up for episodic release.<br><br>In the meantime, allow me to bask in parenthood.<br><br><h4>Soundtrack for this note</h4><br><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002H5K/\">Teddy Pendergrass - Joy</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004SZWD/\">Stevie Wonder - Isn't She Lovely?</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001EFC/\">Bobby Byrd - No One Like My Baby</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004T3XI/\">The Meters - Just Kissed My Baby</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001FOT/\">Tony! Toni! Toné! - Baby Doll</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000IL29/\">Herbie Hancock - Little One</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000WH2/\">UB40 - Baby</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000E97HEE/\">Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000006L4R/\">Prince And The New Power Generation - Sweet Baby</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003U9O4H8/\">Bilal - Little One</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008WT4P/\">The O'Jays - You've Got Your Hooks In Me</a></li></ul><br><br><span>File under: <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/life\" rel=\"tag\">life</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/family\" rel=\"tag\">family</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/baby\" rel=\"tag\">baby</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/parenthood\" rel=\"tag\">parenthood</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/birth\" rel=\"tag\">birth</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/joy\" rel=\"tag\">joy</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/toli\" rel=\"tag\">toli</a></span>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\t\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5467489737/\" title=\"Rawlings and Gaddafi on cover of Talking Drums magazine, 1986-01-13 - Ghana stands by Libya in US dispute - Doe pledges reconciliation\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5260/5467489737_806ffded22_m.jpg\" width=\"182\" height=\"240\" alt=\"Rawlings and Gaddafi on cover of Talking Drums magazine, 1986-01-13 - Ghana stands by Libya in US dispute - Doe pledges reconciliation\"></a></p>\n\n<p>Rawlings and Gaddafi on the cover<br>\nThe Flight Lieutenant and the Colonel<br>\nGhana and Libya<br>\nBlood and Sin<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2011/02/he-of-little-green-book.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">He of The Little Green Book</a>, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, came to Ghana in December 1985 to meet his younger brother in arms and blood, Jerry Rawlings. We asked ourselves: why are these men laughing?<br>\n<br>\nTop stories in this issue:<br>\n- Ghana stands by Libya in US dispute <br>\n- President Doe of Liberia pledges reconciliation</p>"
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"content" : "See, I was employed <br>But not today <br>See Bush came and made all that go away <br>Now I'm the crib with the fakest grin <br>Waiting for Obama to kick in",
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"content" : "Events are fast outpacing the best laid plans of both dictators and mere toli mongers, thus, although the theme fits the bill, I have had to bring forward the piece I promised almost four years ago as a follow up to <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/excellent-discussions.html#excellent\">the theater of that secret video of Gaddafi that was leaked to me</a>. The current atrocities and low rent circumstances however necessitate light verse, or even doggerel, rather than the intended prose poem. Thus I give you another entry in the <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/things-fall-apart.html\">Things Fall Apart Series</a>, file this under the banner of Fallen Angels.<br><br><h3>I. He of The Little Green Book</h3><br>He of The Little Green Book was <a href=\"http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-823448,36-990243@51-987190,0.html\">in Paris</a> the other day<br>A grand tour, part of <a href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-colonel-who-came-in-from-the-cold-libya-opens-its-doors-to-the-west-438936.html\">an awakening</a> some might say<br><br>Hospitality and social graces were extended his way<br>Amnesty International had to make do with dismay<br><br>Inconvenient topics, blood and sin, never to be discussed.<br>He went hunting, or, as his hosts put it, <a href=\"http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,496711,00.html\">faire la chasse</a>.<br><br>The tumult of the entourage and the ceremonial band<br>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/7037403/\">customary bodyguards</a>, as always, were close at hand.<br><br>He pitched his travel tent on the lawn of the Grand Palais<br>And lectured his hosts on human rights throughout the day<br><br>An oasis of oil and gas under his land<br>He'd built up a legacy of blood-soaked sand.<br><br>Self-importance, one can always understand<br>The revolutionary principles, however, damned the man.<br><br>Epigrams, ludicrous even without translation<br>And with translation, worthy of the blandest corporation.<br><br>Claimed to be a Guide with revolutionary notions<br>To life, the Brother Leader presented solutions<br><br>You've heard no doubt about the \"Third Universal Theory\"<br>And of course \"The Solution of the Problem of Democracy\"<br><br>\"The Authority of the People\" was his starting point<br>His modus operandi however was blood, from joint to joint<br><br>The social and economic basis of this here distributed theory<br>Was, in practice, a political axis of corruption, not the first in history<br><br>Newspapers throughout Libya were <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/africa/12libya.html?ex=1331352000&en=945e955c7dd23381&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">organs of adulation</a><br>He of The Little Green Book, officially venerated as a philosopher-king<br><br>...<br><br>Back home in Ghana <acronym title=\"1983-1986 were terrible years of blood and man-made famine courtesy of Rawlings and the PNDC\">at the depth of our despair</acronym><br>When books were scarce, and food shelves were laid bare<br><br>He of The Little Green Book made a donation<br>A token of the good Colonel's appreciation<br><br>A thousand copies of The Little Green Book<br>Brotherly solidarity, extended to the Ghanaian pocketbook<br><br>The generosity of his wisdom, to be shared far and wide.<br>Our universities, the recipients of his vacuous bromides<br><br>We'd learned heavy lessons about what he called revolution<br>\"Crush the dissent\", \"Don't brook any opposition\".<br><br>Thus, ever since the <abbr title=\"Jerry Rawlings\">Flight Lieutenant</abbr>'s arrival<br>We'd had to develop a new <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2009/03/poetry-as-cultural-memory.html\">philosophy of survival</a><br><br>At markets, we would fight over corned beef and sardine tins<br>Throughout I kept asking myself: why are these men laughing?<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5467489737/\" title=\"Rawlings and Gaddafi on cover of Talking Drums magazine 1986-01-13 - Ghana stands by Libya in US dispute - Doe pledges reconciliation\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5260/5467489737_806ffded22.jpg\" width=\"379\" height=\"500\" alt=\"Rawlings and Gaddafi on cover of Talking Drums magazine 1986-01-13 - Ghana stands by Libya in US dispute - Doe pledges reconciliation\" style=\"display:inline\" border=\"0\"></a></div><br><br>...<br><br>He of The Little Green Book was <a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1192117/Colonel-Gaddafis-Mr-Berlusconi--Silvio-taken-Libyan-leaders-honour-guard.html\">in Italy the other day</a><br>Introducing good old Silvio to a rarefied kind of play<br><br><a href=\"http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201006/silvio-berlusconi-profile?printable=true\">Bunga bunga parties</a> were on the menu<br>Gas and oil deals discussed, and matters of revenue <br><br>On Putin's bed, it was eroticism incarnate<br>Sexual gymnastics, the orgies very articulate<br><br>They were men who thumbed their noses at everyone else<br>Impunity their lifeblood, they were enamoured of self<br><br>A cushy life, lived surrounded by buxom Ukrainians<br>They were gremlins and parasites, or rather, rogue authoritarians<br><br>Mercurial, the journalists would call him, and I think it was a cop out<br>For he was severe in the application of power, of that there can be no doubt<br><br>Adept at the <a href=\"http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/08/20/libya_a_foreign_policy_test_ca/#comment-290768\">shell game</a> of diplomacy in latter times<br>Don't forget the expedient dumping of allies at the drop of a dime<br><br>There's even an <a href=\"http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1862017,00.html\">opera about him, Gaddafi</a>, do take a look<br>Although it points out inconsistencies in <a href=\"http://www.mathaba.net/gci/theory/gb.htm\">The Little Green Book</a><br><br>Fear not, in the pantheon where Chairman Mao had his Red Book<br>You can share the luminous thoughts of He of The Little Green Book<br><br>A slight never forgotten, that's what brought him here<br>The clannish sensibility of a cold-blooded dictator<br><br>He of The Little Green Book thus always made it clear<br>He'd kill you and your family no matter when or <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2286553\">where</a><br><br>Stories of <a href=\"http://allafrica.com/stories/200805260016.html?viewall=1\">plots to bomb dissidents in Kenya</a>, Egypt or <a href=\"http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D1FFF3F540C738DDDAF0894DC404482&pagewanted=print\">Saudi Arabia</a><br>Only made it clear to everyone that the world was his oyster<br><br>In newspapers, the subject was always elided:<br>The khat, and other drugs that made him funeral minded<br><br>Conspiratorial notions were his living condition<br>He ascribed drunkenness and drug-taking to any opposition<br><br>...<br><br>He of The Little Green Book <a href=\"http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Muammar+al-Gaddafi/Vladimir+Putin\">met Vladimir Putin the other day</a><br>It was the usual circus, the large retinue come what may. <br><br>Luxurious modesty was how he liked to call it,<br>He lived for the bustle around him, confident he could take Putin's judo hit<br><br>Like a palm tree rising in an oasis surrounded by blight.<br>The other leaders would be shown in their proper pedestrian light. <br><br>The desert savvy, the endurance of those who were truly able<br>By sheer will to conquer the shifting sands, of that he was quite capable <br><br>For months at a time he would go out there on a bend<br>Then emerge seemingly untroubled if not exuberant. <br><br>Men of will who forced their views on clans and the whole world. <br>The caliber of revolutionary, visionary men on the road to hell.<br><br>Take The Little Green Book - a blueprint for life itself,<br>To be studied and internalized, it even dealt with public health!<br><br>An <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8107876.stm\">unbroken chain of leadership</a>, he outlasted Chairman Mao. <br>Who else had such a claim? He even beat <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/world/africa/15libreville.html\">Omar Bongo</a>.<br><br>And <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/05/1\"><em>that</em> kleptocrat</a>, only <abbr title=\"and only Sarkozy at that\">the French</abbr> cared about him<br>The real prize, as you know, was to indulge in blood and sin.<br><br>No, it was only right, he belonged in the history books. <br>In any gathering he would stand out, opinions as sharp as his looks. <br><br>And he had put them down - the opinions that is, <br>Distilled them for present and future generations. <br><br>The <a href=\"http://blogs.aljazeera.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/FeaturedImagePost/images/gaddafigreenbook_crop.jpg\">Little Green Book</a>, the wisdom for the ages. <br>A guide for <a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,964515,00.html\">the world</a>, a guide for revolutions.<br><br>Battle-tested in countless countries, comprehensive and worldly <br>Luminous as only the folk wisdom of desert guides could be. <br><br>...<br><br>He of The Little Green Book <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1553044/Blair-Gaddafi-and-the-BP-oil-deal.html\">met Tony Blair the other day</a><br>That sad sack, for whatever reason, again thought he'd have some sway<br><br>He of The Little Green Book couldn't believe the ease of the bamboozle<br>Of course, we could have told him he was dealing with Bush's poodle <br><br>Then later, remember, there was an audience with <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/world/africa/08diplo.html?ex=1378612800&en=d47f72d9a79b1ce0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink\">Condoleeza</a><br>And a call subsequently for a <a href=\"http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/2849.cfm\">United States of Africa</a><br><br>US policy to the dictator was clear: coddle and let's make nice<br>His gifts, in return, were choice to the talented Miss Rice:<br><br>Diamond trinkets, a locket, and a copy of The Little Green Book<br>A sidelong glance, oil and gas contracts were the inevitable hook<br><br>Those Swiss bank accounts, how prosaic wouldn't you think?<br>Well, even an uncommon criminal needs money to drink<br><br>A bloodthirsty murderer that we indulged like no other<br>Willing to shoot children before their own grandmothers<br><br>He'd even bomb bystanders, he didn't believe in innocence<br>The legacy of a pariah devoid of all human sense<br><br>Months later it was declared, and this was no small thing,<br>Colonel <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7588033.stm\">Gaddafi would be the king of kings</a><br><br>Thus, among traditional leaders on the continent, he was elected<br>Well, according to his bank statements, he was rather <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8485477.stm\">self-selected</a><br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7588033.stm\"><img src=\"http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44970000/jpg/_44970009_libya466afp.jpg\" width=\"466\" height=\"300\" style=\"display:inline\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Gaddafi king of kings\"></a></div><br><br>...<br><br>But back to that time period I alluded to earlier<br>In a Ghana fraught with dubious revolution and political theater<br><br>Perhaps I should not venture into matters eschatological<br>As indeed my doggerel rather tends towards the scatological<br><br>Let me not lose the rhyming meter, indulge my light verse<br>I'm congenitally incapable of engaging in anything terse<br><br>My father, the law school dean, was very precise<br>And, truth be told, what he recalled back then wasn't very nice<br><br>Thankfully it flew under the radar of Rawlings' dispensation:<br>It was about the application of the good Colonel's donation<br><br>In Ghana's scarcity, nothing went to waste:<br>'Twas a grim outlook<br><br>He'd photocopy his lecture notes for students;<br>They'd have to do as a textbook<br><br>As he thumbed through thousands of the Colonel's pristine pages<br>He was minded that, in our country, there were even paper shortages<br><br>We really had no time for this Third Universal Theory<br>It was a undoubtedly a low moment in all of Ghana's history<br><br>The memory, then, should come as no surprise to you, Dear Reader:<br>The pages of The Little Green Book were used as toilet paper.<br><br>...<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5468261014/\" title=\"The Little Green Book is dismantled\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5136/5468261014_f5dd2dedc7.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"287\" alt=\"The Little Green Book is dismantled\" style=\"display:inline\" border=\"0\"></a></div><br><br><h3><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/excellent-discussions.html#excellent\">II. Excellent Discussions</a></h3><br>The issue was blood and sin.<br><br><h3>III. Lest We Forget</h3><br>Field notes on a legacy of blood...<blockquote>Prosecutor: Was there ideology taught in the camp?<br><br>Witness: Yes, what we learned in the <a href=\"http://www.mathaba.net/gci/theory/gb.htm\">Mataba</a> was about how to share the wealth of your government - about <strong>the distribution of wealth</strong>.<br><br>Prosecutor: This Mataba, did you receive any books or lesson papers in that ideology?<br><br>Witness: The ideology was taught in Mataba itself. They had a school to learn the ideology. <strong>You learned about the Green Book. How governments are cheating other governments</strong>.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.charlestaylortrial.org/2008/05/14/200-taylors-former-vice-president-governments-of-libya-burkina-faso-and-ivory-coast-supported-taylors-1989-invasion-of-liberia/\">Taylor's former vice president: governments of Libya, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast supported Taylor's 1989 invasion of Liberia</a></blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\"><blockquote>Prosecutor: At what age do you say you were abducted by the RUF?<br>Witness: 11 years.<br>Prosecutor: Had you been to school up to that time?<br>Witness: Yes.<br>Prosecutor: In what languages were you taught at school?<br>Witness: English.<br>Prosecutor: From what age did you attend school up to the time you were abducted at age 11?<br>Witness: I don't know the age at which I went to school. I don't know the age.<br>Prosecutor: How many years had you been in school by the time you were abducted at age 11?<br>Witness: Six years.<br>Prosecutor: After you were abducted, at some point you have told us in evidence you had some lessons from the RUF. That's right, isn't it?<br>Witness: Yes.<br>Prosecutor: Were you at some time <strong>made to read passages of Colonel Gaddafi's Little Green Book by the RUF</strong>?<br>Witness: <strong>The Green Book. They called it the Revolutionary Green Book. They said it was from Libya, from Mohamed Gaddafi. Yes, I read that one.</strong><br>Prosecutor: In what language?<br>Witness: In English. Everything was in English.<br>Prosecutor: So you speak good English, do you?<br>Witness: The English that I can speak is what I am speaking here. I don't have any other English. As you hear me speaking I don't have it above that and I don't have it below that. That is what I am speaking here.<br>Prosecutor: So, what was taught in English apart from the Green Book?<br>Witness: The Green Book when they read it they would read it in English and they would interpret it, because there were people who did not understand English and so they would interpret it into Krio to them, but some of us who were able to read a little bit when they spoke the English we would understand. That was why I said everything was in English.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.sc-sl.org/Transcripts/Taylor/22August2008.pdf\">Transcript of child soldier's testimony. The special court on Sierra Leone</a>, 22 August 2008</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\"><blockquote>[Moses] Blah testified about the first time he met <strong>[Charles] Taylor</strong> during his military training in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and <strong>Tripoli, Libya. In Libya, he trained with a group of Gambians, as well as a group of Sierra Leoneans led by Foday Sankoh</strong>. Blah testified that Sankoh referred to Taylor as \"chief.\" Blah recounted that the first time he saw Taylor, Taylor introduced himself as \"chief\" and named the soldiers the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Taylor also appointed Blah as Adjutant General of the NPFL.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://charlestaylortrial.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/may-2008-trial-report2.pdf\">Charles Taylor trial report (pdf),</a> May 2008</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\"><blockquote>After listening to 91 prosecution witnesses over the past 18 months, Taylor said people had referred to his forces as if they \"were brutes and savages: We are not. I am not.\"<br><br>Still, the former president acknowledged that <strong>skulls of Liberian soldiers were displayed at strategic roadblocks in 1990</strong>.<br><br><strong>\"They were enemy skulls and we didn’t think that symbol was anything wrong,\" he said. \"I did not consider it bad judgment. I did not order them removed.\"</strong><br><br>Taylor, who earned an economics degree at Bentley College (now University) in Waltham, said <strong>he had seen images of skulls used in many \"<abbr title=\"Skull and Bones\">fraternal organizations</abbr>\" and Western universities</strong>.<br><br>He also acknowledged that atrocities were committed in Liberia by \"bad apples\" and renegade soldiers, but said <strong>he had taught his small band of rebels - from their initial training in Libya - to abide by the laws of war</strong>.<br><br>\"We found out that they were taking place, and we acted to bring those responsible to justice,\" he said. Rebel soldiers who committed excesses were court-martialed and sometimes executed, but civilian judicial institutions were left in place in areas under rebel control, he said.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/07/17/taylor_defends_displaying_of_human_skulls_at_roadblocks/\">Taylor defends displaying of human skulls at roadblocks</a>, Associated Press / July 17, 2009</blockquote>He of The Little Green Book and his brothers in blood will not be missed.<br><br><h4>Soundtrack for this note</h4><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000YAL/\">Miles Davis Quintet - If I Could Write A Book</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001ADD/\">Stevie Wonder - You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000477S/\">Betty Carter - I Could Write A Book</a></li></ul><br><br><span>File under: <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/rogues\" rel=\"tag\">rogues</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Gaddafi\" rel=\"tag\">Gaddafi</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/poetry\" rel=\"tag\">poetry</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/verse\" rel=\"tag\">verse</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/humour\" rel=\"tag\">humour</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/politics\" rel=\"tag\">politics</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/culture\" rel=\"tag\">culture</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/observation\" rel=\"tag\">observation</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/blood\" rel=\"tag\">blood</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/satire\" rel=\"tag\">satire</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/hatchet%20job\" rel=\"tag\">hatchet job</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Libya\" rel=\"tag\">Libya</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/cruelty=\">cruelty</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/violence\" rel=\"tag\">violence</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Liberia\" rel=\"tag\">Liberia</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Sierra%20Leone\" rel=\"tag\">Sierra Leone</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Ghana\" rel=\"tag\">Ghana</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/history\" rel=\"tag\">history</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Things%20Fall%20Apart\" rel=\"tag\">Things Fall Apart</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/Fallen%20Angels\" rel=\"tag\">Fallen Angels</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/search/label/toli\" rel=\"tag\">toli</a></span>"
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"title" : "James Wood: Teju Cole's prismatic début novel, “Open City.”",
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"title" : "Touring Ghana with a Dutchman",
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"content" : "Last Saturday and Sunday were 2 great days I got to spend with my Dutch friend Bertil.<br>Papee, my air-condition repair guy was graceful enough to offer to drive us all the way to the Wli falls.<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450742600/\" title=\"wli falls trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4098/5450742600_891d85470a_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"wli falls trip\"></a><br>We got caught up in crazy traffic at Atimpoku, where Bertil also tasted the smallest fish he’s ever eaten in his life: ONE MAN THOUSAND, as we famously call it in Ghana and of course, he had to have the aboloo too.<br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450741356/\" title=\"wli falls trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4080/5450741356_a0b4077b1c_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"wli falls trip\"></a><br>We decided to hop out of the car and see what the problem was. We found out there was maintenance work going on on the bridge.<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450090135/\" title=\"Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4146/5450090135_48f15a992b_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Wli Falls Trip\"></a> <br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450089939/\" title=\"Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4135/5450089939_aac47f2da7_b.jpg\" width=\"533\" height=\"800\" alt=\"Wli Falls Trip\"></a><br>These fishermen were oblivious to our plight. I hope they caught a lot of tilapia.<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450697712/\" title=\"Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5217/5450697712_75d3bdc513_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Wli Falls Trip\"></a><br><br>We turned what should have been frustrating time into an exciting adventure. It’s amazing how many girls hit on Bertil. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450088919/\" title=\"Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5179/5450088919_7702ba7f98_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Wli Falls Trip\"></a><br>It was funny when this guy asked Bertil for his phone number and he being Dutch, looked the guy in the face and smilingly asked him what he wants it for since he’s not a girl. The brother was so shocked he just disappeared. Boy, did I laugh! That’s the tough dutchman drinking pure water. <br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450089307/\" title=\"Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5178/5450089307_c86074bf9e_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Wli Falls Trip\"></a><br>How many of you know the writing on this vehicle is actually a quotation from the Bible?<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450072883/\" title=\"The Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5259/5450072883_33297f611f_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"The Wli Falls Trip\"></a> Bertil was shocked when I told him. It’s amazing how Dutch people have just generally stopped going to church and turned almost all their churches into nightclubs, musuems, offices etc. They should come and see Ghana, we are turning all our cinemas into churches. That where the money is now, I’m told;)<br><br>I must leave some things for my next post so just go ahead and enjoy these photos and remember, Ghana is a beautiful country with many lovely people; and we would love to have you over, if you’ve never been.<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5450679230/\" title=\"The Wli Falls Trip by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5295/5450679230_3db7354da3_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"The Wli Falls Trip\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1392769759109690709-8770626218197269734?l=nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "They Were Best of Friends, Until the Feds Showed Up",
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"title" : "Letter to Affliction",
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"content" : "<p>Dear ruefulness, dear regret, I’ve rounded<br>\nthe bend and here you are again in the clearing,<br>\neach tree planted like a taper in a circle<br>\nof melted ground. How deep are your roots,<br>\nreally? The sky’s chipped at the rim like an old<br>\npiece of crockery— its white band milky,<br>\nits saucer mismatched. Where’s the calico<br>\nnapkin appliqued with cats? I’ve forgotten<br>\nif I’ve set the table for dinner or for tea.<br>\nPerhaps it’s not too late to take a long<br>\nvacation by the sea. A fleet of sandpipers<br>\nand gulls holds the rocks at siege. The water<br>\nasks over and over, What is the heart?<br>\nYou know it makes a sound louder<br>\nthan any internal combustion engine.<br>\nHere I am waiting for the skin of leaves<br>\nto split open; waiting for lightning<br>\nto marble in the marrow.</p>\n<p>—<a href=\"http://www.blipfoto.com/lizardmeanders\">Luisa A. Igloria</a><br>\n02 17 2011<br>\n<em><br>\nIn response to <a href=\"http://morningporch.com/2011/02/17/159121519/\">today’s Morning Porch entry</a> (and to <a href=\"http://morningporch.com/2011/02/17/159121519/comment-page-1#comment-3005\">another response-poem</a>, by Dale Favier)</em></p>"
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"title" : "Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public",
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"content" : "<blockquote><p>“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they might appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions”</p>\n<p>–Robin Cook, 1977 essay, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,”</p></blockquote>\n<p>I’ve been thinking about Jay Rosen’s piece on <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://pressthink.org/2011/02/the-twitter-cant-topple-dictators-article/\">“The ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’ Article,”</a></span> in which he defines articles like <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100075775/mubarak-steps-down-but-lets-be-clear-twitter-had-nothing-to-do-with-it/\">this</a></span>, <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html%20/%20ixzz1CqneJJOu\">this</a></span>, <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/social-media-oppression/\">this</a></span>, and <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/tools-of-revolution/\">this</a></span>, as a <em>genre </em>by reference these formal markers:</p>\n<blockquote><p>1.) Nameless fools are staking maximalist claims.<br>\n2.) No links we can use to check the context of those claims.<br>\n3.) The masses of deluded people make an appearance so they can be ridiculed.<br>\n4.) Bizarre ideas get refuted with a straight face.<br>\n5.) Spurious historicity.<br>\n6.) The really hard questions are skirted.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Rosen has the beginnings of an answer as to why the genre has an appeal:</p>\n<blockquote><p>…here’s a guess: almost everyone who cares about such a discussion is excited about the Internet. Almost everyone is a little wary of being fooled by The Amazing and getting carried away. When we <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/malcolm-gladwell-tackles-egypt-twitter\">nod along</a></span> with Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators we’re assuring ourselves that our excitement is contained, that we’re being realistic, mature, grown-up about it.</p></blockquote>\n<p>I think this is right, as far as it goes. But I begin with a citation from Robin Cook’s fairly canonical argument about <em>cinematic </em>genre because he’s emphasizing the importance of placing generic formations in their broader discursive context, and I think this is precisely what we need to do with this brand of writing, now that we‘ve (Rosen) identified its formal characteristics. Its coherence is linked to the problem it seeks to solve and how, the work it takes as its project to do.</p>\n<p>Cook’s argument, for example, is that a Film Noir like <em>The Big Heat</em> and a Western like <em>Rancho Notorious </em>are not only part of the same conversation — which he argues <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=c72Dt4oFu9YC&lpg=PA261&ots=czdkSOpLPl&dq=One%20of%20the%20greatest%20obstacles%20to%20any%20fruitful%20theory%20of%20genre%20has%20been%20the%20tendency%20to%20treat%20the%20genres%20as%20discrete.%20An%20ideological%20approach%20might%20suggest%20why%20they%20can't%20be%2C%20however%20hard%20they%20might%20appear%20to%20try%3A%20at%20best%2C%20they%20represent&pg=PA261#v=onepage&q&f=false\">here</a></span>, for example — but that the position they take <em>in</em> that conversation (how they resolve the problems they raise) is at least a partial function of the narratives encoded in the generic structures they employ. To oversimplify: while the Western and the Film Noir are talking about the same kinds of social tensions, anxieties, or contradictions, the position they take on those questions (the answers/resolutions they give) are distinctly organic to their particular generic forms. Context, then, is key: we understand the relationship between Western and Noir (and the function of those generic markers) by placing them as different dialogic parts of a single conversation.</p>\n<p>The goal of doing so would be to liberate the concept of genre from its purely formal characteristics. By attacking “the foolishness of regarding [genres] as discrete and fully autonomous on the grounds of their defining iconography,” as Cook puts it, he wants us to see that the Western or the Noir are coherent <em>ideological </em>structures, not simply a set of clichéd forms. You know it’s a Western, in other words, not because of the simple presence of railroad, lawman, cowboy, Indian, etc, but because of the narratives that these motifs are being used to put forward, the particular kind of story the Western tells about history, progress, gender, and race.</p>\n<p>My version of Rosen’s argument, then, would be this: it is a fantasy of a particular kind of credulousness, which is then so soberly refuted (by sober debunkers) that the overriding impression left for the audience is only of the performance of seriousness itself, and of the credulous enthusiasm which has been dismissed.</p>\n<p>Take <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html#ixzz1DwTnipUG\">this bit</a></span> of rhetoric — much derided — from Malcolm Gladwell:</p>\n<blockquote><p>…surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a <em>phone</em>—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The assertion of eternal verities (people will always) alongside controlled contempt (Please.) and the repeated invocation of what is and isn’t “interesting” all adds up to an argument from an authority derived from the seriousness of his rhetoric: we know he’s a serious guy because he sounds serious, and because the people he’s criticizing are saying things that go against eternal verities, and because they cause a serious person to need to control his contempt (and we know they are contemptible because he is serious). It’s a recursive tautology; what you get is a blank stage in which there are two actors, the twitter-utopian and the debunker, and the staging and background (and object of debate) left insubstantial, immaterial. The rhetorical foreground fills up the camera while the historiographic background is left out of focus.</p>\n<p>Rosen suggests that this allows the “really hard questions” to be skirted, and that’s true, but I think it also accomplishes something else through the blankness of the absent backdrop: the Western generalist (Gladwell) gets to retain Serious Authority. The man who knows nothing about Egypt still gets to Seriously Know, precisely because it‘s only a dialogue between two Western speakers. And this, I think, is the real key. It isn’t just that really “hard” questions get skirted; it’s the fact that Egyptians are driving this narrative — and that if we want to understand it, we have to know something about Egypt <em>in its particularity </em>– that makes these people nervous.</p>\n<p>After all, the question of social media will, in the end, always turn into a question of the particular social reality it’s mediating. Which is why I would add to Rosen’s list another generic trait: the invocation of “people will always” as an explanation, something that always strikes me as a sign of a weak and unadventurous mind. People don’t “always” do anything. People are unpredictable. But they don’t do strange and unexpected things because they‘re irrational; people get called “irrational” when their rationality is not as apparent to us as we’d like to think it is. People always do what they do for a reason, but when we don’t know what that reason is, calling it irrational is a way of papering over the fact that we don’t actually understand.</p>\n<p>In this case, for example, the idea that “People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other” is flatly inadequate. Egypt had a grievance for three decades, yet they only started finding a way to communicate and coordinate with each other (on a massive scale) in the last few years. The Egyptian uprising happened when it did for good reasons, and eternal verities about what people will always do give us less than no purchase on that problem. But to even have the conversation about social media starts taking people like Gladwell way out of their comfort zone.</p>\n<p>In other words, to understand why the Egyptian revolt happened when it did, we’d have to learn something about Egyptian history, about the <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefaya\">Kifaya movement</a></span>, and about how Egyptians were actually using blogs and facebook. Which would mean that a generalist intellectual about everything (and nothing in particular) like Malcolm Gladwell would suddenly find himself having to listen to a specialist like Charles Hirschkind, or even — ye Gods! — Egyptians themselves. But it’s less about <em>who</em> as <em>what</em>; the source of Hirschkind’s knowledge about how blogs were used to lay the foundation of the Egyptian revolution is, ultimately, not his own Deeply Serious intellect, but the fact that he’s been studying the formations of publics in Egypt for decades now. It’s the fact that Egypt is particular and similar only to itself (and that he’s been paying attention to it) that allows him to weave together <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/599/from-the-blogosphere-to-the-street_the-role-of-social-media-in-the-egyptian-uprising\">this narrative</a></span>, for example:</p>\n<blockquote><p>What was striking about the Egyptian blogosphere as it developed in the last 7 or so years is the extent to which it engendered a political language free from the problematic of secularization vs. fundamentalism that had governed so much of political discourse in the Middle East and elsewhere. The blogosphere that burst into existence in Egypt around 2004 and 2005 in many ways provided a new context for a process that had begun a somewhat earlier, in the late 1990s: namely, the development of practices of coordination and support between secular leftist organizations and associations, and Islamist ones (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood)—a phenomenon almost completely absent in the prior decades. Toward the end of the decade of the 90s, Islamist and leftist lawyers began to agree to work together on cases regarding state torture, whereas in previous years, lawyers of one affiliation would almost never publicly defend plaintiffs from the other.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Gladwell can’t take part in this conversation, except by dismissing it. Which is why he <em>must</em> dismiss it: to deal with it on its own terms — a topography of knowledge defined by a meridian set in Cairo — would lead him away from his ability to speak about all people all the time. It would prevent Western Authority from having a monopoly on the truth of all people.</p>\n<p>Let me push this even farther. Rosen writes that “everyone is a little wary of being fooled by The Amazing and getting carried away,” and this, again, seems right to me, but I think the fear runs deeper than simply a desire to not look foolish or of being wrong. Revolution is scary because it’s unpredictable. Hell, <em>democracy </em>is scarily unpredictable. And respect for democracy will require accepting that the Egyptians might do things we wouldn’t do if we were in their place, choices that may seem — to us — irrational, but only because the source of their rationality is unavailable to us. It will mean accepting the legitimacy of political rationalities we may not share, and which dismissing as “irrational” would only reveal us to be crypto-colonialists, willing to allow them to have democratic choice only between the options we’ve chosen for them.</p>\n<p>Note, for example, how many Western commentators have demanded <em>guarantees </em>that a democratic election in Egypt will produce a government we like. And the assertion that if democracy leads to Islamist rule (of any type), then <em>obviously </em>Egypt isn’t ready for democracy.<em> </em>The colonialist assumption of privilege that underpins that kind of thought process is staggering, as is its explicitly anti-democratic preference: before we can accept Arabs making choices for themselves, we have to know what those choices will be. Only choices that have already been vetted in Washington are to be allowed. And thus: only we get to have democracy.</p>\n<p>To return to the conversation about new media, one of the pitfalls of dubbing this a “facebook revolution” would be if we allowed the social topography in which facebook is <em>used </em>to disappear. The straw man that people like Gladwell invent are doing this, turning Egyptians into tools of their media tools. But this is also precisely what Hirschkind is <em>not </em>doing when he <em>places </em>blogs and facebook in their socio-political context: it is precisely because of pre-existing political problems — the fact that Islamists and secularists were not talking to each other — that blogs and other online organizing platforms, like facebook, could become so useful. Conversations that could not be had in person could be had online, which then <em>led</em> to face-to-face conversations, which then made collaborative action possible.</p>\n<p>To build on what seemed to be the consensus of Berkeley’s <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://cmes.berkeley.edu/Events/EGYPT%20EVENT.pdf\">Center for Middle Eastern Studies</a>, </span>the importance of social media is particularly to be found in the sense and performance of Egyptian public identity that it enabled, both the identity and political rationality which were suddenly seen to widespread. Routine state terror has been omnipresent for decades, but what we heard over and over again was that a facebook page like <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/we-are-all-khaled-saeed-redefining-political-demonstration-egypt\">“We Are All Khalid Saeed”</a></span> could became a means of rendering that experience — which so many people <em>silently </em>had in common — something which could be <em>publicly knowable</em> as a common experience. This move — taking something privately experienced, and making it publicly knowable — is a powerful thing.</p>\n<p>As Edward Said put it in <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n03/edward-said/permission-to-narrate\">Permission to Narrate</a></span> (in a quote I was reminded of <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://mondoweiss.net/2011/02/arabs-seize-the-permission-to-narrate.html\">here</a></span>):</p>\n<blockquote><p>Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them. . . . as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, “narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>Before the recent past — goes this interpretation — state terror in Egypt <em>was</em> ubiquitous, but it was not so easily and widely <em>known</em> to be ubiquitous. So however common it might have been, each fact and incident of torture and state violence was mostly knowable as isolated, particular. Which makes sense: in a country whose media was tightly controlled by a dictatorial apparatus, there were few available socially acceptable narratives which could absorb, sustain, and circulate them. Moreover, even if everyone <em>knew </em>that state terror was ubiquitous, they didn’t necessarily know that everyone else knew it too: they might have known that they — and anyone — could suffer the fate of Khalid Saeed, but they didn’t know, for sure, that <em>everyone else </em>knew this as well. In other words, Egyptians might have been united by the <em>fact </em>of being vulnerable to be tortured to death by their government, but the internet allowed them to see and understand that they all understood themselves to be this, that all were united in disgust and rage. This is the fertile seed-bed for revolt: knowing that if you stand in front of a tank, you will not be alone in doing so.</p>\n<p>And this is what I think the main function of the “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” article, and the ideological function that defines its genre: the disappearance of Egyptian social consciousness as the prime driver of events. Against the straw-man of techno-determinism, someone like Gladwell is enabled to argue that this has nothing to do with what Egyptians think of Egypt, nothing to do with a century of accumulated thought, emotion, identity, and narrated experience — most of which is unavailable to Gladwell, and which most Americans find strange and foreign. Instead, it is something safe and easy, something we, in the West, can safely opine and claim authority over: ourselves. The French revolution, the fall of communism, and <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=QqDa4tGENvYC&lpg=PR1&ots=Z5HVXa83jf&dq=provincializing%20Europe&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false\">Universal Western History</a></span>. In an implicit — but constitutive — dialogue with those who would tell us that this is about <em>Egypt</em>, it comes along to tell us that it’s not.</p>"
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"title" : "Happy Valentine's Day from Last.fm",
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"content" : "<p>We all know Last.fm listeners are achingly hip, resolutely individualistic, and far too cynical to be taken in by the annual cards-and-roses marketing-fest called Valentine’s Day, right?</p>\n\n\t<p>Well… perhaps not. We wondered, with years worth of data at our fingertips, if we could see whether February 14th brought out the sentimental side of our listeners.</p>\n\n<h3>This Is Not A Love Song</h3>\n\n\t<p>In order to listen to love songs, you have to find them first. So we started our investigation with the tags <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Romantic\">Romantic</a> and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Love+Songs\">Love Songs</a>. Tags are supplied by listeners, so their presence alone is enough to give away the fact that at least some of you are softies at heart. </p>\n\n\t<p>Of course, ‘Romantic’ music can also refer to 19th-century pieces by the likes of <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Johannes+Brahms\">Brahms</a> and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Franz+Schubert\">Schubert</a>, so we went to our database and extracted the top-scoring tracks associated with both Romantic <em>and</em> Love Songs. </p>\n\n\t<p>This gave us a stack of 30 songs by the likes of <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Lionel+Richie\">Lionel Richie</a>, <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+Manilow\">Barry Manilow</a>, <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Bryan+Adams\">Bryan Adams</a> and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Ronan+Keating\">Ronan Keating</a>.</p>\n\n<h3>What Time Is Love?</h3>\n\n\t<p>We wanted to find out whether there were specific times when our listeners were feeling particularly loved-up. So we scanned our <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/help/faq?category=99\">scrobbling</a> logs for 2010, and for each day counted the number of listeners who’d played at least one of the love songs in our test set. 30 songs is a tiny fraction of the millions of tracks scrobbled to Last.fm every day, but even so there’s a clear spike on February 14th:</p>\n\n\t<p><a href=\"http://blog.last.fm/images/89.png\"><img src=\"http://blog.last.fm/images/88.png\"></a><br>\n<em>Click image for full-size version.</em></p>\n\n<h3>Put It In A Love Song</h3>\n\n\t<p>But tags are only one way of looking at the data. They tell us what people say about their music, but we wanted to turn the question around: what artists do people listen to especially on Valentine’s Day?</p>\n\n\t<p>To answer this question, you can’t just look at the top 10 or top 100 artists. After all, Last.fm listeners’ music taste is incredibly diverse, and for the most part the overlap is made up of the latest hits. For example, here’s the top 5 tracks played on Valentine’s Day 2010:</p>\n\n\t<p>1. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Lady+Gaga\">Lady Gaga</a> – Bad Romance<br>\n2. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Ke$ha\">Ke$ha</a> – TiK ToK<br>\n3. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Lady+Gaga\">Lady Gaga</a> – Poker Face<br>\n4. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Owl+City\">Owl City</a> – Fireflies<br>\n5. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Lady+Gaga\">Lady Gaga</a> – Paparazzi</p>\n\n\t<p>Could be any other day in February 2010 really. But by comparing people’s listening habits on Valentine’s Day to another day of the year you can see what music becomes temporarily more popular than usual when people are in the mood for love.</p>\n\n\t<p>So, we took the scrobbling logs for February 14th for the last six years and pulled out a shortlist of the artists who made it into the top 1000 that day but <em>not</em> seven days later (the 21st – a relatively unromantic day).</p>\n\n\t<p>We added up the number of times an artist appeared in the shortlist between 2005 and 2010 and ranked them by this score, breaking ties by average popularity on Valentine’s Day. </p>\n\n\t<p>So, after all the number-crunching, here’s the Top 10 Valentine’s Day artists for Last.fm listeners:</p>\n\n\t<p>1. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+White\">Barry White</a>, the undisputed master of romance<br>\n2. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/BoA\">BoA</a><br>\n3. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Pete+Yorn\">Pete Yorn</a><br>\n4. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Sixpence+None+the+Richer\">Sixpence None the Richer</a><br>\n5. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Tiga\">Tiga</a><br>\n6. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Wire\">Wire</a><br>\n7. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Sam+Cooke\">Sam Cooke</a><br>\n8. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Shania+Twain\">Shania Twain</a><br>\n9. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Mandy+Moore\">Mandy Moore</a><br>\n10. <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Daphne+Loves+Derby\">Daphne Loves Derby</a></p>\n\n\t<p>So there you have it. The late and lamented Barry White, leader of the <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Love+Unlimited+Orchestra\">Love Unlimited Orchestra</a>, melter of the hearts of housewives everywhere and crooner of the likes of <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+White/_/Can't+Get+Enough+Of+Your+Love,+Babe\">Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe</a>, <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+White/_/You're+The+First,+The+Last,+My+Everything\">You’re The First, The Last, My Everything</a> and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Barry+White/_/It's+Ecstasy+When+You+Lay+Down+Next+To+Me\">It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me</a>, takes his rightful place on top of your Valentine’s Day chart.</p>\n\n\t<p>The runners-up span a vast range of tags — from <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Romantic\">Romantic</a> and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Love\">Love</a> of course (Shania Twain, Mandy Moore and Sam Cooke), to <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Electroclash\">Electroclash</a> (Tiga) and <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/tag/Post-Punk\">Post-Punk</a> (Wire); what a diverse bunch you are.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n\t<p><em>For more technical details about this post, see <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/user/andrewclegg/journal/2011/02/14/47vhk2_technical_background_on_valentine's_day_data-mining_post\">Andrew’s journal</a></em>.<br>\n<em>Last.fm is hiring! If you like crunching big data, come and work for us as a <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/about/jobs#job_Data+Scientist\">Data Scientist</a>.</em></p>"
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"title" : "my boundary issues w/ hypermedia",
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"content" : "<p>\n <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/zrimshots/1066270686/\" title=\"Irrigation\">\n <img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1053/1066270686_37780ffef6_t.jpg\" align=\"right\">\n </a>\n i'll admit it: i have 'boundary issues.' lately i've been thinking about how hypermedia works between\n\tclients and servers and i'm seeing things in a different light. i see <i>boundaries</i>. now, sometimes seeing bright\n lines between things can be a problem; the lines can hinder understanding of the similiarities between things. but\n\tright now, i am working to clarify the boundaries in order to generate a <i>new</i> understanding (at least on my\n part) of how hypermedia works and how it can be leveraged in distributed network applications.\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n <b>NOTE:</b> as i have mentioned in \n <a href=\"http://amundsen.com/blog/archives/1087\" title=\"experimenting w/ RESTful clients\">recent</a> \n <a href=\"http://amundsen.com/blog/archives/1088\" title=\"on generic, specific, and custom media types\">posts</a>, \n i am spending time this year experimentating with hypermedia. what follows is a brain dump of my ideas on the value\n of boundaries in hypermedia messages. this may not be very coherent and there are still holes in the idea, \n but it <i>does</i> accurately represent the current state of my thinking on the matter.\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>first, a small digression...</p>\n\n<h4>Fielding's three architectural elements</h4>\n<p>\n one of the things i find interesting about Fielding's \n <a href=\"http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm\" title=\"Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures\">2001 dissertation</a> \n is his observation about the \n <a href=\"http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/software_arch.htm#sec_1_2\" title=\"Elements\">elements of distributed network architecture</a>. in chapter one, he states that there\n are three elements that deserve attention:\n</p>\n<p><i>(start Fielding quote)</i></p>\n<dl>\n <dt>Components</dt>\n <dd>\n A component is an abstract unit of software instructions and internal state that provides a \n transformation of data via its interface.\n </dd>\n <dt>Connectors</dt>\n <dd>\n A connector is an abstract mechanism that mediates communication, coordination, or cooperation \n among components.\n </dd>\n <dt>Data</dt>\n <dd>\n A datum is an element of information that is transferred from a component, or received by a\n component, via a connector.\n </dd>\n</dl>\n<p><i>(end Fielding quote)</i></p>\n<p>\n The thing that strikes me here is that Fielding has expanded the traditional Component-Connector model by\n elevating Data to the architectural level. this was an important addition at the time. also, as i \n read it the first time, it showed me that - by rethinking a well-known conceptual model - new relationships, \n depdendencies, and interactions can be clearly observed.\n</p>\n<p>end digression.</p>\n\n<h4>my three hypermedia elements</h4>\n<p>\nwhile my own thinking is not to be treated on the same level as Fielding's PhD work, i, too, have been\nre-thinking my conceptual model of hypermedia in order to discover new elements and aspects. the current \nevidence of this attempt is my idea that hypermedia messages carry multiple levels of information.\nnot just the data, not just the \n<a href=\"http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/hfactor/\" title=\"Hypermedia Types\">application controls</a>, \nbut other information, too.\n</p>\n<p>\nas a result of my efforts to refresh my concept of hypermedia and it's role in distributed network applications,\ni've come to view the messages passed between client and server as containing several distinct sets\nof information. these are:\n</p>\n<dl>\n <dt>Protocol information</dt>\n <dd>\n <b>Protocol</b> information expresses the transfer protocol details understood by all participants\n in the network. these are usually application controls in the message that are mapped (via the\n media type documentation) to transfer protocol details\n (<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.2\" title=\"The A element\">HTML.A</a>\n tags map to \n <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.3\" title=\"GET\">HTTP.GET</a>, etc.).\n </dd>\n <dt>Domain information</dt>\n <dd>\n <b>Domain</b> information expresses the specific semantics understood by the target participants\n (usually the origin server and the client). these are usually expressed using the @rel attribute\n in HTML, Atom, etc. (e.g. rel=\"customer\", rel=\"edit\", rel=\"search\", etc.).\n </dd>\n <dt>State information</dt>\n <dd>\n <b>State</b> information expresses the transient state values for the particular request/response\n instance. these are usually expressed using pre-defined data elements within the media type (i.e.\n <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.4\" title=\"The INPUT element\">HTML.INPUT</a>) \n but may also be expressed in rendering elements (i.e. \n <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.2\" title=\"Unordered lists (UL), ordered lists (OL), and list items (LI)\">HTML.LI</a>, \n <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.3\" title=\"Definition lists: the DL, DT, and DD elements\">HTML.DT</a>, etc.). \n state information may even be expressed using \n <a href=\"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2965\" title=\"HTTP State Management Mechanism\">Cookies</a> \n or other message meta-data.\n </dd>\n</dl>\n<p>\ni'll admit that last item (<b>State</b>) is particulary vague right now. today, i'm operating on the idea that it is\npossible to identify, understand, and manipulate <b>State</b> within a hypermedia message when\nthe media type is sufficiently defined to do so. i'm testing some ways to do this, but more at another time...\n</p>\n<h4>improving evolvability</h4>\n<p>\nwhy am i talking about this right now? because i think, by applying this boundary model to hypermedia messages,\nit is possible to improve the capabilities and flexibilty of Web clients|agents|applications.\n</p>\n<p>\nmy contention is, in order to improve evolvability on the Web, hypermedia types must first be sufficiently \ndesigned to allow for clearly-defined, variable protocol understanding. for example, the HTML.A\ntag does not <i>require</i> the href attribute use the \"http\" scheme. second, the hypermedia type must be \ndesigned in such a way as to keep domain-specific information clearly separated from the protocol details. \nagain HTML comes very close to this as it has a limited set of \n<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links\" title=\"Link types\">@rel values defined</a> \nand most of them are very generic.\n</p>\n<p>in my mind, the key is to define and adopt a well-understood way to communicate domain-specific information. the\n<a href=\"http://gmpg.org/xmdp/\" title=\"Xhtml Meta Data Profiles\">XMDP</a> project is one such example. \n<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl\" title=\"Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1\">WSDL</a> and\n<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/\" title=\"Web Application Description Language\">WADL</a> \nare similar attempts. i suspect a registered media type that pulls from these existing\nexamples will do the trick.\n</p>\n<p>\nfinally, the hypermedia type needs to be designed in such a way as to allow clients to easily locate and\nmanipulate state information within a message. this is handled well in the \n<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1\" title=\"\">application/x-www-form-urlencoded</a> media type definition, but not taken into account in \nmost other media types. this lack of clear state semantics within messages is, i suspect,\none of the main reasons most automated agents on the web are limited to read-only activities. \n</p>\n<p>\njust how to go about describing this abstract \"state information\" is not yet clear to me.\nbut i have already begun to map out some of the details in a way that seems promising. essentially, \nby defining a set of elements that the clients and servers will be expected to share, a \"state profile\" \ncan emerge. this profile could be defined in a way that is understood by all parties. the details of how \nto manage and manipulate this stat can be left to each participant as a private implementation detail. \n</p>\n<h4>the missing link</h4>\n<p>\nso where is this leading? i contend that, with a clear set of <b>Protocol</b>, \n<b>Domain</b> and <b>State</b> boundaries, automated agents can be more powerful and flexible. \nin fact, with these three elements of hypermedia clarified and clearly deliniated in a message, \na fourth element - a missing link - can be brought into the picture: a hypermedia DSL.\n</p>\n<dl>\n <dt>Hypermedia DSL</dt>\n <dd>\n a <b>Hypermedia DSL</b> is domain-specific language designed to recognize the <b>State</b> elements \n within a message; understand the available <b>Domain</b> information, and be able to identify and \n execute the <b>Protocol</b> details provided.\n </dd>\n</dl>\n<p>\nIOW, when a hypermedia type has well-defined <b>Procotol</b>, <b>Domain</b>, and <b>State</b> information,\nit is possible to use a very simple turing-complete DSL to 'drive' an automated agent. the DSL might look\nsomething like this:\n</p>\n<pre>\n while(!done)\n {\n if(exsits(state.item='boots')\n {\n done=true;\n }\n if(exists(link.item='boots')\n {\n store(state.item)\n }\n if(exists(link.search))\n { \n actviate(link.search('boots'))\n }\n }\n</pre>\n<p>\neven though the above example is mere speculation, i will point out that the \n<a href=\"http://restfulie.caelum.com.br/\" title=\"Restfulie\">Restfulie</a> framework\nalready has a very compelling \"Web DSL.\" (much more capable then the weak example i offere here). i suspect it\nis only a matter of time before this kind of work spreads and becomes more ubiquitous.\n</p>\n<h4>am i correct?</h4>\n<p>\nin the past, i would make public assertions and <i>expect</i> them to be correct. not so much anymore\nnow, i am happy to expose my speculations and see where it leads. no matter the results, i'll have\nlearned something in the process. \n</p>\n<p>\nso i plod along. working through my 'boundary issues.' poking at the edges. attempting to make some\nheadway in my experiments.\n</p>\n<p>of course, once i have successfully delineated the boundaries, the most likely thing i'll do next is...</p>\n\n<h4>go beyond the boundaries</h4>"
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"content" : "<table border=\"1\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\"><tbody><tr><td valign=\"top\" width=\"65\">Tier</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"135\">Type of knowledge</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"110\">Recommended actions</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"109\">System</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"96\">Compatible with autocracy?</td></tr><tr><td valign=\"top\" width=\"65\">(1) </td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"135\">Certainty (known knowns)</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"110\">Just do it</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"109\">Administration</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"96\">Yes</td></tr><tr><td valign=\"top\" width=\"65\">(2) </td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"135\">Probability (known unknowns)</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"110\">Hypothesis testing</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"109\">Academic freedom</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"96\">Temporarily Yes, eventually No</td></tr><tr><td valign=\"top\" width=\"65\">(3) </td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"135\">Ignorance (unknown unknowns)</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"110\">Decentralized feedback and accountability</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"109\">Individual liberty</td><td valign=\"top\" width=\"96\">No</td></tr></tbody></table><p>As the Egypt crisis drags on, the issue of autocracy vs. democracy in development gets new life. One of the classic arguments against autocracy is that it can’t cope with uncertainty, not to mention ignorance.</p><p>Autocrats defend themselves by claiming they live in a word of certainty, where they can solve problems with known solutions (Tier 1 in the above table) through sheer administrative effort.</p><p>If the world is really more in Tier 2, where academic freedom is necessary to test and reject hypotheses, then autocrats sometimes try to carve out the space for it, while restricting other kinds of freedom. This can sometimes succeed for a while, but a House Divided against itself cannot stand forever — it will eventually revert to no freedoms or all freedoms.</p><p>Much of the development problem is really in Tier 3, where you don’t even know the probabilities of solutions to problems working. Then you need entrepreneurs for business, inventers for technology, and political reformers for institutions, all using a trial and error method where they are accountable to positive and negative feedback. In other words, you need unhindered democracy and markets to support continuing innovation for development to keep proceeding to the highest levels.</p><p>So, for example, the Soviet system <span style=\"text-decoration:line-through\">(not to mention the MVP)</span> tried to make a system work in Tiers 2 and 3, when it could only possibly work in Tier 1. For a while it sort of worked, as Tier 2 science facilitated imitation of technology invented in the Tier 3 West. But eventually Tier 2 scientists became dissidents, Lysenkoism corrupted Tier 2 anyway, and the system eventually collapsed altogether from the lack of innovation that was only possible in Tier 3. Would anyone like to predict a similar long-run fate for {insert NAME of temporarily successful autocracy here}?</p><p>As usual, we will give the economist who understood all this the best the last word:</p><blockquote><p>All institutions of freedom are adaptations to this fundamental fact of ignorance…certainty we cannot achieve in human affairs. (FA Hayek)</p></blockquote>"
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"content" : "The problem with the Rumsfeld taxonomy of knowledge is that it ignores the \"unknown knowns\", that is the unconscious biases that underlie an issue. This was true with regard to Iraq (in which the subtext should well have been ubertext) and certainly of any analysis of autocracies. <br><br>Sidenote: remember in decades past, the conscious linguistic branding that made the semantic split between authoritarian and totalitarian? \"Our\" guys were authoritarian however distasteful that was and \"their\" guys were totalitarian. <br><br>Digressing further: it's always guys isn't it? No Icelandic women in prospect to clean up the mess.<br><br>It's all subtext to me.",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5427526616/\" title=\"Accra by night by Bibinyiba, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5214/5427526616_5d6c38376f_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Accra by night\"></a><br>Squeaky, overworked beds take over<br>After the lights go to sleep <br>And a symphony of snores crescendoes<br>From the chambers of the uninspired.<br><br>Everybody and everything that goes<br>Back and forth and back and forth<br>finally sweats to a halt; even if<br>For just a few hours till they <br>regain enough energy to start<br>Going back and forth and back and forth<br>All over this beautiful city again.<br><br>The mask we wear in the morning <br>Is not the one we greet Night with.<br>If you still think her softest spot<br>Is her heart, you haven’t found good use <br>For your blessed fingers yet. <br>Proper probing yields great results.<br><br>Accra, you’re a beautiful place to know…<br>At night.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1392769759109690709-5770132495123950835?l=nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Teju Cole’s Open City",
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"content" : "<p></p><p><a href=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/teju_cole_smaller.jpg\"><img src=\"http://www.chapatimystery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/teju_cole_smaller-297x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"teju_cole_smaller\" width=\"297\" height=\"300\"></a>I also have a review out today on Bookslut of long-time CM reader <a href=\"http://www.tejucole.com/\">Teju Cole</a>‘s superb new novel <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Open-City-Novel-Teju-Cole/dp/1400068096\">Open City</a>. The novel comes out tomorrow. Everyone must read it! An excerpt from my review:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The review materials I received with Open City ask me to compare Cole’s writing to that of W.G. Sebald or J.M. Coetzee. I was instead reminded of Wharton and James, of their pacing, of their detailed descriptions of place, history and person and of their slightly god-like distance from their characters and subjects. I read in Open City a kind of sequel to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: the writing style, similarly precise and clear; the city, even less innocent than it was then. Cole, who is also a photographer and an art historian, has an enviable ability to take a subject, say, the city of New York, and turn it inside out and upside down, shake it out, and examine the contents, then pack it up again. In this, his writing resembles his photography, which, unlike most urban photography, manages to find grand vistas and great heights in the claustrophobic clutter of a city landscape. In a photograph such as this one, a bird’s eye view of what appears to be the interior of a multi-storied shopping mall becomes a delicate abstraction, the suspended star-shaped lights an orderly arrangement of origami, the tiny shoppers, so many ants dotting the background.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Read the rest <a href=\"http://bit.ly/fx1Jdl\">here</a>.</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?i=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?i=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?a=uaTUFu3K4xk:GR3-yNWEdxU:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chapatimystery?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chapatimystery/~4/uaTUFu3K4xk\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "The 5 Best Toys of All Time | GeekDad | Wired.com",
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"content" : "<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>Why would authorities in a European county like Switzerland <a href=\"http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gKfH0j5XVuNcR8LfyY6yyXx6BE4Q?docId=CNG.57c4250144036276afd6dfad741f5c64.461\"> entertain the idea of trying George W. Bush for torture</a> if he came to give a talk in that country;</p>\n<p>But,<a href=\"http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F02%2F05%2FMN701HJCIV.DTL\"> European countries</a> are supporting <a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/01/who-is-omar-suleiman.html\"> Omar Suleiman</a> for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the one who undertook the torture for Bush? Suleiman tossed some 30,000 suspected Muslim fundamentalists in prison, and accepted from the US CIA kidnapped suspected militants, whom he had tortured. Some were innocent. One, Sheikh Libi, was tortured into falsely confessing that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that straight into Colin Powell’s speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War.</p>\n<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>If Frank Wisner, President Obama’s informal envoy to Egypt, is a paid lobbyist for Egypt and says things like that <a href=\"http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/us-disassociates-itself-from-envoy-s-support-for-mubarak-1.1083617?localLinksEnabled=false\"> Mubarak must stay</a>, which Obama then has to deny …</p>\n<p>Why didn’t Obama send an envoy from Human Rights Watch instead?</p>\n<p>I ask myself why</p>\n<p>If Bush and the Neocons installed a pathbreaking democracy in iraq . . .</p>\n<p>– Why does its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/05/AR2011020503870.html\">have to pledge not to run for office</a> again (taking a leaf from the books of the rulers of Yemen and Egypt? Why does al-Maliki <a href=\"http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0201/Report-Secret-prison-in-Iraq-raises-fresh-concerns-over-torture\">have secret prisons</a> where people appear to have been tortured? Why is he <a href=\"http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/critics-attack-al-malikis-power-grab-over-iraq-state-institutions\">taking over independent commissions</a> such as the electoral commission? </p>\n<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>If President Hosni Mubarak, his generals, and the ruling National Democratic Party <a href=\"http://blackchristiannews.com/news/2010/12/hundreds-of-egyptian-protest-parliamentary-election-results.html\"> have engaged in voter fraud and corruption </a> during each of the elections for the past few decades; </p>\n<p>… Would would make them honest brokers in moving the county to presidential elections in September?</p>\n<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>If the Mubarak regime has had a change of heart and will now move toward democracy;</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1354096/Egypt-protests-Police-use-Facebook-Twitter-track-protesters.html\"> why is its secret police snooping through</a> Facebook accounts with an eye to making arrests? And, where is <a href=\"http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=7941041\"> Wael Ghonim?</a>, the Google exec who began the Facebook page for the Jan. 25 demonstrations?</p>\n<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>If the <a href=\"http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt-protests-20110206,0,6035233.story\">resignations of high Egyptian officials</a>, and reputedly even Mubarak himself, from the National Democratic Party are sincere;</p>\n<p>Then why not just resign from the presidency, since the point of being in the ruling party was to attempt to use it to come to power?</p>\n<p>I ask myself why.</p>\n<p>If the Muslim Brotherhood is supposed to be such a radical party</p>\n<p>Then why is it a) the first <a href=\"http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/06/3131210.htm?section=world\">major opposition party</a> to begin negotiations with the government; and b) why is the MB <a href=\"http://www.eurasiareview.com/world-news/africa/muslim-brotherhood-rejects-khamenei-calls-for-iran-style-islamic-state-05022011/\">rebuking Iran’s ruling ayatollah Ali Khamenei </a> for saying the street revolution is Islamic, insisting instead that it is national?</p>"
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"title" : "The utter futility of scratch card games online with the UK National Lottery",
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"content" : "With an idle moment late last night I wondered how the <a href=\"https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/\">National Lottery</a>'s online scratch card games work. So I decided to poke around and intercept the network connections and have a look. Doing so revealed the utter futility of spending any time on these.<br><br>It's not even like the regular lottery where the result is random. In the \"Instant Win\" games the outcome is entirely known the moment you click Buy and your interaction with the game makes no difference at all. As you interact with the game you are literally wasting your time (and money).<br><br>Here, for example, is the game <a href=\"https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/gaming/wager/showGameDetail.do?type=wager&gameId=00000000000000003500\">Winning 7's</a> which involves being presented with a board with 25 squares on it from which you choose 16. The more 7's you uncover the higher your prize.<br><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnL0Y_1IWI/AAAAAAAAAXw/Mop_0ZXDg2Q/s1600/Picture%2B2.png\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"258\" width=\"400\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnL0Y_1IWI/AAAAAAAAAXw/Mop_0ZXDg2Q/s400/Picture%2B2.png\"></a></div>The thing is, it doesn't matter what squares you uncover, the order in which you will uncover numbers is predetermined. You are not influencing the game at all. Here's why. In Firebug you can see the game downloading its state at the start:<br><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnMrNqVTxI/AAAAAAAAAX4/Lird46x-5J0/s1600/Picture%2B3.png\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"70\" width=\"400\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnMrNqVTxI/AAAAAAAAAX4/Lird46x-5J0/s400/Picture%2B3.png\"></a></div>And if you pretty print that XML you can see the amount that will be won, and the order in which the numbers will be revealed:<br><pre><?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?><br><ticket><br> <outcome prizeTier="14" amount="0.00"/><br> <params wT="0" /><br> <turn n="8" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="7" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="5" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="1" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="3" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="5" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="2" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="7" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="5" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="7" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="9" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="4" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="5" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="6" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="7" wP="0" /><br> <turn n="3" wP="0" /><br></ticket><br></pre>On that go I was destined to receive £0.00 and have the numbers 8, 7, 5, 1, 3, 5, 2, 7, 5, 7, 9, 4, 5, 6, 7 revealed in that order no matter where I clicked. Imagine my surprise on my first click:<br><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnNOFjEiEI/AAAAAAAAAYA/hhCUSvfVKHE/s1600/Picture%2B4.png\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"365\" width=\"400\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnNOFjEiEI/AAAAAAAAAYA/hhCUSvfVKHE/s400/Picture%2B4.png\"></a></div>And a few clicks later:<br><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnNVsvqSCI/AAAAAAAAAYI/-5kNOGdgYDs/s1600/Picture%2B6.png\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"366\" width=\"400\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dt4ksD7hyDE/TUnNVsvqSCI/AAAAAAAAAYI/-5kNOGdgYDs/s400/Picture%2B6.png\"></a></div>The great advantage of this scheme is that it makes the game very secure. It doesn't matter what you do to hack the Flash applet or even modify that XML, the web site knows the correct outcome. When each game ends you end up going back to the same URL (there's no need for the Flash game to tell the web site what you won).<br><br>The same is true of every other game I looked at. And some take a long time to \"play\". Some even emulating shuffling or randomization.<br><br>In the end, it was soul destroying to think that people play these games. It's all a cruel trick. At least the lottery is clear: the chance of your numbers coming up is really, really, really small. Here there's the illusion that you are participating in some way.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/19303585-2827262152380099447?l=blog.jgc.org\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile money",
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"content" : "<p>I’ve heard rumors that Kenya’s mobile money system–cash by cell phone–has grown so big it holds more influence over the money supply than the central bank. Not sure if it’s true, but Billy Jack and Tavneet Suri tell us many interesting M-PESA facts in <a href=\"http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16721\">this new paper</a>.</p><blockquote><p>we report initial results of two rounds of a large survey of households in Kenya, the country that has seen perhaps the most rapid and widespread growth of a mobile money product – known locally as M‐PESA – in the developing world. We first summarize the mechanics of M-PESA, and review its potential economic impacts. We then document the sequencing of adoption across households according to income and wealth, location, gender, and other socio‐economic characteristics, as well as the purposes for which the technology is used, including saving, sending and receiving remittances, and direct purchases of goods and services. In addition, we report findings from a survey of M‐PESA agents, who provide cash‐in and cash‐out services, and highlight the inventory management problems they face.</p></blockquote> <div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?a=5K3E_dLV2OE:Vn7JQFsPPYU:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?a=5K3E_dLV2OE:Vn7JQFsPPYU:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?a=5K3E_dLV2OE:Vn7JQFsPPYU:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?i=5K3E_dLV2OE:Vn7JQFsPPYU:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?a=5K3E_dLV2OE:Vn7JQFsPPYU:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/chrisblattman?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chrisblattman/~4/5K3E_dLV2OE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<b>Arseholes, considered as a strategic resource</b><br><br>Why didn't the Egyptian army fire on the demonstrators. <a href=\"http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/02/the-shifting-civil-military-balance-in-egypt\">Because they had learned how to be nice from the American army?</a>. I think not. Looking at the TV pictures, the Egyptian Army didn't start anything because they didn't get on the streets early enough, and by the time they had, the crowd had got so big that I would imagine the phrase \"torn limb from limb\" might have been drifting through a few minds.<br><br>Numbers make a difference. An invading army can take over a city quite quickly; partly because an invading foreign army can usually be reasonably sure that all the guns are pointing in the same direction, partly because an invading army has physical momentum and has worked out ahead of time where it is marching to, but mainly because the population of an invaded city are usually not on the streets in anything like the numbers seen in Egyptian cities. Even a <a href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/i-had-to-get-out--soldiers-tell-of-escape-as-warrior-caught-fire-507843.html\">tank</a>[1] is surprisingly little protection once it has stopped moving[2] and is surrounded by a mob. I saw pictures on the news yesterday of a tank crew sitting around at the edge of a square in Cairo - I have never in my life seen the crew of a tank looking so small and vulnerable. People are still talking about the army as if it was in control of the situation and for the moment at least, it just isn't.<br><br>And so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million, meaing potentially as many as three million adults on the streets in the worst case. Your total active-duty armed forces are unlikely to be a tenth of that. When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you.<br><br>And that is, a <i>reactionary</i> citizens' militia, to combat the revolutionary citizens' militia. Former socialist republics always used to be fond of buses full of coal miners from way out the back of beyond, but the Iranian basijs are the same sort of thing. Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren't interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising - there are <i>fucking millions</i> of them.<br><br>This is my advice to any aspiring dictator; early on in your career, identify and inventory all the self-pitying, bullying shitheads your country has to offer. Anyone with a grievance, a beer belly and enough strength to swing a pickaxe handle will do. You don't need to bother with military training or discipline because they're hopefully never going to be used as a proper military force - just concentrate on nuturing their sense that they, despite appearances, are the backbone of the country, and allowing them to understand that although rules are rules, there are some people who just need a slap. The bigger and burlier the better, but when the time comes they'll be fighting in groups against people weaker than themselves, often under cover of darkness, so numbers are more important than anything else. The extractive industries are indeed often a good source, as are demobbed veterans (Zimbabwe) or the laity of an established religion.<br><br>I think this is my new rule for assessing the stability of any dictatorship around the world, and I am on the lookout for any Francis Fukuyama style book contracts. The key factor in determining the survival of repressive regimes isn't economics, religion or military success. It's arseholes.<br><br><hr><br><br>[1] Can I make it clear at this stage that if it turns out to be the case that the vehicle in question (a Warrior) is not technically a \"tank\" for some obscure reason of military terminology, any attempt to explain this to me will be resisted viciously with the comment delete button. It has tracks and a fucking gun.<br><br>[2] If you are sitting around on a street corner in Cairo in your tank, you have to open the hatches or you will get too hot; even the minority of tanks which have air conditioning systems will run out of fuel to run them eventually. If you open the hatches, you are no longer in a heavily armoured and invulnerable battle vehicle - you are a bloke sitting on top of a van.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3699020-1066091166462626680?l=d-squareddigest.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "I was in Russia when the suicide bomber blew him/herself up in the arrivals hall of Moscow Domodedovo Airport. A rush of worried calls and e-mails jammed my phone (‘I am fine, I was in the Urals when it happened’). One message stands out: ‘The fuckers wrecked our set. Our set!’\nIn 2008 I produced a [...]"
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"content" : "<h4><a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Howard French. (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3)</a></h4>\n<div><img src=\"http://www.radioopensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/hofrench.jpg\"></div>\n<p>Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination\">Patrice Lumumba</a> in the Congo — a Cold War murder by Belgium with help from our CIA — the journalist <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">Howard French</a> is sketching an alternative path ahead for African development today. China is the big investor in 21st Century Africa. China sees Africa as yet another “natural-resource play” but also as a partner in growth — not a basket-case but a billion customers who’ll be two billion by mid-century. With the West and Japan deep in a post-industrial funk, China is keeping its focus on manufacturing, exports and markets, “and we’ll have them largely to ourselves,” China calculates, “because the West doesn’t make the stuff middle-class Africans are buying — cars and houses and shopping malls and airports and all the things associated with a rise to affluence. Those are the things that China makes.”</p>\n<p>For the New York Times <a href=\"http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/f/howard_w_french_french/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=howard%20french&st=cse\">Howard French</a> covered Africa and then China, where he learned Mandarin. He returns to Africa now on a book project, observing and overhearing Chinese migrants to places like Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Liberia. </p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>HF:</strong> I was struck every time I got on a plane: the Westerners tend to be rich American tourists on their way to seeing lions and giraffes; or aid workers and NGO people — coming with a mission to minister to Africans about capacity-building or democracy and what my father used to do: public health. I say none of this with scorn, but the Chinese have a very different mission. The Chinese that I saw on the planes — and by the way, ten years ago I saw no Chinese; now they’re maybe a fifth of all the passengers — are all, almost to a person, business people. They’ve pulled up their stakes wherever they lived — in Szechuan province or Hunan province — and they have come to make it in Africa. And they’re not leaving until they do. Whatever it takes for them to make a breakthrough in farming or in small industry, they’re going to work 20 hours a day till they make it. They see Africa as a place of extraordinary growth opportunity, a place to make a fortune, to throw down some roots. These are not people who’re there for a couple of years. They’re thinking about building new lives for themselves in Africa. So you have this totally different perspective between the Westerners and the newcomers. One sees Africa as a patient essentially, to be lectured to, to be ministered to, to be cared for. The other sees Africa and Africans as a place of doing business and as partners. There’s no looking down one’s nose or pretending to superiority. It’s all how I can make something work here. </p>\n<p><strong>CL:</strong> I just wonder: among those development geniuses who argue about Trade vs. Aid as America’s next gift to Africa, in the face of all the Chinese activity buying forests, or building railroads, or planning the sale of billions of cellphones, what is the West’s better bet? Do we have one, or are we still asleep?</p>\n<p><strong>HF:</strong> I think we’re still asleep. </p></blockquote>\n<p>Yes, Howard French observes a Chinese style of racism in Africa, both familiar and different. “There’s a certain discourse about Africans being lazy or lacking in intelligence or unready, variations on a theme. One guy said to me just last week in Liberia essentially: ‘there’s a thousand-year gap between them and us,’ meaning… culturally, educationally, just sort of temperamentally; the ability to save, to sacrifice, to commit to a long-term project. But there’s an important distinction to be made. Western racism was instrumentalized to justify the sale of black people and their enslavement across the ocean to work as animals of labor on other continents. Chinese racism is, comparatively speaking up until this point, a largely rhetorical phenomenon…”</p>\n<p>And what are Africa’s chances of doing well in the new Chinese “deal”? Howard French sees “an incredible opportunity for Africa,” but no guarantees. States with a vigorous civil society, strong elites and an informed view of “how people’s daily and longer-term interests will be served” stand to get good results. “In states that are stuck in the kleptocratic authoritarian mode, the Chinese will pay cash on the barrel for whatever they want and all of the contracts will go through the state house and none of the money or very little of it will enter the public budget. Twenty years from now, China will say: it’s not our fault if the money is frittered away on Mercedes and villas in France and Swiss bank accounts. We paid you exactly the amount we said we were going to pay you. Don’t blame us if you have twice as many people and all of your iron ore is finished.” </p>"
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"title" : "Nabokov gets his lepidopterological props",
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"content" : "Harvard, whatever its strong points, doesn’t always do a good job of recognizing genius. \n\n\nExample one: When I was on the staff of the Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate literary magazine, I heard a story about what happened when the young Robert Lowell tried out for a place there. He was allegedly put to cleaning the stairs or some other menial task. “I’m through,” he said when he had finished, and was told, “Yes, you are.” He then transferred to Kenyon College. (When I was a freshman, Robert Lowell was teaching at Harvard. If the story I’d heard was true, this must have taken an exceptional amount of forgiveness or masochism on his part. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover until after he was dead that Lowell was one of my favorite American poets. )\n\n\nExample two: Most universities would have been pleased to have Vladimir Nabokov teach literature for them, but not Harvard. Here’s what happened, according to the version of Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland: “When Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard in 1957, the language theorist Roman Jakobson is said to have objected, saying ‘Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?’”\n\n\nSo instead of teaching literature, Nabokov became the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Yet even here he apparently got no respect. \n\n\nBut despite the fact that he was the best-known butterfly expert of his day and a Harvard museum curator, other lepidopterists considered Nabokov a dutiful but undistinguished researcher. He could describe details well, they granted, but did not produce scientifically important ideas.\n\n\n\nNow it appears that Nabokov was no slouch as a lepidopterist. His bold theory about the evolution of the Polyommatus blues has been proven correct by modern gene sequencing. So congratulations, Volodya. And eat it, Harvard.<img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ANaturalCuriosity/~4/oIEuE8aiEsQ\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Alan Trustman on Bullitt",
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"content" : "<div><p>Yesterday afternoon, an email arrived in my in-box with a curious <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a75b9970c-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Screen shot 2011-01-26 at 6.05.17 PM\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a75b9970c-350wi\" style=\"width:333px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"Screen shot 2011-01-26 at 6.05.17 PM\"></a> subject line: "That's MY car chase. MINE!!" The writer was, of course, referring to my article in Wednesday's <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <strong><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704698004576104001598265530.html?KEYWORDS=marc+myers\">here</a></strong> on the famed car chase from <em>Bullitt</em>, the 1968 film starring Steve McQueen. Over the past weekend I was in San Francisco driving the movie's chase route in a new Mustang with Loren Janes, Steve McQueen's stunt double. [Photo of Steve McQueen in Palm Springs with albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Frank Sinatra and Count Basie at his feet]</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e205f9f8970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Screen shot 2011-01-26 at 5.58.19 PM\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e205f9f8970b-200wi\" style=\"width:200px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\" title=\"Screen shot 2011-01-26 at 5.58.19 PM\"></a> When I opened the email, the writer turned out to be Alan Trustman [pictured], who wrote the screenplay for <em>Bullitt</em> as well as <em>The Thomas Crown Affair</em> and other films. </p>\n<p>Here's what Alan's email said:</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">"That subject line is childish, but I am now 80 years old, so I’m entitled to be childish.<br> <br>"Did you ever wonder where the idea for the car chase <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e20154a9970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Images\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e20154a9970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"Images\"></a> came from? Director Norman Jewison told me on <em>The Thomas Crown Affair</em> in '67 to include something athletic to absorb Steve’s energies. That's why I put the polo and dune-buggy sequences into the movie.<br> <br>"I originally wrote <em>Bullitt</em> for New York City. But when producers Philip D’Antoni and Robert Relyea and McQueen wanted to shift it to San Francisco, I was ecstatic. I told them that back in the summer of 1954, I had worked there at the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro and was familiar with the city.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">"Back in '54, Ford had based its car prices on purchase locations—something it called the Basing Point system. As <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a84a3970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"54FORD5\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a84a3970c-300wi\" style=\"width:300px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\" title=\"54FORD5\"></a> a result, I was able to buy a Ford in Boston for a reasonable price and drive it to San Francisco. There, I worked at the law firm and drove around the city for three months before selling it for more than I paid. So I was very familiar with the streets.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">"I learned that when you drove a light car like a Ford <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e2016570970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Images-1\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e2016570970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"Images-1\"></a> downhill in San Francisco, as we often did at 2 a.m., it would take off and fly through the air as you crossed some of the intersections. When we were discussing <em>Bullitt,</em> I suggested a Mustang, which was still quite a new car model in 1968. Steve was ecstatic. He couldn’t wait to try it.<br> <br>"I wrote the car chase in detail that night, including locations, the low camera on the bumper of the following cars, and the hub cap coming off as it bashed against the wall beside one locus. Since everybody loved the car chase idea, I insisted on a director who could do a car chase. </p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">"Peter Yates had directed a great car chase in <em>Robbery</em> with Stanley Baker, which producer Joe Levine hated and buried. <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a9487970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Images-3\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340148c80a9487970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\" title=\"Images-3\"></a> But I screened the movie at Warner Bros., loved it and put Peter at the top of my list for director. He had put the camera on the front bumper of the following car and got terrific shots. Peter was, however, the third name on the list favored by D’Antoni, Relyea and McQueen. <br> <br>But Nos. 1 and 2 on the list failed to answer the phone when they were called. D’Antoni, Relyea and McQueen refused to call again <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e2016b6b970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Alg_peter_yates\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e2016b6b970b-300wi\" style=\"width:300px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"Alg_peter_yates\"></a> later or even leave a message. Instead, they immediately phoned No. 3 in England. Peter [pictured] answered because it was the middle of the night there, and that’s how he happened to direct <em>Bullitt</em>.<br> <br>"An incredible, very Hollywood, but true story.<br> <br>"Anyhow, many thanks for a great article in my favorite newspaper. What a great way to wake up in the morning!<br> <br> <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e20171bc970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Carey\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340147e20171bc970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\" title=\"Carey\"></a> "By the way, the crew gave Carey Loftin [pictured], whom they called a car jockey, most of the credit at the time, and Frank Keller won an Oscar for the editing and the film was nominated for best sound."</p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color:#ff0000\">JazzWax clip:</span></strong> <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K-GT-_gziw\">Here's </a>the car chase from <em>Robbery</em> that Alan Trustman refers to above. Peter Yates directed the film in 1967 and in some ways the chase is the prototype of <em>Bullitt's</em> famed sequence written by Alan and directed by Yates a year later. The chase and stunts in the clip below are indeed tension-filled and magnificent...</p>\n<p><iframe frameborder=\"0\" height=\"390\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/1K-GT-_gziw\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"450\"></iframe></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Jazzwax/~4/niYUpBrKowE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p>documentary on Richland, the nuclear city in the west of the US.. its iconography is that of the mushroom cloud. interesting relationship between the population that depends on the jobs cleaning up the nuclear mess, the town and the nuclear material it draws it notoriety from. \nPour cette communaute, la nucleaire est une affaire de famille.</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://www.delicious.com/save?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fa-la-une%2Fvisuel%2F2011%2F01%2F20%2Fatomic-city-la-ville-et-le-nucleaire_1464133_3208.html&title=Atomic%20City%2C%20la%20ville%20et%20le%20nucl%C3%A9aire&copyuser=amaah&copytags=nuclear+video+documentary+France+city+urban+sociology+anthropology+usa+culture+history+bomb+iconography+Nagasaki+plutonium+memory+observation+radiation+health+policy+danger+richland+hanford+safety&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://www.delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://www.delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged nuclear\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/nuclear\">nuclear</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged video\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/video\">video</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged documentary\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/documentary\">documentary</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged France\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/France\">France</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged city\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/city\">city</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged urban\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/urban\">urban</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged sociology\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/sociology\">sociology</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged anthropology\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/anthropology\">anthropology</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged usa\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/usa\">usa</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged culture\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/culture\">culture</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged history\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/history\">history</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged bomb\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/bomb\">bomb</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged iconography\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/iconography\">iconography</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged Nagasaki\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/Nagasaki\">Nagasaki</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged plutonium\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/plutonium\">plutonium</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged memory\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/memory\">memory</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged observation\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/observation\">observation</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged radiation\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/radiation\">radiation</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged health\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/health\">health</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged policy\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/policy\">policy</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged danger\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/danger\">danger</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged richland\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/richland\">richland</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged hanford\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/hanford\">hanford</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged safety\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/amaah/safety\">safety</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://www.delicious.com/url/18696d12941b44fe4bc1e6848aad02ab\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"title" : ""The Big Onion"",
"published" : 1295216880,
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/5361189419/\" title=\"Kaneshie Sunday Market by NanaKofiAcquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5170/5361189419_30dfee724f_b.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" alt=\"Kaneshie Sunday Market\"></a>I call this market \"The Big Onion\" for a couple of reasons:<br>1. It is layered beyond comprehension. The only way to fully discover it is by peeling one layer at a time.<br>2. It has this peculiar strong stench that never leaves.<br><br>Do have a great week.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1392769759109690709-2239002363041914031?l=nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "A schematic for M. pneumoniae metabolism",
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"content" : "<p>With the madness of CES over and the Chinese New Year holiday coming up, I finally found some time to catch up on some back issues of <a href=\"http://www.sciencemag.org\">Science</a>. I came across a beautiful diagram of the metabolic pathways of one of the smallest bacteria, <em>Mycoplasma Pneumoniae</em>. It’s part of an article by Eva Yus <em>et al</em> (<a href=\"http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5957/1263.abstract\"><em>Science</em> <b>326</b>, 1263-1271 (2009)</a>). </p>\n<p><a href=\"http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/m.pneumonia_sch_big.jpg\"><img src=\"http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/m.pneumoniae_sch.jpg\"></a></p>\n<p>Looking at this metabolic pathway reminds me of when I was less than a decade old, staring at the schematic of an Apple II. Back then, I knew that this fascinatingly complex mass of lines was a map to this machine in front of me, but I didn’t know quite enough to do anything with the map. However, the key was that <b>a</b> map existed, so despite its imposing appearance it represented a hope for fully unraveling such complexities.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/appleii_schematic.png\"><img src=\"http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/appleii_schematic_sm.png\"></a></p>\n<p>The analogy isn’t quite precise, but at a 10,000 foot level the complexity and detail of the two diagrams feels similar. The metabolic schematic is detailed enough for me to trace a path from glucose to ethanol, and the Apple II schematic is detailed enough for me to trace a path from the CPU to the speaker. </p>\n<p>And just as a biologist wouldn’t make much of a box with 74LS74 attached to it, an electrical engineer wouldn’t make much of a box with ADH inside it (fwiw, a 74LS74 (<a href=\"http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/MC74HCT74A-D.PDF\">datasheet</a>) is a synchronous storage device with two storage elements, and ADH is alcohol deydrogenase, an enzyme coded by gene MPN564 (<a href=\"http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?mpn:MPN564\">sequence data</a>) that can turn acetaldehyde into ethanol). </p>\n<p>In the supplemental material, the authors of the paper included what reads like a <a href=\"http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/m.pneumoniae_bom.pdf\">BOM (bill of materials) for <em>M. pneumoniae</em></a>. Every enzyme (pentagonal boxes in the schematic) is listed in the BOM with its functional description, along with a reference that allows you to find its sequence source code. At the very end is a table of uncharacterized genes — those who do a bit of reverse engineering would be very familiar with such tables of “hmm I sort of know what it should do but I’m not sure yet” parts or function calls. </p>"
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"content" : "The Agona Swedru Youth Brass played an impromptu jam session of highlife hits such as Old School by Lucky Mensah, Rekpete by Hugh Masekela and Hedzolleh Soundz and even All for You by E.T. Mensah. My shaky Kodak didnt' deter an inspiring and dynamic young group of musicians. Boxing day 2010 at a party in Weija, Ghana.",
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"title" : "Witness: Ghana coup",
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"content" : "<div style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black\"><div>\n<table style=\"border:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"line-height:0;border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top\"><a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/nomugshot-medium.png?v=0fa9\" alt=\"Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah\" style=\"border:1px solid #ccc;width:50px;height:50px\"></a></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top;padding-left:8px;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt\">\n<div style=\"margin-bottom:1pt;color:black\">\n\n\n\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;color:#00c\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n</div>\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:black\">Witness: Ghana coup - <a style=\"text-decoration:none;color:#00c\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://www.divshare.com/download/13757482-50d\" title=\"http://www.divshare.com/download/13757482-50d\">http://www.divshare.com/downloa...</a></div>\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:#737373;font-size:10pt\">\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/7711c914/witness-ghana-coup\" style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\">January 12</a>\n\nfrom <a style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">delicious</a>\n\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/7711c914/witness-ghana-coup\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Comment</a>\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/7711c914/witness-ghana-coup\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Like</a>\n</div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:6pt\">\n<table style=\"border-spacing:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;padding-right:5px;padding-top:2px;vertical-align:top\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/n-comment.png?v=1fa9\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#737373;vertical-align:middle\">How a New Year coup in Ghana in 1981 put one journalist in danger. Amongst other things, this is the story of how Mum and I fled Ghana in 1982. - <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"color:#7777cc;text-decoration:none\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a></td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n\n\n</td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Miles Davis with Gil Evans - Miles Ahead (1957)",
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"content" : "<div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/TRnl3MRtsyI/AAAAAAAABBc/gDEYVSuqqAs/s1600/milesdavisgilevansplus19milesahead.jpg\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"386\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/TRnl3MRtsyI/AAAAAAAABBc/gDEYVSuqqAs/s400/milesdavisgilevansplus19milesahead.jpg\" width=\"400\"></a></div><br>\n<b>by Nick DeRiso</b> <br>\n<br>\n<i>Miles Ahead </i>was initially billed by Columbia Records, in the flatly obvious tone of the day, as \"Miles Davis plus 19, with <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Gil%20Evans\">Gil Evans</a>.\"<br>\n<br>\nRight. Still, it was that last guy, the 20th man, who was the important one.<br>\n<br>\nAfter a burst of creativity in the late 1940s -- the clearest result being the very cool but obviously embryonic <i><a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2008/08/gerry-mulligan-shorty-rogers-miles.html\">Birth of the Cool</a></i> on Capitol -- Evans didn't work with Miles Davis again until the late 1950s. Davis seemed better for the reunion, as this record touched off an incredible rejuvenation for someone who had already done seminal work with the jazz legend <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Charlie%20Parker\">Charlie Parker</a>.<span><br>\n<br>\n<div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/TRnl8hcTTeI/AAAAAAAABBg/_u3ff27Deac/s1600/milesdavisandgilevans.jpg\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"148\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/TRnl8hcTTeI/AAAAAAAABBg/_u3ff27Deac/s200/milesdavisandgilevans.jpg\" width=\"200\"></a></div>Highlights, and there are many, included the title track (embedded below), <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Dave%20Brubeck\">Dave Brubeck</a>'s \"The Duke,\" and \"The Maids of Cadiz\" by Leo Delibes, Davis' initial stab at reformulating European classical music. <br>\n<br>\nIn fact, <i>Miles Ahead </i>-- an underappreciated gem which I guess should be filed here as part of <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Forgotten%20series\">our ongoing Forgotten Series</a>, it once featured the above since-removed hipster-cool cover image -- marks the beginning of a striking second period of collaborative vitality for both <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Miles%20Davis\">Miles Davis</a> and for Gil Evans: Next from these two came <i>Porgy and Bess</i>, issued a year later; and then <i>Sketches of Spain</i> from 1960, both also on Columbia Records. Too, arguably the best recordings by Evans and Davis apart from each other as band leaders are from this period, as well: Miles' 1959 <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2009/01/miles-davis-kind-of-blue-legacy-edition.html\"><i>Kind of Blue</i></a> and Gil's 1960 Impulse LP <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2010/09/gimme-five-forgotten-jazz-gems-from.html\"><i>Out of the Cool</i>.</a><br>\n<br>\nThere's a newer digital version of <i>Miles Ahead, </i>from 1997, with a remaster job by original producer George Avakian. He took the session's (superior, in terms of sound) mono tapes and cleaned up a few glitches from that first analog-to-digital transfer. Namely, Avakian eliminated some hiss and extraneous noises -- and linked both sides at their mid-album intersection, which you couldn't do with vinyl.<br>\n<br>\nNothing wrong with that, I suppose. Even so, there was something about the roundness, and the upfront bass, that mono brought so brilliantly to these sessions. Call me old: On most days, I still prefer how <i>Miles Ahead</i> sounds on my turntable. <br>\n<br>\nThey kept the newer album cover, too. <br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/jvks2xDhwyE?fs%3D1%26hl%3Den_US&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\nThose are quibbles, though. We move on ... These sets -- featuring talented sidemen like <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Wynton%20Kelly\">Wynton Kelly</a>, Lee Konitz, <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Paul%20Chambers\">Paul Chambers</a> and Art Taylor -- are infectious, loose and sheer genius. <br>\n<br>\nEvans said they were done in three, three-hour sessions -- with no rehearsals. His chromatic, counter-rhythmic charts are bluesy, new and sure. Throw in Miles' long, cerulean notes -- and there are still few recordings of any kind that approach <i>Miles Ahead</i>.<br>\n<br>\n</span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8367705548617137551-438475812336224442?l=www.somethingelsereviews.com\" alt=\"\"></div><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/n0argi6ohlbaa56i35go4j7peg/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.somethingelsereviews.com%2F2008%2F07%2Fmiles-ahead-miles-davis-with-gil-evans.html\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/somethingelsereviews/JjnG/~4/2AbKQbeEEXg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "me and abena fifth anniversary",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\t\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/5284448234/\" title=\"me and abena fifth anniversary\"><img src=\"http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5125/5284448234_8f14b3b292_m.jpg\" alt=\"me and abena fifth anniversary\" height=\"180\" width=\"240\"></a></p>\n\n<p>dining alfresco in Sonoma</p>"
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"title" : "The Christmas sermon",
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"content" : "<p>Another year over, and what have we done? Once more, I muse philosophically on matters of risk and return, at annoying length (at least I cut out the footnotes this year). But first, perhaps, a little quasi-seasonal story:</p>\n\n\t<p><b>The Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar</b><br>\n<span></span><br>\nDecember, as we all know, is the month when people who never go out, go out. All the cheer and goodwill and merrymaking is apt to render the pubs and dive bars more or less uninhabitable, and even the expensive places less than congenial. So it was lucky that I first came across the World’s Greatest Homeopathic Barman in the dour month of January, season of short pockets and long evenings.</p>\n\n\t<p>The world was decidedly out of the party mood, but I wasn’t; memory fails me as to whether it was a horse or a South American republic, but I’d achieved a minor coup of the financial sort and was looking for somewhere to erase the sweet pain of all that money. Walking down Cornhill between the tube stop and the Leadenhall, I noticed that a new place had opened up on the site of an Irish-themed pub which had recently taken authenticity to extremes by going bankrupt. I shoved open the door and went in.</p>\n\n\t<p>There’s a kind of sublime beauty to an unreviewed and poorly signed licensed premises, on a notorious graveyard street and newly opened in the worst month of the year. A small room can feel as empty as the Negev Desert at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, you know, and this was only Tuesday. I was more or less the only thing in the place that hadn’t been sketched in by Edward Hopper, but hey ho. To have made a bolt for the door and somewhere with a fireplace would have seemed like kicking the place while it was down.</p>\n\n\t<p>As so often in all manner of circumstances, I found myself deciding on a course of action by pondering the maxim “What Would <span>JK </span>Galbraith Do?”. Since the answer is nearly always something like “written a couple of best-sellers, had a three-martini lunch with the President, then scooted off to his chalet in Gstaad to get some quality skiing in before dispensing bons mots at a party with Edith Piaf and a couple of Agnellis”, I find it strangely comforting to know that I don’t have the talent to do the right thing, and thus might as well please myself. By way of minor homage, I ordered three martinis, to arrive sequentially.</p>\n\n\t<p>I’ll say this for the chap, his timing was excellent. As the glass collar round the top of the liquid extended, he began to pour. As the lemon peel made its first coquettish bump against my top lip, I could hear the sweet Latin percussion of the stirring-spoon. And as I put the empty glass down, the ring of crystal on zinc was answered within a semiquaver by the slightly heavier bump of a full glass of the same. Quite a trick to work out the speed at which I was drinking, particularly from a noncylindrical glass, and fast work to match pace with a thirsty young stockbroker (as I then was). Clearly, this was an attentive craftsman close to the height of his mixological powers. The actual drink, however, was filthy.</p>\n\n\t<p>After a second and half way down the third, I decided to take an interest in why this might be the case. Not in a chemical or culinary sense, it was glaringly obvious what was wrong there. But rather, my curiosity was piqued by the sociological, psychological and hell, even political nexus of causes and effects which had brought this swill to my glass. You never know with these things, it might have an interesting root cause; I recall a particularly profitable operation in Brent Crude that had begun by politely inquiring of an Aberdonian trawlerman why he was not drunk. Expecting not much more than a gob full of acession-state-accented apologies, but in the general spirit of nothing ventured, nothing gained, I broke the monastic silence of the place.</p>\n\n\t<p>“Young man”, I ventured (I was, it pains me to say, a bit of a knob in those days), “Let me first reassure you that I am not angry” (I had something of a combative face in those days). “But I am, however, curious, as to why you have just served me three glasses of undiluted room temperature gin, and I am sure that you must be just as curious as to why I drank them. Shall we compare notes?”</p>\n\n\t<p>It was a conversational gambit designed to start things off on the right foot, the right foot being the one into which I had persuaded my shoemaker to install a steel toe-cap, the better to pursue advantage in crowded conditions on the Northern Line. But I was surprised to discover that the fellow’s consternation had little to do with fears of violent reprisal, but were mainly motivated by a sort of existential crisis of confidence.</p>\n\n\t<p>Lukas, it seemed, had served mixed drinks with the best of them at the Paris Ritz, the Waldorf-Astoria and everywhere else on that circuit. But he’d jacked it in and taken up a defunct lease in the City, to follow a vision; the vision of bringing the crude pseudoscience of bartending together with the noble art of homeopathic medicine. The cocktail he had painstakingly constructed for me had been made from a base of gin, mixed with gin from a bottle which had once contained a drop of vermouth, and stirred assidously over gin from a bottle which had once contained a sliver of ice. Lukas had been up all the night before, pouring and re-pouring the gin, to ensure that these original ingredients had long since been rinsed away.</p>\n\n\t<p>In principle, of course, this dilution and redilution ought to have raised the concoction to its apotheosis; a sort of divine essence of all the martini’s possibilities. In practice, the fact that I had unerringly identified the contents as warm gin, and rather cheap off-brand gin at that, had been a crestfalling experience and one that threatened to undermine the integrity of the whole concept. Of course the fact that <i>I</i> don’t believe in homeopathy or any of that horse-manure was no comfort to the man. The whole point of the sweet science of homeopathic bartending is that it’s meant to work even if you don’t believe in it. Lukas was at the point of questioning whether a series of articles in the Journal of Consciousness Expansion were really a sound basis for a business plan.</p>\n\n\t<p>Now I hate to see a grown man cry for longer than eight or nine minutes, so I soon befriended the plucky little battler and encouraged him to “get back up on that horse”. Perhaps the homeopathic martini was a step too far for the early days – he should try easier cocktails and work up to it. So I had a homeopathic screwdriver – warm cheap supermarket vodka. A homeopathic daiquiri – warm cheap supermarket rum. All night we toiled, talking like brothers about everything and nothing; sadly none of the glassware survived our frequent bitter rages, but we found a supply of paper cups, apparently pilfered by the previous owners from a nearby McDonald’s. Until (and I maintain that this is how it happened – the intellectual property lawyers be damned) I had my inspiration.</p>\n\n\t<p>We were on our third or fourth attempt at a homeopathic Manhattan. Lukas had lined up four identical bottles of supermarket scotch, labelled “Heritage Bourbon”, “Aromatic Bitters”, and so forth to indicate the molecules each had once contained. The drink was at the point of assembly when I drawled, with perhaps an elegant hint of slobber …</p>\n\n\t<p>“Curious, isn’t it, that such a rigorously constructed homeopathic drink should be garnished with a <i>whole</i> maraschino cherry?”. Lukas looked at me with a wild expression, rather like that of Victor Frankenstein on being asked if he’d thought about switching power suppliers. In a flash, he had drawn back the offending cherry from its position immediately above my cup, hurled it onto the bar-top, pricked it with a needle and shaken the needle in the direction of the cocktail, from a safe distance of six feet. It was as brilliant a piece of improvised dilution as I’d seen in my life up to that point.</p>\n\n\t<p>I sipped the drink. It was nectar. It was even cold.</p>\n\n\t<p>Our celebrations were intense, of course, and ended in filth and in prison as these things often do. But a sensation had clearly been born.</p>\n\n\t<p>I was but an infrequent visitor over the next six months – although Lukas considered me an honoured friend, I was inconveniently barred from the three surrounding streets for a short while, meaning I could only attend by the use of a helicopter. But I read the reviews and they were extraordinary. Critical opinion was not wholly favourable, true – a fair number of reviewers thought that The Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar was a dingy hole serving paper cups of warm cheap spirits, and I could see their point. But the general consensus was that it was largely irrelevant whether Lukas was a master of gastronomic libations or a deluded nerk selling rotgut. It was something more important than that.</p>\n\n\t<p>Whatever the merits of the actual drinks, it was said, the modern consumer was aching for a bartender who would provide a personal connection and recognise them as an individual, rather than simply churning out formulaic remedies to their symptoms. And Lukas was good at that – he had a pair of those dark, searching soulful eyes that are described as “almost human” when they occur in spaniels. And, of course, the patrons appreciated the way in which he rendered himself vulnerable to them, simply by the act of serving such terrible drinks. At any point, a stag party from Liverpool or somewhere might have blown into the bar, not realising they were in the presence of greatness, and trashed the place in angry disgust. Punters appreciate it when a man lays his neck on the line to that extent.</p>\n\n\t<p>As time went on, however, the novelty faded, and the dog days of the summer holidays were not kind to Lukas and his Great Homeopathic Cocktail Bar. Things in fact reached such a pass that one day in August, while dancing an improvised celebratory jig down Cornhill in recognition of a triumph in the Ashes (or in the collateralised debt market, I forget which), I found that the bouncers which had previously been placed outside Lukas’ door to beat back the baying crowds had instead grabbed me by the scruff and chucked me in. The place was cavernous once more, filled with only a few local alcoholics, their numbers bolstered by half a dozen tourists who had read an old <i>Time Out</i> in a bus station and thought the place was still fashionable. Even I could see that it wasn’t.</p>\n\n\t<p>The problem, of course, as the host confided to me over a lachrymose whisky-sour, is that the provision of a humane, personal, individual connection is something that really doesn’t have much in the way of economies of scale. In order to pay the ground rent, Lukas needed to shift X glasses over the bar per evening, and when divided by X, the amount of time provided by the licensing hours made it more or less impossible to give each homeopathic beverage more than about a minute and a half. “How do you engage with a holistic individual, in ninety seconds?”, he pleaded.</p>\n\n\t<p>To ask the question is to answer it, of course, and I think we came up with this one independently at the same time (as I have later testified under oath). The problem was one intrinsic to homeopathy, and thus it must have a homeopathic solution. And because it was a very serious homeopathic problem, the solution would have to be correspondingly weak.</p>\n\n\t<p>Henceforth, Lukas would make fleeting eye contact with one customer, for about half a second, every third alternate Wednesday if there was an R in the month. This would be the sole and total extent of his personal consideration of them; otherwise they were to be treated strictly as an undifferentiated mass of service units. Diluted in thus fashion, the human engagement and involvement of his service would be unimaginably powerful.</p>\n\n\t<p>Well, I don’t need to tell you what a success that was; if you were around in London, and maintained even the most casual interest in the nightclub scene, you’ll remember it. All through the autumn, he packed them in, and the Christmas party season was looking amazing. What with one thing and another (and a short but vigorous argument with one of the bouncers, who was later deported for unrelated reasons), I didn’t get back there myself until the shortest day in December. And thank God I did.</p>\n\n\t<p>Any bar in the City is going to be pretty unpleasant in the last week before hols, and a fashionable one serving paper cups full of warm spirits more so than most. It was heaving, crushed, shoulder to shoulder and cheek to jowl. I hopped on my left foot and kicked shins with my right, and eventually hacked out a path to my favourite spot at the bar. Everything was about as merry as it was disgusting, but Lukas was stressed to breaking point and clearly in pain. He was leaping about, pouring drinks three at a time, desperately trying not to make eye contact with anyone.</p>\n\n\t<p>It couldn’t last, of course – have you ever tried to simultaneously avoid the gaze of two hundred people, all of whom are trying to catch your eye? And when it did, my god, it was awful. The crowd <i>turned</i>, like a mobbing of crows, angrily waving their suddenly-disgusting cocktails. Thank heaven Lukas had the luck or foresight to have continued serving his drinks in paper cups, because if that lot had glass in their hands, I doubt he’d have lived. Like the man of action I sometimes am, I rushed back and bustled him out into the bar kitchen. Here was a man in dire need of a pep talk.</p>\n\n\t<p>“Lukas!” I shouted, grasping his lapels for emphasis and kicking his shins to shut him up. “Your customers are furious! How much do you care about your customers, Lukas?”</p>\n\n\t<p>“I care!”, he sobbed unattractively. “I care so much! Homeopathic drinks are my life! I care so, so much about those people”.</p>\n\n\t<p>“No, you’re not listening”, I growled. “How much do you care? How much passion do you have? <i>How much do you care</i>?”</p>\n\n\t<p>“I really, really care!” The tears and snot were flying in all directions, in distinctly more than homeopathic quantities.</p>\n\n\t<p>I lost all restraint and started shaking him. “HOW <span>MUCH DO YOU CARE</span>, LUKAS? <span>HOW MUCH DO YOU CARE</span>?!”. A paper cup flew through the open door and hit him in the face. It appeared to be full of warm spittle.</p>\n\n\t<p>Thankfully, the penny dropped shortly before he lost consciousness. Possibly he understood what I meant; perhaps the paper cup broke his will. Either way, he did that Baron Victor stare again, and hissed:</p>\n\n\t<p>“<i>I hardly care at all! I once cared, but now I am almost completely indifferent! <span>I COULD NOT POSSIBLY CARE LESS</span>!</i>”</p>\n\n\t<p>Have you ever seen a crowd go from friendly, to violent, and then just like that, back to happy again? Astonishing. The pressure-wave of concentrated bonhomie had us both grasping onto the fittings for support. By the time I left they were singing songs in his honour and chanting his name.</p>\n\n\t<p>Obviously, it went from strength to strength since then. The concept got franchised to death of course – I hear that there are chains of bars all over the MidWest serving warm, half-diluted cocktails to rapturous customers. Lukas, professional to the last, takes infinite pains not to find out about them or to display more than an atom of interest in their management or standards. You might have been to one without knowing it.</p>\n\n\t<p>And as I’ve mentioned, there’s a fair old amount of litigation going on – a private equity fund made a homeopathic investment, and there was some disagreement as to whether this meant they put up a hundredth of a penny and got 90% of the equity, or vice versa. Every now and then Lukas’ firm of homeopathic lawyers ask me for a witness statement; I write the letter “e” in the top corner of a large piece of paper and it seems to satisfy them, but I really honestly want no further involvement, even if it means sacrificing my due credit for nearly all the crucial innovations. I’m just happy to know that if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then I’m probably the safest man in Europe.</p>\n\n\t<p><span>THE END</span></p>\n\n\t<p><hr></p>\n\n\t<p>Well, after reading that I think you can agree that we’re all 2800-odd words nearer our deaths. But is there an important point to be made here about the nature of risk and reward? Probably not, but there’s a sort of semi-attached one.</p>\n\n\t<p>Which is related to <a href=\"http://ohgoodale.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/down-with-craft-beer/\">this piece of sterling common sense</a> from Phil Edwards, proprietor of the <a href=\"http://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/\">gaping silence</a> blog. It’s a psot targeted at “craft beer”, which is related to a point I’ve made myself in the past – that beer and whisky, unlike wine, are industrial products rather than agricultural ones, and that small-batch production of either is a very modern development of somewhat questionable sense.</p>\n\n\t<p>But I think I’d like to take this for the time being in a somewhat different direction, one which is rather at a tangent to Phil’s cultural point, and one which, Mr Angry commenters may be pleased to hear, probably doesn’t involve mentioning Budweiser all that much. Instead, consider Guinness, the pre-packaged, industrially brewed pasteurised commodified nitrokeg beer that somehow gets a free pass from ale enthusiasts.</p>\n\n\t<p>Now, Guinness is beloved to statisticians, of course, for inventing the t-distribution. And it’s worth thinking about why it was that a turn-of-the-century brewery would be interested in the ratio of the a normally distributed variable to the square root of a chi-square distributed variable divided by its degrees of freedom. And the answer, of course, is that William “Student” Gosset was responsible for quality control in the Guinness brewery, and thus was very much in need of a distribution which would tell him exactly how significant the variations were in the characteristics of his various samples, and whether they indicated an underlying problem.</p>\n\n\t<p>The development of the science of quality control in the twentieth century is really interesting, and another example of a road not taken by economics, but that’s not really my point. The point I’m currently interested in is that many of the things which people think about in terms of “risk management” are actually problems of quality control.</p>\n\n\t<p>The reason that shifting your thinking from “risk management” to “quality control” is an interesting thing to do is that it gets you away from a creeping cultural assumption that risk is in some way related to return. This is in fact, as <a href=\"http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/\">Eric Falkenstein</a> keeps proving, not even true in its paradigm case, the stock market – more or less however you measure it, high risk shares have lower average returns, not higher. Eric has a complicated theory of why this might be the case, involving benchmarking and the role of institutional investors, but I think it’s simpler than that – it’s just that the main source of risk in the world is mistakes, that a “high risk” share is one that has a lot of bad surprises happening to it, and that it’s not particularly complicated to understand why a prevalence of mistakes and bad surprises isn’t correlated with higher returns.</p>\n\n\t<p>Consider booze once more; the (possibly fictitious) barman in <a href=\"http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/deming_w11.html\">this</a> article (via Unfogged comments), the basis for Lukas in my story, doesn’t sell “industrial liquor” – he refuses to stock any brand that produces more than a thousand cases a year. What can we say about a distillery that operates on that scale? Well, that unless it is superlatively well-run (and in many cases even then), it is going to see considerable variation in the taste of its product from batch to batch.</p>\n\n\t<p>It is logically possible that this variation might be a good thing – that each case of liquor will taste wonderful in a distinctive and separate way. But it’s massively more likely that any such variation is going to take the form of some batches being of inferior quality. The risk is wholly skewed to the downside, which is why even small brewing and distilling operations take the utmost pains to eliminate batch-to-batch variation – and of course there is an economy of scale here, because the cost to Diageo of throwing away a single poor-quality distilling run is proportionately much smaller than to a micro-scale producer.</p>\n\n\t<p>Of course, dogmatism about the superiority of industrial product is just as silly as dogmatism about superiority of craft production. In some cases the random variation really can be a good thing. There are such things as vintage years in wines, and it is possible for improvised music to deliver things that composed music really doesn’t. But they’re very much the exceptions; as someone who listened to a lot of heavy metal in the 1980s, I can report back that the improvised guitar solo is not necessarily a thing of wonder; in general, a lot of the problem with jazz is basically one of quality control.</p>\n\n\t<p>I think everyone can see where I’m going with this; to the wider point that Frank Furedi and similar commentators are right to say that over the period since the war, modern society has become increasingly obsessed with risk reduction, but wrong to say that this is a bad thing. “Risk” is the risk that something bad will happen, which is why people want to get rid of it. And it is for the most part not correlated with anything good in any kind of straightforward way; if we all threw away health and safety regulations, we wouldn’t actually get a new Internet invented or a massive surge of freedom and well-being, we’d just get the occasional broken toe and bout of food poisoning.</p>\n\n\t<p>And looking at the things that can’t be fitted into this model, and at the kinds of risks which really are related to returns, gives you more of an appreciation of what we actually really mean by risks. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs take great big risks with their livelihoods (and furthermore, take <i>uninsurable</i> risks), but notoriously, they tend to be absolutely obsessive about quality-control issues – they don’t take needless unrewarded risks. Not coincidentally, film stuntmen seem to make a similar distinction between the risks they’re taking and things which are quality-control issues; the guy who is about to jump his car over a flaming building will be mightily careful about the fitting of his safety harness.</p>\n\n\t<p>And so there we are. I think perhaps a more practical bit of advice than you might find in <i>The Black Swan</i> is to a) recognise that this is an industrial world, and that most risks aren’t worth taking, but b) to recognise that the man who proposes to live off the public dole simply by virtue of owning a million dollars’ worth of treasury stock isn’t really morally all that far above any other kind of bludger, and so c) to take a few, well organised risks, with a clear view of the benefit that you anticipate from taking them, and d) be as tough as you can on the quality control. Happy Christmas, Eid, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Yul, Diwali (actually that one’s gone), or whatever other Winterval you choose to celebrate, and here’s hoping that next year, whatever else it brings, will be slightly less full of avoidable mistakes than recent ones.</p>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/TQDsnfaSNZI/AAAAAAAACX4/vrzqvalNliY/s1600/amazing-grace.jpg\"><img style=\"width:400px;height:391px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/TQDsnfaSNZI/AAAAAAAACX4/vrzqvalNliY/s400/amazing-grace.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Aretha at Her Peak</span><br>by Mark Anthony Neal<br><br>In January of 1972, two months short of her 30th birthday, Aretha Franklin walked into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church Los Angeles to record a live gospel album. Backed by the Southern California Community Choir, under the direction of her longtime friend and mentor the Reverend James Cleveland, the subsequent recording by Franklin eventually sold over two-million copies and remained the best selling Gospel album of all time for more than twenty years. Firmly established as the “Queen of Soul” and still more than a decade away from the caricature that she has become, Aretha Franklin was at the peak of her artistic powers when she recorded <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span>. More than 35 years after its release, the album stands as the best testament of Franklin’s singular genius.<br><br>A <span style=\"font-style:italic\">New York Times</span> review of Aretha Franklin’s <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Young, Gifted and Black</span>, published in March of 1972, was tellingly titled, “Aretha’s Blooming Thirties.” In the review, critic Don Heckman describes Young, Gifted and Black as “an extraordinary eclectic set of material.” To date, Franklin had earned six Grammy Awards, nearly a dozen gold singles and several gold albums; Franklin was easily the most commercially successful black women vocalist ever. Culled from sessions recorded in late 1970 and throughout 1971, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Young, Gifted and Black</span> marks the beginning of what might be called Franklin’s most sustained period of artistic genius.<br><br>Franklin’s decision to record tracks like Elton John’s “Border Song,” Jerry Butler’s “Brand New Me,” Lennon and McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road” and Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” alongside originals like “Day Dreamin’,” “All the King’s Horses” and the infectious “Rock Steady” was as much about an artist who had warranted the right to record anything she wanted, as it was about a woman, who felt she finally had control over her life and career.<br><br>Living in New York City, after years of being in the shadow of her father, the legendary preacher Reverend C. L. Franklin, and under the professional guidance of her first husband Ted White, Franklin’s writes in her autobiography <span style=\"font-style:italic\">From These Roots </span>(1999) that in the period that she recorded <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Young Gifted and Black</span> she felt “free and willing to take creative risks.” (141) “In my mind’s eye” Franklin adds, “I see those days as a tremendous growth period and declaration of my independence. I was rediscovering myself.” (146) Part of that rediscovery, apparently entailed Aretha going back to the church.<br><br>Franklin is adamant in her memoirs, that <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span> didn’t mark a return to church, in a spiritual sense, but “when I say ‘took me back to church,’ I mean recording in church. I never left church. And I never will.” (150) Franklin’s very first recording “Never Grow Old” was recorded in her father’s church in 1956. Her first album Songs of Faith was released a year later and contained recordings collected from live performances done while on tour with her father. In the interim years between that release and Amazing Grace, Franklin had, with others, been largely responsible for mainstreaming the black Gospel aesthetic in popular music and culture.<br><br>Though Franklin had long desired to make a fully-fledged live Gospel recording, the immediate impetus for <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span> might have been one of Franklin’s most triumphant performances—her three night stand with King Curtis at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in March of 1971. The engagement resulted in the recording <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Live at the Fillmore West </span>(recently re-issued as <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Don’t Fight the Feeling: Live at the Fillmore West</span>). Introducing Franklin and her music to one of the iconic sites of late 1960s and early 1970s counter-culture seemed like a risky endeavor at the time. As writer Mark Bego describes the venue in his book Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul, “There were no chairs and bleachers…the audience sat cross-legged on the floor, or stood up and grooved to the music being performed on stage. People in the audience freely passed around joints during the shows.” (137)<br><br>It was Jerry Wexler, Franklin’s longtime producer, who was largely behind the Fillmore West engagement, resisting the natural inclination for the public and critics to simply see Franklin as a Soul singer. Wexler is quoted in Bego’s book “we want these longhairs to listen to this lady. After that they’ll be no problems.” Franklin still had to deliver, and she did, tackling material like Stephen Stills “Love the One Your With” and Bread’s “Make It With You” for the first time. By the time Franklin digs deep into the well of black spirituality, with the assistance of Ray Charles, on a nearly 30-minute rendition of “Spirit in the Dark” on the last night of her engagement, it was clear that the largely Hippie crowd had themselves been sanctified. In his book <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul</span>, scholar and critic Craig Werner writes, “‘Spirit in the Dark’ evokes the sense of political community that seemed to be slipping away.” (184) As Franklin writes about that night, “soul oozed out of every pore of the Filmore. All the planets were aligned right that night, because when the music came down, it was as real and righteous as any recording I’d ever made.” (139) With <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span>, Franklin would capture that same energy, in what was nothing short of an old-fashioned revival.<br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/TQDsxdHYT7I/AAAAAAAACYA/Dh4ZrHQ_oHk/s1600/Sydney-Pollack-s-Amazing-Grace-with-Aretha-Franklin-finally-surfaces_header_image.jpg\"><img style=\"width:400px;height:218px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/TQDsxdHYT7I/AAAAAAAACYA/Dh4ZrHQ_oHk/s400/Sydney-Pollack-s-Amazing-Grace-with-Aretha-Franklin-finally-surfaces_header_image.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>“Aretha Franklin returns home,” is how one critic described <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span>, and indeed much of the preparation for the two nights of performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church was intended to make Franklin feel at home. In the mix were members of Franklin’s regular studio band including guitarist Cornel Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, and drummer Bernard Purdie. In addition her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, who provided remarks on the second night and gospel singer Clara Ward were in attendance for the recording. As Franklin admits in<span style=\"font-style:italic\"> From These Roots</span>, “Along with my dad, Miss Ward was my greatest influence. She was the ultimate gospel singer—dramatic, daring, exciting, courageous…She took gospel where gospel had never gone before.” (153)<br><br>If<span style=\"font-style:italic\"> Amazing Grace</span> was a homecoming, it was because the recording recalled Aretha’s home life two decades earlier, when a young ambitious and talented musician and choir director James Cleveland was living in the Franklin household. Of Cleveland, Franklin would later write, “James helped shape my basic musical personality in profound ways…I was blessed to meet James so early in his career.” (41) By the time that Cleveland joins Franklin for the Amazing Grace sessions, he had long been established as one of the leading gospel stars of his generation, most well known for his composition “Peace Be Still” and his stunning arrangements for choirs. Cleveland was himself at the peak of his powers in 1972. Franklin’s longtime producer Jerry Wexler realized as much and recalls that the “arrangements were between [Franklin] and James Cleveland. Those arrangements, some of them were traditional—and some of them were things that she and James Cleveland put together.”<br><br>Franklin’s involvement in the production of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span> was no small matter. As Franklin rather pointedly expresses in her memoir, “As much as I appreciated the soulful studio environment in which Atlantic placed me and the sensitive musicians who played by my side, one point was deceptive and unfair: I was not listed as a co-producer.” Franklin later told Gerri Hirshey in <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music</span> (1984), “I always worked on my sound, my arrangements, before I went into a studio with a producer.” Hirshey confirms this point: “there’s no better evidence than Aretha’s own notes from those fabled sessions. They are written in a girlish, slanted hand on yellow legal pads. They actually look like homework, as Aretha claims they were.”(243) It was to Wexler’s credit that he understood from the beginning of his work with Franklin in 1967, that she had the best idea about how she should sound. Franklin’s piano playing on many of her Atlantic recordings to that point was a testament to that understanding. Franklin’s point was that she needed to get formal recognition for her co-producer status. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span> is the first Franklin recording in which she is listed as a co-producer.<br><br>The song list from the first night of the live recording reveals the eclecticism that would become the hallmark on Franklin’s recordings in this era. Pop standards like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the 1945 musical Carousel (the song was an early hit for Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles), were chosen alongside traditional gospel fare like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Precious Memories,” (popularized by Sister Rosetta Thorpe), original tunes like Clara Ward’s “How I Got Over” and even Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy,” which Franklin opens with. Franklin’s eclecticism was a product of the multiple worlds her success forced her to bridge. Nowhere was this more apparent than her medley of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand/You’ve Got a Friend” which combines the most well known compositions of the “Father of Gospel,” Thomas A. Dorsey (whose Chicago church, Cleveland got his start in) and singer-songwriter Carole King, whose “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Women” was one of Franklin’s signature recordings.<br><br>The brilliance of Franklin’s seamless performance of the songs is not simply the acknowledgement of great songs from the American Songbook, but the realization of Franklin’s own cultural gravitas which had the impact of elevating Dorsey—largely unknown to Franklin’s mainstream fans—to the level of King, who at the time had been acknowledged as the quintessential singer-songwriter of her generation. Franklin’s efforts are akin to what scholar and critic Walton M. Muyumba (borrowing from Tim Parrish) calls “democratic doing and undoing.” Writing about the improvisational techniques of another African-American musical genius, Charlie Parker, Muyumba writes in his book <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Shadow and Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation and Philosophical Pragmatism</span>, “Parker’s music ‘undoes’ status quo American musical performance theories by offering new modes for ‘doing’ or improvising American music.” (31)<br><br>In addition Franklin’s merging of Dorsey and King can be read as an act of generosity; a generosity that would be realized again a year later when Franklin gave her Grammy Award for Best Rhythm Blues Performance (awarded for Young, Gifted and Black) to former label-mate Esther Phillips, whose <span style=\"font-style:italic\">From a Whisper to a Scream</span> was also nominated. Noted critic Leonard Feather described Franklin’s recognition of Phillips as “a rare noblesse oblige gesture”—a term that translates into the “obligation of nobility.”<br><br>What ultimately makes <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Amazing Grace</span> such a powerful index of Aretha Franklin’s talent, was the response of the audience—traditional church goers among fans, critics, gospel royalty and the curious. Cleveland makes note of the atypical crowd in his opening comments telling the audience “I’d like for you to be mindful though, that this is a church, and we’re here for religious service…we want you to give vent to the spirit. Those of you not hip to giving vent to the spirit, then you do the next best thing.” By the time Aretha segues into “How I Got Over” after her stirring duet with Cleveland on “Precious Memories,” it is clear that the crowd has caught the spirit; “How I Got Over” elicits a false start as Cleveland tells folk, “you know ya’ll threw us off just then, don’t clap ‘till we get it open.”<br><br>The crowd was thus ripe when Franklin delivers what might be the definitive performance of her career. “Amazing Grace” is the most traditional of all traditional hymns and there has not been a Gospel singer (or Country or Blues singer for that matter) worth their salt that hasn’t spent some time putting their unique spin on the song. For all of those suspicious of Franklin’s seemingly sudden desire to come “back home” to the Church, this was the performance that would put all concerns to rest . Clocking in at over 16 minutes, including Cleveland’s touching introduction, “Amazing Grace” features Franklin unadorned with simply the accented backing of organist Ken Lupper and Cleveland on piano. Critic David Nathan perhaps says it best describing the “emotional nakedness” of Franklin’s performance. The performances has the feel of a testimony or even a spiritual purging, and the crowd was in-step with Franklin through every turn of phrase and melismic flourish. Hirshey recalls that Cleveland “stayed at the piano until he broke down in tears” during the performance. “Amazing Grace” would be Franklin’s closing number on the opening night and there was little reason to believe that she would match the emotional level of her performance on “Amazing Grace.”<br><br>The second night of performances opens with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and Gaye’s “Wholy Holy”—two of the four songs performed on both nights. Perhaps anticipating a letdown from the first night’s closing performance, Cleveland says to the crowd, with regards to the opening hymn, “you only get out of it, what you put in.” Cleveland’s warning wasn’t necessary. After a rather perfunctory performance of the opening tracks, Franklin begins a sequence of five songs that is as impressive as any suite of songs recorded within the idiom of African American music.<br><br>Beginning with a rousing rendition of the hymn “Climbing Higher Mountains,” Cleveland slows the tempo with an improvised Blues riff on the song (doing call and response opposite Franklin), that serves as an introduction to the hymn “God Will Take Care of You.” The significant action in the song occurs nearly two-thirds in when Cleveland again ascends to the mic, urging the crowd to a higher level. “Over in the sanctified church, when they begin to feel like this” Cleveland exhorts “All the saints get together and they join in a little praise. I wonder can I get you to help me say it one time” as the crowd yells “yeah” several times in unison, before the musicians unleash a torrent of sanctified rhythm. This section of the performance can be best described as the “pedagogy of Black Gospel” as Cleveland literally provides instruction for “catching the spirit” at the same time making transparent the more intimate details of African-American community. The sheer brilliance of the moment is that Cleveland was essentially using the segment as a musical transition from a spiritual ballad to a down-home stomper—you can hear Cleveland on the piano cueing the musicians and the choir for “Old Landmark’s” cold start—highlighting the genius that is often born of utility.<br><br>The crowd is spent when the pace shifts again for Franklin’s stellar version of The Caravan’s classic, “Mary Don’t You Weep.”—and fittingly so, as Franklin begins her own version of Gospel pedagogy. At the time of the recording, The Caravans were largely known as Gospel’s first super-group, counting the legendary Albertina Walker, Dorothy Norwood, Inez Andrews and Shirley Caesar among its ranks at one time or another. Cleveland was an accompanist for the group in the mid-1950s. The Caravans were to Gospel in the 1950s and 1960s, what Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were to Jazz; a high end finishing school for the genre’s elite. Given this legacy, it was only fitting that Franklin would perform one of the group’s most well known songs.<br><br>The song, originally recorded by the Fisk Jubilee Singer in 1915, tells the story of Lazarus of Bethany—a figure that, in Biblical lore, is brought back from death by Jesus. Ostensibly a song about the power of Jesus to deliver believers from adverse conditions, Franklin’s performance of the song offers an interesting commentary for Black America at a historical moment functioned, in part, as an extended moment of collective grief and mourning, in the aftermath of the murder of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (a close confidante of Franklin’s father) and others such as Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter, students at Jackson State and countless others who sacrificed their lives in support of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Franklin and Cleveland’s arrangements transform “Mary Don’t You Weep” into a dirge, but in the spirit of much of the best of black expressive culture, builds on cathartic possibilities.<br><br>Franklin is midway through the song when she begins to explicitly retell the story of Lazarus—her vocals vacillating between singing and preaching, not unlike the style in which her father was well known for—recreating Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus. As Franklin sings, “Jesus said ‘for the benefit of you, who don’t believe, who don’t believe in me this evening, I’m gonna call him three times.’ He said ‘Lazarus,’ hmmmm ‘Lazarus,’ hear my, hear my voice ‘Lazarus’…he got up walking like a natural man.” At face value, Franklin’s “Mary Don’t You Weep” is a powerful example of Gospel music’s capacity to perform exegesis, but I’d like to suggest something much more. In Franklin’s hand, “Mary Don’t You Weep” resurrects the very idea of progressive community—a concept of community that was literally under siege when Franklin made her recording. Less an act of resurrecting of a mythical “savior,” Franklin’s performance was an attempt to recover “beloved” community—a community that as constituted in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church during those two nights in January of 1972, was a metaphor for the kind of “imagined” community that would have the capacity to elect a Black President more than three decades after Franklin’s performance.<br><br>Franklin, ends the suite with a 15-minute version of “Never Grow Old”—a song she first recorded as teen—seemingly putting an exclamation point on the inexhaustible idea of “beloved” community (“I have heard of a land on the far away strand, ’Tis a beautiful home of the soul”). By the time Franklin and Cleveland concluded the evening with a second rendition of “Precious Memories,” after impromptu comments from Reverend C.L. Franklin, it was evident to many in the audience, that they had been witness to something that was genuinely transcendent. They didn’t just witness one of the greatest singers of the 20th Century at her peak, but arguably the peak moment of a musical tradition that had, indeed, changed the world.<br></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/13096878-1554083995825817092?l=newblackman.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "“Two-handed engine”: Wikileaks, the Defense of Diplomatic Secrecy, and East Timor",
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"content" : "<p><em>This is a long post, almost 7000 words, so proceed with caution. It began with Wikileaks and Scott Gilmore’s article “In Defense of Secrecy,” but most of it’s about East Timor and the larger problem — which I recognize in retrospect as the motivation — of our apparent inability to see what diplomats and militaries do as part of the same thinking apparatus; no matter how clichéd Clausewitz has become, we use a different set of paradigms to judge what the Defense department does from what the department of State does. This is a dangerous double standard. </em></p>\n<p><em> </em></p>\n<p>The logic behind leaking diplomatic cables seems to be different than the logic behind producing a document like the “Collateral Murder” video. The latter is a recognizable piece of muck-raking in the classic sense, since the aesthetic and ethical response is it designed to provoke is horror: showing us video of an Apache helicopter killing non-combatants (and letting us hear the disregard for human life in the voices of the pilots as they did so), the point of the video was to take something that repetition has rendered banal — “collateral damage” — and re-stage it as unnatural, perverse, horrible, and unacceptable, as “collateral murder.”</p>\n<p>While Wikileaks also released the unedited footage, Raffi Khatchadourian’s <em>New Yorker </em><span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian\">piece</a></span><em> </em>focuses on the ways Wikileaks tried to shape its reception, cutting the raw tape to emphasize the parts they wanted to emphasize, adding captions, and framing it with an inflammatory title and a George Orwell quote (“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”). And in describing how Wikileaks went about deciding where and how to edit the video — choosing that title, for example, instead of the less explicit “Permission to Engage” — Khatchadourian gives us space to see the video through the lens which Defense Secretary Robert Gates offers us:</p>\n<blockquote><p>“These people can put anything out they want and are never held accountable for it.” The video was like looking at war “through a soda straw,” he said. “There is no before and there is no after.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>There is certainly some validity to this argument. Wikileaks did work to shape the narrative by making decisions about what to show us and what <em>not </em>to show us. Calling it “murder” before we’ve even seen the event is not a act of passive journalism, and if Wikileaks is working to publicize events in our world which we were not otherwise cognizant of, they are doing so with purpose and intent, as a kind of civil disobedience, working as hard to <em>make</em> the story as they are to simply report it.</p>\n<p>But there’s nothing “simple” about reporting “the story.” All “facts” come to us embedded in contextual cues and narratives that prompt us on how to respond. When we see an American military helicopter firing on shadowy faceless figures carrying an unidentifiable object, after all, do Americans remember that they are Americans as they watch? And reflect on how Americans have been the targets of terror attacks by shadowy faceless figures, maybe like these? If we’ve been conditioned by television and films to regard Arabs as dangerous villains — and <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko_N4BcaIPY\">we have</a></span> – is the way we respond to <em>these </em>moving images influenced by <em>those </em>moving images? Is it relevant that we hear the voices of the pilots — making them persons, present to us, legible to us — while their victims are faceless ciphers? Are we influenced by video games that play out this very scenario, with <em>us </em>in the cockpit? As we struggle to make sense of the event we see in front of us, does it influence us that one interpretation — murder — will make us feel bad and uncomfortable, while the other — justifiable, collateral damage — will make us feel <em>less </em>bad?</p>\n<p>I think the answer is yes to at least some of these questions at least some of the time. As consumers of news, we are sometimes passive and sometimes active; sometimes we question what we see and look straight on at the things that make us uncomfortable, and sometimes we don’t. And the way we can be <em>most </em>comfortable about the world we live in is to forget how often and how pervasively we get manipulated by the people who serve us our news, to pleasantly overlook how carefully packaged and framed and edited and commented upon every image and word we ever receive <em>already</em> is.</p>\n<p>After all, the alternative to Wikileaks’ editing that footage is for someone else to edit it, and if we look critically at and question the way that Wikileaks has presented it to us — and we <em>should </em>do that — then we should also criticize the alternative that Secretary Gates wants us to view. Which is to not view it at all. In this sense, while Khatchadourian’s <em>New Yorker </em>piece is more or less fair as far as it goes, it doesn’t go very far: Assange is shown editing and crafting and interposing himself between us and “reality,” while Secretary Gates — the man who denied Reuters’ FOIA requests for the footage — is given to us as media critic, the guy pointing out to us how our reality has been distorted by the villainous Julian Assange. The man who suppressed the tape in its entirety is heard complaining that Assange has suppressed parts of it. But both are doing more or less the same thing: Assange gives us a picture of the event that makes it look like murder, while Gates gives us a picture of the even in which it is not.</p>\n<p>Leaking those diplomatic cables, on the other hand, would seem to be something altogether different, which is part of why the conversations about Wikileaks have changed. Wikileaks <em>has </em>“cooperated” with the US government in a certain ways (through the mediation of the big newspapers) to redact certain aspects of the leaks; they are not, despite the hyperbolic claims of their detractors, releasing information indiscriminately. One could certainly still complain that they’re not discriminating in the <em>right </em>ways. But where Gates complained that the “Collateral Murder” video had been altered, arguing that it could not be trusted because it didn’t show the <em>whole </em>story, the problem with what Wikileaks is doing now — say its critics — is that the cables have not been <em>sufficiently </em>altered, that certain information can and should legitimately be kept secret. I want to fixate on this argument — the argument for the value of secrecy as such — because it comes from a different place than Gates’ lament about the perniciously edited footage. There, Gates implicitly conceded that we have some basic right to know the truth, and that the problem is simply that we‘ve been denied it: if you could only see the <em>whole video</em>, he argues, you would understand that our soldiers are just doing their job. Here, the line is the opposite: if only things could be kept secret, they say, all would be well.</p>\n<p>I think it would be fair to say that we in the United States have a certain tradition of being, if not <em>skeptical </em>of the military, at least open to the argument that the military has to be watched pretty closely. Americans love us some soldiers, but we nevertheless tend to presume, at a certain basic and conceptual level, that the job of the soldier is to be beholden to civilian leadership and public oversight. It’s in the constitution both of our laws and of our assumptions about what the military <em>is</em>, which is why we have neither a tradition nor the real possibility of direct military political leadership. I suspect, then, that this is why conservatives work so hard to lionize the soldiery: since the military is constitutionally and conceptually subordinate to the civilian leadership and mass public, insisting that they almost never do bad things — that they are supernaturally <em>good </em>human beings — is a way of easing up on the kind of actual oversight and civilian control over the military that we constitutionally presume. The non-military always has the <em>right</em> to oversee the military, but if — as Gates’ statement presumes — we don’t <em>need </em>to, if we can trust them, then we won‘t actually have to. We give our soldiers free rein in practice, just not in theory.</p>\n<p>However, to say that because we can <em>trust </em>the military, we don’t need to rigorously oversee their actions, is a significantly different argument than the argument which is made in explicit defense of the positive value of diplomatic secrecy. Gates is not arguing that it is a positive good for the military to operate without supervision; even in our hyper-militarized society, that’s still a relatively minority position. His point, informed by long military tradition, is simply that oversight is superfluous, <em>not </em>that its absence is, actually and in and of itself, a positive necessity.</p>\n<p>The argument in direct defense of diplomatic secrecy comes from a different place, and from a different set of rhetorical principles. <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://buildingmarkets.org/blogs/blog/2010/11/29/in-defense-of-secrecy/\">This article</a></span> <strong>– </strong>“In Defense of Secrecy” –<strong> </strong>was written by former Canadian diplomat Scott Gilmore, and seems more or less representative (it’s a <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Aaron%20Bady/Desktop/In%20Defense%20of%20Secrecy\">blog post</a></span> he wrote last Tuesday which was then picked up by a the <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/wikileaks-just-made-the-world-more-repressive/article1818157/\">Globe and Mail)</a></span>.</p>\n<p>The heart of his argument is that what diplomats <em>do </em>is work for human rights, and that they use secret cables to do it. “The third most common topic in the WikiLeaks cables is human rights,” he argues — with a graph to prove it — and portrays “American diplomats doing the same thing we were trying to do in Indonesia: Make the world a little better.” He talks in some lurid detail about his posting in Indonesia during the two and half decades the Suharto regime was committing genocide on the East Timorese people, and closes with this “Thankfully, for the Timorese at least, WikiLeaks did not exist in the 1990s.”</p>\n<p>There are three propositions here that we need to disentangle: (A) American diplomats essentially work to “make the world a little better,” (B) the people of East Timor were significantly helped, in some way, by diplomats like him, and (C) just as Wikileaks is today impeding the efforts of American diplomats to do what they do, if Wikileaks had existed in 1999, it would have impeded the efforts by American and Canadian diplomats to “make the world a little bit better.”</p>\n<p>I disagree with all three of these propositions, and I’ll explain why, at ponderous length. But first, let us take in the rest of Scott Gilmore’s account of himself:</p>\n<blockquote><p>…while posted in Jakarta, my job was to find out as much as I could about the human rights abuses being committed by the Indonesian government, and to help apply whatever pressure we could on Jakarta to make them stop. I wrote cables back to Ottawa that would raise the hair on the back of your neck. Describing abuses that make me sick even now to think about them. <strong>These cables gave my government the ammunition it needed to lean heavily on the Indonesian leadership at the UN and at summits like APEC</strong>.</p>\n<p>…Every few months, I would go visit a small white-washed school in the hills of Indonesian occupied Timor. The young teacher who ran the school would cheerfully bring me into her office, and we would chat about small things while her uniformed students would serve us strong coffee and homemade buns. Once the students left and closed the door, she would open her desk drawer and hand me horrifying photos of disinterred bodies. The Timorese resistance would dig up the fresh graves of torture victims, take photos for evidence, and pass them through their secret network to the teacher, who would then pass them to me and other diplomats. <strong>With that information we knew what the Indonesian military was doing and that the government in Jakarta was lying to the international community. And we could confront them, and we could pressure them to change. And ultimately, thanks to the perseverance of the Timorese and the efforts of thousands of diplomats and activists and politicians, this worked. The international arm twisting led to a referendum, and Timor is now independent. </strong></p></blockquote>\n<p>Again, there is an implicit chain of propositions here that add up to a coherent narrative: (A) diplomats need information about abuses in order to do their job of making the world a little bit better, (B) secretly transmitting that information back to their government is necessary to protect their sources so as to maintain the flow of information, (C) the “international arm twisting” which that information enabled “led to a referendum, and Timor is now independent,” and (D) East Timor is lucky it had American and Canadian diplomats on its side.</p>\n<p>All of these claims seem to me to be at least irresponsibly exaggerated. I say this mainly because I know enough about the broadly accepted historical narrative that’s emerged about what happened in 1999 to see all the places where Gilmore is diverging from it. I distrust his account of how genocide was stopped in East Timor because I trust Geoffrey Robinson’s account in <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=142nuDzaU2sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=geoffrey+robinson+how+genocide&source=bl&ots=Go1iywsvqy&sig=pkfa6WntOjD2Mrzkv_xifWEEzFA&hl=en&ei=2Gz-TOK-CYy-sQOc-9ivCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false\">his book </a>with the subtitle “How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor,” and in which paints a very different picture of what was going on in 1999. But most of all, I’m struck by the completely and incompatibly different version of the story that the same Canadian diplomat told in <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://this.org/blog/2010/01/19/interview-scott-gilmore/\">this interview</a></span>, a short eleven months ago, when he wasn‘t prompted by Wikileaks to defend the noble calling of secret diplomacy.</p>\n<p>As he tells it there, at the time he joined the foreign service and was posted to Indonesia, the Suharto regime that had, by then, been murderously repressing East Timor for almost 24 years “was falling apart”:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The government was collapsing, Suharto, the dictator, had resigned, and so I volunteered for it and was sent out to Jakarta. And because I was a low man in the embassy I was given the crap files and one of them was East Timor, because at that time it was a forgotten conflict, there was nobody on the ground, the UN wasn’t there. The only foreigners anywhere near it were nuns and the Red Cross.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Even this, by the way, is bizarre; in 1998 (when Suharto resigned), East Timor was a forgotten conflict? Huh? In 1991, journalists Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn witnessed the Santa Cruz massacre, in which the Indonesian military killed 270 people who had gathered for the funeral of a young man killed by the Indonesian military earlier. In 1996, Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta, Timorese resistance spokesman (in exile in Australia), were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And while Indonesia was intransigent right up until the moment when it wasn’t, NGO’s, the Catholic church, and the international press were making East Timor into a big noisy deal throughout the entire 90‘s. It says a lot more about the diplomatic bubble he was encased in that he would consider it forgotten than about Eat Timor itself.</p>\n<p>But anyway, here’s the part where the story he told a year ago starts to diverge from his story of last week:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Catch all that? Reporting atrocities to Ottawa was a “futile exercise”; instead of giving his government “the ammunition it needed,” Gilmore’s point is that recording what was actually happening on the ground was “to bear silent witness,” an experience of the uselessness of diplomacy which upset and depressed him. He’s telling a story of his disillusionment with the foreign service.</p>\n<p>Then, once the uselessness of diplomacy has been thoroughly demonstrated:</p>\n<blockquote><p>What happened was that, bizarrely, one day, the new Indonesian president just announced he was going to hold a referendum for independence for the Timorese. And suddenly what became a lost cause became the <em>cause celebre</em>.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Diplomacy? “A lost cause.” The reasons the referendum came? Not a hard-bargained diplomatic concession in the face of Western pressure (as in his “international arm twisting led to a referendum”), but a bizarre and unexpected decision on the part of the new president of Indonesia which took everyone by surprise.</p>\n<p>He continues:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The UN arrived and the donors arrived and the media arrived, and there was only about two or three of us at the time, Western diplomats: somebody for the US embassy, somebody from the Australian embassy and myself, who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas. So we had very valuable skills for a short period of time and so it wasn’t long going from that to working for the UN because, frankly, there weren’t very many Timorese experts…I had a very strange job. It was a very unique UN mission because it was one of the first times the UN actually ran the country, as opposed to just trying to broker peace or maintain peace. The UN was running everything from the health department to creating the East Timorese defense force and I landed in an office called the National Security Advisory office, where myself and a colleague who I had actually known from grad school, found ourselves sitting across a desk from each other at a very young age, doing things like designing with the defense agency for what East Timor should look like, or with the intelligence agency for what East Timor’s supposed to look like, and actually trying to create these things on behalf of the Timorese.</p></blockquote>\n<p>I don’t want to dismiss what Scott Gilmore may or may not have done in 1999; unless his story is completely fabricated (and there’s no real reason to think it is), the man did dangerous work in a very good cause. So good on him for that. I am a bit skeptical of the way he makes himself and a handful of other diplomats the only (white) people “who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas.” This seems deeply wrong to me; if you read accounts of the country in that period <em>not </em>written by former Canadian diplomats, it seems clear that there were a great many East Timorese people who had been paying attention, spoke their own language, and could get hold of the guerillas (especially when they <em>were </em>them), and that there wasn’t even a great shortage of great white fathers either. But let that go.</p>\n<p>What <em>really </em>interests me in this old account is the way he nowhere emphasizes the role played by diplomats in secretly shuttling information back to their bosses in Ottawa and Washington. What interests me even more is that his story in the year-old interview is consistent with the one Robinson tells in his book (and in everything else I’ve read on the subject), in which the 1999 referendum not only comes out of nowhere, has very little to do with what was happening on the island, and took most Western observers and diplomats completely by surprise, but which also was followed up with a profoundly ineffective diplomatic effort to: convince the Indonesian military to run a really fair and peaceful election.</p>\n<p>In other words, after 24 years of institutionalized repression, torture, murder, and more torture and murder, the US state department’s perspective on the situation was that it was up to the Indonesian military to keep the peace in East Timor. Apply enough diplomatic pressure on the fox and it will turn into a really good guard of the henhouse.</p>\n<p>Surprisingly, that didn’t happen at all. Instead, in the lead up to the referendum in 1999, the Indonesian military secretly worked to form and organize local militias of Timorese who were loyal to Indonesia to use systematic violence and suppress the vote for independence. The violence wasn’t secret. The whole <em>point </em>of mass repression was that it had to be widely known, to everyone, or it wouldn‘t work. And this is where another genocide might have happened; had the UN not intervened when it eventually did, with peacekeeping troops, it certainly would have gotten very, very bad.</p>\n<p>Here is what Robinson, who was in East Timor at the time, has to <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=142nuDzaU2sC&lpg=PR1&ots=Go1iywsvqy&dq=geoffrey%20robinson%20how%20genocide&pg=PA187#v=onepage&q&f=false\">say </a>about that moment:</p>\n<blockquote><p>…however obvious the need for peacekeepers seemed to those who had been in East Timor, the idea never got off the ground. The reason was simple: in the course of negotiations in April 1999 and the months leading up to the ballot, it was either ignored or actively opposed by elements within the UN Secretariat and key powers on the Security Council, most notably the United States. <strong>This is not to say that these powers remained silent in the face of mounting violence. There was plenty of criticism, and even some veiled threats, for example, at a donors meeting for Indonesia in Paris in late July </strong>and again as voting day approached. In the final weeks of August, for instance, President Clinton wrote to President Habibie warning that relations with the United States would b e seriously damaged if mass violence occurred during or after the ballot. <strong>But peacekeepers were never mentioned. Instead, the concerned states stuck steadfastly, one might even say pigheadedly, to the position that security was the responsibility of the Indonesian authorities.</strong></p></blockquote>\n<p>Without UN peacekeepers, it is worth re-iterating, things would have gotten much, much worse. The most you can say for Western diplomatic efforts is that they eventually succeeded in convincing Indonesia to allow peacekeepers to enter the country. But there’s nothing else they <em>could </em>have accomplished, no matter how much “ammunition” Scott Gilmore provided them with. The Indonesian military were the bad guys in this situation and Indonesian President Habibie was the villain. The only thing standing between the people of East Timor and the paramilitary forces that had been killing and torturing them for decades was, eventually, the UN. And the main obstacle to UN action was the United States.</p>\n<p>Which starts to bring us closer to the real issue here: the US not only didn’t care about humanitarian issues in East Timor, it was — as it had been for decades — actively working to train and support the Indonesian military during the 24-year period in which the Indonesian military was the primary instrument of genocidal repression in East Timor. This is not controversial or disputed. This is not a wild conspiracy theory. The turning point in the crisis — the APEC summit which Gilmore specifically mentions — was when Clinton suddenly announced (well after the referendum) that (A) if Indonesia didn’t suddenly get serious about not repressing the Timorese any more, UN intervention would be necessary, and (B) the US was suspending its military co-operation programs with the Indonesian military.</p>\n<p>One thing to point out, then, is Scott Gilmore’s very unfortunate choice of metaphor in describing how secret diplomatic “cables gave my government the ammunition it needed to lean heavily on the Indonesian leadership at the UN and at summits like APEC.” In his testimony in front of Congress, for example, Allan Nairn spoke about being the last journalist in Dili, when the violence was at its height (during the APEC summit), and seeing <em>actual </em>American ammunition littering the ground. In other words, if those cables gave Scott Gilmore’s government the <em>metaphorical </em>ammunition to use against Indonesia, it seems worth pointing out that, at the exact same time, the Indonesian government was using <em>actual ammunition</em> against the people of East Timor, ammunition that was actually given to them by the US. Allan Nairn’s congressional <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=TAs5RSWNYvkC&lpg=PA168&ots=oexxMkLStX&dq=A%20few%20weeks%20ago%2C%20as%20Dili%20was%20burning%20and%20as%20the%20UN%20had%20evacuated%2C%20as%20foreign%20journalist%20had%20left%2C%20I%20had%20the%20opportunity&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q=A%20few%20weeks%20ago,%20as%20Dili%20was%20burning%20and%20as%20the%20UN%20had%20evacuated,%20as%20foreign%20journalist%20had%20left,%20I%20had%20the%20opportunity&f=false\">testimony </a>is worth quoting at some length on this point:</p>\n<blockquote><p>“A few weeks ago, as Dili was burning and as the UN had evacuated, as foreign journalist had left, I had the opportunity to be, I think, probably the last foreign journalist left on the streets of Dili. And I was walking around in the early mornings going from one abandoned house to another. You could hear the militias coming around the corners with their chopper motorcycles. They would fire into the air and honk their horns as they were about to sack and burn another house.</p>\n<p>And you also found littering the streets, hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings. They came from two places, one from Pindad [PT Pindad: Pusat Industrial AD. Army Industries Center], the Indonesian military industries, which have joint ventures with a whole list of U.S. companies. And the other from Olin Winchester of East Alton, Illinois. These cartridges had been recently shipped in to Battalion 7444, one of the territorial battalions in Timor, and then issued to the militiamen. As you can see from these photos, they come in the new white Olin Winchester boxes, twenty cartridges to a box. These were amongst the bullets that they were using to terrorize Dili.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>US military support for Indonesia goes a lot deeper than this, of course,<a href=\"http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Aaron%20Bady/My%20Documents/east%20timor%20final%20post.doc#_ftn1\"><sup><sup>[1]</sup></sup></a> and I will continue in a moment. But we first need to just linger a moment on the fact that exactly the kinds of atrocities which Scott Gilmore talks about, the atrocities which he needs diplomatic cables so he can secretly document “what the Indonesian military was doing,” are atrocities being done with US military hardware and by militiamen directly trained by the Indonesian military, which was directly trained by the American military. Which side of the story do we chooses to emphasize?</p>\n<p>Allan Nairn’s point, in front of Congress, was that the US’s support of Indonesia is the central problem. Having been actually <em>present </em>during the 1991 massacre in Dili (many years before Scott Gilmore would accidentally go to East Timor), Nairn takes a big picture approach to the conflict, and he began his <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=TAs5RSWNYvkC&lpg=PA168&ots=oexxMkLStX&dq=A%20few%20weeks%20ago%2C%20as%20Dili%20was%20burning%20and%20as%20the%20UN%20had%20evacuated%2C%20as%20foreign%20journalist%20had%20left%2C%20I%20had%20the%20opportunity&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false\">testimony </a>by situating American support for Indonesia in 1999 in the context of US support for Indonesia over the entire 24 years of its occupation of East Timor:</p>\n<blockquote><p>“Back in December 1975, when the Indonesian military began consulting with Washington about a possible invasion, they promised they could crush Timor within two weeks. General Ali Murtropo came to the White House and met with General Brent Scowcroft. President Ford and Henry Kissinger went to Jakarta and sat down with Suharto. And then, sixteen hours later, the invasion was underway. The paratroopers dropped from US C-130’s. They used new US machine guns to shoot the Timorese into the sea.</p>\n<p>In 1990, when I first went to Timor, the intelligence chief Colonel Gatot Purwanto confirmed that by that time their operation had killed a third of the original population.</p>\n<p>On November 12, 1991, when the troops marched on the Santa Cruz cemetery, they carried U.S. M-16s. They didn’t bother with warning shots. Amy Goodman and I stood between them futilely hoping to stop them from opening fire. But they opened fire systematically and they kept on shooting because, as the national commander, General Soestrisno, explained: “These Timorese are disrupters; such people must be shot.”…</p>\n<p>At no time during these years of slaughter did the US government executive branch ever decide that the time had come to stop supporting the perpetrators. President Carter and Richard Holbrooke sent in OV-10 Broncos and helicopters. Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton sent in weapons, multilateral financing, and sniper trainers…</p>\n<p>In recent weeks, commentators have criticized the United States for failure to intervene, for not sending in foreign troops fast enough to stop the Indonesian army’s final burst of Timor terror.</p>\n<p>But Mr. Chairman, I want to make the point today that <strong>intervention is not the issue</strong>. The Clinton doctrine and the questions flowing from it do not apply in Timor or Indonesia because the killing is being perpetrated with the active assistance of the United States. <strong>The United States is not an observer here; it is not agonizing on the sidelines. It has instead been the principle patron of the Indonesian armed forces. The issue is not whether we should step in and play policeman to the world, but whether we should continue to arm, train, and finance the world’s worst criminals.”</strong></p></blockquote>\n<p>To return to Scott Gilmore, I have no particular reason to think that he, personally, did anything but honorable and commendable work in East Timor, and every reason to believe that in the moment when it was possible for him to do some good on one of the dark places of the earth, he did his best. That’s not what I’m arguing; foreign service diplomats are not the bad guys here. But the attempt to make them into the <em>good </em>guys is somewhere between ignorant and disingenuous; you cannot be the voice of a government that kills people and pretend that your efforts to stop them from being killed don’t have to be stacked against your governments efforts to help kill them. Without active Western military and diplomatic support for the Suharto regime — starting in 1965, when the real atrocity was committed (over a million communists and suspected communists killed), and continuing past 1999 — the genocide in East Timor could never have happened; in 1975, it was diplomatic pressure from the US, Australia, and the UK that stifled any outcry in the UN, and that was the pattern for the entire history of the “conflict.” Again, this isn’t even secret; in his memoirs, our ambassador to the UN during the initial 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notoriously <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=142nuDzaU2sC&pg=PA63&dq=The+United+States+wished+things+to+turn+out+as+they+did,+and+worked+to+bring+this+about.+The+Department+of+State&hl=en&ei=EW7-TMqcBIz6sAOH0dCvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20United%20States%20wished%20things%20to%20turn%20out%20as%20they%20did%2C%20and%20worked%20to%20bring%20this%20about.%20The%20Department%20of%20State&f=false\">described </a>what he did in the UN at that time:</p>\n<blockquote><p>“The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” (245-7)</p></blockquote>\n<p>In other words, if East Timor “was a forgotten conflict” when Scott Gilmore got there, and if “the UN wasn’t there,” it was because the West (starting with but not limited to the US) had worked hard to make sure that this was so. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, stopping “dominoes” in Asia was vastly more important to the “free world” than anything so piddling as hundreds of thousands of people in East Timor. If you agree with that calculus, fine. But you can’t pretend that human rights ever amounted to anything even close to the importance that the US placed on “strategic considerations,” like maintaining good relations with Jakarta. As Daniel Southerland put it in 1980, “in deferring to Indonesia on the issue, the Carter administration, like the Ford administration before it, appears to have placed big-power concerns ahead of human rights.”<a href=\"http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Aaron%20Bady/My%20Documents/east%20timor%20final%20post.doc#_ftn2\"><sup><sup>[2]</sup></sup></a></p>\n<p>This is why we have to look at what our military does and what our diplomats do in the same context. They are only two different faces of the same state, two different functions and ways of doing things, but ultimately in service of the same goals. We have to scrutinize our diplomats with precisely the same rigor with which we need to oversee our military. And in that sense, it’s worth noting that one of the ways Allan Nairn was able to document American-Indonesian cooperation in the events leading up to 1999 was <em>a leaked diplomatic cable</em>. Here is how he closed his testimony to Congress:</p>\n<blockquote><p>One point I want to make about the constant Pentagon argument. The argument for training is: Well, when you train officers it gives you access to them. It teaches them good values and so on. Those arguments are summarized in this cable. This is a cable from Ambassador Roy to CINCPAC [commander in chief, Pacific].</p>\n<p>He makes all the arguments about how when we train officers, they get good values. They rise in the ranks. And then to clinch the argument, it cites examples of the best and brightest of the Indonesian officers who’ve been trained by the U.S.</p>\n<p>These are the examples they cited. General Feisal Tanjung, who became the commander in chief of the Indonesian armed forces, one of the most notorious, hardline, repressive officers; [Lieutenant] General Hendropriyono, one of the legendary authors of repression in Indonesia, who was involved in Aceh. He’s the man who commanded Operation Cleanup in Jakarta prior to the ’94 APEC summit. This was the operation in which they swept through the streets, picked up street vendors, petty criminals, prostitutes; executed many of them, according to human rights grups. Major General Sihombing, a longtime Intel man who became deputy chief of the secret police. [Major General] Agus [Wirahadikusumah] who has a less egregious human rights record than the others. His main distinction is he’s bought a lot of U.S. weapons for the Indonesian military.</p>\n<p>And then their final example of the best and the brightest was General Prabowo, the most notorious of all the Indonesian officers; also one of the most extensively US- trained officers, famous for his participation in torture in Timor, West Papua, Aceh; for the kidnappings in Aceh.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Again, I don’t want to pretend that Western diplomacy never did any good. At APEC, in 1999, Clinton signaled that the US was now ready to allow the UN intervention into East Timor that would, eventually, stop the militia violence and lead to a shaky peace. But it wasn’t human rights abuses that led him to do it, nor was there any doubt, at that point, that the Indonesian military was behind the atrocities that were happening. The reason Allan Nairn was the last journalist in Dili was that all the others had been driven out by the violence, and the reason we knew the Indonesian military was behind it was that we were training and advising the people who did it.</p>\n<p>But what happened in East Timor was a broad change in strategic priorities; human rights became relevant only once Indonesia was no longer so important as an ally, and once Suharto was no longer “our kind of guy,” as Clinton notoriously once called him. Richard Falk <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=TAs5RSWNYvkC&lpg=PA156&ots=oexxMkLUtX&dq=basic%20change%20in%20East%20Timor%E2%80%99s%20prospects%20resulted%20from%20an%20overall%20transformation%20of%20the%20geopolitical%20climate%2C%20as%20well%20as%20from%20the%20play%20of%20internal%20forces%20within%20Indonesia&pg=PA156#v=onepage&q&f=false\">describes </a>what happened this way:</p>\n<blockquote><p>“…the basic change in East Timor’s prospects resulted from an overall transformation of the geopolitical climate, as well as from the play of internal forces within Indonesia. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, concerns about global strategic alignment were considerably weakened…Such an altered context was then deeply influenced by Indonesia’s fall from International Monetary Fund (IMF) grace in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. Instead of Indonesia being seen as the darling of the second generation of Asian emerging markets, it was now being castigated as the kingpin of “crony capitalism,” and its once admired and pampered leader, Suharto, was condemned as an Asian autocrat whose time of useful service to Indonesia had long passed.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>Suharto resigned, as Falk tells it, because we didn’t <em>need </em>him any more, and because he had become an embarrassment. He became the fall guy, and his promoted vice president declared a referendum on independence in East Timor (A) to clean up the image problem that Indonesia had because of it, and (B) because he thought that the military could swing the election the way they wanted it to go. That it didn’t work out that way doesn’t contradict the basic bad faith of the plan from the start.</p>\n<p>The reason it <em>didn’t</em> work out, the reason the UN intervened when we did, is complicated. But note how secret diplomatic cables don’t in any way play into Geoffrey Robinson’s <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=142nuDzaU2sC&lpg=PR1&ots=Go1iywszvy&dq=geoffrey%20robinson%20genocide&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q&f=false\">account</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>A careful reconstruction of the decisions and events of mid-September 1999, against the background of this literature, suggests that the intervention was the result of an unusual conjuncture of historical trends and events that distinguished that moment decisively from the situation in the late 1970’s. These included: the presence of a good many foreign observers and journalists in the midst of the post-ballot violence; the credibility and strength of the international NGO and church networks that exerted influence on their governments, and mobilized popular demonstrations around the world, most notably in Canberra and Lisbon; the impact of myriad acts of conscience and extraordinary courage by East Timorese; a temporary shift in prevailing international norms and legal regimes that strongly favored humanitarian intervention in cases where national governments commit crimes against their own populations; the presence in a position of power of a strong proponent of humanitarian intervention in such circumstances — UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; and the recent memory of egregious UN failures to protect civilians from mass killings in comparable situations, notably in Rwanda and Srebrenica.</p></blockquote>\n<p>What I am suggesting, then, is that the decision to intervene militarily in East Timor in mid-September 1999 stemmed from an unusual, but, temporary, confluence of historical trends and political pressures that briefly altered the calculus by which key states assessed their national interest, making inaction more costly than humanitarian intervention. Tat view accords well with Samantha Power’s argument [in <em>“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide</em>] about the reasons for US inaction in the face of genocide in the twentieth century. US failures, she argues, can be traced to the fact that there have been no significant domestic political costs to such inaction.</p>\n<p>It is impossible to read Robinson’s book — or pretty much everything else I’ve read on the subject — and not come away with a very different impression of the role played by Western diplomats in East Timor than the one described by Scott Gilmore in his recent column. As agents of their states, they did what their states wanted them to do. And when someone like Gilmore was in East Timor at a time when what was wanted was to “bear silent witness,” well, that’s pretty much all someone like him is going to be able to do. States only care about human rights when they have some reason to care. Most of the time they don’t.</p>\n<p>On the other hand, Robinson and Samantha Power emphasize that what makes states suddenly break with history and care about, say, a little thing like genocide, is when a lot of people start demanding that they care. If inaction has political cost, states will act. And if there’s one thing that the secrecy of diplomatic cables will <em>not </em>accomplish, it’s making citizens angry about inaction, or about actions done in their name.</p>\n<p>East Timor is a special case; as Robinson specifically notes, the UN was able to do the right thing in that moment because a whole bunch of factors were just right: the cold war was over, Indonesia was disgraced, the war on terror had not yet begun, and shameful memories of non-intervention in Rwanda and Bosnia still stung in the collective memory. And this confluence of unusual factors brought about a unique state of affairs, where suddenly a jaded diplomat, a person who was accustomed to being able to do nothing about the horrors he was documenting to apathetic or ineffective officials in Ottawa, was able to be on the right side by working for the UN. Popular pressure from citizens who read Allan Nairn’s journalism, for example, demanded action; Kofi Annan worked very hard to create a coalition of forces to stop the violence; and the US, for a time, fell into line.</p>\n<p>Would we do so now? Doubt it. Indonesia is a massive nation full of Muslims, in case you haven’t heard, and friendly dictators who fight terrorism on our behalf are our favorite kind of ally. If a few eggs get broken, etc. And the main thing that the Wikileaks cables have revealed — just like the cable that Nairn read in front of congress in 1999 — is confirmation of exactly these sorts of complicities. We now have <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/30550\">confirmation</a></span> that we were behind the humanitarian clusterfuck that Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia has turned out to be, for instance, an invasion that was necessary because of all those scary Muslims in Somalia, and possible because of our close relationship with Ethiopia. Just like we already knew that our military was behind Indonesia’s military which was behind the militia violence in Timor, we already “knew,” in a certain sense, that the US gave Ethiopia the green light to invade. They wouldn’t have done so without our approval any more than Indonesia would have invaded in 1975 without it. But Wikileaks fills in some of the gaps. Now we have proof.</p>\n<p>I don’t know how to highly to value that proof; I’m not sure whether Wikileaks just adds to a store of knowledge that we already have or if it represents something new. But the idea that it’s a bad thing to know more about the how the governments that act in our names <em>actually</em> behave is laughable, and the idea that impeding their ability to act secretly prevents them from advancing the cause of justice and human rights, it seems to me, is utterly without merit. There may be a human rights argument against what Wikileaks does; it may be that they’ve been sloppy in the data they’ve released. But given how many times I’ve seen that charge laid at their feet, and how completely unsupported by any credible evidence it has been, without exception, I’m not willing to give people like Gilmore the benefit of the doubt. If anyone has actual examples of a time when government secrecy was used for something other than exerting force in support of self-interest, I’d like to hear it. But until then, I’m going to continue to assume, as usual, that the only check on the amorality of the state is a moral citizenry. And the only way that citizens can <em>act </em>as a check on the state’s amorality is when they know what their government is doing. Hiding cables from the public does the opposite of accomplishing that.</p>\n<div>\n<hr size=\"1\">\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Aaron%20Bady/My%20Documents/east%20timor%20final%20post.doc#_ftnref1\"><sup><sup>[1]</sup></sup></a> As Nairn points out “The units on the ground that were specifically running the militia operation included some of those most intensely trained by the United States,” and he names a series of Indonesian military individuals and units coordinating the militia operation in Timor who were “graduates of US IMET and intelligence training.”</p>\n</div>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Aaron%20Bady/My%20Documents/east%20timor%20final%20post.doc#_ftnref2\"><sup><sup>[2]</sup></sup></a> CSM, “US Role in Plight of Timor: An Issue That Won’t Go Away,” March 6, 1980. I’m not sure “deferring” is the right word, but let it pass.</p>\n</div>\n</div>\n<br> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2808/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=zunguzungu.wordpress.com&blog=873814&post=2808&subd=zunguzungu&ref=&feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p>On the radio, there’s some talk show banter going on. A new study says men who kiss their wives every morning live five years longer than the ones who don’t. </p>\n<p>The driver says to me, “I’d kiss my wife every morning if she’d let me!” He’s got a sweet laugh. A small guy, bundled against the cold. He touches his chin. “In fact this morning I told her this was her last chance to kiss my smooth cheek until summer. I’m gonna grow a beard to keep warm. Never had a beard before but I gotta do something, I freeze in these cars.”</p>\n<p>“Did she kiss you?”</p>\n<p>“Yeah, she’s a good girl, my wife. We couldn’t be more different. She reads books all the time, I don’t touch the stuff. I never even went to high school, but somehow we get along real good.” </p>\n<p>We’re driving along the river, the traffic is slow. I’m watching his pitted face, his shy smile. “I met her in the car. A customer. I picked her up by the hospital and we talked so much I forgot where I was supposed to be driving her! She said that was alright. We had breakfast the next couple mornings and then she moved in. Eight years.”</p>\n<p>He’s on a roll now, and I’ve no inclination to stop him. He’s telling the kind of stories I always think the cabbies might be making up. The kind that are a little too cute. But I believe him.</p>\n<p>“I grew up over there,” he says, pointing across the river to a row of project towers. “I started dealing drugs when I was 12. I tell you, drugs gave me a good life. I had money, I went all over the world. I went places I don’t remember going but people tell me I was there.” </p>\n<p>“Then I had to get cleaned up. My clock ran down. So here I am. I’m doing ok. I work, people work.” </p>\n<p>This looks bitter on the page but he’s not. He is laughing his sweet laugh. He is, I find out later, dying slowly of the things you would expect. His liver, he says, but not his heart.</p>\n<br> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/420/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/420/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=municipalarchive.wordpress.com&blog=3626641&post=420&subd=municipalarchive&ref=&feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Why is Xinmao bidding for Draka?",
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"content" : "<p>The answer is suggested by Hendrik Rood (Stratix):</p>\n<p>“There are only 4 complete patent portfolio’s for fibre optic manufacturing in the world</p>\n<p>* Corning (USA)</p>\n<p>* Draka Comteq (Netherlands)</p>\n<p>* Sumitomo (Japan)</p>\n<p>* Fujikura (Japan)</p>\n<p>The rest of the fibre optic industry works on licenses of one of these four leading firms. It seems someone in China thinks this is the opportunity to buy a full scale optical fibre patent portfolio.”</p>\n<p>Very likely.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dadamotive.com%2F2010%2F11%2Fwhy-is-xinmao-bidding-for-draka%2F&linkname=Why%20is%20Xinmao%20bidding%20for%20Draka%3F\" title=\"Facebook\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/icons/facebook.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Facebook\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/digg?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dadamotive.com%2F2010%2F11%2Fwhy-is-xinmao-bidding-for-draka%2F&linkname=Why%20is%20Xinmao%20bidding%20for%20Draka%3F\" title=\"Digg\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/icons/digg.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Digg\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/stumbleupon?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dadamotive.com%2F2010%2F11%2Fwhy-is-xinmao-bidding-for-draka%2F&linkname=Why%20is%20Xinmao%20bidding%20for%20Draka%3F\" title=\"StumbleUpon\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/icons/stumbleupon.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"StumbleUpon\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/share_save\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/favicon.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Share\"></a> </p>"
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"title" : "tales by the moonlight #1",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9KRvm2_omrk/TOMKXuI2JjI/AAAAAAAAFKs/AY9x5QKU2vs/s1600/A-1-sm.jpg\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9KRvm2_omrk/TOMKXuI2JjI/AAAAAAAAFKs/AY9x5QKU2vs/s1600/A-1-sm.jpg\"></a><br><br><i><span style=\"font-size:x-small\">well it's full moon today, not like you can tell from the London skies, so ...</span></i><br><br>Back in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enugu\">Enugu</a> city, east of Nigeria, in my younger days getting ready for school was the usual routine (<span style=\"font-style:italic\">border line chaotic</span>). My older brother, myself and sister would bundle into the bath, get ready for school, and go across the street to Mama Okey's yard to buy breakfast. breakfast was ritual fried bean cake/fritter (<a href=\"http://www.avartsycooking.com/2010/06/akara-fried-bean-cake/\">Akara</a> in the lingo) and maize pap, sorta custard like (called Akamu). it was bare joke business cos Mama Okey was loud as hell and always cussin' the labourers who bought breakfast there. Okey, her second son, was our best friend so we to get extras. life was simple and fun for the three young kids. Then strange rumours started hitting the street. People living in her yard would complain of being attacked at night and having terrible nightmares. They were waking up with scratches all over their body and ish like that. the street was shook. My dad thought it was all nonsense and allowed us to keep going there but people started avoiding the place.<br><br>One morning on the usual breakfast run we saw a large crowd gathered round the entrance of Mama Okey's house. No sign of her or her food stall. A large aggressive black cat had accidentally trapped itself in a food basket in the backyard. no known owner of the pet. witchcraft business afoot. one of the tenants, a lorry driver, brought the trapped cat out to the front of the house and ordered everyone out. One by one the residents filed out. The only people that hadnt appeared was Okey and his Mums. Lorry man hollered a few times but no response. Everyone was scared and no one made a move to knock on her door. After some crowd driven delibration they decided to let the cat out and see what happens. My young mind was like yeah right. Lorry guy pulled the lid off and cat jumped out the basket. mr cat meowed loudly, scaled the wall and was gone. That moment Mama Okey's door creaked opened. The biggest stampede in the east of nigeria ensued. I and my siblings were 10 paces ahead of the crowd.<br><br>They moved out that morning and I never saw Okey or his Mum again.<br><br>On hindsight it was all rubbish and could be easily explained. but i aint hanging around to find out.<div><br></div><div><i><span style=\"font-size:small\">when in doubt? run</span></i></div><br><br><br><a href=\"http://www.avartsycooking.com/2010/06/akara-fried-bean-cake/\"><img style=\"margin:0 10px 10px 0;width:320px;height:213px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9KRvm2_omrk/TOh7yeWDAwI/AAAAAAAAFK0/Ao8JCUb0azg/s320/akara1-600x399.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><span><span style=\"font-size:small\">best thing since sliced bread. actually preferred it with custard</span></span></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6471248371228098126-5823601570943723531?l=swankanddirect.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The Ramblers Dance Band (Re-Up)",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IPE-dBSxpcY/R-z3nJQ_LfI/AAAAAAAABnw/IUueACbQZ_o/s1600-h/DSC01612.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IPE-dBSxpcY/R-z3nJQ_LfI/AAAAAAAABnw/IUueACbQZ_o/s400/DSC01612.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>A Highlife LP on the Decca label from West Africa recorded in 1969. <br><br>The sleeve notes say-<br><br>\"It is over a decade now since Decca started recording local artists in West Africa. During this stretch of time dance bands have sprouted and wilted away to die in the true tradition of musicla groups. Somehow one band has satyed around longer than most; it seems to have succeeded where others have failed. The Ramblers Dance Band, nearly eight years old, have introduced glamour to the West African Highlife scene. the band have provided it's dance fans with their highlife tunes, while for those who prefer to listen it has supplied the necessary innovations to the traditional forms.\"<br><br><br>\"From its early development in Ghana through the 1970s, Highlife was Africa's first big popular music trend. Evolving from the the music of society bands and military marching bands, Highlife music re-africanized these contemporary instrumental ensembles, adding local percussion, indigenous rhythms and crafting local lyrics around powerful local themes. Highlife, named for the lifestyle of the high society Africans who were its early patrons, was the first major popular music trend in West Africa. Some of Nigeria's early highlife luminaries Bobby Benson, Cardinal Rex Lawson, EC. Arinze, Stephen Amechi, Inyang Henshaw, Celestine Ukwu and many others are still revered to this day. Though highlife lost some of its national power during the Civil War years, Highlife Heavies like Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe and Oliver DeCoque remain powerful National forces. Recentely a young generation has worked to put highlife back on the map.\"<br><br>Discover more about Nigerian Highlife <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Nigeria\">HERE</a><br><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?zzmzmdwm2gg\">Ramblers Dance Band - Ekombi</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?wnz5mydzmy5\">Ramblers Dance Band - Agyanka Dabre</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?ygjziynkmgg\">Ramblers Dance Band - Ama Bonsu</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?ziiqjiwdj2u\">Ramblers Dance Band - Nyame Ne Nyhehyee</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?bzeuumq5zz2\">Ramblers Dance Band - Nyame Mbere</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?nn2nrmianyh\">Ramblers Dance Band - Alome</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?wcyzqvivyjy\">Ramblers Dance Band - Knock On Wood</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/15815883-2897757143425422241?l=bootsalesounds.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.4/85171?ns=guardian&pageName=Ecuadorean+wins+Spain%27s+first+siesta+contest%3AArticle%3A1470252&ch=World+news&c3=Guardian&c4=Spain+%28News%29%2CEcuador+%28News%29%2CWorld+news&c5=Not+commercially+useful&c6=Associated+Press&c7=10-Oct-24&c8=1470252&c9=Article&c10=News&c11=World+news&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FSpain\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>Pedro Soria Lopez wins €1,000 after sleeping – and snoring – for 17 minutes in busy Madrid shopping mall</p><p>A 62-year-old Ecuadorean man managed to ignore the uproar of a crowded Madrid shopping centre and snore loudly enough to win what was billed as Spain's first siesta championship.</p><p>Organisers yesterday proclaimed unemployed security worker Pedro Soria Lopez the champion after he slept for 17 minutes.</p><p>They said his snoring on Tuesday registered 70 decibels – the equivalent of the noise of someone talking loudly. That earned him extra points and enough to defeat the runner-up who had slept for 18 minutes.</p><p>\"Oh I am so happy to be the first champion,\" said Soria Lopez before collecting the €1,000 winning cheque. \"My wife made me do this, but then they couldn't wake me up. Naturally, the lunch I had before with the €7 (£6) they had given me helped.\"</p><p>The somewhat tongue-in-cheek nine-day contest, which ended yesterday , was organised by the recently formed <a href=\"http://www.campeonato-de-siesta.com/\" title=\"National Association of Friends of the Siesta\">National Association of Friends of the Siesta</a> and sponsored by a shopping mall in Madrid's working class Carabanchel district.</p><p>The aim was to promote a revival of a custom that some believe is in danger of vanishing because of modern life.</p><p>\"People are so stressed out they can't take siestas any more,\" said a spokesman, Andres Lemes. \"Studies show it's a healthy practice that recharges your batteries.\"</p><p>Each of the 360 sleepers that took part in the contest got just one shot. There were individual prizes for snoring, odd sleeping positions and wearing striking pyjamas.</p><p>Contestants in groups of five were given 20 minutes to lie down on blue couches and timed by a doctor with a pulse-measuring device to determine how long they spent snoozing. A judge perched on an umpire's seat awarded points for position, snoring ability and apparel.</p><p>\"It's not a scientific study, obviously,\" said Dr Lila Chuecas, who monitored the contestants. \"The idea is to encourage people to practice a healthy habit.\"</p><p>She said less than 30% of contestants managed to nod off, given the surrounding noise of giggling youths and parents screaming at their kids. Loud, thumping pop music pounded continuously from the numerous stores all around.</p><p>The sofas were lined up in parallel numbered lanes like those of an athletics race, and eight rounds were held per day.</p><p>On Saturday, one young girl showed up in pink, heart-striped pyjamas and snuggled up to a brown furry bunny. An older man wore a Santa hat and had a cushion stuffed under his T-shirt.</p><p>Two Americans studying in Madrid read about the contest on the internet and won second and third place in their individual round. \"I think I fell asleep, but someone kept kicking my couch,\" said Asya Kislyuk, 21, of Indianapolis. \"We will now go forth to be the ambassadors for the siesta,\" she joked.</p><p></p><p>Organisers said they planned a bigger championship next year, and may even take it abroad.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/spain\">Spain</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ecuador\">Ecuador</a></li></ul></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/tnjfgs37ucnl649hfpb0neurik/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fworld%2F2010%2Foct%2F24%2Fecuadorean-wins-spain-first-siesta-contest\" width=\"100%\" height=\"60\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"title" : "Anokye Contra Yehoshua - Martin Egblewogbe",
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"content" : "<blockquote>It is of great interest<br>to compare Yehoshua and Anokye;<br>The latter murdered in his deep sleep<br>by the firing of a musket –<br>the gun not even pointed at him.<br>From such a death there is no resurrection:<br>thus perished the hope of a Guan elixir.<br><br>Mark here one notable divergence:<br>Whereas Yehoshua is documented four-fold or more<br>Anokye lives on in a multitude of tales<br>Each morphing in time and space.<br><br>So in the remote gospel according to McCaskie<br>Anokye approaching the town discovered<br>it was his own funeral in full swing:<br>Disgusted, Anokye turned and walked away,<br>presumably into the forest, and thus disappeared.<br><br>Yehoshua, on the other hand,<br>was done to death in a most grisly fashion,<br>hanging from a wooden stake for all to see –<br>and how can we not shed a tear, a tear! at least.<br>Yet Magic Man even in death, Yehoshua fled the grave!<br>He rose from the dead! and for emphasis,<br>rose also into the air and thus disappeared.<br><br>It may well be<br>Magic Men all like to vanish<br>preservéd bones are not the fashion<br>for prophets thus revered.<br>In which case the manner in which one disappears<br>is how the trump is held.<br>Grant Yehoshua this:<br>levitating in the light of day<br>Out-of-doors, and in sight of many –<br>this was a master touch.<br>Beaten perhaps, only by Elijah's<br>terrific ascent into the stratosphere<br>flaming chariot and all that:<br>Elijah wins on dramatics.<br><br>In any case, we are told<br>Yehowa engineered Yehoshua's great escape<br>and had planned the whole thing for an eternity.<br>But as I am sure you will agree,<br>it all was done with a very nice touch.<br>Add Elijah's case, and one concludes<br>Yehowa cannot be beaten at this game.<br><br>But unlike Yehoshua, Anokye was altogether earthly,<br>with no relations in high places – much less a father;<br>and so stayed put wherever.<br>(The lesson has been well learned in this country:<br>nepotism springs from this).<br><br>Centuries on and Yehoshua is leading,<br>Anokye creeping behind, a shaky image.<br>And as in the name of Yehoshua, Anokye's fame is dimmed,<br>We, his people have been thrashed,<br>and our heads are forced to bow, and bow...<br>Anokye... next time, walk on water! Next time, be crucified!<br>Next time have connections, preferably to Yehowa.<br><br>How shall we poetically approach Anokye?<br>Or sing of his powers, and<br>Create a buff shine for our own black mysterian?<br>Shall we resurrect this Magic Man?</blockquote><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7555516329392912719-6914952550105224855?l=oneghanaonevoice.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p>We moved to Freetown for my dad’s work when I was seven years old.<br>\nThere was a woman in the house the night we arrived, she made us dinner, helped us unpack and helped us get settled in.<br>\nMy dad who had moved a few months ahead of us said she was his house keeper of sorts; she cooked his meals and kept the house tidy.<br>\nA few years later the woman become my stepmother and I would call her ‘Mommy’</p>\n<p><a title=\"Backs by Elsbro, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/elsbro/4924559198/\"><img style=\"border-width:0px\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4139/4924559198_23a537c57a.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Backs\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\"></a></p>\n<p>My friend Eve dated an older man when we were teenagers.<br>\nEve had always been mature for her age.<br>\nBy Sixteen she’d loved two men (boys, really), each affair had been deep, passionate and tumultuous.<br>\nThe next year she declared that she was done dating boys!<br>\nOne day while playing house with the older-man boyfriend, his fiancée returned from where ever she’d been.<br>\nNot like a mirage, although she could very well be, because E. had no clue he had a fiancée.<br>\nTo explain her presence in his life, the man told his fiancée that Eve helped him out around the house and cooked his meals.</p>\n<p><a title=\"Hall by Elsbro, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/elsbro/4923977331/\"><img style=\"border:0px\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4099/4923977331_4b1f7ff794.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Hall\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\"></a></p>\n<p>I head towards the apartment in excitement; it’s going to be a surprise.<br>\nI see them on the balcony and pause halfway through pulling my keys out the keyhole.<br>\nIt’s the peppy girl from upstairs, the one whose constant peppiness exhausts us.<br>\nThey’re having brunch, she made pancakes…<em> “it’s delicious, you’ve got to try it”</em>, he says.<br>\nShe giggles and flails about, she’s so happy to see me, it’s great to have me back, and life is just so great.<br>\nAnd just then, when no explanation was needed, when silence was enough, he said it;<br>\n<em>“Kate’s been helping me out a bit around here while you’ve been gone”.</em></p>\n<p>©2010 <a href=\"http://elsbro.com/blog\">the whinery 2.0</a>. All Rights Reserved.</p>.<p><a href=\"http://www.addtoany.com/share_save\"><img src=\"http://elsbro.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png\" width=\"171\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Share\"></a> </p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?a=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?a=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?i=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?a=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?i=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?a=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?i=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?a=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:66VmDHf5eaU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheWhinery20?i=yG8BgaVq9bM:EOlyJ31D-Vw:66VmDHf5eaU\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheWhinery20/~4/yG8BgaVq9bM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "her body is the land - Krissy Darch",
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"content" : "<blockquote>Vanilla Ice on the loudspeaker says <i>kick it one time boyyyy</i><br>mine deeper harder faster now<br>be a miner for a heart of gold<br>it’s illegal<br>not the taking<br>just if you don’t have a permit<br>her body is the land where all you need is a license<br>to plunder<br>the paper work becomes an extension of the violence<br>signatures and lines and hands that sign<br><br><i>galamsey</i>, they call us<br>we are illegal miners<br>after the same thing as those licensed ones really<br>(the aura of licenses)<br>survival<br>(the aura of survival)<br>the desire to have children<br>we don’t have papers or permits<br>sometimes we use mercury<br>it gets into the water<br>the children have sores and rashes<br>but our operation is the same if<br>smaller<br>no funding from the government<br>no sustainability<br>inspectors<br>no heavy equipment just our hands<br>grassroots plunder<br>I take from the earth with my own hands<br>economy is not abstract here<br>there’s economy and the economy<br>burning down the skin of the legs of the girl down the river<br>like the skin of a grape<br>she will be a porter like her mother<br>and carry<br>nuggets from the earth<br>the newspapers say it’s criminal<br>we know<br>it’s just criminal<br>on a smaller scale<br><br>we take gold out of the earth<br>we take and we take it<br><br>we were born here in the gold<br>nothing will make us stop<br><br>*<br><br>hope, like gold<br>can be traded<br><br>wrested from the ground with mercury<br>how many rashes and rivers to extract this hope?<br>hope is a dirty word here<br>a nugget covered in dirt<br><br>they send in the journalists for human rights<br>(as opposed to the ones who aren’t)<br>who cut tiny openings through which<br>the story comes in spurts<br>between the squeeze of the lede and the nut graf<br>and the two line quotes<br>gold and mercury coming out<br>between business finance culture leisure<br><br>*<br><br>we travel from town to town<br>she carries and she cooks<br>and when I come home covered in mercury<br>she hides me in her body<br>she hides me in her body to hold me back from the world<br><br>*<br><br>Canada goes for gold<br>gold standard<br>gold rush<br>gold wash<br>gold collar worker<br>goldschläger<br>gold digger<br><br>*<br><br>men make nations<br>and call them she<br>draw borders, set limits, regulate and sell off rights<br>of access<br>and call that project she<br>God bless our homeland Ghana<br>and make our nation great and strong<br>as it lives this divided life<br>what men say it is<br>and all the things it really is.<br><br>*<br><br><i>Gold running beneath the children’s feet<br>under those mud huts and malnourished children, the news says<br>in an imagined whisper<br>gold<br>they don’t even fuckin know it</i></blockquote><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7555516329392912719-8972771430449671092?l=oneghanaonevoice.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Deep Cuts: George Benson \"Valdez In The Country\" (1976)",
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"content" : "<div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rlkraNz2WZQ/TK6E25n31FI/AAAAAAAAA9M/QMQF0Jw0VP4/s1600/george_benson1.jpg\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"254\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rlkraNz2WZQ/TK6E25n31FI/AAAAAAAAA9M/QMQF0Jw0VP4/s320/george_benson1.jpg\" width=\"320\"></a></div><strong>by Pico</strong> <br>\n<br>\nWhen we last visited a George Benson recording, it was about his <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2006/07/george-benson-other-side-of-abbey-road.html\">remake of the still fresh-out-the-oven <i>Abbey Road</i></a>. Fast forward seven years later, to 1976: Benson had just ended his long and artistically successful stint with CTI Records, having been enticed back to the majors by Warner Brothers. Warners put Tommy LiPuma in charge of producing Benson's records and the relationship, which spanned four years and four albums, transformed the guitarist/singer from a jazz star to a jazz-pop superstar. His ascension in status started right off with the jazz record everyone knows about, <i>Breezin'</i>, and the two hits it spun (\"Masquerade,\" \"Breezin'\").<span> <br>\n<br>\nThose hits would be followed up next year with his burnin' live version of \"On Broadway,\" from <i>Weekend In L.A.</i>, but the hit-less <i>In Flight</i> is a forgotten stepping stone from his first Warners to his third. Attempting to capitalize on the surprise success of \"Masquerade,\" LiPuma and Benson made four of the six tracks on <i>In Fight</i> include his soulful vocals. Aside from that, it's a <i>Breezin'</i> redux, and once again, conductor Claus Ogerman was enlisted to dump buckets of cushy orchestration on even the funky numbers. Yes, it's my main pet peeve with the LiPuma era, because Benson was in command of one of the tightest soul-jazz units ever with Phil Upchurch (rhythm guitar) and Ronnie Foster (keys) carried over from the CTI days, and adding Stanley Banks on bass guitar, original Head Hunter Harvey Mason on drums and the ever-present Ralph McDonald on percussion. LiPuma evidently thought that diluting the fiercely taut funk would make more people buy the records, but it moved the music into danceable Muzak territory.<br>\n<br>\nSometimes, even Ogerman's heavy handedness couldn't stop the inspired grooves, and \"Valdez In The Country,\" one of <i>In Flight</i>'s two instrumentals, is one of those times. \"Valdez\" is a Donny Hathaway cover from his 1973 <i>Extension Of A Man</i> album, and not one of his better known songs. Perhaps the reason for this is because Hathaway was known as a singer, but this number was conceived as an instrumental in its original form. Hathaway led the way with an electric piano, and it was fairly loose groove. In contrast, Benson & Co. retains the basic melody but adds a dark, two-chord sequence used in the intro and visited again for a portion of Benson's solo part, providing a contrast to the main chord sequences. The strings are heavier there, accentuating the dark overtones, then recede when the theme is played by Benson's indestructible unit. <br>\n<br>\nBenson plays that theme by way of his famed octaves. Smooth, flawless and nimble, Montgomery could only dream about doing it this well. But where Benson excels on this song is where he excels on so many other ones: he plays equally melodically and rhythmically at a high level. He is always precisely in the pocket and somehow consistently finds the best notes to play and he doesn't even break a sweat doing so. A couple of generations of imitators have followed closely listening to records like this one, and as yet none of them does it as well as he does. <br>\n<br>\n\"Valdez\" is picked out of dozens of other examples of Benson's amazing fretwork I could have chosen, simply because Hathaway wrote a damned good whistle-able earworm. It's one of the handful of tunes I haven't been able to get out of my head for, oh, about the last thirty years now. George Benson's voice may have helped to make him a jazz-pop superstar, but all the commercially driven product he's pumped out over the years does nothing in my mind to obscure his craftsmanship of the highest order.<br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/Sydd1Czbx3M?fs%3D1%26hl%3Den_US&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<br>\n</span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8367705548617137551-355508698135422640?l=www.somethingelsereviews.com\" alt=\"\"></div><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/n0argi6ohlbaa56i35go4j7peg/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.somethingelsereviews.com%2F2010%2F10%2Fdeep-cuts-george-benson-valdez-in.html\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/somethingelsereviews/JjnG/~4/ZvBWtaT43x8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "This is a news website article about a scientific finding | Martin Robbins",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.4/82173?ns=guardian&pageName=This+is+a+news+website+article+about+a+scientific+finding+%7C+Martin+Robbi%3AArticle%3A1457096&ch=Science&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Science%2CPress+and+publishing%2CDigital+media%2CMedia&c5=Press+Media%2CDigital+Media%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CMedia+Weekly&c6=Martin+Robbins&c7=10-Oct-05&c8=1457096&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Science&c13=&c25=The+Lay+Scientist&c30=content&h2=GU%2FScience%2Fblog%2FThe+Lay+Scientist\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?</p><p>In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of \"scare quotes\" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.</p><p>In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research \"challenges\". </p><p>If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.</p><p>This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like \"the scientists say\" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist. </p><p>In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won't provide a link because either <em>a)</em> the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, <em>b)</em> I can't be bothered, or <em>c)</em> the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published. </p><p><em>\"Basically, this is a brief soundbite,\"</em> the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. <em>\"The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,\"</em> she or he will continue.</p><p>I will then briefly state how many years the scientist spent leading the study, to reinforce the fact that this is a serious study and worthy of being published by <del>the BBC</del> the website. </p><p><strong>This is a sub-heading that gives the impression I am about to add useful context.</strong></p><p>Here I will state that whatever was being researched was first discovered in some year, presenting a vague timeline in a token gesture toward establishing context for the reader. </p><p>To pad out this section I will include a variety of inane facts about the subject of the research that I gathered by Googling the topic and reading the Wikipedia article that appeared as the first link. </p><p>I will preface them with \"it is believed\" or \"scientists think\" to avoid giving the impression of passing any sort of personal judgement on even the most inane facts. </p><p>This fragment will be put on its own line for no obvious reason.</p><p>In this paragraph I will reference or quote some minor celebrity, historical figure, eccentric, or a group of sufferers; because my editors are ideologically committed to the idea that all news stories need a \"human interest\", and I'm not convinced that the scientists are interesting enough. </p><p>At this point I will include a picture, because our search engine optimisation experts have determined that humans are incapable of reading more than 400 words without one.</p><p> </p><p><strong>This subheading hints at controversy with a curt phrase and a question mark?</strong></p><p>This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true. </p><p>In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn't even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.</p><p><em>\"The research is useful\"</em>, they will say, <em>\"and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.\"</em></p><p>If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public \"controversy\" exists.</p><p>This paragraph will provide more comments from the author restating their beliefs about the research by basically repeating the same stuff they said in the earlier quotes but with slightly different words. They won't address any of the criticisms above because I only had time to send out one round of e-mails.</p><p>This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space. </p><p>The final paragraph will state that some part of the result is still ambiguous, and that research will continue. </p><p><strong>Related Links:</strong></p><p><a href=\"http://www.answersingenesis.org/arj\">The Journal (not the actual paper, we don't link to papers).</a></p><p><a href=\"http://www.wbschool.org/\">The University Home Page (finding the researcher's page would be too much effort).</a></p><p><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOU8GIRUd_g\">Unrelated story from 2007 matched by keyword analysis.</a></p><p><a href=\"http://www.jabs.org.uk\">Special interest group linked to for balance.</a></p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pressandpublishing\">Newspapers & magazines</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/digital-media\">Digital media</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/martin-robbins\">Martin Robbins</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p>"
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"title" : "On Black Sisters' Street",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">“They often talk about it: the standing and waiting to be noticed by the men strolling by, wondering which ones are likely to tip well, and which not. From their glass windows they watch the lives outside, especially the men’s. It is easy to tell those who have stumbled on the Schipperskwartier by mistake. Tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, mostly Japanese tourists who do not know Antwerp, seduced by the antiquity of the city and deceived by the huge cathedral, wander off and then suddenly come face to face with a line-up of half-dressed women, different colours and different shades of those colours. They look and, disbelieving, take another look. Quickly. And then they walk away with embarrassed steps. Not wishing to be tainted by the lives behind the windows.”</span><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">I lived in Liege for over a year in the early 1990s. This city in francophone southern Belgium is apparently unremarkable; a European urb that has yet to recover from the soot of its industrial past. The Belgian equivalent of Stoke-on-Trent. When my pal and I were trying to organise our Erasmus year studying philosophy in Europe, we had had something a little more glamorous in mind, and definitely something francophillic. Tours perhaps, or Strasbourg. Lyons at least. But Belgium was the line of least institutional resistance, and Liege was where we found ourselves.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Looking back, </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Liege sur Meuse</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> has become a phantasmagoric city of the mind. I’m grateful for the time I spent there. Hidden dreams and desires lurk still, beneath the threshold of my consciousness. An infinity of stone steps reaching up, via occluded gardens, to medieval palaces where talented Belgo-Italians play bebop deep into the night in louche bars. Restaurants designed like swimming pools in deserted factories, with cultivated men playing huge board-games in surreal side rooms. A chiaroscuro pall cast over cobbled streets. Piss swilling into drains from a thousand alfresco penises. Liege was and still is an </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">unheimlich</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> city, where mittel-Europa catholicism sprinkles its ritual powder like snow: in hidden corners, shrines to the Virgin, forever fresh with flowers; </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Paques</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> celebrations that last for days, resolved only by alcohol, the sound of the drum and mistresses spent in the arms of mistresses. Between the cracks in the mottled seminarial stone, catholic yearnings forever sprouting forth.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> <br><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Prostitution was part of it all. There were two red light districts in Liege, one near the Gare Liege-Guillemans and the other, at the back of the Rue Leopold near the footbridge to the </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Outremeuse</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">. The one near Guillemans was the upmarket option: young European women in catalogue lingerie, with plastic stickers of accepted credit cards near the doors. The other place was far more gothic; haggard vixens draped in leather and torn fishnet, idling for an impoverished cash-only clientele.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">And so it all seemed to my innocent eyes. Something in the place haunted me as the years passed. The memories folded in each other: parallel love affairs with a woman and with jazz; the genesis of arcane philosophical detours; the design of Lucky Strike cigarette packets and sex for sale, behind glass. As the years passed, a gathering desire to be back in the depths of Europe, chimed intermittently, like the quiet bell in the far-off village. There is a specific type of nostalgia for the foreign cities of youth which threatens the bounds of velleity: to wander once again to the place where vivid memory was set becomes an irresistible impulse.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">And so, over a decade later, I headed back, on the pretext of visiting a friend in Maastricht. The first thing I noticed at Guillemans was the red light district had gone. Or maybe it was never in the place my memory had allocated it: a shear wrought by time on the mind’s cartography. The second area was now populated with young black women, dancing and beckoning from behind the neon lit windows. They were signs of a shift in the economy of desire. I walked quickly on. The city had also developed; yawning cavities of rubble had been filled with glass and glitz. I struggled to find my way about and had no way of finding anyone that I had known. The jazz club which soldered my ears to Miles and Coltrane was no more. I was bereft in the primal scene of youthful departure. The dissonance had added another layer to my strange desire for Liege. I must return again.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">A few years later, in quite another part of Europe, I found myself, at a later stage of philosophical development. I was bound for the </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Collegium Phenomenologicum</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">, a philosophical retreat held each year in </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Citta di Castello</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> in Perugia. It was a thrill to go at last; I had never had the funds during my years as a doctoral student. Many of the celebrated “continental” philosophers participated, one year or another. </span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">The getting there would be part of it: from Stanstead to Rome airport and then the train to Arezzo, with the final leg by bus. As Tuscany skidded by from inside the metal and plastic interior of the train, it felt like a journey to the heart of things, or to the heart of thought. An English woman told me about her vineyard on a hill close by.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">By the time I boarded the bus at Arezzo, the delight of travel had receded; I was by now keen to just arrive, find the hotel and meet my fellow </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">penseurs</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">. As my mind began to slumber, the bus stopped in some forgotten village and about ten young black girls got on. I was immediately perplexed: who were they? Where did they come from? Where were these girls going and what were they going to do? They were about fourteen or fifteen at most. They sat around me. One had a Walkman and danced to the music. They all wore jeans and had pink bags and chewed gum. Their talk was girlish, their perfume garish. I tried to listen, to understand what they were doing there, but the scene refused to be set. They spoke in a mixture of fast pidgin and an African language I was yet to recognise. I turned back in my seat. And then, as the bus sped on, out of the window I noticed girls in laybys, standing, staring up as we passed. And the shock of what it all meant finally drenched me with ice-water. Young African girls, a long way from home, selling their bodies, deep in the Italian countryside. </span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">But these girls are too young! The thought-protest repeated itself. As the bus twisted and turned on its way to the historic town of Sansepolcro, each widened space would feature a young girl, advertising herself. Always alone, always black, precipitously vulnerable against a stunning renaissance backdrop. Sex and the shadow of death amid the cypresses. And then, the road widened, and a man on a bicycle in racing gear, shaking hands goodbye with two young African women, emerging from behind a bush, a post-coital grin on his face. Stop by stop, the girls alighted. By the time we arrived in Citta di Castello, I was alone on the bus, shocked by had transpired. Back then, I had no idea of the thriving sex trafficking of young Nigerian girls to Italy.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">These are some of the capsules of time that flood back to me as I read <a href=\"http://www.chikaunigwe.com/\">Chika Unigwe’s</a> devastating novel, </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Sisters-Street-Chika-Unigwe/dp/0099523949/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1285357819&sr=8-1\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">On Black Sisters’ Street</span></a><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">. Unigwe’s second book follows the lives of four African sex workers, Sisi, Ama, Efe and Joyce, as they hustle their lives away in Antwerp, in Flemish speaking north Belgium. Language and diamonds aside, a town probably quite a bit like Liege: ancient and industrial and solemn and leery. The four women dream of glamorous futures while swilling beer and falling in and out of friendship. As the narrative progresses, the cat-fight between them quells, for a specific reason. Sisi has died and no one knows how or why. The event brings the remaining trio together. Their Madam gives them the day off. Unigwe deftly weaves the back-stories together on that day of mourning as they sit on the black sofa in the unlovely living room. All the girls have been trafficked by Dele, a bear of a man with scant command of English and a shag pile carpet in his cavernous office on Randle Avenue in Lagos. The stories the girls tell each other in those desolate hours after the death are knives sharp enough to slice into any human heart; Ama running from sex abuse at home, Joyce fleeing from Janjaweed ultra-violence in Sudan via a failed relationship in Lagos, Sisi and Efe from the gloomy horizons of impoverished destinies in the slums of Lagos.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">The narrative structure of </span><b><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">On Black Sisters’ Street</span></b><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> is simple but highly effective. In the aftermath of the death of a friend, shared stories among the ‘sisters’ begin the prolonged work of healing and the transition from non-self to selfhood. Sisi’s sordid end, and the sorrows that led each to Belgium are the two points of trauma the three young women share that bring them together. The stories they tell begin the work of redemption. At the beginning and on arrival, each woman had taken on an assumed identity. The transition from Nigeria to Belgium created an existential void. In a sense, each woman left their identity behind, and had not yet taken up a new sense of self along with the fake passport that got them into Europe. Each exists therefore in a sort of limbo or hiatus being, between a horror that was and a prophecy that is not yet. In the new world of Antwerp, each develops their own coping mechanism. For instance, when Sisi is finally found a window and can move out of working the bar:</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">“She learned to stand in her window and pose in heels that made her two inches taller. She learned to smile, to pout, to think of nothing but the money she would be making. She learned to rap at the window, hitting her ring hard against the glass on slow days to attract stragglers. She learned to twirl to help them make up their minds, a swirling mass of chocolate flesh, mesmerising them, making them gasp and yearn for a release from the ache between their legs; a coffee-coloured dream luring them in with the promise of heaven. She let the blinking red and black neon lights of her booth comfort her, leading her to the Prophecy.”</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">The agency of the sex worker is affirmed in passages like this, at the same time as the distance between active self and pleasure is maintained. Pleasure or even happiness remains deferred, in the form of the dream of the life that will take place once the mortgage to the fat pimp in Lagos is paid off. The novel is all the more powerful for the crystalline dramaturgy of Unigwe’s language. For instance, in the scene where </span><i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Oga</span></i><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> Dele decides to try out Ama before she is packed on her way to Antwerp, she writes,</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">“He pulled Ama close and she could feel his penis harden through his trousers.</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">‘I shall sample you before you go!’ he laughed. The sound that stretched itself into a square that kept him safe. Lagos was full of such laughter. Laughter that ridiculed the receiver for no reason but kept the giver secure in a cocoon of steel.”</span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">Chika Unigwe’s </span><b><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">On Black Sisters’ Street</span></b><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"> is a shockingly powerful read, exposing the lives of women who are far from home and from familiarity, using the power of story to weave a sense of belonging amid the cold strangeness of northern Europe. It shocks me just as I was shocked back on that bus in Perugia. There is however a form of therapy at work in the text, for both the characters, and for the reader. For the women, the tragedy of Sisi’s passing is the moment when the surface is broken: artificial identities and stories that cannot be told cede to narrative integrity: three selves meet and recognise each other in that tawdry red living room. </span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">“They do nothing. They are in unknown territory here, having always had a relationship which skimmed the surface like milk. They have never before stirred each other enough to find out anything deep about their lives…The territory they are charting is still slippery. They are only just beginning to know each other.” </span></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\"><br></span> </div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif\">And for us, we think back to all those other windows we may have passed. For the stagnight wolf pack over from England, or the Japanese tourist missing his way, or for the alienated divorcee, or for the trembling virgin, or even the young philosopher, these streets present a gratuitous street porn, good for a laugh or even for a quick release. And yet, behind those windows there are shattered lives and fractured dreams resolving to mend. And there, amidst the shadows and the death, as Unigwe reminds us, we may find solidarity and even love. </span></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-7187376956036635988?l=www.naijablog.co.uk\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Bribing your way through life",
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"content" : "Salisu Suleiman<br><br><br>You know the traffic light has stopped you, but still zoom on, only to be flagged down by traffic wardens who have strategically positioned themselves for that very purpose – not before the lights to deter potential offenders, but after, to arrest actual offenders. For one split instant, you consider speeding off, assured in the knowledge that the wardens do not have the vehicles to chase, nor the gadgets to track you. <br><br>But you stop, and like vultures, they get into your car. You drive to a corner and negotiate. They demand for five thousand naira or threaten to take you to court. You plead or insult them into taking two hundred naira. Both sides are satisfied. <br><br>A few days later, officers of the Federal Road Safety Corps mount a roadblock to check drivers and vehicle documents. Your driver’s license expired ages ago. Your car does not have insurance or up to date registration. It is seized by stony faced officers. Soon, a friendlier officer comes along and offers you tips on how to ‘escape’ the problem. After artful negotiations, you end up parting with thousands of naira and the car is released. Life goes on. <br><br>Not long afterwards, you are stopped by customs officers who demand the original import duties of your car. Nobody knows if they have the powers to do that, but uniforms represent very powerful tools of oppression in Nigeria. Of course you do not have the documents because the car was smuggled in with forged papers. This could be a serious offense, but you negotiate your way out of it with several thousands of naira and a warning to go and get genuine documents. Both of you know it will not happen. <br><br>Then you run into a police checkpoint on a highway. The officers are heavily armed and will brook no nonsense. You do not have proof of ownership, so the car is not yours. To prove that the car is actually yours, you are also forced to part with a couple of hundreds of naira. You curse them. You pray that the money will never be of use to them. <br><br>You invoke calamities on them and their future generations yet unborn. They do not care. They’ve heard more curses and more invectives rained on them by other motorists. If you do not cut your losses by quickly leaving the scene, you may end of a victim of ‘accidental discharge’ or shot for resisting arrest. <br><br>A friend or relative is in hospital with a health problem. You get there, only to be told that the sick person is yet to see a doctor despite waiting for hours. You immediately take charge. You locate the relevant officials and soon, your patient is moved to the front of the line. Miraculously, he sees a doctor within minutes. The hospital pharmacy tells you that there are no medicines and refers you a private pharmacy owned by his friend or relative. You smile knowingly. A few more notes (one issued by the doctor, and the others by the CBN) exchange hands. Again, by some form of miracle, medicines appear. <br><br>At school, there is a carryover that you have been unable to deal with. Your friends and classmates tell you that no matter how much you try, you’ll never pass cross that bridge. Eventually, you find out that the course has a fee that has to be paid. Through intermediaries (usually the class rep or other classmates, you pay the fee and the carryover immediately varnishes. Depending on how much you ‘dropped’, you may end of with a distinction. <br><br>You get home one day to find that your water supply has been cut. You immediately call a contact at the water board who tells you there is nothing he can do since there is a mass disconnection of defaulters going on. Joke. You see the manager and ‘settle’ with him and he orders that you be immediately reconnected. The bill is torn up. <br><br>Every so often, NEPA decides to remind Nigerians that it is still alive, so even without giving you any light, they issue a huge bill you must pay or else be disconnected (from what, you may be tempted to ask). But you know the game and play along. You part with a few thousands and the enormous bills are erased from the central computer. Don’t ask how. <br><br>A niece or nephew has been unable to secure admission into a university despite trying several times and is becoming despondent. Since you know that our universities can only take a tenth of the candidates seeking admission every year, you make a call or two, drop a bribe or two and your candidate’s names makes it to the admission list. That the candidate may not be able to meet academic pursuits is not your problem. After all, you have just proved that marks can be bought and sold. When the time comes....<br><br>So having bribed, cajoled, threatened and bought your way through life, who then has the moral right to say that votes were rigged, or government corrupt?<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8645399025059309116-4467618929800293208?l=suleimansblog.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"></div><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/TILGKmPTl7I/AAAAAAAACE0/7BX2Z-8sQL8/s1600/P8310322.JPG\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"300\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/TILGKmPTl7I/AAAAAAAACE0/7BX2Z-8sQL8/s400/P8310322.JPG\" width=\"400\"></a></div><div><strong>Haïti, redresse-toi</strong> en créole. En terminant cet ouvrage, je me demande si des mots simples peuvent relever un pays en ruines, si la succession de séismes humains ou naturels peut cesser par une simple formule incantatoire. « Haïti, kenbé la ! ». En terminant ce livre témoignage de <a href=\"http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/saint-eloi.html\">Rodney Saint-Eloi</a>, homme de lettres haïtien, éditeur, fondateur des <a href=\"http://www.memoiredencrier.com/\">Editions Mémoire d’encrier</a>, je me pose la question de la place, de l’intérêt, de la portée de ces mots cochés sur papier, ces mots qui racontent la souffrance, l’espérance, le combat d’un peuple qui ploie sous le poids des éléments en furie. A quoi peuvent servir les mots.</div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"text-align:center\">L’Evangile de Jean commence avec cette affirmation : « Au commencent était la parole ».</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">On peut interpréter ce passage dans n’importe quel sens, mais j’apprécie l’idée que la parole est créatrice de toute chose. Même quand elle n’est que témoignage, loin de la fiction et bien ancrée dans la réalité.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Rodney Saint-Eloi était avec Dany Laferrière au moment où le <span style=\"font-size:large\">goudou-goudou</span> commence. Ceux qui ont lu les premiers propos du <a href=\"http://blackbazar.blogspot.com/2010/01/dany-laferriere-me-reconte.html\">lauréat du Prix Médicis 2010</a>, rentré à Montréal peu de temps après la catastrophe, s’en souviennent.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Ce texte commence donc avec l’atmosphère du tremblement de terre et de cette fête de la littérature dans ce pays si pauvre matériellement, mais si riche de sa culture. Les écrivains arrivent, les organisateurs se démènent car le programme est ambitieux. Puis vint le goudou-goudou. 35 secondes et un pays qui bascule encore plus dans l’horreur.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Si l’écrivain s’autorise quelques flashbacks, le récit reste dans son ensemble linéaire. Le scribe raconte ce qu’il voit. Il y a des anecdotes qu’on lui rapporte. Il y a ce qu’il entend à la radio. Si les premières pages sont écrites dans un style ampoulé, la voix de Saint-Eloi se veut très rapidement plus naturelle et transmet mieux son ressenti sur ce qu’il perçoit. Il réussit à échapper au misérabilisme, ce que rapporte Saint-Eloi relève à la fois de l’abattement et du désir de faire face en fonction de ses ressources, comme ces jeunes qui continuent de jouer au jeu de dames comme de coutume, quelques jours après le séisme. Certaines images pourront surprendre. Mais c’est Haïti.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Si Saint-Eloi évoque la solidarité entre les auteurs dans les premières heures du tremblement de terre, Trouillot, Laferrière et lui-même pour prendre des nouvelles des proches, plus on avance dans le texte et dans le temps, plus son analyse se montre global. </div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Rodney Saint-Eloi revient sur la violence de la société haïtienne, les taches encore présentes du passé colonial, les antagonismes qui continuent d’écraser les communautés de ce pays. Le temps du séisme, le sentiment que tous les haïtiens sont logés à la même enseigne, malgré leurs divisions.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">L’espoir est surement dans le message que lui adresse le grand écrivain Frankétienne peu de temps après son retour à Montréal où il broie du noir <em><span style=\"color:#4c1130\">« Je continuerai à écrire et à peindre. L'attribut de Dieu est sa perpétuation. Même sous les décombres, j'attends le Nobel. Et note bien ceci: je ne mourrai pas sans le Nobel»</span></em>. Celui qu’il désigne comme « un génial mégalomane », abattu quelques heures après le goudou-goudou, rêve de nouveau de conquérir le monde par ses mots et par son œuvre, dans sa demeure en reconstruction. C’est Haïti, sans démagogie, dévastée, mais digne. L'espoir est haïtien.</div><br><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><blockquote><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Cela fait deux jours et on dirait une éternité. tant de voix trébuchées. tant de murs lézardés. Désormais la ville est divisée en deux factions, celle qui est debout et qui respire sans en savoir la raison, et celle qui est ensevelie sous les gravats. La nouvelle histoire du pays débute par ce cri perçant qui fendille le ventre de la terre : rafales de mitrailleuses lourdes, tremblements des toits, craquelure des chaises. Une houle sans nom engrange, tranquille, la mémoire des choses. Un grand bruit de tonnerre, on croirait que le diable bat sa femme. Tous les visages sont fissurés. Tous les corps. Les morts paraissent sérieux sous les décombres. Ils ont sur la figure une balafre secrète.</div></blockquote>Page 178, Editions Michel Lafon<br><br><span style=\"font-size:large\">Rodney Saint-Eloi, Haïti, kenbé la!</span><br>Editions Michel Lafon, 1ère parution en 2010, 267 pages </div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/104300315399051243-2866568080844473935?l=gangoueus.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://cdn.worldcupblog.org/www.worldcupblog.org/files/2010/08/1982_fra_ger_03_2749_full-lnd.jpg\" alt=\"1982_fra_ger_03_2749_full-lnd\" width=\"512\" height=\"341\"></p>\n<p>The piece below – a piece rather than video – is a rather astonishing remake of the final 15 minutes, the penalties, of the semifinal between France and West Germany in 1982. Astonishing in its labor, nuanced accuracy and sheer simplicity. These are everyday people doing largely everyday things, movements which normally wouldn’t turn a single head, but combine to recreate a World Cup semifinal.</p>\n<p>Block off a quarter hour today – it’s well worth it.<br>\n<span></span></p>\n<p>The description:</p>\n<blockquote><p><em>“Refait” is a remake of the football WorldCup match between France and Germany (Seville, Spain, 1982). Shot by Pied La Biche in Villeurbanne (France), every aspect of the fifteen last minutes of the match was carefully reconstructed : players, positions, gestures, intensity, drama etc. It consists in shifting the traditional game area into the urban environment. Each sequence takes place in one or several locations and then the city temporarily becomes the lab for unsual experiments. The soundtrack is made up of the original commentaries mixed with interviews of the audience recorded during the shooting. </em></p></blockquote>\n<p>The remake:</p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/9426271\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>/<br></p>"
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"title" : "Banksy Strikes Again",
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"content" : "<p>One of <a href=\"http://www.banksy.co.uk/\">Banksy’s</a> most recent works, this time in Detroit.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://anjalir.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/banksy-detroit-self-opt_2103.jpg\"><img title=\"banksy-detroit-self-opt_2103\" src=\"http://anjalir.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/banksy-detroit-self-opt_2103.jpg?w=595&h=396\" alt=\"\" width=\"595\" height=\"396\"></a></p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/20/banksy-does-detroit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing)&utm_content=Google+Reader\">Boing Boing</a>.</p>\n<br> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/anjalir.wordpress.com/2112/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=anjalir.wordpress.com&blog=9058167&post=2112&subd=anjalir&ref=&feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\">"
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"title" : "The Telephone Conversation",
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"title" : "The Mechanics of a Curse",
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"content" : "A girl in a compound house* loses her phone in broad daylight. About ten people were close enough to have filched the phone. A day steals by, and the phone has not been found. The ‘Landlord’ calls a house meeting. There is fulsome denial all round, and free-flowing suspicion-spiel. In the middle of the din, the victim takes a white egg from under her clothes, calls on a deity with a disturbing name to slay the thief, and shatters the egg on the floor. Two of the cruellest accusers immediately drop to their knees, and confess to the crime in rapids and waterfalls. The Landlord prevails on the girl to revoke the murderous curse. She calls for a bowl of water with a charcoal chip in it; this she sweeps over the egg remains. Then, there is peace. The curse is revoked. Is everything really that easy? I lost a pocket calculator I really loved seventeen years ago. I want an egg right now!<br><br>* Compound House - A house with a walled compound and several detached or semi-detached rooms or apartments usually given out for rent.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7564356874518161776-4499007191977330199?l=antirhythm.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.",
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"content" : "<p>\nEvery fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.\n</p>\n\n<p>\nIt's hard to describe it in words.\n</p>\n\n<p>\nSo, I use pictures.\n</p>\n\n\n<p>\nRead below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.\n</p>\n\n <p><a href=\"http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/\">Click to read more</a></p>"
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"content" : "<div><div>\n<h4>By Nate Barksdale</h4>\n<img alt=\"Cardus5\" title=\"Cardus5\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0133f2a8cbf3970b-800wi\">\n\n<h5>Originally published in <a href=\"http://www.natebarksdale.com/\"><em>Comment</em></a>, 11 June 2010</h5>\n</div>\n<p>My latest online column <a href=\"http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2037/\">Comment Magazine</a></p>\n<p>One Friday night in the early 1990s, my family rented an old black-and-white foreign film for our weekend's entertainment. I don't recall the movie's title, let alone what any of us thought of it when we viewed it, but I remember very clearly a bit of promotional copy on the front of the VHS cassette's cardboard slipcase, in the space usually reserved for Siskel and Ebert's thumbs: NOW WITH YELLOW SUBTITLES!</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I'd never thought of subtitles as having (let alone needing) colouration. It was like being told that you can pour lemonade on your breakfast cereal: I guess it's technically possible, but what would be the point? Now, many years and Google searches later, I realize that those yellow subtitles did merit at least some of the excitement. For decades, the standard way to apply subtitles to a movie had been an intricate process in which tiny two-point letters were etched into a finished print of the movie using a combination of letterpress plates, chemical washes, and—as technology progressed—lasers. Subtitles were white because the film emulsion beneath them had been scraped or burned away—the light shone through the letterforms' pure celluloid. It worked well enough for a dark scene shown in a darkened theater, but less so on television, and woe to the foreign film that ventured into the bright outdoors: translations hid out in the grass, got lost in the snow.</p>\n<p>I guessed this latter bit during the course of the film—apparently to the exclusion of forming any long-term memories about plot or title—and by the time the credits rolled, I'd concluded that the yellow subs' reason for existence was also their downfall: they kept the dialogue legible at the expense of never letting you forget that you were reading something foreign to the original film. Though they solved a technical problem, the yellow video subtitles undermined one of the main attractions of movie subtitles: the assumption that we can dive into another culture and, aided by comfortable, transparent technology, breathe as we're accustomed.</p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Still from Fellini's <em>8½</em> (1963). Not the movie I've been talking about, but you get the idea.</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale01.JPG\" alt=\"Still from Fellini's 8½ (1963)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n \n<p>All stories, even true ones, become fictions in their telling. Cinema is fiction upon fiction, making use of compressed and guided views, techniques of editing, novel ways of seeing, all of which have grown and evolved over more than a century of story upon story, film upon film. Subtitles, at least when they're not included in the initial release, scrape out their own fictitious space. You have all the challenges of translation—how to transfer the content and nuance of speech from one voice to another—with the added technical constraints that whatever's said must fit into short, center-justified, grammatically correct semantic units of no more than two lines, to remain on the screen for no less than one and no more than six seconds.</p>\n<p>I got those last bits from the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation's \"<a href=\"http://www.transedit.se/code.htm\">Code of Good Subtitling Practice</a>,\" which makes for interesting reading. The stipulation for grammatical correctness, for instance, references subtitles' role as a model for literacy. And it's heartening to know that there's a robust spoiler-alert clause in article 15 of the Code: \"Subtitles must underline surprise or suspense and in no way undermine it.\"</p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Character exposition via subtitle, in Buster Keaton's <em>College</em> (1927)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale02.JPG\" alt=\"Character exposition via subtitle, in Buster Keaton's <i>College</i> (1927)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n \n<p>Subtitles precede the movies, having had a long and healthy career in printed matter of all types. They worked their way into the silent cinema as printed cards explaining or commenting on what was happening in the filmed sequences. Now these title cards are called intertitles, but in the day they were simply subtitles. For instance, in her 1916 book <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=mKfqsV7ckgUC&dq=subtitle&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q=subtitle&f=false\"><em>How to write for the \"movies\"</em></a>, Louella O. Parsons offers what might be the earliest version of Rule 16 of the Subtitler's Code, about the dangers of the too-long subtitle:</p>\n\n<blockquote>You cannot be prodigal in your language and interpose any unnecessary flowery phrases; footage is too precious. Neither must you express yourself in the stilted words of a child just learning to talk.<br><br>\nAs an apt illustration of the too long subtitle we might give:<br><br>\n\"It is surely the inevitable will of God that has brought this affliction upon us. We must in this adversity bow our heads to His commands.\"<br><br>\nThat is all very well if you have one thousand feet of film at your disposal to give to your subtitle, but when you have a limited amount of footage why not be sensible and merely say:<br><br>\n\"God's will be done.\"</blockquote><br>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\"> </font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale03.JPG\" alt=\"Anita Loos, Expert Creator of Movie Subtitles\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n<p>A year later, <a href=\"http://www.natebarksdale.com/\">Everybody's Magazine</a> ran a glowing profile of Anita Loos, who made her name subtitling Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers and D.W. Griffith epics. Loos's subtitles for Griffith's 1916 epic <em>Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages</em> even employ footnotes to help viewers keep track of the film's millennia-spanning quadruple-plotline. Of Loo's craft the journalist writes:</p>\n\n<blockquote>The subtitle has only been in vogue a few years. It differs from the title—the wording between scenes which describes the action of the picture that is to come—in that it need not attend to business. It is meant only for the audience, and though at times in the supposed speech of the characters in the film, it may be a mere comment outside the picture and addressed to the audience like the aside of our fathers' theatre.</blockquote><br>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Silent film subtitle with explanatory footnote, <em>Intolerance</em> (1916)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale04.JPG\" alt=\"Silent film subtitle with explanatory footnote, Intolerance (1916)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n<p>That's what I miss about the post-talkie school of subtitles. Often, waist-deep in the swamp of some obscure foreign film, what I want most is not to know what the characters are saying but to get an explanation of what's going on, or just an acknowledgement of the strangeness of the story and the oddness of the foreign film-watcher's predicament (which, among other things, keeps us from really looking at the actors' faces). The only time this sort of meta-commentary comes in the sound era is in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtitle_%28captioning%29#Subtitles_as_a_source_of_humor\">cinematic spoofs</a> like <em>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</em> or the films of Carl Reiner.</p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">A rare humourous subtitle from the sound era. <em>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</em> (1975)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale05.JPG\" alt=\"A rare humourous subtitle from the sound era. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n \n<p>Generally, though, when looking for subtitular humour, it's up to the viewer to discover his own. Subtitles, once suitably legible, generally do their best to disappear; it's only when something goes wrong in the presentation that their workings and complexity become apparent.</p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Bollywood superstar Sharukh Khan: Not as good as Michael Jordan, but good enough in <em>Kuch Kuch Hota Hai</em> (Hindi, 2000)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale06.JPG\" alt=\"Bollywood superstar Sharukh Khan: Not as good as Michael Jordan, but good enough in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Hindi, 2000)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n \n<p>Every month or two my friends will get a late-night email from me containing a fuzzy picture of my TV screen frozen in a moment in which the subtle subtitle machinery has gone wrong. The film in question is usually from India; Bollywood movies (and their regional equivalents) present a unique subtitling situation. First of all, the target idiom is generally a variety of Indian English, which of course makes sense given the speech of both translator and average viewer, meaning that even perfect execution will often look odd to American eyes.</p>\n\n<p>Secondly, Indian movies are generally quite long, and I've noticed that the quality of the subtitles generally plummets by the time you enter the third hour of the film: grammar goes slack, dialogue becomes terse, there are long awkward stretches where you hear voices but see no words. I figure the screen translation economics work out such that somewhere around the one hundred twentieth minute, anyone still watching is sufficiently committed to the film that there's no additional return on investment for perfecting the subtitles that remain. I imagine a video editing suite somewhere in the suburbs of Mumbai or Chennai, where the key moment arrives and the lead translator hands off the balance of the film to some sub-subtitler and heads outside for a well-deserved <em>masala dosa</em>.</p>\n \n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">A third-hour subtitle from <em>Alai Payuthey</em> (Tamil, 2000)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale07.JPG\" alt=\"A third-hour subtitle from Alai Payuthey (Tamil, 2000)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n<p>Finally, though, the greatest amount of South Asian subtitle strangeness often boils down to Article 12 of the Code: \"Songs must be subtitled where relevant.\" It's in their songs that Indian films dip deepest into translation-defying metaphor. There's only so much that can be done: the words may correspond but the underlying sentiment remains amusingly, thrillingly novel.</p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Romantic song lyric from <em>Mullum Malarum</em> (Tamil, 1978)</font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale08.JPG\" alt=\"Romantic song lyric from Mullum Malarum (Tamil, 1978)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n \n<p>\"I love watching movies with subtitles,\" a friend told me recently. \"They make me feel so smart!\" There's something to that observation, especially when one knows enough of the film's language to pick out familiar words as the translations flash by on the screen's lower third. When I watch a film like Fatih Akin's wonderful <em>The Edge of Heaven</em>, my high school German comes streaming back. At least, it seems that way. I get the pleasant surface recall without the work of actually stringing sentences together on my own. <em>Das wird viel, um, schwerer sein?</em></p>\n\n<table width=\"500\" align=\"center\"><caption style=\"text-align:center\" align=\"bottom\"><td><font size=\"-1\">Speaking German in <em>The Edge of Heaven</em> (2007) </font></td></caption><tbody><tr><td><img src=\"http://www.cardus.ca/assets/data/images/2010/2010-06-11-NBarksdale09.JPG\" alt=\"Speaking German in The Edge of Heaven (2007)\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"500\" align=\"top\" border=\"0\"></td></tr></tbody></table><br>\n\n<p>Sometimes I take the smartness game too far and try to watch a film in one language I've studied, with the DVD subtitles set in another (say, a Hindi film with Spanish subs). The end result is usually a headache-inducing mental tug-of-war that yields, if such a thing is possible, negative comprehension. I ask myself, why would a person do that? Not to feel smarter, certainly not to get more out of the movie. Could it be that I love watching movies with subtitles because they make me feel dumber?</p>\n<p>There's something to that as well. Watching movies that take place outside the realm of one's cultural fluency always involves a tension of desires: we want to be transported, we want to fit right in. There's something comforting about not-quite-comprehension, about speech in all its nuance whittled down to one or two lines on the screen, coloured for contrast but still—when it works out right—invisible.</p></div>"
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"title" : "How to miss a coup",
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"content" : "<p>Start by leaving the country a few days before the event (not that you know it’s going to happen). About five days is good, say, around July 22, 1990. Make sure the place you’re going is far from any established West Indian community. Northern California is a workable option.</p>\n<p>On the morning of the event (i.e. <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaat_al_Muslimeen_coup_attempt\">July 27, 1990</a>), sit down in your friend <a href=\"http://intenselives.blogspot.com/\">Gillian Goddard</a>’s cottage in Menlo Park, type up a television script on Gillian’s friend Dan’s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Plus\">Mac Plus</a>, print it out and take it to a nearby copy shop, e.g. Kinko’s. From the shop, fax the script to your colleagues Walt and Danielle in Trinidad, who, later that day, will use it to shoot a segment of the television show you’re working on together. The act of faxing the script also inserts you—tenuously—into Walt and Danielle’s more heroic narrative related to the event, though of course you don’t know this at the time.</p>\n<p>Take the train into San Francisco, trawl around the city like a tourist then in the afternoon meet up with Gillian in order to hitch a ride back to Menlo Park. While sitting in the car in rush-hour gridlock on US-101, fiddle with the dial on the radio and happen upon a National Public Radio (NPR) report about an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaat_al_Muslimeen_coup_attempt\">attempted coup</a> in your home country of Trinidad and Tobago!</p>\n<p>Marvel at the coincidence of your landing, just at that moment, upon a news report about a nation that would otherwise receive scant coverage even on public radio, but exhibit incredulity. Await the jingle at the end of the report announcing that what you just heard was a comedy segment. When, instead of a jingle, you hear another report about something bad happening in some other part of the world, freeze for a few seconds. Then try to recall whether, five days before, there had been any sign or indication that something like this was going to happen. Decide that there hadn’t.</p>\n<p>As it would be some years yet before either you or Gillian—or most of the world’s citizens—acquires a cell phone, sit patiently in traffic until you get back to Menlo Park, but once there, rush to the answering machine which is pulsating with voice messages. Be amused at Gillian’s Washington DC-based sister’s succinct “They had a coup! Call me!”. Wonder how all the Trinidadians on the west coast had managed to get hold of Gillian’s number. Return calls. Answer new calls that come in. Lament the fact that nobody has any real information.</p>\n<p>Even though the phone lines to Trinidad are perpetually busy, keep trying to get through to family, but make sure you have a list of questions prepared, as long distance calls aren’t cheap and <a href=\"http://www.skype.com\">Skype</a> hasn’t yet been invented, nor has the <a href=\"http://www.magicjack.com/\">MagicJack</a>. Lament the absence, in northern California, of a real West Indian community such as exists in New York or Washington D.C. or south Florida or even Atlanta, and discuss how this limits your access to the choicest rumours and to folks who know folks who had managed to get through to somebody in Trinidad who knows somebody who knows what’s going on. Experience feelings of profound isolation.</p>\n<p>Keep the radio tuned to NPR. Make sure you tune in to an NPR report in which journalist Ira Mathur is interviewed from Port of Spain about the horrors to which your homeland is being subjected while sitting on the bonnet of the car in Stinson Beach, in the atmospheric Marin Headlands, looking out at the magnificent Pacific. Note it as one of the most bizarre juxatpositions of your lifetime.</p>\n<p>Leave California for New York. Wait it out there for what seems like—or may well be, as you don’t yet record all your trips using as-yet-to-be-dreamed-of services like <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr</a> and <a href=\"http://www.tripit.com\">TripIt</a>—weeks. Watch that single, worrying image on CNN of Port of Spain with a plume of smoke wafting up from the middle of the city over and over again; listen to the West Indian radio stations; talk to folks on the phone—but still feel you have no idea what’s going on in your homeland, except that the insurgents have surrendered and there’s now a curfew. Write letters (longhand, as you’re still five years from getting an e-mail account) to friends in various places announcing that you might end up staying in the US.</p>\n<p>Be deeply envious of your friends Walt and Danielle, who were in fact shooting your script when news of the insurrection reached them, and who, with all other work brought to a standstill by the events, report that they’ve been venturing out with the camera to capture coup-related action.</p>\n<p>Keep harassing the airline to put you on a flight back home. Settle eventually for one that connects in Miami, even though it means spending an awful night in Miami International Airport.</p>\n<p>Return to Trinidad. Fail to remember, 20 years later, who collected you at the airport, what you saw from the car on the way home, what you felt when you finally walked through the doors of the home you weren’t sure you’d ever see again.</p>\n<p>Wonder if 20 years is really that long or if there’s some other reason you’ve shoved those memories aside.</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:63t7Ie-LG7Y\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:JEwB19i1-c4\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=OPXhLvON7Ek:7EzAwYI3M3o:JEwB19i1-c4\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog/~4/OPXhLvON7Ek\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "HUGH MASEKELA / “Stimela Mixtape”",
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"content" : "<img width=\"345\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"229\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela 53.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 53.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2053.jpg\"> <br><blockquote>“The coal train is a motherfucker.”<br><a href=\"http://www.mahala.co.za/art/curse-of-the-coal-train/\"><b>—Hugh Masekela</b></a><br></blockquote>We’ve ridden these rails before, been all over these tracks (see <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2008/12/15/hugh-masekela-%E2%80%9Dstimela%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">here</font></a> and <a href=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2006/05/27/hugh-masekela-%E2%80%9Cstimela%E2%80%9D/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">here</font></a>), the difference this time we’re taking the whole journey following the song over the years, grasping the politics behind the tones and textures and not just simply enjoying the melody and rhythms.<br><b><br>“Stimela”</b> is both a curse and an analysis, a deep political shout out to and for the sufferers, and simultaneously one of, if not, “the” most requested song at Masekela concerts.<br><img width=\"342\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"245\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2049.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 49.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 49.jpg\"> <br>In February of 2010, Hugh Masekela premiered a major program he called Songs of Migration and of course <b>“Stimela” </b>was one of the centerpieces. <br><br>The train was the main mechanism of forced migration in South Africa. The coal trains were the dominant mode of transport ferrying conscripted black male labor to the gold and mineral mines in and around Johannesburg to do extremely dangerous work for extremely little pay.<br><img width=\"345\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"255\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2027.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 27.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 27.jpg\"> <br>The brilliance of Masekela’s song is that Masekela makes the train live through sound. Not just the choo-choo chug-a-lugging of the rhythm but also the whistles and the steam, the rocking, and, more importantly, the dislocation and emotional ripping of families and community, the separation of urban exploitation and toil from traditional land and cultural community. You don’t have to speak a South Africa language to understand the feeling and to feel the pain.<br><br>Hugh Masekela is an excellent instrumentalist. His horn crackles and notes burst forward in a passionate outpouring, but on <b>"Stimela"</b> it’s Hugh’s vocal work that aptly and brilliantly dominates. With his voice he does a creative call and response: he is both the laboring men cursing the train, and the train itself carrying the workers to an accursed circumstance. <br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2035.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 35.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 35.jpg\"> <br>Over the years, Masekela developed a verbal prologue that effectively contextualizes the song. Even people who have never heard about conscript labor under apartheid, even an audience of people who are truly ignorant of the conditions decried by the song, even those who know nothing are given a glimpse of what hell under earth looks like, and if not an intellectual understanding, certainly an emotional portrait.<br><br>The last version, the quarter hour rendering in concert at the Haymarket in Johanesburg is special because whereas <b>“Stimela”</b> is specifically grounded in the historic South Africa reality, Masekela has now opened the song to expressed solidarity with exploited laborers who work life-threatening jobs worldwide. Masekela is no less proud to be South African, but he now recognizes and communicates to us the urgency of solidarity in the face of global capitalism. <br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2016.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 16.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 16.jpg\"> <br>Yeah, I know, it seems like I’m trying to freight down a good song with a whole lot of extraneous political analysis. But that is precisely the importance of <b>“Stimela”</b>—the song is both emotionally potent and politically astute. Hugh Masekela’s prologue powerfully preaches both the politics of the situation and communicates the passion of those resisting dehumanization.<br><br>Most of the songs in the Songs of Migration program are South African but Masekela includes both an Afrikaans song (“Sarie Marais”) and a Yiddish folk song, both represent elements of the South African experience. Hugh is not blinded by racial essentialism. He knows that not just blacks were forced into migration. And <a href=\"http://www.mahala.co.za/art/curse-of-the-coal-train/\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">Hugh also knows</font></a> “migration is always the result of social and political upheaval, poverty, war and colonialism.”<br><br><b>“Stimela”</b> has developed into a conscious statement but it started as an unconscious expression at a low point in Hugh’s career. And I’m not exaggerating when I say “low point.” Listen to how Hugh describes his situation in the early seventies in the United States.<br><blockquote>"I felt like a total failure. I had destroyed my life with drugs and alcohol and could not get a gig or a band together. No recording company was interested in me and I had gone full circle from major success to the point where my life was worse than when I had left South Africa 11 years earlier."<br><a href=\"http://za.mg.co.za/article/2010-07-09-coal-train-coming\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><b>—Hugh Masekela</b></font></a><br></blockquote>Early success had turned into a disaster as attempts to start his own record company failed and he was bedeviled by the majors shunning him because of his politics, which he did not see as separate from the core of his music. He ended up retreating to Woodstock, where he and some friends rented a house Masekela used as a refuge.<br><br>When he got to the place where he would be staying there was a piano. Masekela recounted the composing experience in an <a href=\"http://za.mg.co.za/article/2010-07-09-coal-train-coming\"><font color=\"#cc0000\">interview with Gwen Ansell</font></a>. <br><blockquote> "I ran to the piano and began to sing a song about a train that brought migrant labourers to work in the coal mines of Witbank, my birthplace." His friends said: "’That’s a mean song. When did you write it?’ I said, between phrases: ‘I didn’t write it. It’s coming in now.’ The song was Stimela. I sang it from beginning to end as if I had known it for a long time."<br> "For me," he said, "songs come like a tidal wave … At this low point, for some reason, the tidal wave that whooshed in on me came all the way from the other side of the Atlantic — from Africa, from home."<br></blockquote><img width=\"341\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"228\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2043.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 43.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 43.jpg\"> <br>By the mid-seventies Masekela left the States and returned to Africa. He went to Ghana, and to Guinea, and afterwards to other countries in Central and Southern Africa, and finally not until over thirty years later with the fall of apartheid, Hugh Masekela was able to return home to South Africa. He was no longer a young man.<br><br>Hugh could have retired—or, more probably, Hugh couldn’t retire. He was temperamentally incapable of withdrawing from the struggle. For Masekela the end of apartheid marked the beginning of the even harder job of reconstruction—phase two of life-long struggle. <br><br>In the post-apartheid era, conscious artists such as Masekela now dedicated their lives to pulling together the pieces of their history and passing it on to younger generations to assist in building a new society based in part on prior struggles and the culture that enabled older generations to survive unbelievable horrors.<br><br>Born April 4, 1939 in Witbank, South Africa, Hugh Masekela is now a dynamic septuagenarian force on South Africa’s cultural scene in the new millennium. He says he has a storehouse of ideas and memories he plans to bring to the stage and to the bandstand.<br><img width=\"338\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"363\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2019.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 19.jpg\" title=\"hugh masekela 19.jpg\"> <br>We are all blessed by this man’s vigor and steadfast commitment to cultural and consciousness. Enjoy these diverse and wide ranging readings of Hugh Masekela’s signature song <b>“Stimela.”</b><br><br><b>—Kalamu ya Salaam<br><br><br><u><i>“Stimela” Mixtape Playlist</i></u></b><br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela cover 01.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela cover 01.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%20cover%2001.jpg\"> <br>01 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBest-Hugh-Masekela-Century-Masters%2Fdp%2FB000HT366Y%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1280115070%26sr%3D8-3&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>The Best of Hugh Masekela Twentieth Century Masters </i></font></a><br>This is the first recorded version, 1974 on the now out of print album <i>I Am Not Afraid</i>. This version is available, however, on a number of compilations including the new <i>Hugh! The Best of Hugh Masekela</i>. <br><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela cover 02.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela cover 02.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%20cover%2002.jpg\"> <br>02 <b>“Stimela (Jazzanova Remix)”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHugh-Best-Presented-Till-Bronner%2Fdp%2FB003NDS47M%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1280115259%26sr%3D8-37&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Hugh! The Best of Hugh Masekela </i></font></a><br>This is a new remix from the latest Hugh Masekela compilation that covers mostly Hugh’s recordings from the seventies but also includes a handful of new material such as this remix.<br><br><br><img width=\"337\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"224\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela 50.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela 50.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%2050.jpg\"> <br>03 <i>Concert with Paul Simon </i><br>I’m not sure but I think this is a bootleg from the Paul Simon Live in Africa DVD but I’m not certain, so I can’t supply a link or even a picture of the cover. <br><br><br><img width=\"299\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"299\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela cover 04.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela cover 04.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%20cover%2004.jpg\"> <br>04 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHope-Hugh-Masekela%2Fdp%2FB00005YUFK%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1280115291%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Hope </i></font></a><br><br><img width=\"300\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"300\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela cover 05.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela cover 05.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%20cover%2005.jpg\"> <br>05 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGrazing-Grass-Best-Hugh-Masekela%2Fdp%2FB0012GMUWC%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1280115316%26sr%3D8-5&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Grazing In The Grass: The Best of Hugh Masekela </i></font></a><br>Be careful. There are a number of compilation albums and a number of different versions of <b>“Stimela.”</b> This version is available on this particular album, which is not to be confused with the “best of” album cited for the opening track 01.<br><br><img width=\"307\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"307\" border=\"0\" title=\"hugh masekela cover 06.jpg\" alt=\"hugh masekela cover 06.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/hugh%20masekela%20cover%2006.jpg\"> <br>06 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLive-Market-Theatre-2CD-SET%2Fdp%2FB000R9YE56%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1280115368%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Live At The Market Theater </i></font></a><br><br><br><br>"
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"title" : "Quelques notes sur Black bazar et Verre cassé au Lavoir Moderne Parisien",
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"content" : "<b><span style=\"font-size:large\">Black Bazar d’Alain Mabanckou, adapté et interprété par Modeste Nzapassara (Mardi, Mercredi à 21h)</span></b><br><br><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">C’est au Lavoir Moderne Parisien que le roman Black Bazar de l'écrivain congolais Alain Mabanckou est adapté depuis le début du mois, tous les mardis et mercredis du mois de Juillet.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Je dois tout de suite et sans détour vous dire que j’ai apprécié l’interprétation de cette pièce. Modeste Nzapassara déploie toute la mesure de son talent de comédien pour donner libre expression au fessologue, personnage épique aux allures de dandy, pathétique amant refoulé, dépouillé de sa belle, et qui tente par l’écriture de se remettre de ses déboires conjugaux.</div><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4139/4773943783_e42a88e9e4.jpg\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"320\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4139/4773943783_e42a88e9e4.jpg\" width=\"240\"></a></div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">N’ayant pas lu ce roman d' <span style=\"font-size:large\">Alain Mabanckou</span>, j’ai néanmoins reconnu dans la construction de la pièce, la structure qui a fait le succès de Verre cassé : la truculence, le rire, l’ironie, l’auto dérision si chers aux personnages du romancier, puis le drame, la fêlure individuelle, voir l’imposture à laquelle Alain Mabanckou ne cesse de renvoyer ses lecteurs. Dans <span style=\"font-size:large\">Black bazar</span>, c’est le monde du paraître qui caractérise si bien la société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes, j’ai nommé la SAPE, qui tombe sous les griffes de l’auteur.</div><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><br></div><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Modeste Nzapassara qui semble s’être parfaitement imprégné du discours de l’écrivain met magnifiquement en scène cette duplicité du sapeur. Le fessologue, dandy, écrivain en herbe, spécialiste de la fesse porte un regard sur cette population qui l’entoure dans ce milieu de l’immigration africaine à Paris qui s’apparente aux personnages qui rôdent près du <span style=\"font-size:large\">Lavoir Moderne Parisien</span>, du côté de Château Rouge. Un regard caustique. Mais il entend aussi ce que l’on dit de lui. Comme le discours un poil raciste, de ce voisin français, qui ne comprend qu’un homme descende jeter sa poubelle en demi-dakar, bref bien mis. </div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Mon esprit s’est surpris à voir les murs de la salle s’effondrer et Modeste Nzapassara poursuivre son récital dans les rues du quartier du LMP, tellement son jeu, ses tirades vibraient en phase avec l’atmosphère du milieu ambiant. Le déroulement de la pièce n’est pas linéaire. Il suit plutôt les états d’âme du fessologue. Ce qui peut rendre ardu la compréhension de cette pièce. Mais la cohérence de l’ensemble permet au spectateur de ne pas lâcher son fil d’Ariane.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Que trouve-t-on derrière le rire, la mascarade ? Vous le saurez surement en allant voir cette pièce qui m’a donnée envie de passer à la lecture du roman. Pièce que le comédien joue seul ,peut-être pour mieux illustrer la solitude du fessologue, de l’immigré, de l’homme tout simplement. Bien sapé, cela va de soit.</div><br><b><span style=\"font-size:large\">Verre cassé d’Alain Mabanckou, adapté et interprété par Fortuné Batéza (jeudi, vendredi 21h)</span></b><br><span style=\"font-size:large\"><br></span><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:large\">Fortuné Batéza</span> est venu de Kinshasa pour nous livrer sa partition sur le roman qui a rendu populaire Alain Mabanckou : j’ai nommé Verre cassé. Inutile de présenter ce texte tant de fois chroniqué sur la blogosphère, là où les lettres africaines ont tant de mal à trouver un écho. Histoire de souligner l’influence de l’auteur.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">J’aurai tendance à comparer les deux adaptations de ces romans en considérant que les charnières de ces derniers semblent très proches. Pourtant les choix ne sont pas les mêmes, tant sur la mise en scène que dans le jeu des deux acteurs. Fortuné Batéza joue beaucoup plus dans le registre du théâtre populaire congolais. Ce qui n’a rien de péjoratif, puisqu’il a beaucoup plus de chance de toucher le public africain. Ce qui se traduit le prix d’interprétation qu’il a obtenu justement avec <span style=\"font-size:large\"><b>Verre cassé</b></span>.</div><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/TDzms4qhfhI/AAAAAAAACD8/0l7kNmCNNj4/s1600/P7090275.JPG\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"240\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/TDzms4qhfhI/AAAAAAAACD8/0l7kNmCNNj4/s320/P7090275.JPG\" width=\"320\"></a></div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Il interprète donc tous les personnages qui ont fait rire ceux qui ont ouvert et lu ce roman étonnant. L’homme aux pampers, Robinette, Mouyéké l’escroc...Il met en scène les réflexions ubuesques du dictateur en panne de communication. J’ai personnellement trouvé qu’il y avait un déséquilibre puisque dans son adaptation, Batéza donne beaucoup plus de poids à la première phase du roman qui est une franche rigolade et une accumulation de caricatures, qu’à la seconde partie du roman où le lecteur que je suis, était rentré dans l’intimité de Verre cassé (le personnage), dans son drame, dans sa solitude. De plus, on ressent un peu moins le texte, la langue de Mabanckou.</div><br><div style=\"text-align:justify\">Néanmoins, le jeu du comédien kinois pallie à ces légers manquements et réussit à tenir le rythme de cette pièce très intéressante.</div><br>A voir et à faire voir au <a href=\"http://www.rueleon.net/\">Lavoir Moderne Parisien</a><br>35 rue Léon, Paris 18ème arrondissement<br>Réservation au 01.42.52.09.14<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/104300315399051243-6619882216620620705?l=gangoueus.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The thrill of the chase",
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"content" : "<p>How I love to go out hunting on a bright Sunday morning—though it’s not my style to shoot furry/feathery/finny animals. <em>My</em> game is to get up early and stalk a wily factoid.</p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http://moleseyhill.com/blog/2009/05/25/how-many-bugs/\">posting</a> from Mat Roberts, whose <a href=\"http://moleseyhill.com/blog/\">blog</a> I’ve recently discovered, sent me out this morning to chase down a passage in <em><a href=\"http://plus.maths.org/issue21/reviews/book4/index.html\">How Long Is a Piece of String</a></em>, a book by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham:</p>\n<p><img title=\"Don't be picky about the formula. Yes, it's true, S could be zero. We can handle that, if necessary, with a slightly more elaborate version.\" src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/eastaway-wyndham-p160.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"passage from Eastaway-Wyndham, page 160\" width=\"450\" height=\"329\"></p>\n<p>The concept here seemed familiar, but the term “Lincoln Index” was new to me. Lincoln who? What index?</p>\n<p>Google offered some useful clues. (Also a generous helping of false scents—books about Honest Abe that happen to have an index.) Without even clicking on a link I had the general context:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The <em>Lincoln Index</em> provides a way to measure population sizes of individual animal species. It is based on a capture/mark/ recapture method…</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>So we’re talking ecology and population biology. The original idea was not to catch the same typo twice but to catch the same furry/feathery/finny creature twice. Interesting. However, the first couple of web pages that Google sent me to (<a href=\"http://www.offwell.free-online.co.uk/lincoln.htm\">here</a> and <a href=\"http://teachers.net/lessons/posts/2222.html\">here</a>) told me nothing about Lincoln. And, oddly, I found no Wikipedia entry for “Lincoln Index.” If it’s not in Wikipedia, does it exist?</p>\n<p>With a little more poking around, I stumbled upon another clue that seemed promising: a <a href=\"http://www.sbs.utexas.edu/jcabbott/courses/bio208web/labs/populations/populations.htm\">mention</a> of “the Lincoln-Pearson equation for estimating population size.” I was still in the dark about Lincoln, but Pearson is quite a familiar figure. Surely that’s Karl Pearson, the pioneering statistician, who did much of his work in the biological sciences and might very well have come up with a scheme for estimating population sizes.</p>\n<p>Back at Google, though, searching for “Lincoln-Pearson” turned up nothing pertinent other than the page I’d come from (though I <em>did</em> learn that Karl Pearson “read in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn” during his early years studying law).</p>\n<p>More beating the bushes. Eventually I realized I had wandered into a blind alley. Somebody needs to hire a pair of proofreaders: The formula is not “Lincoln-Pearson” but “Lincoln-Petersen.” Try <em>those</em> names at Google and you’ll get an abundance of useful pointers. (You’ll also learn that Abraham Lincoln died in Petersen’s Boarding House, across the street from Ford’s Theater. Google is not just a search engine but also a coincidence engine.)</p>\n<p>The particular web page where I finally got the correct names (<a href=\"http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/fw353/Estimate.htm\">notes for a course at North Carolina State University</a>) explains that capture-mark-recapture methods</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>are used extensively to estimate populations of fish, game animals, and many non-game animals. The approach was first used by Petersen (1896) to study European plaice in the Baltic Sea and later proposed by Lincoln (1930) to estimate numbers of ducks. Petersen’s and Lincoln’s method is often referred to as the Lincoln-Petersen Index, even though it is not an index but a method to estimate actual population sizes. (Should it not be the Petersen-Lincoln Estimate?)</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I decided to pursue Petersen first—and immediately ran into a few further bibliographic brambles. Some citations spell the name “Petersen” and others “Peterson.” Some give the initials “C. G. T.” and others “C. G. J.” or “C. J. G.” The date might be 1895 or 1896 or 1897. Here’s what I believe to be a correct citation:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Petersen, C. G. J. 1896. The yearly immigration of young plaice into the Limfjord from the German Sea. <em>Report of the Danish Biological Station to the Home Department</em> 6:1–48.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Wikipedia identifies our elusive author as Carl Georg Johannes Petersen (1860-1928). He was a founder of the Danish Biological Station, which was not in fact a station but a mobile laboratory—a decommissioned naval vessel that was moved around from year to year. In 1895, Petersen took the station to the Limfjord, a chain of bays, lakes and channels cutting across the Jutland peninsula in northern Denmark. There he studied the plaice fishery. (Back to Wikipedia: “The European plaice is a right-eyed flounder belonging to the Pleuronectidae family.” But let’s not get started on right-eyed and left-eyed flatfish, or we’ll never get to the end of this.)</p>\n<p>Petersen’s report is <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/details/reportofdanishbi06dans\">available online</a>, scanned from a copy belonging to the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and hosted by the Biodiversity Heritage Library of the Internet Archive. A second surprise: The report is written in English. But on reading through it I find only vague and murky connections between the work Petersen reports and the mark-recapture method of estimating populations. There’s nothing resembling the <em>E<sub>1</sub>E<sub>2</sub>/S</em> formula.</p>\n<p>Petersen <em>does</em> describe a series of capture/mark/recapture experiments. A few hundred plaice were caught and marked by attaching numbered buttons, then put back in the water. Fishermen who recaught the labeled fish in later months were asked to report them. But the purpose of this study was not to estimate the total population; instead, Petersen used before-and-after measurements of the marked fish to estimate their growth rate.</p>\n<p>In a much larger experiment, some 82,580 plaice (somebody must have counted them!) were transplanted into the fjord, and 10,900 of the fish were marked by having a hole punched in their dorsal fin. The number of marked fish was recorded as the plaice were caught during the coming year. It’s not clear whether the aim of this project was to estimate the total population, but in any case it didn’t work. The fraction of marked fish in the transplanted batch was about 1/7, but the marked fraction in the subsequent catches was 1/5. Petersen remarks, “This result is very strange,” and I have to agree.</p>\n<p>When Petersen did try to estimate the plaice population, he didn’t rely on a recapture scheme. He went out with seine nets designed to dredge up every bottom fish in a measured plot, then extrapolated from the density of fish per unit area.</p>\n<p>The whole report is fascinating fishy stuff, but it leaves me wondering just how Petersen came to be given credit for the resampling idea. As far as I can tell, it’s not to be found in this paper.</p>\n<p>Having chased down Petersen, I turned back to Mr. Lincoln. Without much trouble I was able to identify the work in question:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Lincoln, F. C. 1930. Calculating waterfowl abundance on the basis of banding returns. <em>United States Department of Agriculture Circular</em> 118:1–4.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><img title=\"Credit: U.S. Geological Survey\" src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/fredericklincoln.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"portrait of Frederick C. Lincoln in his office, with stuffed duck.\" width=\"220\" height=\"289\">The author was Frederick C. Lincoln, who was <a href=\"http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/BBL/homepage/lincoln.htm\">bird-bander-in-chief</a> in the U.S. for some 25 years. The agency he founded has since migrated from the Department of Agriculture to the U.S. Geological Survey and become the Bird Banding Laboratory.</p>\n<p>Google returns hundreds of works that cite Lincoln’s paper (including some quite far afield from population biology). But tracking down the USDA document itself was not so easy. If the USDA has it online, I wasn’t able to locate it. But a search of <a href=\"http://www.worldcat.org/\">WorldCat</a> eventually turned up an archive in the <a href=\"http://catalog.hathitrust.org/\">Hathi Trust Digital Library</a> where you can page through <a href=\"http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=umn.31951d02969945h;page=root;seq=640;num=81\">Lincoln’s pamphlet</a> in a copy scanned by Google at the University of Minnesota library.</p>\n<p>Lincoln gives only a brief and informal account of the recapture idea, but the basic principle is stated clearly enough:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If in one season 5,000 ducks were banded and yielded 600 first-season returns, or 12 percent, and if during that same season the total number of ducks killed and reported by sportsmen was about 5,000,000, then this number would be equivalent to approximately 12 per cent of the waterfowl population for that year, which would be about 42,000,000.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>It’s not hard to translate this formula from the language of duck hunters into the language of proofreaders. The first reader finds 5,000 typos and the second spots 5 million; 600 of these errors are common to both lists, and so the total number of typos is:</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/typos-eqn.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\\frac{5\\,000 \\times 5\\,000\\,000}{600} = 41\\,666\\,667\" width=\"208\" height=\"34\"></p>\n<p>So that’s my reward for a morning spent out hunting: 42 million typos.</p>\n<p>Does Frederick Lincoln deserve credit for the Lincoln Index? I’d say he has a good claim, except that Pierre Simon de Laplace <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\" title=\"text added 2010-07-12\">had the same idea</span> more than a century earlier. In 1802 Laplace applied his method to estimating the (human) population of France. But maybe that’s a story for another Sunday morning.</p>\n<p><strong>Epilogue</strong>. This is not really a story about typos, or about fish and ducks. It’s about finding things—about the phenomenal ease of chasing facts on the world wide web. Does a marked fish have any hope of escaping recapture there?</p>\n<p> </p>"
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"content" : "<p>\n\n\t“We mourn the man whom death takes from us, and the loss of his miraculous talent and the grace of his human presence, but only the man do we mourn, for destiny endowed his spirit and creative powers with a mysterious beauty that cannot perish.”\n\t—from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis\n\n\tOn June 18, 2010, the Portuguese writer José Saramago dies at the age of eighty-seven after a long illness. The cause is multiple organ failure. The government announces ...</p>\t\n<p>\n \n</p>\n\n <div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?a=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?a=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?a=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?i=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?a=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/wwborders?i=9g8ogYfD3UU:eDfOkmkr9KQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wwborders/~4/9g8ogYfD3UU\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "A Wolof weaver on Goree island, 1844",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://lh4.ggpht.com/_o3RfR0wD8Y8/TAOEb3iVhpI/AAAAAAAAGHM/-ExTujo9F1g/s1600-h/arc127_tisserand_001f%5B3%5D.jpg\"><img title=\"arc127_tisserand_001f\" style=\"border-width:0px;display:inline\" alt=\"arc127_tisserand_001f\" src=\"http://lh3.ggpht.com/_o3RfR0wD8Y8/TAOEcfsypKI/AAAAAAAAGHQ/ZUPNf7cmDLo/arc127_tisserand_001f_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg?imgmax=800\" border=\"0\" height=\"205\" width=\"321\"></a> </p> <p>Although this sketch in the French National Archives is not the earliest depiction of a West African weaver it is exceptionally detailed and clear for a nineteenth century source. It was drawn by Isidore Hedde (1801-1880) a ribbon manufacturer from St. Etienne whose boat paused in Senegal on route to China as part of a French diplomatic mission. Undoubtedly Hedde’s own background in weaving contributed to the attention he paid to depicting the key loom components. The weaver is described as a slave and griot, although it seems likely, to me at least, that “slave” is Hedde’s gloss on the complex and anomalous status of weavers and other craftspeople in Senegambian societies. The drawing is accompanied by an important letter that describes at some length his observations on textile production in Goree at that date, including the surprising fact that there were 114 weavers on the small island. Click <a href=\"http://www.histoire-image.org/site/etude_comp/etude_comp_detail.php?i=745\">here</a> to see more details.</p> <p>By way of comparison, here is a Senegalese weaver depicted on an old postcard, dating from about 1905, by Charles Fortier (author’s collection.)</p> <p><a href=\"http://lh5.ggpht.com/_o3RfR0wD8Y8/TAOEdFRRq-I/AAAAAAAAGHU/ABoDLVhgXNk/s1600-h/fortier%20weaver%5B3%5D.jpg\"><img title=\"fortier weaver\" style=\"border-width:0px;display:inline\" alt=\"fortier weaver\" src=\"http://lh6.ggpht.com/_o3RfR0wD8Y8/TAOEdx2DxOI/AAAAAAAAGHY/6wJE2TbxNTg/fortier%20weaver_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg?imgmax=800\" border=\"0\" height=\"401\" width=\"260\"></a></p><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3842834058715698204-2078281628497235177?l=adireafricantextiles.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/11spice.html\">This case</a>, pitting the fatal-paprika-allergy-warning dog vs. the co-worker with the serious allergy to canines has great facts and a knotty legal problem — surely it is coming to a moot court or mock trial near you?</p>\n\n<blockquote><p>Fearing a fatal encounter with paprika, Ms. Kysel’s parents and grandparents chipped in to buy her an allergy-detection dog, which works much like a narcotics-sniffing dog. After she had extensive talks with her employer, the City of Indianapolis, officials gave her permission to take the dog to work. The golden retriever, named Penny, cost her family $10,000 — it jumps up on Ms. Kysel whenever it detects paprika.</p>\n\n<p>On the first day Ms. Kysel took Penny to work, one of her co-workers suffered an asthma attack because she is allergic to dogs. That afternoon Ms. Kysel was stunned when her boss told her that she could no longer take the dog to work, or if she felt she could not report to work without Penny, she could go on indefinite unpaid leave. She was ineligible for unemployment compensation because of the limbo she was put in.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Perfect.</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=VuNUa-v6msE:9BC-ESfXsbE:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=VuNUa-v6msE:9BC-ESfXsbE:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=VuNUa-v6msE:9BC-ESfXsbE:YwkR-u9nhCs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=YwkR-u9nhCs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=VuNUa-v6msE:9BC-ESfXsbE:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?i=VuNUa-v6msE:9BC-ESfXsbE:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Charles Mingus, \"Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus\" (1963)",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/S-F_wpjbY8I/AAAAAAAAAyw/sq4xSEP9Ba4/s1600/charles_mingus.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px;width:269px;height:400px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/S-F_wpjbY8I/AAAAAAAAAyw/sq4xSEP9Ba4/s400/charles_mingus.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><strong>NICK DERISO: </strong>Bassist Charles Mingus, an enlightening yet stormy presence, clearly felt he had unfinished business with some of his earlier work. So, he used \"Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus\" and a move to the more creatively open Impulse! label to take another pass at them.<br><br>That turned into a dramatic remodeling project for Mingus.<br><br>In fact, he rips them up, pieces them back together, speeds them up, slows them down, drives them into the ditch, then reattaches all the dented parts. <br><br>\"MingusX5,\" as I always called it, would eventually become less about reevaluation than about true rediscovery -- and, for me, every bit the creative triumph of more widely praised efforts like \"The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady,\" \"Mingus Ah Um\" and the posthumous \"Epitaph.\" <br><br><span>Mingus was still working within a Dixieland-style collective improvisation, and amid this spectacular din of sound, we should probably expect complexity. The marvellously complex Mingus doesn't disappoint.<br><br>Adept at both an almost naughtily playfulness in the opener -- a redo of \"Haitian Fight Song\" called \"II B.S.\" (sound out the Roman numeral, then refer to the vernacular for the following two letters), featuring tenor saxist Booker Ervin and pianist Jaki Byard -- as well as the sensual curiosity of the \"Nouroog\" update \"I X Love,\" Mingus is freed to experiment as composer, arranger and performer.<br><br>Mingus was also playing around with his band, updating the same basic cast as 1963's \"Black Saint\" by adding reedman <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2008/07/somethingelsetribute-jazzs-greatest.html\"><strong>Eric Dolphy </strong></a>-- who completes one of the very best groupings ever constructed by the mercurial bassist. \"MingusX5\" allows every player to somehow make the other better. <br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/S-F8-7FAefI/AAAAAAAAAyo/ClwVCtYcwG0/s1600/mingusx5.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0;width:200px;height:200px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/S-F8-7FAefI/AAAAAAAAAyo/ClwVCtYcwG0/s200/mingusx5.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>A more turbulent theme can be found in \"Celia,\" in keeping with its subject matter. (Mingus is said to have written it in tribute to his ex-wife, and even includes at one point just a hint of \"The Lady In Red,\" referencing her hair color.) Altoist Charlie Mariano is highlighted here, as well as on \"I X Love,\" and he adds to the innate drama.<br><br>That tension finds its zenith during an amped up take on \"Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul,\" presented in 6/8 time yet boasting an interesting countermelodic grit. On the closing \"Hora Decubitus,\" a rewrite of \"E's Flat Ah's Flat Too\" which the bassist said meant \"At Bedtime,\" Mingus' 10-member group -- with a notable turn at this point by Dolphy -- turns up the fire, putting a fierce exclamation point on this album.<br><br>But even in moments of reflection, however, Mingus challenges himself, and those around him, to dig deeper. <br><br>Given an opportunity to pay tribute to a childhood hero in <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Duke%20Ellington\"><strong>Duke Ellington</strong></a>, on \"Mood Indigo\" <em>(embedded below)</em>, Mingus sets the tone with a virtuoso solo. Later on \"Theme For <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/search/label/Lester%20Young\"><strong>Lester Young</strong></a>\" (also known as \"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat\"), there is a quiet, almost tenderly reflective solo from Ervin -- in keeping with the tune's origin: Mingus reportedly wrote it at a New York club on the night he heard of Young's passing.<br><br>That underscores the tough spirituality that still makes Mingus so intriguing. <br><br>He was a straight talker but also a seeker of things, someone who questioned it all -- including himself and his own work. As well known for his volatility as for his ambition, Mingus took everyone on his journey -- starting with the sidemen. <br><br>That helped Mingus, when everything came together, draw out such memorable performances from those around him. \"MingusX5\" was one of those times.<br><br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/Jl--643tTe4%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x5d1719%26color2%3D0xcd311b&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br><br>Purchase: <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Mingus/dp/B000003N7Y\"><strong>Charles Mingus - Ming<em>us Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus</em></strong></a></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8367705548617137551-3458640493391498272?l=www.somethingelsereviews.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Has Globalization Stolen the World Cup Magic?",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://i.cdn.turner.com/sivault/multimedia/photo_gallery/0906/history.june29/images/pele-1958.cut.jpg\" width=\"400\"><br>\n<em>Who is this kid? Pele terrorizes Sweden in 1958</em></p>\n<p>Nobody outside of Brazil had heard of the 17-year-old who exploded onto the international stage in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden with a display of skill, audacity, guile, vision and sheer exuberance that was to make Pele a global household name for the next half-century.</p>\n<p>His status as the global symbol of football excellence was all the remarkable considering that the world only got to see him three more times at the quadrennial World Cup tournaments, culminating in 1970. Pele, after all, played his weekly club football for Rio De Janeiro’s Santos, whose games weren’t available on satellite TV.</p>\n<p>There are many reasons why World Cup 2010 won’t surprise us with a new Pele, but the first should be obvious: today any teenager even half as talented would likely be on the books of Barcelona or Arsenal already, and therefore a familiar face to European club football’s massive global TV audience.</p>\n<p>Think Alexandre Pato, the 20-year-old Brazilian striker who joined AC Milan at 18, or Manchester United’s marauding 19-year-old Brazilian fullbacks, Rafael and Fabio da Silva, who signed at 17, a year older than Spanish midfield supremo Cesc Fabregas was when he joined Arsenal.</p>\n<p>In Pele’s era, the world’s best players met only at the World Cup. Today they play each other once or even twice a week while the whole world watches.</p>\n<p>Last year’s Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United was the world’s most-watched sports event of the year, with an audience of 209 million. And a lot more than that were expected to tune into the recent Real Madrid-Barcelona Spanish league showdown.</p>\n<p>It’s not hard to see why: El Clasico, as the Spanish fixture is known, pitted the world’s two best players, Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo against one another, with a supporting cast stronger than either would find in his national team.</p>\n<p>The fact that the European game now features all the world’s soccer heroes is the reason you’re as likely to see a Chelsea or Arsenal shirt being worn at a mall in Shanghai or San Diego as in a Baghdad demonstration or Mogadishu firefight.</p>\n<p>Almost without exception, today the world’s best players play their club football in Europe. Brazil’s and Argentina’s World Cup squads will be picked almost entirely from Europe-based players, and those will also be the mainstay of the likes of Uruguay, Chile and Honduras. Ivory Coast took just one home-based player to the recent African Nations Cup in Angola, and Ghana is likely to do the same at the World Cup. Don’t expect any in Cameroon’s squad, while there are unlikely to be more than two or three in Nigeria’s squad.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article428369.ece/Has-globalisation-stolen-the-World-Cup-magic-\">Read the rest here</a></p>"
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"content" : "<p>Further thoughts on “Ship of Fools” by Fintan O’Toole …</p>\n\n\t<p>In so far as these things matter, I totes claim bragging rights over calling the end of the bubble in Ireland, in writing in October 2006 and my only regret is that I changed jobs and started doing something else before I had time to milk it[1]. My basic point at the time was that the rental yield on Irish property at the time was estimated at 3.25% (Daft.ie had begun to calculate a rental yield index, tragically too late – I believe unless someone knows different that at the time I was in possession of the only even acceptably accurate time series of data on Irish rental yields), and that with the most recent <span>ECB</span> rate rise to 3.75%, the logic of the myopic-expectations buy-or-rent model[2] was about to start working in reverse. As it did. I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions that in actual fact, this was a policy-caused bubble, and that’s true in Ireland as well. But of course, the actual mechanisms by which a bubble is inflated, since they are based on a combination of the winner’s curse and limited liability, tend to involve the sorts of tales of sharp elbows, social capital and low risk aversion which can be made to look absolutely awful with the benefit of hindsight and/or in a court of law. So let the games begin …<br>\n<span></span></p>\n\n\t<p>Of course, there’s a world of difference between “Ship of Fools” and Dean Baker’s “False Profits”. For one thing, although at a very high level the Irish boom was a product of the <span>ECB</span>’s need to keep the rust belts of France and Italy out of depression, there is not much mileage in an Irish commentator calling for the <span>ECB</span> governor to be sacked. And so it is that Fintan O’Toole’s “Ship of Fools” concentrates less on the high-level policy failures and more on the nuts-and-bolts of the shady deals and unwise decisions that let the Irish boom get so big and so much more destructive than, say, the Spanish one. Henry has written on this in detail, so I’ll hand over that to him, both because I don’t have the detailed knowledge, but more importantly for the reason that I think any British person writing about the Irish economic situation at the moment really needs to check his motives.</p>\n\n\t<p>Which is to say that, hey Irish people, shall I tell you a secret? That economic miracle of yours – it just killed us inside. The Gore Vidal proverb[4] doesn’t capture the half of it. My God. Even me, commenting on this site of all sites, couldn’t occasionally resist <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/22/free-lunch-and-irish-breakfast/#comment-169430\"> the occasional outburst</a> of <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/18/small-country-big-job/#comment-11445\">sheer green-eyed jealousy</a> at any signs of the Irish contributors mentioning that the place seemed to be doing all right these days. I can’t find the bit where I literally started going “look it’s all housing and construction you know, it’ll end in tears” to Kieran, but I vividly remember it happened. And this was not an untypical attitude among Brits during the period.</p>\n\n\t<p>Part of the reason of course was that during the boom years, Ireland did take the advantage to export some incredible, complete, total and utter pricks to the rest of the world in the hope that they’d stay gone. I mean, it hardly behoves a London stockbroker to make a comment of this sort, but even by that benchmark the newly enriched Irish business/political class turned up some world-beaters. And, like the Icelanders they floated a fair couple of companies on the London market that turned out to be not quite as great as they’d appeared, and like the Icelanders, they were given to occasionally, usually when drink had been taken on, providing us with lectures about the secret of their economic success which gave the strong impression of having been cribbed from <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/01/the-way-of-the-leprechaun/\">Thomas Friedman books</a>.</p>\n\n\t<p>Unlike the Icelanders, of course, there was always a certain amount of edge to the relationship between us and the Irish Raiders though. For one thing, of course, there was the legacy of empire[5]; it really was not so long ago that <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2008/11/28/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-london-irish-social-services-industry/\">Irish people</a> in London were treated as somewhere between an oppressed minority and a public health problem[6].</p>\n\n\t<p>For another, though, there was never any real threat to us from the Vikings. Broadly speaking, the financial community knew what they were up to. They were a bunch of foreigners with seemingly no clue what they were doing, more or less unlimited amounts of money borrowed from their local banks, a burning ambition to pick up iconic and prestigious business assets, and seemingly no concept at all of a fair or even reasonable valuation. People like that, one finds, are generally well liked in Throgmorton Street; you might have to put up with the odd economics lecture, but usually they’ll make it worth your while to hang on. Generations of such ambitious foreigners have breezed through the City, usually leaving with armfuls of previously unshiftable dogs and sans wallet. Come one come all, as long as you pay cash etc.</p>\n\n\t<p>The Irish, on the other hand … well, what was their big idea? From the late 90s onward, it was clear that Ireland was determined to become the entrepot and offshore haven between Europe and America, sitting in the North Atlantic with a low tax rate, a population of intelligent and creative people with somewhat lax morality, a loose system of financial regulation with slap-on-the-wrist enforcement, in general a place where you went in order to do things that you were slightly ashamed of and didn’t want to do back home. And well … isn’t that, kind of, our job? I think this was the real source of English ressentiment of the Irish miracle – after all, even the most ancient of enemies can reconcile and make up, but <i>competitors</i> are opposed to each other by definition.</p>\n\n\t<p>And that, I think, shows us what the underlying social reality is behind the corpus delicti set out in “Ship of Fools”. The difference between the two places, and the reason why the City abides, bruised and humiliated but still here, while the Financial Centre in Dublin currently looks really rather past-tense, is that the sort of brinkmanship that is required to play the regulatory arbitrage game, and to make sure that the get-er-done mentality of the best dealmaking lawyers and bankers doesn’t get <i>totally</i> out of hand, is one of the ultimate ‘thick’ social institutions. The kind of culture under which the most dreaded punishment is the “cold shoulder” of the Takeover Panel is not something you can throw up overnight.</p>\n\n\t<p>So anyway, it turns out that this review was more in the <span>LRB</span> style of a semi-attached essay but what can you do? Go read Henry’s post, he’ll tell you what the book was about.</p>\n\n\n\t<p>[1] The publication of that report gave me one of the only moments in my career which would make a good anecdote for a Michael Lewis book. I was, unsurprisingly, not popular with Irish investors and ended up doing a tour of Dublin to explain myself. At the end of a long day, I found myself in front of a character who started his speech by saying “well, you know, of course I’m not an economist like yourself, I’m just a thick Paddy me …”. Having basically lost both all patience and all hope of getting any business, I launched into a short speech, the gist of which was[3] “excuse me mate, when I was a teenager I worked on the Holyhead-Dun Laoghire ferry, and during that period I met enough colourful Irish characters to last me a lifetime. The other thing I learned was that when you hear an Irish person talking to an English person and describing themselves as “just a thick Paddy”, you should check your wallet”.</p>\n\n\t<p>[2] “Myopic expectations” – in my model, agents assumed that the current level of interest rates would prevail forever. “Buy versus rent model” – just what it sounds like, based on my assessment of the typical financing structure. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, but it wasn’t much more complicated.</p>\n\n\t<p>[3] Of course, as is traditional for a mass-market business thriller, it didn’t happen <i>exactly</i> like that. Also I was lying at the time – my brother had worked on the ferry, not me.</p>\n\n\t<p>[4] “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies”</p>\n\n\t<p>[5] During the Celtic Tiger years, and after reading excerpts from Liam Kennedy’s <a href=\"http://www.sluggerotoole.com/index.php/weblog/comments/mope_moping_and_mopery/\">essay</a>, I used to find it a useful technique when in the presence of an Irish person (or, frankly, an Englishman or American with any hint of Irish heritage) who I believed to be whining, to theatrically exclaim “400 years of oppression and now this!”[8]. I’m not saying it was big or clever, or even completely free of bigotry. I’m just saying it worked. Probably still does.</p>\n\n\t<p>[6] I actually live in a rather chichi leafy avenue in North London, and there are still people in my street who remember when my attractive Georgian townhouse was occupied by three <i>large</i> Irish families. There are one of two aging Irish tramps hanging round the area who appear on the occasions I’ve spoken to them to be utterly confused about what happened to what had previously been a quite well-defined social role.</p>\n\n\t<p>[7] Actually, eight hundred years, as Henry reminded me.</p>"
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"title" : "The clever Australian FttH architecture",
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"content" : "<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">As a\nproponent of evaluating FttH topologies (shared and point-to-point) on their\npath dependencies and option values I have been looking forward to see how the\nAustralians would make their choices.</span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">One of the\nfactors that make their case interesting is the utility infrastructure\napproach. The Australian Government has decided that a country wide open FttH\ninfrastructure is required and will be deployed.<span> </span>Deploying FttH in vast countries like the USA\nand Australia poses its own challenges compared with dense urban countries like\nthe Netherlands.<span> </span>Often citied issues are\nthe lower densities of housing so a shared fiber architecture must be\nunavoidable, and<span> </span>very low density rural\nareas which are deemed unaffordable.</span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">The\nrecently published architecture of the Australian FttH network show an\nintelligent and interesting approach (courtesy Peter Ferris for explaining some\ndetails) . The first observation is that even in a vast country like Australia\npeople live closely huddled on a small part of the land. </span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><a href=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/Australia%20density-1052.html\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/Australia%20density-thumb-450x193-1052.gif\" width=\"450\" height=\"193\" alt=\"Australia density.GIF\" style=\"float:left;margin:0 20px 20px 0\"></a></span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p>67 % Of the\npopulation lives in the top 50 urban areas, if you include the major rural areas\nyou can reach 85 % of the addresses in 1,5 % of the land. So it makes sense to\nprovide 93 % of the addresses with FttH and the remaining with radio (5%) and\nsatellite (2%).</p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">For the 93% which will get FttH they have chosen for a surprising combination of options in\ntheir architecture. The next-best-thing to full point-to-point in my opinion,\nfull with potential to support different kinds of technologies and future upgrades\nif and when needed. <span> </span></span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">Let me\nfocus on the interesting choices: overprovisioning in a point-to-point topology\nin the deepest part of the last mile, underprovisioning in the concentrated\nparts of the outside plant.</span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">The basic\nbuilding block of their architecture is a group of up to 200 addresses. A fiber\nlocal loop is deployed with 3 (!) fibers per address. In an aerial deployment\n12 local drop fibre connectors (preterminated drop line, no splice needed) are\nmade available on the poles per 4 addresses and used when and how required. The\nsame approach is used for underground cabling. This setup will allow for layer\n1 unbundling future expansion, support of point-to-point Ethernet to businesses, multiple ISP's to same address, support for 3G/wifi mobile broadband and so\non.</span></p><p>All fibers\nfor these 200 addresses concentrate in a Fiber Distribution Hub (FDH), a\ncabinet in the street or cleverly combined with other uses like a seat in the\nparc. In the FDH the connections are made to either a splitter (for PON) or a\nsingle fiber (point-to-point) in ducts leading toward higher layers of the\nnetwork. <span> </span>It is even foreseen to change\nthe splitters for filters if WDM becomes financially viable.</p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">Up to 16\nFDH's are concentrated into a Fiber Serving Area Module (FSAM, max 3200 addresses).\n<span> </span>The capacity in the concentration\ncabling initially deployed is enough to support PON as a technology to each\nhome, plus some extra for businesses and other uses.<span> </span>Some sort of redundancy is built in by an interesting\n\"dual-loop\" structure by geographical separate paths in the connection of FDH's\nto FSAM location. If needed the capacity to one or more FDH's can be increased\nby deploying more cables in that path.</span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><a href=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/fdh-1055.html\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/fdh-thumb-500x367-1055.gif\" width=\"500\" height=\"367\" alt=\"fdh.GIF\" style=\"float:left;margin:0 20px 20px 0\"></a></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"> </span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">The FSAM is\na planning construct initially but it allows also for future expansion. The\nnumber of addresses is ideally suited to be served by a prefab active equipment\ncabinet (know as Controlled Environment Vaults, or APOP's in the Netherlands),\nif needed. </span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><a href=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/CEV-1058.html\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/CEV-thumb-450x378-1058.jpg\" width=\"450\" height=\"378\" alt=\"CEV.jpg\" style=\"float:left;margin:0 20px 20px 0\"></a></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><i>(Controlled Environment Vault</i></span><span lang=\"EN-US\"><i>)</i></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\">These CEV's bear a lot of resemblance to the prefab APOP's Reggefiber\ndeploys outside city centres. They can be truckrolled to a given location,\nplaced within a day.</span></p><a href=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/AAPOP-1064.html\"><img src=\"http://www.dadamotive.com/assets_c/2010/04/AAPOP-thumb-300x230-1064.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"230\" alt=\"AAPOP.jpg\" style=\"float:left;margin:0 20px 20px 0\"></a><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><i>(Reggefiber prefab APOP)</i></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br></span></p><p><span lang=\"EN-US\">At the\nstart FSAM's are just a passive concentration point for cabling to the Fibre Acces Node (FAN). Again some redundancy is\nintroduced by geographical different routes for the cabling to the FAN exchange / central office, maximum size 76,800\nlocations/adresses.</span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">It makes a\nlot of sense for the geography with lots of suburbanity. The key is having\nspace in the street for these FDH cabinets. Just install a lot of point-to-point\nfiber in the part where a lot of labor is required (you don't want to redo that\never) and allow for all kinds of upgrades , options for expansion, unbundling\nlocations, active equipment deeper into the network, as you see fit in the\nfuture. </span></p>\n\n<p><span lang=\"EN-US\">Smart guys,\ndown under.</span></p>"
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"title" : "WATCH BBC'S 'WELCOME TO LAGOS' PARTS 1 & 2 (VIDEO)",
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"content" : "<p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/gpj9j2u4qhugienhvcd5luf71g/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nigeriancuriosity.com%2F2010%2F04%2Fwatch-bbcs-welcome-to-lagos-parts-1-2.html\" width=\"100%\" height=\"60\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>The BBC documentary 'Welcome to Lagos' has become relatively controversial. Some see it as a positive depiction of the poor but ingenious in Nigeria's teeming commercial center, Lagos. Others see it as a negative and derogatory attempt by a foreign media outlet to <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2010/03/lagos-is-not-5th-worst-city.html\">once again</a> insult Lagos and Nigerians.<br>\n<br>\nWhile the program was available to a mostly European audience, viewers in America were unable to watch this documentary until now. Below are 6 clips that comprise Part 1 of the documentary. A link to watch Part 2 is also available below. Part 3 of the documentary is yet to air but will be uploaded as soon as it does. <br>\n<br>\n<a name=\"more\"></a><br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/sHKLIpz9F5c%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/cdAMXM0m8aU%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/Bnbt0kbHiz0%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/DCuJTp3edzQ%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/ogzdkAbGMT4%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/DRoyK_4_76o%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x2b405b%26color2%3D0x6b8ab6&width=480&height=385\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></iframe><br>\n<br>\nWhat do you think about what you have seen thus far? Is it fair to categorize the documentary as dismissive of Lagos and Nigerians? Or, are supporters correct that this is a positive portrayal of one of the busiest and most successful African cities?<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2010/04/bbcs-welcome-to-lagos-part-2-video.html\">To see Part 2, click here</a>.<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2010/04/watch-bbcs-welcome-to-lagos-part-3.html\">To see Part 3, click here.</a> <br>\n<br>\nHattip to Dr. U for sending this in.<br>\n<br>\nFrom The Archives:<br>\n- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/11/elite-living-effizy-in-lagos.html\">Elite Living & 'Effizy' in Lagos</a><br>\n- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/11/lagos-one-of-worlds-most-expensive.html\">Lagos - One Of The World's Most Expensive Cities</a> <br>\n- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/02/nigerian-curiosity-of-2008.html\">The Nigerian Curiosity of 2008</a><br>\n- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/09/creating-better-cleaner-lagos.html\">Creating A Better & Cleaner Lagos</a><br>\n- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/02/nigeria-is-home-to-worlds-largest-cyber.html\">Nigeria is Home To The World's Largest Cyber Cafe</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1259678905729324935-5311405315690634562?l=www.nigeriancuriosity.com\" alt=\"\"></div><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:I9og5sOYxJI\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=I9og5sOYxJI\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:63t7Ie-LG7Y\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:YwkR-u9nhCs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=YwkR-u9nhCs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:3XSh_JyuPpU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=3XSh_JyuPpU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?i=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?i=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:l6gmwiTKsz0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=l6gmwiTKsz0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?i=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=J_jWp1Q8bRo:o5SpouPB0-k:TzevzKxY174\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=TzevzKxY174\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU/~4/J_jWp1Q8bRo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Return of \"Homophily, Contagion, Confounding: Pick Any Three\", or, The Adventures of Irene and Joey Along the Back-Door Paths",
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"content" : "<blockquote><em>Attention conservation notice</em>: 2700 words on a new paper\n on causal inference in social networks, and why it is hard. Instills an\n attitude of nihilistic skepticism and despair over a technical enterprise you\n never knew existed, much less cared about, which a few feeble attempts at\n jokes and a half-hearted constructive suggestion at the end fail to relieve.\n If any of this matters to you, you can always check back later and see if it\n survived peer review.</blockquote>\n\n<p>Well, we decided for a more sedate title for the actual paper, as opposed to the <a href=\"http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/633.html\">talk</a>:\n<dl>\n<dt>CRS and <a href=\"http://www.acthomas.ca/comment/\">Andrew C. Thomas</a>,\n\"Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social\nNetwork Studies\", <a href=\"http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.4704\">arxiv:1004.4704</a>,\nsubmitted to <cite><a href=\"http://smr.sagepub.com/\">Sociological Methods and\nResearch</a></cite></dt>\n<dd><em>Abstract:</em> We consider processes on social networks that can\npotentially involve three phenomena: homophily, or the formation of social ties\ndue to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social\ninfluence; and the causal effect of an individual's covariates on their\nbehavior or other measurable responses. We show that, generically, all of these\nare confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires\nstrong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the\nadequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular we demonstrate, with\nsimple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify\ncausal effects, and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social\ncontagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual's\nenduring traits and their choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity\nbetween them. We also suggest some possible constructive responses to these\nresults.</dd>\n<dd><a href=\"http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/homophily-confounding/\">R code for our simulations</a></dd>\n</dl>\n\n<p>The basic problem here is as follows. (I am afraid this will spoil some of\nthe jokes in the paper.) Consider the venerable parental question: \"If your\nfriend Joey jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?\" The fact of the matter\nis that the answer is \"yes\"; but why does Joey's jumping off a bridge mean that\nJoey's friend Irene is more likely to jump off one too?\n<ol>\n<li> <em>Influence or social contagion</em>: Because they are friends, Joey's\nexample inspires Irene to jump. Or, more subtly: seeing Joey jump\nre-calibrate's Irene's tolerance for risky behavior, which makes jumping seem\nlike a better idea.\n<li> <em>Biological contagion</em>: Joey is infected with a parasite which\nsuppresses the fear of heights and/or falling, and, because they are friends,\nJoey passes it on to Irene.\n<li> <em>Manifest homophily</em>: Joey and Irene are friends <em>because</em>\nthey both like to jump off bridges (hopefully with bungee cords attached).\n<li> <em>Latent homophily</em>: Joey and Irene are friends because they are\nboth hopeless adrenaline junkies, and met through a roller-coaster club; their\ncommon addiction leads both of them to take up bridge-jumping.\n<li> <em>External causation</em>: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)\">Sometimes</a>, jumping off a bridge is the only sane thing to do:\n<center><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TacomaNarrowsBridgeCollapse_in_color.jpg\"><img width=\"200\" src=\"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/TacomaNarrowsBridgeCollapse_in_color.jpg\"></a></center>\n</li></li></li></li></li></ol>\n\n<p>For Irene's parents, there is a big difference between (1) and (2) and the\nother explanations. The former suggest that it would be a good idea to keep\nIrene away from Joey, or at least to keep Joey from jumping off the bridge;\nwith the others, however, that's irrelevant. In the case of (3) and (4), in\nfact, knowing that Irene is friends with Joey is just a clue as to what Irene\nis really like; the damage was already done, and they can hang out together as\nmuch as they want. The difference between these accounts is one of causal\nmechanisms. (Of course there can be mixed cases.)\n\n<p>What the statistician or social scientist sees is that bridge-jumping is\ncorrelated across the social network. In this it resembles many, many, many\nbehaviors and conditions, such as prescribing new antibiotics (one of the\nclassic examples), adopting other new products, adopting political ideologies,\n<a href=\"http://research.yahoo.com/pub/2210\">attaching tags to pictures on\nflickr</a>, <a href=\"http://icanhascheezburger.com/\">attaching mis-spelled\njokes to pictures of cats</a>, smoking, drinking, using other\ndrugs, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide\">suicide</a>, <a href=\"http://www.powells.com/partner/27627/biblio/0226741001\">literary\ntastes</a>, coming down with infectious\ndiseases, <a href=\"http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/357/4/370\">becoming\nobese</a>, and <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a2533\">having bad acne or\nbeing tall for your age</a>. For almost all of these conditions or behaviors,\nour data is purely observational, meaning we cannot, for one reason or another,\njust push Joey off the bridge and see how Irene reacts. Can we nonetheless tell\nwhether bridge-jumping spreads by (some form) of contagion, or rather is due to\nhomophily, or, if it is both, say how much each mechanism contributes?\n\n<p>A lot of people have thought so, and have tried to come at it in the usual\nway, by\ndoing <a href=\"http://bactra.org/notebooks/regression.html\">regression</a>.\nMost readers can probably guess what I think about that, so I will just say:\ndon't you wish. More sophisticated ideas,\nlike <a href=\"http://arxiv.org/abs/math.ST/0609201\">propensity score\nmatching</a>, have <a href=\"http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0908800106\">also\nbeen tried</a>, but people have pretty much assumed that it <em>was</em>\npossible to do this sort of decomposition. What Andrew and I showed is that in\nfact it isn't, unless you are willing to make <em>very</em> strong, and\ngenerally untestable, assumptions.\n\n<p>This becomes clear as soon as you draw the\nrelevant <a href=\"http://bactra.org/notebooks/graphical-models.html\">graphical\nmodel</a>, which goes like so:\n\n<center><a href=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/latent-homophily.pdf\"><img width=\"300\" src=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/latent-homophily.jpg\"></a></center>\n\nHere <i>i</i> stands for Irene and <i>j</i> for\nJoey. <i>Y</i>(<i>i</i>,<i>t</i>) is 1 if Irene jumps off the bridge on\nday <i>t</i> and 0 otherwise; likewise <i>Y</i>(<i>j</i>,<i>t</i>-1) is whether\nJoey jumped off the bridge yesterday. We want to know whether the latter\nvariable influences the former. <i>A</i>(<i>i</i>,<i>j</i>) is how we\nrepresent the social network --- it's 1 if Irene regards Joey as a friend, 0\notherwise. Lurking in the background are the various traits which might affect\nwhether or not Irene and Joey are friends, and whether or not they like to jump\noff bridges, collectively <i>X</i>. Suppose that, all else equal, being more\nsimilar makes it more likely that people become friends.\n\n<p>Now it's easy to see where the trouble lies. If we learn that Joey jumped\noff a bridge yesterday, that tells us something about what kind of person Joey\nis, <i>X</i>(<i>j</i>). If Joey and Irene are friends, <em>that</em> tells us\nsomething about what kind of person Irene is, <i>X</i>(<i>i</i>), and so about\nwhether Irene will jump off a bridge today. And this is so <em>whether or\nnot</em> there is any direct influence of Joey's behavior on Irene's, whether\nor not there is contagion. The chain of inferences — from Joey's\nbehavior to Joey's latent traits, and then over the social link to Irene's\ntraits and thus to Irene's behavior — constitutes what\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/621.html\">Judea Pearl</a> strikingly called a\n\"back-door path\" connecting the variables at either end. When such paths\nexist, as here,\n<i>Y</i>(<i>i</i>,<i>t</i>) will be at least somewhat\npredictable from\n<i>Y</i>(<i>j</i>,<i>t</i>-1), and sufficiently clever regressions will detect\nthis, but they <em>cannot</em> distinguish how much of the predictability is\ndue to the back door path and how much to direct influence. If this sounds\nhand-wavy to you, and you suspect that with some fancy adjustments you can duck\nand weave through it, read the paper.\n\n<p>To switch examples to something a little more serious than jumping off\nbridges, let's take it as a given that (as \n<a href=\"http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/\">Christakis</a>\nand <a href=\"http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/\">Fowler</a> <a href=\"http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/357/4/370\">famously\nreported</a>), if Joey became obese last year, the odds of Irene becoming obese\nthis year go up substantially. They interpreted this as a form of social\ncontagion, and one can imagine various influences through which it might work\n(changing Irene's perception of what normal weight is, changing Irene's\nperception of what normal food consumption is, changes in happiness leading to\nchanges in comfort food and/or comfort alcohol consumption, etc.). Now suppose\nthat there is some factor <i>X</i> which affects both whether Joey and Irene\nbecome friends, and whether and when they become obese. For example:\n<ul>\n<li> becoming friends because they both do extreme sports (like jumping off\nbridges...) vs. becoming friends because they both really like watching the\ngame on weekends and going through a few six-packs vs. becoming friends because\nthey are both confrontational-spoken-word performance artists;\n<li> friendships tend to be within ethnic groups, which differ in their\nculturally-transmitted foodways, attitudes towards voluntary exercise, and\noccupational opportunities;\n<li> (for those more fond of genetic explanations than I am): friendships tend\nto be within ethnic groups, so friends tend to be more genetically similar than\nrandom pairs of individuals, and genetic variants that predispose to obesity\n(in the environment of Framingham, Mass.) are more common in some groups than\nin others.\n</li></li></li></ul>\nSo long as we cannot measure <i>X</i>, the back-door path linking Joey and\nIrene remains open, and our inferences about contagion are confounded. It\nwould be enough to measure the aspect of <i>X</i> which influences link\nformation, or the aspect which influences obesity; but without that, there will\nalways be many ways of combining homophily and contagion to produce any given\npattern of association between Joey's obesity status last year and Irene's this\nyear. And it's not matter of not being able to decide among some causal\nalternatives due to limited data; the different causal alternatives all produce\nthe same observable outcomes.\n(<a href=\"http://bactra.org/reviews/manski-on-identification/\">More on this\nnotion of \"identification\".</a>)\n\n<p>Christakis and Fowler made an interesting suggestion in their obesity paper,\nhowever, which was actually one of the most challenging things for us to deal\nwith. They noticed that friendships are sometimes not reciprocated, that Irene\nthinks of Joey as a friend, but Joey doesn't think of Irene that way —\nor, more cautiously, Irene <em>reports</em> Joey as a friend, but Joey doesn't\nname Irene. For these asymmetric pairs in their data, Christakis and Fowler\nnote, it's easier to predict the person who named a friend from the behavior of\nthe nominee than vice versa. This is certainly <em>compatible</em> with\ncontagion, in the form of being influenced by those you regard as your friends,\nbut is there any other way to explain it?\n\n<p>As it happens, yes. One need only suppose that being a certain kind of\nperson — having certain values of the latent trait <i>X</i> — make\nyou more likely to be (or be named as) a friend. Suppose that there is just a\none-dimensional trait, like your location on the left-right political axis, or\nperhaps some scale of tastes. (Perhaps Irene and Joey are neo-conservative\nintellectuals, and the trait in question is just how violent they like their\n<a href=\"http://www.nypress.com/article-8822-black-metal-nation-what-do-norwegian-dirtheads-and-richard-perle-have-in-common.html\">Norwegian\nblack metal music</a>.) Having similar values of the trait makes you more\nlikely to be friends (that's homophily), but there is always an extra tendency\nto be friends with those who are closer to the median of the distribution, or\nat least to <em>say</em> those are who your friends are. (Wherever\nneo-conservatives really are on the black metal spectrum, they tend to say, on\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/000165.html\">Straussian grounds</a>, that\ntheir friends are those who prefer only the median amount of church-burning\nwith their music.) If Irene thinks of Joey as a friend, but Joey does not,\nthis is a sign that Irene has a more extreme value of the trait than Joey does,\nwhich changes how much their behavior predicts each other. Putting together a\nvery basic model of this sort shows that it robustly generates the kind of\nasymmetry Christakis and Fowler found, <em>even when</em> there is really no\ncontagion.\n\n<p>To be short about it, unless you actually know, and appropriately control\nfor, the things which really lead people to form connections, you really have\nno way of distinguishing between contagion and homophily.\n\n<p>All of this can be turned around, however. Suppose that you want to know\nwhether, or how strongly, some trait of people influences their choices.\nFollowing a long tradition\nwith <a href=\"http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2\">many\nillustrious exponents</a>, for instance, people are very convinced that social\nclass influences political choices, and there is indeed a predictive\nrelationship here, though many people are\n<a href=\"http://redbluerichpoor.com/\">totally wrong</a> about what that\nrelationship is. The natural supposition is that this predictive relationship\nreflects causation. But suppose that there <em>is</em> contagion, that you can\ncatch ideology or even just choices from your friends. Social class is\ndefinitely a homophilous trait; this means that an opinion or attitude or\nchoice can become entrenched among one social class, and not\nanother, <em>simply</em> through diffusion, even if there is no intrinsic\nconnection between them. And there's nothing special about class here; it\ncould be any trait or combination of traits which leads to homophily.\n\n<p>Here, for example, is a simple simulation done using\nAndrew's <a href=\"http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ElectroGraph/index.html\">ElectroGraph</a>\npackage. \n<center>\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/diffusion-initial-act.pdf\"><img height=\"400\" src=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/diffusion-initial-act.jpg\"></a>\n</center>\nTo explain: Each individual has a social type or trait, which takes one of two\nvalues and stays fixed — think of this as social class, if you like.\nPeople are more likely to form links with those of the same type, so when we\nplot the graph in a way which brings linked nodes closer to each other, we get\na nice separation into two sub-communities, with all the upper-class\nindividuals in the one on top and all the lower-class individuals in the one\nbelow. Also, each individual makes a "choice" which can change over time,\nwhich again is binary, here "red" or "blue". Initially, choices are completely\nindependent of traits, so there's just as much red among the high-class\nindividuals as among the low.\n\n<p>Now let the choices evolve according to the simplest possible rule: at each\npoint in time, a random individual picks one of their neighbors, again at\nrandom, and copies their opinion. After a few hundred such updates, the lower\nclass has turned red, and the upper class has turned blue:\n<center>\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/diffusion-midway-act.pdf\"><img height=\"400\" src=\"http://bactra.org/sloth/diffusion-midway-act.jpg\"></a>\n</center>\nAnd this isn't just a fluke; the pattern of color separation repeats quite\nreliably, though which color goes with which class is random. If you wanted to\nbe more quantitative about it, you could, say, run a logistic regression, and\ndiscovery that in the homophilous network, statistically-significant prediction\nof choice from trait is possible, but not in an otherwise-matched network\nwithout homophily; you can see those results in the paper. A bit more\nabstractly, when I\nlearned <a href=\"http://bactra.org/notebooks/cellular-automata.html\">cellular\nautomata</a> from <a href=\"http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/cook.html\">David\nGriffeath</a>, one of the topics was something called the \"voter model\", which\nis just the rule I gave above for copying choices. On a regular\ntwo-dimensional grid, the voter model\n<a href=\"http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/archive/recipe72.html\">self-organizes from\nrandom noise</a>\ninto <a href=\"http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/archive/recipe7.html\">blobs of\nhomogeneous color</a>\nwith <a href=\"http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aop/1176992521\">smooth\nboundaries</a>; this is just the corresponding behavior on a graph. As I have said\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/notebooks/neutral-cultural-networks.html\">several</a> <a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/404.html\">times</a> <a href=\"http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.4911\">before</a>,\nI think this phenomenon — correlating traits and choices by homophily\nplus contagion — seriously complicates a lot of what people want to do in\nthe social sciences and even the humanities, but since I <em>have</em> gone on\nabout that already, I won't re-rant today.\n\n<p>In their own way, each of the two models in our paper is sheer elegance in\nits simplicity, and I have been known\nto <a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/517.html\">question the relevance of such\nmodels for actual social science</a>. I don't think I'm guilty of violating my\nown strictures, however, because I'm not saying that the processes of, say,\nspreading political opinions really follows a voter model. (The reality\nis <a href=\"http://www.powells.com/partner/27627/biblio/9780521542234\">much\nmore complicated</a>.) The models make vivid what was already proved, and show\nthat the conditions needed to produce the phenomena are not actually very\nextreme.\n\n<p>My motto as a writer might as well be \"the urge to destroy is also a\ncreative urge\", but in this paper we do hold out <em>some</em> hope, which is\nthat even if the causal effects of contagion and/or homophily cannot be\nidentified, they might be bounded, following the approach pioneered by\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/reviews/manski-on-identification/\">Manski</a> for\nother unidentifiable quantities. Even if observable associations would never\nlet us say exactly how strong contagion is, for instance, they might let us say\nthat it has to lie inside some range, and if that range excludes zero, we know\nthat contagion must be at work. (Or, if the association is <em>stronger</em>\nthan contagion can produce, something else must be at work.) I suspect (with\nno proof) that one way to get useful bounds would be to use the pattern of ties\nin the network to divide it into sub-networks or, as we say in the\ntrade, <a href=\"http://bactra.org/notebooks/community-discovery.html\">communities</a>,\nand use the estimated communities as proxies for the homophilous trait. That\nis, if people tend to become friends because they are similar to each other,\nthen the social network will tend to become a set of clumps of similar people,\nas in the figures above. So rather than just looking at the tie between Joey\nand Irene, we look at who else they are friends with, and who their friends are\nfriends with, and so on, until we figure out how the network is divided into\ncommunities and that (say) Irene and Joey are in the same community, and\ntherefore likely have the similar values of <i>X</i>, whatever it is.\nAdjusting for community might then <em>approach</em> actually adjusting\nfor <i>X</i>, though it couldn't be quite the same. Right now, though, this\nidea is just a conjecture we're pursuing.\n\n<p><em>Manual trackback</em>: <a href=\"http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/04/contagion_and_homophily.html\">The Monkey Cage</a>;\n<a href=\"http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/04/30/shalizi-on-the-confounding-of-contagion-and-homophily-in-social-network-studies/\">Citation Needed</a>;\n<a href=\"http://healthyalgorithms.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/network-theory-in-health-metrics/\">Healthy Algorithms</a>;\n<a href=\"http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2010/05/links-and-notes.html\">Siris</a>;\n<a href=\"http://sarcozona.org/2010/05/02/what-ive-noticed-53/\">Gravity's Rainbow</a>\n\n<p><span>\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_networks.html\">Networks</a>;\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_enigmas_of_chance.html\">Enigmas of Chance</a>;\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_complexity.html\">Complexity</a>;\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_social_science.html\">Commit a Social Science</a>;\n<a href=\"http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_selfcentered.html\">Self-Centered</a>\n</span></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "The mystery of Naomi Campbell and the blood diamond | Hadley Freeman",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/61141?ns=guardian&pageName=The+mystery+of+Naomi+Campbell+and+the+blood+diamond+%7C+Hadley+Freeman%3AArticle%3A1391556&ch=Comment+is+free&c3=Guardian&c4=Celebrity%2CNelson+Mandela+%28News%29%2CCharles+Taylor%2CABC+%28US+media%29&c6=Hadley+Freeman&c7=10-Apr-28&c8=1391556&c9=Article&c10=Comment&c11=Comment+is+free&c13=&c25=Comment+is+free&c30=content&h2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>You may not have heard this story. Allow me to lower your brow. And then mop it</p><p>Newspaper columns are, apparently, supposed to be agenda-setting. They're supposed to made of the silken fabric of the zeitgeist, then studded with the sequins of aperçus and interwoven with the silver thread of wit, like a cheap sarong from Monsoon that has been<strong> </strong>left floating on the sales rack. And so, with just eight days to go before the general election, it would make sense to talk politics. Will Clegg ally himself with Cameron? Will Mandelson ally himself with the Queen and become the next ruler of this country?</p><p>But I don't want to talk about any of those things. I want to talk about the mystery of Naomi Campbell and the blood diamond.</p><p>Occasionally, a story comes along that is just so stuffed with glories it is hard to believe it's not from the pen of Chris Morris. Naomi Campbell and the blood diamond is one such story. Perhaps you have heard a whisper of this tale from a downmarket rag. Because you are a Guardian reader and your brow is raised high, it is likely you have not. Allow me to lower your brow. And then mop it.</p><p>Our tale begins one evening in 1997 in the home of Nelson Mandela, a man whose saintliness is never to be questioned. His unwavering fondness for Slugger Campbell is, therefore, one of those things that most of us are just too mortal to understand.</p><p>Campbell was spending the night at Mandela's house, as was Mia Farrow. I reiterate, it is not for humble mortals to query Mandela's social circle. The main thing is, something may have happened that night. Whether it did or not may not ever be fully known. But if it did, the UN-backed special court in The Hague would quite like to know.</p><p>Our story now fast-forwards almost a decade, and Farrow has just remembered something about that party round at Nelson's. According to her, the next morning Campbell came to her and said that in the middle of the night, some representatives from one Charles Taylor gave her a diamond. \"I just thought, 'What an amazing life Naomi has!'\" Farrow told ABC News.</p><p>Doesn't she just. You see, there was a small detail that I omitted about that 1997 slumber party: along with Campbell and Farrow, there was one other house guest – namely Taylor, the former president of Liberia who is on trial in The Hague for atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, including orchestrating the raping, torturing, killing and eating of hundreds of thousands of people.</p><p>Naomi Campbell, Mia Farrow and President Charles Taylor: you gotta hand it to Mandela, the man sure knows how to compile a guest list. Isn't it funny how, <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/qa\" title=\"Guardian: The Q&A\">while Mandela is always everyone's fantasy dinner guest</a>, he opts for the dream team of Campbell and Taylor? But I digress.</p><p>Here the story might have died, were it not for the fact that Taylor is now on trial for some really inconvenient, you know, things; and were it not also for the fact that, if Taylor did give Campbell a diamond – something that he has denied, along with many other things he is currently denying these days – it could have been a blood diamond. This is not a diamond that is covered in blood, like the ones on Campbell's phone after she embeds it in a maid's skull, but rather a diamond given to Taylor by the junta to purchase arms for the Sierra Leone rebels from South African armament manufacturers.</p><p>Campbell's spokeswoman insisted that the model was "co-operating with prosecutors". And again, there this story might have languished, were it not for the fact that Campbell's several bouts of anger management have failed to take root.</p><p>Last week, ABC News tried to go where The Hague could not by getting Naomi to answer some questions. Now is one of those times when I regret having chosen the written word as my instrument because, really, you're just going to have to put down this newspaper and <a href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/video/naomi-campbell-snaps-at-abc-news-10446725\" title=\"Naomi Campbell Snaps at ABC News\">get online to watch this interview</a>, in order to see how it looks when a person's soul leaves their body and is replaced by the cold hard eyes of a killer – as is what happens when the reporter repeatedly asks after the alleged diamond. Naomi then jerks her head, as if showing small children what \"in a huff\" looks like, stands up and – accidentally, on purpose, who can say? – punches the camera.</p><p>This story came at a good time for me. Last week, I made what some might call "a slighting reference" to Mr Sean Penn and his occasional international rescue efforts in this newspaper. I was duly rebuked by a fellow journalist who had recently been in Haiti, claiming that not only was Penn doing lots of good there, but that he "pulled the internet link to stop other people twittering about how cool they were to be saving the world".</p><p>This was an extremely disturbing revelation: a celebrity who is not only doing good for charity, but who is not a subscriber to the Philosophy of Demi – that if a good gesture is not recorded on Twitter, and ideally illustrated with a picture of oneself holding a cute brown child in one's lap, then it is not worth doing.</p><p>For a few minutes, my entire world view went fuzzy, and every lesson I'd ever learned from Team America seemed tenuous. Wait . . . wait . . . are some celebrities OK? Are their occasional efforts at international diplomacy not entirely laughable?</p><p>To calm myself down, I turned on the TV and there was Naomi, punching a camera when asked if she was given a blood <sup></sup>diamond by an African despot. Thank you, Naomi. Thank you.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/celebrity\">Celebrity</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nelsonmandela\">Nelson Mandela</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/charles-taylor\">Charles Taylor</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/abc\">ABC</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/hadleyfreeman\">Hadley Freeman</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/tnjfgs37ucnl649hfpb0neurik/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fcommentisfree%2F2010%2Fapr%2F28%2Fnaomi-campbell-blood-diamond\" width=\"100%\" height=\"60\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"title" : "god, jeep",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif;font-size:15px;line-height:22px\"><p>Compare <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIEBVDCNK28\" style=\"color:rgb(51,0,204);text-decoration:none\">Jeep’s new tag line</a> – its content and order – with my favorite line from Paul’s speech on Mars Hill (Acts 17):</p><table border=\"1\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\"><tbody><tr><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>in him</p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>we live</p></td><td width=\"79\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>and move</p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>and are*</p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p> </p></td></tr><tr><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p> </p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>i live.</p></td><td width=\"79\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>i ride.</p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>i am.</p></td><td width=\"65\" align=\"center\" valign=\"top\" style=\"font-weight:normal\"><p>Jeep</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I guess if <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-CEO-Ancient-Visionary-Leadership/dp/0786881267\" style=\"color:rgb(51,0,204);text-decoration:none\">Jesus, CEO</a>, has come, can Paul, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_marketing_officer\" style=\"color:rgb(51,0,204);text-decoration:none\">CMO</a>, be far behind?</p><p>*New American Standard’s version of the line, which I otherwise quote here, ends with “exist,” but the NAS acknowledges in its notes that the original word is literally translated “are.\"</p><p style=\"font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',Times,serif;font-size:15px;line-height:22px\"> </p></span>"
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"title" : "Remembering Romero: The Murder that Ruptured El Salvador",
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"content" : "<div style=\"width:220px\">\n <img src=\"http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l19033KL2l1qa1cnp.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"width:210px\"><div>Archbishop Romero surrounded by nuns, shortly after being gunned down at Mass, El Salvador, March 24, 1980 (Eulalio Pérez)</div>\n</div>\n\n<p>I was in Managua, Nicaragua, thirty years ago, recovering from dengue fever, when my editor at <em>The Guardian</em> called from London to say that I should get on the next plane to San Salvador: the Archbishop of El Salvador had been gunned down while saying Mass. I remember laughing at the impossibility of this too literary story—Murder in the Cathedral; of course it wasn’t true!—and then feeling sick. Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a self-effacing, not particularly articulate, stubborn man, who insisted every day on decrying the violence and terror that ruled his country, was, after all, the hierarch of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He had all the weight of the Vatican behind him, and the natural respect of even the most right-wing zealot for such a holy office. And then there was the act itself: murder at the most sacred moment of the Catholic Mass. Who, in such a Catholic country, would dare to violate the transubstantiation of Christ’s body?</p>\n\n<p>But of course the story was true. At around 6:30 <span>PM</span> on Monday, March 24, 1980, a red <span>VW</span> Passat drove up to the small, graceful chapel of the Divina Providencia Hospital, a center run by Carmelite nuns where Romero lived. It was, as it almost always is in San Salvador, a hot day, and the wing-shaped chapel’s doors were open. As Romero, standing at the altar, prepared to raise the host for consecration, a tall, thin bearded man in the passenger seat of the <span>VW</span> raised an assault rifle and fired a single .22 bullet into the archbishop’s heart. Then, in no particular hurry, the car drove away. A grainy black-and-white photograph from that day shows the victim on the floor. As Romero’s heart pumps out the last of its blood, the white-coiffed nuns gather around him like the points of a star, or like the figures at the feet of the Christ in Rennaissance murals, which were intended simultaneously as representations and as prayers.</p>\n\n<p>Historical turning points are so often the result of stupidity. The Sandinista Revolution, which had triumphed in Nicaragua barely eight months before, had set the dream of revolution flaring across Central America. But Romero’s murder, and the mayhem and bloodshed set off by a sharpshooter at his funeral the following Saturday, were perhaps the immediate sparks for the bloody twelve-year civil war that started just months later, with the <span>US</span> providing financial and military backing to the government side. It is hard to overstate how fervently the campesinos of El Salvador believed in Romero. When he was gone, entire villages placed themselves at the disposal of the now united guerrilla factions.</p>\n\n<p>Archbishop Romero made a long journey to arrive at his death. Hardworking and conscientious, he rose through the ranks and eventually became bishop of the rural province of San Miguel, maintaining all the while a strict distance from Liberation Theology and what he called the left’s “mysticism of violence.” By then, however, the insistent defense of human rights by the new generation of radicalized priests and nuns, and the murderous government’s determination to violate those rights, particularly in the case of the landless peasantry, had created a small army of conscripts for the guerrilla organizations, which promised an equal and just world order born of socialist revolution.</p>\n\n<p>During the presidency of General Arturo Molina (1972–1977), the army and security forces were essentially transformed into death squads: Romero watched in horror as campesinos in his parish were displaced, threatened, terrorized, and, increasingly, shot, stabbed, or hacked to death by underfed, underage soldiers wielding machetes against their own kind. He began speaking out against these atrocities and received his first death threat (from General Molina himself, who wagged a finger at him and warned that cassocks were not bullet-proof). And then, in 1977, just weeks after Romero had been ordained archbishop, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, a close friend of Romero’s who had been organizing landless peasants, was shot down on a country road along with two of his parishoners.</p>\n\n<div style=\"width:250px\">\n <img src=\"http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1903kkH7u1qa1cnp.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"width:240px\"><div>Romero with seminarians, undated (Photography Center \n of El Salvador)</div>\n</div>\n\n<p>All Romero’s contradictory feelings about Church and duty, repression and human dignity, his native distrust of radicalism and politics, his caution and, no doubt, his fear, appear to have resolved themselves at that moment. With the same methodical determination that seems to have characterized his rise to the archbishopry, he spent the next three years organizing human rights watchdog groups, asking President Jimmy Carter to suspend military aid to the murderous junta, and speaking out—plainly, but never unreasonably—against the government. “It is sad to read that in El Salvador the two main causes of death are: first diarrhea, and second murder,” he would say. “Therefore, right after the result of malnourishment; diarrhea, we have the result of crime; murder. These are the two epidemics that are killing off our people.”</p>\n\n<p>Around this time, I made many trips to the countryside. But it was only two years later, after Romero’s funeral had dissolved into grim chaos, that I had my first real understanding of the feudal ignorance in which Salvadoran campesinos were kept. As red-robed cardinals from abroad milled around the vast unfinished cathedral together with humble worshipers who had lost their shoes, their false-teeth, their satchels or their eyeglasses in the stampede to escape from a sniper’s bullets, everyone trying to understand what had happened, and why, a tiny, trembling man approached my friend, the photographer Pedro Valtierra. “Please, my daughter’s lost.” he said, and then he repeated several times, until we understood: “Please use your loudspeaker to call out her name.” He was pointing to Valtierra’s camera.</p>\n\n<p>Those were the days before the Internet or even faxes, and the lone opposition newspaper, <em>El Independiente</em>, was more or less gagged. The murders and disappearances carried out by death squads, army officers, and a notorious security force called, for inexplicable reasons, the Treasury Police were unreported, but Romero took to reading a detailed account of the week’s brutalities. The sermons were broadcast over the Catholic radio station, and campesinos all over the country gathered around a radio to listen to them. So did the military.</p>\n\n<p>The once conservative archbishop, who had been trained and nurtured not in his homeland but in Rome, became the government’s most visible opponent. Later he would say that when he stood on the dirt road where Father Rutilio Grande had been murdered and contemplated his friend’s corpse, he thought, “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.”</p>\n\n<p>Thanks to an <a href=\"http://www.elfaro.net/es/201003/noticias/1416/\">extraordinary reportage</a> posted last month on the Salvadoran online newspaper <em>El Faro</em> we know that the tall, skinny shooter who killed Romero was contracted by General Arturo Molina’s son, while the weapon and the getaway car were provided by the drinking buddies and death squad associates of a former Army major called Roberto D’Aubuisson. Not that anyone doubted from the moment it happened that the murder was D’Aubuisson’s work. He died of cancer of the esophagus at the age of forty-seven, in 1992, but while he lived, this slender, charismatic psychopath was king. Although he was briefly arrested, he was never tried for murder, and soon rose to become the head of the Constituent Assembly; he was defeated only narrowly when he ran for President in 1984. Until last year, the party he founded, which had its origins in the death squad he also put together, governed El Salvador.</p>\n\n<p>Over a two-year period <em>El Faro</em>’s director, Carlos Dada, hunted down and twice interviewed one of the surviving participants in D’Aubuisson’s conspiracy against the Archbishop, a former Air Force pilot by the name of Álvaro Saravia. Four other alleged co-conspirators named by Saravia have been killed, another committed suicide. Some, like, Mario Molina, son of former President Arturo Molina, are enjoying the good life, but Saravia, pursued by his own demons, is living in abject poverty in another Latin American country not disclosed in the newspaper’s report. Perhaps out of sheer loneliness, he told his story to <em>El Faro</em>.</p>\n\n<p>Saravia recounts the details about the hit man and Mario Molina’s role in hiring him. He also reveals that an announcement placed in <em>La Prensa Grafica</em> by Jorge Pinto, the owner of the independent newspaper <em>El Independiente</em>, inadvertently sealed Romero’s fate. Published on the morning of March 24, it informed readers that the archbishop would celebrate a Mass in memory of Pinto’s mother at 6 <span>PM</span> that afternoon, in the Divina Providencia chapel. Hung over after a party with other members of D’Aubuisson’s group, Saravia woke to the news that the boss had ordered Romero’s murder at this conveniently secluded location.</p>\n\n<p>Karol Wojtyla had just been annointed pope at the time of Romero’s murder, and with the assistance of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he was busy dismantling the progressive church of Latin America. Pope John Paul <span>II</span>’s response to the crime—he called it “a tragedy”—was hardly as emphatic as his attacks on the pro-Sandinista clergy when he visited Nicaragua four years later. A spontaneous movement in favor of Romero’s canonization has been stalled for years now in Rome.</p>\n\n<p>But for the Church rank-and-file Romero has become an extraordinarily meaningful figure, as a quick Internet search of his name can attest. We can find evidence of this in yet another work intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his death: a documentary film, <em>Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero</em>, directed by Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber, and produced by the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame, a Catholic university.</p>\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n<p>The film is, unintentionally perhaps, or at least effortlessly, a hagiography, a record of a saintly life. It is an astonishing compilation of footage from the last three years of Romero’s life, not only of the archbishop himself but of army patrols and mothers of the disappeared and guerrillas on the move—and above all of those unforgettable Masses in which the small, unprepossessing archbishop read out loud the record of the government’s atrocities while hundreds of ragged, persecuted campesinos listened in gratitude, their existence and suffering recognized at last.</p>\n\n<p>I interviewed Romero two or three times before he died, and although I cannot locate any of my notebooks from those dreadful years, I have the distinct recollection that he did not say anything particularly scintillating or inspirational or visionary: he was deeply distrustful of rhetoric and purposefully self-effacing. Instead of words I have the memory of a peculiar ducking gesture he used to make with his head when, after Sunday Mass, he stood outside the Cathedral doors shaking hands with every single one of the knobby-jointed, malnourished campesinos who came from miles away to hear him, a few coins knotted into their handkerchiefs for the journey back. They would clasp his hand and stare into his face and try to say something about what he meant to them, and he would duck his head and look away: <em>not me, not me</em>.</p>\n\n<div style=\"width:280px\">\n <img src=\"http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l19042nL2w1qa1cnp.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"width:270px\"><div>Nuns leaving the cathedral after the funeral of Romero, El Salvador, March 30, 1980 (Harry Mattison)</div>\n</div>\n\n<p>The day before his murder, on Sunday March 23, after the long dreadful months in which four American churchwomen had been killed, and a cropduster had sprayed insecticide on a protest demonstration, and we reporters had gone nearly mad from the obligation to hunt every morning for the mutilated corpses that D’Aubuisson’s people had left at street corners the night before, and distraught mothers lined up every day outside the archbishopry’s legal aid office asking for help in finding their disappeared children, and the waking nightmare of El Salvador clamored to the very heavens for justice, Óscar Arnulfo Romero for the first time spoke in exclamation points during his Sunday homily.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I want to make a special request to the men in the armed forces: brothers, we are from the same country, yet you continually kill your peasant brothers. Before any order given by a man, the law of God must prevail: “You shall not kill!”… In the name of God I pray you, I beseech you, I order you! Let this repression cease!</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The next day he was shot.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em>Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero</em>, a film directed by Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber.</strong></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?a=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?i=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?a=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?i=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?a=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?a=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nyrblog?i=BNhXZXp-7XE:jgzXnn07QKs:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/nyrblog/~4/BNhXZXp-7XE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Africa: Jack Abramoff - The Savimbi Years",
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"content" : "Those who've caught the trailer for Alex Gibney's new documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, about the rise and fall of Washington super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, will no doubt have caught the footage of what looks like the Jamboree in Jamba...<br><br><br><br>...a 1985 get together organized by Abramoff and hosted by UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi , who, even though he was said to be a"
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"title" : "Conversations with a Mali mobile field technician",
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"content" : "<p>Now feeling better after a crappy bout of malaria, I'm getting the chance to revisit a couple of posts that got left behind, like this one from Mali as I was trying to make my way back from Dogon Country to Bamako. Given that the <a href=\"http://subsaharska.com/eng/articles/main/nor1268656229/\">bus was a fail</a>, the only plausible option seemed to be hitchhiking. Amazingly, it worked out quite well in the end and through a series of private cars, my wife and I managed to get to Bamako in probably half the time of the bus. Never thought I'd be hitchhiking across Africa in my 30s.\n</p><p>It was the segment from Djenné to Ségou that was the most interesting though, due to it being a fellow in a Caterpillar company truck picking us up. All along I thought that these guys were just roving salesmen for the equipment. In the US and Europe, I only know them as makers of kick ass heavy machinery that someday I would love to own one of everything they make. But no, in Mali, as well as Côte d'Ivoire and many other countries I'd assume, they're doing what it is that the US does best these days in providing services. In these case, they provide technicians to service the generators that they build. I assume that they give a steep discount on the machinery if the customer agrees to the service given that that is where all the money is now.\n</p><p>Anyways, this fellow worked for this contracting arm and while he didn't know the specifics of mobile broadcasts systems in Mali, he knew what it took to keep them running for Orange. His daily job consists of driving massive distances around the country to make sure that the generators for the mobile towers stay fully functional. We happened to encounter him as he was heading in to Ségou for some new parts, but usually he stays way out east.\n</p><p>\n</p><p><b>What is the normal antenna tower deployment?</b>\n</p><p>In places where there is decently regular electricity, there is only one backup generator. In places that are more remote or where there is never electricity, there are two.\n</p><p><b>How often do they get maintenance? What are the usual problems?</b>\n</p><p>They get regular maintenance every month. The dust is the biggest problem. It coats the machinery and all the moving parts, so they have to be cleaned quite thoroughly. Actual breakdowns are quite rare as the machinery can handle the environment, as long as it is maintained.\n</p><p><b>How long can a tower run on only generator power?</b>\n</p><p>Three months. Each tower with two generators has a 5,000L tank of fuel. The generators take shifts running with each rotating out every six hours to properly cool down and rest. They can run for three months uninterrupted, but since we visit them each month, the places without power run constantly.\n</p><p><b>How dense are the tower distributions, such as in Mopti or Timbuktu?</b>\n</p><p>In Mopti [approx. 100,000 people, densely populated] there are two towers. In Timbuktu [a few more than 100,000, but more spread out] there are six towers. In Bamako and other towns, I don't know offhand because I don't service them.\n</p><p>\n</p><p>And from there we chatted about the weather and other things until he dropped us off and we were picked up by some other kind souls to cart us the rest of the way to Bamako. That last bit about deployment was quite interesting to me as it shows that where they can somehow get away with it, the mobile operators will run the bare minimum amount of towers they can to maximize profits. Sure, voice quality is worth spit, but signal exists in theory and so does their coverage even if you can't make a call or send an SMS. Again, proof that despite this being the \"fastest growing mobile market in the world\" there are all kinds of problems with mobile in Africa that fall vastly short of what those outside the continent are promising it can deliver. Definitely one of the more interesting random rides I've had.</p><br> <img src=\"http://www.maneno.org/img/box/2244.jpg\" alt=\"Conversations with a Mali mobile field technician\"><br>"
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"title" : "Sensing the Future - Inaugural Address",
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"content" : "<div style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black\"><div>\n<table style=\"border:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"line-height:0;border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top\"><a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/nomugshot-medium.png?v=0fa9\" alt=\"Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah\" style=\"border:1px solid #ccc;width:50px;height:50px\"></a></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top;padding-left:8px;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt\">\n<div style=\"margin-bottom:1pt;color:black\">\n\n\n\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;color:#00c\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n</div>\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:black\">Sensing the Future - Inaugural Address - <a style=\"text-decoration:none;color:#00c\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=53224d0ba7984c0f95bc30aeb92604c4\" title=\"http://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=53224d0ba7984c0f95bc30aeb92604c4\">http://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasi...</a></div>\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:#737373;font-size:10pt\">\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/ca05b876/sensing-future-inaugural-address\" style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\">April 13</a>\n\nfrom <a style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">delicious</a>\n\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/ca05b876/sensing-future-inaugural-address\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Comment</a>\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/ca05b876/sensing-future-inaugural-address\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Like</a>\n</div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:6pt\">\n<table style=\"border-spacing:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;padding-right:5px;padding-top:2px;vertical-align:top\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/n-comment.png?v=1fa9\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#737373;vertical-align:middle\">My brother's inaugural address at Delft University of Technology as Professor of analog interfacing and sensor design. Would that I had continued to follow his path in electrical engineering. The example he gives of how research into wind sensors led to innovation in temperature sensors. Call it serendipity perhaps or rather manufactured serendipity. We are all proud. - <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"color:#7777cc;text-decoration:none\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a></td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n\n\n</td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Obama’s African Rifles – Partners/Surrogates/Proxies",
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"content" : "<blockquote><p>“We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting whacked . . . We want Africans to go in.”<br>\n…<br>\nWithin the military realm, the terms proxy and surrogate are largely interchangeable.</p></blockquote>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/20-rwandawardrdfreview-4-09.jpg\"><img title=\"RwandaWardRDFreview-4-09\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/20-rwandawardrdfreview-4-09.jpg?w=300&h=200\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\"></a><p>KIGALI, Rwanda - General William E. "Kip" Ward, commander of U.S. Africa Command, reviews a Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) honor guard upon his arrival to the RDF’s Gabiro School of Infantry April 22, 2009. Ward led a U.S. Africa Command delegation on a two-day visit to Rwanda to visit with RDF officials. Ward met with RDF soldiers and toured the Gabiro school, the primary facility for infantry, armor, artillery and engineering training of RDF officers and enlisted members. (U.S. Africa Command Photo by Kenneth Fidler)</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-1-amisom-9-09.jpg\"><img title=\"AMISOM-9-09\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-1-amisom-9-09.jpg?w=300&h=193\" alt=\"AMISOM-September-09\" width=\"300\" height=\"193\"></a><p>AMISOM troups from Uganda in Mogadishu, from an article published in September 2009</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/5-7thkar-mogadishu-1941.jpg\"><img title=\"7thKAR-Mogadishu-1941\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/5-7thkar-mogadishu-1941.jpg?w=300&h=177\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\"></a><p>'C' Company 7th Battalion Kings African Rifles (KAR) at Mogadishu, 1 June 1941, WWII Photo Album of William Henry Rogers</p></div>\n<p>I have included some current pictures of partner/surrogate/proxy military in Africa, and some historic pictures as well. It is important not to forget the history and the heritage of this relationship. Uganda President Museveni’s name <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoweri_Museveni\">means</a> “Son of a man of the Seventh”, in honour of the Seventh Battalion of the King’s African Rifles, the British colonial army in which many Ugandans served during World War II.</p>\n<p>I found one picture of C Company of the 7th Battalion KAR taken in Mogadishu in 1941. It is interesting to note that Ugandan soldiers are currently embroiled in Mogadishu as partners/surrogates/proxies for the United States. The middle picture above is Ugandan soldiers from the current AMISOM mission in Mogadishu.</p>\n<p>Below are pictures of the Kings African Rifles, KAR, during the riots and disturbances in Nyasaland, which marked the end of colonial rule. The KAR acted as partners/surrogates/proxies for British colonial rule. I also added a few pictures of riot control training from a recent AFRICOM partner/surrogate/proxy training exercise in Benin for visual comparison. Experience tells us that in many countries these skills are likely to be used for internal counter insurgency operations and to quell legitimate political dissent, not unlike some domestic assignments given the former Kings African Rifles, who also served heroically in World War II.</p>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/23-kar-1959.jpg\"><img title=\"KAR-1959\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/23-kar-1959.jpg?w=300&h=206\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"206\"></a><p>King's African rifles advance on African rioters at time of emergency. Photos: James Burke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, Mar 01, 1959. By 1959 (in Nyasaland) major disturbances were taking place whereby natives stoned police stations and attacked policemen. A state of emergency was declared, and military forces were brought in to handle the situation. Regiments of the Royal Rhodesian Army and platoons from Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia imported some 2,500 soldiers. The manpower of the police force was expanded to a total of about 3,000, including 200 extra policemen from Britain. Nevertheless, all these efforts were of no avail. The political opposition to British rule, organized in the Nyasaland African Congress, grew stronger and stronger, and the British colonial administration could not but prepare the way for African self-government. After the transition of power in 1962, the new African state of Malawi inherited from its colonial past a police force of some 3,000 agents, consisting of British, Asian and African recruits."</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/14-benin-riotcontrol-6-091.jpg\"><img title=\"Benin-riotcontrol-6-09\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/14-benin-riotcontrol-6-091.jpg?w=300&h=226\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\"></a><p>BEMBEREKE, Benin - Beninese Army soldiers demonstrate their riot control procedures for U.S. Marines during peacekeeping training at the Military Information Center in Bembereke, Benin on June 11, 2009. SHARED ACCORD is a scheduled, combined U.S.-Benin exercise designed to improve interoperability and mutual understanding of each nation’s military tactics, techniques and procedures. Humanitarian and civil affairs events are scheduled to run concurrent with the military training. (Official Marine Corps photo by Lance Corporal Jad Sleiman)</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-3-kar-riotcontrol1959.jpg\"><img title=\"KAR-riotcontrol1959\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-3-kar-riotcontrol1959.jpg?w=300&h=195\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\"></a><p>Nyasaland Riot Control unit 1959</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:310px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/17-beninpractice6-11-09.jpg\"><img title=\"Beninpractice6-11-09\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/17-beninpractice6-11-09.jpg?w=300&h=194\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"194\"></a><p>BEMBEREKE, Benin - A Beninese soldier practices baton strikes during peacekeeping training with U.S. Marines at the Military Information Center in Bembereke, Benin on June 11, 2009. SHARED ACCORD is a scheduled, combined U.S.-Benin exercise designed to improve interoperability and mutual understanding of each nation's military tactics, techniques and procedures. Humanitarian and civil affairs events are scheduled to run concurrent with the military training. (Official Marine Corps photo by Lance Corporal Jad Sleiman)</p></div>\n<div style=\"width:208px\"><a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-4-kar-karibadam19591.jpg\"><img title=\"412-4-KAR-KaribaDam1959\" src=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/412-4-kar-karibadam19591.jpg?w=198&h=300\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\"></a><p>Kariba Dam February 1959. Kariba dam workers went on strike protesting low pay and terrible working conditions. Army riot squads flew to the dam to reinforce security troops after the striking workers stoned buildings and cars. Two special squads of European and African police were put on alert to move at a moments notice to any trouble spot in the British ruled federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. Nevertheless, all these efforts were of no avail. The political opposition to British rule, organized in the Nyasaland African Congress, grew stronger and stronger, and the British colonial administration could not but prepare the way for African self-government. </p></div>\n<p>Maj Shawn T. Cochran wrote <em>Security Assistance, Surrogate Armies, and the Pursuit of US Interests in Sub-Saharan Africa</em> published in the <a href=\"http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/\">U.S. Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly</a> Spring 2010 v.4 #1 (<a href=\"http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2010/spring/cochran.pdf\">PDF</a>). He is quite interesting on the subject of US surrogates and partners in Africa, and on historic and current US efforts to create and use African partners/surrogates/proxies.</p>\n<blockquote><p>In the words of a senior US military officer assigned to AFRICOM, the United States seeks to enhance regional military forces because, “<strong>We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting whacked . . . We want Africans to go in</strong>.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>One thing he points out early on is:</p>\n<blockquote><p>There is no official DoD definition for surrogate force, the second key concept. For many, the term proxy may be more familiar. <strong>Within the military realm, the terms proxy and surrogate are largely interchangeable.</strong> The use here of the latter reflects a desire to establish a degree of distance from the related, yet viscerally more contentious, concept of proxy war. Given the African experience, any allusion to proxy war will likely elicit recollections of how external powers, both in the colonial and Cold War eras, competed by initiating, escalating, and exploiting local conflicts. Today, many who wish to denigrate a given foreign policy in Africa simply apply the label “proxy war” for dramatic effect</p></blockquote>\n<p>I am one of those who uses the label proxy war not just for dramatic effect but to keep in mind an accurate historic context for viewing current US military adventurism in Africa.</p>\n<blockquote><p>… a surrogate force is defined as an organization that serves the needs or interests of a secondary actor—the sponsor—by employing military power in place of the sponsor’s own forces. Implicit within this definition is the requirement for the sponsor to fund, equip, train, or otherwise support the surrogate. The sponsor also must exercise at least some form of control or influence over the surrogate.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Cochran discusses the term partnership:</p>\n<blockquote><p>US policy makers and defense personnel alike speak regularly in terms of “building partner capacity.” The dialogue surrounding the standup of AFRICOM certainly follows this trend. This is probably more palatable than the notion of developing surrogates, but the palatability comes with a downside. Bertil Dunér outlines the three dimensions of a surrogate relationship as<br>\n<strong>compatibility of interests</strong>,<br>\n<strong>material support</strong>,and<br>\n<strong>power</strong>.<br>\nOf the three, <strong>power, or influence, exerted by the sponsor is most critical</strong>.</p>\n<p>… By analyzing, strategizing, and implementing security assistance in terms of a partnership instead of a sponsor-surrogate relationship, one is perhaps more likely to marginalize the critical, albeit controversial, factor of donor influence and control.</p>\n<p>Such marginalization may affect adversely the degree to which security assistance programs achieve US objectives.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Cochran uses two case studies to explore US surrogacy in Africa, the Nigerian intervention in Liberia in 2003, and the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 and its aftermath.</p>\n<blockquote><p>The surge in US security assistance to Nigeria from 2000 to 2003 was closely tied to the US government’s expectation of Nigeria as a lead contributor to subregional and regional peace support operations. From the US point of view, Nigeria’s hesitancy to respond to the Liberian crisis and attempt to pressure the United States into committing its own forces represented a degree of “shirking,” defined within agency theory as not doing all that was contracted or not doing the task in a desirable way.<br>\n…<br>\nBeyond the factor of conflicting goals, shirking is also more likely in situations where there is significant outcome uncertainty and thus significant risk.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Particularly noteworthy to the role of partner/surrogate/proxy is this point that Cochran notes:</p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Nigerian lack of enthusiasm for the mission stemmed in part from the inculcation of democratic practices</strong>. <strong>In a democracy, the state military ultimately serves as an agent of the people. Where Nigerian dictators had been able to employ the military whenever and however they saw fit, the democratically elected leadership, accountable to Nigerian public opinion, found it increasingly difficult to justify and garner public support for the expenditure of troops and national treasure in external conflicts</strong>.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Democracy is likely to discourage military surrogacy. When the people in a country have a say, they must see a good reason and a potentially positive outcome to be willing to spend national blood and treasure. Democracy was at work preventing Nigeria and Ghana from participating in the disastrous US exercise in Somalia. Uganda and Rwanda, being only nominally democracies, and actually run as military governments, make much better surogates and are favorites of the US Africa Command and significant recipients of US military funding. Uganda has contributed a great many soldiers to the Somali exercise. The development of military partners/surrogates/proxies is an enemy of democratic governance.</p>\n<p>Cochran also includes the following quote, which has continent wide implications. In the Cold War you called your enemy a communist in order to get military assistance, only the word has changed.</p>\n<blockquote><p>“<strong>The new game in Somalia is to call your enemy a terrorist in the hope that America will destroy him for you</strong>.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>The US put considerable pressure on Ghana and Nigeria to contribute to the Somali disaster.</p>\n<blockquote><p>… the failure of Ghana and Nigeria to respond is of particular interest. Both received substantial US security assistance funding in 2005 and 2006. Both, at the urging of the United States, pledged troops to AMISOM and in return were promised additional US training and equipment tailored specifically for the operation. The United States also agreed to provide logistical support. Still, despite significant US diplomatic pressure, neither country ever deployed its forces to Somalia, each offering a continuous litany of reasons for the delay. When asked to explain this lack of response despite previous pledges, a senior US military official in the region opined that Somalia “scared the . . . out of them” and that they had no direct interests related to the mission. In other words, “Why would Ghana care about Somalia?”</p></blockquote>\n<p>And that is the key question. There is no reason on earth that benefits Ghana why Ghana should become involved in Somalia. I think Ghana has shown great wisdom. Ghana should be wary, it has received quite a bit of “assistance” through the ACOTA program.</p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Why invest long term without any guarantee of return? Why not just wait until the need arises</strong> and then tailor security assistance to provide only the willing actors with what is necessary for a specific intervention? This would ostensibly eliminate some of the uncertainty inherent in screening and mitigate agency loss from shirking behavior. The United States, in fact, has moved in this direction over the past few years. <strong>ACOTA, in particular, has been utilized repeatedly for such “just in time” security assistance</strong>.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Summing up the US approach to partnerships/surrogates/proxies Cochran writes:</p>\n<blockquote><p>From the case studies, it is apparent that the United States takes two broad approaches to developing surrogate forces in Africa. The first derives from the perceived strategic potential of a key actor. It consists of a longer-term security assistance relationship not tied directly to any specific intervention. …</p>\n<p>The second can be characterized as a “fire brigade” approach. This is more ad hoc and involves a short-term use of security assistance to generate support for a specific intervention and preparing willing participants just prior to deployment.</p></blockquote>\n<p>He has the grace and intelligence to tell us:</p>\n<blockquote><p>One should not take from this discussion that Africa’s problems or threats to US strategic interests in Africa are best dealt with through military means. In most cases, military force, even if employed by a surrogate, is not the answer but sometimes it is. Given the nature of the African security environment, it is sometimes impossible to pursue broader economic, political, and humanitarian aims without a concomitant threat or application of arms.</p></blockquote>\n<p>With the gigantic imbalance between military and civilian spending, and the huge presence and activity of the Africa Command around the continent, and the US not doing much else, all African problems as viewed by the US are likely to be treated like nails requiring a military hammer. With the present imbalance in military to civilian spending, a military hammer is about the only tool on offer from the US.</p>\n<blockquote><p>Through its various security assistance programs, the United States now seeks to build both the capability and willingness of African states to employ military force throughout the region in a manner that supports US strategic interests and precludes the requirement for direct US military intervention. <strong>The United States, in effect, is seeking to develop surrogates</strong>.</p>\n<p>…</p>\n<p>“<strong>We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting whacked . . . We want Africans to go in</strong>.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>Koranteng <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2010/04/codes-of-martial-music.html\">writes</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I have many memories of the two coups I lived through in Ghana …The safe detail that lingers, however, is of the martial music that consumed the radio, and then the TV, airwaves in the ensuing days. … Suffice to say that I have a visceral reaction to military strongmen and their rhetoric – I am blinded by the accompanying blood.</p>\n<p>The martial music of our coups all had this alien, otherworldly aura – as if to remind the listener that <strong>the military in Africa were one of the most ruinous of our colonial inheritances</strong>.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The US Africa Command and the military contractors continue that ruinous colonial tradition, the latest manifestation of that ruinous colonial inheritance.</p>\n<p>________<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.cas.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/zcolpol.html\">By 1959</a> [in Nyasaland]</p>\n<br> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/3135/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com&blog=4054563&post=3135&subd=crossedcrocodiles&ref=&feed=1\">"
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"title" : "Not all fiber is created equal",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal.ars\">http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal.ars</a><div><br></div><div><a href=\"http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal.ars\"></a>(Shameless selfpromotion :-))<br><div><br></div><div><br></div></div>"
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"title" : "One Man Thousand",
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"content" : "<span><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/S66aFmJE9qI/AAAAAAAAA-s/unGEyUm6XXc/s1600/img946.gif\"><img style=\"width:480px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/S66aFmJE9qI/AAAAAAAAA-s/unGEyUm6XXc/s1600/img946.gif\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><span><br></span></span><span><span>The 1976 album <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Asaase Asa</span> (Brobisco KBL 016) was a breakthrough hit for Alex Konadu, establishing him as </span></span><span><span>Ghana's</span></span><span><span> foremost exponent of \"roots highlife.\" The title song is based on a true story about Mr. </span></span><span><span>Asaase Asa, who lost both his wife and sister when they were killed by a falling tree. It is dedicated to all who have lost their loved ones.<br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Obi%20Aware%20Wo.mp3\"><br></a></span></span><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/S67LRce75eI/AAAAAAAAA-0/K2WOxj19wvA/s1600/Asaase+Asa+Little.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:3pt 17px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:200px;height:200px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/S67LRce75eI/AAAAAAAAA-0/K2WOxj19wvA/s400/Asaase+Asa+Little.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span><span>Konadu had been singing since an early age, and became a leader of the Kantamanto Bosco Group before moving on to the band of the well-known <a href=\"http://likembe.blogspot.com/search/label/Akwaboah\">Kwabena Akwaboah</a> for three years and then to the Happy Brothers Band. After going solo he was discovered by the producer A.K. Brobbey and the rest, as they say, is history.<br><br>His ability to draw crowds wherever he goes has given Konadu the appellation \"One Man Thousand.\" Withstanding the vicissitudes of fame and fashion, and staying true to his vision of pure, unadulterated highlife music, he has been an inspiration to Ghanaian musicians for years. While Konadu has issued many wonderful recordings over the decades, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Asaase Asa</span> is still considered one of his most noteworthy achievements. Enjoy!<br><br></span></span><span><span><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Obi%20Aware%20Wo.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Obi Aware Wo</span><br></a><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Me%20Ne%20Me%20Aserene.mp3\"><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Me Ne Me Aserene</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Obiri%20Pajampram.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Obiri Pajampram</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Owuo%20Mpe%20Sika.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Owuo Mpe Sika</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Emum%20Aso%20Dae.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Emum Aso Dae</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Asem%20Ne%20Me%20Ara.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Asem Ne Me Ara</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/Asaase%20Asa.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - Asaase Asa</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Asaase/W%27awu%20Da%20Ho%20No.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Alex Konadu's Band - W'awu Da Ho No</span></a><br><br>Download <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Asaase Asa</span> as a zipped file <a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mymmzcwjt5i\">here</a>. For a taste of Alex Konadu recorded before a live audience, </span></span><span><span>be sure to check out his album <a href=\"http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=182943&highlight=182956\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">One Man Thousand Live in London</span></a>.<br><br></span></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5459104099060577976-105684877909058074?l=likembe.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101",
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"content" : "<p>Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://delicious.com/post?url=http%3A%2F%2Fd-squareddigest.blogspot.com%2F2004%2F05%2Fd-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html&title=The%20D-Squared%20Digest%20One%20Minute%20MBA%20-%20Avoiding%20Projects%20Pursued%20By%20Morons%20101&copyuser=amaah&copytags=zingers+hatchetjob+bush+iraq+war+politics+wisdom+economics+accounting+humour+culture+language+lies+mendacity+buyer%27sremorse&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged zingers\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/zingers\">zingers</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged hatchetjob\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/hatchetjob\">hatchetjob</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged bush\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/bush\">bush</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged iraq\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/iraq\">iraq</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged war\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/war\">war</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged politics\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/politics\">politics</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged wisdom\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/wisdom\">wisdom</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged economics\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/economics\">economics</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged accounting\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/accounting\">accounting</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged humour\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/humour\">humour</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged culture\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/culture\">culture</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged language\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/language\">language</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged lies\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/lies\">lies</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged mendacity\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/mendacity\">mendacity</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged buyer'sremorse\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/buyer%27sremorse\">buyer'sremorse</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/url/8797471ec3fb61c3a752440ae057c3bc\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"title" : "Spock with a Beard: The Sequel",
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"content" : "<p>For some years now, I’ve been morbidly fascinated by the political dark arts -- especially the <em>very</em> dark art of disinformation: the systematic creation and dissemination of false narratives designed to discredit your opponents and/or drive undecided audiences away from their cause.</p>\n\n<p>The difference between disinformation and just plain lying is in the scope of the enterprise: A lie is intended to conceal a specific truth (e.g. "I did not have sex with that woman"). Disinformation, on the other hand, is aimed at constructing an entire alternative reality -- one in which the truth can find no foothold because it conflicts just not with a specific falsehood, but with the entire fabric of the false reality that has been created. It puts the "big" in big lie, in other words.</p>"
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"title" : "EX, nouveau roman en cours : la fin des choses",
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"content" : "<p> </p>\n<p><font color=\"#000033\">Commencer ou finir une histoire, commencer par s’accorder le pardon du vécu, même mal vécu, sans raison particulière et franchir la passerelle du futur, en se préparant à partir, à tout quitter, mais pour aller où ? C’est ce que je me répétais, tandis que les images me sautaient au visage. Dehors encore, des images qui ne s’effaçaient pas de ma mémoire, et c’était déjà trop tard. J’étais expulsée du ventre de ma mère, je n’avais rien à envier aux morts, là même où je me trouvais.</font></p>\n<p><font color=\"#000033\">Un léger bruit de carton bousculé m’avait attirée de l’autre côté de la cuisine. Je savais que l’endroit était infesté de rongeurs. Une petite souris dérapa au quart de tour, en me voyant ouvrir la porte et s’enfuit à toute vitesse, balayant le sol de sa longue queue poussiéreuse. Je réprimai un léger cri de frayeur. J’étais une citadine et n’avais eu que rarement l’occasion d’entrevoir<span> </span>ce genre de bestiole dans mon ancien domicile. Je revis le moment où j’avais franchi pour la dernière fois le seuil de l’appartement que j’avais occupé durant de si longues années, avant d’en être expulsée. Les gros meubles avaient été démontés, puis descendus péniblement par l’escalier. Je les avais entendus résonner d’une manière lugubre contre le châssis des portes trop étroites, j’avais fermé les yeux pour éviter de regarder le pire en face, mais cela n’avait pu empêcher l’inévitable. En rouvrant les yeux, j’avais aperçu les marques laissées sur le bois, comme l’expression de la souffrance indélébile qui sortait dérisoire de mon cœur. Dans mon histoire, rien n’était assez<span> </span>brûlant. Tout me rattrapait au passage et me cherchait sous la peau, m’asphyxiait, sans modifier le cours de l’histoire. J’avais pris goût au paradoxe de la situation, depuis le début des conflits. Je m’étais crue plus forte que les lois, sans réaliser que j’étais perdante, d’emblée. C’était le temps des grands changements, des coupures brutales, la fin d’une époque insouciante, le dernier rire bohême. Je ne savais pas encore ce que cela signifiait d’être ex. Expulsée, poussée dehors, hors de ma vie, de mes habitudes, sans même savoir où aller, où retrouver un semblant de sécurité.J’avais pris contact avec les services sociaux, afin d’éviter le pire. Le journal de la région avait même écrit un article à mon sujet, qui avait été finalement interdit de publication, pour des raisons que j’ignorais. Tout m’était incompréhensible, depuis le début. J’avais l’impression de vivre un cauchemar, sans pouvoir émerger.</font></p>\n<p><font color=\"#000033\">Où était l’époque où je me promenais le long des côtes basques ? J’avais besoin de l’odeur du large pour vivre, du bruit des vagues qui se brisaient sur les rochers, des grains de sable blanc qui caressaient ma peau sous le vent.<span> </span>L’infini du ciel me rattrapait souvent dans un chatoiement de couleurs au changement imperceptible, selon les moments de la journée. Mes larmes se mêlaient aux embruns, selon les émotions qui me submergeaient et leur gravité. J’avais toujours été sensible au contact de l’eau, depuis l’époque de ma petite enfance, lorsque ma mère me prenait par la main pour marcher dans l’océan et raconter mes secrets de petite fille aux vagues attentives. J’étais l’enfant océan, celle qui parlait aux vagues et les entendait soupirer en retour sur mes escapades de petite trop couvée par les femmes de la famille. J’aurais voulu être libre de m’échapper dans le vent, pour courir vers la mer et me blottir en une fois sous l’écume mousseuse des vagues<span> </span>qui me berçaient dans mon élan.<span> </span>J’éprouvais cette envie indicible de traverser la ville jusqu’à la plage déjà bondée de monde, qui m’avait murmuré quelques jours auparavant : « Ouvre bien les yeux et pense à grandir ».</font></p>\n<p><font color=\"#000033\">C’était un concert pour l’eau et le sable, pour les étoiles et le vent, l’eau était tiède, caressante comme des mains et jouait sur ma peau mouillée, la rive n’avait plus de contours, seul le sable découpait mon territoire, convaincu de pouvoir me protéger. Mon corps se cambrait malgré moi, à la rencontre de l’océan, j’ai perçu à ciel ouvert son approche, quand enfin il est entré en moi et m’a fait chavirer. Je le sentais frémir en moi, retarder le moment final et je demeurais moi-même en équilibre, à l’extrême limite du plaisir, suspendue dans le temps qui m’aspirait.</font></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><font color=\"#000033\"><span>J’ai habité la vieille maison biarrote, jusqu’au moment où on l’a rasée. Je ne me souviens<span> </span>que du déménagement dans une autre ville du nord, mon grand père qui avait disparu était revenu et avait fini par trouver la mort dans un lit d’hôpital. La mort était connue pour cela, rentrer dans les vies et les écourter. Coupez! La poussière et la mer, tout est là finalement et se mêle à la réalité. Ce que je veux, moi, c’est le monde et il faudra bien que j’aille le chercher.</span></font><span style=\"font-size:16pt\"></span><br>\n</p>\n<p><span></span>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Dexter Gordon: Doin' Allright and GO",
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"content" : "<div><p>In the spring of 1961, Dexter Gordon was living in Los Angeles,<span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbe980970c-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"4154533731_1cdeb30957\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbe980970c-350wi\" style=\"width:325px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"4154533731_1cdeb30957\"></a> </span>against his will. Born in the city, the dynamic tenor saxophonist had left town in the mid-1940s to work and record in New York. But drug addiction plagued his career just as it was taking off. Arrested in 1952 for possession, he was sentenced to a two-year term. Arrested again on drug charges in California in 1955, Gordon was sentenced this time to a longer stretch. During his years away, the independent sound he had pioneered was leveraged to great advantage by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. Released on parole in 1960, Gordon had to remain in L.A. until the end of April 1961. Which made the phone call he received on April 25, 1961 much sweeter. [Photo of Dexter Gordon with Blue Note founders Alfred Lion, left, and Francis Wolff]</p>\n\n<p>On the line that day was Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion. After some small talk, Lion, in his thick German accent, told Gordon that he wanted to record two albums with him as leader in New <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbebf5970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Alfred1\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbebf5970c-300wi\" style=\"width:300px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> York over the coming weeks. Overjoyed, Gordon asked Lion about money, and they agreed on a fee. The next day Lion sent Gordon a letter confirming their phone conversation. In the correspondence, Lion told Gordon that he wanted to record the first album on May 6th with pianist Horace Parlan, bassist George Tucker and drummer Al Harewood. The rhythm section, Lion wrote, had been recording steadily behind Lou Donaldson and now with tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin.</p>\n\n<p> Lion cautioned in the letter: "I don't want any complicated <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964e7fa970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Bio1\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964e7fa970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>music; but rather some good standards in medium, medium-bright and medium bounce tempos." He also asked Gordon to consider a blues and a slow, walking ballad. "I'd like to make something that can be enjoyed and played on jukeboxes stationed in the soul spots throughout the nation."</p>\n\n<p>Gordon flew East, and the result was <em>Doin' Allright,</em> a masterpiece by any measure and to my ear Gordon's finest recording for the label.<em> </em>At some point <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcc2b0f970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Dexter_gordon_doinallright\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcc2b0f970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> between Lion's letter in April and Gordon's arrival for the May 6th session, Lion added trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to the mix. Hubbard was at his youthful peak (two weeks later he would record <em>Africa Brass </em>with John Coltrane). </p>\n\n<p>Yesterday, I spoke with Maxine Gordon, Dexter's wife, about the vibrant and exciting <em>Doin' Allright</em> session: </p><blockquote><p>"I love <em>Doin' Allright,</em> too. If I had to choose a favorite tune from the album, it would be <em>Society Red. <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf1a7970c-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Gordon\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf1a7970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a> </em>It's something of a theme song that Dexter wrote \nfor himself. 'Society Red' was one of his nicknames along with 'Long Tall' and 'Vice.' I love the way that he and Freddie Hubbard blend to make \nthe tenor sax and trumpet sound unified.</p>\n\n<p>"When Freddie came to Paris in 1986 to record the <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964ec4f970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"1125344\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964ec4f970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> Birdland scenes for the film \n<em>'Round Midnight</em>, he and Dexter played <em>Society Red.</em> They both had \nserious flashback moments. It was 25 years later, but Freddie still \nremembered the tune as though they were still in the studio in '61. Jazz musicians have phenomenal memories I've \nnoticed."</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yesterday I also spoke with Ira <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964ecb2970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Ira headshot\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964ecb2970b-200wi\" style=\"width:200px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a> Gitler, who wrote the album's original liner notes and was close friends with the saxophonist:</p><blockquote><p>"Just after Dexter arrived in New York to record <em>Doin' Allright,</em> I went to see him. I had been assigned by <em>Down Beat</em> to write a feature. It was the first time I had met him personally, and we hit it off immediately. For whatever reason, we became close, and that friendship lasted until he passed in 1990. We saw each other regularly with our families for years in Europe and in New York. I loved his sound. </p>\n\n<p>"His personality was so open, and he had such a quick wit. I had been a great fan of his since the late 1940s. For me, it was an honor to meet him personally. I remember <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf403970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Dexter-Gordon\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf403970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> that day in May 1961. Dexter was excited about recording for Blue Note. The label had become a big deal by the late 1950s, and Dexter was back in New York. Which for him was a relief." </p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Interestingly, despite the power and magnetism of <em>Doin' Allright,</em> Maxine told me <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf548970c-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"AlbumcoverDexterGordon-Go\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcbf548970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>yesterday that Gordon's own Blue Note favorite was <em>GO,</em> recorded on August 27, 1962. Maxine said the reason was simple: "The rhythm section—Sonny Clark on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Dexter said the trio was 'as close to perfect as you can get.' " </p>\n\n<p>After a careful re-listen to both albums, it's still a tough call. Both feature dynamic playing and flawless execution, and both <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964f88e970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Rs_1\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a964f88e970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> are jammed tight with sticks of energy. What you do realize is that what one hears as a listener is often very different from what an album leader hears—and wants. Listeners are fixed on the album's soloist. The soloist, meanwhile, is focused on the rhythm section, for drive, swing and motivation. [Photo by Riccardo Schwamenthal/<a href=\"http://ctsimages.com/\">CTSImages.com</a>] </p><em>Doin' Allright</em> has a melodic toughness, with Hubbard and Gordon operating like two drag racers. The song choices are lyrical and off the beaten path. When Gordon turned up at the<a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcc039f970c-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Smiles\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401310fcc039f970c-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a> recording session, he had reached deep into his bag of lesser-known standards. The three here are <em>I Was Doing All Right</em> (Gershwins), <em>You've Changed</em> (Bill Carey and Carl Fischer) and <em>It's You or No One </em>(Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn). The Gordon originals are <em>For Regulars Only, Society Red</em> and <em>I Want More</em>. What's remarkable is that you can't tell the standards apart from Gordon's own contributions. That tells you just how brilliant Gordon was as a songwriter. <br><p><em>GO</em> is a more tightly wound and competitive album. Sonny Clark's piano punctuates with rhythmic clarity, as though he's pecking <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a96508d7970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Picture 1\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a96508d7970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> out his solos on a typewriter, and Gordon seems to be fencing with him throughout. Higgins on drums has full command of the beat, holding steady on the cymbal while serving up an endless stream of mixed beats on the snare. This album also carries three well-known standards as well as three jazz tunes—<em>Cheese Cake </em>(an original),<em> Second Balcony Jump</em> (by Gerry Valentine for Billy Eckstine's band) and <em>Three O'clock in the Morning</em>, a song from the 1920s.</p>\n\n<p>Both albums are standouts during a period of transition for Gordon, who would depart for an extended stay in Europe in the fall of 1962 and not return to the U.S. until 1976. </p>\n\n<p><strong><span style=\"color:#ff0000\">JazzWax tracks: </span></strong>Both <em>Doin' Allright</em> and <em>GO</em> have been <a href=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a9652bd9970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"41JCY3RV73L._SL500_AA240_\" src=\"http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f088340120a9652bd9970b-250wi\" style=\"width:250px;margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a> remastered as part of Blue Note's Rudy Van Gelder Series. You'll find <em>Doin' Allright</em> and <em>GO</em> at iTunes—or <strong><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Doin-Allright-Dexter-Gordon/dp/B0002IQ9RI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1269290357&sr=8-1\">here</a></strong> and <strong><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Go-Dexter-Gordon/dp/B00000I8UJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1269290424&sr=8-1\">here</a></strong>. The original liner notes in both cases are by Ira Gitler, with updates by Bob Blumenthal. </p><p>Gordon's first album following his prison release in 1960 was <em>The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon</em> (Jazzland). It can be found <strong><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Resurgence-Dexter-Gordon/dp/B000000Z3E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1269348084&sr=8-1\">here</a></strong>. Prior to this album, he had not recorded since 1955.</p>\n\n<p><strong><span style=\"color:#ff0000\">A special JazzWax thanks</span></strong> to Maxine Gordon for sharing with me Dexter Gordon's correspondence. For more, visit the official Dexter Gordon site <strong><a href=\"http://dextergordon.com/\">here</a></strong>. </p>\n\n<p><strong><span style=\"color:#ff0000\">JazzWax clip: </span></strong><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Msqw94XfKk\">Here's</a> Dexter Gordon playing Sonny Stitt's <em>Loose Walk</em> in Denmark in 1964...</p>\n\n<p><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/7Msqw94XfKk%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=450&height=385\" width=\"450\" height=\"385\"></iframe></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Jazzwax/~4/oEbCi_HEvSM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Lucian Msamati and Chipo Chung read from "An Elegy for Easterly"",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9aDYsZihb1g/S6c9atgioxI/AAAAAAAAAb4/sHmSHHjM_y0/s1600-h/Lucian+Reading.jpg\"><img style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:center;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;WIDTH:400px;DISPLAY:block;HEIGHT:282px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9aDYsZihb1g/S6c9atgioxI/AAAAAAAAAb4/sHmSHHjM_y0/s400/Lucian+Reading.jpg\"></a> No one, and I mean no one, does radio like the BBC. Hands down! I came home from Zimbabwe to find floods of emails from Radio 4 listeners who loved the afternoon readings from <em>An Elegy for Easterly</em> last week. As I wote here a few weeks ago, Lucian Msamati and Chipo Chung did the honours, and what a job they did. They did absolute marvels with the many voices in the three stories. I am so pleased and happy, and very, very proud. I also loved the little touches, like the late great Simon Chimbetu closing out <em>The Mupandawana Dancing Champion</em>. Also, at the end of <em>Our Man in Geneva</em>, you catch a little bit of my favourite Tennyson poem as a kid: <em>Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred</em>. <em>Forward the Light Brigade, Charge for the guns he said</em>!.:)<br><br><div><img style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:center;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;WIDTH:400px;DISPLAY:block;HEIGHT:322px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_9aDYsZihb1g/S6c7lQFmbwI/AAAAAAAAAbw/o5CqjkROmug/s400/chipo+posing.jpg\"></div><div><div>If you missed them, you can listen to the stories here:</div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div><a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rb372/Afternoon_Reading_An_Elegy_for_Easterly_The_Mupandawana_Dancing_Champion/\">Lucian Msamati reads <em>The Mupandawana Dancing Champion</em></a>.</div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rb374/Afternoon_Reading_An_Elegy_for_Easterly_My_CousinSister_Rambanai/\">Chipo Chung reads <em>My Cousin-sister Rambanai</em></a>. </div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rb376/Afternoon_Reading_An_Elegy_for_Easterly_Our_Man_in_Geneva_Wins_a_Million_Euros/\">Lucian Msamati reads <em>Our Man in Geneva Wins a Milllion Euros</em>.</a></div><br><div>Lucian and Chipo, you rock in a million fantabulous ways. Thank you! I am also grateful to the BBC, particularly to Elizabeth Allard who produced the shows, and who also sent me the pictures above. Thank you all! </div></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7847684117499939473-3512014313693940552?l=petinagappah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "South Africa: Remembering Sharpeville Massacre",
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"content" : "<p>On 21 March 1960 the South African police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters who were part of political campaign organized by the Pan African Congress (PAC) against pass laws. It is estimated that 69 people were killed on that day in the township of Sharpeville. This horrific event is commonly known as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre\">Sharpeville Massacre </a>.</p>\n<p>Sharpeville massacre was the turning point in the history of political resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. Since 1994, 21 March is Human Rights Day in South Africa. March 21 is also <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_for_the_Elimination_of_Racial_Discrimination\">the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination </a>in memory of the massacre.</p>\n<p>Every March 21st, Rethabile posts a poem to remember Sharpeville massacre. His Sharpeville poem for this year is <a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/2010/03/sharpeville/\">posted on Black Looks</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>the day king walked<br>\nfrom selma to montgomery,<br>\nthe tops of trees shook<br>\nas in a forest, and shivered<br>\nfor this man who had crossed a line<br>\nof centuries in the south, but<br>\neven more south, we worried for our lot,<br>\nresolved as we were to break you,<br>\nbut you to put us with our ancestors.<br>\nof course there have never been questions:<br>\nwhy shoot them in the back? why shoot them?<br>\nwhy shoot? why? but our name got its shrine<br>\nwhere the children now gather,<br>\nfor sixty-nine of us lay on the street<br>\non that day in march sixty. as others<br>\nfilled hospitals and covered cell-floors<br>\nwith clenched bodies, dachau<br>\nwas completed, stowe published her book,<br>\nalcatraz was shut down for good, and<br>\nwe moved from non-whites<br>\nto non-carriers of passbooks.<br>\n© Rethabile Masilo</p></blockquote>\n<p>He also posts a poem by South African political activist and poet <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Brutus\">Dennis Brutus</a>. It is titled, <a href=\"http://poefrika.blogspot.com/2008/09/dennis-brutus-reads.html\">“A Poem About Sharpeville”</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>What is important<br>\nabout Sharpeville<br>\nis not that seventy died:<br>\nnor even that they were shot in the back<br>\nretreating, unarmed, defenseless<br>\nand certainly not<br>\nthe heavy caliber slug<br>\nthat tore through a mother’s back<br>\nand ripped through the child in her arms<br>\nkilling it<br>\nRemember Sharpeville<br>\nbullet-in-the-back day<br>\nBecause it epitomized oppression<br>\nand the nature of society<br>\nmore clearly than anything else;<br>\nit was the classic event<br>\nNowhere is racial dominance<br>\nmore clearly defined<br>\nnowhere the will to oppress<br>\nmore clearly demonstrated<br>\nwhat the world whispers<br>\napartheid with snarling guns<br>\nthe blood lust after<br>\nSouth Africa spills in the dust<br>\nRemember Sharpeville<br>\nRemember bullet-in-the-back day<br>\nAnd remember the unquenchable will for freedom<br>\nRemember the dead<br>\nand be glad.<br>\n© Dennis Brutus</p></blockquote>\n<p>Travel Blog Portfolio <a href=\"http://travelblog.portfoliocollection.com/Blog/Happy-Human-Rights-Day\">wishes all South Africans a safe and peaceful Human Rights day </a>and ask them to learn more about Sharpeville Day.</p>\n<p>How could such atrocities happen and no one is punished?, <a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/2010/03/sharpeville/\">asks Sokari Ekine</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>It’s been a long time coming, but change is gonna come, sang Sam Cooke about America. He could have been singing about South Africa, or the world, even. For what is baffling is how Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976, King’s and X’s murders, the Civil Rights movement, Mandela’s 27 years in jail, not to mention the thousands tortured and killed in South Africa, and tortured and lynched in America, what is baffling is how these have not entered the minds of all and instructed them on the evils of discrimination and segregation in all its forms. That is truly baffling to me.</p>\n<p>It is also amazingly stunning that all these things happened and almost no one got punished for it, no international hunt for the wrong-doers, no motivation to see them “brought to justice,” as George Bush the son would say about so many who had committed so less. Today is a day to remember and to know why it should be remembered</p></blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http://alphacc.blogspot.com/2008/03/good-friday-human-rights-day-or.html\">Alpha Christian discusses the link </a>between Good Friday, Human Rights Day and Sharpeville Day:</p>\n<blockquote><p>In a recent column in the Beeld, Nico Botha, deals with this anomaly where the Good Friday falls on the same date as the Human Rights Day, or, even better, the commemoration of Sharpeville Day. For many the debate was whether we will loose a public holiday as workers.</p>\n<p>Where are we to find the key to link Good Friday to the significance of today, Human Rights day, Sharpeville day ?<br>\nI believe the little dialogue between Jesus and Pilate helps us to start to understand this link.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Michael Trapido remembers this day in his post on Thought Leader titled <a href=\"http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/traps/2010/02/24/sharpeville-redux-and-a-bit-more/\">Sharpeville Redux and a Bit More</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>On that fateful day a group of between 5 000 and 7 000 people converged on the local police station in the township of Sharpeville, offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their pass books.</p>\n<p>As the large crowd gathered the atmosphere was peaceful and festive with less than 20 police officers in the station at the start of the protest. Police and military tried using low-flying jet fighters in an attempt disperse the crowd without success.</p>\n<p>As a result the police set up Saracen armoured vehicles in a line facing the protesters and, at 13:15, incredibly, opened fire on the crowd.</p></blockquote>\n<p>He continues:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The official casualties were 69 people killed, including 8 women and 10 children, with more than 180 injured.</p>\n<p>To date the worst case of police insanity in the history of this country.</p>\n<p>As a result there followed a spontaneous uprising among black South Africans with demonstrations, protest marches, strikes, and riots taking place throughout the country.</p>\n<p>This led to the government declaring a state of emergency on March 30 1960, which saw more than 18 000 people detained.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Texas In Africa notes that Sharpeville<a href=\"http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2010/03/sharpeville.html\"> was the first major turning point in the struggle against apartheid </a>in South Africa and that the massacre led to the militarisation of the anti-apartheid movement:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The rest of the world started to question the regime's racist policies much more openly; South Africa left the commonwealth a year later.</p>\n<p>It also provoked the militarization of the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC's militant wing, MK (Umkhonto wa Sizwe) and Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, both formed soon after the massacre. The next thirty years were marked with horrific acts of violence before - to almost everyone's surprise - the evil of apartheid ended peacefully.</p>\n<p>Five years later to the day, American civil rights protesters led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began marching from Selma to Montgomery. The attempt by 600 marchers to do the same thing three weeks earlier culminated in Bloody Sunday, an attack by local and state law enforcement officials. With a protective order from a federal judge, five times as many marchers turned out for the March 21 walk. A few months later, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, which effectively ended the last vestiges of legal discrimination in the south.</p>\n<p>My students (whom, you will remember, are almost all black men) sometimes debate the question: “Are you a Malcolm or a Martin?” What they mean by this is, “Is social change best achieved through peaceful means (as MLK carried out his work) or violent means (as Malcolm X advocated)?”</p>\n<p>I cannot even begin to claim to be qualified to answer this question. If we look at political history, it's clear that MLK's nonviolent methods worked to restore voting rights and some degree of social equality for American minorities, and they worked relatively quickly. MK and Poqo's violent methods certainly also had an effect on the apartheid regime, although the struggle was very long and ultimately did not end because of violence but rather because of economic turmoil and Mandela's willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement with de Klerk. But nothing approaching true equality of economic opportunity has happened for the vast majority of blacks in either country.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Ab<a href=\"http://abioye-berbiciangriot.blogspot.com/2010/03/sharpeville-massacre-50-years-later.html\">ioye discusses</a> the international dimension of Sharpeville Day:</p>\n<blockquote><p>In 1966 the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. The Canadian government and various institutions in Canada including Carleton University and the University of Toronto, colluded with the white supremacist apartheid government of South Africa by refusing to<br>\ndivest and continuing to trade with the government and South African companies.</p></blockquote>\n<p>South Africa Good News <a href=\"http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/benchmarking_progress/mandela_foundation_remembers_sharpeville_massacre.html\">has posted a statement </a>from Nelson Mandela Foundation:</p>\n<blockquote><p>March 21, 2010, marks 50 years since 69 unarmed protestors were killed by South African police outside a police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg.</p>\n<p>Nelson Mandela burning his pass on March 28, 1960, in protest to the atrocities at SharpevilleWhen commemorating Human Rights day, during his presidency, Nelson Mandela said: “21 March is South African Human Rights Day. It is a day which, more than many others, captures the essence of the struggle of the South African people and the soul of our non-racial democracy. March 21 is the day on which we remember and sing praises to those who perished in the name of democracy and human dignity. It is also a day on which we reflect and assess the progress we are making in enshrining basic human rights and values.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>Photographer Greg Marinovich has <a href=\"http://www.gregmarinovich.com/BLOG/?p=456\">Sharpeville Massacre photos </a>on his blog. </p>\n<p>The Sharpeville Massacre led to new ways of political organisation and resistance. The African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) were banned after the Sharpeville Massacre. </p>\n<p>Monako Dibetle notes in his column in the Mail & Guardian that <a href=\"http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-03-19-sharpeville-is-still-bleeding\">Sharpeville is still bleeding</a>. Recently, the residents of Sharpeville<a href=\"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article7043244.ece\"> rioted over poor social services </a>.</p>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black\"><div>\n<table style=\"border:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"line-height:0;border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top\"><a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/nomugshot-medium.png?v=0fa9\" alt=\"Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah\" style=\"border:1px solid #ccc;width:50px;height:50px\"></a></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;vertical-align:top;padding-left:8px;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:11pt\">\n<div style=\"margin-bottom:1pt;color:black\">\n\n\n\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;color:#00c\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n</div>\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:black\">Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba Senate Testimony on Iraqi Prisoner Report - <a style=\"text-decoration:none;color:#00c\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2004/05/11/HP/A/704/Maj+Gen+Antonio+Taguba+Senate+Testimony+on+Iraqi+Prisoner+Report.aspx\" title=\"http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2004/05/11/HP/A/704/Maj+Gen+Antonio+Taguba+Senate+Testimony+on+Iraqi+Prisoner+Report.aspx\">http://www.c-span.org/Watch...</a></div>\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:2px;color:#737373;font-size:10pt\">\n<a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/b956a73c/maj-gen-antonio-taguba-senate-testimony-on\" style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\">March 17</a>\n\nfrom <a style=\"color:#737373;text-decoration:none\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">delicious</a>\n\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/b956a73c/maj-gen-antonio-taguba-senate-testimony-on\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Comment</a>\n- <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng/b956a73c/maj-gen-antonio-taguba-senate-testimony-on\" style=\"color:#77c;text-decoration:none\">Like</a>\n</div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div style=\"margin-top:6pt\">\n<table style=\"border-spacing:0;border-collapse:collapse\">\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;padding-right:5px;padding-top:2px;vertical-align:top\"><img src=\"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/n-comment.png?v=1fa9\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\"></td>\n<td style=\"border:0;padding:0;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#737373;vertical-align:middle\">this was the congressional hearing on Abu Ghraib - right after the photos were made public, that got me interested in that bad man Stephen Cambone aka Donald Rumsfeld's enforcer. If war crimes are ever to be prosecuted Cambone will be the one to turn. There are no clean hands - <a href=\"http://friendfeed.com/koranteng\" style=\"color:#7777cc;text-decoration:none\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a></td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n\n\n</td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n</div>\n</div>"
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"title" : "A double flip",
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"content" : "<p>All my closest friends know about my strange obsession with the mathematics of mattress flipping. A few thousand other people also know my secret, since I have written about it in an <em>American Scientist</em> column (<a href=\"http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/group-theory-in-the-bedroom\">HTML</a>, <a href=\"http://bit-player.org/bph-publications/AmSci-2005-09-Hayes-mattress.pdf\">PDF</a>), which later became a chapter in a <a href=\"http://grouptheoryinthebedroom.com/\">book</a>.</p>\n<p>To recapitulate: Fussy housekeepers rotate their mattress twice a year to ensure even wear. But a mattress has three axes of twofold symmetry (roll, pitch and yaw). Rotating around the same axis over and over will not cycle through all four possible states of the mattress, so you need to vary the procedure. Perhaps you do a roll one time and a yaw the next. But in the spring you may have forgotten which way you turned last fall. Thus the quest for a “golden rule” of mattress flipping:</p>\n<blockquote><p>A golden rule of mattress flipping would be some set of geometric maneuvers that you could perform in the same way every time in order to cycle through all the configurations of the mattress. Following this algorithm might entail extra physical labor on each occasion–perhaps making multiple flips or turns–but at least it would eliminate the mental effort of remembering.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The rules of this peculiar game forbid putting any marks on the mattress (which would break the symmetry). If we abide by this constraint, the multiplication table for the group of flip operations looks like this:</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/2005-09-f2-klein-table.png\" alt=\"2005-09-F2-Klein-table.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"448\" height=\"194\"></p>\n<p><em>R</em>, <em>P</em> and <em>Y</em> indicate half-turns around the roll, pitch and yaw axes; <em>I</em> is the identity or do-nothing operation. This table is bad news for golden rules. We already know that no single operation will cycle through all four states of the system, and the table shows that every combination of two operations is equivalent to some single operation. Hence there is no golden rule.</p>\n<p>There the matter stood until a few days ago, when I received a letter from Tim Knoll:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I just completed reading your collection of columns entitled “Group Theory in the Bedroom” and I wanted to offer up an alternative solution to the mattress flipping problem. I believe if you add one more operation to the mattresses you can achieve your “golden rule.” What you need to add is a second bed to allow a shift operation in addition to the rotations. If you have the second bed oriented in the opposite manner as the first bed (with the first having the headboard facing north, the second facing south) you can simply have an operation of a non-rotating shift from the first (north-facing) bed to the second (south-facing) and then do a shift in addition to a rotate about the pitch axis from the south-facing bed to the north-facing bed. This mattress juggling should also achieve the desired results using the roll axis in the second step. I unfortunately can’t implement this method in my own apartment since it is equipped with one queen-sized bed and one full-sized bed, but my tests using an index card seemed accurate.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Ingenious, no? But is it truly a golden rule? I’m going to leave that question for readers to decide.</p>\n<p>Knoll also points out that even if the new “shift” operation doesn’t yield a golden rule, it does succeed in getting two mattresses flipped with the same mental effort that would otherwise be needed for one mattress. This raises a further question: Why stop at two beds? What about mattress flipping in a barracks, where many beds are lined up in a row? And then there’s the job of flipping mattresses in the Hilbert Hotel, which has infinitely many beds. Does the mental effort per mattress go to zero in this limit?</p>"
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"title" : "Marie N'Diaye : Trois femmes puissantes",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/S5usgrjz7FI/AAAAAAAAB8w/3D8w8K4lMSc/s1600-h/Marie+Ndiaye.jpg\" style=\"clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/S5usgrjz7FI/AAAAAAAAB8w/3D8w8K4lMSc/s320/Marie+Ndiaye.jpg\"></a><br><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">J’ai terminé ce week-end la lecture du récent Goncourt de <a href=\"http://www.evene.fr/celebre/biographie/marie-ndiaye-4814.php\">Marie N’Diaye</a>. <b>Trois femmes puissantes</b>. Et je ne sais pas vraiment par quel bout prendre ce roman, tellement il y a des choses à dire.</span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Le roman «<b> Trois femmes puissantes </b>» s’apparente à la narration de trois parcours de femmes. C’est effectivement la première impression que le lecteur se fait lors de l’entrée en matière avec l’histoire de Norah. Métisse comme l’auteure, cette femme mène sa vie à Paris où elle est avocate, mère d’une fille, évoluant dans une famille qu’elle a recomposée avec Jakob, une sorte de parasite, et la fille de ce dernier. Norah a tant bien que mal bâti un édifice de sa vie à force de rigueur et de sacrifice. Édifice qui se lézarde avec l’intrusion de Jakob...</span><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"></span><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"></span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Comme c’est souvent le cas dans nos tranches de vie terrienne, une nouvelle épreuve s’ajoute à ce contexte déjà branlant quand son père, basé à Dakar, lui demande en toute urgence de venir au Sénégal...</span><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"></span><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"></span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Ce premier texte offre un premier portrait qui, dans le voyeurisme conscient ou inconscient du lecteur, pourra paraître comme le plus autobiographique de ce roman. Au fil des pages, c’est la figure du père que Norah ou les événements nous révèlent. Une figure paternelle qui s’apparente à des portraits que j’ai entendus ça et là dans mon entourage... La figure africaine ayant abandonnée des enfants en Hexagone prend la forme d’une hydre monstrueuse (pléonasme). Ce retour à une source va s’avérer extrêmement violent. Les hommes n’étant pas figés dans le marbre, la confrontation entre Norah avec son père éclate pour un motif auquel elle ne s’attend pas... Le style de ce premier texte n’est pas forcément laborieux, mais il faut prendre le temps de se faire à cette écriture soignée, faite de longues phrases. La chute laissera le lecteur sur sa faim ou plutôt avec de nombreuses pistes.</span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Aussi étonnant que cela pourrait paraître, c’est à partir des divagations d’un homme que semble se former le portrait de la 2<sup>ème</sup> femme puissante. Rudy Descas nous livre ses états d’âme le temps d’une journée. L’homme est à la dérive. Et il tente de garder prise sur Fanta, une jeune sénégalaise qui est venue se perdre dans un trou perdu de la France profonde sur son incitation. Mais la femme puissante est-elle celle qui obsède ou celle à qui on croit tout devoir ? Marie Ndiaye brouille les pistes. Elle joue avec son lecteur à cache-cache. Ce second texte m’a paru long à lire jusqu’à ce que j’arrive au bout de l’escalade. L’art de l’écriture est aussi dans le bouquet final que l’on offre. Ici l’écriture suit le chemin tortueux et torturé du donologue intérieur de Rudy. Intéressant.</span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Le lecteur attentif fera le lien entre Kadhy Demba qui est le personnage principal du dernier texte. Peut-on aussi facilement passer d’un imaginaire, d’un système de pensée à un autre ? D’une avocate métisse à un enseignant blanc expatrié pommé ? De cet enseignant à une veuve sénégalaise illettrée ? Marie Ndiaye y arrive. Avec aisance. Ce dernier texte est sûrement le plus désespéré. Celui qui draine le plus de poésie aussi. </span><br><br><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Tous ces personnages naviguent entre la France, l’eldorado recherché, et le Sénégal terre de contraste. Avec un tel intitulé, on pouvait s'attendre à un texte féministe. Mais les choses sont beaucoup complexes que cela. Si la figure misogyne du père est contestée par une femme, ce sont bien des femmes qui persécutent une veuve sans ressource. La vérité est ailleurs, c'est certain. </span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Naturellement, on cherche les passerelles entre ces textes qui ne sont pas des nouvelles. Elles ne sont pas là ou on les attend. C’est avant tout une histoire de volatiles. Ne sont-ils pas la représentation de nos âmes ? Un texte très riche, dont je n’attendais pas grand-chose et qui m’a beaucoup touché par les parcours individuels qu’il propose et la spiritualité qui l’anime.</span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Bonne lecture !</span></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:justify\"></div><br><br><div style=\"clear:both;text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/S6AEpGRrS2I/AAAAAAAAB9Q/UlkBvSeTyMc/s1600-h/P2260046.JPG\" style=\"margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em\"><img border=\"0\" height=\"300\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_kl-8Cz-TJDI/S6AEpGRrS2I/AAAAAAAAB9Q/UlkBvSeTyMc/s400/P2260046.JPG\" width=\"400\"></a></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif\"><br></div><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:left\"><div><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"><a href=\"http://www.telerama.fr/livre/marie-ndiaye-trois-femmes-puissantes,46056.php\">Marie Ndiaye, Trois femmes puissantes</a></span></div><div><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Edition Gallimard, 1<sup>ère</sup> parution en 2009</span></div><span style=\"font-size:10pt\">Prix Goncourt 2009, 316 pages</span></div><div style=\"text-align:left\"><br><div style=\"font-family:"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;text-align:left\"><span style=\"font-size:xx-small\"><b>Photo Marie Ndiaye : <a href=\"http://www.blogger.com/goog_1268778032486\">Michaël Ferrier, Tokyo, copyright Tokyo/La Lézarde, 2009</a></b><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/43368504@N03/\"> </a></span> </div><span style=\"font-size:10pt\"> </span><br><br></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/104300315399051243-7138266806969786474?l=gangoueus.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "Can it have been seven whole months since the last installment of The Rap Sheet’s <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/search/label/Copycat%20Covers\">copycat covers series</a>? That’s an indication of how busy I’ve been, not only with regular blogging responsibilities, but also with work on end-of-2009 wrap-ups, contributions to a couple of crime-fiction-related books, and the ongoing editing of a voluminous biography of one of America’s Founding Fathers. This isn’t to say, though, that I haven’t been keeping <a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AFecz2tpI/AAAAAAAAGjs/QPk4Pu0mXdg/s1600-h/THE+GOLIATH+BONE-2.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AFecz2tpI/AAAAAAAAGjs/QPk4Pu0mXdg/s200/THE+GOLIATH+BONE-2.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AFZXfYFGI/AAAAAAAAGjk/M7Z60RYuvWk/s1600-h/Spade+and+Archer+US-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:130px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AFZXfYFGI/AAAAAAAAGjk/M7Z60RYuvWk/s200/Spade+and+Archer+US-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>track of examples of egregious book cover duplication--I have been, and other readers of this blog have sent their own discoveries my way, as well.<br><br>Let’s begin this round of look-alikes with the newly released Vintage Crime paperback edition of <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307277062?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307277062\">Spade & Archer</a> (2009), by <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/02/before-black-bird.html\">Joe Gores</a>, a prequel to <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Maltese Falcon</span>, Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1930 private-detective novel. I rather liked the <a href=\"http://www.theinsider.com/photos/1744755_New_book_a_novel_attempt_to_resurrect_Sam_Spade\">old-fashioned, shadowed cinema-style typography</a> that fronted Alfred A. Knopf’s original hardcover version of Gores’ book. I also thought Gores’ yarn was consistent with Hammett’s vision, and it was certainly dramatic in the telling. I was bothered only by Gores’ occasional inside-baseball allusions to other Hammett tales and his oddly repeated mistake of writing “would of” when he actually meant “would’ve” or “would have.” (Why a copy editor didn’t fix such glaring errors is beyond me!) Much less imaginative, though, is the design of Vintage’s paperback reissue. The cover photograph (above), taken by <a href=\"http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Barnaby__Hall_01/2/0/0/\">Barnaby Hall</a>, of a man in an overcoat and brimmed hat, with a smoking cigarette between his lips, is a stock shot from <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_images\">Getty Images</a>. It positively <span style=\"font-style:italic\">screams</span> “private eye”--which is probably <a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AGeKsjwsI/AAAAAAAAGj0/hGKKXQOC9l0/s1600-h/Spade+and+Archer+UK-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:128px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AGeKsjwsI/AAAAAAAAGj0/hGKKXQOC9l0/s200/Spade+and+Archer+UK-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>why it also fronted <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://utter-scoundrel.livejournal.com/289120.html\">The Goliath Bone</a> (2008), the first of <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/search/label/Mickey%20Spillane\">Mickey Spillane</a>’s posthumously published Mike Hammer novels, <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/10/that-hammer-guy-returns.html\">finished by Max Allan Collins</a>. The image has been flopped on <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Spade & Archer</span>, but there’s no mistaking the resemblance.<br><br>On the whole, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Spade & Archer</span> has been poorly served by cover designers. The British hardback edition (left), released last year by Orion, carries the exact same image of an indistinct, topcoat-wearing figure with an elongated shadow that can be spotted <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2007/11/two-timers.html\">here</a> on the jackets of Olen Steinhauer’s 2005 Eastern Bloc thriller, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">36 Yalta Boulevard</span>, and the 2003 U.S. edition of Robert Wilson’s excellent Spanish series introduction, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.januarymagazine.com/features/03bestofcrime.html\">The Blind Man of Seville</a>.<br><br>Why do publishers and designers think that readers aren’t going to notice these instances of blatant duplication? Do they really think we’re stupid, that we don’t care that their efforts to save the cost of original artwork diminish the novelty of new books?<br><br>And it really is appalling to see how frequently stock images are manipulated--composited, flipped, and recolored--<a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AHOuIfXNI/AAAAAAAAGj8/OAQoWRtbtrg/s1600-h/Anathem.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AHOuIfXNI/AAAAAAAAGj8/OAQoWRtbtrg/s200/Anathem.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AHSRuDL2I/AAAAAAAAGkE/RdAuRoGxumM/s1600-h/DARKNESS+RISING-2.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:124px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AHSRuDL2I/AAAAAAAAGkE/RdAuRoGxumM/s200/DARKNESS+RISING-2.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>in order to give readers the impression that they’re looking at something original, when they’re not. Take these next two jackets, for example. The first comes from the Century UK edition of Frank Tallis’ 2009 Dr. Max Lieberman novel, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1846053617?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1846053617\">Darkness Rising</a> (recently released in the States as <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812980999?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0812980999\">Vienna Secrets</a>). The central image of a berobed holy man ascending a flight of stone steps comes from Spain-based <a href=\"http://www.arcangel-images.com/\">Arcangel Images</a>. That identical figure shows up again--only this time behind an archway--on the front of Neal Stephenson’s 2008 novel, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006147410X?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=006147410X\">Anathem</a>.<br><br>Then consider the 2005 Picador paperback edition of Martin Booth’s “creepy psychological suspense novel,” <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312309090?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0312309090\">A Very Private Gentleman</a>. The <a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AH3HrFaUI/AAAAAAAAGkM/wLASep5ixEc/s1600-h/A+Very+Private+Gentleman.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:134px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AH3HrFaUI/AAAAAAAAGkM/wLASep5ixEc/s200/A+Very+Private+Gentleman.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AH8Au67MI/AAAAAAAAGkU/Q7WaEVgNiFI/s1600-h/The+One+from+the+Other.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AH8Au67MI/AAAAAAAAGkU/Q7WaEVgNiFI/s200/The+One+from+the+Other.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>Getty Images photograph at the bottom of that cover shows a man lighting a cigarette and standing before a river railing with what looks like an old-fashioned steamship of some sort in the background. It’s quite obviously the same individual employed on the 2006 Putnam hardback edition of Philip Kerr’s fourth Bernie Gunther crime novel, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HREKDM?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B002HREKDM\">The One from the Other</a>--only in the latter case, a shot of the clock tower in Munich, Germany’s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marienplatz\">Marienplatz</a> (taken by Owen Franken and purchased from the stock company <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis\">Corbis</a>) has been inserted behind the smoking gent. (Click on these and other covers for enlargements.)<br><br>These next two jackets bookend well together, though neither is particularly distinctive. The cover on the left comes from <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556527977?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1556527977\">Murder Short & Sweet</a> (Chicago Review Press), a 2008 anthology of mystery-fiction short stories edited by Paul D. Staudohar and featuring prose by such pros as Agatha Christie, <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellery%20Queen\">Ellery Queen</a>, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ruth Rendell, and <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-you-have-to-read-eighth-circle-by.html\">Stanley Ellin</a>, as well as outside-the-genre <a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ARUieJ6NI/AAAAAAAAGmM/Oui6oKrl0p0/s1600-h/A+Partisan%27s+Daughter.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:147px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ARUieJ6NI/AAAAAAAAGmM/Oui6oKrl0p0/s200/A+Partisan%27s+Daughter.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ARQl5jXLI/AAAAAAAAGmE/Eptsv2IQ410/s1600-h/Murder+Short+and+Sweet-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ARQl5jXLI/AAAAAAAAGmE/Eptsv2IQ410/s200/Murder+Short+and+Sweet-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>stars on the order of John Updike and C.S. Forester. Meanwhile, on the right is displayed the front of Knopf’s 2008 hardcover edition of Louis de Bernières’ <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030726887X?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=030726887X\">A Partisan’s Daughter</a>. The typeface used is different in each, and there’s a polychromatic strip running down the left side of the De Bernières cover. However, the main photograph--a partial side shot of a woman with a burning cigarette in her fingers (lots of flaming coffin nails in these covers, eh?)--is the same in both. The image has been reversed, but not altered appreciably otherwise.<br><br>More has been done to disguise the resemblance between this other pair of book fronts, sent to me by Brian Lindenmuth of <a href=\"http://www.bscreview.com/\">BSCReview</a> and <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.spinetinglermag.com/\">Spinetingler Magazine</a>. The cover on the left comes from the 2007 Serpent’s Tail edition of Heidi W. <a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJQE6BJoI/AAAAAAAAGks/dvHwx4BWyis/s1600-h/Crossing+the+Dark.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:134px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJQE6BJoI/AAAAAAAAGks/dvHwx4BWyis/s200/Crossing+the+Dark.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJWbKGgiI/AAAAAAAAGk0/62oCGL1tsMM/s1600-h/Se+Dig+Ikke+Tilbage.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:127px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJWbKGgiI/AAAAAAAAGk0/62oCGL1tsMM/s200/Se+Dig+Ikke+Tilbage.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>Boehringer’s <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1852424982?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1852424982\">Crossing the Dark</a>, the story of a police officer who rescues her kidnapped and sex-enslaved daughter, and then has to deal with the ramifications of those crimes on their respective psyches. It’s a haunting jacket, focusing on a naked young woman who has evidently collapsed on what looks like a roadway, dead or unconscious--it is impossible to know. The cover on the right--from what I believe is a Norwegian edition of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Fossum\">Karin Fossum</a>’s <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://djskrimiblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/karin-fossum-se-dig-ikke-tilbage.html\">Se dig ikke tilbage</a> (published in English as <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156031361?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0156031361\">Don’t Look Back</a>)--shows the same woman, only this time she’s been slightly cropped and situated in the foreground, with a somewhat bleak-looking lake dropped behind her.<br><br>Even famous folk aren’t safe from the clutches of today’s cost-cutting book designers. <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_bogart\">Humphrey Bogart</a> may have been a Hollywood original, but he’s nothing new in this comparison. Although I’ve never read the book on the left--<a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/076210578X?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=076210578X\">Great TV & Film Detectives: A Collection of Crime Masterpieces Featuring Your Favorite Screen Sleuths</a>, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Reader’s Digest Association, 2005)--I immediately <a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJ_7eO8II/AAAAAAAAGlE/c82xpnWiEZA/s1600-h/We%27ll+Always+Have+Murder-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:128px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJ_7eO8II/AAAAAAAAGlE/c82xpnWiEZA/s200/We%27ll+Always+Have+Murder-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJ7HuMjSI/AAAAAAAAGk8/cpB3DuI4IOI/s1600-h/Great+TV+%26+Film+Detectives-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:134px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AJ7HuMjSI/AAAAAAAAGk8/cpB3DuI4IOI/s200/Great+TV+%26+Film+Detectives-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>took a shine to its front, which shows Bogie in all of his trenchcoated, fedora-ed, and steely-eyed prominence. On the other hand, I <span style=\"font-style:italic\">have</span> read the novel on the right, Bill Crider’s <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743475054?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0743475054\">We’ll Always Have Murder</a> (iBooks, 2003). <a href=\"http://januarymagazine.com/features/gifts2003crimefiction.html\">As I wrote shortly after its publication</a>, Crider’s book was supposed to be the first entry in a new series featuring an ex-Marine and 1940s Tinsel Town private eye named Terry Scott, but I don’t believe there was ever a sequel. The photograph of Bogart is better displayed on Jakubowski’s anthology, with much bolder typography. Yet it’s incontestably the same piece of art, again from Corbis.<br><br>Rap Sheet reader Patrick Lee was kind enough to set up this next, not-so-obvious pairing. The cover on the left comes from <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786713712?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0786713712\">The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Short Stories</a>, a delightful and diverse collection of tales edited by <a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2007/11/aint-it-grand.html\">Bill Pronzini</a> and Martin H. Greenberg, and released in 2004 by Carroll & Graf. <a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ALLS7SR3I/AAAAAAAAGlM/m8UMdi--5EE/s1600-h/The+Mammoth+Book+of+Private+Eye+Stories-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ALLS7SR3I/AAAAAAAAGlM/m8UMdi--5EE/s200/The+Mammoth+Book+of+Private+Eye+Stories-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ALPGlCOmI/AAAAAAAAGlU/hd5K0sEaDCk/s1600-h/Espionage-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:153px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ALPGlCOmI/AAAAAAAAGlU/hd5K0sEaDCk/s200/Espionage-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>Beside it is <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0762108126?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0762108126\">Espionage</a> (Readers Digest, 2006), a non-fiction and “up-to-date guide to the espionage world in all its complexity,” by British science writer David Owen. Who knows how many elements were combined into the <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Espionage</span> front, but one of them--the lower left-hand image of a shadow-concealed man in a brimmed chapeau--is the same individual shown on the right-hand side of Pronzini and Greenberg’s anthology. Once more, that stock photograph comes from Getty.<br><br>While there certainly appears to have been a recent and rampant rash of copycat covers cropping up in the crime-fiction field, the recycling of artwork isn’t a wholly new phenomenon. Nor is it one confined to a single category of works.<br><br>Low-budget publishers of the mid-20th-century had a habit of using--sometimes overusing--commissioned illustrations. It isn’t all that rare to come across two <a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AMo2CepWI/AAAAAAAAGlk/9KvACc5O0lQ/s1600-h/The+Wicked+Never+Sleep.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:120px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AMo2CepWI/AAAAAAAAGlk/9KvACc5O0lQ/s200/The+Wicked+Never+Sleep.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AMja-WB_I/AAAAAAAAGlc/11r2tZGCwj0/s1600-h/Her+Private+Hell-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 0px 10px 10pt;float:right;width:120px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AMja-WB_I/AAAAAAAAGlc/11r2tZGCwj0/s200/Her+Private+Hell-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>pulpy paperbacks of yore, fronted by identical imagery. A particularly good and oft-mentioned example is represented by our next two specimens. Both of these boast a painting by <a href=\"http://www.goodgirlart.com/rader.html\">Paul Rader</a> (1906-1986), who, in additional to his more respectable book illustrations, produced an extensive body of sexy work for the publishers of male-oriented “literature.” Initially, this looks like a painting of two women embracing. But when you study it closer, you realize that Rader offers up only a single female, pressed against a mirror. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Her Private Hell</span>, <a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ANOsrLbOI/AAAAAAAAGls/7ygo9dZ5A70/s1600-h/House+Hop.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:120px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ANOsrLbOI/AAAAAAAAGls/7ygo9dZ5A70/s200/House+Hop.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ANSnz4ziI/AAAAAAAAGl0/73Ep8OR3pHU/s1600-h/The+Lustful+Ones.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10pt 10px 0px;float:left;width:120px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ANSnz4ziI/AAAAAAAAGl0/73Ep8OR3pHU/s200/The+Lustful+Ones.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>by March Hastings (aka Sally Singer), was released in 1963 by <a href=\"http://lynnmunroe.tripod.com/midwood.htm\">Midwood</a>. Matt Rogers’ <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Wicked Never Sleep</span> came out in either 1966 or ’67 from Private Edition.<br><br>Sometimes, the original illustrators were complicit in recycling cover ideas. The magnificent jackets shown here--from <span style=\"font-style:italic\">House Hop</span>, by John Dexter, and <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Lustful Ones</span>, by Clyde Allison (aka William Henry Knowles)--were both painted by <a href=\"http://robertbonfils.com/\">Robert Bonfils</a> in the mid-1960s.<br><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ATex84i-I/AAAAAAAAGmU/84AzBB_pp4E/s1600-h/The+Flying+Troutmans-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:3pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:134px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ATex84i-I/AAAAAAAAGmU/84AzBB_pp4E/s200/The+Flying+Troutmans-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ATj-JQ5EI/AAAAAAAAGmc/xMrWeQ0_euE/s1600-h/Spoiled.2-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:3pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6ATj-JQ5EI/AAAAAAAAGmc/xMrWeQ0_euE/s200/Spoiled.2-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>These final four copycat covers are drawn from volumes to be found nowhere near the crime-fiction stacks of your local bookshop. I don’t think anyone will miss the similarities between the Random House hardcover edition of Caitlin Macy’s 2009 short-story collection, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400061997?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1400061997\">Spoiled</a>, and the front of Miriam Toews’ 2008 mainstream novel, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582435316?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1582435316\">The Flying Troutmans</a> (Counterpoint). That photograph of a girl with her hands over her eyes is credited to Beate Lie and <a href=\"http://www.milim.com/\">Millennium Images</a>/UK.<br><br>Still more blatant is the relationship between the front of Diane Ravitch’s new non-fiction work, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465014917?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0465014917\">The Death and Life of the Great American School System</a> (Basic Books), and Pacific Northwest writer Ivan Doig’s 2006 <a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AUNP8jr8I/AAAAAAAAGmk/eOTUDdWK5SE/s1600-h/The+Death+and+Life+of+the+Great+American+School+System-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AUNP8jr8I/AAAAAAAAGmk/eOTUDdWK5SE/s200/The+Death+and+Life+of+the+Great+American+School+System-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AUSLeg1-I/AAAAAAAAGms/KKz4nTWJ_6w/s1600-h/The+Whistling+Season-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:15pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:132px;height:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_v-3gbtENGj8/S6AUSLeg1-I/AAAAAAAAGms/KKz4nTWJ_6w/s200/The+Whistling+Season-1.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>novel, <a style=\"font-style:italic\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156031647?ie=UTF8&tag=thrash01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0156031647\">The Whistling Season</a> (Harvest). That little wooden schoolhouse with the bell tower looks lonely, but book designers just don’t want to leave it alone.<br><br>With publishers endeavoring to slash their costs in these economically troubled times, and the easy availability of relatively cheap stock art, it’s probably too much to hope that there will be a reversal of the trend toward duplicate covers at any time soon. Exacerbating the situation still further are technological advancements that make it particularly easy for book cover designers to manipulate and combine images. I’m hardly the first blogger to post the following video (I picked it up from <a href=\"http://www.casualoptimist.com/?p=3867\">The Casual Optimist</a>), but it gives you a fairly good idea--in just 55 seconds--of how many designers work these days, compositing and retouching existing art to create a unique-seeming finished product:<br><br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/yoDCiTsS7dU%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=410&height=344\" width=\"410\" height=\"344\"></iframe><br><br>It looks as if our work to expose this notorious publishing trend will continue. So, if you can, please lend a hand. When you spot examples of copycat covers, especially on crime novels, please <a href=\"mailto:jpwrites@wordcuts.org\">e-mail them to me</a>. I’ll post more such fronts as they become available.<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\">* * *</div>Just in case you’ve missed previous installments of The Rap Sheet’s copycat covers series, let me direct you to the full set:<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-covers-are-two-of-kind.html\">When Covers Are Two of a Kind</a>” (May 27, 2006)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-two-arent-better-than-one.html\">When Two Aren’t Better Than One</a>” (May 30, 2006)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2007/01/did-they-really-think-nobody-would.html\">Did They Really Think Nobody Would Notice?</a>” (January 10, 2007)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2007/05/double-faults.html\">Double Faults</a>” (May 20, 2007)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/05/too-much-of-good-thing.html\">Too Much of a Good Thing</a>” (June 13, 2007)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-two-arent-better-than-one.html\">Bad Company</a>” (July 3, 2007)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/05/can-we-retire-these-photos-yet.html\">Can We Retire These Photos Yet?</a>” (August 26, 2007)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/03/double-exposure.html\">Double Exposure</a>” (March 19, 2008)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/07/twin-piques.html\">Twin Piques</a>” (July 7, 2008)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/08/imperfect-mates.html\">Imperfect Mates</a>” (August 2, 2008)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/12/seeing-doubles.html\">Seeing Doubles</a>” (December 10, 2008)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/03/run-buddy-run.html\">Run, Buddy, Run</a>” (March 13, 2009)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/04/familiarity-breeds-contempt.html\">Familiarity Breeds Contempt</a>” (April 9, 2009)<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">•</span> “<a href=\"http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/08/take-gander.html\">Take a Gander</a>” (August 19, 2009)<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">READ MORE:</span> “<a href=\"http://gravetapping.blogspot.com/2010/02/deja-vu.html\">Déjà Vu</a>,” by Ben Boulden (Gravetapping); “<a href=\"http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2009/12/most-used-cover-image-in-world.html\">The Most-Used Cover Image in the World</a>” and “<a href=\"http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2009/11/this-damned-necklace-wont-stay-on.html\">This Damned Necklace Won’t Stay On</a>,” by JRSM (Caustic Cover Critic); “<a href=\"http://eurocrime.blogspot.com/2009/12/copycat-cover-best-foot-forward.html\">Copycat Cover--Best Foot Forward</a>,” by Karen Meek (Euro Crime blog); “<a href=\"http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-gamble-hidden-war-same-photo.html\">The Great Gamble, The Hidden War, the Same Photo</a>,” by Joseph Sullivan (The Book Design Review).<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/16749171-4073994875370163417?l=therapsheet.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The Web Seer",
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"content" : "<table border=\"0\" width=\"591\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"600\">\n<table style=\"height:166px\" border=\"0\" width=\"427\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"427\">Is there a way to visualize people’s innermost thoughts? Google Suggest lets you see what others are asking when they search the web. From the existential to the mundane, the questions form a portrait of human curiosity. (Read our <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/opinion/22viegas.ready.html\">article in the New York Times</a>, or<a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer\"> try it live now</a>.)\n<h1> </h1>\n<p>Take the phrase “Why doesn’t he…” To make it easy to see Google’s suggestions, we’ve created a diagram where the size of arrows and words show how many pages on the web answer each question. (In these diagrams, the arrow thicknesses show the number of web pages for each question.)</p></td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/doesnt_he.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/doesnt_he_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:38px\" border=\"0\" width=\"425\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">Even more revealing is the comparison between what <em>he </em>doesn’t do, and what <em>she </em>doesn’t. Our diagram puts the two lists side by side.</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/doesnt_he_she.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/doesnt_he_she_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:22px\" border=\"0\" width=\"424\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">Family issues run deep, and sex differences loom large:</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/daughter_son.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/daughter_son_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:22px\" border=\"0\" width=\"422\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">Sometimes the result is simply sad.</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/wife_husband.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/wife_husband_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"500\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">What about star-gazing?</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/brad_george.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/brad_george_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/britney_paris.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/britney_paris_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/images/bill_warren.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/bill-warren_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"427\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"427\">The diagrams above show that if there’s one common question for the famous, it’s not about money or cosmetic surgery. It’s whether they’re Jewish.\n<h1> </h1>\n<p>Some questions are metaphysical:<br>\n<a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/dreams_nightmares.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/dreams_nightmares_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p></td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">Sometimes questions can be philosophical, with an edge:</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/kissing_flirting.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/kissing_flirting_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"500\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">And others unexpected:</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/pretend.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/pretend_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:22px\" border=\"0\" width=\"477\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">What about practical advice?</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/buy_sell.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/buy_sell_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:44px\" border=\"0\" width=\"427\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"427\">(For all we know, a dozen hedge funds are using Google to play the market.)</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<table style=\"height:44px\" border=\"0\" width=\"427\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"427\">Finally, what does Google say about politics? Well, some of us are confused:</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/are_democrats.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/are_democrats_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<table style=\"height:22px\" border=\"0\" width=\"479\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"500\">But there is a bipartisan consensus on one thing: The other side is wrong.</td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/democrats_are.gif\"><img src=\"http://hint.fm/seer/images/democrats_are_small.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://hint.fm/seer\">Give it a spin!</a></p></td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>"
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"content" : "<b>Thursday music link</b><br><br>I had the idea a while ago of making my bid for literary greatness by simply getting a Mills & Boon romance novel from a railway station bookshop and plagiarising it more or less word for word, except that I would cunningly transpose the setting to a concentration camp. ("Life is Beautiful" had been out recently, and I was becoming irked at the rash of subsequent films and books which had broken out a case of grey-tone face makeup to spray a thin layer of gravitas and moral seriousness over what was basically a genre romcom). I filed it in my bulging binder marked "Conceptual Art Projects Of Dubious Taste, Not Worth Bothering With" and hardly thought about it again, apart from when Ian McEwan's "Saturday" came out and I thought I might repurpose the idea by stealing a M&B wholesale and just putting <i>\"These events happened on September 10, 2001\"</i> at the front.<br><br>But I was going the wrong way. I was thinking \"serious\" and going for the sallow tones, when I should have been thinking \"edgy-cool\" and going for fake fangs. My local Waterstones now has an entire shelving unit dedicated to \"Dark Fantasy\", ie vampire chick lit. The BBC series \"<a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/beinghuman/\">Being Human</a>\" was explicitly admitted by its creators to have started as a screenplay for a thirtysomething stages-of-life drama, which wasn't really coming together until they decided to use a bit of spray-on ironic monsterdom.<br><br>The initial instinct of course, is to be irritated at a cynical rebranding exercise. But actually, I think that something rather more sinister might be happening. Consider: previously, the bookshop used to have a whole rack of innocent, wholesome uncomplicated romance novels, and only a few vampire-porn titles. But now, the vamplit has spread out and the neighbouring shelves have seen their spines turn from pink, to black and red (to the extent that I once mistook \"Dark Fantasy\" for the <a href=\"http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/09/celebrations-i-see-from-barbicans.html\">military history section</a>).<br><br>There's only one sensible conclusion. The vampire novels are biting the romance novels on the neck, and claiming them for the undead.<br><br><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw1XAqSh3jA\">The Durutti Column</a><br><br>Now I'm off to the bookshop to buy a couple of \"Jennings and Darbyshire\" books and a Fodor guide to Tehran. Look out for me at the next Booker Prize.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3699020-1467552752726322252?l=d-squareddigest.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says Devil is in the Vatican",
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"content" : "<p>angels and demons, we were discussing over lunch the other day interesting occupations and I came up with being an investigator for the beatitude of prospective saints, sort of a spiritual claims adjuster, I should have gone one further and mentioned being an exorcist.\n\nFather Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon".</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://delicious.com/post?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.timesonline.co.uk%2Ftol%2Fcomment%2Ffaith%2Farticle7056689.ece&title=Chief%20exorcist%20Father%20Gabriele%20Amorth%20says%20Devil%20is%20in%20the%20Vatican&copyuser=amaah&copytags=angels+demons+jobs+religion+work+labour+christianity+groups+organization+catholicism+sex+history+culture+perception+observation&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged angels\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/angels\">angels</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged demons\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/demons\">demons</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged jobs\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/jobs\">jobs</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged religion\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/religion\">religion</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged work\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/work\">work</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged labour\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/labour\">labour</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged christianity\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/christianity\">christianity</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged groups\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/groups\">groups</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged organization\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/organization\">organization</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged catholicism\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/catholicism\">catholicism</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged sex\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/sex\">sex</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged history\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/history\">history</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged culture\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/culture\">culture</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged perception\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/perception\">perception</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged observation\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/observation\">observation</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/url/2c6c248205870fd030d484019f8fa548\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"title" : "Scott and Scurvy",
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"content" : "<p>Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143039385?ie=UTF8&tag=idlewords-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0143039385\">The Worst Journey in the World</a><img src=\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=idlewords-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143039385\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none!important;margin:0px!important\">, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole. I can’t do the book justice in a summary, other than recommend that you drop everything and <a href=\"http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14363\">read it</a>, but there is one detail that particularly baffled me the first time through, and that I resolved to understand better once I could stand to put the book down long enough.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=RXS04HcPrFwC&lpg=PP1&dq=worst%20journey%20in%20the%20world&pg=PA220#v=onepage&q=&f=false\">casually mentions</a> an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:</p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote>\n\nAtkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria...<br>\n\nThere was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.<br>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lind\">James Lind</a> proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>...</p>\n\n\n\n<p>By all accounts scurvy is a horrible disease. Scott, who has reason to know, gives a succinct description:\n\n\n\n<blockquote>\n\nThe symptoms of scurvy do not necessarily occur in a regular order, but generally the first sign is an inflamed, swollen condition of the gums. The whitish pink tinge next the teeth is replaced by an angry red; as the disease gains ground the gums become more spongy and turn to a purplish colour, the teeth become loose and the gums sore. Spots appear on the legs, and pain is felt in old wounds and bruises; later, from a slight oedema, the legs, and then the arms, swell to a great size and become blackened behind the joints. After this the patient is soon incapacitated, and the last horrible stages of the disease set in, from which death is a merciful release.\n\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.\n\n\n\n<p>It is not easy to find fresh foods that lack vitamin C. Plants and animals tend to be full of it, since the molecule is used in all kinds of biochemical synthesis as an electron donor. But the same reactive qualities that make the vitamin useful also make it easy to destroy. Vitamin C quickly breaks down in the presence of light, heat and air. For this reason it is absent from most preserved foods that have been cooked or dried. Its destruction is also rapidly catalyzed by copper ions, which may be one reason sailors, with their big copper cooking vats, were particularly susceptible.\n\n\n\n<p>Because our bodies can't synthesize the vitamin, they have grown very good at conserving it. It takes up to six months for scurvy to develop in healthy people after vitamin C is removed from the diet, and only a tiny daily amount is enough to keep a person healthy.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It has been known since antiquity that fresh foods in general, and lemons and oranges in particular, will cure scurvy. Starting with Vasco de Gama’s crew in 1497, sailors have repeatedly discovered the curative power of citrus fruits, and the cure has just as frequently been forgotten or ignored by subsequent explorers. \n\n\n\n<p>Lind tends to get the credit for discovering the citrus cure since he performed something approaching a controlled experiment. But it took an additional forty years of experiments, analysis, and political lobbying for his result to become institutionalized in the Royal Navy. In 1799, all Royal Navy ships on foreign service were ordered to serve lemon juice:\n\n\n\n<blockquote>\n\nThe scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea, the lemon juice being often called ‘lime juice’ and our sailors ‘lime juicers’. The consequences of this new regulation were startling and by the beginning of the nineteenth century scurvy may be said to have vanished from the British navy.\tIn 1780, the admissions of scurvy cases to the Naval Hospital at Haslar were 1457; in the years from 1806 to 1810, they were two. \n\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>(As we'll see, the confusion between lemons and limes would have serious reprecussions.)</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves. \n\n\n\n<p>The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both \"lemon\" and \"lime\" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (<i>citrus medica, var. limonica</i> and <i>citrus medica, var. acida</i>) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It fell to the unfortunate George Nares to discover this fact in 1875, when he led the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Arctic_Expedition\">British Arctic Expedition</a> in an attempt to reach the North Pole via Greenland. Some oceanographic theories of the time posited an open polar sea, and Nares was directed to sail along the Greenland coast, then take a sledging party and see how far north he could get on the pack ice.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The expedition was a fiasco. Two men in the sledging party developed scurvy within days of leaving the ship. Within five weeks, half the men were sick, and despite having laid depots with plentiful supplies for their return journey, they were barely able to make it back. A rescue party sent to intercept them found that lime juice failed to have its usual dramatic effect. Most damning of all, some of the men who stayed on the ship, never failing to take their daily dose, also got scurvy.</p> \n\n\n\n<p>The failure of the Nares expedition provoked an uproar in Britain. The Royal Navy believed itself capable of sustaining any crew for two years without signs of scurvy, yet here was an able and adequately supplied crew crippled by the disease within weeks. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the effectiveness of citrus juice as an absolute preventative was in doubt.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>More troubling evidence came several years later, during the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson-Harmsworth_Expedition\">Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition</a> to Franz-Josef Land in 1894. Members of this expedition spent three years on a ship frozen into the pack ice. Koettlitz, their chief physician, describes what happened:\n\n\n\n<blockquote>\n\nThe expedition proper ate fresh meat regularly at least once a day in the shape of polar bear. The people on the ship had, however, a prejudice against this food, which certainly was not particularly palatable, and insisted, against all advice, upon eating their preserved and salted meat. This meat I occasionally noticed to be somewhat \"high\" or \"gamey\", and afterwards heard that it was often so. The result was that, though I visited the ship every day, and personally saw that each man swallowed his dose of lime juice (which was made compulsory, and was of the best quality), the whole ship’s company were tainted with scurvy, and two died. \n\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.\n\n\n\n<p>This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems. \n\n\n\n<p>But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.\n\n\n\n<p>Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its <a href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2511962/pdf/brmedj08208-0030.pdf\">enthusiastic backer</a>:\n\n\n\n<blockquote>\n\nThat the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called \"antiscorbutics\" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic - in other words, scurvy-producing - or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.\n\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The ’ptomaine’ in the theory was never really defined, other than as a noxious waste product of bacterial action. But the theory had an internal logic. Poorly preserved meats would be contaminated by ptomaine. Under normal conditions, this was not enough cause scurvy. Not only did fresh food consumed in the diet have a kind of antidote effect (whether it worked by neutralizing the poison, or by simply displacing it in the diet, was not clear), but environment also played an important role. Certain factors seemed to predispose people to chronic ptomaine poisoning, including darkness, intense exertion, idleness, close air, prolonged confinement and cold. \n\n\n\n<p>On prolonged journeys under harsh conditions, the accumulated ptomaine in badly preserved meats would disrupt health, giving the classic symptoms of scurvy. Once the tainted foods were discontinued, the body would rapidly excrete the accumulated ptomaine and return to healthh.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>To the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was because their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them. The real culprit was in the bad meat, and the casks of lime juice mandated by law on every seagoing ship were another example of outdated medical superstition that would now give way to a more sophisticated understanding of illness.\n\n\n\n<p>This was the latest in medical thinking on scurvy when Scott prepared for his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1903. It would be the first serious British expedition to the continent in fifty years. Scott took the very same Dr. Koettlitz along as his chief physician. \n\n\n\n<p>Scott was a meticulous planner, and mindful of the ptomaine theory, paid special attention to the quality of his provisions. While the cold and cramped conditions of the journey could not be helped, he knew he could avoid any risk of scurvy by using only completely unspoiled canned goods. For his part, Koettlitz predicted that as long as there was fresh seal meat available, \"we can take it as certain that no scurvy will be heard of in connexion with the expedition, however long it may remain in the High South\".\n\n\n\n<p>Scott did not have time to supervise the actual canning of his provisions for the Discovery journey, but he made sure that before being served, all tins were opened in the presence of his medical staff, including Dr. Koettlitz, and carefully examined for signs of spoilage. Any doubtful cans were consigned to the trash heap.\n\n\n\n<p>So it came as a bitter surprise to Scott when one of the Discovery’s early sledging parties trudged into camp with unmistakable symptoms of scurvy after only a three week absence. Subsequent examination showed that many of the men on the ship were also in the early stages of the disease. The preventative measures had failed, and Scott was <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=l5YSAQAAIAAJ&lpg=PA399&ots=YHMSjoLVis&dq=The%20evil%20having%20come%2C%20the%20great%20thing%20now%20is%20to%20banish%20it.%20scott&pg=PA399#v=onepage&q=&f=false\">greatly distressed</a>:\n\n\nThis ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scott left camp with 16 men on November 1, 1911. His plan was to lay depots along the route, and send groups of men back at intervals until he was left with three companions on the great plateau south of the Beardmore Glacier. The expedition used men, dogs, ponies (slaughtered and fed to the dogs at the foot of the glacier), and a pair of experimental motorized sledges that broke down after just a few miles on the ice. \n\n\n\n<p>Scott sent back his men in stages; each group had a progressively harder time making it back to camp. The last group, sent back from the top of the Beardmore, was led by Edward Evans, who quickly developed a severe case of scurvy. After bravely walking most of the distance, he became incapacitated and had to be left on the ice in the care of a companion while the third man in the group force-marched the thirty remaining miles to camp to summon a rescue team.\n\n\n\n<p>Scott, oblivious to this ominous development, pressed onwards. The rest of his story is well known. Norwegian tents at the Pole, an increasingly desperate return, two in his group sickening and dying, then a terrible blizzard eleven miles short of his last depot; the three men freezing to death in their tent. \n\n \n\n<p>The evidence that the Polar Party suffered from scurvy on their return trip is strong but circumstantial. The wounds that would not heal, the sudden death of Seaman Evans during the descent down the Beardmore, their great weakness are all consistent with the disease. Both Scott and Wilson would have easily recognized the symptoms, but it is possible that they would have chosen not to record them. There was a certain stigma with scurvy, especially in their case, having taken such pains to forestall the disease. Scott had nearly left any mention of scurvy out of his 1903 report, before deciding to do so for the cause of science, and it’s possible he felt a similar reticence now.\n\n\n\n<p>Entire academic careers have been devoted to second-guessing Scott's final journey. It would probably be easier to list the few things that didn’t contribute to his death, than to try and rank the relative contributions of cold, exhaustion, malnutrition, bad weather, bad luck, poor planning, and rash decisions. But with regard to scurvy, at least, the Polar explorers were in an impossible position. \n\n\n\n<p>They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.\n\n\n\n<p>It was pure luck that led to the actual discovery of vitamin C. Axel Holst and Theodor Frolich had been studying beriberi (another deficiency disease) in pigeons, and when they decided to switch to a mammal model, they serendipitously chose guinea pigs, the one animal besides human beings and monkeys that requires vitamin C in its diet. Fed a diet of pure grain, the animals showed no signs of beriberi, but quickly sickened and died of something that closely resembled human scurvy.\n\n\n\n<p>No one had seen scurvy in animals before. With a simple animal model for the disease in hand, it became a matter of running the correct experiments, and it was quickly established that scurvy was a deficiency disease after all. Very quickly the compound that prevents the disease was identified as a small molecule present in cabbage, lemon juice, and many other foods, and in 1932 Szent-Györgyi definitively isolated ascorbic acid.\n\n\n\n<p>---\n\n\n\n<p>There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking:\n\n\n\n<p>First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease - imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection - that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective.\n\n\n\n<p>Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of \"vitamin\". Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong.\n\n\n\n<p>Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentaly replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk.\n\n\n\nIt took several years for infant scurvy, at first called \"Barlow's disease\", to be properly identified. At that point, doctors were caught between two fires. They could recommend that parents not boil their milk, and expose the children to bacterial infection, or they could insist on pasteurization at the risk of scurvy. The prevaling theory of scurvy as bacterial poisoning clouded the issue further, so that it took time to arrive at the right solution - supplementing the diet with onion juice or cooked potato.\n\n\n\n<p>Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test. One of the experiments that ’confirmed’ the ptomaine theory involved feeding a handful of monkeys canned and fresh meat. The fructivorous monkeys died within days; the ones who died last, and with the least blood in their stool, were assumed to be the ones without scurvy. And even these flawed experiments were a rarity compared to the number of flat assertions by medical authorities without any testing or basis in fact.\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?\n\n\n\n<p>In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almroth_Wright\">Almroth Wright</a>, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.\n\n\n\n<p>But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort. \n\n\n\n<p><b>tl;dr</b>: scurvy bad, science hard.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I'll try to footnote this essay properly in the next few days; in the meantime, if you'd like to geek out with me I invite you to check out <a href=\"http://pinboard.in/u:maciej/t:scurvy\">a list of collected links</a>.</p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Nigeria: Jos - From Tin City to Massacre City",
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"title" : "Three New Poems",
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"content" : ".<br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Obscura</span><br><br>What better than warm sheets <br>weighing down; the brief moment <br>both sleep and perception<br>occupy the same space.<br><br>In that room you’re at your best−<br>even though ardent demons<br>scrape nails on your windows <br>and both ears strain for sound. <br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Driven To Ruin</span><br><br>I’ve been given <br>strong thighs, bad arches<br>and an over-zealous mind. <br>I can run for miles on one tank <br>of mojo, then go lame for a month<br>under the pretense of pain.<br>I can push the envelope<br>all the way to the post office.<br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Malice Aforethought</span><br><br>It began in the morning, spilled<br>over into the afternoon and was brought<br>to an abrupt ending by early evening.<br>It may have been cocaine poisoning <br>or the culmination of a cruder <br>insanity, but the lump sum of all calculations<br>point to a blunt object driven home<br>with the force of a Mack truck into a soft skull.<br>It may have been worked out well in advance<br>or it may have come together<br>in the time it took to butter toast.<br>My guess is he saw it coming years ago.<br>Long before we could put a name to it.<br><br>EDN, 3/10<br><br><br><br>.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/671943706633921975-861360707520637042?l=edwardnudelman.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou - Se Ba Ho",
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"title" : "Workstation 4 2",
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"content" : "<div dir=\"ltr\" style=\"text-align:left\"><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5FeuWYmvjI/AAAAAAAAAPc/C2Vw2piuVqc/s1600-h/desk-F_ISO1+copy.jpg\"></a><br><div>Pics from fabrication of my desk. Welded steel frame on 5\" rubber casters, 3/4\" plywood surface inset and cable tray, sanded putty, candy white car finish... via a welder, carpenter and autobody mechanic.<br><div><br></div><div>Still getting used to moving the desk for/backward instead of my chair...</div><div><br></div></div><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5vWrCCJI/AAAAAAAAAPM/d1I5bd6ddrE/s1600-h/2010-02-06+11.37.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"479\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5vWrCCJI/AAAAAAAAAPM/d1I5bd6ddrE/s640/2010-02-06+11.37.jpg\" style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" width=\"640\"></a><br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5vBIO7pI/AAAAAAAAAPE/OnRMkEYBwkY/s1600-h/2010-02-10+12.53.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"479\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5vBIO7pI/AAAAAAAAAPE/OnRMkEYBwkY/s640/2010-02-10+12.53.jpg\" style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" width=\"640\"></a><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5u4NqW1I/AAAAAAAAAO8/WKhTFmcOwQs/s1600-h/desk_DSC_0201_web.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"428\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5u4NqW1I/AAAAAAAAAO8/WKhTFmcOwQs/s640/desk_DSC_0201_web.jpg\" style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" width=\"640\"></a><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5utuiARI/AAAAAAAAAO0/qd8yvNCOEpc/s1600-h/desk_DSC_0092-web.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"428\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5A5utuiARI/AAAAAAAAAO0/qd8yvNCOEpc/s640/desk_DSC_0092-web.jpg\" style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" width=\"640\"></a><br><div><br></div><div>I used this axonometric drawing to explain the 4 ft x 4 ft frame to the welder (casters are welded to the steel frame) and the base <a href=\"http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b6cdbedf071f3f31dad59af3d94e8d5d\">Sketch-up model</a> is available in Google 3D warehouse. Added two cross braces (2 in angle bar) at the bottom for stability, and so that each side of the desk has its own footrest. </div><div><br></div><div><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5FeuWYmvjI/AAAAAAAAAPc/C2Vw2piuVqc/s1600-h/desk-F_ISO1+copy.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" height=\"465\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_27j17aod2Mo/S5FeuWYmvjI/AAAAAAAAAPc/C2Vw2piuVqc/s640/desk-F_ISO1+copy.jpg\" style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" width=\"640\"></a></div></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2508512514605530857-5484301339991221399?l=afrch.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Parodie de vie politique en Côte d’Ivoire",
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"content" : "<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Si j’étais caricaturiste, il y a longtemps que j’aurais couché sur le papier ce dessin d’une haie de gaillards le gourdin dressé au dessus de leurs têtes, prêts à frapper une Côte d’Ivoire stylisée et humanisée sur deux pattes, l’échine courbée car déjà mal en point, qui s’apprêterait à faire mine de passer entre les rangs et à tenter d’éviter les coups de massues sur lesquelles figureraient les noms des principales formations politiques du pays.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">A coup sûr elle n’y survivrait pas. C’est d’ailleurs ce que sont aujourd’hui en train de faire ces partis politiques, achever le pays et ruiner l’espoir de sortie de crise avec des formations politiques capables de s’affronter ensuite dans une vie politique normalisée.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\"><span></span></p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Dix ans de gbagboïsme sont passés par là, dix ans à détruire tout ce qui faisait la renommée de la Côte d’Ivoire et la différenciait de ses voisins ouest-africains.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Dix ans et résultat : faillite de la SIR, délestages en série dans un pays qui n’en avait plus connu depuis 1984, éclatement de la partie nord du pays en une dizaine de régions dont l’économie est aux mains de factions armées, corruption généralisée, apparition des “refondateurs”, une classe de nouveaux riches intellectuellement faible et financièrement puissante, s’étant enrichit sur la faillite de l’État, appauvrissement des classes moyennes comme jamais auparavant, mainmise du syndicat à la solde du pouvoir (la FESCI) sur les campus universitaires, les logements étudiants, etc., fuite des étudiants étrangers, des étrangers tout court, quand ce n’est pas plus simplement chasse aux Burkinabè, dégradation du respect de la vie privée, règne de l’argent comme seule valeur morale, progression des églises champignons où des pasteurs s’enrichissent en vendant la théologie de la prospérité à tout va, impunité de l’ensemble des responsables des crimes et massacres commis de 2002 à 2004, déchets toxiques déversés à Abidjan, etc… Abrégeons une énumération qui peut s’éterniser !</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Le plus tragique peut-être c’est de voir le manque d’imagination politique de l’opposition qui entre encore en 2010 dans un gouvernement Soro-Gbagbo, censé conduire le pays vers des élections, quand le boulanger lui-même fournit pourtant l’occasion rêver de l’envoyer rouler dans la farine en choisissant de dissoudre gouvernement et Commission Électorale Indépendante.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Malheureusement, logique du “tout-sauf-la-guerre” ou du “mange-qui-peut”, ce sont les élites politiques toutes ensembles qui sont aujourd’hui responsable de la situation ivoirienne. En acceptant d’entrer dans un gouvernement qui de fait ne fera que prolonger la situation actuelle le plus longtemps possible, elles ne s’enfoncent que davantage. Alors que dans le même temps on laisse détruire des archives et l’état civil à Bouaké, on continue à assister aux mêmes douteux incendies accidentels, tantôt au siège d’un parti politique, tantôt dans un bureau de l’administration universitaire.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">A trop entrer dans le jeu du FPI et de Gbagbo, les partis d’opposition finissent par porter la responsabilité du mode de gouvernance carnassier de la caste politique qui le tient en otage. Il aurait pourtant été facile de paralyser le pays mi-février, faire tomber l’exécutif, avec un peu plus d’imagination et de volonté de prendre des risques. C’était l’appui de la rue assurée, cette même rue qui avait mis en place l’actuel président. Malgré la répression probable.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Mais le choix fait a été tout autre au nom d’une stabilité qui n’existe que dans les esprits de cette même caste, mais qui pour l’homme de la rue est aujourd’hui du domaine d’un passé lointain. Le choix de continuer à s’asseoir à la même table, le choix de ne pas aller au bras de fer, le choix de ne laisser que deux alternatives à la population : continuer à subir accroché aux postes de radio et de télévision ou battre le pavé…seule, sans soutien politique aucun.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Ça va aller, ce n’est qu’une question de temps.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Autre caricature, des moustiques suçant le sang du pays à la tête humanoïde (Gbagbo, Soro, Bédié, ADO, Wattao, etc.)… Au-dessus telle une épée de Damoclès : une tapette à moustique géante actionnée par la population …2005, raté les mailles sont trop grosses, 2008 les mailles, plus petites, sont encore trop grosses, 2010, tout le monde a compris et travaille à réduire les mailles de la tapette à moustique…</p>\n\n<div>\n<a title=\"Click me to see the sites.\" href=\"http://www.sachaproject.net/#\"><strong><em>Bookmark It</em></strong></a>\n<br>\n<div style=\"overflow:hidden\">\n<br>\n<a 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"title" : "The March of the Guinea Fowls",
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"content" : "Somewhere in Northern Ghana...<br><br><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackwize/4391118327/\" title=\"The March of the Guinea Fowls by NanaKofiAcquah, on Flickr\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4033/4391118327_fda58252e8_o.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"571\" alt=\"The March of the Guinea Fowls\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1392769759109690709-3640976419450231461?l=nanakofiacquah.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "A Tribute to Film Noir",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOgBa2Oij1A\">The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir</a> [slyt] A montage of scenes from classic film noir. <br> The Noirs:<br>\n<br>\nTHE LETTER (1940, William Wyler. Bette Davis)<br>\nTHE MALTESE FALCON (1941, John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor)<br>\nSHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943, Alfred Hitchcock. Joseph Cotten)<br>\nDOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944, Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray)<br>\nMURDER, MY SWEET (1944, Edward Dmytryk. Dick Powell)<br>\nSCARLET STREET (1945, Fritz Lang. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett)<br>\nLAURA (1945, Otto Preminger. Gene Tierney)<br>\nDETOUR (1945, Edgar G. Ulhmer. Ann Savage)<br>\nNOTORIOUS (1946, Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman)<br>\nGILDA (1946, Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth)<br>\nTHE KILLERS (1946, Robert Siodmak. Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster)<br>\nTHE BIG SLEEP (1946, Howard Hawks. Humphrey Bogart)<br>\nTHE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946, Tay Garnett. John Garfield, Lana Turner)<br>\nTHE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947, Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth, Welles)<br>\nOUT OF THE PAST (1947, Jacques Tourneur. Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum)<br>\nBRUTE FORCE (1947, Jules Dassin. Burt Lancaster)<br>\nFORCE OF EVIL (1948, Abraham Polonsky. John Garfield, Marie Windsor)<br>\nTHE SET-UP (1949, Robert Wise. Robert Ryan)<br>\nTHE THIRD MAN (1949, Carol Reed. Orson Welles)<br>\nCRISS CROSS (1949, Siodmak. Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo)<br>\nGUN CRAZY (1950, Joseph H. Lewis. John Dall, Peggy Cummins)<br>\nIN A LONELY PLACE (1950, Nicholas Ray. Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame)<br>\nTHE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950, Huston. Sterling Hayden)<br>\nNIGHT AND THE CITY (1950, Jules Dassin. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney)<br>\nSUNSET BLVD. (1950, Billy Wilder. Gloria Swanson, William Holden)<br>\nACE IN THE HOLE (1951, Billy Wilder. Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling)<br>\nANGEL FACE (1952, Otto Preminger. Jean Simmons)<br>\nPICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953, Samuel Fuller. Richard Widmark)<br>\nTHE BIG HEAT (1953, Fritz Lang. Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin)<br>\nKISS ME DEADLY (1955, Robert Aldrich. Gaby Rodgers)<br>\nNIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955, Charles Laughton. Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish)<br>\nTHE KILLING (1956, Stanley Kubrick. Sterling Hayden)<br>\nELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (1958, Louis Malle. Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet)<br>\nTOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)<br>\nTHE NAKED KISS (1964, Samuel Fuller. Constance Towers)<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?a=XuCDB_jlPco:gCAZ5jQKcd0:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?i=XuCDB_jlPco:gCAZ5jQKcd0:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "A graphical analysis of national anthem lyrics",
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"content" : "<div><div><h2>With attention to religious expression, Olympic performance, <br>and general bloodthirstiness</h2><img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"Mapstrip\" title=\"Mapstrip\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c01310f40c155970c-800wi\" border=\"0\"></div>\n<div>\n<h4>By Nate Barksdale</h4>\n<h5>February 2010</h5>\n\n</div>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.natebarksdale.com/\"></a></p>\n<p>One of my 2010 New Year's resolutions was simple: I wanted to learn the words to the French national anthem. My reasons for memorizing \"La Marseillaise\" were twofold: first, I'd always wanted to sing along with <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM-E2H1ChJM\">that climactic scene in <em>Casablanca</em></a> where Bogart, Bergman, and the whole gang at Rick's Café Américain join together to drown out an annoying chorus of Nazi officers. And second, for the past few years I've undertaken an unsuccessful effort to teach myself the language of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire\">Voltaire</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_Hulot%27s_Holiday\">Hulot</a>, largely by watching <a href=\"http://jt.france2.fr/20h/\"><em>Le 20 Heures</em></a>, the French national broadcaster's nightly newscast.</p>\n\n\n<p>I've seen a lot of <em>Les 20 Heures</em> over the years, enough to notice how certain stories cycle through every year or two: transit strikes, theater festivals, cheese fairs, <a href=\"http://recherche.france2.fr/?q=johnny+hallyday\">Johnny Hallyday</a>. One of these is a story I like to call \"Are our students French enough?\" The inciting topic is usually something to do with education policy, but the climax inevitably features clips of giggling high schoolers trying, and failing, to get through the first verse of \"La Marseillaise.\" Thus was my inspiration born: I know I'll never be fluent in French, but darn it, at least I can out-Frenchify those French kids on one count. <em>Le jour de gloire et arrivé!</em></p>\n<p>But a funny thing happened—in the midst of my memorizing, I realized that the anthem's lyrics were far stranger and more disturbing than I'd imagined: the last lines of every refrain go thus:</p>\n<blockquote><p align=\"center\"><em>Qu'un sang impur <br>Abreuve nos sillons!</em><br> <br>May an impure blood <br> Water our furrows!</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>\nIn essence, <em>kill the foreigner!</em> It's hardly the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from Ingrid Bergman, or a grinning high-schooler, let alone the French soccer team <a href=\"http://www.metacafe.com/watch/889705/wc_germany_2006_final_italy_and_france_anthems/\">as they line up to lose the World Cup</a>. I started to wonder: were other national anthems like this too? Was my own?</p>\n<p>Soon I was clicking every link on Wikipedia's <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_anthems\">List of national anthems</a>, reading and copying and pasting all sorts of odd stuff from various national ditties. I made a <a href=\"http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tFxrziGMON0NWafrEY41dpA&single=true&gid=8&output=html\">giant spreadsheet</a> of the full translated lyrics of every anthem I could find, then hopped over to <a href=\"http://www.wordle.net/\">wordle.net</a> to generate frequency clouds of all the anthem's not-so-common words (we'll look at the untranslated and unsifted lyrics data further down). What follows are some findings and some thoughts—all to be taken lightly, of course. Whatever country you're from, let me start by assuring you that its national anthem is the very best one.</p>\n\n<p></p>\n<p style=\"float:left\">\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd23970b-pi\">\n<img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"A_full_versions_every\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd23970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a></p>\n<p>A couple of notes about my technique: many of the countries with longer anthems (more on that below) have wisely designated only a stanza or two for their official versions. It is a wisdom that I admire, commend, and ignore: I'm an anthem maximalist. Who cares if the last stanza of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Canto_degli_Italiani\">Il Canto degli Italiani</a>, which is a celebration of Poland's independence struggle, isn't in the version they sing before soccer games? And for that matter, who cares if \"Il canto degli Italiani\" is supposed to be sung in Italian? Wikipedia's provided English translations vary in quality and archaic diction, but for the most part facilitate decent cross-cultural comparison. (The only anthem whose full translation proved elusive was the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia,_Wake_Up\">Somali hymn</a>: its page tantalized with an English-rendered first verse, but the rest was impermeable to my internet searches and auto-translations. Fed snippets of the later stanzas, <a href=\"http://translate.google.com/#auto%7Cen%7CSoomaaliyeey%20toosoo%0AToosoo%20isku%20tiirsada%20ee%0AHadba%20kiina%20taagdaranee%0ATaageera%20waligiinee%0A%0AIdinkaysu%20tookhaayoo%0AIdinkaysu%20taamaayee%0AAadamuhu%20tacliin%20barayoo%0AWaddankiisa%20taamyeeloo\">Google Translate</a> guesses that it was written, depending on the excerpt, in Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, Malay, Estonian, Basque, Hungarian, English, or possibly Quechua.)</p>\n\n<p>\n\nSo what do the combined lyrics tell us? When it comes to national anthems, it's all about the Land, in all its Mother- Father- and Home- varieties. It's a concreteness that makes sense: this is where we are, and here's a song about it. More surprising is the popularity of the less-substantial verbs <em>may</em> and <em>let</em> which, as a friend pointed out, speak to an anthemic tendency towards hopefulness and singing-into-being. If you squint your eyes and pretend some of the words rhyme, you can almost make out a one-size-fits all global hymn (imagine it playing as a <a href=\"http://kottke.org/09/12/a-world-flag\">population-weighted composite world flag</a> runs up the pole).</p>\n<p>The trouble with this arrangement, though, is that the residents of the world's most populous countries are underrepresented: \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wodefit_Gesgeshi,_Widd_Innat_Ityopp%27ya\">March Forward Dear Mother Ethiopia</a>\" gets the same emphasis as \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_On,_Bahamaland\">March On, Bahamaland</a>,\" which doesn't seem quite fair.</p>\n<p>To even things out, made a population-weighted text file, which contained 98 copies of China's anthem for every one copy \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Kazakhstan_(anthem)\">My Kazakhstan</a>\" (countries below a certain Kazakhstan-ish population were left out entirely). Suddenly the word-cloud gets a lot more Asian:</p>\n<p><a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd35970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_full_versions_weighted2\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd35970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>New words jump to the fore: March, in particular, owes its clout to the Chinese anthem, \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_of_the_Volunteers\">March of the Volunteers</a>\" which, true to title, contains a fourfold exhortation to march. The miracle of national branding that is the Indonesian anthem punches above its hefty population-weight by including the name of the country both in the anthem's title (\"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia_Raya\">Indonesia Raya</a>\" aka \"Great Indonesia\") and in just about every other line thereafter:</p>\n<blockquote><p> Indonesia, my nationality<br>\n My nation and my homeland<br>\n Let us exclaim<br>\n \"Indonesia unites!\" </p>\n\n</blockquote>\n<p> Perhaps a nation of a thousand-plus islands needs more than the occasional reminder what country it is they're singing about. \"God defend...—wait, what country are we again?\"</p>\n\n<p>\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd21970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_full_versions_25least\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd21970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>By way of comparison, here's a cloud of the anthems of the twenty-five least populated countries. God definitely gets a higher billing, and not just <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inno_e_Marcia_Pontificale\">thanks to the Pope</a>. Apparently smallness turns a nation's mind towards higher things. (During communist times, the <a href=\"http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fbg.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F%25D0%259C%25D0%25B8%25D0%25BB%25D0%25B0_%25D0%25A0%25D0%25BE%25D0%25B4%25D0%25B8%25D0%25BD%25D0%25BE&sl=auto&tl=en\">Bulgarian Anthem</a> added a line that said \"Moscow is with us at peace and at war\" just to be on the safe side, higher-power-wise.)</p>\n\n<p style=\"float:left\"><a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d9a15d970b-pi\"><img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"A_region_pop_1600\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d9a15d970b-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n<p>Next, I split up all the anthems by region, and then performed my same word-weighting trick. Here is a world map with each region's anthem-word-cloud scaled according to population and placed, roughly at least, over the region it represents. To make things a bit more legible, I made the following table of word-clouds by region; the word clouds from the map version are in the left column, while on the right there are clouds made from the full, unweighted lyrics from every nation in the region. Often this makes a pretty big difference. For instance the population-weighted lyrics from Oceania are all from \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair\">Advance Australia Fair</a>,\" while the unweighted cloud shows words from a diversity of (apparently far more God-exhorting) islands, many of which have adopted the Indonesian trick of featuring the country's name prominently in the lyrics. Indeed, most of the time a country's name shows up in these word clouds, an island is involved.</p><p style=\"float:left\">\n\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c01310f3753f3970c-pi\"><img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"A_lang_pop_chart3\" title=\"A_lang_pop_chart3\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c01310f3753f3970c-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a> <br>\n\n</p>\n<p>It is interesting to note which regions' word clouds are most swayed by population-weighting. The Central American and Caribbean weighted cloud bears the heavy imprint of Mexico's battle-saturated <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himno_Nacional_Mexicano\">Himno Nacional</a> (\"War, war without quarter to any who dare to tarnish the coat of arms!\"). In Europe giving the mini-nations' anthem equal footing increases the relative presence of both God and the German (and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oben_am_jungen_Rhein\">Liechtensteinian</a>) concept of fatherland. Africa, meanwhile, looks about the same either way, which would suggest that population heavyweights Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa have anthems that aren't much different than the pan-African average, emphasizing people, oneness, and, of course, Africa itself.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>Now let's step back, in turn, from our two starting hedges in this whole word-analysis game: translation and common-word filtering. The first allows the fiction of a more universal commerce in anthem-words; the second provides us the happy delusion that the words that stand out are especially interesting and meaningful. To do this, I created a new data set of untranslated and unweighted variants of the anthem corpus. Here's what we get:\n</p><p style=\"float:left\"><a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c01310f36edc0970c-pi\"><img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"A_lang_pop_chart-untranslated2\" title=\"A_lang_pop_chart-untranslated2\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c01310f36edc0970c-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n<p>I tried to include all the official translations of a given anthem on the Wikipedia list (thus some countries with multiple official languages got to increase their word count accordingly). When we weight by population, a number of lovely non-Latin characters and scripts jump to the fore, most noticeably Chinese (simplified), Hindi and Bengali. Both <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jana_Gana_Mana\">India</a>'s and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Shonar_Bangla\">Bangladesh</a>'s official anthems are by the Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore\">Rabindranath Tagore</a>, and I couldn't quite tell if the Hindi version of the anthem is considered first among equals of India's <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India#Official_languages\">twenty-two official languages</a>, or if any translation is official at all. I'd have loved to have added Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, and lots of others, but I wouldn't have known when to stop. So I added Hindi in the above chart, but not in the by-language breakdown table below.</p>\n<p>My attempt at linguistic inclusiveness pushed the limits of Wordle's admirable text-handling; often it took a few renderings to get the Chinese characters to appear in the cloud, and I know that several significant anthem-languages (notably <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka_Matha\">Sri Lanka</a>'s Sinhalese) weren't rendered at all. Preparing the common-words-removed versions of the corpus created graver doubts. Wordle will only remove common words from one language at a time, so I wound up having to delete articles, particles, and short prepositions by hand to generate the bottom two clouds—not so difficult with the languages I was familiar with, but much more challenging for the ones with non-roman scripts. Then there was the problem of homonyms, which allowed disparate languages to combine forces to rank certain words higher—this explains much of the dominance of the pan-Romance de and la and en in the upper-left column. Then there were words like <em>die</em>, which is an feminine article in German and a morbid verb in English.</p>\n<p>Next, the same grid with all the words in English. Apparently the smaller countries are more likely to include plural pronouns and possessives.</p>\n<p><a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8c53778970b-pi\"><img alt=\"A_lang_pop_chart-translated\" title=\"A_lang_pop_chart-translated\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8c53778970b-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n<p>Returning to the realm of the untranslated, here are word clouds for several of the major languages by population. Chinese is the only single-country language I included (since Taiwan and Hong Kong don't have full and separate anthems, and Singapore and Vietnam offer only secondary Chinese-character translations). Official anthems in Bahasa Indonesia, Urdu, Russian, and Japanese represent more citizens than do the ones in German, but German has those extra mini-nations.</p>\n\n<p style=\"float:left\">\n\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d07951970b-pi\"><img style=\"width:744px\" alt=\"A_lang_pop_chart-languages5\" title=\"A_lang_pop_chart-languages5\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d07951970b-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a> <br>\n\n</p>\n<p>The Spanish and Portuguese language clouds both lead with the word patria, which is rendered as land in the translated cloud but contains additional overtones of home, nationhood, identity, and independence. If I had to summarize the body of Latin American anthems in three words, they would be those of the battle cry, <em>¡Patria o muerte!</em> It's also worth noting that Spain's \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcha_Real\">La Marcha Real</a>\" currently lacks official lyrics, <a href=\"http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL0477098820070604?feedType=RSS&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+reuters%252FUKOddlyEnoughNews+%2528News+%252F+UK+%252F+Oddly+Enough+News%2529&utm_content=Google+Reader\">much to the consternation of their soccer players</a>.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>\nWhere would national anthems be without sporting events? Well, they'd still be in Wikipedia, but my guess is a lot fewer people would be exposed to their wondrous (and yet <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2245179/\">oddly similar-sounding</a>) diversity. So I made another weighted word-cloud, this time pasting each anthem in once for every gold medal a given nation has won (summer and winter games both included)—that is, once for each time that anthem has been played as the three flags rose behind the podium (forgetting for a moment that said performances are pretty much always instrumental). For this cloud I used my first lyrics from an ex-nation; the USSR's medal count was too significant not to include the now-defunct <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_the_Soviet_Union\">Soviet Anthem</a>, but I decided against teasing apart which Germans won gold with which anthems, or what to do with, say, the mixed Danish-Swedish team that <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_team_at_the_1900_Summer_Olympics\">won the tug-of-war</a> at the 1900 games. But here's a general sense of how the victorious athletes have been singing along (in their heads) over the years:\n</p>\n \n<p> <a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd2d970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_full_versions_olympic\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd2d970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>By way of equal time, here's the cloud for the un-winningest nations. Again, it seems the smaller or less-Olympically-powerful a country, the more likely God is to appear in their anthem.</p>\n<p>\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd29970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_full_versions_nogold\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd29970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>Ok, enough word clouds! One thing that I found myself more and more interested in as I worked my way through all the anthems was why some countries had anthems that, at least when I counted every stanza and chorus, were really, really long. </p>\n<p>\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d02c89970b-pi\"><img alt=\"Maxlength\" title=\"Maxlength\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8d02c89970b-800wi\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n<p>The country with the longest national anthem is Peru. It has 956 words in its English translation. Word for word, you could fit more than fifty Japanese national anthems into a single Peruvian one. The nineteen-word Japanese anthem is both the shortest and has the oldest lyrics, which are from a 9th century poem:</p>\n<blockquote><p>May your reign<br> Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations,<br> Until the pebbles<br>Grow into boulders<br>Lush with moss</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>\nJapan's competition in the oldest-anthem race is from the Netherlands, whose \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Wilhelmus\">Het Wilhelmus</a>\" dates to the sixteenth century but has been considered a national song for much of its history. It is still the third-longest anthem, whose length is due to the fact that it is an acrostic, with the first letter of each stanza combining to reveal the name of the Dutch republic's founding leader, Wilhelmus von Nassouwe. The entire poem is autobiographical, narrated (a bit paradoxically) by the man known to history as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Silent\">William the Silent</a>.</p>\n<p>\nNow let's look at a series of frequency maps for certain words. The numbers in the legend are normalized to instances per thousand anthem-words.</p>\n<p> <a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd3e970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_maps_2\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd3e970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>I found it a little surprising that Canada beats out the United States in frequency of references to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Canada\">Land, God and Freedom</a>—this in spite of the \"Land of the free and the home of the brave\" closer to every verse of \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner\">The Star-Spangled Banner</a>.\" But the freedom-singingest anthem of all is \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Sing_of_Zambia,_Proud_and_Free\">Stand and Sing of Zambia, Proud and Free</a>.\" No anthem mentions America particularly frequently, but it is interesting that every one that does is in South America, or as they call it, <a href=\"http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9rica_%28desambiguaci%C3%B3n%29\">América</a>. Nobody north of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap\">Darién Gap</a> seems to've felt a similar need. Now let's consider another quartet:</p>\n<p>\n<a style=\"display:inline\" href=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd40970b-pi\">\n<img alt=\"A_maps_3\" title=\"Click to enlarge\" src=\"http://natebarksdale.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a672d95c970c0120a8adbd40970b-800wi\" border=\"0\">\n</a>\n</p>\n<p>\nIt's nice to have proof that anthems mention life more than death, especially given the question of bloodthirstiness that got me started on this research. I fear that the Enemies quadrant of the above chart may be a little misleading—not that the Chinese anthem isn't all about enemies, but rather that other anthems just don't use the word directly all that much. For instance, here's a passage from the \"<a href=\"http://www.natebarksdale.com/style=\">Himno Nacional de la República de Bolivia</a>\":</p><blockquote><p>If a foreigner may, any given day<br>\neven attempt to subjugate Bolivia,<br>\nlet him prepare for a fatal destiny,<br>\nwhich menaces such brave aggressor.<br>\nFor the sons of the mighty Bolívar<br>\nhave sworn, thousands upon thousands of times,<br>\nto die rather than see the country's<br>\nmajestic banner humiliated.</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>... and one from the final stanza of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Canto_degli_Italiani\">Italian anthem</a>: </p><blockquote><p>Mercenary swords,<br>\nthey're feeble reeds.<br>\nThe Austrian eagle<br>\nHas already lost its plumes.</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>When it comes to bloodthirstiness, it isn't enough to talk about battle, weapons (\"Farmers their axes sharpened / whenever an army advanced\"—<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja,_vi_elsker_dette_landet\">Norway</a>), enemies, death, or even things being soaked in blood, whether the land (\"The blood of our sires which hallows the sod\"—<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Free\">Belize</a>) or the flag (\"Ever since the day when her lofty banner,\nIn letters of blood, wrote 'Freedom'\"—<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_El_Salvador\">El Salvador</a>). Anyway, much of the death-talk is about dying for one's own country (\"to die for the fatherland is to live\"—<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bayamesa\">Cuba</a>; \"O Martyrs! Your cries echo in the ears of time\"—<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorud-e_Melli-e_Iran\">Iran</a>), rather than killing for it.</p>\n\n<p>When I asked my friends to guess which country had the most violent and bloodthirsty national anthem, a few guessed the United States, what with the rockets and the bombs. The anthem's <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner#Lyrics\">third stanza</a> does add details less comfortable for a Fourth of July reenactment, noting that the blood of the invading enemy \"has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.\" All that said, though, I think my own country's anthem doesn't quite come close to, say, the all-or-nothing apocalypticism of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaba_Ma_Kyei\">Burma's anthem</a> (\"Until the world ends up shattering, long lives Burma!\"), or that of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himno_Nacional_Mexicano\">Mexico</a>:</p><blockquote><p>O, Motherland, ere your children, defenseless<br>\nbend their neck beneath the yoke,<br>\nmay your fields be watered with blood,<br>\nmay their foot be printed in blood.<br>\nAnd may your temples, palaces and towers<br>\ncollapse with horrid clamor</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n<p>Then there's this bit, from Vietnam's \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti%E1%BA%BFn_Qu%C3%A2n_Ca\">Tiến Quân Ca</a>\":</p>\n<blockquote><p>Our flag, red with the blood of victory, bears the spirit of the country.<br>\nThe distant rumbling of the guns mingles with our marching song.<br>\nThe path to glory is built by the bodies of our foes.</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n<p>We're a long way from simply plucking the Austrian eagle now.</p><p>The <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassaman\">Algerian anthem</a> goes still further. It opens like this:</p><blockquote><p>We swear by the lightning that destroys,<br>\nBy the streams of generous blood being shed,</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>... and pounds things home with a for-anthems-rare burst of 20th-century technology:</p><blockquote><p>When we spoke, none listened to us,<br>\nSo we have taken the noise of gunpowder as our rhythm<br>\nAnd the sound of machine guns as our melody</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n<p>It is interesting to note that these last two are anthems that were written during their respective countries' struggles against French colonial rule; one wonders whether there was a conscious effort on the part of the songwriters to out-Marseillaise the Marseillaise. But do they succeed? I'd shift the prize but for that last minor-key line before the clarion call to arms:</p><blockquote><p>\n<em>Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras<br>\nÉgorger nos fils, nos compagnes!</em><br>\nThey come up to our arms<br>To slit the throats of our sons and wives!</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>For me, that image—more even than the watering-with-blood that happens in retaliation, pushes it over the line—violence with a far more personal touch. Maybe I should have been content to learn \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Time_Goes_By_%28song%29\">As Time Goes By</a>.\"</p></div>"
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"title" : "Songs of Evil: Notes on Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You"",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_s3qR1IWHXYM/SoWSaKDgx1I/AAAAAAAACXQ/rrerjUQzEpM/s1600-h/whitney1.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_s3qR1IWHXYM/SoWSaKDgx1I/AAAAAAAACXQ/rrerjUQzEpM/s200/whitney1.jpg\" style=\"float:right;height:194px;margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;width:200px\"></a>A few weeks ago they released the <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/01/25/new-music-preview-whitney-houston-the-deluxe-anniversary-edition/\">25th anniversary edition</a> of Whitney Houston's debut album, <i>Whitney Houston</i>.<br>\n<br>\nWhitney is sort of fascinating as a human embodiment of the philosophical conundrum of \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus\">Theseus' Ship</a> (props to Jen Dziura's <a href=\"http://www.philosophyshow.com/\">one-woman show</a> for reminder on this).<br>\n<br>\nThe Ship of Theseus <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus\">paradox</a> poses questions of identity and authenticity in the form of a riddle/parable: If a ship leaves the port -- in this case Theseus' ship -- and while out at sea has all its planks replaced over time, piece by piece, when it returns to port with all new parts is it still Theseus' Ship?<br>\n<br>\nNow you may or may not know that some scientists will tell you that our cells are <a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cells+regenerate+every+7+years&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8\">regenerating every 7-10 years</a>. In effect, we all have a little Theseus Paradox in us: our whole bodies are renewed over time, piece by piece, but we stay (in some essential way) the same person.<br>\n<br>\nIn the case of the <a href=\"http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=tblTopArt\">fourth best-selling female artist</a>, the paradox is striking: If when we met Whitney she was a god-fearing, clean-cut, singer from heaven, and then twenty years later all of her cells have changed, and she's a crack-smoking, Bobby Brown f'ing, reality show ghetto diva doing very little singing. Well, is that still Whitney Houston?<br>\n<br>\nI don't know.... But, uh, ANYwhitney, I didn't want to unpack our enigmatic angel in this post, but rather her song, \"Saving All My Love For You\" which got stuck in my head upon revisiting her debut album.<br>\n<br>\nHave you listened to this song recently? I personally had not, and after being briefly enamored with the parodic possibilities of turning the song into an ode to eye-crust called \"Saving All My Crust For You\", I realized the song is one of the most purely evil songs I've ever given my attention. It's selfish, obnoxious, and pretty much morally reprehensible. If that proves to be a harsh assessment, then it's at the very least disingenuous. Like some sort of romantic Trojan Horse purporting the spirit of true love, when it's no more than the the deranged fantasy of an intolerably narcissistic lunatic.<br>\n<br>\nThe title of this song suggets a paean to waiting, pining, fighting, and willing ones way into someone else's heart. In a different context, perhaps a noble sentiment. But as per the setup of the song, you get a sense of some rather questionable pathology lurking beneath the surface. Some notes on all this after the video below.<br>\n<br>\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/I_esJmpDcLM%26hl%3Den%26fs%3D1%26&width=415&height=344\" width=\"415\" height=\"344\"></iframe><br>\n~~<br>\n<i></i><br>\n<i><a name=\"more\"></a><br>\nA few stolen moments is all that we share<br>\nYou've got your family, and they need you there<br>\nThough I've tried to resist, being last on your list<br>\nBut no other man's gonna do<br>\nSo I'm saving all my love for you</i><br>\n<br>\n1. Ok. First off, on premise alone this song it's clear they just don't make 'em like they used to. This is a pop song! It's like writing a lament for a <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/weekinreview/21bilton.html\">Chat Roulette</a> stalker and having it be on the radio all the time. Maybe Bob Dylan might have popped something like that off back in the days, but definitely alternative indie material in the 2010.<br>\n<br>\n2. Think of the last year of <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/tiger-woods-women-picture_n_383328.html\">rampant</a> <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/06/elizabeth-edwards-oprah-winfrey-resilience\">infidelity</a> news <a href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/david-letterman-admits-sexual-affairs-staffers-details-extortion/story?id=8728424\">stories</a>, and amidst all the grief and hubbub and backlash the one sentiment no one considered putting out there is a LOVE BALLAD FROM THE MISTRESS (hoes gotta sing love songs too? Say it ain't so! ). Next up: Requiem for a Rapist. Or a woeful Murderer's Malaise ballad. Ok, not those two so much. Sorry. But still, the edgiest pop song material we get these days is Beyonce or Lady Gaga or <a href=\"http://music.aol.com/video/keha-tik-tok/kesha/sony:41872299001\">Ke$ha</a> talking about how dudes want to f 'em in the club. And if you take away the soft porn videos, that's really about as tame a sentiment as you can get. This is like going out with your hottest girlfriend -- not only hot cause she's naturally physically hot, but because she enjoys drawing attention to her hotness, dresses hot, etc -- and she's prattling on and on: All the boys want me in the club. Can you believe all the boys want me in the club? I think all the boys want me in the club. Don't be mad all the boys want me in the club. I think your boy wants me in the club. He has to beat those other boys that want me in the club. I think the DJ wants to see me dancing in the club. Everybody lets start dancing in the club. Me and my girls 'bout to start dancin' in the club, and then comes the chorus about how the boys want me in the club..... so, y'know, its pretty boring and lame without music and visuals of dry-humping. And that's our \"edgy\" pop stuff. So off the bat this mistress manifesto is treading in dark places we dare not venture.<br>\n<br>\n3. \"they need you there\": Maybe I'm getting old and soft, but is it not WEIRD to be so brazen about breaking up a family? the subtext of the first two lines are basically: Your son will have daddy issues. Your daughter will have insecurities. And they need you.... They need you to not make the damage worse and flat out abandon them. For a few stolen moments. So don't worry about me.<br>\n<br>\n3.5. And ...THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE SONG. THIS IS HOW WE START THE CONVERSATION? Can I get a drink? How's the weather? Sun shining? Rain falling? Maybe some *ooh la la, I love you* stuff to warm me up? Do we have to cut right to, hi, let's get the issue of the damage you're doing to the people you love for selfish reasons on the table ASAP?<br>\n<br>\n4. \"but no other man's gonna do\": Really? No other man? Seriously? I mean Whitney is looking impossibly hot rocking the off-the-shoulder sweater (apparently imported direct from <a href=\"http://store.americanapparel.net/rsa2305.html\">2010 American Apparel catalog</a>). So I think she has options. Are we distinguishing between man and peen here? Is this her soulmate? I'm not getting a sense of that from \"a few stolen moments. So if this is just some motherfucker you like, I mean, come on now. Its one thing to have a crush and write a song for <a href=\"http://theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com/2005/10/gawk-at-this-gawker-audio.html\">someone</a>, but if they're married with a family? And no other man's gonna do? huh?? what??? Shit, I'm going to try that on someone married and hot. Look, Angelina, and, uh, family,-- no other woman's gonna do! THAT'S IT! Tell Brad. And we don't have to, y'know, resolve to live together right this second or whatever, but realize that every drop of love is in fact being saved ... for you. Not just some ideal avatar for a \"perfect partner\". But you. Yooooouuu.<br>\n<br>\n4.5. If Rachel Uchitel showed up at Tiger's press conference and was like, \"Look, no other man's gonna do! Surprise! \" Would we be like, awwwww, yay her?<br>\n<br>\n5. Life Truism #1: Being last on the list sucks all around. For listmakers too! But if there's a list, someone has to be last! it's really the list's fault when you think about it. not players, hate the game, etc.<br>\n<br>\n<i>It's not very easy, living all alone<br>\nMy friends try and tell me, find a man of my own<br>\nBut each time I try, I just break down and cry<br>\nCause I'd rather be home feeling blue<br>\nSo I'm saving all my love for you</i><br>\n<br>\n6. Life Truism #2: everyone lives and dies alone on some level. If you're a sensitive brooder type, that's awesome. I'm one of those too! But it doesn't entitle you (or me) to peen. Or anything, really.<br>\n<br>\n7. The friends: Your friends probably hate you, Miss Myopia. Do you realize this? If you have a crush on your -- let's call him a project manager, or boss; it's not a best friend, or long time confidante, which would be more understandable -- and you like them, but they have a family, and are otherwise unavailable, and your friends are like, girl, you need to find someone who's like, available, and interested. and what do you do? Cry? Really? ... break down and cry?!!? What kind of friend is this? It's such a selfish socially dysfunctional response. Put on a front, at least. You have to at least be able to lie and say, ha ha, just kidding. No, I'm not really sweating him that much. Then cry and stalk him anonymously on the internet like the rest of the world. When your friends act like friends and suggest you act normal, i.e. not like an asshole, you're not allowed break down and cry. Not without needing new friends to hoodwink with your emotional bait-and-switch routine.<br>\n<br>\n8. The Girl: I don't even know about this girl finding a man of her own at this point. This girl is f'd up. What she needs is a break. Some time smacking herself in front of a mirror. Banging her head against the wall. Building houses in Haiti. Anything will be more productive. This sort of OCD possessiveness sows the seeds of discontent in any relationship. All the love being saved here is toxic. let it go and replenish from new supply.<br>\n<br>\n<i>You used to tell me we'd run away together<br>\nLove gives you the right to be free<br>\nYou said be patient, just wait a little longer<br>\nBut that's just an old fantasy</i><br>\n<br>\n9. The Guy: ah, now we get a little backdrop. dude sold the \"run away\" fantasy to get in the drawers. Ha, I don't know how many girls i've told that we'd totally run away to zimbabwe as soon as I get my papers in order ... y'know, as long as we definitely have sex <i>tonight</i>. Oh wait, I do know how many. Zero. Because what f'ing woman would still be listening to me after I suggested \"running away together\"? This is some humprey bogart white people shit that was never fact-checked before being allowed to run amok in songs and movies and general storytelling. People don't run away together. Because soon after running away together comes followup questions like, \"what the fuck are we doing running away?\" \"Who or what are we running away from?\" \"why have we left the comforts of our home and familiar lifestyle and environment?\" \"Do you not see this is f'ing retarded?\" <br>\n<br>\nNow poor people might be like, do you want to share this rent together? Ok. That's practical. Romantics might want to try and find a soulmate. That's very sweet. But running away together? That's just some retarded leftover vestigial tail shit. No one is really pitching a new love interest on that unless they also refer to dinner as \"hunter-gathering\". I guess when this song came out in the early-80s those people weren't all dead yet. But still. <br>\n<br>\n10. At least we see this isn't strictly Whitney/<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Masser\">Songwriter</a> making melodies to emotively underscore this particular brand of mental derangement and disregard for others. Until this point in the song the dude seems like an innocent victim (in the video too he never indicates much interest besides pleasantly smiling.) So, ok. Now we have a glimmer of something that might make sense in terms of reciprocated affections, complicated relationship problems. But just to be clear, this one glimmer of possible rationality is predicated on THE GUY BEING A BIGGER ASSHOLE THAN THE GIRL. So yeah, getting better. Less unequivocally evil. Still pretty bleak.<br>\n<br>\n11. love gives you the right to be free? does it, really? whitney? why are you hitting that line with such warbling gusto? wtf does that even mean? That's definitely some more <a href=\"http://theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com/2008/08/post-racial-is-not-postmodern.html\">pretentious white man</a> talking to dumb natives bullshit. Would someone say that during sex? New Rule: If you can't express the sentiment during sex without laughing (not the fun irreverent laughing, but contemptuous sneering, judgmental laughing), then it's not love. <br>\n<i><br>\nI've got to get ready, just a few minutes more<br>\nGonna get that old feeling when you walk through that door<br>\nCause tonight is the night, for feeling alright<br>\nWe'll be making love the whole night through<br>\nSo I'm saving all my love<br>\nYes I'm saving all my love<br>\nYes I'm saving all my love for you</i><br>\n<br>\n12. The glimmer of goodness that appeared to shine through in the last refrain has been shut out. Old feeling? Oh, ok... the cheating that was speculative fantasy in the beginning has already popped off. Those lines about the family were apparently just some casually callous role playing? Ok. Well, unless maybe this narrative has a timeline and divorce been settled in between verses? Doubtful. Sounds like these two just don't give a fuck. Maybe <i>they are</i> made for each other?<br>\n<br>\n(13. Aside: this is also the \"get busy\" verse. I remember blushing when i heard things like \"make love the all night through\" when i was little. now, y'know, i just think much like \"running away together\" and \"love gives you the right to be free\" who are the people who say such things? I do have surrealist fantasies about someone saying that to me, but never have any notion of what the person saying it looks like.)<br>\n<br>\n<i>No other woman, is gonna love you more<br>\nCause tonight is the night, that I'm feeling alright<br>\nWe'll be making love the whole night through<br>\nSo I'm saving all my love<br>\nYeah I'm saving all my lovin<br>\nYes I'm saving all my love for you<br>\nFor you, for you...<br>\n</i><br>\n14. How to Love More, by Miss Selfish & Evil: Interesting assertion, about no one loving more. How does one, exactly, enhance the qualitative nature of love? Or even assess how much one individual loves another? Is it more, like, more physically tangible? Like more backrubs and BJ's? Is it more concerned with his failings, like snatching <a href=\"http://theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com/2007/06/quest-for-claire-huxtable.html\">hoagies</a> out of his hand before he continues to fatten himself up? Is it more emotionally available? Like when he's tormented about leaving his family for a long night of making love the whole night through? There are questions for another song i guess ... because I know the girl in this song hasn't thought about any of this.<br>\n<br>\n15. I don't know if this is Whitney Houston, but if you told me that in twenty years, the clean-cut girl inhabiting this song and video would be a crack-smoking, bobby brown f'ing, reality show ghetto diva doing very little singing. Well, I don't know, I guess I wouldn't be shocked. The sensibility of this song and that lifestyle seems to be the same ship with different planks. Or something.<br>\n<br>\nPreviously in Deconstructed Song Lyrics:<br>\n<a href=\"http://theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-conversation-with-biz-markie.html\">My Conversation with Biz Markie</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/16210951-1897068251454839130?l=theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAssimilatedNegro/~4/nMrw8WxAm40\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping!",
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"content" : "<p>As part of my <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/11/03/the-pursuit-of-happiness\">pursuit of happiness</a>, I have been steadily <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/01/24/attachments-2\">shedding attachments</a>, getting rid of things I don’t use, <a href=\"http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/\">thinking about ways of keeping the things I do use longer</a>, and just generally being a pain in the ass. This, for instance, is an actual conversation I had with my wife last fall:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>Herself: What do you want for your birthday?</p>\n<p>Myself: Nothing.</p>\n<p>Her: You’re impossible to shop for.</p>\n<p>Me: Actually, I want less than that. I want you to let me sell my car and replace it with nothing.</p>\n<p>Her: Be realistic. We live in the suburbs.</p>\n<p>Me: I have a bike.</p>\n<p>Her: But what if my van breaks down?</p>\n<p>Me: We have AAA.</p>\n<p>Her: It would still put a huge burden on me if we only had one vehicle.</p>\n<p>Me: That’s why it’s called a “gift.”</p>\n<p>Her: You’re getting restaurant gift cards. And socks.</p>\n<p>Me: I don’t need socks.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Apropos of nothing, I would just like to point out that the title of this post is a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone\">snowclone</a>, which itself is a word that I learned in the process of researching the exact wording of the original phrase of which it is a snowclone (“Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!” from <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie#Controversies\">Teen Talk Barbie</a> circa 1992). Not knowing whether I should write “simplicity is hard” or “simplicity is tough,” I searched Google for <a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?&ie=UTF-8&q=%22let's+go+shopping%22+math+barbie\">“let’s go shopping” math barbie</a>, and the first result was a Language Log article called <a href=\"http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002892.html\">Tracking snowclones is hard. Let’s go shopping!</a> which is both self-referential in the obvious sense, and also wonderfully meta-referential in that Language Log <a href=\"http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html\">was instrumental in coining the word “snowclone”</a> in the first place, but now can not possibly keep track of the snowclones, as seen by the lengthy update to that very post “added for those who find this via the Wikipedia entry for ‘snowclone’,” which would be… me. And damn it, now I’ve spent the last two hours on a <a href=\"http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WikiWalk\">wiki walk</a>. (And <em>now</em> I’ve (re)introduced you to TvTropes, so, you know, there goes your evening and most of your night. Try to come up for air before dawn.)</p>\n\n<p>My point, such that I have one, is that simplicity is easy to describe but difficult to achieve. Especially (though not exclusively) when there are other people in your life. While I applaud <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/7190750/Millionaire-gives-away-fortune-that-made-him-miserable.html\">millionaires who decide to give away all their money</a> (I say “their” money instead of “his” money, since even if he made the bulk of it, I can’t imagine him being able to give it away without his wife’s consent), the reality at home is more droll. Take, for instance, the television in our bedroom. It is small, as televisions go, costing no more than $100. It was once hooked up to a <abbr>DVD</abbr> player, which itself cost less than $50. Our children used to congregate in our bedroom after bath and before bed and watch 10 or 15 minutes worth of a movie or Sesame Street or some similar passive entertainment. I say “used to,” because in truth they stopped doing that about a year ago. No particular reason, just changing patterns. I pointed out to my wife that this would be a perfect opportunity to simplify by getting rid of the television and replacing it with nothing. That conversation went something like this:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>Myself: Can we get rid of this television?</p>\n<p>Herself: No.</p>\n<p>Me: But we never use it anymore.</p>\n<p>Her: I’m sure that’s not true.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>So I did what any self-respecting scientist would do when faced with an untested hypothesis: I devised a test. Which is to say, I unplugged it. The television. The power cord winds its way to a wall socket behind a dresser, which itself has to be moved in order to get at the socket, so my trickery was both non-obvious and difficult to counteract even if one should notice it. Which, of course, no one did. So there it sat, unused and unplugged, for over six months. Until one day, or rather one night, when we found ourselves in an old familiar situation — kids in pajamas, jumping on the bed, and so on — and my wife actually tried to pop in a <abbr>DVD</abbr>.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>Herself: The <abbr>TV</abbr> doesn’t work.</p>\n<p>Myself: I unplugged it.</p>\n<p>Her: When?</p>\n<p>Me: About six months ago.</p>\n<p>Her: Why would you do that?</p>\n<p>Me: To prove we never use it.</p>\n<p>Her: I’m trying to use it right now.</p>\n<p>Me: What are you hoping to accomplish?</p>\n<p>Her: I need to calm the boys down.</p>\n<p>Me: And this need has not arisen in the past six months?</p>\n<p>Her: We usually read books.</p>\n<p>Me: Why can’t we do that now?</p>\n<p>Her: …</p>\n<p>Me: Can we get rid of the television now?</p>\n<p>Her: No, we might need it.</p>\n<p>Me: OK, but I’m not plugging it back in.</p>\n<p>Her: I hate you.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>About five and a half months after that, which is to say about two weeks ago, I had <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/17/buying-art-online\">bought some new art</a> and set about rearranging the walls to make everything fit. “Aha, an opportunity presents itself!” I thought to myself. You see, the (unplugged) television had always blocked a critical piece of real estate in our bedroom, above the dresser, in direct line of sight while lying in bed. The next morning, shortly after she had left the house to go to work, I disassembled the whole contraption, television and <abbr>DVD</abbr> player and all. I cleaned up an impressive amount of Assorted Random Crap that had accumulated around, behind, and beneath the television, I said goodbye to the final pile of physical discs in our house, and I hung one of my wife’s favorite pieces on the newly reclaimed wall in its place. When she came home, I gave her the grand tour of our newly rearranged walls, of course working up to the bedroom as the finale.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>Herself: Yes! You finally got rid of that stupid television!</p>\n<p>Myself: You know I unplugged it a year ago.</p>\n<p>Her: Really? Why would you do that?</p>\n<p>Me: It’s not important.</p>\n</blockquote>"
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"title" : "The Merchant and the Leper 3",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Part 3: Millions of Grain</span><br><br>The Leper goes to see the King<br>More intrigue does he bring:<br>“You made it easy, and he won<br>“Set him a more difficult one.”<br><br>“Take him to your Great Granary<br>(’Bout which you sing like a canary)<br>“Mix up all the grain of the land<br>“Let him separate each kind by hand”<br><br>The kind Merchant is sad again<br>As he walks, all can see his pain<br>He meets the Ant who he’s helped before<br>The Ant brings his colony to the grain store<br><br>Rice and Barley, Oats and Wheat<br>All are sorted nice and neat<br>When King and Leper come to check<br>They both go like “What the heck!”<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7564356874518161776-2547955603540332912?l=antirhythm.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The Merchant and the Leper 1",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Part 1: Kindness Repaid</span><br><br>A kind, old Merchant rides homeward<br>With his caravan from abroad <br>He sees a Leper at the roadside<br>And brings him home to reside<br><br>Rather than give great gratitude<br>The Leper picks an attitude<br>He’s torn, by green envy, apart<br>At the Merchant’s golden heart<br><br>The Leper goes to see the King<br>And taunts his blue blood to pink<br>“Why do you sit idle and weak,<br>“While the Merchant’s riches peak?”<br><br>“What shall I do”, the King enquires<br>“Whatever your sovereign will requires!”<br>“Set tasks he cannot do,<br>“Then seize his wealth and due!”<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7564356874518161776-8230971216275364804?l=antirhythm.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "A Bus System Reopens Rifts in South Africa",
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"content" : "<p>interesting problem... we want/need bus rapid transit systems (for efficiency, environment and public policy reasons) and it makes sense to have them be overlay networks on top of taxi and mini-bus systems. Adoption however is subject to competition, politics and geography... Cash flow businesses like taxis and minibuses are low barrier entrypoints into entrepreneurship and often add convenience of routes and. in the South African context, have historical resonance and influential political constituencies... How should the tradeoffs be made and what will passengers use? I'm curious also about the payment systems on these newfangled bus rapid transit schemes... The same issues have been seen on a much reduced scale in Ghana with the 'Kufuour' buses - often second hand that were introduced in the past decade: initial uneasy coexistence with tro-tro and taxi industry, routes that weren't as flexible initially and yet after a few years the buses are always full. Revisit for the toli</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://delicious.com/post?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2010%2F02%2F22%2Fworld%2Fafrica%2F22bus.html%3Fref%3Dtodayspaper%26pagewanted%3Dall&title=A%20Bus%20System%20Reopens%20Rifts%20in%20South%20Africa&copyuser=amaah&copytags=bus+transportation+systems+networks+taxi+adoption+design+architecture+urban+city+development+infrastructure+poltics+policy+strategy+history+race+SouthAfrica+Africa&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged bus\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/bus\">bus</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged transportation\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/transportation\">transportation</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged systems\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/systems\">systems</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged networks\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/networks\">networks</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged taxi\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/taxi\">taxi</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged adoption\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/adoption\">adoption</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged design\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/design\">design</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged architecture\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/architecture\">architecture</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged urban\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/urban\">urban</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged city\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/city\">city</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged development\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/development\">development</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged infrastructure\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/infrastructure\">infrastructure</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged poltics\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/poltics\">poltics</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged policy\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/policy\">policy</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged strategy\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/strategy\">strategy</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged history\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/history\">history</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged race\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/race\">race</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged SouthAfrica\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/SouthAfrica\">SouthAfrica</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged Africa\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/Africa\">Africa</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/url/b7535ed442d365ca8a8a24fc71275c53\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"content" : "Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America."
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/S3l3TUBJM3I/AAAAAAAAAaw/lsYE7QUWhTM/s1600-h/blacktarheroinMap.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:333px;height:400px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/S3l3TUBJM3I/AAAAAAAAAaw/lsYE7QUWhTM/s400/blacktarheroinMap.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Graph: Black tar heroin vs powder heroin, and HIV among injection drug users vs HIV among men who have sex with men, in a map of the US and Canada from <a href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pmc/articles/PMC1343535/\">Ciccarone and Bourgois 2003</a>--click on the graph for a full-size picture.</span></span><br><br>Black tar heroin is moving east, <a href=\"http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-blacktar14-2010feb14,0,5863703.story?page=1\">says the<span style=\"font-style:italic\"> LA Times</span></a>, in this first part of a three part article I'll be reading over the next days, being moved by folks from Xalisco, Mexico. The strategy described in the <span style=\"font-style:italic\">LA Times</span> article involves low-profile low-weaponry low-volume operations targeting white people who've been using prescription opiates, and moving small cheap quantities of black tar heroin as an alternative to Oxycontin and Percocet. <br><br>What will this mean for clinicians on the East Coast if the Xalisco teams and their ilk manage to continue moving black tar heroin eastward? UCSF researchers have hypothesized that <a href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pmc/articles/PMC1343535/\">the properties of black tar heroin itself contributed to less spread of HIV among West Coast heroin users</a> because black tar heroin has to be boiled more; and remaining bits of gooey leftovers in syringes caused users to rinse their works more thoroughly, and to switch out needles more frequently. But black tar heroin also most likely means more bacterial soft tissue infections. <br><br>When I started as a pre-med in San Francisco, I volunteered on a healthcare for the homeless medical van. The van would stop and I would circle the surrounding blocks, telling everyone who looked homeless, \"Outreach van, down there\" and sending them to the nurse and the medical resident who were in the van. In addition to handing out socks and vitamins, a lot of what we did was abscess care. It seems kind of crazy and unthinkable in Boston, but almost inevitable in San Francisco at the time, that medical residents would be lancing and draining small abscesses in the back of an Econoline van. Better that than let some not entirely well-organized heroin addict wait for the bacteria to build up to bigger balls of pus (and attendant complications) until finally winding up in the San Francisco General Hospital emergency department. <br><br>At one point, the San Francisco Department of Public Health started<a href=\"http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5019a3.htm\">what became known as \"the abscess task force\" to try to deal with the huge number of soft tissue infections</a>, most dramatically abscesses, but also necrotizing fasciitis, botulism, and other soft tissue badness. These problems can be linked to black tar heroin through greater amounts of intramuscular and subcutaneous injection. Black tar heroin users seem to do more shooting into muscle and skin-popping because black tar heroin users sclerose their veins faster. And the boiling of the tar (which Ciccone and Bourgois posit helps kill HIV virions) does not kill the spores of <span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium\">Clostridium</a></span> species. That seems to mean greater vulnerability to tetanus, botulism, and gangrenous skin infections when the spores of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">C. tetani</span>, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">C. botulinum</span>, or <span style=\"font-style:italic\">C. pefringens</span> get embedded in the tar and then shot into soft tissue.<br><br>As far as I can find, there has not been a direct comparison of bacterial infection rates among injection drug users by geography--but it looks like there is a natural experiment in the making, if someone is ready to track it. And, an opportunity to set up systems for early detection and treatment of soft tissue infections, before they begin to swamp new cities' healthcare systems the way they did in San Francisco.<br><br><br><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Ciccarone D and Bourgois P, Explaining the geographical variation of HIV among injection drug users in the United States. Subst Use and Misuse 2003 December; 38(14): 2049–2063.</span></span><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Hemodynamics/~4/20y7kywO9Jc\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "Teaser for a film by Abena Dove Osseo-Asare on Kwabenya, Ghana, popularly known as Atomic Junction. What does nuclear power mean for an African suburb? How do the scientists that work there conceive of themselves? How does the surrounding community respond to the presence of a nuclear facility in their midst?",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/upload/2010/02/the_faulty_fluid_dynamics_of_h/westin_shower.jpg\" width=\"250\" height=\"309\" alt=\"westin_shower.jpg\">Boskone this past weekend was held at the Westin Waterfront in Boston, which has these funky double showerheads that they charmingly call the \"Heavenly(R) Shower\" (hype aside, they are very nice showers). The picture at right is courtesy of <a href=\"http://twitpic.com/13d7w1\">lannalee on Twitter</a>, as I didn't bring a camera.</p>\n\n<p>Why am I telling you this? Because there was a sign glued to the wall in the shower that read:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Refresh yourself, restore our world</p>\n\n<p>One of your Heavenly(R) Shower heads has been turned off in an effort to minimize water usage and protect one of our most precious natural resources.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The smarmy enviroweenieness of this was undercut somewhat by the next paragraph, which explained that you could turn it back on by pushing a little button on the showerhead (you can see one side of it on the lower head in the picture). And also by the fact that it's a completely stupid statement.</p>\n\n<p>Turning off one of the two showerheads does essentially nothing to reduce the water usage. The flow rate of water coming into the shower is determined by the pressure and cross-sectional area of the pipes. If you turn off one of the two showerheads, it just makes the water come out of the other one faster-- at twice the speed, in the ideal case, which means you use just as much water per second in the shower with one head as with two. This is why putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose makes the water spray out so much farther-- the same amount of water needs to pass through a much smaller opening, so it has to move much faster on the way out. The only way turning one showerhead off can reduce the water usage by making showering slightly less pleasant, and thus getting people to take shorter showers.</p>\n\n<p>But that's the ideal case-- does it hold up in reality? And, more importantly, can we test this?</p>\n\n<p>Of <em>course</em> we can test this-- we're physicists. Well, I am. Also, I'm enough of a dork to want to check this out experimentally.</p>\n\n\n <a href=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/02/the_faulty_fluid_dynamics_of_h.php\">Read the rest of this post...</a> | <a href=\"http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/02/the_faulty_fluid_dynamics_of_h.php#commentsArea\">Read the comments on this post...</a><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/uncertainprinciples/~4/50deRi7m1o4\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in an African Suburb",
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"content" : "<p>It's official. The NSF is on board with The Wife's next project. I no longer have to censor myself about Atomic Junction.</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://delicious.com/post?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nsf.gov%2Fawardsearch%2FshowAward.do%3FAwardNumber%3D0958104&title=Atomic%20Junction%3A%20Nuclear%20Power%20in%20an%20African%20Suburb&copyuser=amaah&copytags=research+Ghana+energy+nuclear+history+science+Abena+Africa&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged research\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/research\">research</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged Ghana\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/Ghana\">Ghana</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged energy\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/energy\">energy</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged nuclear\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/nuclear\">nuclear</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged history\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/history\">history</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged science\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/science\">science</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged Abena\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/Abena\">Abena</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged Africa\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/Africa\">Africa</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/url/e6757fcb629f312e3d677f1679e23cfc\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.radioopensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/k-nimo.jpg\" alt=\"\"></p>\n<h4><a href=\"http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/RadioOpenSource-Koo_Nimo.mp3\">Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Koo Nimo (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3)</a></h4>\n<p><i>It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to be hanging out for an hour of music and a few well-chosen words with a aristocrat of sound and four accompanists in his studio in Kumasi, the old Ashanti tribal capital.</i></p>\n<p>Ghana’s guitar treasure <a href=\"http://homepage.ntlworld.com/latham/koonimo/\">Koo Nimo</a> has the air, it’s been well said, of an “<a href=\"http://homepage.ntlworld.com/latham/koonimo/kaye.htm\">Ashanti Segovia</a>, proud of his heritage and of the instrument he has adopted.” He also reminds you immediately of the cellist<a href=\"http://www.yo-yoma.com/\"> Yo-Yo Ma</a>. He smiles warmly with the simplicity of the infinitely accomplished — the disarming modesty of ultimate celebrity. These charismatic string-players both have a way of telling you that, in truth, they are humble heirs of ancient musical cultures and disciplines. Both embody the highest refinement of music at its widest reach — Yo-Yo in his <a href=\"http://www.silkroadproject.org/\">Silk Road Project</a> linking North Africa to East Asia; Koo Nimo in representing the circular Gulf Stream of musical influences from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, Havana, New Orleans and New York — and endlessly back and around. </p>\n<p>Koo Nimo is a peculiarly Ghanaian figure, in that he’s a musical child of the royal Ashanti court, who came of age as a public performer at precisely the moment in the late 1950s when newly independent Ghana was searching for a nation-building sound. </p>\n<p>He’s the personification, at the same time, of “world music,” in the way he encompasses all. In his conversation and his playing, you can hear that nothing human is foreign to Koo Nimo.</p>\n<p>Among the names respectfully dropped in an hour’s rambling talk of friends and inspirations are:<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-SQH94Pifc\"> Fela Kuti</a>, as in the current Broadway show celebrating the late great Nigerian Afrobeat star; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHny1UyjXQU\">Hugh Masakela</a> of South Africa; Ghana’s late “divine drummer” “<a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/07/obituary-kofi-ghanaba\">Ghanaba</a>;” the American jazz immortals <a href=\"http://www.radioopensource.org/robin-kelleys-transcendental-thelonious-monk/\">Thelonious Monk</a>, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and <a href=\"http://www.pharoahsanders.net/\">Pharoah Sanders</a>; the harmonica blues man <a href=\"http://www.sonnyboy.com/\">Sonny Boy Williamson</a>; <a href=\"http://www.artistsonly.com/memphis.htm\">Memphis Slim</a>; great soloists of the Ellington band he heard and met in London in the early ’70s, including <a href=\"http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1253060146498742906#\">Johnny Hodges</a>, Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson and<a href=\"http://www.clarkterry.com/\"> Clark Terry</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg\">Ellington</a> himself, though Koo Nimo never got to shake Duke’s hand — “we would go to the dressing room and just look at him;” the very different guitar geniuses <a href=\"http://www.classicjazzguitar.com/artists/artists_page.jsp?artist=9\">Charlie Christian</a> of Oklahoma City and the Virginian <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPyY80pUujE\">Charlie Byrd</a> of samba fame; the rock legend<a href=\"http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/the-jimi-hendrix-experience\"> Jimi Hendrix</a>, for his guitar chord voicings; and the Brazilian composer <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEkMwotUuic\">Antonio Carlos Jobim</a> — two of whose songs find their way into Koo Nimo’s performances here. </p>\n<p>But here’s the beauty of “world music” as the great Koo Nimo embraces it: his sound is never remotely a soup. And he himself is never to be confused with any of the people he admires so generously. “They are all influences,” as he says to me, “but I have a way of keeping the influences light… I listen to Latin calypso a lot,” he adds, and you’ll hear it in his playing, “but I use all these influences, all these techniques, to do justice to our own.”</p>"
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"title" : "Real Homes of Genius – Santa Monica Westside Short Sale Action. How to go from $770,000 to $1,200,000 Million in 3 Years and Lose it All. The Short Sale Valentine Special with No Mortgage Payment for Nearly Two Years.",
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"content" : "<p>The <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/westside-los-angeles-the-ultimate-prime-and-stagnant-real-estate-market-comparing-march-and-may-2009-data-gear-up-for-the-foreclosure-storm-175-million-foreclosures-happen-when-you-let-wamu/\">Westside</a> of Los Angeles is a coveted area. I’ve covered many parts of this market including <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/real-homes-of-genius-the-culver-city-mortgage-equity-withdrawal-machine-the-hidden-southern-california-housing-disaster/\">Culver City</a>. Yet even within the Westside zip codes some areas are more prized than others. Santa Monica is one of those jewels but only if you land in the right zip code. In the early days of the bubble bursting some people were still thinking that contrary to economic trends that <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/real-homes-of-genius-santa-monica-meet-housing-crash-prime-real-estate-isnt-so-prime-anymore/\">Santa Monica</a> would somehow stay out of the problems associated with the California housing market. Yet we now know that every area is being touched and not even the prime locations are immune from massive price corrections. It is interesting that all it took to pop the bubble was two major things. For the herd to stop believing real estate would always go up and the vaporizing of the no document and low down <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/the-truth-about-option-arms-pick-a-pay-mortgages-and-alt-a-loans-looking-at-wells-fargo-bank-of-america-and-jp-morgan-we-are-in-the-eye-of-the-469-billion-toxic-mortgage-hurricane-and-silence/\">toxic mortgage enterprise</a>.</p>\n<p>If we really look at things objectively you would think that things are really good for housing. Mortgage rates are at generational lows, there is certainly plenty of inventory, and banks are willing to work with buyers. But this is all a charade. The problems we are still experiencing are that in many cities in California prices are still in actual bona fide bubbles. Would you buy a flat screen for $18,000 if your payment was $50 per month for 30 years? Santa Monica is one of the markets still in a solid bubble. Today we salute you Santa Monica with our <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/category/real-homes-of-genius/\">Real Home of Genius Award</a>.</p>\n<p><strong>Short Sale Valentine Special</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mls-data-and-short-sales.png\"><img title=\"mls data and short sales\" src=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mls-data-and-short-sales.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"464\" height=\"353\"></a></strong></p>\n<p>I’ve been getting a few e-mails on how great it is that banks are now approving short sales. This is actually bogus because it is in their best interest to do this plus, as the <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/banking-and-finance-and-nationalizing-the-housing-market-tarp-and-other-funding/\">SIGTARP report</a> showed banks will get $1,500 for each approved short sale. Here are some of the incentives:</p>\n<p><strong>• Borrower Relocation Assistance </strong>— A $1,500 incentive payment to the borrower.</p>\n<p><strong>• Servicer Incentive </strong>— A $1,000 incentive payment for the servicer.</p>\n<p><strong>• Investor Reimbursement for Subordinate Lien Releases </strong>— For every $3 an investor pays to secure release of a subordinate lien, such as a second mortgage or a home equity line of credit, the investor is reimbursed $1, up to a reimbursement limit of $1,000 per transaction.</p>\n<p>The most hypocritical can of horse manure coming out from banks is that they are now doing this as some kind of favor! They are using taxpayer money for something they should already be doing. But that is beside the point. <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/california-budget-and-hamp-is-the-home-affordable-modification-program-helping-california-tax-revenues-falter-and-employment-breaks-historical-record/\">With HAMP</a> going down in a wave of flames, we will start seeing more short sales hitting the market. The above chart breaks down the MLS data and as you can see, short sales are a big part of the MLS while foreclosure listings are virtually non-existent even though 1 out of 7 mortgages are in default. Where are these homes then? In the <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/where-the-housing-bubble-still-lives-263-zip-code-analysis-for-los-angeles-county-28-percent-increase-in-l-a-cpi-from-2001-to-2009-but-county-home-prices-still-up-by-70-percent/\">shadow inventory</a> or simply being lived in with no payment.</p>\n<p>Today’s home is an interesting short sale in Santa Monica. It has only been on the MLS for a week but the story behind the home is much more interesting:</p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/santa-monica-short-sale.jpg\"><img title=\"santa monica short sale\" src=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/santa-monica-short-sale.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"507\" height=\"380\"></a></strong></p>\n<p>According to the ad this is a “short sale valentine special” so you might need to rethink that tired and old flower routine this weekend. Maybe a <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/real-homes-of-genius-santa-monica-meet-housing-crash-prime-real-estate-isnt-so-prime-anymore/\">Santa Monica</a> short sale is the aphrodisiac your relationship needs. The home is listed at 2,044 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 3 baths. It was built in 1947. I give California realtors credit for not even mowing the lawn on a listing in an expensive zip code (90405) in Santa Monica. Let us look at the pricing action:</p>\n<p><strong>Price Reduced: 02/05/10 — $930,000 to $899,000</strong></p>\n<p>Only a week on the MLS and already a $30,000 reduction. Looks like someone is looking to move this place! You might be stunned that a home listed for $900,000 doesn’t even have a manicured lawn but the path this home took to short sale land is symptomatic of the insanity of California real estate:<br>\n<strong><a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/santa-monica-mortgage-notes.png\"><img title=\"santa monica mortgage notes\" src=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/santa-monica-mortgage-notes.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"488\" height=\"200\"></a></strong></p>\n<p>Let us walk through the above details. The home was purchased in 2003 for $770,000. If you do the math, a mortgage of $600,000 and $93,000 meant this buyer went in with 10 percent down ($77,000). So they definitely had some skin in the game. But then, the California housing market went into warp speed bubble mode and they managed to refinance for a stunning $1.2 million. We really don’t know what was done with that money but we do know this:</p>\n<p><strong>$1,200,000 – $693,000 = $507,000 cash out</strong></p>\n<p>Now the above numbers are for simplicity. We don’t know what kind of loan they got but all the lenders listed about specialized in let us say, easy money financing. Also, we are using the $693,000 for ease of calculation because most of your first mortgage payments go to interest (hardly any principal is taken down). And who knows, these could be <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/option-arms-for-dummies-why-45-percent-mortgages-rates-will-do-absolutely-nothing-for-these-toxic-assets/\">option ARMs</a>. So now we are in 2006 with a mega mortgage but some cash as well. Let us run the numbers for a $1.2 million mortgage:</p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/loan-amount.png\"><img title=\"loan amount\" src=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/loan-amount.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"362\" height=\"246\"></a></strong></p>\n<p>Now we are really being generous with the above data. The above only includes principal and interest. Let us include taxes and insurance and the monthly nut looks like:</p>\n<p><strong>PITI: $8,394</strong></p>\n<p>Now how much time does that $507,000 cash buy you in terms of monthly payments:</p>\n<p><strong>$507,000 / $8,394 = 60 months (5 years)</strong></p>\n<p>Well you know where this is heading. In September of 2009 a notice of default was filed. They were already behind by $138,099. Now think about this. Assuming the $7,194 payment how many months was this:</p>\n<p><strong>$138,099 / $7,194 = 19 months</strong></p>\n<p>Now this is insane of course but we know with all those <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/the-truth-about-option-arms-pick-a-pay-mortgages-and-alt-a-loans-looking-at-wells-fargo-bank-of-america-and-jp-morgan-we-are-in-the-eye-of-the-469-billion-toxic-mortgage-hurricane-and-silence/\">Alt-A and option ARM products</a> that this is typical with shady bank strategies. Finally the home was scheduled for auction and is now listed at $899,000. Who is going to buy this place? It doesn’t qualify for <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/fha-loans-the-choice-of-housing-comrades-how-government-backed-loans-are-creating-another-problem-for-the-housing-market/\">FHA insured loan</a> financing. It would appear that the bigger your mortgage the more dubious banks will be on moving to foreclose on your home. They are happy to move quickly on homes in the<a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/real-homes-of-genius-today-we-salute-you-temecula-and-culver-city-lower-end-of-housing-seeing-bottom-buyers-lining-up-for-middle-to-upper-priced-housing-markets-1-percent-discount-in-culver-ci/\"> Inland Empire</a> but put a prime Westside location and banks are letting people live rent free for what would seem as ages. The fact that a listing like this doesn’t surprise me anymore shows how desensitized I am to the gaming banks have been doing.</p>\n<p>Today we salute you Santa Monica with our <a href=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/category/real-homes-of-genius/\">Real Home of Genius Award</a>.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://feedproxy.google.com/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal\"><img src=\"http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/576/rsslc7ue5.jpg\" alt=\"\">Did You Enjoy The Post? Subscribe to Dr. Housing Bubble’s Blog</a> to get updated housing commentary, analysis, and information.</p>\n<img src=\"http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/407b7ca7/4a7d9e51/FeedBurner/1.0%20(http://www.FeedBurner.com).gif\"><p>a</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?i=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?i=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?i=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?a=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal?i=AiB52B34jp8:8JpkzsK6ub8:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DrHousingBubble-HowILearnedToLoveSocal/~4/AiB52B34jp8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Match Making Machine",
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"content" : "<p>Match making is at the heart of most middleman functions. The buyer and seller work thru the middleman to improve the chance of closing a transactions. Both sides reveal information to the match maker who then puzzles out if a deal can be closed.</p>\n<p>The negotiation literature is full of examples where the negotiations fail, in spite of the existence of a deal to be had, because the two parties reveal information along a path that leads to a lousy outcome. The simplest example is negotiating over price. The rule of thumb is that once each side has bid a price the only possible outcome, short of a great deal of negotiation, is to split the difference. The rub here is that each party has a space of acceptable deals and the challenge of the negotiation is to both discover if they overlap and then give that find a good point to close on. But the moment one side reveals anything about his space of acceptable outcomes the other side will adjust what he reveals.</p>\n<p>The following illustration is taken from a paper that suggests a way, using cryptography, that two parties might check if they have found common ground without actually revealing anything about the ground that is acceptable to them. The paper frames the match making as a romantic problem (Romantic Cryptography (<a href=\"http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/papers/2000-StajanoHar-romantic.pdf\">pdf</a>) in the <a href=\"http://www.anagram.com/~jcrap/\">Journal of Craptology</a>). The two sides want to know if they love each other without revealing their love.</p>\n<p>The balance beam below tries to solve this problem. The players place tokens on the right side. These tokens are identical to the eye, but are either light or heavy. In the drawing the heavy tokens have a dot shown in their center. A player who loves the other player places a heavy token on the scale. Once both players have placed their tokens a pin is removed and if the scale falls they both love each other.</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pastedGraphic2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"575\" height=\"324\"></p>\n<p>You could use this in price negotiations. You using a spinner to suggest a price and then both sides play a round; repeating until a mutually acceptable price is discovered. It could also be used to make all kinds of self revealing games; say with a deck of cards that ask questions.</p>\n<p>Of course in this story the device, the scale, is acting as the middleman. The paper sketches out how to do this kind of thing with cryptography.</p>\n<p>I wonder if there is a simple way to cobble together a scale and tokens like this out of stuff likely to be lying about. The need does arise. Say for example when a team wants to know if they all think it’s time to cancel the project, delay the release, switch database engines, fire the project manager, hire this guy, …</p>\n<p>The paper goes on to describe variation on the technique using transparencies.</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pastedGraphic3.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"497\" height=\"128\"></p>\n<p>Each player is provided with two transparencies, a yes and no vote, that look similar the ones above. If the two yes votes are overlaid you get a heart. Otherwise you get nothing. The first approach requires some carefully made tokens and scale that works just os. This technique requires preparing the transparencies for each round; but they can be manufactured before hand into a deck for use during the negotiation. It’s fun to note that a similar technique can be used so the players can distinguish if which of their cards are yes or no.</p>\n<p>They point out that there is a problem with lying. If the game reveals both sides love each other it’s still a problem that they might say “Oh, just kidding!” Placing a bond or playing the game in a group can help to put a price on that behavior. There is somewhat different problem that raising a question reveals a lot, as in the example “Do you think we should fire Bob?” Some of that can be addressed by creating a swarm of random but oft raised questions.</p>"
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"title" : "Ghana-Nigeria Jan. 2010",
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"content" : "People don't like to travel on New Years day. That's why I managed to score a cheap last minute ticket to Ghana and left NYC in the early afternoon of January 1st on a direct flight to Accra.<br>I arrived in the early morning of January 2nd. My friend Ken had already plugged a large \"Records Wanted\" advert in the biggest, national newspaper for that day and I hit the ground running. Only minutes after depositing my luggage at the hotel, Ken and I were already sitting in a taxi, speeding towards the first piles of records.<br><br>After a few days in Accra, we left for Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city in the Ashanti region from where we had received a lot of calls. On our way back, we stopped for a visit at Kwaho Bepong, a beautiful small town located on a plateau, not far from the Volta river. We had received a serious call from there and scored a large collection of incredibly well preserved afrobeat, funk and some seriously deep highlife. Not only on LP but also on 45. Finding good 45s is very rare and always a cause for celebration. We went to a small village in the bush and bought a fresh caught grasscutter (also called cane rat) which we had prepared for us on the spot over and open fire. Later, on a nightly scroll along the Volta river, a large praying mantis landed on my hand, traditionally a sign for good luck!<br><br>We stopped in Accra for only another 2 days and then chartered a car to bring us to Takoradi, a coastal town in the West the niece of legendary musician CK Mann had called us and set up a meeting with her uncle. On our way back, we stopped by Cape Coast, picked up some more vinyl and back in Accra met with another living legend: Pat Thomas who as I had hoped for gave us some clues about the whereabouts of the members of the mythical funk band Marijata. The subject Marijata shall remain on hold for now until sometime later this year.<br><br>On January 17th I took a plane to Lagos where I met with my friend Damian and together we went on a journey to Enugu where Damian had located a warehouse full of records. He had sent me pictures of the place and I couldn't wait to get there. The region prepared for local elections and the atmosphere was tense. Kidnappings were at an all time high and there were a lot of rumors about armed robbers randomly stopping buses on the highway, robbing people and taking hostages. We had no trouble reaching our destination and on the evening of the first day, when I was sitting outside the hotel, enjoying the evening sun and a couple of Star beers, some military type guys came up to me and told me they were concerned about my safety and would therefore set up a road block directly outside the hotel...<br><br>Just like I had seen in Damian's pictures, the warehouse was filled with records. Literally. The entire place was flooded about one to two meters high with mostly 45s, some LPs and even old 8-track tapes. No shelves, not even boxes, just records. You will have to check out the pictures below and you will understand.<br><br>We hired three helpers who cleaned out a narrow path alongside one wall by piling records into boxes and dragging them outside for us to sort through them. The warehouse belonged to a record label and distributor and about 95% of all the vinyl consisted of the label's own releases, for the most part highlife and folklore. We made sure to leave a good stack of every single release in the big shelf that stood in the middle of the mess and then just threw the rest of all these undesirable 45s onto a huge pile in front of the building. After half a day, the path was cleared down to the floor and we were able to dig ourselves through the rest of the place, from one end to the other.<br><br>The result wasn't huge but I walked away with a good stack of killer 45s including a whole bunch of stuff that I had never seen before, mostly Nigerian releases but surprisingly enough also some Ghanaian stuff.<br><br>Once we were done with this place, we took a bus back to Lagos where I spent the remainder of my stay checking up on various local record dealers. Then I took a plane back to Accra from where Ken and I followed up on various leads all over Southern Ghana.<br><br>Constantly being on the move made the time pass very fast and before I knew it, the month was over. My plane back to NYC left on January 31st and now I'm busy cleaning myself through piles and piles of fresh African vinyl. One thing is for sure: This wasn't my last trip to Africa for this year!<br><br>Click on images for a larger view:<br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/takoradi.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:400px;height:534px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogtakoradi.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>I had brought 10.000 of these posters and we bombarded city after city with them.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/ckmann-1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:400px;height:548px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogckmann.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>CK Mann at his house in Takoradi.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/capecoast1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogcapecoast1.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>Beautiful stretch of road right alongside the beach between Takoradi and Cape Coast.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/capecoast2.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogcapecoast2.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>A storm is brewing over Cape Coast.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/capecoast3.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogcapecoast3.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>Just before it started pouring down on us...<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/kwahubepong.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogkwahubepong.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Driving up the mountains towards Kwaho Bepong.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/grasscutter2.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:558px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/bloggrasscutter2.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Fresh grasscuter...<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/grasscutter3.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:381px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/bloggrasscutter3.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>After all the hair is removed, the animal is cut into portions.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/grasscutter4.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/bloggrasscutter4.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>BBQ!<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/grasscutter5.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:495px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/bloggrasscutter5.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Almost ready... my mouth is watering just looking at the picture.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/mantis.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:363px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/mantis.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Good luck!<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/Ken.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:517px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogKen.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>My friend Ken. I wouldn't have managed without him. Sometimes we had over 100 calls a day.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/mining1-1.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:374px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogmining1.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>The difference between record shopping and record digging...<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/foolonthehill-1.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:292px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogfoolonthehill.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>My head was about to explode.<br><br><br><a href=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/mining2-1.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o36/voodoofunk/Ghana%20January%202010/blogmining2.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Mining for records with Damian."
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"title" : "d is for dictionary",
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"content" : "<br><p><strong>dark</strong> adj. Contemptible quality of the SKIN; may be forgot for a time if the Bearer be ELOQUENT.</p>\n<p><strong>death</strong> n.s. Second among preconditions for SAINT-HOOD, the first being a cunning Self-abuse.</p>\n<p><strong>decline</strong> n.s. A terminal phase in the history of every IMPERIUM, save the American one, in which it is NOT POSSIBLE.</p>\n<p><strong>deliberation</strong> n.s. Arcane manuvre by SUPERNAL COURT to judge which among Disputants is more moneyed & thus more in the RIGHT.</p>\n<p><strong>Devil</strong> n.s. High-ranking goblin much given to PACTS. Second in sulphurousness only to Mr CHENEY.</p>\n<p><strong>dew</strong> n.s. That which is done.</p>\n<p><strong>diamond</strong> n.s. glitterous substaunce of mythick HARDNESS oft-times compared to that of REPUBLICKAN hearts.</p>\n<p><strong>dictionary</strong> n.s. Printed archive of ORTHOGRAPHY & cunning LINGUISTICKS, excepting in California</p>\n<p><strong>diphthong</strong> n.s. A portmanteau word of Obscure Denotation & Vulgar Connotation.</p>\n<p><strong>dragon-fly</strong> n.s. winged insect thought to drink, when athirst, entire FLAGONS dry.</p>\n<p><strong>dunce</strong> n.s. Any person who demonstrates ardour in IGNORANCE; more generally, any member of the HOUSE of CONGRESS.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/1856/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=porousborders.wordpress.com&blog=7142945&post=1856&subd=porousborders&ref=&feed=1\">"
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"content" : "‘Sorry, but it’s no longer the way it used to be. There’s nothing more I can do for you. Under Bongo Senior, this would have been unthinkable. But Bongo Junior doesn’t have the same grip on the situation – and nor do I, nor does France. We go through the motions but we’re no longer in control.’ I received this text message on 9 August 2009 from Robert Bourgi, known in Paris as ‘the attorney of la Françafrique’. It’s probably not the last word on France’s incestuous relationship with her former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, but it put an end to my four-day wait at a rat-infested border post, where I’d hoped to be allowed into Gabon."
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/4324784738/\" title=\"Wole Soyinka me\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2741/4324784738_4a6108cc57_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" alt=\"Wole Soyinka me\"></a></p>\n\n<p>Rubbing shoulders with the man after he delivered his lecture on <br>\nRights and Relativity: The Interplay of Cultures. It was a typically cerebral foray into tradition and modernity and cultural universals and particulars.</p>"
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"title" : "Haiti: On reconstruction",
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"content" : "<p>Having spent the last year doing a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiap/sets/72157604898347184/\">house renovation</a>, and one that’s involved a fair amount of demolition, I’m naturally intrigued by the conversations around the rebuilding of Haiti post-earthquake. We hear yesterday that they’ve begun to <a href=\"http://www.miamiherald.com/news/5min/story/1452076.html\">tear down the damaged buildings in Port-au-Prince</a>, even though an official demolition plan is yet to be announced. We’ve seen a fair amount of salvaging, do-it-yourself rubble-removal and a backhoe or two on our trips around town: those who can and those who can afford to, such as private enterprises like Sogebank, are forging ahead with the cleanup process.</p>\n<div><a title=\"Salvage operation by caribbeanfreephoto, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiap/4312824338/\"><img src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4312824338_406143c03f.jpg\" alt=\"Salvage operation\" width=\"334\" height=\"500\"></a><br>\n<small></small><small>Men salvage furniture from an earthquake-damaged house in Port-au-Prince </small></div>\n<p>Jacqueline Charles <a href=\"http://www.miamiherald.com/news/5min/story/1452076.html\">writes</a> in the <em>Miami Herald</em> that “government estimates that 25,000 government offices and businesses either toppled or need to be demolished. In addition, there are 225,000 residences that are no longer habitable. In all, some 2.1 billion cubic feet of concrete and rubble need to be hauled out of the city.” The article says that the United Nations Development Program has hired 12,000 people to clean up debris and hope to have 50,000 clearing roads by next week. I’m assuming this information has come via the daily briefings the UN has been holding for journalists at their headquarters. A development agency contact who’s been attending the briefings tells me he’s yet to see a Haitian journalist there. He also says he rarely sees non-Haitians at the briefings hosted by the Haitian government.</p>\n<p>There’s been much discussion about <a href=\"http://www.miamiherald.com/haiti/rebuilding/story/1442882-p2.html\">the role played by building practices and standards</a>, or lack thereof, in intensifying the impact of the disaster. Marc Herman, <a href=\"http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/01/22/haiti-shelter-coming-both-too-slow-and-too-fast/\">writing</a> a few days ago over at Global Voices, reminds us that cultural practices are also part of the mix. “But Adolphe Saint-Louis, a 49 year-old quake survivor interviewed in Port au Prince by <a href=\"http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=1d772de3ec2f398d651ea3633d8fe7fe,\">New American Media</a>, describes something more complicated than iffy concrete,” Marc writes:</p>\n<p><tt>Her home was built as a series of additions, — and with rebar, she says — to keep extended family under one roof, and share building costs in the family. Making the building expandable served an important function, but proved catastrophic when the structure failed.</tt></p>\n<p>But even houses that don’t appear to be designed with expansion in mind appear to favour concrete as a roofing material. Travelling around Port-au-Prince, I’ve seen gables and hip roofs made of concrete.</p>\n<p>Then there’s the critical matter of shelter for those who have lost their homes. Those who can manage it are already beginning to repair and rebuild for themselves. Those who can’t have been evacuated to the country side or are living in increasingly fetid improvised tent cities—or rather “sheet cities”, as I heard someone remark, as genuine tents are few and far between. </p>\n<p>There’s talk of the setting up of official settlements with proper facilities, which one hopes won’t <a href=\"http://www.racewire.org/archives/2010/01/another_tent_city_haitis_refugee_crisis_leads_to_mass_exodus.html\">replicate the old mistakes</a>. In the meantime, the crowds camped out in Place St. Pierre in Pétion-ville—likely one of the better serviced settlements—make do with a handful of portable toilets, and the daily information bulletins ask people to refrain from defecating in the streets. You keep your fingers crossed that this will all be sorted out in time for the rainy season, which begins in three months’ time.</p>\n<div><a title=\"Earthquake suvivor by caribbeanfreephoto, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiap/4315784307/\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2733/4315784307_f859654c77.jpg\" alt=\"Earthquake suvivor\" width=\"418\" height=\"222\"></a><br>\n<small></small><small>Several of the 19th-century gingerbread houses in Port-au-Prince managed to weather the January 12 earthquake</small></div>\n<p>Writing on the <a href=\"http://www.webster.edu/%7Ecorbetre/haiti/library/mailing.htm\">Corbett Haiti mailing list</a>, Anne-Christine d’Adesky highlights another factor complicating the reconstruction process—the preservation of traditional architecture:</p>\n<p><tt>As the bulldozers work to clear the rubble, some Haitians who are very involved in Preservation of Haiti's rich cultural heritage are sounding the alarm about the need to PRESERVE and RESTORE Jacmel's unique architecture - including 100 year old houses. Ironically in P au P, Haiti's famed gingerbread houses are among the only ones standing (like my late grandmere's house in Bois Verna, an otherwise very hard-hit section with nearby Sacre Coeur church collapses. We need to learn from the survival of these well-built wooden houses...</tt></p>\n<div><img src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=1dfc98d5-47ca-8c3d-b15e-b9b02f283aa1\" alt=\"\"></div>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:63t7Ie-LG7Y\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:JEwB19i1-c4\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=486GQeHYSbI:BtDhAyx5GMI:JEwB19i1-c4\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog/~4/486GQeHYSbI\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p style=\"text-align:justify\"><em><img title=\"newyorker2\" src=\"http://pierrejoris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/newyorker2-259x350.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"415\" height=\"561\">The New Yorker</em>, as we well know, has a house style and is proud of it. That this may be a natural thing to aspire to for such a venerable old publication isn’t too problematic as long as it applies to its journalistic pieces, from “Talk of the Town” to the various in depth investigative pieces <em>The New Yorker</em> is justly famous for. But this gets problematic when the same stylistic gauge is applied to its choice of literary artifacts, the translations of poems, for example. Now, we also know that in its stance for ethical correctness and good liberal relevancy, the magazine will speak its mind on current problems & disasters, natural or manmade. These two preoccupations came together in the recent issue that speaks to the earthquake in Haiti: the editors must have decided that the traditional light fare of its poetry department, which has usually been intellectually somewhat less demanding than its cartoons, needed to be upgraded for the occasion.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Thus they printed a poem by Aimé Césaire entitled “Earthquake,” translated (for the occasion, and therefore all too hurriedly?) by Paul Muldoon, the current poetry editor. Césaire is of course from Martinique, but I guess that is close enough to Haiti, or could even be the same speck somewhere off to the left of the page, if checked on that old map of America as seen from Manhattan looking out across the Hudson once published as a cover by <em>The New Yorker</em>. And given the poem’s title, “Earthquake,” it is possible to assume that it has something to do with a natural disaster in the Caribbean. Of course if one checks closer, one realizes that Césaire’s poem was first published in his book <em>Ferraments</em> in 1960, and may refer to some temblor in the Caribbean, though who knows? Well, if we go to the little Seghers <em><strong>Poètes d’aujourdui: Aimé Césaire</strong></em> volume, its editor, Lilyan Kesteloot, a Belgian scholar close to the poet from early on, makes it clear (cf, pp. 74-75) that the temblor in question is symbolic and that Césaire is referring to the political situation in Martinique during the fifties and describes — as Gregson Davis, another Césaire translator, writes — “events that culminated in Césaire’s disenchantment with and resignation from the French Communist Party.” So, using this poem to make a point about the current natural disaster in Haiti is sloppy literary <em>adequatio</em>, and disingenuous at best.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Worse than that, however, is the translation: Paul Muldoon must obviously have done this one rapidly to get the poem in under deadline and in basic <em>New Yorker</em> style, for it is a flat, bland, workshoppy version that loses all the power of Césaire’s language. Muldoon should have stayed with another of his magazine’s time-honored policies, namely never to print a poem that has been translated and published before — or, if willing to breach such a time-honored if somewhat non-sensical habit, he should have used one of the two extant translations of the poem that are way better than his quickie version (he may of course invoke the excuse of the deadline). The poem was first published in English in Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith’s version in <em>Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry</em> (U of Cal Press, 1983) as well as by Gregson Davis’ translation, in N<em>on-Vicious Circle /Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire</em> (Stanford U Press, 1984).</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">I don’t have the time or the inclination here to go over Muldoon’s version (which you can consult <a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/01/25/100125po_poem_cesaire\">here</a>) line by line, or to do a detailed comparison with the other two versions, but let me quickly point out a few inaccuracies, using the Eshleman/Smith version which I have at hand: in the first line, Muldoon translates the French word “pans,” which refers to sections or surfaces of walls, as “stretches,” which is abstract and forces him to add “scapes” to “dream,” which scapes are not there in French. Line two is even more puzzling: what E/S give as “parts of intimate homelands” (an accurate and literal version), PM renders incomprehensibly as “lines of all too familiar lines.” Line 4 is indeed difficult because the French is so assonance-charged, and thus the E/S version, “fallen empty and the soiled sonorous slipstream of the idea,” rich in assonance and accurate in semantic meaning, is much superior to PM’s boringly flat “caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the motion.” In line 7, Muldoon wrongly puts “serpent” for “couleuvre” (a grass-snake,) but maybe he wanted us to “avaler une couleuvre” in the French expression meaning “to have to do or accept something that one doesn’t want?” I could go down the poem line by line, but it would become an exercise in triviality. So let’s just go to the final lines, which in Césaire read “jusqu’ici dans la réserve d’un oubli / gitant” translated by E/S as “until now in the reserve of a supine / oblivion” is turned by PM into “that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness / itself quite tumbledown.” An awful rendering apparently meant to remind the reader than an earthquake is under discussion.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Clearly, it is a disgrace both to the enormity of what happened in Haiti and to the art of translating poetry to do such sloppy work, even if well-meant — and get away with it because it appears in <em>The New Yorker</em> and because the perp is that mag’s poetry editor.</p>"
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"content" : "<p>If I were in the CD selling business, and I were concerned about losing sales to things like <span>MP3 </span>downloads, whether legal or illegal, I think I would make it a little easier to open the seal along the top of the CD when folks brought them home from the shops.</p>\n\n<p>Just sayin'….</p>\n\n<p><span>OK, </span>now to find a band-aid to cover up the puncture in my thumb from stabbing myself with the sharp object that failed to remove the <code>#$&**</code> barcode/title sticker on the top.</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=1UM8unD4wik:v_bFb4jDTfk:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=1UM8unD4wik:v_bFb4jDTfk:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=1UM8unD4wik:v_bFb4jDTfk:YwkR-u9nhCs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?d=YwkR-u9nhCs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?a=1UM8unD4wik:v_bFb4jDTfk:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/discourse2?i=1UM8unD4wik:v_bFb4jDTfk:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "abena koranteng at the university of ghana, Legon",
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"content" : "Happy New Year.<br><br>It's almost a month overdue but here's wishing you (the royal you) all a very happy new year and all the best for you and yours. The phone calls, emails and cards will undoubtedly follow once we regain our voices.<br><br>This year should see lots of production what with books and the like on the agenda. Keep us in your thoughts.<br><br>Koranteng and Abena<br><br>Soundtrack for this note:<br><br>Children of Production by Parliament<br>\"We are children of production...<br>We're gonna blow the cobwebs out your mind\"<br><br><a href=\"http://osseo.berkeley.edu/\">http://osseo.berkeley.edu/</a><br><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/\">https://koranteng.blogspot.com/</a>",
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"title" : "Knitting on sticks",
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"content" : "<div style=\"width:601px\"><a href=\"http://www.abelard.org/france/les_landes_forestry_industry1.php#stilts\"><img title=\"shepstiltphoto\" src=\"http://www.twistedrib.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/shepstiltphoto.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"591\" height=\"341\" align=\"center\"></a><p>Shepherd on stilts, knitting, with his flock 1905</p></div>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.abelard.org/france/les_landes_forestry_industry1.php#stilts\">Stilts</a> first appeared well before the forest, when Les Landes was an immense marshy country, very flat, with the vegetation primarily consisting of grass and undergrowth. Principally, it was shepherds who lived in this landscape. The shepherds had several reasons for using stilts:</p>\n<ul>\n<li> in order to more easily make a path through the vegetation when the shepherds travelled the long daily distances required by their sheep-tending;</li>\n<li> to avoid wetting their feet in the marshes;</li>\n<li> but their main use was to be able to supervise their flocks of sheep from afar.</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://craftersresource.com/content/view/96/329/\">The medieval peasants</a> of the marshy Les Landes area kept vast herds of sheep. The shepherds used the sheep for manure and wool, rather than meat. It is said that these shepherds would walk on stilts to increase their stride and see greater distances, and knit while watching their sheep. To keep their wool from ruin, these men wore a knitting belt and made their own felted jackets and protective clothing for their feet.</p></blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1084600/index.htm\">The great, home-hewn ash poles</a> were kept on hooks attached to the beams of cottage ceilings and could be mounted with ease by sitting on the mantelpiece, or with more difficulty from ground level. The walker lashed the stilts to his upper legs by cloth or leather bindings called <em>arroumères</em>, and thus left his hands free. He carried a third and longer pole as a balance, and when stationary he could prop his back on it to provide a firm tripod while he watched over the sheep. On his back he carried a little satchel, the <em>baluchon</em>, in which he kept food, animal medicines and the materials needed for knitting the footless stockings peculiar to the district.</p></blockquote>\n<div style=\"width:330px\"><a href=\"http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/12/stilt-walkers.html\"><img title=\"Shepherd resting on stilts and knitting\" src=\"http://www.twistedrib.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Shepherd-resting-on-stilts-and-knitting.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"400\" align=\"center\"></a><p>Shepherd resting on stilts and knitting</p></div>\n<p>There are <a href=\"http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a906202726&db=all\">tantalising suggestions</a> that the shepherds used <a href=\"http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l8y97RlUd58C&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=landes+shepherd+hook+sock+knitting&source=bl&ots=bZjJxbBfJd&sig=bLlsUfHFkbrWv7TzpaW2eB_OJng&hl=en&ei=e9peS5L9NIay0gSB4LySDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAwQ6AEwAA\">hooked needles</a> (whether latched or not I can’t make out) but I don’t have access to either the book or the paper in which this appears to be recorded.</p>\n<blockquote><p>People who saw them in the distance compared them to <a href=\"http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2263977.ece\">tiny steeples and giant spiders</a>. They could cover up to 75 miles a day at 8mph. When Napoleon’s empress Marie-Louise travelled through the Landes . . . her carriage was escorted for several miles by shepherds on stilts who could easily have overtaken the horses.</p></blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.archive.org/stream/claretolivesfrom00reacuoft/claretolivesfrom00reacuoft_djvu.txt\"><em>Claret and Olives</em>, Angus Bethune Reach, 1852, pp 72-74</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>The novelty of a population upon stilts men, women, and children, spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than the rest of mankind irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At last I was gratified ; as the train passed not very quickly along a jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it, as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with broad brims, like Mother Bed-cap’s, the swarthy, bearded face, and the rough, dirty sheep- skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all. Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall ones ; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste.</p>\n<p>Anon, near a cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not only by two daddy long-legs’ limbs, but by a third, which appeared to grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly explained by my bloused cicerone, who seemed to feel especial pleasure at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his back- stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs.</p>\n<p>” He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being wearied,” said my fellow-passenger. “It is away of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play cards, so, without once coming off their stilts.”</p></blockquote>"
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"content" : "A recent <a href=\"http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/01/02/Doing-It-Wrong\">post by Tim Bray</a> started a conversation on a mailing list that I enjoy lurking (and occasionally commenting) on. In <i>\"Doing It Wrong\"</i>, Tim laments the complexity of \"enterprise systems\", and the heavy-weight processes and cultures that surround them. Now I may be fairly evil to point this out, but Tim is widely credited for co-inventing XML, and thus (IMHO) is automatically disqualified from lamenting the complexity of enterprise systems, since most modern complexity seems to somehow be related to the use of XML ;-).\n<p>\nEinar Landre, speaking at Oppdat, and on much the same subject, asked the question \"What is the reasons why students or startups manage to pull off things that big enterprise IT teams almost never manage to pull off?\"\n<p>\nDave Bartlett responded:\n<p>\n<blockquote><i>There are examples of groups withing large companies that have successfully short circuited the bureaucracy. In the '80s the term for these groups was usually a \"skunk works\" project. Essentially a start-up within a large company, but for that project to succeed there had to be someone with the vision to recognize an opportunity from the changes that are emerging from technology, business and society. With the entrepreneurial culture we have today, less of these talented people go into large corporations.</i></blockquote>\n<p>\nAnd Barry Hawkins added:\n<p>\n<blockquote><i>Regarding \"enterprises\" (a term I've come to loathe), the apathy and ineffectiveness seems to stem from being so far removed from the actual business of providing people something they pay money for. So very few companies manage to reach a largish size and maintain that sense of immediacy and connection with their domain.</i></blockquote>\n<p>\nI added seven points to consider, which after some feedback I expanded to these Eight Theses:\n<ol>\n<li>There is a difference between version 1 and version 2. Building something with a single purpose from scratch is mind-bogglingly easy compared to changing something that already exists. While we use the term \"system integration\" in enterprise software, what we're really talking about is going from version 72915287 to version 72915288 of a complex system called \"IT\", composed of many moving parts (e.g. applications and the infrastructure that they run on). Those same people, if they were building a new \"IT version 1\" to include all the features of \"IT version 72915288\" would be able to do it in a much shorter aggregate time, at much lower aggregate cost.\n<p>\n<li>Second system effect. While I just claimed that a veteran IT group could build an \"IT version 1\" from scratch quite quickly and inexpensively, there is also an incredibly high likelihood that they could not build it at all. The name given to this phenomenon is \"second system effect\", which basically means that people who have battle scars from a legacy system will tend to over-invest in the \"flexibility\" and \"completeness\" of a green-field replacement of that system (often out of fear of missing something important), causing the complexity of the project to sky-rocket and killing it in the process. In summary: Knowledge is paralyzing. (That could largely explain why students are fearless.)\n<p>\n<li>The real cost of complexity increases exponentially. I usually deplore folklore about start-ups that \"go big\" (e.g. Google and Twitter), but there is one that I'd like to repeat (and probably butcher in the process), and here it is: One guy wrote eBay in a day -- one guy, one day! When they built version 2, the project took the same guy many weeks. Version 3 took many years. There can <b>never</b> be a version 4, because the system is so complex that it literally <b>cannot</b> be replaced in total. Just to be clear, the same brilliant person is usually present for version 1 and 2 and 3, so why does each version take longer -- even if replacing the system in full? The answer is that small amounts of increases in perceived complexity (e.g. each new requirement) expands the real complexity of the system exponentially. Want examples? Take a hand-built web-site and add internationalization / localization. Add accessibility support. Add support for other devices, such as an iPhone. Add scale-out. Add high availability. Add security. If you know someone that thinks it's easy, then whatever you do, don't hire that person, fire them if they already work for you, and quit if you work for them.\n<p>\n<li>Survivor bias. (i.e. Perception vs. reality.) For every successful (?) Twitter, there are dozens or hundreds of failures. While many of us have heard of every single large success, no one person has even heard of 10% of the failures. While large business have large IT failures, the rate of failure is far lower than that of start-ups (including all those half- and 90%-implemented ideas that never even make it to a visible \"start-up\" phase). Attempting to draw conclusions from a comparison of success in enterprises versus start-ups is thus pointless, because one is largely comparing the success from one group with the successes and failures from the other, and that bias is unavoidable.\n<p>\n<li>Managing risk when there is something to lose. When you are building a new system, there's nothing to break, and thus nothing to lose. When you are modifying a production system that is perceived as largely working and mostly available, there's plenty to lose. It is self-evident that you will make different decisions when you feel that you have something to lose.\n<p>\n<li>Organizational overhead. In a start-up or a small company you are much more likely to spend a large percentage of your time actively working toward the goals of the company, while in a large company you may only spend a small fraction of your time (if any) working toward the goals of the company. That's why \"skunk-works\" projects can work: Large organizations often exist (both in aggregate and at any observable level of division) primarily to continue to exist and can best be described as a social form of Brownian motion; a skunk-works project creates a goal that is in concert with the <i>real</i> goal of the larger company, and then shields that project's direction and progress from the effects of the larger organization's Brownian motion. It can be done.\n<p>\n<li>Employee bias. Ask yourself this: Who works at start-ups? The risk profile of an employee at a start-up will tend to be significantly higher than those at a large company. That concentration of risk takers may contribute to the high percentage of start-ups that fail, but they also contribute to the breakthroughs that would be impossible to realize in a large, risk-averse organization. Perhaps the scariest aspect of this is that many employees at large organizations have absolutely no power and -- managing their own risk well -- do absolutely net-nothing, which is why it does not surprise me that large organizations have such difficulty executing on projects of substantial size.\n<p>\n<li>Conflicting goals. In a small team or a small organization, particularly one that is formed around a vision or commonality, it's actually possible to have a largely-shared set of values and goals, and a largely-shared vision. This is much more difficult (if not impossible) in a large, established organization. Furthermore, it is likely that the incentives meant to drive behavior will only approximate (at best) the goals of the organization. For example, someone working in Direct Sales will likely be rewarded for their ability to keep cold-called customers <i>on</i> the phone, while someone working in Technical Support will likely be rewarded for their ability to get customers <i>off</i> of the phone. Add politics and self-centered career- and empire-builders, and you have an environment in which a few destructive employees will freely spend company resources for their own purposes, often at the expense of the real goals and values of the organization.\n</li></p></li></p></li></p></li></p></li></p></li></p></li></p></li></ol>\n<p>\nThese thoughts are obviously my own perceptions from my own experiences. I do find that having an understanding of these trade-offs and differences is useful in \"getting stuff done\" and shielding our own little skunk-works organization within a large company. On the other hand, my experience is so short and limited that all of the things that I assume to be true may yet be turned on their heads. I hope pleasantly so ....</p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"content" : "<p></p><p>Captain Galaxy and Commander Glarcon are locked in mortal combat. Each mans a battle tank armed with N photonic missiles which move at the speed of light. They move toward each other at constant velocity=v on a 1-dimensional track, unable to stop or reverse direction. Assume v << c. The probability of scoring a kill with a missile is described by a function f(d) which monotonically increases from 0 to 1 as the distance between the tanks decreases from infinity to 0. If the distance closes to 0 and no missiles are fired, both tanks are destroyed in the collision. Assume each combatant attempts to maximize their own probability of survival.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/duel.png\"><img title=\"The Duel\" src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/duel.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"557\" height=\"127\"></a></p>\n<p>Note that this is not strictly a zero-sum game, since it is possible for neither player to survive. But it is impossible for both to survive.</p>\n<p>The state of the game is thus described by three variables:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>d=distance between the players</li>\n<li>N1= number of own missiles remaining</li>\n<li>N2= number of opponent’s missiles remaining</li>\n</ul>\n<p>A strategy S(d,N1,N2) would describe a combatant’ actions (shoot or don’t shoot) for all possible states.</p>\n<ol>\n<li>If each player has exactly one missile what is the optimal strategy? Clearly, if the first player shoots and misses, the 2nd will win by waiting for d to approach 0 and then make a last minute shot.</li>\n<li>What if each player has exactly two missiles?</li>\n<li>What if each player has N missiles?</li>\n</ol>\n<p>It may simplify the problem to assume f(d) is proportionate to 1/d or 1/d^2 and then solve the general case.<a title=\"Reblog this post [with Zemanta]\" href=\"http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/e01b50f8-ceb8-4735-bc4f-2fa1c1d47894/\"><img style=\"border:medium none;float:right\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e01b50f8-ceb8-4735-bc4f-2fa1c1d47894\" alt=\"Reblog this post [with Zemanta]\"></a><span></span></p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?a=jhHDHdsXtpU:SapTwTRP_Uc:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?a=jhHDHdsXtpU:SapTwTRP_Uc:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?i=jhHDHdsXtpU:SapTwTRP_Uc:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?a=jhHDHdsXtpU:SapTwTRP_Uc:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/robweir/antic-atom?i=jhHDHdsXtpU:SapTwTRP_Uc:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~4/jhHDHdsXtpU\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "restoration",
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"content" : "<div><br><p><a href=\"http://porousborders.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/stone.jpg\"><img title=\"stone\" src=\"http://porousborders.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/stone.jpg?w=700&h=312\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"312\"></a><em>Hieronymous Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, 1475-80</em></p>\n<p>In a battle recently with a computer virus I did, for the first time, a procedure known as “system restore.” A system restore takes a PC to an earlier state in its life; this is useful if the current state of the computer is fucked up. System restore is possible because, while you’re using your computer, it is all the time creating “restore points,” unbeknownst to you.</p>\n<p>It does this (on PCs) through Microsoft’s ominously-named “Shadow Copy” technology. Shadow copy creates restore points: pictures of the system files, registry keys, and so on, at a given point in time. What I did a few days ago, fighting with the virus, was instruct my computer to go back to the image of itself from December 13. It did. That picture did not contain a virus. The registry keys at that date were uninfected. My problem was solved.</p>\n<p>Pardon the boring technical prologue. The Shadow Copy, naturally, led my thoughts to poetry and to psychiatry.</p>\n<p>In the future, when we have computerized circuits in our personalities, or when our mapping of the brain is at a more comprehensive state, it might be possible to create restore points and return to earlier selves. The self from last week, the self from last year. A return to the self before the infection. Psychoanalysis already tries to do this: taking you back to the originary traumas. Infancy as the ultimate restore point, before everything got spoiled by mummy and daddy and their accomplices.</p>\n<p>With the merging of computing and neurology, this process might be more precisely managed. I take no delight in this. I mention it merely as a possibility. The neurons can be instructed to reassume an earlier configuration (say, the configuration you had during last year’s brain scan). It would be surprising, when this becomes possible, that it doesn’t prove yet another instance of our technology exceeding our wisdom.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/1827/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=porousborders.wordpress.com&blog=7142945&post=1827&subd=porousborders&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Nakatomi Space",
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"content" : "<img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2701/4266111895_d219cc5334_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"200\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Lasts_Forever_(1979_novel)\"><i>Nothing Lasts Forever</i></a> by Roderick Thorpe].</small><br><br>While watching <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a> the other night—one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an essay called \"Lethal Theory\" by Eyal Weizman—itself easily one of the best and most consequential architecture texts of the past decade (download the complete <a href=\"http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Weizman_lethal%20theory.pdf\">PDF</a>).<br><br>In it, Weizman—an Israeli architect—documents many of the emerging spatial techniques used by the Israeli Defense Forces in their high-tech, legally dubious <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/03/world/israelis-clamp-down-on-nablus-hunting-suspects.html\">2002 invasion of Nablus</a>. During that battle, Weizman writes, \"soldiers moved within the city across hundred-meter-long 'overground-tunnels' carved through a dense and contiguous urban fabric.\" Their movements were thus almost entirely camouflaged, with troop movements hidden from above by virtue of always remaining <i>inside buildings</i>. \"Although several thousand soldiers and several hundred Palestinian guerrilla fighters were maneuvering simultaneously in the city,\" Weizman adds, \"they were so 'saturated' within its fabric that very few would have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment.\" <br><br>Worthy of particular emphasis is Weizman's reference to a technique called \"walking through walls\":<ul>Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.</ul>Weizman goes on to interview a commander of the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade. The commander describes his forces as acting \"like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner.\" <br><br>This is how the troops could \"adjust the relevant urban space to our needs,\" he explains, and not the other way around.<br><br>Indeed, the commander thus exhorted his troops as follows: \"There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!\"<br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4071/4266291847_0c8018a82a_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"324\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: Israeli troops scan walls in a refugee camp; photo by Nir Kafri (2003), from Eyal Weizman's essay \"Lethal Theory\"].</small><br><br>Weizman illustrates the other side of this experience by quoting an article originally published during the 2002 invasion. Here, a Palestinian woman, whose home was raided, recounts her witnessing of this technique:<ul>Imagine it—you’re sitting in your living room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal. . . . And, suddenly, that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. . . . Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?</ul>In fact, I'm reminded of a scene toward the end of the recent WWII film <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NVT0RU?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000NVT0RU\"><i>Days of Glory</i></a> in which we see a German soldier blasting his way horizontally through a house, wall by wall, using his bazooka as a blunt instrument of architectural reorganization—\"adjusting the relevant space to his needs,\" we might say—and chasing down the French troops without limiting himself to doors or stairways. <br><br>In any case, post-battle surveys later revealed that \"more than half of the buildings in the old city center of Nablus had routes forced through them, resulting in anywhere from one to eight openings in their walls, floors, or ceilings, which created several haphazard crossroutes\"—a heavily armed improvisational navigation of the city. <br><br>So why do I mention all this in the context of <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>? The majority of that film's interest, I'd suggest, comes precisely through its depiction of architectural space: John McClane, a New York cop on his Christmas vacation, moves through a Los Angeles high-rise in basically every conceivable way <i>but</i> passing through its doors and hallways. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4039/4266929620_73f80b9433_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4002/4266183047_16c8b77a45_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Images: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>McClane explores the tower—called Nakatomi Plaza—via elevator shafts and air ducts, crashing through windows from the outside-in and shooting open the locks of rooftop doorways. If there is not a corridor, he makes one; if there is not an opening, there will be soon. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4050/4266859674_98c91159d7_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4025/4266112275_0922b8d5d7_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"200\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4022/4266112137_9bb5d0867b_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Images: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects. <br><br>His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement <i>within</i> the material structure of the building. <br><br>The film could perhaps have been subtitled \"lessons in the inappropriate use of architecture,\" were that not deliberately pretentious. But even the SWAT team members who unsuccessfully raid the structure come at it along indirect routes, marching through the landscaped rose garden on the building's perimeter, and the terrorists who seize control of Nakatomi Plaza in the first place do so after arriving through the service entrance of an underground car park. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4007/4266539367_31d0262149_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4013/4267285770_f18e0dcbf2_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Images: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>What I find so interesting about <i>Die Hard</i>—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building's narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation's electromagnetically sealed vault. <br><br><i>Die Hard</i> asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from <i>A</i> to <i>B</i>—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment? <br><br>Why not personally infest the spaces around you? <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4016/4266859782_66c4779504_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 2px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2721/4266859818_52e4d29648_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4026/4267306274_89b2da92e7_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Images: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>I might even suggest that what would have made <i>Die Hard 2</i> an interesting sequel—sadly, the series is unremarkable for the fact that each film is substantially worse than the one before—would have been if <i>Die Hard</i>'s spatial premise had been repeated on a much larger urban scale. <br><br>For example, Weizman outlines what the Israeli Defense Forces call \"hot pursuit\"—that is, to \"break into Palestinian controlled areas, enter neighborhoods and homes in search of suspects, and take suspects into custody for purposes of interrogation and detention.\" This becomes a spatially extraordinary proposition when you consider that someone could be kidnapped from the 4th floor of a building by troops who have blasted through the walls and ceilings, coming <i>down</i> into that space from the 5th floor of a neighboring complex—and that the abductors might only have made it that far in the first place after moving through the walls of other structures nearby, blasting upward through underground infrastructure, leaping terrace-to-terrace between buildings, and more. <br><br>An alternative-history plot for a much better <i>Die Hard 2</i> could thus perhaps include a scene in which the rescuing squad of John McClane-led police officers <i>does not even know what building they are in</i>, a suitably bewildering encapsulation of this method of moving undetected through the city.<br><br>\"Walking through walls\" thus becomes a kind of militarized <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour\"><i>parkour</i></a>. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4055/4266859720_e1b7b73091_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: Inside Nakatomi space, from <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>Indeed, recent films like <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VWYJ86?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000VWYJ86\"><i>The Bourne Ultimatum</i></a>, <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MNP2KI?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000MNP2KI\"><i>Casino Royale</i></a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_13\"><i>District 13</i></a>, and many others could be viewed precisely as the urban-scale realization of <i>Die Hard</i>'s architectural scenario. Even <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0019EXZY4?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0019EXZY4\"><i>The Bank Job</i></a>—indeed, any bank heist film at all involving tunnels—makes this Weizmanian approach to city space quite explicit. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4053/4266859450_154b0c5b78_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>; it's hard to see here, but an LAPD SWAT team is raiding the Nakatomi Building by way of lateral movements across the surrounding landscape].</small><br><br>Tangentially, I'm reminded of Matt Jones's thought-provoking 2008 <a href=\"http://magicalnihilism.com/2008/12/12/the-bourne-infrastructure/\">blog post</a> about the urban differences between the Jason Bourne and James Bond film franchises. Jones writes that \"there’s no travel in the new Bond\"; there are simply \"establishing shots of exotic destinations.\" By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply \"feel like you are in the international late-capitalist <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1859840515?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1859840515\">nonplace</a>,\" a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory. <br><br>Compare the paradoxically unmoving, amnesiac geography of James Bond, then, to the compressed spaces of Peter Greengrass-directed Jason Bourne films. These films are \"set in <a href=\"http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_4361.html\">Schengen</a>,\" Jones writes, \"a connected, border-less Mitteleurope that can be hacked and accessed and traversed—not without effort, but with determination, stolen vehicles and the right train timetables.\" Indeed, Jones memorably suggests, \"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.\"<ul>Rather than Bond’s private infrastructure [of] expensive cars and toys, Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower. A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities.</ul>The space of the city is used in profoundly different ways by Bond and Bourne—but to this duality I would add John McClane of the original <i>Die Hard</i>. <br><br>If Jason Bourne's actions make visible the infrastructure-rich, borderless world of the EU, then John McClane shows us a new type of architectural space altogether—one that we might call, channeling topology, <i>Nakatomi space</i>, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of non-architectural means. In all three cases, though—with Bond, Bourne, and McClane—it is Hollywood action films that reveal to us something very important about how cities can be known, used, and navigated: these films are filled with the improvisational crossroutes that constitute Eyal Weizman's \"Lethal Theory.\"<br><br>As I wrote the other day, <a href=\"http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/crime-is-way-to-use-city.html\"><i>crime is a way to use the city</i></a>.<br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2758/4266859558_d1a46bb077_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>On the other hand, as Weizman points out, this is not a new approach to built space at all:<ul>In fact, although celebrated now as radically new, many of the procedures and processes described above have been part and parcel of urban operations throughout history. The defenders of the Paris Commune, much like those of the Kasbah of Algiers, Hue, Beirut, Jenin, and Nablus, navigated the city in small, loosely coordinated groups moving through openings and connections between homes, basements, and courtyards using alternative routes, secret passageways, and trapdoors.</ul>This is all just part of \"a ghostlike military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean.\"<br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4058/4266112063_6048866e57_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"201\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a>].</small><br><br>Treated as an <i>architectural premise</i>, <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O77SRC?ie=UTF8&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000O77SRC\"><i>Die Hard</i></a> becomes an exhilarating catalog of unorthodox movements through space. I would suggest again, then, that where the various <i>Die Hard</i> sequels went wrong was in abandoning this spatial investigation—one that could very easily have been scaled-up to encompass a city—and following, instead, the life of one character: John McClane. But, when taken out of Nakatomi Plaza—that is, out of the boundless, oceanic fluidity of Nakatomi space—McClane is reduced to an action film cliché whose failing charisma no amount of wise-cracking can salvage. <br><br><small>(I remembered while writing this post that I actually discussed <i>Die Hard</i> on National Public Radio last year; you can listen to that show <a href=\"http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/05/30/03\">here</a>).</small><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8663346-7431077656847072792?l=bldgblog.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "This Life Came So Close To Never Happening",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1UxfEH_yI/AAAAAAAAGjk/BztyyVJDZ2E/s1600-h/TwentyFifth1.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:274px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1UxfEH_yI/AAAAAAAAGjk/BztyyVJDZ2E/s400/TwentyFifth1.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>I think even at the time I knew that I was underrating 25TH HOUR. That probably doesn’t make any sense but sometimes even if you don’t have the biggest response to a film, somewhere in the back of your head you know that this one is going to stick around. Maybe the film just felt too raw at the time, being in many ways an examination of New York and what it had become of it in the months following 9/11. Released at the end of 2002, Spike Lee must have known that people would be resistant to it but he made the film this way regardless and in doing so made what may very well be one of the most valuable films of the decade. I suppose this is the time to make those lists of the best of the year, the best of the aughts. I’m always resistant to making to those things maybe because I’m always worried I’m forgetting something, but like anyone I know that the best film released to theaters over the past ten years was obviously MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Other titles ranking under it would probably include WONDER BOYS, ALMOST FAMOUS, FEMME FATALE, LOST IN TRANSLATION, SIDEWAYS, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, BEFORE SUNSET, CHILDREN OF MEN, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES…, ZODIAC, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. What the hell, put ANCHORMAN on there as well. This is not an official list of any sort, just some names that occurred to me, some films that meant the most to me. But looking back at it now, 25TH HOUR plays as this anomaly, the rare film in this changing world of cinema that increasingly wants to avoid anything having to do with actual reality, that just wanted to pause and take a look around at what was happening for a few moments. It’s as if Spike Lee needed to make these things a part of the film, to get all this on film so the way people were feeling at that point in time would be remembered. And, let it be said, the film received zero Oscar nominations, which now seems particularly shameful. Looking at it again now, it’s just a beautiful piece of work and seemed like on this occasion this is the film that needs to be watched to remember where we’ve been but also to try to move on. I’m not saying that it even belongs on the list, though maybe it does, it just needed to be mentioned before we wrapped everything up. It’s been that kind of decade. <br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1Vhq-qVXI/AAAAAAAAGj8/Sc-dHELOzuU/s1600-h/TwentyFifth3.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:301px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1Vhq-qVXI/AAAAAAAAGj8/Sc-dHELOzuU/s400/TwentyFifth3.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>The majority of 25TH HOUR is set over the course of a single day as small time Manhattan drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) faces his last twenty-four hours of freedom before having to report for a seven-year prison sentence. As he prepares to spend one final night seeing girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), old friends Frank (Barry Pepper) and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as well as bar owner father Jimmy Brogan (Brian Cox) Monty tries to come to grips in his own head with what he’s done and the hell he’s about to enter. It’s not just seven years—for some of them it’s going to be forever because it’s obvious that the Monty they’ve always known is never coming back. This is it. And they certainly can’t forget what he did to have this happen since it’s not like he was an innocent man set up, after all. And the heightened emotions of the night results in the heat on their own personal dramas to boil over as well. With a screenplay by David Benioff based on his novel of the same name, 25TH HOUR is an elegy. An elegy for youth, an elegy for living a life where you think there will be no consequences. And an elegy for New York and whatever that great city was going through during the months when this film was in production early in 2002, something which certainly affected a film which had to have been in the preparation stages when 9/11 happened. Any rewrites that took place to incorporate it were most likely minimal and from what I can tell are kept to the scene at Frank’s apartment downtown which chillingly overlooks Ground Zero and a few mentions at the bar that Jimmy Brogan owns. But the memory of that day permeates the characters and entire right from the beautifully shot opening credit sequence to the American flags seen in the frame all throughout, something that is perhaps not spoken of in dialogue for long stretches but it’s always there.<br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1VJjFSL-I/AAAAAAAAGj0/Sqeo97vLtTQ/s1600-h/TwentyFifth4.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:287px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1VJjFSL-I/AAAAAAAAGj0/Sqeo97vLtTQ/s400/TwentyFifth4.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>One thing that stands out in the film watching it now is how steady it is the whole way through, how confident it is in taking its time moving through the scenes, pausing as Monty goes for his morning walk with his dog Doyle. No handheld camera nonsense and scenes are allowed to play out in an unhurried fashion as the characters continually absorb what is happening. When making one of their several toasts of the evening, the cute girl bartender says they should come by on Sunday for her birthday party. Everyone becomes quiet. Sunday isn’t going to happen. Every now and then a moment is briefly repeated like a stutter in the editing, making it clear how much these moments are being absorbed by Monty as he tries to remember them. The device is wisely not overused but it certainly has the right effect to get us to pay closer attention. It may take some time to realize that the film isn’t avoiding getting to the plot by spending time with its characters but that this interaction is the plot, building to what happens with them and how their loyalty will be portrayed. With their own lives happening at full throttle at the same time there’s nothing anyone can say to Monty that will make anything better so all they can do for the time being is just to stay by his side. <br><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1XCBhWW9I/AAAAAAAAGkc/HHkPzI11Ce4/s1600-h/TwentyFifth6.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:268px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1XCBhWW9I/AAAAAAAAGkc/HHkPzI11Ce4/s400/TwentyFifth6.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>The expected Spike Lee stylistics are certainly there on occasion (with strikingly gorgeous use of colors throughout courtesy of D.P. Rodrigo Prieto, shot on film. Film!!) from Norton’s memorably profane rant against everything he hates about New York but also throughout the extended nightclub scene where such exaggerations make sense and these points which we expect from the director have rarely been used in as effective a manner. I won’t say this is Lee’s best film but years from now it might be the one I’d choose to see over all the others. The plot strand that is there—the question of whether Naturelle betrayed Monty by ratting him out to the Feds—does figure into things but not as much as you would expect. The crime stuff doesn’t really matter as much as the interaction between these people who love each other and how much it shows it their faces and actions. This level of emotion extends to the heartbreaking theme by Terence Blanchard which haunts the film throughout, acting as its own eulogy as well as a clock ticking down to the final seconds. It’s even snuck into the film during one bar scene as source music continuing that feel in an almost subliminal way—I admit that I’m a sucker for this type of source music usage but it adds something particularly beautiful to the scene. <br><br>I have a specific memory of seeing this film at The Grove in January 2003. At a key point late in the film—right as Norton is being driven away—the film broke. The lights came up and it took several minutes for it to start up again. For all I know, some people left since, at this point, it seemed like the story had reached its conclusion. There was no way to know at that point that what up until then had been a very good film would be transformed to a great film by what was to come with its shattering conclusion brought to the finish line by the great Brian Cox. This ending haunted me after I saw it and haunts me even more now nearly seven years later.<br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1WAoopJfI/AAAAAAAAGkM/D3aFPGAmzEU/s1600-h/TwentyFifth2.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:265px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1WAoopJfI/AAAAAAAAGkM/D3aFPGAmzEU/s400/TwentyFifth2.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>The entire cast rises to the occasion, doing some of their best work and the pain in Norton’s every movement is felt more and more as the film goes on. He’s just phenomenal. Hoffman gives one of his best socially awkward portrayals of this character who clearly has no idea how to handle all this and Barry Pepper does some particularly good, layered work getting better as the film goes on, revealing more shadings than just the ‘Gordon Gekko-wannabe’ he comes off as when first introduced. Rosario Dawson delivers some of her strongest work ever here as Naturelle and the beguiling Anna Paquin is terrifically enjoyable as Mary D'Annunzio, one of Jacob’s students who winds up joining the group at their extended nightclub stop. I’ve already said how amazing Brian Cox is here. I may as well say it again. Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who I’ve noticed through the years in New York-based shoots, is particularly good in his nasty way as the DEA Agent who knows that he’s got Monty right where he wants him. Vanessa Ferlito, Butterfly in DEATH PROOF, appears in a flashback as a friend of Naturelle’s who takes off when she realizes who Monty is—that voice of hers is instantly recognizable.<br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1W2X7ms0I/AAAAAAAAGkU/_O7JTNN_eYg/s1600-h/TwentyFifth7.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:270px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1W2X7ms0I/AAAAAAAAGkU/_O7JTNN_eYg/s400/TwentyFifth7.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>The devastating finale brought tears to my eyes on this viewing and it also reminded me how it is in fact seven years after the film’s original release, the exact amount of time Monty Brogan was due to serve. And in thinking about the character’s own release, I’m finding myself relieved that this miserable, no-good decade where some of the worst things imaginable happened is finally coming to a close. Maybe the idea of his release actually gets me to look forward with a kind of anticipation. The emotion delivered by Bruce Springsteen as the powerful song “The Fuse” plays over the end credits makes couldn’t feel more right at the end of this film about regret, about feeling like you blew it in life. And as I think about this sadness I remember a small beat near the end involving Phillip Seymour Hoffman that gives me more hope than any bogus feel-good movie ever could. I’ll just remember that moment, along with the knowledge that those seven years since the story of 25TH HOUR are now up and maybe in this life that really is happening there might actually be something good found in the first half of the twenty-first century. And on that note, Happy New Year. <br><br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1U501SCrI/AAAAAAAAGjs/SMQWB7KJJc4/s1600-h/TwentyFifthP.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:268px;height:400px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/Sz1U501SCrI/AAAAAAAAGjs/SMQWB7KJJc4/s400/TwentyFifthP.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2118574901486983093-5325000039571937499?l=mrpeelsardineliqueur.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:Calibri,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial\"><span style=\"font-size:11pt\"><div>Forwarded email from Norma of Zamani Farms.</div><div><br></div>Hello customers,<br><br>I don't know whether my internet connection will be working tomorrow, so I have decided to take this opportunity to let you know the situation at Zamani Farms.<br><br>First of all, thanks to all of you who tried to help me rescue some of our staff and others in Kuru Jenta. I want to state that I have not yet been able to go to the farm to see for myself what is the situation, but have been in touch with some individuals by phone. According to reports, all of the Muslim houses in Kuru were burnt, and most of the Muslims were killed. Only a few are still alive. Although the person I spoke with (one of our farm staff) was naturally upset and a bit confused, he told me that he believed that except for himself, the other Muslim members of staff of the farm were all killed, along with many other inhabitants of the village.He along with his wife and children were injured but managed to escape, and at that point (this evening) he was attempting to walk through the bush to get to the Police Staff College, which he felt was the nearest place of refuge where they could be safe.<br><br>At Kuru, there was not a fight between groups, as had been the case in Jos. Muslim inhabitants were rounded up and shot or burnt in their houses. As I said, I have yet to see for myself, but I received the same report from both Muslim and Christian staff and have no reason to doubt its veracity. Only that I am not sure of the details of the exact number killed<br><br>I don't yet know whether any damage was inflicted on the farm itself, or the condition of the crops. As soon as the 24 hour curfew in Jos is lifted, I will attempt to go to the farm.<br><br>Meanwhile, at this point, I really cannot say when we will be able to resume deliveries to Abuja. The farm cannot operate without staff, and the crops need watering daily. I don't know how many of our over 25 staff have been killed, and how many have run away. But we will certainly not have an adequate work force for the time being. As for myself, I cannot see myself living and working in a community where injustices like this can be perpetrated without culprits being brought to book, as has usually been the case in the past. So in the near future we will have to take a decision about either relocating the farm or closing it down altogether. Right now I am too upset to be able to deal with this issue rationally, and we will have to give it some careful thought.<br><br>We will try if possible to resume supplies to Abuja as soon as we can, as our crops need picking, and we do need the income for all of the expenses we will undoubtedly incur in the process of sorting things out.<br><br>After I have gone to the farm, I will let you know the situation. We are unlikely to be able to deliver anything this Friday, although I can't rule this out completely.<br><br>Another issue is that there have been attacks on passengers along the Jos-Abuja road around Riyom and other villages near the entry point to Jos, as well as in Bukuru, a town just before Jos. So we cannot send Audu and Ado on the road until we can be assured of their safety.<br><br>So the situation is still uncertain in so many ways. We will keep you informed of any decisions we make.<br><br>Meanwhile, please accept our sincere thanks for all of your efforts and your moral support. It is very much appreciated.<br><br>Best wishes,<br>Norma<br><br></span></span> <div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-3387718921589781195?l=naijablog.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:justify\"><strong style=\"font-weight:normal\">\"Stimulating Consumption: Yerba Mate Myths, Markets, and Meanings from Conquest to Present\" is now in print and available <a href=\"http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=CSS&volumeId=52&issueId=01&iid=6905936#\">online</a> as part of C<span style=\"font-style:italic\">omparative Studies in Society and History</span>'s newest issue. Below is the editorial forward. I'm incredibly grateful for the support from editor Andrew Shyrock and managing editor David Akin in this process. </strong><br><strong></strong><br><strong>Christine Folch</strong> explores the market history of yerba mate, a caffeinated drink akin to coffee and tea. Long popular in the southern countries of Latin America, yerba mate is largely unknown in other parts of the world. As a global commodity, its largest external market is in Syria and Lebanon, where it is drunk by Druze and other Levantine populations with ties to Arab immigrant communities in South America. Folch traces the movement of yerba mate from its origins as a commodity monopolized by the Spanish Crown and cultivated on Jesuit-owned plantations, to its current status as a novelty drink sold in North American organic and natural food stores, where it is marketed as an exotic, healthier alternative to coffee and tea. Diverse factors have prevented (and now aid) the global spread of yerba mate. The character of the tree itself, which could not be easily transplanted, the aesthetics of yerba mate consumption, which uses a communally shared filter/straw, and explicit anti-yerba campaigns run by coffee and tea merchants backed by colonial interests at odds with Spain, confined yerba mate to South American markets. Its reputation as a local beverage associated with Amerindian cultures and the Southern Cone is now the basis, Folch argues, for yerba mate's success as a global commodity that is defined, almost everywhere, by its strong associations with regional identities, distinct ethnonational communities, and medicinal and psychotropic alternatives to the worldwide hegemony of coffee and tea.<br><br><br></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4281969930440774536-698357659029142168?l=cfolch.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<blockquote><p><em>The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.</em><br>\n—Thomas Jefferson, 1781</p></blockquote>\n<p><em>Banjar</em>, he wrote, because he found it jarring<br>\nto his cultured ears.</p>\n<p>Because he was thinking of <em>nightjar</em>, &<br>\nhow the whip-poor-will<br>\ndisturbed his slumber with its<br>\nmonotonous omens.</p>\n<p>Because the singing was in<br>\na nearly incomprensible jargon.</p>\n<p>Because its roundness & depth<br>\nseemed sufficient for the keeping<br>\nof treasured things, as in a jar.</p>\n<p>Because of its striking resemblance<br>\nto that drinking vessel in the sky,<br>\nwhich also empties itself<br>\nevery night.</p>\n<p>Because of the way it summons one<br>\nto the cut-out or Virginia jig, & that door<br>\nin the slave quarters<br>\nleft ajar.</p>\n\n\n<p>__________</p><p><em>Similar Posts</em></p><p><dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2005/03/cibola-63/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: Cibola 63\">Cibola 63</a></dl>\n<dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2007/12/f-stop/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: F-stop\">F-stop</a></dl>\n<dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2005/02/cibola-42/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: Cibola 42\">Cibola 42</a></dl>\n</p>"
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"title" : "James Wood and Zadie Smith were doing battle in the sky",
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"content" : "<div><p>Our own Morgan Meis in <em>The Smart Set</em>:</p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<p><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a7711f7b970b-popup\" style=\"FLOAT:right\"><img alt=\"Morgan Writing\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a7711f7b970b-300wi\" style=\"BORDER-BOTTOM:black 3px solid;BORDER-LEFT:black 3px solid;MARGIN:3px;WIDTH:300px;BORDER-TOP:black 3px solid;BORDER-RIGHT:black 3px solid\" title=\"Morgan Writing\"></a> I had a dream, which was not all a dream. James Wood and Zadie Smith were doing battle in the sky. James was in silver armor and upon it the starlight did twinkle so. Zadie was in flowing white gowns. Her face was aglow with what I can only describe as a honey radiance. Still, I could see her freckles, which, I recall, pleased me to no end even as the terrible battle raged on and on. Twice, James smote her a heavy blow. Twice, Zadie raised herself up and hurled herself back upon him with swirling gowns and not an infrequent flash of thigh. Then the heavens went dark again and these two titans were seen to retire, he to one side of the galaxy and she to another. I thought I saw them both smile as the dream dissolved and the reality of a new day roused me from this nocturnal emanation. <br></p>\n<p>James was mean to Zadie once in the real world. Without rehashing the whole thing, he accused her of laziness and self-absorption, of silly tricks and meager powers of concentration. He described what she — along with a few other young writers — was doing as Hysterical Realism. That now-famous <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction\"><font color=\"#0066cc\">piece</font></a> in <em>The Guardian</em> included these devastating sentences:</p>\n<blockquote>This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).<br></blockquote>\n<p>This was in the early autumn of 2001, the heady days just after the 9/11 attacks when everyone felt that the world had changed somehow and that the frivolity of the recent past just wouldn't do. Zadie took the criticism standing up.</p></blockquote>\n<p>More <a href=\"http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article12160902.aspx\">here</a>.</p></div>"
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"title" : "Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk",
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"content" : "<h4><a href=\"http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/RadioOpenSource-Robin_Kelley.mp3\">Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robin Kelley (51 min, 24 meg mp3)</a></h4>\n<div><img src=\"http://www.radioopensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/robin.jpg\" alt=\"\"></div>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/03/06/robinKelley.html\">Robin Kelley</a>’s superb biography brings the<a href=\"http://monkbook.com/\"> Thelonious Monk story</a> back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can’t bring it to mind. </p>\n<p>There’s a vastly detailed, fresh take here on an immortal jazz pianist and composer whose life is often remembered as freakish, at best impossibly mysterious. Not that jazz players hadn’t known from the early 1940s that young Monk was a giant, and ever afterward that those odd, distinctive Monk tunes (nearly 100 of them) are the exotic orchid-like treasures of the American song book. </p>\n<p>But this was a man who mumbled at the keyboard, got up and danced around it onstage, showed up late and sometimes disappeared; who did time for small drug offenses and famously lost his “cabaret card” required to play in New York jazz joints. This was a man who suffered bipolar disease and finally died in 1982 in the care of the same rich European lady who’d been Charlie Parker’s last refuge almost 30 years earlier. It is an impossibly eccentric story until Robin Kelley fills in the life of an unshakeably original musician, and with endless family detail paints a fresh picture of a consistently generous friend, a revered and attentive son, father and husband, in triumph and trouble. </p>\n<div><img src=\"http://www.radioopensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/monk.jpg\" alt=\"\"></div>\n<p>In this telling Monk emerges as (not least) a heroic African-American Emersonian at the keyboard. Monk’s insistence that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” resonates with Emerson’s war on conformity and consistency. Monk’s stubborn, self-sacrificing attachment to his own aesthetic summons up Emerson’s “trust thyself” wisdom, and his advice that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind <i>from within</i>.” “To believe your own sound,” (paraphrasing “Self-Reliance”) “… that is genius.” Monk knew.</p>\n<p>One of Robin Kelley’s many arguments with the received wisdom on Monk is that, though he was the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after 1941, and a cornerstone of the regeneration of jazz at mid-century, he belongs to no genre, no “period.”</p>\n<blockquote><p>I kind of break with tradition: I don’t see him as part of the bebop movement. I see his harmonic ideas as being fundamental to so-called bebop, but he wasn’t really out of that. He spent more time in the early forties hanging out in these old piano parlors, at James P. Johnson’s house, with the great stride pianists up in Harlem at that time, Clarence Profit, Willie “The Lion” Smith… He learned piano from an African-American woman who lived in his neighborhood named Alberta Simmons. Nobody’d ever heard of her until my book. She was a fabulous stride pianist. She was part of the Clef Club. She knew Eubie Blake and Willie “The Lion” and all these cats. And so, he grew up playing that and maintaining the old stride piano style because of three things.</p>\n<p>One, they believed in virtuosity, but virtuosity that is expressed through your individual expression, not just through speed. How could you take a tune that everybody plays, like “Tea for Two,” and really make it sound like you, like your inner soul.</p>\n<p>Two, Monk learned from these guys all the tricks that became fundamental to his playing: the bent note, for example. We say “Monk was so amazing because he could bend notes.” Well, wait a second. Listen to James P. Johnson play Mule Walk. He’s bending notes. It’s all about that. Monk learned all that from those guys, the clashing, the minor seconds, they’re playing that stuff back in the twenties.</p>\n<p>And then, you mention Monk’s mumbling. Well, Willie “The Lion” Smith said in his own memoir, “if a piano player’s not mumbling or growling, you ain’t doing anything.” That’s old school.</p>\n<p>What Monk did was take the oldest, rooted tradition of the piano, in Harlem, New York, all over the country. And then he combined it with a future we have yet to achieve. It’s collapsing space and time. And his whole approach to the piano is one that brings past and present and future together in one. And he had never ever left his roots as a stride pianist — all the way to the very last tune he ever played.<br>\n<h6><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_D.G._Kelley\">Robin D. G. Kelley</a> in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 18, 2009</h6>\n</p></blockquote>"
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"title" : "Surrealistan",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/SzOgTI2ytKI/AAAAAAAACWU/OMeQ2KuXh-8/s1600-h/surrealistan.jpg\"><img style=\"width:400px;height:267px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/SzOgTI2ytKI/AAAAAAAACWU/OMeQ2KuXh-8/s400/surrealistan.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><div><br></div><div><span style=\"font-family:Times;font-size:medium\"><table cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" border=\"0\"><tbody><tr><td valign=\"top\" style=\"font:inherit\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Guest essay by Teju Cole<br><br></span><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Christmas Eve. The fuel crisis seems to have eased. I just walked by a Kotco filling station, and instead of the congestion and the clot of taxis and cars we’d been seeing this past week, there was an orderly flow of vehicles buying petrol. As recently as two days ago, prices were more than doubled: we were buying N65 per litre petrol at around N140. That price is dropping now.</span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"> <span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The shortage was artificial. Greed had something to do with it; oil transporters know that over the holiday period, people are ready to pay more. What we also hear is that some army officer beat one of the leaders of NUPENG, the petroleum workers’ union. In an act of vengeance, the union decided to make the entire country suffer. The country suffered. Countless hours were lost queuing for fuel in “oil rich Nigeria.”</span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"> <span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The shortage caused suffering in another way: because many roads are narrow, and because impatient drivers can’t form a single orderly queue, the triple-rank of cars at the petrol stations caused nightmare traffic snarls on almost all the major roads in the city. Trips of half an hour took four hours. When I did my book event in Ikoyi on Saturday, everyone was late, some by two hours, and many who had intended to come didn’t show up at all. That same day, heavily armed gangs of thieves roved the length of Ikorodu Road, one of the central arteries of Lagos, holding up the suddenly cash-rich petrol stations.</span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"> <span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">In the days of Generals Buhari and Idiagbon, hoarding was a serious crime.</span><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> That was in the mid 80s. The generals had come in on a law-and-order platform (coups, like democracies, have their own selling points). If you hoarded, or dropped litter on the streets, or rushed to enter a bus, you would be flogged or jailed. Buhari and Idiagbon had overdone it, and hadn't lasted long in power. But we miss them just a little now, now that we're more comfortably capitalist, and people can deprive their fellow citizens of essentials with impunity.</span></span><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Crises of this kind happen in Nigeria anyway. But the current crises happen all the more effectively now because the country is literally headless. Aso Rock, the residence of the president of the Federal Republic, lies vacant, with President Yar'Adua incapacitated in a Saudi Hospital. The rumor, never confirmed, was that he has a kidney ailment, but we were informed a month ago that he has acute pericarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart. The condition is serious, and could well be fatal.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">As is the case with all countries that feel the need to have a Ministry of Information, information is hard to come by here. The Ministry of Information, as everyone knows, is actually there to disinform and misinform. One thing we do know for sure is that when the president was flown out to Saudi Arabia 31 days ago, Dora Akunyili, the Minister of Information only found out about it on the television news. She was not herself otherwise informed.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Yar'Adua has been seriously ill since before his election in 2007, though he only formally admitted it a month ago. Since then, there hasn’t been a word from him, there have been no pictures, no medical updates, and no prognosis. There's a general sense that he is in the office because it is the turn of the north to rule, the previous president, Obasanjo, having been a southerner. There is a further sense that Umaru Yar'Adua, in particular, was anointed for the role largely because his brother, Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, served as General Obasanjo's military vice-president in the late 70s, and then was in prison with Obasanjo in the late 90s, when Abacha kept large numbers of his perceived rivals locked up. The elder Yar'Adua died in prison, and Obasanjo had a debt of loyalty to discharge.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">And so the younger Yar'Adua--prodigiously uncharismatic, visibly sick, so deliberate in manner and indecisive in policy that his name also doubles as slang for \"fried snails\"--ascended to the highest office in the land. His rule is based on a laconic seven-point plan. Wags point out that he has fulfilled at least four of the seven points, having married off four daughters while in office, every single one of them to sitting governors of northern states, and all of them as the latest wives in polygamous households.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Thirty-one days and counting. Official sources in Saudi Arabia say that only his wife, Turai, has seen him in the past two weeks. Is he comatose? Is he already dead? Are the PDP (the ruling party) scrambling to find a suitable Northern replacement? Anything to the rumor that Turai herself might be interested? All the Minister of Information has for us is that it is “in the hands of the doctors.”</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Why, any one partial to democratic constitutions might ask, doesn't the vice-president simply take over? Goodluck Jonathan, a Southerner, matches his boss for lack of charisma. His situation is worsened by the fact that, as a member of a minority ethnic group, he has no political base. He's a figurehead diversity pick. Very briefly, he was the governor of Bayelsa state, after the man he served as deputy stole so much money that even Nigerians were astonished by it. Jonathan himself was never voted governor, and he certainly could never win a presidential vote. What many people I’ve talked to believe is that the PDP is trying to pick the next president, have that fellow serve as Jonathan's vice for a year or so, and then have Jonathan step aside at the next general elections.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Those voices, meanwhile, that are calling for an immediate transfer of power, are taking the political risk of their lives, as the president's loyalists are making threatening noises. Several people in Abuja expressed to me the sentiment that, with the big boss away, the stealing from the national coffers has reached frenzied proportions. For some, this is a most delightful time, and shouldn't be brought to an end too hurriedly.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The constitutionalists, in any case, have a situation of such intractable elegance in their hands that Joseph Heller would have been proud to have devised it. A new president mid-term can only be signed in if the old president is unable to continue. The argument is that the old president will be fine, and will continue soon, if only we would pray for him (there has been much talk of prayer). The other possibility is that he arrange, in writing, for a formal temporary hand-over before he goes on medical leave. He neglected to do so. Furthermore, any new president must be sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Federation. So far, so sensible.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The problem is that, on December 31, there will be no Chief Justice of the Federation. The old justice, Idris Kutigi, is retiring. A new justice (one has been nominated) can only be confirmed by the president of Nigeria. Without a president, the Chief Justice cannot be sworn in. But without a Chief Justice, a president cannot be sworn in. Catch-22 might be too mild a term for it, and it is precisely the kind of manufactured disorder that makes junior officers itchy in their army barracks. Which: God forbid.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The current Attorney General seems to have suggested that, according to section 5 of the constitution, the vice-president or any of the ministers can exercise executive power on behalf of the president. He was shouted down from all quarters, and appears now to be in some political jeopardy. The jeopardy is spreading: this past week, Ahmed Shekarau of the People’s Daily was picked up by the State Security Service for</span><span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span></span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">piece he did on Yar’Adua’s illness. They detained him at their offices for four hours, allegedly for a “routine discussion.” No one who remembers the Abacha years can read these words without shuddering a little.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">Meanwhile, there are important governmental priorities that are being held up. Only the president has the right to sign national budgets, and a massive supplementary budget has been passed by the senate. It's going nowhere, since the vice-president is not authorised to sign it.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">But, thankfully, not everything has come to a standstill. The Federal Government has just approved N7 billion (around $50 million) for the construction of a new residence for the vice-president. Everyone is in cheerful earnest about it.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The vice-presidents, from 1999 until 2007, have lived in a palatial residence, but that has lately been given over to the Chief Justice. Why? Because that's what the Abuja masterplan calls for, and the masterplan must be followed at all costs.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">The vice-president will now get a residence, as Akunyili put it, \"befitting his status.\" The contract has been given to Julius Berger, and construction will take twenty months. So, presumably, the residence of the Chief Justice will soon lie empty, the presidential villa remains empty, and we are sinking $50 million into a vice-presidential villa. The approved supplementary budget of N356 billion remains unsigned. Oh, and the position of the President of the Appeals Court is also vacant, awaiting presidential confirmation. It would be unbearably funny if it weren’t so nasty and grim.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\">What is clear is that, twenty-months from now, Goodluck Jonathan will not be vice president, and he probably won't be president either. The president will be the Chosen One from the north, whomever he or she turns out to be, and the vice-president will be another figurehead southerner.</span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia,serif\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia,serif\"><br></span></p><p style=\"margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:24px\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"></span></span></p><span lang=\"EN\" style=\"font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:12pt\"><span style=\"font-family:georgia\"><span style=\"font-size:medium\">I was in Abuja two weeks ago. A clean, unlovely town, not built to human scale. One afternoon, driv</span><span style=\"font-size:medium\">ing down one of the city's broad, bare boulevards, I saw the monolith of Aso Rock in the distance. On the right side of the forested hill, near the summit itself, was a bush fire. It was like an apparition, and it was hard to believe that so large a fire was raging unattended in the heart of the capital. The flames leapt like angry tongues, and grey smoke billowed into the still blue air. This must be uncomfortable for the residents of the presidential villa, I thought, but then I realised it was quite alright. There is no one at home.</span></span><br></span><br></td></tr></tbody></table></span></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-1360708451883552034?l=naijablog.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:Times;font-size:medium\"><div><div>E don reach time wey we, as original Naija people must stop to dey use oyinbo abreviations like LoL, LMAO, ROTFLMAO etc etc. when we fit dey use our own exceptional Street lingua.<br><br>LWKM - Laugh wan kill me<br>MIDG - make i dey go<br>WGYL - we go yarn later<br>IGA - I gbadun am<br>ICS - I can't shout<br>DJM - Don't jealous me<br>WBDM - Who born d maga<br>UDC - U de craze<br>NUS - Na u sabi<br>WSU - who send u<br>ITK - I too know<br>WDH - wetin dey happen<br>NDH - nutin dey happen<br>FMJ - free me jo<br>BBP - bad bele people<br>HUD - how u dey<br>WKP - waka pass<br>NTT - Na true talk<br>NDM - no dull me<br>IFSA - I for slap am<br>IGDO - I go die o<br>YB - Yess boss<br>NLT - No long thing<br>CWJ - carry waka jorh<br>WBYO - wetin be your own<br>U2D - U 2 do<br>U2DV - U 2 dey vex<br>WSDP - who send dem papa<br>INS - i no send<br>INFS - i no fit shout<br>WWY - who wan yarn<br>NBST - no be small thing<br>NWO - na wah oooooo<br>NMA - no mind am<br>MIHW - make i hear word<br>NBL - no be lie<br>wd - wetin dey<br>UNGKM - u no go kill me<br>o2s - omo 2 sexy</div></div></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-7050528525538296973?l=naijablog.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The best project ever (so far)",
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"content" : "<p>It started with a mail via flickr, one of those “you don’t know me, but… ” that usually mean something interesting is about to happen. It was headlined “Soon to be Doctor <a href=\"http://www.slimcoincidence.com/blog/\">Krista</a>“:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I’m Krista’s Dad and I need a favor from you – I need to find a Doctor Who scarf. Of course it needs to come from the Mother Country, not some colonial fake. Where can I buy one or could you make her one? I tried to find her a Tardis and did not have any luck so I thought of the scarf. For one of my birthdays she and her mother gave me a commemorative Dr. Who stamp so now with her becoming a true doctor, I must repay in kind.</p></blockquote>\n<p>How many levels of awesome is that? For a start there’s Krista’s geektasticness for even knowing, let alone loving, <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/\">Dr Who</a>, a British sci-fi tv series <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who#History\">born several decades before she was</a> as well as the other side of the atlantic. But even more awesome as far as I’m concerned is the fabulousness of her parents who knew of and appreciated her interest and came up with possibly the best PhD present idea in the world. (I think they must have known I knitted because of <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/slimcoincidence/3110366589/\">this</a>.)</p>\n<p>And it only got better. Because there is (but of course) an entire website devoted to this singular (and yet, as we shall see, multiple) item of clothing – <a href=\"http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/index.php\">The Doctor Who Scarf</a>. Which is not one scarf but a multitude of different scarves which <a href=\"http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/history.php\">mutated over time</a> (but not always linearly to the the viewer) and even <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(Doctor_Who)\">regenerated</a> into something, visually at least, <a href=\"http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/season18.php\">very different</a>.</p>\n<p>A piece of swift and unscientific research revealed that, to us Brits, the original is also the best, so that’s the scarf that was made since we couldn’t find one for sale. Armed with a printout of the “<a href=\"http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/graphics/season12a.gif\">pattern</a>” I went with artist F, who has, unsurprisingly, superb colour sense, to the nearest large <a href=\"http://www.johnlewis.com/Shops/DSDepartments.aspx?Id=23\">haberdashery department</a> to get the wool. This looked as though it might be a considerable challenge since all the brands featured on <a href=\"http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/season12.php\">the website</a> are American and not widely available here (if at all). But we were fantastically lucky. The Rowan yarn <a href=\"http://www.knitrowan.com/yarns/Wool-Cotton.aspx\">Wool Cotton</a> has a very close approximation to each of the seven shades required and is, miraculously, also the right weight.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><a title=\"1 The yarn by turn toward the light, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192907926/\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2747/4192907926_e3c0b9ec3d.jpg\" alt=\"1 The yarn\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\"></a></p>\n<p>Knitting started <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192907768/\">in the summer on Holy Island</a>, and continued <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192145935/\">hither</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192145775/\">yon</a> through the autumn. This thing is BIG. There was a hideous number of ends to darn in and <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192906446/\">tassels</a> to be added. Finally it was finished, ceremonially <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192144761/\">photographed</a></p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><a title=\"9 Ok, so I broke the gate by turn toward the light, on Flickr\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tournesoleil/4192905864/\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2559/4192905864_011a610381.jpg\" alt=\"9 Ok, so I broke the gate\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\"></a></p>\n<p>and despatched.</p>\n<p>At last, months after Krista was Doctored and even more months after it was started, it has found its home. Hurrah!</p>\n<p>(It’s on ravelry <a href=\"http://www.ravelry.com/projects/fluffspangle/doctor-who-scarf---season-12\">here</a>.)</p>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/NYO616.jpg\"><img title=\"NYO616\" src=\"http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/NYO616.jpg\" alt=\"NYO616\" width=\"500\" height=\"350\"></a></p>\n<p>via <a href=\"http://www.rjmatson.com/cgi-bin/framesdisplay.cgi?image=NYO616.jpg&date=11/18/2009&title=IRRATIONAL%20EXUBERANCE%20THEN%20AND%20NOW&pub=NYO616\">RJ Matson</a>, NY Observer</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/b0bjd6fho47voudd2of6s5dq9g/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ritholtz.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F12%2Firrational-exuberance-then-now%2F\" width=\"100%\" height=\"60\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:KwTdNBX3Jqk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:KwTdNBX3Jqk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:l6gmwiTKsz0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=l6gmwiTKsz0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=cfMvDSJ3hDg:NsKOsmK6Z3o:TzevzKxY174\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=TzevzKxY174\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"content" : "<div>\t<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/4167973615/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2579/4167973615_d05f201b51.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a><br>\t<span><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/4167973615/\">Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #1300</a>, originally uploaded by <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/apelad/\">Ape Lad</a>.</span></div>\t\t\t\t<p>\tMore info on the usual ebay listing later this week.</p><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/30451540-2122205952388203595?l=apelad.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "No individual 'fathered' modern African literature",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/49837?ns=guardian&pageName=No+individual+%27fathered%27+modern+African+literature%3AArticle%3A1313308&ch=Books&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Chinua+Achebe+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Nii+Ayikwei+Parkes&c7=09-Dec-02&c8=1313308&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Books&c13=&c25=Books+blog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>Chinua Achebe is right to reject this dubious honour, but his contribution as a writer and, crucially, editor – has been immense</p><p>As soon as I heard about Chinua Achebe's rejection of the label \"<a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/12/achebe-rejects-father-modern-african-literature\">father of modern African literature</a>\", I did two Google searches. One, was for \"father of modern European literature\" for, surely, if modern African literature has a father, European literature could not possibly be a bastard. The second, was for \"father of primitive African literature\", since such a competent fatherless father (which in this case would be Achebe) would be something worth documenting. I hate to disappoint eager readers, but both searches drew a blank.</p><p>I thoroughly agree with Achebe's rejection of the label, because, as he has said, \"there were many of us – many, many of us\". The truth is, history is made up of what we choose to accept and shaped by what we reject, and to declare Achebe alone as the \"father of modern African literature\" is to skew the realities of the world's second largest continent, a place of multiple languages and identities, that has been sharing and writing stories for longer than the modern English language has existed. The irony, of course, is that the attempt to place Achebe atop the African literary family tree is due to a leaning towards work published in English. Such an approach negates the contributions of work in French, in which <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/jun/11/obituaries\">Sembène Ousmane</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9opold_S%C3%A9dar_Senghor\">Léopold Senghor</a> were published before Achebe; work in Arabic (a language spoken right across Africa due to the influence of Islam), such as Naguib Mahfouz's huge oeuvre of more than 50 novels and countless short stories; and, of course, work in Portuguese, Somali, Dutch, Hausa, Amharic and countless other indigenous languages. </p><p>Furthermore, there's a saying that's common in many parts of Africa, including Achebe's Igbo land, which was famously used by Hillary Clinton and which roughly translates as \"it takes a village to raise a child\". I think the saying is easily adapted for literature: it takes a people to create a literature and Chinua Achebe's rejection of the mantle of sole ancestor reflects this notion. However, the argument can be made that Achebe's role as editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, an unsalaried position he held for 10 years, from 1962 to 1972, makes him, without question, a nurturer of African literature. During his tenure, he published writers from all corners of Africa, including now-famous names such as <a href=\"http://www.ngugiwathiongo.com/\">Ngugi wa Thiong'o</a>, <a href=\"http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/armah.htm\">Ayi Kwei Armah</a>, <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/20/obituary-tayeb-salih\">Tayeb Salih</a>, <a href=\"http://www.bessiehead.org/\">Bessie Head</a> and <a href=\"http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pbitek.htm\">Okot p'Bitek</a>, as well as nation builders such as Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. The series, which published new work until 2003, was also a place of publication for writers such as Ben Okri, Tsitsi Dangaremba and Abdulrazak Gurnah before they became widely known. Achebe has said that he considers his work as editor of the African Writers Series to be more important than his achievements as a novelist and I can't argue with his assessment. </p><p>Chinua Achebe's work has been important to my own writing practice through the exploration of his ideas on Conrad and language use: I read and write with an understanding of prejudice in spite of a positive intellectual position, and accept my existence as a hybrid of ever-expanding ancestries, who thinks and writes in many languages. However my understanding of nuance, the notion of shades, the absence of a clear defining line between right and wrong in real life, which is central to my work, is something I learned not just from Achebe, but also from Mariama Bâ, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and pirated Indian films watched in small spaces in Accra. Achebe is only one of my fathers. </p><p>And speaking of nuance, I return, being a classy Ghanaian, to Google: the phrase, \"father of modern African literature\" it appears, is taken from a Nadine Gordimer quote when Achebe won the international Booker in 2007; what she said was: \"Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature\". Seen in context, what she said is very different to what the great man was asked to take on. We all reject it.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/chinuaachebe\">Chinua Achebe</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction\">Fiction</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nii-ayikwei-parkes\">Nii Ayikwei Parkes</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/8kf8j41glg0kjidva4o58ic684/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fbooks%2Fbooksblog%2F2009%2Fdec%2F02%2Ffather-modern-african-literature-achebe\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"title" : "Most unintentionally ironic headline of the day",
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"content" : "From the BBC World Service Africa's Twitter feed: \"<a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/2009/11/091127_madagascar_cartoon.shtml\">Madagascar's constitution becomes the basis of a cartoon</a>\".<br><br>This from a country where several months, a guy who was constitutionally too young to become president stole power from the democratically elected government in a military-backed coup.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5237946-882791064303919684?l=blackstarjournal.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The World Cup Group of Death: Drogba the Reaper",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://ivorycoast.worldcupblog.org/files/2009/12/Confess-120x120.jpg\" alt=\"Confess\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\"></p>\n<p> The African Cup of Nations and World Cup draws have both ended. And I take from these events one unalterable and eternal truth: <em>Didier Drogba is death</em>. </p>\n<p>Allow me to make my case. </p>\n<p>In 2006, the Ivory Coast was drawn with Serbia, Argentina, and the Netherlands. Argentina had been knocked out of the 2002 World Cup in the first round, the Dutch implode like clockwork, and Serbia was, and is, Serbia. So what made that group so menacing? Was it Roman Riquelme’s footspeed? Nemanja Vidic’s footskills? Marco Van Basten’s charming personality? No. It was one man. Didier Drogba.<span></span></p>\n<p>The African Cup of Nations pot 1 group, with Egypt and Camaroon, would be a difficult group…but for Drogba’s ominous presence. Now all shudder for fear of the mask of the red death. And the World Cup 2010? Group G? G stands for grisly demise. The North Korean Republic may not make your knees tremble, but neither Portugal nor Brazil wanted to cross swords with the Coite d’Voire. Why? Surely Carvahlo and Alex have some tips and tricks on stopping Didier from Chelsea training sessions.</p>\n<p>But there is only one way to stop Didier: die. Die slowly. Die painfully. Die…mercilessly.</p>\n<p>Now I am a lover of alliteration, so Drogba tickles my fancy in that regard. But he also does play football. And play it quite well. In many ways, Drogba’s game reflects all of societies’ preoccupations and fascination with death. He attacks in many forms…</p>\n<p>You thought you’d see your own demise a mile away? Didier Drogba is not opposed to throwing hand grenades from afar, all the better to surprise you.</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/4Plsn_8Zf-8%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe></p>\n<p>\nI’m sorry – did you think you were smarter than death? Didier Drogba is no fool – at times, he will out think you.</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/o6Y0kqrtUBc%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe></p>\n<p>\nI’m sorry, did you think you could outmuscle death? Drogba leaps into danger with little to fear.</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/vxk3OH4grJY%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe></p>\n<p>I know your retort – Drogba does dive. But what happens when Drogba the shadow on the ground picks himself up, sharpens his scythe, and the fire in his eyes burns into your very soul? </p>\n<p>The Ivory Coast is a fine side, with the Toures locking down the defense and Kalou making neat cameo appearences. But only one player haunts central defender’s dreams. Only one player, in the blink of an eye, can cause the demise of two years of World Cup qualifying.</p>\n<p>Sleep tight Carvahlo. Sleep tight, Alex. Drogba is watching you train every single day…and only he knows the contents of the last chapter of your storied careers.</p>"
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"title" : "Suppositions",
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"content" : "<p>what would the savior have looked like<br>\ngrown old?<br>\nwould he still have lent<br>\nhis severe, nostalgic face<br>\nto the builders of churches<br>\nto the arrogant destroyers in quest of myths<br>\nor guilty would he have healed<br>\nhis own joints<br>\nletting the water remain water<br>\nwhile the blind fumbled along their way?</p>\n<p>would he have given his last son<br>\nto doubt<br>\nor in the evening<br>\nlaying his head on Magdalene’s knees<br>\nwould he have seen the earth as round<br>\nspinning on her index finger?</p>\n<p><em>Translation of “Supoziţii.” Copyright Carmen Firan. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2009 by Adam J. Sorkin. All rights reserved.</em></p>\n<p><em>Read the author’s <a href=\"http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=FiranCounterfeits\">“Counterfeits”</a>\n</em></p>"
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"content" : "<p>The <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/being-elegant.shtml\">“Importance of Being Elegant”</a> is a film by directors George Amponsah & Cosima Spender. It sheds a light (too little I think) on the Congolese SAPE (Société Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants) scene in Paris and Brussels. The narrative centers around Papa Wemba, widely considered Sapeur #1. He has just been released from prison on human trafficking charges. Among other things in this cinema verite style documentary, Papa Wemba is rehearsing for an upcoming show and laying tracks for a new CD. It also turns out that he has found religion while in prison, so this is a transitional time for Papa Wemba, who wrestles with how to marry his new spiritual side with the worship of “the cloth” that is the hallmark of La Sape. He struggles with how to keep his central position of power in the expat Congolese community, but also take them in a new direction. This leads to some pretty hilarious situations. In one he is laughably decrying materialism; in another he is in a high end (Cavalli?) boutique justifying to another Sapeur the wisdom of spending 15,000 euros on one article of clothing. </p>\n<p>The film has some brilliant footage of Papa Wemba in rehearsal (that voice!). Those of a certain age will remember vinyl 45s of Congolese rumba available in Nairobi that contained one song pressed on two sides. The first side (Part 1) had the emotive, mellow side, and while I know zero Lingala the emotion conveyed by the singing was of sadness, longing, loss. Part 2 was the upbeat guitar-driven side; basically ”life sucks, whatever. Let’s dance!”. This contradiction, a willingness to live with the fact that this moment contains both sad and happy together forms the genius of rumba and informs the world view of Sapeurs, it seems to me. If you are from a place like Congo, where there is little hope for the future, why not live like all your dreams have come true, like there is no tomorrow?</p>\n<p>La Sape has always been about escape even for the <a href=\"http://forota.net/wordpress/2008/04/02/africafashionthe-congolese-sape/\">now old gentlemen in Congo Brazzaville</a> where this all started in the 1940s. The young men in the film have bought into that escape fantasy to propel themselves from the poverty and war of Kinshasa to a life of luxury and elegance in Paris. In the final scenes when the filmmakers follow a sapeur nicknamed “the Archbishop” as he attempts to establish himself in Paris and in the SAPE scene there, we get a peek into the harsh realities awaiting these young men when they arrive, including a realization that it is all just a mirage.</p>\n<p>One can tie a thread through two other NYAFF films I saw: “Killer Necklace” and “Area Boys”; through “Tsotsi” and “City of God” earlier. All these stories dramatize the effects of the developing world’s near complete failure to provide for its youth who can’t make a living, a life in the cities they grow up in. These young men become “area boys”, “tsotsis”, “sapeurs”, “pantsulas”, and other urban fringe subcultures created in the search to find meaning in life. Those who are lucky and can leave wind up living on the fringe of cities like Brussels, Paris, London, New York City, hawking knock-off merchandise, driving cabs and cleaning toilets, while avoiding deportation. Those who are left behind and who lose hope fuel the crime in Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, and war in Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia.</p>\n<p>In the end, TIOBE is a lost opportunity. It is really an immigration story masquerading as a fashion story, a superficially narrated fashion story at that. In Q&A after the NY African Film Festival showing recently, director George Amponsah mentioned that they didn’t visit Kinshasa while filming and noted that Papa Wemba thought he was depicted as a gangster after seeing edited footage. It seems to me the director chose to caricature the Sapeur scene as a way of finding a strong narrative arc and to make the film accessible to non-African audiences. That way it was not necessary to explore any of the contradictions thrown up by Papa Wemba and the Sapeur culture. I was a little miffed that some people, unaware of the history of Congo in general and of La Sape in particular, probably walked out of that showing thinking “What losers! Spending 15,000 euros on a jacket while living in a hostel and running from <em>la migra</em>, wtf?!!”. To someone like me who grew up in Africa where music and pop culture was so driven by men like Papa Wemba, Franco and Tabu Ley, it is an injustice to reduce all that to just a buffoonish worship of clothes.</p>"
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"content" : "In order to expand its sources of energy supply, Nigeria is seeking to generate electricity via nuclear power. There are already 2 nuclear research centers at Ahmadu Bello University, in Zaria and another in the capital, Abuja. In June 2008, <a href=\"http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/19214\">the G8 expressed concerns </a>over Nigeria's quest for nuclear energy, citing concerns over safety and security. Some G8 members specifically questioned the nation's level of responsibility. Despite these and other issues, on December 3rd, 2009, <b><span></span><a href=\"http://www.channelstv.com/newsdetails.php?news_id=15229\">the IAEA approved</a><span></span> Nigeria's application to build a reactor in Abuja</b>.<br><a name=\"more\"></a><br><b>DETAILS ON THE NUCLEAR POWER PROJECT</b><br>Construction is expected to begin in 2011 with power production to begin in 2017. The plant is expected to provide up to 4000MW of energy by <a href=\"http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html\">2025</a>. Nigeria's former Minister of Science & Technology insisted in November 2008 that Nigeria's nuclear program <a href=\"http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art200811051411434\">will not use foreigners</a>, but would depend primarily on local labor, skills and expertise. In March 2009, Russia signed a <a href=\"http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html\">nuclear energy cooperation agreement</a> with Nigeria, that provided for domestic uranium exploration and mining. An <a href=\"http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5inXkvTZtwWMZ4laZ7HgIyN4dj00A\">additional agreement</a> in June 2009 gave Russia access to Nigeria's gas reserves in exchange for the construction of a Russian power reactor and a new research reactor.<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://ekstranghero.i.ph/photo/189/292\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://ekstranghero.i.ph/photo/d/292-1/nuclear-power-tower1.jpg\" border=\"0\" height=\"320\" width=\"240\"></a><br></div><br><b>THE ISSUES NUCLEAR AMBITIONS PRESENT</b><br>Considering the nation's problematic electricity supply, nuclear power will definitely help improve Nigeria's energy issues. Even more importantly, nuclear projects have benefits that go far beyond electricity supply to impact research and development in agriculture, health, science, technology and other key areas that every nation depends upon. Although the cost will be enormous, if done right, the advantages of a nuclear power program will be exponential and and pay off for many years to come.<br><br><div style=\"text-align:left\">However, Nigeria's nuclear ambitions raise certain concerns such as security. The entire West African region has historically been known to be fraught with security issues. Nigeria, in particular, has experienced outbreaks of religious/political/ethnic violence, and that combined with threats from militants (<a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/07/mend-attack-in-lagos.html\">MEND</a>, <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/08/boko-haram-questions-remain.html\">Boko Haram</a>). One cannot help but wonder how these issues and other possible sources of violence could impact the security of a nuclear reactor. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the government would definitely assign the necessary armed forces to protect such an installation from any attacks.<br></div><br>There is also the question of maintenance. The maintenance of a nuclear reactor cannot be contracted out to private firms as is the case with airports and other installations. Hence, the government would have to commit to adequately caring for a nuclear installation so as to limit a Chernobyl-like incident that puts lives at risk. A first step would be to ensure that the online website of Nigeria's nuclear agency, the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority, is accessible and not a <a href=\"http://nnra-ng.org/nnra/part2/index2.php\">blank page</a> because the domain name expired (as of December 4th, 2009).<br><br>The agreement with Russia cannot be ignored. Russia has aggressively tried to control Europe's access to gas and all energy sources that will heat and power the continent and its agreement with Nigeria is a victory that undoubtedly causes some panic in Europe's capitals. Regardless of the power struggle between Russia and its neighbors, one can only hope that this agreement with Russia will not result in a repeat of the space ambition agreement with China. That led to the embarrassing revelation that Nigeria's first space satellite lost power and hurtled back to earth before schedule. Essentially, Nigeria must not enter into an agreement that will put the nation and its people at a disadvantage.<br><br>Finally, \"wazobia politics\" is nothing new to Nigeria. \"Wazobia politics\", affected intrinsically by tribal issues, was allegedly the reason why it took Nigeria this long to get this close to the construction of an IAEA-approved nuclear power plant. Nigeria's nuclear ambitions began shortly after it gained independence in 1960, and many steps were taken to put Nigeria on the road to nuclear development. However, concerns over what parts of the country would get nuclear research facilities and reactors delayed progress. Currently, the only IAEA-approved nuclear facility is in the northern part of the country and the head of the nation's nuclear agency is also a northerner. These facts coupled with the realities of ethnic tensions in the country, will undoubtedly raise certain concerns from non-northerners. Nigeria would do well to ensure that nuclear power control, development and its benefits will not be limited or seen to be limited to any specific region of the country.<br><br>Ultimately, Nigeria's nuclear ambition can be a boost not just to the nation's quest for consistent electricity, but a boost to the economy as well. As long as the commitment is there to follow through with this ambition and do it well, keeping in mind the various political pressures, nuclear power could transform Nigeria and its people.<br><br><br>From The Archives (detailed news and analysis of Nigeria's electricity problems):<br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/10/electricity-problems-at-nigerian.html\">Electricity Problems At Nigerian Airport</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/10/smart-grid-for-nigerias-energy-woes.html%20\">A Smart Grid for Nigeria's Energy Woes</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/10/banning-generators-in-nigeria.html\">Banning Generators in Nigeria </a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2009/07/mission-to-light-up-nigeria.html\">The Mission To Light Up Nigeria</a> (#lightupnigeria)<br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/04/more-solar-energy-plans.html\">More Solar Energy Plans</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/03/solar-energy-plans.html\">Solar Energy Plans</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/04/could-coal-be-power-solution-for.html\">Could Coal Be A </a><a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/04/could-coal-be-power-solution-for.html\">Power </a><a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/04/could-coal-be-power-solution-for.html\">Solution For Nigeria</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/09/nigeria-is-full-of-gas.html\">Nigeria Is Full Of Gas</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/03/power-blackouts-loom-across-nigeria.html\">Power Blackouts Loom Across Nigeria</a><br>- <a href=\"http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/03/nigerian-power-scandal-authority.html\">Nigerian Power Scandal: Authority Stealing</a><br><br><div><br></div><a href=\"http://www.addthis.com/feed.php?pub=solomonsydelle&h1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nigeriancuriosity.com&t1=\" title=\"Subscribe using any feed reader!\"><img alt=\"AddThis Feed Button\" src=\"http://s9.addthis.com/button1-fd.gif\" border=\"0\" height=\"16\" width=\"125\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1259678905729324935-8855948211357379073?l=www.nigeriancuriosity.com\" alt=\"\"></div><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=cAABckjKuGg:Q8f0aOY4aQg:I9og5sOYxJI\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=I9og5sOYxJI\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=cAABckjKuGg:Q8f0aOY4aQg:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?a=cAABckjKuGg:Q8f0aOY4aQg:63t7Ie-LG7Y\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/nigeriancuriosity/fpFU?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y\" border=\"0\"></a> <a 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"title" : "Artificial",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/artificial.PNG\" alt=\"artificial\" width=\"563\" height=\"1527\" title=\"Artificial and a bit pretentious.\"></p>\n<p><br>\n<a href=\"http://www.reddit.com/submit\"> <img src=\"http://www.reddit.com/static/spreddit1.gif\" alt=\"submit to reddit\" border=\"0\"> </a><a href=\"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fabstrusegoose.com%2F215&title=Artificial\"> <img border=\"0\" src=\"http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/16x16_su_3d.gif\" alt=\"Stumble this!\"></a><a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://abstrusegoose.com/215\"><img src=\"http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/zAB5S/hash/4273uaqa.gif\" alt=\"\"></a></p>"
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"title" : "Africa and the Crisis: What's Next?",
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"content" : "<p>Vox has an <a href=\"http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4268\">informative article</a> by two South African economists, Peter Draper and Gilberto Biacuana, highlighting the effects of declining trade flows on African growth. The first half of the piece offers an excellent summary of Sub-Saharan Africa's economic state as a result of the crisis. The authors argue that the crisis has affected Africa mostly through reduced exports and commodity prices, along with declining capital inflows. </p>\n<p>Roughly 80 percent of the continent's exports are comprised of minerals, metals, and food products. Over half of these exports are destined for Europe and North America (Asia currently comprises under 25 percent of exports). Looking at the data, the link between China and Africa is more about value than volume: Chinese growth raises the overall price for commodities, which then increases the value of Africa's exports to the United States and Europe. The value of these exports is especially important when considering that they are a large source of government revenue. When the crisis sent the price of commodities downward, the value of Africa's overall exports and a disproportionate share of government revenue went down as well. </p>\n<p><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20120a6f1b5bd970b-pi\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Africaexportstructure\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20120a6f1b5bd970b-500wi\" style=\"WIDTH:500px\"></a> </p>\n<p><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2012875f3d5f3970c-pi\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Africaexports\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2012875f3d5f3970c-500wi\" style=\"WIDTH:500px\"></a> <br></p>\n\n<p>The second half of the paper discusses Africa and the bigger picture:</p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<p>Altogether the cumulative impacts of the crisis on Africa, already arguably the most vulnerable region of the global economy, are serious. The crisis impacts described above reinforce the point that African economies are still integrated into the global economy as suppliers of raw materials to manufacturing industries located elsewhere – albeit some new sources of services revenues (remittances and tourism primarily) have contributed to diversification in recent years. Any major changes to global trade and investment patterns that the crisis may engender are unlikely to substantially transform this structural feature.</p>\n<p>As things currently stand, African policy makers in Finance Ministries and Central Banks seem to realise, in the aggregate, that the crisis is essentially a temporary liquidity problem requiring extraordinary but temporary policy responses in the countries concerned. Furthermore, there does not seem to be a major appetite in Africa to reverse reforms, since it is highly unlikely that policy reversals will lead to substantial changes in their countries’ economic circumstances.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The continent's prognosis for growth is dependent on a return to growth in developed countries, further cooperation with the Washington-based development community (including the World Bank), and deeper ties with China:</p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<p>African policy makers are pursuing a two-pronged strategy:</p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<p>Petition the IMF and World Bank to maintain capital flows into the continent on reasonable terms and waiting for the developed world’s growth to resume and lift their economies. </p>\n<p>And – just in case progress is slow on both fronts – they continue to deepen engagement with China.</p></blockquote></blockquote>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The good news is that Africa is becoming increasingly tied to the global economy. One of the advantages of this is that, when faced with a crisis, African economies have a greater diversity of response options. They can now turn to the World Bank/IMF, developed economies, and China. In the future, the list is only likely to grow longer. </p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The bad news is that, as the paper notes, Africa's growth continues to hinge on commodity exports. As emerging economies continue to catch up with the West, commodity prices are likely to remain high. This will not bode well for Africa's prospects for economic diversification. </p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=dgWpG36N_KE:sYpyrBfDf9U:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=dgWpG36N_KE:sYpyrBfDf9U:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?i=dgWpG36N_KE:sYpyrBfDf9U:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=dgWpG36N_KE:sYpyrBfDf9U:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=dgWpG36N_KE:sYpyrBfDf9U:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PSDBlog/~4/dgWpG36N_KE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Originally written earlier this month, and originally posted late November while dated \"November 1\" --now dated 11/25 to reflect the order in which it was posted</span>.</span><br><br><br>Ms. Dr. Hemodynamics and I got married a few weeks ago, and then went on a honeymoon. So my faithful reader(s) will be unsurprised to find that the thing I want to write about on my return is, of course, local production and the evolution of service economies. To those finding this blog with some hope of reading about medicine, I promise that this discussion, after passing through Marie Antoinette, water buffalo, goat cheese, and wine, will lead us back to medicine.<br><br>I'm not writing about the wedding and honeymoon part, dear reader(s), because though it was very lovely, it was also private, and I'm not one of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">those</span> bloggers. But, for all you sentimentalists--and who is my Hemodynamic reader(ship) if not sentimental fool(s)?--a bit of our honeymoon will appear below.<br><br><br> * * *<br><br>I wrote a little while ago about our farmer from whom we purchased a Community Supported Agriculture share this summer. We loved having a specific guy, Steve the Farmer, provide us with our spring and summer produce, even though (or perhaps because) sometimes Steve the Farmer's operation is a mess, his corn gets flooded, we don't get any corn, and he worries about losing the farm. Every small farm is like that, at least sometimes, so we know that buying into a farm means buying into the uncertainty of farming. And also, some really delicious produce and a connection to the process of growing it.<br><br>Ms. Dr. Hemodynamics and I are confirmed urbanites, but we like going and seeing where food is made. Last year, almost exactly a year ago, we went on a road trip to Montreal, stopping for a couple of stops to sample the goods and view the workings of a couple of small Vermont cheese producers. The Vermont Agency of Agriculture has <a href=\"http://www.vermontagriculture.com/buylocal/visit/cheese.html\">put together a \"Vermont Cheese Trail\" which is more conceptual than actual</a>: when you call these places on the phone they are often not able to accept visitors, and sometimes even seem befuddled by the question. But we found a couple of cheese farms, beyond bigger tourist-targeted operations like <a href=\"http://www.cabotcheese.coop/pages/visit_us/\">Cabot</a>, who would let us visit. This included <a href=\"http://www.bufaladivermont.com/\">a farm that raised water buffalo to make the real deal Italian-style mozzarella di bufala (now apparently moving the herd and operations to Quebec, per an updated web site)</a>, and even more lovely, a small goat farm and cheese-making operation run by <a href=\"http://www.formaggiokitchen.com/travelogues/domestic/twig_farm\">a former employee of Cambridge cheese mecca Formaggio Kitchen</a> and his wife, called <a href=\"http://www.twigfarm.com/about.php\">Twig Farm</a>.<br><br>At Twig Farm, we learned about goats and goat social hierarchies, saw where the cheese gets made, and the basement of the Twig Farm family house where the cheese is aged. We started to understand what it takes to make delicious cheese like the kind of cheeses we buy at Formaggio Kitchen. And we grew more fond of the cheese itself in a way we do not when we just go to Formaggio Kitchen's deli counter and jostle with the well-heeled Cantabridgians who try to cut ahead of us in line to get their prosciutto before we get our cheese. We bought Twig Farm t-shirts and a bunch of Twig Farm cheese. It was delicious, and precious to us not only for being delicious, and for being two pounds of gourmet expensive cheese which we got from the source, but for being the cheese from a herd of goats and a little family of cheesemakers who we had met and spent time with.<br><br>A couple of hours after we returned from that road trip to Vermont and Montreal, our apartment building caught fire, and when we were able to get back into our water-damaged apartment, moving the cheese out of the fridge and into safety was one of the first things we did. And we still wear our Twig Farm t-shirts with great affection and loyalty, even after just meeting the Twig farmers for a couple of hours.<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">(continued below the pictures)</span><br><br>* * *<br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2eiFjMGbI/AAAAAAAAAXo/jMNmAi7tzoI/s1600-h/IMG_0095.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2eiFjMGbI/AAAAAAAAAXo/jMNmAi7tzoI/s400/IMG_0095.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2eRRVKdwI/AAAAAAAAAXg/9muD8pSVkkc/s1600-h/IMG_0092.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2eRRVKdwI/AAAAAAAAAXg/9muD8pSVkkc/s400/IMG_0092.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2evnUQXhI/AAAAAAAAAXw/rVZ-m_b-me8/s1600-h/IMG_0097.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2evnUQXhI/AAAAAAAAAXw/rVZ-m_b-me8/s400/IMG_0097.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2e28svCyI/AAAAAAAAAX4/67ucyTaQUts/s1600-h/IMG_0098.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2e28svCyI/AAAAAAAAAX4/67ucyTaQUts/s400/IMG_0098.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2k91prPVI/AAAAAAAAAYA/iKhT8R3HfJE/s1600-h/IMG_0177.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su2k91prPVI/AAAAAAAAAYA/iKhT8R3HfJE/s400/IMG_0177.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su4DcEPMgII/AAAAAAAAAY4/qtOUyfMGre0/s1600-h/IMG_0079.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su4DcEPMgII/AAAAAAAAAY4/qtOUyfMGre0/s400/IMG_0079.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su4DjoUhIVI/AAAAAAAAAZA/TFcBvgSG5Kw/s1600-h/IMG_0086.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Su4DjoUhIVI/AAAAAAAAAZA/TFcBvgSG5Kw/s400/IMG_0086.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><br><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Photos: </span><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.twigfarm.com/about.php\">Twig Farm</a> goats being milked by Michael Lee of Twig Farm; groups of the goats get into this milking area via one door. As he milked, Mr. Lee explained the complex goat hierarchy, in which the chief goat and her lieutenants are the first group to get in the door from outside to get milked (and eat yummy snacks while being milked), with the head goat going into the first position. This means more snacks for complex reasons having to do with the order in which Mr. Lee does the milking and snack replenishing. A former queen goat had been deposed last year, and if our memory serves us, she is the one looking at the camera in the picture of the goats eating, below, now in a later milking group, abandoned by her former lieutenants, but still (from this picture, at least), clearly possessing qualities of curiousity and leadership. Once finished with milking, the group of goats files out, leaving through a second door which leads to the other side of a fence, with the last one in the group being urged out by Mr. Lee's helpful push. Below that: Ms. Dr. Hemodynamics and I remain big fans of the Twig Farm t-shirts we bought on our visit; this is mine, worn while visiting a local orchard to pick our own apples, a much older and more developed New England agricultural tourism tradition. Last two photos: A water buffalo cow, and a water buffalo calf, at the mozzarella farm.</span></span><br><br>* * *<br><br>We went to France for our honeymoon, and we discovered some changes since our last visits there, before we knew each other. France now has big box stores, and <a href=\"http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3723/is_10_12/ai_67720448/?tag=content;col1\">more and more chains</a>. These were not only McDonald's, which serves a more French menu than it used to, and Starbucks, which was dotted throughout Paris, but also French chains, with food prepared in some central assembly center and trucked out to the stores. I remember that there was an earlier time in which this sort of thing seemed shocking to French people and those who loved them (like the part of the movie <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076341/usercomments\">Perfumed Nightmare</a>, where the narrator proclaims, \"Liberte! egalite! fraternite! supermarchet!\"), but it's now <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/6259044/McDonalds-restaurants-to-open-at-the-Louvre.html\">part of the landscape</a> in a permanent way.<br><br>It seemed during this visit that France has now more fully entered a stage of <a href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/britains-brilliant-career-in-the-services-sector-proves-a-myth-1314362.html\">rationalization, automation, and modernization of the service industry</a>, in which many of the past quaint details of small shops and producers are overcome by the same factors that make box stores and chains attractive and competitive elsewhere.<br><br>But even when we went to buy cheese in the little cheese store, there was not a focus on who made the cheese, but instead, where it was from and what kind it was. When there are traditional ways of doing things, I guess, customers assume that one of the traditional products is like that of another; or perhaps, the consumers are focused on their trust for the shopkeeper's taste.<br><br>We actually had a Twig Farm sort of experience when a friend of ours arranged some wine tastings for us. One of the appointments she made was at a small winery, run by a married couple who left their jobs with a corporation that runs big box stores in Europe and elsewhere. They started making <a href=\"http://www.laroche-pressac.com/aventure.htm\">lovely wine from a small vineyard</a>. We loved their winery as much as we loved Twig Farm, and we liked their wine as much as we liked Twig Farm cheese. We bought a cheap bag in a crummy Paris luggage store just so we could put our extra clothes in it to make room for extra bottles of wine in our suitcases.<br><br>The winemakers' personal trajectory seemed almost like the evolution of our era's service economy in general. They went from box stores to their little winery. But this is a romantic adventure, not a transformation of the actual economy of wine. The emphasis on small personal producers, once a feature only of pre-industrial economies, is now a feature of a romance of local and artisanal products.<br><br>The economy sacrifices small-scale pre-automation production for efficiency, gets agribusiness and box stores, and then one part of the market starts romanticizing the small local producers. I don't want to diminish those producers; I believe in Steve the Farmer, and Twig Farm, and all the other small producers with whom I have relationships. I believe in what they do, and I want more people to be able to do what they do.<br><br>But then there was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hameau_de_la_reine\">Marie Antoinette's country village</a> at Versailles. There, in a tucked-away corner of the most insane royal estate this side of the Taj Mahal, she imagined herself as some kind of rural peasant. She had a little herd of sheep, and beautifully arranged little plots of vegetables. Marie Antoinette probably got a bum rap in all kinds of ways--there were much bigger villains in the pre-Revolution order of things--but we know that this kind of romanticism is not how we want to relate to the project of growing food.<br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/SvJHRPh218I/AAAAAAAAAZI/3NILiQ43zoE/s1600-h/IMG_0800.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/SvJHRPh218I/AAAAAAAAAZI/3NILiQ43zoE/s400/IMG_0800.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/SvJHnv4cOVI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/AnzVaEe5qJ0/s1600-h/IMG_0811.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/SvJHnv4cOVI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/AnzVaEe5qJ0/s400/IMG_0811.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><br>Of course, Twig Farm and Steve the Farmer are not Marie Antoinette. They are real farmers, they work hard, they get their hands dirty, and their operations are arranged for the creation of pleasing products, not for the pretense of the pleasure of production. But unless we are thoughtful about it, there can be a little bit of the queen's farm in those of us who support the industrial service economy, but romanticize the pre-industrial way of doing things.<br><br>Every time we shop in a big chain store, or buy food shipped from some other hemisphere of the world, we are making it more difficult for small producers and sellers who make personal products to sell to other people. We make the relationships of small markets and high quality more difficult. This actually has the paradoxical effect of increasing the romantic value of small farms, and the difficulty of actually running a small farm. In other words, the mass production of food is itself what creates the small high-cost market of special and personally-made food. We value Twig Farm partly because of the co-existing massive industrial project of creating and distributing mass-produced cheese. The contrast makes Twig Farm what it is.<br><br>To put this another way, the American service economy is so industrialized and hyper-efficient, that it has made personal production romantic enough to make money.<br><br>In 17th century France, peasants labored on over-farmed soil controlled by large landholders, taxed by the church, with lean years meaning famine, fear, death from hunger. Meanwhile, the queen delighted in the quaint project of harvesting a tiny crop of perfect grapes, or commanding a small herd of perfect sheep to amble across a perfect meadow. Both of these projects had something to do with agriculture, but little to do with each other.<br><br>Many of us are aware of this problem in our modern lives, and try to make compromises with it. The effort to sell us on a compromise becomes a goal of marketing for chains like Whole Foods. When they highlight local producers and particular high-quality low-volume products, they help us feel that the convenience of Whole Foods is a reasonable compromise, even if it is a giant supermarket chain run by <a href=\"http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jmackey/\">a libertarian guy whose views on health reform run counter to those of many of his customers</a>.<br><br>It would matter to me if Steve the Farmer was mean to his kid (he's not, he seems to have a nice relationship with his kid, and I like that), or if Twig Farm was run by insufferable snobs who spent all their time expressing disdain for people who eat cheddar. But I know that Whole Foods is a large chain, a corporate enterprise. It is not a farmer's market. I don't like the CEO, but I can maybe get a little more local produce there; the produce that isn't local might be at least organic, which is better for the people working in the fields far away; and I can buy delicious cheese made locally or made in my old local cheese zone of Northern California.<br><br>* * *<br><br>I'm no agricultural theorist, and one reason I've actually been thinking about all of this in a more than idle way is because of the evolution of the service economy of medicine.<br><br>Medicine, particularly primary care medicine, is retail business. Customers come in, they get served, they leave. Medicine is its own distinct industry; and yet, it is also part of the service economy. Most of us, when we think of the doctor we want, imagine a medical equivalent of Steve the Farmer or Michael Lee of Twig Farm--someone who is somehow apart from the hyper-industrial underpinnings of the actual larger healthcare system, someone who in fact runs counter to that system.<br><br>The personal relationship in medicine is a near-necessity, and this is why we have not sacrificed it as easily as we long ago sacrificed making food ourselves, and then sacrificed having relationships with people who make our food. But our desire to have a personal relationship with a doctor means that the medical system is an awkward blend of types of service economy. It is one part an old-style pre-modern service economy, and the other part, a highly industrialized and automated up-to-date service economy.<br><br>In my big hospital, going to work in the morning in a massive medical area with not only my hospital, but others, and lots of laboratory and clinic buildings as well, I am always aware of medicine as an industrial process. I work in a hospital which is making a niche in the local and academic medical marketplace by emphasizing \"quality\", which in medicine has become the shorthand for a movement which emphasizes process, reliability, systems engineering. It emphasizes rationalizing and industrializing the processes of medicine. It is a descendant of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordism#Fordism_in_the_United_States\">Fordism</a>; it more explicitly borrows from Toyota.<br><br>I believe in this way of thinking about medicine. But at the same time, I know that embracing Toyota medicine means that I'm not making goat cheese. I'm not bringing a truck full of vegetables to a corner in Somerville, where my little son runs around trying to get my customers to buy the special mushrooms. I'm joining a big store, a big factory.<br><br>That means there is an irony in my life. At the same time I believe in standardization, in streamlining processes, in building guidelines and common ways of doing things, I also want to make my own special kind of goat cheese. I want my patients to think of me as someone unique and special. I want to think of myself that way.<br><br>And so, the rhetoric of doctors and patients is full of mutually-agreeable untruths. Whether in the politics of healthcare reform, or in our personal relationships of the clinic, we like to emphasize that there are large dark forces that want to embed our relationship within some kind of bureaucratic industrial process, when all we want is small-scale goat cheese. Any system survives because it plays useful functions. In our current insurance system, we enjoy having a scapegoat. The insurance company becomes the holder of all our anxiety and anger, the faceless formless evil which absorbs all blame and pays all bills.<br><br>Doctors who nourish sentimentalism within an industrial medical economy will emphasize the humanism and kindness of particular doctors, rather than the systems that make humanism and kindness possible or impossible. Yet it is the system that matters within a massive rationalized Fordist/Toyota-cized infrastructure. The infrastructure supports relationships or doesn't. Pretend that medicine is mainly about a single doctor and a single patient, and you risk building Marie Antoinette's clinic.<img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Hemodynamics/~4/eweLV0TOWGg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<div><p><strong><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0128759f1d47970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Tootie\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0128759f1d47970c-800wi\" title=\"Tootie\"></a> </strong></p><p>Tootie is on a little NYC club tour at the moment. Tonight and tomorrow he's at Birdland with the Heath Brothers, Monday-Wednesday with me and Ben Street at Smalls, Thursday with Tomas Janzon at Kitano, and Friday at Flushing Town Hall with the NEA Jazz Masters including Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Barry Harris, Benny Powell, and David Wong.</p><p>This past spring Billy Hart told me to call Tootie when Hart couldn't make a standards hit I wanted to do. I dislike cold-calling the masters but I sucked it up and went for it anyway. I reached Tootie on his cell when he was driving into a car wash in LA. He was happy to hear from me but suggested I call back when he was out of the wash. I said to myself, "This is really a California cat. He's <em>washing his car</em>." However, when I asked Charlie Haden about Tootie, he said, "One of the reasons I love Tootie, in addition to his great playing, is that he looks and dresses like New York, <em>not California</em>."</p><p>(I once had an amazing bootleg tape of Joe Henderson, Jim McNeely, Charlie, and Tootie at a Stanford Jazz Workshop concert. Anybody have this? I'd love to hear it again.)</p><p>Tootie made that hit with me and now we are recording for the new Smalls Live label. He's expressed interest in playing in NYC more often, so skilled musicians who want to go to serious bebop school on a gig shouldn't hesitate about giving him a call. (I certainly didn't regret it!) He's frankly been somewhat underutilized since moving out to California.</p><p>In addition to the records we discuss below, two of the all-time classic Albert "Tootie" Heath recordings are Herbie Hancock <em>The Prisoner</em> and Kenny Dorham <em>Trompeta Toccata</em>. </p><p>---</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I always felt that this music was a tradition that was handed down by my family. My father was a clarinetist, a weekend clarinetist. During the week he was an auto mechanic. But he loved music, especially John Philip Sousa, and he was in the marching band. My mother marched in the band too, in the women’s section. She didn’t play an instrument but sang in the church choir at the 19th Street Baptist Church in Philadelphia. </p>\n\n<p>Together, they always provided us with plenty of music in the house, especially on recording. Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson: I heard those people from the very beginning. Mahalia was my mom's favorite. </p>\n\n<p>And when I really got to thinking about playing an instrument, I paid attention to my older brothers, who were listening to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ben Webster, Don Byas...people like that. </p>\n\n<p>For drummers I listened to Max Roach, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, and Specs Wright, a local drummer who was an amazing musician. He was in my brother Jimmy’s band, and he took me on as a student. I learned most of the rudimental drum studies through him. I kind of cast those aside for a while: you need to be really mature and secure in your musicianship to be able to sit down and deal with the basics. When you’re young you think the basics aren’t hip. So the rudiments I got in early life, I chucked them out, but in later life I’m discovering how important they are, and how much the guys I admired and wanted to be like knew their rudiments. Kenny Clarke was probably one of the most rudimental players in jazz. And Max Roach of course, same thing. His solos were very melodic but you could still relate them to rudiments. </p>\n\n<p>Actually the best young drummers have amazing rudimental control. </p>\n\n<p>But when I was young, I followed my ear and heart. There’s a kind of divine intervention that helps. Alan Dawson always said that it was 90% rudiments and 10% divine intervention! That was his philosophy, and it makes a lot of sense.\n\nThat divine intervention is what I always relied on, and how I was able to create a unique conglomerate of everything, rudiments included. Whenever I sit down to play, I’m quiet for a couple of seconds. Then I ask permission from the ancestors to allow me to do these things that have already been done. </p>\n\n<p>A joke about that comes from “Sweets” Edison. After I played a drum solo, he said to me, “Yeah, you thought that shit was something, huh?” </p>\n\n<p>I said, “Well...” </p>\n\n<p>“That shit was nothin’ but a bunch of old Sid Catlett licks!” Of course, nobody in the club even knew who Sid Catlett was. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Did you get to see Catlett play?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> No, never. But I heard the records.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Who did you get to see live in Philly growing up?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Well, Philly Joe Jones before he moved to New York. Ronald Tucker, who’s on one album with Jackie McLean, the one with the first recording of “Little Melonae.” He was really my hero, because Ronald never practiced but could play anything. Just anything. He’d see you trying something, and he would say, “What’s that you are trying to play? You mean this?” And he could do it. He could hear and play anything, Max Roach solos, you name it. We called him “The Flame,” since he used the hair straightener called Conkaline and let it get red. Conkaline was almost like lye, it would basically burn your hair, and if you weren't careful, you would end up with red hair, which is what happened to Ronald.</p>\n\n<p> \n\nSpecs Wright was very technical, a great reader, wonderful smooth hands, clean, the “4”s were exact -- but this guy Ronald could try anything and come out of it like magic. \n\nI also used to see a wonderful drummer named Charlie Rice around Philadelphia, in fact Rice is still there, and I’m sure I’m leaving some other people out. </p>\n\n<p>Then from New York City guys would come through. Max Roach, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, I saw Kenny Clarke with the Modern Jazz Quartet a few times in the beginning.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I like those records of the MJQ with Kenny Clarke.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I do too! I like most of the recordings I heard of Kenny Clarke. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Not just with the MJQ: Your brother and Kenny Clarke is one of the all-time great rhythm sections of the 50’s. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Oh man! Those were amazing records, with Miles and so forth. </p>\n\n<p>One time the Heath Brothers went to Paris. We went to the New Morning where Kenny Clarke was sitting up there playing with a bunch of young kids in kind of a strange environment. He had his eyes closed and it looked like he was bored out of his mind. So Percy waved to the bass player, who recognized Percy and gestured for Percy to come up. He kept playing until Percy was able to take the bass and fall right in. All of a sudden, Kenny Clarke felt this shift in intensity in sound and beat and he opened his eyes. Oh, man! The music just lit up. After the song they embraced. It was great seeing that. \n\nWe all had such a good time after the gig. He died not too much later on.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> What was that beat your brother and Klook play on the Miles album <em>Bag’s Groove</em>?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> It was Kenny Clarke’s cymbal beat, and how sparingly he played: he could always find the <em>cracks</em> in the music. When he did something, it was always a lift. Some drummers get carried away and stop listening, maybe because we are doing four or five things at the same time. You want to see if things will work or not, but you’re not really paying enough attention. Drummers have a big responsibility to be happy. We think we need to make everything happen, but it’s not true: everything is already happening, all you need to do is find your place. \n\nKenny Clarke was a master of that. He had a ride cymbal beat...I haven’t figured it out yet. When I hear it today I still say, “Damn, man! Is it a triplet feel or a sixteenth note feel?” It is so distinct. When you listen back it is so different than other drummers. Max and Art Blakey had completely different cymbal beats.</p>\n\n<p>That was the identity during that time. \n\nThe influence of Tony Williams and Elvin Jones has shifted the emphasis away from the ride cymbal to the orchestration of the drum kit. It’s a bigger sound instead of the light swing with a few accents.\n\nGuys now can do some pretty amazing stuff. Drummers are off the page! They can do incredible stuff. We all need to keep listening, though.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> What about feathering the bass drum?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> That’s an old tradition. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> You feather, right?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I try, yeah. A lot of times I get carried away and I stop feathering, and I feel it right away. I know it’s an emptiness if it's not there. But guys <em>can</em> play without that and still use it as part of the overall sound, and you don’t miss it. </p>\n\n<p>But there’s something about feathering: once you start doing it, everyone on the bandstand -- in fact, everyone in the whole place -- can feel it. It’s right with the bass, and when you can put it in the right place with the bass, it enhances the bass. If it is too loud, it will make the bassist’s notes sound very short. But if you can do it just right, like the word itself, “feathering,” it works out. Tapping it lightly is the trick to that. \n\nI was watching Eddie Locke. He’s got it. And Jackie Williams? He’s another one of those guys that can tap that bass drum...forever! Right through everything, hits and all -- you keep thinking, “He’s going to miss it, he’s too busy,” but these guys keep it going. </p>\n\n<p>But they are from the old tradition. The Jo Jones tradition. </p>\n\n<p>Buddy Rich used to play it, but he played it like a truck. Sure, it was right there: it was accurate. But no finesse! You know, I saw Jo Jones sub for Buddy Rich once in Buddy’s big band. When Jo came in, the first thing he did was ask the whole trumpet section but mutes in. Then he played the whole gig on brushes!\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I heard Blakey play the four beats on the bass drum pretty loud, too.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> He could do it kind of loud, sometimes. But he used to have a special sheepskin beater on his bass drum that was very soft, and he tuned the bass drum in a special way: he got a wonderful sound, with those cymbal crashes and the bass drum going. It’s a sound on every Blakey recording.\n\nConnie Kay used to have one of those beaters, too, and Lester Young used to call that beater a powder puff. Connie would tap it like that, too. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> It’s pretty mysterious. I heard Billy Hart sometimes and swore he was feathering, but then I watched his foot and he wasn’t.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Exactly! There’s something going on in the whole that makes you feel that. Billy’s tricky, man. He knows what he’s doing. </p>\n\n<p>I find that swing is really hard to do. You’ll have a nice feeling for a moment but then somebody on the stand messes it up. Often the piano player, where he puts his left hand, it’s...It’s OK, but...Piano players get carried away, just like drummers. They are more concerned with the harmony and not enough concerned with where they play that harmony in the rhythm.\n\nThat’s why the way that Count Basie played the piano was so special, or the way Abdullah Ibrahim or Ahmad Jamal played. Red Garland's left hand was either on or off the beat, in a clear way, and the drummer could play off those anticipated beats. </p>\n\n<p>You leave space, too: I heard that last night. That lets me and the bass player - last night it was Ben - we can keep it right there, keep the beat consistent, and at a volume where you don’t need to bang to be heard. It gets real smooth and starts to flow. And everybody feels it, not just the musicians, but the people in the club, too.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I guess I think pianists can overplay in the left hand. If you’re not playing an ostinato or stride, why not just keep it light and listen to the bass and drums? \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Drummers can play too much in the left hand too! It becomes a battle.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I tolerate it more from the drummers than the pianists!\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> During that battle, the bass player just starts ignoring both of us. And then sometimes he gets really busy, with their “diggety-booms” and the bass bombs! Then you got 4 or 5 guys up there, everybody’s dropping bombs--you bomb everything out, it’s blown up! \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Your brother never got too busy. Ben and I talk about how the best recorded bass playing with Charlie Parker is the studio date with Al Haig and Max Roach.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Wow! \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Also, you and Percy lay a smooth carpet down together on what many people consider to be the greatest straight-ahead guitar record ever made, <em>The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery.</em></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a69cf0ce970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Wesmontgomery\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a69cf0ce970b-800wi\" title=\"Wesmontgomery\"></a> <br> <br>\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I like that record, but you know that was the only time I played with Wes.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> How did you end up on the date?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I can’t remember, maybe Orrin Keepnews called me when Philly Joe Jones didn’t show up or something. That what Art Taylor said, that his whole was career was based on Philly Joe not showing up. But they kept calling Philly Joe, since if he did show, they knew that they were going get something special. \n\nPhilly Joe played piano, too, like so many great drummers. Kenny Clarke could play piano, but he was really into vibes until he heard Milt Jackson. When he heard Milt he said, “No more vibes for me!” \n\nAnyway, apparently Philly Joe could play his ass off at the piano as long as it was in the key of F.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> We call that “The people’s key.” Bb is a little hard, but F is just right.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> That’s the one. I can stumble around in it myself. I don’t need too many “accidents,” that’s what I call accidentals! If you don’t see them coming it’s definitely an accident. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> You just mentioned Milt Jackson. Tell me about playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I did a world tour with them the last two years they existed. With John Lewis, “Less is Best.” </p>\n\n<p>Percy told me that in advance, and it was true. I understood it when I got in that seat. I could see how Connie Kay adapted to fit into John’s concept of how the music should go. Connie did such an excellent job of playing John’s music. \n\nKenny Clarke quit the quartet because of how there wasn’t enough activity for the drums. “I gotta play the drums, man! I can’t hold back like this all the time. It’s not jazz: I’m outta here.” </p>\n\n<p>But Connie was perfect. Connie was on staff at Atlantic Records on the R&B side, which meant that he had a beat that was ridiculous. Then he could apply that knowledge to the Modern Jazz Quartet music, but down about 50 decibels! </p>\n\n<p>John’s music was not easy, you know. The first gig I played, we played all the stuff I heard my whole life. I sat there like I was Connie Kay myself! But the second gig, here at the Blue Note in New York, John wanted to play some of the extended pieces like “A Day in Dubrovnik.” \n\nMilt was always argumentative, wanting to play his blues and all that. Milt and John were always in conflict. Percy always thought that John had made Milt -- and had made Connie and even Percy too! -- because of John’s original music, not because of those blues pieces Milt wrote. </p>\n\n<p>Milt never wanted to play the hard John Lewis pieces, but John would insist, like when we were in New York, saying that people wanted to hear this music. Milt was pissed, but John got his way. </p>\n\n<p>At the rehearsal, John gives me this book. Wow! I can’t even look up: I need to watch this motherfucker close. I get through the rehearsal OK, since in addition to the written parts, there was a lot of space and keeping time, thank goodness. </p>\n\n<p>Milt’s part, though, was ongoing the whole time. I didn’t see a single rest in that score! There was page after page after page of the shit. Milt looked at it once and put it away. We came back and played it that night. Milt was pissed at having to play this piece, but he didn’t miss a thing or play any wrong notes. This guy had the capacity to look at written music once and know it cold. Milt Jackson had a photographic memory and perfect pitch. He was a freak! </p>\n\n<p>Then, when John was soloing, Milt came over to me and started talking. “Yeah, Bubba, I see you got the rug underneath the drums tonight,” and all that shit. I told him, “Man, I can’t talk while playing, I’m worried I’ll get lost,” and Milt got so mad he wouldn’t talk to me for three days.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Come on.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> It’s true! But that’s not as bad as what happened this other time. Milt <em>really</em> got mad when I got in the wrong limo. The MJQ traveled in two limos. John and Percy rode together and Milt and Connie were together in the other limo. That’s how Milt thought it was supposed to go, and when I got in the limo with John, I think he didn’t speak to me for three weeks! </p>\n\n<p>Two separate limos! Also, they asked for the four corners in first class, to be as far from each other as possible. These guys did not get along. Until they got onstage, when it was phenomenal. Well, they would play cards up until showtime. During the card-playing they would get loosened up, start laughing a bit. But after the gig, bam, they were strangers. Amazing! Forty-two years of this bullshit.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I would have quit the band.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Yeah! Most people would. Well, Milt did quit a couple of times. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I guess the bread was too good for him to stay away.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> The money brought him right back. Oh, he hated it. He hated John Lewis. He was very envious. </p>\n\n<p>[Tootie pauses to order a beer.]\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> The best beer I ever had was in Prague when I was there with Ron Carter. We were there to play with Frederick Gulda. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Oh, no, that must have been a drag.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Gulda was nuts! And he wanted to play jazz. Oh, how he wanted to play jazz, so badly...\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I’m sorry to be negative, Gulda obviously had amazing talent. But he seems like a tourist when he deals with jazz.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> He was very arrogant and very insecure. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> There I have sympathy: playing with you and Ron? Who wouldn’t be insecure, Christ.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I also went to Brazil with Gulda and Jimmy Rowser. It was supposed to be what we did in Eastern Europe: the first half solo piano classical music, the second half with the jazz trio. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Well, I hope you got paid.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Oh yeah we got paid! Really well. In fact, in Brazil they didn’t want us, they just wanted Fredrick Gulda, so Rowser and I hung at a great hotel for two weeks with a pool and everything and still got paid well without even having to go the gig!\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> When was this?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Early sixties maybe.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Of course you and Ron Cater were playing with Bobby Timmons around that time.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Now that was fabulous, man. Every time I see Ron we immediately start telling each other the Bobby Timmons stories. He says, “Man, we had a nice thing, didn’t we?” And I say, “Yeah, Ron, did you ever listen to the record?” and he says, “I do all the time!”\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> It’s a classic record, live at the Village Vanguard. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a69cf121970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"BobbyTimmons-InPerson\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a69cf121970b-800wi\" title=\"BobbyTimmons-InPerson\"></a> <br> <br> \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Bobby was struggling with his addiction. It was the height of his popularity as a composer of “Dis Here” and “Dat Dere.” He was getting a lot of attention. \n\nSo Orrin Keepnews arranged a tour for us with Riverside Records backing it. </p>\n\n<p>Bobby was trying his best to straighten his life out and get rid of his addiction. So he lied to me and Ron. He was a chronic liar, which had something to do with his addiction.\n\nWe told him, “Man, we don’t want to go to San Francisco if you are strung out and sick and can’t play and all that.” \n\n“Oh no, I’m cool! I went to the doctor and got this bottle of dolophine pills.” Heroin addiction is very painful: your hands ache and everything, and dolophine was supposed to suppress the pain. </p>\n\n<p>So we get on the plane, and we are all happy. Bobby’s going to get clean, we’ve got a great band, the press is waiting, the records are selling: great! We even had little uniforms. In these green jackets me and Ron -- both young and handsome -- we were sharp! </p>\n\n<p>Unfortunately, on the plane, Bobby took all of the pills at once and starting drinking vodka. He started feeling the pain, I guess.\n\nSo by the time we get to San Francisco he was out of it! We check in the hotel and Bobby hooks up with this guy Jason. I don’t know if Jason was a supplier or an addict, but we had an adjoining room. We thought we had gotten Bobby safely into bed but this Jason shows up. Bobby obviously couldn’t use anything, since he was already poisoned with everything, so I don’t know exactly what was going on.\n\nIt was time to go to soundcheck, and Bobby said he’d meet us there. </p>\n\n<p>The club owner greets me and Ron, we set up, and finally it’s time to play. No Bobby. The club’s full and the owner says, “You and Ron have to do something, I don’t want to give any money back.” So Ron and I play the first set duo. We’d played everything we could possibly play duo while staying in the context of the the Bobby Timmons trio! We didn’t go nuts, we played the tunes. We both soloed a lot, of course. I played everything I knew on the first song, really. My shit was over even then. </p>\n\n<p>After that was done, on the break: still no Bobby. When it was time for the second set we went up there again to try it some more. While we are playing Bobby finally comes in, and he and the club owner go into the back room behind the bandstand together. They had some words, you know, and the next thing I know Bobby comes out with blood all down the front of his green uniform. The owner had punched him in the nose and fucked him up. Bobby told me and Ron, “Pack that shit up. We are out of here.” </p>\n\n<p>That was our grand opening on the West Coast. </p>\n\n<p>The club owner later said that Bobby came at him with a knife, and Bobby did carry one, I know that, since Bobby pulled it on me a couple of times. The owner said he popped Bobby on the nose to protect himself. And, actually, Bobby and the owner settled whatever it was and we went on to play the two weeks. </p>\n\n<p>Ron would always push me to negotiate with Bobby since Bobby and I grew up together. When we got to Detroit, after two nights at the club, the hotel was demanding some money to keep staying there. We hadn’t given them a dime yet. Ron said, “That’s your man. Go tell B.T. we need some money!” So I’d go over and say, “Bobby, we need some money.” \n\n“Okay, man. I’ll get some tonight.” He’d say that all the time but every night, after drawing the money, he’d leave with this dope dealer and go shoot up somewhere. On the third night, Ron says to me, “Tell your man if he doesn’t give us some money they are going to throw us out of the hotel!” So I confronted Bobby again and that’s when he pulled a knife on me in the dressing room. I got scared: I saw the rage in his eyes. “If you ask me again...” </p>\n\n<p>But then he did give up some money that night and we gave it to the hotel. </p>\n\n<p>The music, though, that was all fun. I loved playing with Bobby Timmons and Ron Carter. The intrigue before and after the gig, though, that was a problem! </p>\n\n<p>I remember when Bobby was dying at Saint Vincent’s right across from the Vanguard. I went in to see him. He was all tubed up and shit.\n\n“Hey, Toots, what’s happening? Yeah, I’m getting out on the weekend. ”</p>\n\n<p>\n\nI went outside the room and the doctor said, “Can I speak to you a minute? Are you a close friend?” </p>\n\n<p>“Yeah! Bobby Timmons and I grew up together, he was around the corner from me and then we went to school together. I’ve been knowing him my whole life.” </p>\n\n<p>He said, “He’s not getting out on the weekend, and if he is getting out on the weekend, it’s going to be in a box, because his liver is like a sieve.” </p>\n\n<p>So Bobby was lying all the way until the end!\n\nHis son tragically committed suicide in his twenties, I never knew him though. I knew Bobby’s wife, of course, since we all were in school together.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Who else did you go to school with?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I’ll never forget when Jimmy Garrison came up from Florida. He was very country, with thin and colorful clothes -- flowery shirts and such -- that were way out of season for Philadelphia, where it was cold as hell. We used to laugh at Jimmy Garrison.\n\nIn Florida, Jimmy was a singer in a quartet like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orioles\">The Orioles</a>. So when he hooked up with me in high school, somehow he got to my house because he knew I was into music. When he came over, he saw Percy playing the bass, and that was it! He started playing bass.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Jimmy Garrison started playing bass because of seeing Percy practicing at your house?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Through his whole career, Jimmy said that Percy was the guy that started him off.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Did you play with Garrison much besides those three tracks with McCoy Tyner on <em>Today and Tomorrow</em>?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I called Jimmy once for a gig uptown at a place called Mikell’s. This was after Coltrane died, and I thought he might want to make the hit. I said, “Damn, James, can we do a gig together?” </p>\n\n<p>He said, “I’d love to make it, Tootie, but after playing with Coltrane for so long, I don’t know any songs! After seven years of vamps, I forgot all the tunes!” I thought that was some funny shit. Of course, the way Elvin played so loud and rumbled through everything, you couldn’t hear those vamps anyway!\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Did you play with Wilbur Ware at all?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Yeah, I did. Just a few times at jam sessions and in lofts. Guys like Wilbur Ware who had no place to stay, you could often find them hanging out and begging! But he was one of the greatest, though. Like Bobby, he fought that addiction.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> You’re on so many records with so many great people. Billy Hart told me about a fabulous Yusef Lateef quartet with Kenny Barron and Bob Cunningham that I don’t think was documented properly.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> We were in there about eight years! I did about eleven years with him: after Kenny left, Danny Mixon played piano, and there was an electric bassist named Steve Neil that took Bob’s place. \n\nThere’s about three Lateef records that I’m on. Yusef was always searching and trying to do different things. We used to have one-act plays in the club! We’d be running all around, and the audience would say, “What the hell is this?” Yusef is a very interesting man. He’s in his 80’s now but hasn’t stopped yet.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> I’m not sure, but there doesn’t seem to be a record of that quartet that doesn’t have heavy studio overdubbing. Is there one of those you especially like, anyway?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I like <em>The Gentle Giant</em>, but it’s out of print for sure. There was some different people involved in that, too. But Yusef let me play flute on it, I remember that. He always pushed every one of us to compose and play other instruments, and also advocated going to school. </p>\n\n<p>Yusef taught a composition and arranging class here at City College in New York, and encouraged us all to attend. We all did, we registered and everything, and Kenny went on to get an undergraduate degree. I was discouraged because the class was in atonal music. I wanted to write songs, not deal with atonal music, tone rows and all that, where the notes don’t repeat until you use them all. \n\n<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_Hathaway\">Donny Hathaway</a> was in one class. He came one time and got the assignment for the term project. I did a string quartet and Donny Hathaway did a brass ensemble. For the recital students played all our little pieces and Hathaway’s was the best by far! I can still hear this music Donny Hathaway wrote for brass! It was incredible, and he didn’t even come to hear it played that one time. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> So there’s a Tootie Heath string quartet out there?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Somewhere. Atonal stuff, pretty wild. But Donny took that atonal concept and made it musical, more then the rest of us. Even Kenny Barron couldn’t do that. </p>\n\n<p>The songs on my second record with Kenny Barron came out of Yusef’s class.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0c85f970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Albert_heath_kwanza\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0c85f970c-800wi\" title=\"Albert_heath_kwanza\"></a> <br> <br> \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> You aren’t associated with the avant-garde that much, but your first record has Don Cherry on it. I think that’s the only meeting of Herbie Hancock and Don Cherry, actually. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> <em>Kawaida</em>. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0c9d9970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Heath_kuumb_kawaida~~_101b\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0c9d9970c-800wi\" title=\"Heath_kuumb_kawaida~~_101b\"></a> <br> </p>\n\n<p>My nephew, Mtume, was in an organization called <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Organization\">US </a> which was a counter-organization to the Black Panthers. It was a black nationalist group interested in Nigerian culture, religion and the history of the African-American people. Mtume was involved with them and for a time followed the teachings of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Karenga\">Maulana Karenga</a> (now Dr. Karenga; he’s out in LA). We learned about Swahilli and that we should rename ourselves since our given names are slave-owner’s names. </p>\n\n<p>When I had the opportunity to make a recording, I got Mtume involved and he came in with the music and poetry. He also named everybody: that’s when Herbie became Mwandishi. I was Kuuamba. </p>\n\n<p>I don’t remember what he called Don Cherry, but I know Johnny Griffin named him “The Traveler,” since Don Cherry could show up anywhere in the world, surrounded by strangers, playing his little trumpet. It could be an airport in Istanbul, he’d just show up. The next week you’d hear that someone just saw him in Pakistan, again surrounded by people and playing the pocket trumpet.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Did you call Don for the date?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Yeah. Don has always been my hero as far as trumpet was concerned. I like two trumpet players: Miles Davis and Don Cherry. Of course there are others but those are my heroes. </p>\n\n<p>Now, one of the reasons I loved Don Cherry so much is that he knew how to play conventionally, but he chose not to. He found his own voice. Him and Ornette Coleman together, with Charlie Haden and either Blackwell and Higgins, that was my favorite music. \n\nDon and I lived in Stockholm together for some years, too.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> Don’s the highlight of <em>Kawaida,</em> for sure.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Oh, man! He could play. One time we went to Europe together, in George Russell’s band. That Lydian Concept, man, a lot of the time it sounded like you just sat on the piano at that was it: every note at one time, instead of real chords. I hated it. But Don came and played all of George’s hard music like it was nothing, and then played incredible solos on it. \n\nIn France they booed us after that arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine.” I’ll never forget that! We played it in twelve, and everybody played the melody in a different key, and the French said, “BOO!” </p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> It sounds like I would dig that arrangement!\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> It wasn’t for me.</p><blockquote><p>[<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40jXuSmusXc\">Watch this arrangement with Tootie on drums on YouTube.</a> I do like it, but also admit that Tootie's comments made me notice that Russell's extended "fists on the piano" bit towards the end is rather gratuitous.]<br>\n\n</p>\n\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> But it’s interesting you had such a positive reaction to Ornette. Not every straight-ahead musician did. \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Compared to George Russell, Ornette Coleman was Guy Lombardo! </p>\n\n<p>I used to live on Fifth Street between Bowery and Second Ave. Tons of musicians were on the block: Elvin Jones, Joe Farrell, John Hendricks, Ted Curson, Bobby Timmons, Lee Morgan... We used to go on the roof, get high, and have jam sessions. And around the corner on Bowery and Third was the original Five Spot, where Ornette would play every night for months. We’d walk around, smoke a couple of joints, and say, “Hey, let’s go listen to the Cold Man.” We called Coleman “the Cold Man.” </p>\n\n<p>At the Five Spot, everybody in the place was high, and at first, the music seemed real out. But after awhile...Billy Higgins was the one who helped me begin to understand that: “Hey, man, these guys are actually playing together. I don’t know what it is, but they’re together.” I loved it. Ornette didn’t count off anything, didn’t tell anybody any changes, he would just do it like this: “Boom!” They’d start, and be in the song, together. I was amazed by Ornette. </p>\n\n<p>I saw Sonny Rollins in there a lot, hiding in the phone booth, checking out the music but not wanting to be seen. Trane was down, Lewis from the MJQ. Everybody started coming down. </p>\n\n<p>Percy was the one that kind of got me on Ornette. He brought me the record that he’s on with Ornette, saying, “This is some funny stuff these guys play!” </p>\n\n<p>I loved some of the phrases Ornette played, they sounded like he was saying things, which he was, so I made up little sayings that went with the music. I know in that interview, Billy Hart said I made up words to whole songs, but that’s not really true, it was just some phrases. </p>\n\n<p>But I did love Ornette, especially with Charlie Haden and Don Cherry. Blackwell and Higgins each had their special magic. </p>\n\n<p>Higgins could play anybody’s drums and still sound like Higgins. It could be a huge bass drum and the wrong kind of snare, but he could sit down and start swinging right away. There was some happiness in his playing that related to his beat. He had a great ride cymbal beat that was consistent, that never stopped, no matter what else was going on. </p>\n\n<p>Blackwell had the New Orleans street stuff that he could incorporate into swinging. He’d play swing for a while but then he would leave it, and with Ornette he could do that. He was a master of swinging, leaving it, and coming back to swing. One of his signature things was something that sounded Nigerian, too. </p>\n\n<p>I called Blackwell alongside Cherry for that same record with Mtume. I had him on there with Don. I would have had Ornette too if I could have paid him enough! \n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> <em>Kawaida</em> is a record of grooves, with nothing swinging. You played a lot of grooves with Herbie Hancock and others in that era, too. In fact, you are one of the few guys that played the real bebop with the masters in 1960 and then the new groove languages with the cats in 1970. Not everybody could - or was willing - to do that.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> I always try to look around and see what’s important in the time. </p>\n\n<p>Like now, hip-hop is very important, and I pay a lot of attention to it. I pay attention to the beats and what they are saying. It’s the music of this generation. </p>\n\n<p>It's influence is unbelievable. You go to Paris, and you see these kids with their pants around their ankles and their hats sideways. That’s prison stuff, man, they take your belt away so you don’t hang yourself (or somebody else). And you put your hat on backwards because you know you aren’t going forward. </p>\n\n<p>So I paid attention to Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Sunny Murray when it was their time. Or the way Mingus talked about the Civil Rights movement in his music. Or the way Herbie and Yusef played the groove music in the late 60’s and early 70’s. In true forms of art you need to express the time. \n\nYou can just be self-involved or you can try to deal with the world. </p>\n\n<p>Hip-hop started in the community, in the hood. They took the instruments out of the schools? Ok, we don’t need no instruments: we’ll start scratching, and make music that way.\n\nIt’s important to have a spectrum. Coltrane used to say, “When you think you know it all, it’s over.” </p>\n\n<p>I’m very grateful I was in Coltrane’s early life. We were in a group together called the Hi-Tones with Shirley Scott on Wurlitzer and her husband Bill Carney, who sang, played some conga, got the gigs, and drove. John and I had to lift that heavy-ass organ and put it the truck. We hated that! The Hammond was in two sections, but this Wurlitzer was in one piece. Horrible! Shirley played that because then you couldn’t look up her dress. (The Hammond B3 was open.) </p>\n\n<p>We had that group for a long time around Philly, and I remember John playing kind of like Sonny Stitt and Dexter. He was the ultimate searcher. He would practice all day and fall asleep with the horn in his mouth.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> But you’re not a fan of the classic quartet with Elvin?\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Not really. It was important at that time, but I thought Elvin played too loud sometimes. Of course it did get exciting...and long! Man, they played one tune for 40 minutes. </p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> There’s two other tenor players I want to ask you about while we still have a second. You played a lot with Warne Marsh in California.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0e709970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Warnemarsh\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef012875a0e709970c-800wi\" title=\"Warnemarsh\"></a> <br> <br>\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> Wow! Warne Marsh was amazing. He was always, always, always high. And to play with him, you needed to be high yourself or be sober for a week in advance. Otherwise you’d be lost playing with him.\n\nLennie Tristano put a hurting on Warne Marsh. Tristano was great! We don’t talk about him enough. But Marsh had a hard time getting away from thinking about Tristano. Great tenor player, though.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>EI: </strong> And you played on the last Sonny Rollins live stuff from Denmark in the ‘60s, before Sonny left music for a while. Speaking of forty-minute tunes, that forty-minute version of “Four” is legendary.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><strong>AH: </strong> That was a hard gig.</p><p> This is what I felt about Sonny Rollins: that he could play anything I played back at me, twice as fast and twice as good. During the first chorus I would play the hippest stuff I knew, but then Sonny would make mincemeat of that and keep going. What a musician. What a career. </p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/UF5Qtv9wy2k%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%26&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe></div>"
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"title" : "VARIOUS ARTISTS / “Work Song Mixtape”",
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"content" : "<img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"nat adderley 03.jpg\" alt=\"nat adderley 03.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/nat%20adderley%2003.jpg\"><br>Sometimes the connections linking different styles of the music are not obvious, other times the relationships are directly stated. <b>“Work Song,”</b> a jazz classic by cornetist Nat Adderley with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., represents a conscious effort to acknowledge the debt modern jazz owes to an earlier form of music. The song is also a critique of the American system of injustice that prevailed during the first half of the 20th century.<br><br>Just as there were differences from state to state and from time period to time period, these musical versions aurally illustrate diverse variations on a common theme.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong oscar cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong oscar cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20oscar%20cover.jpg\"> <br>01 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSoul-Then-Some-Oscar-Brown%2Fdp%2FB0012GMZ2C%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258337556%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Sin & Soul… And Then Some</i></font></a> - Oscar Brown Jr.<br>This is probably the most widely known version, featuring the gritty vocals of lyricist Oscar Brown Jr.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong nat cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong nat cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20nat%20cover.jpg\"> <br>02 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSoul-Experiment-Autobiography-Freddie-Hubbard%2Fdp%2FB00004YNFA%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338202%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Autobiography</i></font></a> - Nat Adderley<br>Some folk consider this a “lite” album because of the R&B influences but I like the variations Nat introduces. While this may not be the best version from a blowing standpoint, it is one of the more interesting arrangements.<br><img width=\"238\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"236\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong williams cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong williams cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20williams%20cover.jpg\"> <br>03 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBlues-my-Heart-Joe-Williams%2Fdp%2FB00007BKD2%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258337803%26sr%3D8-3&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Blues in My Heart</i></font></a> - Joe Williams and Carmen McRae<br>It’s dangerously easy to take Joe Williams for granted but don’t sleep. Joe Williams was a master vocalist with both an astounding range and a superb sense of timing with his phrasing. Check his ending on this short version—that’s a baritone singer par excellence!<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong wolff cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong wolff cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20wolff%20cover.jpg\"> <br>04 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDangerous-Vision-Michael-Impure-Thoughts%2Fdp%2FB00063MB30%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338237%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Dangerous Vision</i></font></a> - Michael Wolff & Impure Thoughts<br>Pianist Wolff wins my admiration with this poly-rhythmic interpretation of a classic theme.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong callier cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong callier cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20callier%20cover.jpg\"> <br>05 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLive-at-Mother-Blues-1964%2Fdp%2FB00004L8BX%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338254%26sr%3D8-3&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>1964-Live At Mother Blues</i></font></a> - Terry Callier <br>Terry Callier, Terry Callier, that man does so much with his burnished voice and makes it all sound so casual, so simple yet it’s far from a naïve reading. At first it sounds like some old blues guitarist or maybe a folk singer who is blues influenced, but this is an urbane musician who is radically altering the chords to produce a singular interpretation. Wonderful.<br><img width=\"243\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"243\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong phenix cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong phenix cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20phenix%20cover.jpg\"> <br>06 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPhenix-Cannonball-Adderley%2Fdp%2FB00000K0Y8%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338280%26sr%3D8-4&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Phenix</i></font></a> - Cannonball Adderley<br>What is most admirable about Cannon’s long career is that he kept on developing his music by revisiting and revising old songs, and also by exploring new directions. This is a truly spirited rendition recorded in 1975 mere months before he died from a stroke. The band is Cannonball Adderley (soprano & alto saxophones); Nat Adderley (cornet); George Duke (keyboards, synthesizer); Mike Wolff (keyboards); Walter Booker (acoustic & electric basses); Sam Jones (acoustic bass); Louis Hayes, Roy McCurdy (drums); Airto Moreira (congas, percussion). That’s George Duke soloing on keyboards.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"work song nina cover.jpg\" alt=\"work song nina cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/work%20song%20nina%20cover.jpg\"> <br>07 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FAnthology-Colpix-Years-Nina-Simone%2Fdp%2FB0000033WH%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338337%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Colpix Years Anthology</i></font></a> - Nina Simone<br>Nina Simone—I don’t need to say anything else.<br><img width=\"239\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"239\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong paris 69 cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong paris 69 cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20paris%2069%20cover.jpg\"> <br>08 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FParis-Jazz-Concert-Cannonball-Adderley%2Fdp%2FB00000F1UZ%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258338384%26sr%3D8-14&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Paris, Salle Pleyel, 1969</i></font></a> - Cannonball Adderley<br>These cats are textbook definition of swinging—that is, if there was some magic textbook that could teach anyone to swing this hard. The band is Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone); Nat Adderley (cornet); Joe Zawinul (keyboards); Victor Gaskin (bass); Roy McCurdy (percussion).<br><img width=\"240\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"240\" border=\"0\" title=\"worksong lyambiko cover.jpg\" alt=\"worksong lyambiko cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/worksong%20lyambiko%20cover.jpg\"> <br>09 <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FOut-This-Mood-Lyambiko%2Fdp%2FB0000657YR%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1258339621%26sr%3D8-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Out Of This Mood</i></font></a> – Lyambiko<br>Afro-German vocalist Lyambiko sounds like she’s singing her way out of jail a la Leadbelly who did it twice (got his prison sentences reduced by singing for/to the authorities. That takes some singing, and that’s what Lyambiko is doing.<br><div align=\"center\"><b>* * *</b><br></div><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"sam cooke 14.jpg\" alt=\"sam cooke 14.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/sam%20cooke%2014.jpg\"> <br>And now a bonus. In the jukebox there are three versions of Sam Cooke’s seminal <b>“Chain Gang”</b> as performed first by Sam Cooke, then Jerry Butler doing his ultra-smooth do, and closing out with the Big “O”—Otis Redding—breaking bricks with the force of his voice. These songs are directly in keeping with the spirit of <b>“Work Song.”</b><br><br>"
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"content" : "Seventy years after the start of the Second World War the overwhelming impression is of a conflict fought on the battlefields of Europe by white troops. Britain’s war effort was bolstered by soldiers from the white Commonwealth – Australia, Canada and New Zealand and later by the United States. The war in the Far East is often overlooked, as is the fighting that took place in Africa. Yet one million African troops participated in the conflict, fighting their way through the jungles of Burma, across the Libyan deserts and in the skies over London.\r\n\r\nIn this documentary we hear first hand from the African troops who participated in the war – and who played a critical part in freeing the world from the threat of fascism.\r\n\r\nMartin Plaut reports."
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"content" : "<p>via Bill King, we get this modest variation of<em> The Lord’s Prayer:</em></p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#ffffff\">></span></p>\n<blockquote>\n<h3>THE LLOYD’s Prayer</h3>\n<p>Our Chairman,<br>\nWho Art At Goldman,<br>\nBlankfein Be Thy Name.<br>\nThe Rally’s Come. God’s Work Be Done<br>\nOn Earth As There’s No Fear Of Correction.<br>\nGive Us This Day Our Daily Gains,<br>\nAnd Bankrupt Our Competitors<br>\nAs You Taught Lehman and Bear Their Lessons.<br>\nAnd Bring Us Not Under Indictment.<br>\nFor Thine Is The Treasury,<br>\nThe House And The Senate<br>\nForever and Ever.<br>\nGoldman.</p></blockquote>\n<p><em><br>\nHat tip Scott F.</em></p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/b0bjd6fho47voudd2of6s5dq9g/300/250#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ritholtz.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F11%2Fthe-lloyds-prayer%2F\" width=\"100%\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:KwTdNBX3Jqk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:KwTdNBX3Jqk\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:l6gmwiTKsz0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=l6gmwiTKsz0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?i=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?a=g6H2Mh9g1dQ:oFfjlWJDYa8:TzevzKxY174\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/TheBigPicture?d=TzevzKxY174\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "History Matters: If you paid a $4 poll tax in 1910, your great-grandchild gets a polio vaccine today",
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"content" : "<div style=\"width:260px\"><img title=\"Nigeria_710_250\" src=\"http://aidwatchers.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Nigeria_710_250.png\" alt=\"Nigeria_710_250\" width=\"250\" height=\"230\"><p>The straight horizontal line across Nigeria at latitude 7˚10' divided it into two colonies, Northern and Southern, in 1899</p></div>\n<p>In colonial Nigeria in the last years of the 19th century, a strange quirk of history led the British rulers to draw an arbitrary boundary line along the 7˚10′ N line of latitude, separating the population into two separate administrative districts.</p>\n<p>Below the line, the colonial government raised money by levying taxes on imported alcohol and other goods that came through Southern Protectorate’s sea ports. Above the line, the administrators of the landlocked Northern Protectorate had no sea ports, and instead raised money through direct taxes. In the areas near the border, this took the form of a simple poll tax, where tax officials collected from each citizen the equivalent of between $4 and $20 in today’s dollars.</p>\n<p>Could this seemingly minor difference—created over a century ago by a long-defunct colonial administration, and long ago erased by subsequent administrative divisions—possibly still matter today?</p>\n<p>Yes, it could, according to Daniel Berger, a PhD student in politics at NYU. Berger’s paper, <a href=\"http://homepages.nyu.edu/~db1299/Nigeria.pdf\">Taxes, Institutions and Local Governance: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Colonial Nigeria</a>, finds that the “simple act of having to collect taxes caused governments to be forced to build the capacity which can now provide basic government services.” As a result, governance today is “significantly better” in areas just above the line than in those just below it.</p>\n<p>After looking at historical evidence and running statistical tests, Berger finds that there is no evidence of pre-existing differences among the people living very close to the arbitrary boundary on either side, and so is able to rule out the possibility that some third factor could account for the differences in governance that remain today.</p>\n<p>The results are threefold. Berger uses <a href=\"http://www.afrobarometer.org/index.html\">Afrobarometer public opinion data</a> to show that residents just above the line are happier with their local governments, and his use of demographic survey data shows that local governments just below the line spend 10 percent more of their budget on salaries (”an indicator of less competent government.”) Zeroing in on the propensity of mothers to vaccinate their child as a way to get at a precise measure of the quality of public service delivery, Berger finds that “living just below the line leads to a 10.7 percentage point reduction in the probability that her child will be vaccinated for polio.”</p>\n<p>The conditions created by the administrative division led to two different equilibria, which help explain how the differences above and below the line were able to persist over time:</p>\n<blockquote><p>In the first, the local government does little except extract what few bribes it can….There is no incentive for hard work, as bureaucrats will neither be able to extract appreciably more rents (due to the limited amount of money available in the local economy) nor will they be able to improve government functioning on their own (since efficient functioning requires the entire bureaucracy working together). This also leads to a knock on effect on the human capital available to the local governments as the families which control the local government have no reason to steer their smartest children into local government service.</p>\n<p>The second equilibrium is one in which significant services are actually delivered. Here, the local government is capable of delivering local basic public services with a reasonable level of efficiency and honesty. This grants sufficient legitimacy to the local government that they are able to collect local taxes, which never go to the center. They can then pay themselves regularly despite the fact that they are not regularly receiving the transfers they are due from the center. Here hard work does make a difference.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Berger’s conclusions also speak to the strength of norms and informal institutions. While the formal institutions—the idiosyncratic colonial structure of taxation—that created the original difference in bureaucratic capacity were long ago swept away, it is the informal norms, transmitted across generations, that persist and lead to the different outcomes we see today.</p>\n<p>You may wonder what whim caused the British create this artificial boundary in the first place. The literature tells us that the British were worried that a colonial official senior enough to administer the whole undivided territory of Nigeria would be too old and too weak to survive the malarial climate. By cutting the province in two, the British could send two younger and heartier (but less-experienced) governors instead.</p>\n<p>So, to simplify: measurable differences in the perception and quality of local government provision service persist between otherwise identical populations just north and south of Nigeria’s the 7˚10′ N latitude line…all for fear of a malarial mosquito.</p>\n<img src=\"http://aidwatchers.com/wp/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=1485&type=feed\" alt=\"\">"
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"title" : "Pushkar Mela",
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"content" : "<div>Pushkar Mela (or Pushkar Fair) is an annual five-day camel and livestock fair, held in the town of Pushkar in the state of Rajasthan, India, where over 25,000 camels are traded each year. The fair draws thousands of tourists, camels, camel traders, racers, locals and Hindu faithful who come to bathe in the sanctified Lake Pushkar - until the final day, Kartik Poornima, a Hindu holy day celebrated on the full moon day of the month of Kartik. Collected here are a handful of photographs from Associated Press photographer Kevin Frayer, from his trip to this year's Pushkar Mela. (<a href=\"http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/pushkar_mela.html\">30 photos total</a>)</div><div><a name=\"photo1\"></a><a href=\"http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/pushkar_mela.html\"><img src=\"http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/pushkar_11_04/p01_20895003.jpg\" style=\"height:695px;width:990px\"></a><br><div>A camel herder carries a budle of leaves for camel feed at the Pushkar Mela in Pushkar, Rajasthan, India, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer) <div></div></div></div><br style=\"clear:both\">\n<br style=\"clear:both\">\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:14585a19e4165c4a10ba8f6504463230:DJkzJxFzMCK08vNwU5TYen6ZU91dv7bNrP85zkcOYExIWcTRQGq71gM3W5QCy%2BMQr4xVg%2BoeMYtMhg%3D%3D\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to Facebook\" alt=\"Add to Facebook\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:5f54df1d1082880fb1729e155badfb5f:Bz6wxu%2BN0Z8dJFp9xGEExu8FooX8ZuWFpJC50xheoeV%2FgxUvPcUuBRa%2BkkMevg3q5EyM%2Fzfs7fj06g%3D%3D\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to Twitter\" alt=\"Add to Twitter\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/twitter.png\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:47a5fc81f75eb8c43e058f1619294184:SD2cOVNWipqHzKeaZALjTM4GM8MDNAHFeiL1XXVcepf40i3snPNPzLcLHFSyyIeuh4t%2FmvcmeO94\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to digg\" alt=\"Add to digg\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:31d7a1f8b25f600ed426320778f26378:15b3EH%2FkcDbbtiXAfJYV6wA3uN7Rf64%2BO%2FH5Pte2qyF4zonCC2RrLfbYyCohhcOLwZTslYXVQSjeOw%3D%3D\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to StumbleUpon\" alt=\"Add to StumbleUpon\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/stumbleit.gif\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:05d88acaa1c35500dad5a666eb1b250c:m1igtblVSBO3ScFa099lMOka1J9VEHQfvyBMNEX9EkBb3pq08DWwAThKVx9hoa94DxHNJj%2B8im6a\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to Reddit\" alt=\"Add to Reddit\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:028e14522fb7cd98d604d43253643c12:sdGjC6NewQibTdUq4LFXeOZuaEG%2BF2XtSI7wvE05Nu4z2oCFBsvGz1mZpwujhEmqf6dtyChWbiCb\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Add to del.icio.us\" alt=\"Add to del.icio.us\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/delicious.gif\"></a>\n <a style=\"font-size:10px;color:maroon\" href=\"http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:4259f029c6f81d79ed367cb90835888b:OKXAvt50Ma%2BD9QCm21RKfVEmxpz3j519UsUJkl%2FbBMo%2F6tzIRMQIfO1Yh8k1dqEkAJJnqb9s%2FDMG\"><img border=\"0\" title=\"Email this Article\" alt=\"Email this Article\" src=\"http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/emailthis.png\"></a>\n<br style=\"clear:both\">\n<a href=\"http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=2d3dcea9572cc351316414beb6627829&p=1\"><img alt=\"\" style=\"border:0\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=2d3dcea9572cc351316414beb6627829&p=1\"></a>\n<img alt=\"\" height=\"0\" width=\"0\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://a.rfihub.com/eus.gif?eui=2223\">"
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"title" : "PHOTOGRAPHY / BRAZZAVILLE’S SAPEURS",
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"title" : "African view: China's new long march",
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"content" : "<p>Mum's latest toli... The relationship between Africa and China is a love-hate one - the love is more on the side of the governments and the hate on the side of business, civil society and the unions. But those of us of a certain age know that the Chinese are not new to Africa...Sixty years of communism in the People's Republic has lulled some people into forgetting just what committed businessmen the Chinese have been for 3,000 years.</p>\n <span>\n <a href=\"http://delicious.com/post?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F2%2Fhi%2Fafrica%2F8314534.stm&title=African%20view%3A%20China%27s%20new%20long%20march&copyuser=amaah&copytags=africa+china+ghana+economics+politics+culture+observation+history+strategy+mum&jump=yes&partner=delrss&src=feed_google\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"add this bookmark to your collection at http://delicious.com\"><img src=\"http://l.yimg.com/hr/img/delicious.small.gif\" alt=\"http://delicious.com\" width=\"10\" height=\"10\" border=\"0\"> Bookmark this on Delicious</a>\n - Saved by <a title=\"visit amaah's bookmarks at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah\">amaah</a>\n to\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged africa\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/africa\">africa</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged china\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/china\">china</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged ghana\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/ghana\">ghana</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged economics\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/economics\">economics</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged politics\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/politics\">politics</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged culture\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/culture\">culture</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged observation\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/observation\">observation</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged history\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/history\">history</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged strategy\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/strategy\">strategy</a>\n <a rel=\"tag\" title=\"view amaah's bookmarks tagged mum\" href=\"http://delicious.com/amaah/mum\">mum</a>\n \t\t\t- <a rel=\"self\" title=\"view more details on this bookmark at Delicious\" href=\"http://delicious.com/url/f6c1a16dd0fca4194b4c6b182278bff8\">More about this bookmark</a>\n </span>"
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"content" : "<p><img width=\"346\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"224\" border=\"0\" title=\"thelonious monk 11.jpg\" alt=\"thelonious monk 11.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/thelonious%20monk%2011.jpg\"><br>What fierceness tender touched us whenever Monk made music. He would dance to show the way. Once a new drummer asked: what you want me to do? Monk said “swing.” And the drummer wanting to make sure he got it right asked “what else you want me do to?” Monk said, swing some more.<br><br>Simple. Swing. And swing some more! Oh, if only most of us were capable of following those pithy instructions, think how much more delightful our brief time on planet earth would be.<br><br>Fifty years is an eyeblink in cosmic terms—assuming we had a big enough eye to see ourselves withn the context of the cosmos. See as in understand that human beings been living for tens of thousands of years. Tens. Of Thousands. Of Years. A long time for us but oh so short in the context of the universe. Monk knew that.<br><br>Which is why he wrote music that was both weird and wonderful, all at the same time. Weird to make us look at ourselves anew, reconsider everything we thought we knew, think of things we never knew. Wonderful in what great glories we witnessed once we knew what we were looking at, looking for. <br><br>Looking is a lot more complex than simply opening one’s eyes. In order to really see one has to part the veil, not be seduced by mirages, push past the fog, not fear the dark. To see, we need to be both courageous and honest. Like Monk’s music is.<br><img width=\"345\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"354\" border=\"0\" title=\"thelonious monk 14.jpg\" alt=\"thelonious monk 14.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/thelonious%20monk%2014.jpg\"> <br>His songs are really songs. Even without words you can sing them. They seem so simple, except they require a sense of rhythm, a sense of understanding the world and also understanding where we are situated within the world; understanding movement, how to propel ourselves forward and when to pull up short so we don’t go too far. We need awareness; in order to play Monk, you have to be aware of where you are and where everybody else is. You’ve got to always know.<br><br>This brace of eight compositions and the way Monk sounds them are required grasping if one would consider one’s self hip in the sense of knowing anything significant about the 20th century.<br><br>Yes, I know there are people who don’t know Monk. I’m not saying you have to know Monk in order to be a human being. But I am saying that if you are in America, have ears and listen to music, then if you don’t know Monk, something is deeply wrong with your education.<br><br>Which, of course, is making a major claim for the importance of his music but the fact that fifty years or so after Monk put these sounds together, musicians are still studying Monk, still struggling to make the changes and get the songs right—that alone should be instructive.<br><img width=\"345\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"478\" border=\"0\" title=\"thelonious monk 18.jpeg\" alt=\"thelonious monk 18.jpeg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/thelonious%20monk%2018.jpeg\"> <br>This collection kicks off with a supreme version of <b>“Little Rootie Tootie"</b> from a 1959 (there’s that magic year again!) Townhall Concert and features arranger Hal Overton’s transcription of a Monk solo written out for the whole band to perform. When the record was first released we all chased it incessantly, marveling at how hard it swung and also astounded by how the band rightly and righteously played Monk’s solo. Aw wow, we marveled. Even now, as I listen, I can’t resist going, aw wow!<br><br>As if to prove that he could make lightening strike twice, Monk did a big band reprise that surpassed Town Hall. <b>“I Mean You”</b> and the definitive reading of <b>“Four In One”</b> are from that session. If <b>“Tootie”</b> was difficult, <b>“Four In One”</b> was impossible. How could he dare do both the difficult and the impossible in one life time? Listen, you will hear what I mean.<br><br>On all the songs, Monk’s touch is awesome. The man was a moving company. His piano notes sounded rock solid, dense but deft, agile the way he moved, yet solid and heavy as a cement truck unloading.<br><br>Except Monk’s music was not the exterior. Monk made the structure, the skeleton, the scaffolding, gave the improvising musician a major platform. He was the legendary maestro who oriented Coltrane toward vistas that were then invisible. <br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"thelonious monk 12.jpg\" alt=\"thelonious monk 12.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/thelonious%20monk%2012.jpg\"> <br>Between composing, and creating a new vocabulary for the technique of playing the piano, and being a visionary guide for generations of musicians, Monk was also a man of the highest moral character. He silently took a drug rap to save his friend Bud Powell. Monk anecdotes (such as the drummer story I used to start this short homage) are both legion and legendary. <br><br>Consider this a brief introduction. Just a little signal to let you know you are approaching greatness.<br><br>Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917, Rocky Mount, North Carolina — February 17, 1982, New Jersey). What a man.<br><br><b>—Kalamu ya Salaam</b><br><br><br><u><i><b>Classic Monk Mixtape Playlist</b></i></u><br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"monk town hall cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk town hall cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20town%20hall%20cover.jpg\"> <br>01 <b>“Little Rootie Tootie”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FThelonious-Monk-Orchestra-Town-Hall%2Fdp%2FB000UDQR4U%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256514986%26sr%3D8-28&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><i><font color=\"#cc0000\">At Town Hall </font></i></a><br> <br></p><p><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" title=\"monk columbia years cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk columbia years cover.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20columbia%20years%20cover.jpg\"> </p><p>02 <b>“Ask Me Now”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FColumbia-Years-62-68-Thelonious-Monk%2Fdp%2FB00005IBGJ%2F&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><i><font color=\"#cc0000\">The Columbia Years 1962-1968 </font></i></a><br> <br></p><p><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20carnegie%20with%20trane%20cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk carnegie with trane cover.jpg\" title=\"monk carnegie with trane cover.jpg\"> </p><p>03 <b>“Crepuscule With Nellie”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FThelonious-Monk-Quartet-Coltrane-Carnegie%2Fdp%2FB000AV2GCE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256514931%26sr%3D8-12&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>At Carnegie Hall Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane</i></font></a> <br> <br></p><p><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20big%20band%20cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk big band cover.jpg\" title=\"monk big band cover.jpg\"> </p><p>04 <b>“I Mean You”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBand-Quartet-Concert-Thelonious-Monk%2Fdp%2FB0012GMXME%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256515038%26sr%3D8-45&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Big Band and Quartet in Concert</i></font></a><br>05 <b>“Monk’s Mood”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FThelonious-Monk-Quartet-Coltrane-Carnegie%2Fdp%2FB000AV2GCE%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256514931%26sr%3D8-12&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>At Carnegie Hall Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane</i></font></a> <br> <br></p><p><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20frisco%20alone%20cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk frisco alone cover.jpg\" title=\"monk frisco alone cover.jpg\"> </p><p>06 <b>“Ruby, My Dear”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FThelonious-Alone-San-Francisco-Monk%2Fdp%2FB000000YCZ%2F&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Thelonious Alone in San Francisco </i></font></a><br> <br></p><p><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/monk%20complete%20prestige%20cover.jpg\" alt=\"monk complete prestige cover.jpg\" title=\"monk complete prestige cover.jpg\"> </p><p>07 <b>“Monk’s Dream”</b> - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FComplete-Prestige-Recordings-Thelonious-Monk%2Fdp%2FB00004UETR%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256514931%26sr%3D8-15&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>The Complete Prestige Recordings </i></font></a><br>08 <b>“Four In One”</b> – <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBand-Quartet-Concert-Thelonious-Monk%2Fdp%2FB0012GMXME%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1256515038%26sr%3D8-45&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Big Band and Quartet in Concert</i></font></a><br><br></p>"
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"title" : "Mandela anger over 'fake endorsement' in foreword",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/55282?ns=guardian&pageName=A+bit+foreword%21+Nelson+Mandela+plans+legal+action+over+%27fake+endorsement%3AArticle%3A1294183&ch=World+news&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Nelson+Mandela+%28News%29%2CCongo+Brazzaville+%28News%29%2CWorld+news%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CSouth+Africa+%28News%29&c6=David+Smith+%28Africa+correspondent%29&c7=09-Oct-21&c8=1294183&c9=Article&c10=News&c11=World+news&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FNelson+Mandela\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>Nelson Mandela denies writing introduction praising Congo-Brazzaville's president as a 'great African leader'<br></p><p></p><p>In the crowded field of political biography, it can be hard for a novice author to stand out. But not Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the president of Congo-Brazzaville, who has certainly managed to make a splash.</p><p>In his new tome he boasts, in large type on the cover, that it contains a foreword written by Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president.</p><p>The foreword praises Sassou-Nguesso as \"one of our great African leaders\" which, as endorsements go, beats the Booker and Nobel prizes rolled into one.</p><p>But the biography, Straight Speaking for Africa, appears to fall short of its title. Mandela has issued a statement saying he did not write the foreword. Nor has he read the book. He plans to take legal action.</p><p>\"This is a false claim,\" said Verne Harris, acting chief executive of the Johannesburg-based Nelson Mandela Foundation. \"Mr Mandela has neither read the book nor written a foreword for it. We condemn this brazen abuse of Mr Mandela's name. We will be taking appropriate action.\"</p><p>The foreword says in Mandela's name: \"In President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, I recognise a man who is not only one of our great African leaders ... but also one of those who gave their unconditional support to our fighters' demand for freedom, and who worked tirelessly to free oppressed peoples from their chains and help restore their dignity and hope.\"</p><p>That alone might have aroused the suspicions of readers aware that while Mandela helped end apartheid, won his country's first democratic elections and stepped down graciously after one term, Sassou-Nguesso came to power in a coup three decades ago and, after losing an election, regained it by winning a civil war.</p><p>Amnesty International's most recent report on Congo-Brazzaville said that human rights defenders and journalists faced threats, arrests and detention, while a number of people arrested after a disturbance were tortured or otherwise ill-treated.</p><p>Mandela, 91, has become a global brand with everything from Russian dolls and fridge magnets to innumerable streets and squares bearing his image or name. The foundation occasionally issues statements on attempts to exploit the Mandela brand, but rarely in language as sharp as that used yesterday.</p><p>\"Mr Mandela is still overwhelmed by requests to write book forewords,\" his foundation said. \"A year ago he indicated he will no longer be agreeing to such requests.\"</p><p>Officials in Sassou-Nguesso's government said they were unable to respond to the statement.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nelsonmandela\">Nelson Mandela</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/congo-brazzaville\">Congo Brazzaville</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/southafrica\">South Africa</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidsmith\">David Smith</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/tnjfgs37ucnl649hfpb0neurik/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fworld%2F2009%2Foct%2F21%2Fnelson-mandela-book-foreword-row\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"title" : "Cities of the CDC",
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"content" : "<img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3536/4032208582_67a503e3c9_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"179\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: A mobile, military field hospital and medical instant city].</small><br><br>If you happen to be in Montreal this week, I will be giving a lecture tomorrow night at the <a href=\"http://www.cca.qc.ca/en\">Canadian Centre for Architecture</a>. I have to admit to being a long-time fan of the CCA, so it's quite a thrill to be speaking there. The lecture is free and open to the public, it's on Thursday, October 22, and it kicks off at 7pm; it's called \"<a href=\"http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/education-and-events/647-geoff-manaugh-cities-of-the-cdc\">Cities of the CDC</a>.\" <br><br>For the most part, I'll be addressing the topics of urban form, epidemic disease, and the spatialization of public health, by way of my recent research into <a href=\"http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/design-challenge-day-what-should-quarantine-look\">spaces of quarantine</a>. <br><br>The point is to look at a number of questions, including: What might have happened, architecturally speaking, if <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archigram\">Archigram</a>, when it came time to design their Instant Cities, had teamed up with the <a href=\"http://www.cdc.gov/\">CDC</a>? <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3484/4031455467_dacdabfc58_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"364\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: A modular, \"containerized\" field hospital complex by the Red Cross and UN].</small><br><br>Put another way, what might have been the result if the CDC had been asked to design a planned city like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City\">Masdar</a>, and not Norman Foster? Is there such a thing as a medical utopia? And how do our cities help to shape the diseases that infect us?<br><br>Along with this will be some new, previously unpublished material taken from the ongoing series of quarantine interviews that I've been doing with <a href=\"http://www.ediblegeography.com/\"><i>Edible Geography</i></a>. <br><br>In any case, if you're in Montreal tomorrow night, be sure to say hello!<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8663346-1479671709775988001?l=bldgblog.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><p><strong>Jina Moore, for the Pulitzer Center</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Photos by Glenna Gordon, for the Pulitzer Center</strong></p>\n\n<p>Last week, for the Christian Science Monitor, I headed to Congo Town, home of beloved warlord Charles Taylor. Seriously. Beloved. Warlord. More on that in the story, when it runs.\nOne of the guys I met there is Bill Akar, a general under Taylor. Today, he sits under a tree just down the road from Taylor’s old house, foreboding even in its emptiness…and kinda creepy, always wishing people “Season’s Greetings.” Akar charges people’s cell phones with a small generator and spends the rest of his time preaching in ghettoes, he says. One of the Liberian journalists who went with me said, “This is a guy everyone knew. People would hear his name and run.” \n<a href=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a62f8681970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"IMG_9062\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a62f8681970c-800wi\" title=\"IMG_9062\"></a> <br> <br> </p>\n\n<p>But today, Akar says, he is a man of peace and Jesus. The first thing Akar said to me? “I was a general for Charles Taylor, a great man for him. Today I bless God for Victory Outreach [Church], which came with the vision to evangelize us, to reclaim our lives from drugs, alcohol and other abuses. Today, I testify. I am an evangelist.”</p>\n\n<p>A reformed man, my Liberian colleagues and I expected him to be a bit more confessional than he ended up being. Sure, Taylor committed crimes, and Akar says it would be better if Taylor confessed, made “people understand why, and say ‘I’m sorry.’” But justice? “Man can prosecute him,” Akar said, but “wherever Taylor is at now, no man can free him from that.”</p>\n\n<p>And what of Akar, a man whose name once made people run with fear? Does conversion lead to confession?</p>\n\n<p>Not so much.\n</p>\n\n\n<p>Akar insisted he was “my man age” when he joined Taylor – he wasn’t a child soldier, was his point, but it also opened the door to intention and culpability. So why did he join? “That’s best known only to me,” he said. Then he added, “I saw people going against me; I saw people killing Gio and dumping them into the valley. We had to take arms.”</p>\n\n<p>Ah, the old “kill them before they kill you” defense. I’ve heard this one <a href=\"http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.05-no-small-mercy-jina-moore-rwanda-genocide/\">before</a>.\n</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a5d92962970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"IMG_9028\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a5d92962970b-800wi\" title=\"IMG_9028\"></a> <br> </p><p>What did Akar do during the war? He dodged the question. I tried a different angle: Did you do anything during the war you should be punished for? “That’s best known only to me,” he said again.</p>\n<p>He admitted that he was an infamous guy during the war. “I was more greater than some” of the men recommended for prosecution by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he said. But he was also, he insisted, no different. “Everybody holds the gun [in the war], but today every man…shall live by his character.”</p><p>Nice words, but what about the people who remember the old Bill Akar? Can they forget what he did?</p> \n<p>“I see myself as a role model,” he told me. “Many days I go to the [radio] studio, and people say, ‘If God can forgive Bill Akar…’”</p>\n<p>Maybe God forgave him, I said, but do the people who remember him want to see him punished? Some do, he concedes.</p>\n<p>“If you want to prosecute me as a living sacrifice, I’m willing. But I’ve already been seeking forgiveness from God. Second Corinthians 5:17 says, ‘Behold all things have passed, and all things are new,’” he said. “Now I’m carrying with Jesus. So why? Why?”\n</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a5d929fc970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"IMG_8957\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e20120a5d929fc970b-800wi\" title=\"IMG_8957\"></a> <br> </p></div>"
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"title" : "Gettin By - Hawking T-Shirts",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_m5FqKkvF9rc/StiAspu2a6I/AAAAAAAAAMI/w0Adqb_hVJg/s1600-h/Gettin+By+-+T+Shirts.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:267px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_m5FqKkvF9rc/StiAspu2a6I/AAAAAAAAAMI/w0Adqb_hVJg/s400/Gettin+By+-+T+Shirts.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>This blog post is part of a larger series called '<a href=\"http://esteyonage.blogspot.com/2009/06/gettin-by.html\">Gettin' By</a>', which profiles petty traders, street sellers, vendors and other members of the informal market who are part of the reported 85% of Liberians without jobs.<br><br>Click on the 'Gettin' By' search term to see past articles, or read on.<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Profession:</span> Selling T-Shirts<br><br>Location: Strategically placed wheelbarrows; roving wheelbarrows; roving sellers with <br> hangers of shirts<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">How it works:</span> <br><br>There are a lot of bizarre things about the supply chains in this country. I don't know if I actually fully understand the t-shirt supply chain - mainly due to heavily conflicting reports - but this is what I do know.<br><br>T-shirts in Liberia largely come from the US. Most are donated, but it is not abundantly clear to me through what means. Certainly, a lot of the shirts that end up here en masse are manufacture rejects that either get donated by the companies, or more likely, sold on the little-known international used t-shirt market. <br><br>But, for the majority of t-shirts that read anything from \"Auntie Louise's XXXLenent 50th\" to \"Waco Texas Swim Club\" to homemade renditions of \"Rock Out With Your Cock<br>Out\" (seen yesterday on an old woman, and me... without a camera! shhheeeeet...) they are donations from individuals. <br><br>Now here is where I am most unclear. One friend told me that all T-shirts from the US route through East Africa; Dar es Salaam and Nairobi to be specific. I personally have a hard time believing this (look at a map), but their insistence on the matter was based in experience, so I'll just say that.<br><br>Another version of the story is that these are gathered through t-shirt drives and other auspices of 'giving' to people who need them, and then whoever forks out the change to fill the sea cans (about 12 G to ship from US) takes a cut at the port.<br><br>Yet another version has Lebanese and other merchants buying bulk shirts from places like Goodwill at pretty low prices, fronting the shipping cross, and making it all up on this end.<br><br>More pessimistic versions argue that co opted aid missions and misappropriations of unguarded, low-value goods while in ports become too enticing for longshoremen et al to bear (yo: watch The Wire season two if you don't think that is a possibility).<br><br>Anyways, I think its mainly the middle two options, with perhaps a touch of the first and healthy dab of the last option. If anyone wants <span style=\"font-weight:bold\">to pay me</span> to do a real article on this subject, I will expend much more time and effort and solve the supply riddle.<br><br>Moving on to easier empirics.<br><br>Sea cans on the back of trailers deliver the t-shirts to wholesalers in vaccuum packed bags labeled 'boys sports' or 'women t's.' They cost $ 100 US for about a 3 foot cube. Although sometimes the trucks serve as the wholesalers, just parking themselves in Waterside market, and selling to whoever crowds the truck. <br><br>These wholesalers are exclusively Lebanese who have connections in the port. They expect the payments in USD, even though their shirt sellers receive all payments in LD (note: this links back to <a href=\"http://esteyonage.blogspot.com/2009/07/gettin-by-with-changing-money.html\">the post on Changing Money</a>, and how the money cutting works)<br><br>So Liberian sellers get the bundles, unpack them, and fill up wheelbarrows, either splitting the packs, or going it solo: a relatively big investment for petty traders.<br><br>The packs vary, but for adult sized t's there tends to be about 70 - 100 per 'bushel'- the shirts are also sorted by quality, and the higher quality ones have less per cube. Of course, there is no recourse if you receive less, or if quality does not match expectations, its just a typical 'hope I don't screwed on this one'. <br><br>So, shirts can be had for as low as 70 LD in the city centre ($ 1 US), but most tend to fall between $ 90 - 150 LD ($US 1.40 - $ 2.10). For selling a cube, vendors try to make $ 10 - 15. This is not usually possible in a day, but sellers willing to 'hel you wih speciah price my man!' take the route of selling more for lower price to add up the day. So, they'll roll a barrow into a crowded place and yell \"no more 150, pay 90,\" reveling in the ensuing buying frenzy. <br><br>Most shirt vendors say they are happy to clear $ 500 - 600 LD, or 7 - 8 bucks, though many make much less.<br><br>As usual, 'wafer thin margins'. (nate...)<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Variables:</span> New city laws that discourage petty trading, 'the rai-in!', getting spoiled shirts, <br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"><br>Price Point Comparison:</span><br><br>if you live in Paynesville, Bardnersville or Stephen Tolbert estates and sell in town - which many do - it costs $ 40 LD for transport each way, 80 LD per day; more than 1/8 of your wages.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3192577124620432658-6105988934387219949?l=esteyonage.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "In honor of Franco",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">In honor of the greatest Congolese musician of the 20<span>th</span> century, Franco <span>Luambo</span>, who died 20 years ago this week, I wanted to give a platform to some (probably gratuitous) speculations on Kinshasa's streets.</span> <br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">In 1985, Franco released what would become his greatest hit, Mario. It was a rambling, 13 minute track about a young gigolo who, despite having a god education, chose to sit around and live off his lover, a woman twice his age. Wonderful stuff, especially because there was some speculation that the maestro was really talking about Mobutu - the double <span>entendres</span> and oblique criticism were typical of Congolese music and Franco's own style of social commentary. After all, Franco could not openly insult his biggest benefactor. The Congo is full of this playful, tongue in cheek resistance. </span><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Which brings me to the gossip on the radio <span>trottoir</span> of Kinshasa. Earlier this year, <span>Kofi</span> <span>Olomide</span> - arguably the successor the Franco as the king of the Congolese rumba - released his new album, \"<span>Bor</span> <span>Ezanga</span> <span>Kombo</span>,\" which translates roughly as \"The Thing Without a Name.\" This, naturally, led <span>aficionados</span> quickly to infer that he was talking about none other than President <span>Kabila</span>, whom many <span>Kinois</span> still suspect of being Tanzanian, real name <span>Hippolyte</span> <span>Kanambe</span>. Hence: The Thing Without a Name. Check out the track, even if you don't get the words, it's a good show. </span><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Talking about names, for some reason <span>Kofi</span> has now (actually for the past 2 years) changed his name to <span>Kofi</span> <span>Olomide</span> <span>Sarkozy</span>. Is it entirely unclear why - I guess in 2007 there weren't many other charismatic western leaders to choose from. Maybe next year it will be <span>Kofi</span> Obama <span>Olomide</span> (after all, one of <span>Werra</span> Son's greatest proteges used to go by Bill Clinton (now <span>McKintosh</span>)). He's already tried Grand <span>Mopao</span>, <span>Mopao</span> <span>Mokonzi</span>, Papa <span>bonheur</span>, Papa plus, Papa <span>fleur</span>, <span>Koraman</span>, <span>Quadra</span> <span>Koraman</span>, <span>Tati</span> <span>Wata</span>, <span>Chéri</span> O, <span>Benoît</span> XVI (he had to drop this last name after the Catholic church protested)....</span><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Franco was just Franco. </span><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-family:Courier New;font-size:100%\"></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1209670742820403516-1173411188634423008?l=congosiasa.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/index.html\">The James Koetting Ghana Field Recordings</a> has <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/recordings.html\">142 reels of Ghanaian music</a>, almost all of which have more than one track, collected by ethnomusicologist <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/memoriam.html\">James Koetting</a>. There is a <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/glossary.html\">glossary of musical terms</a> should you want to know a bit more about Ghanaian music and <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/koetting/notebooks.html\">Koetting's notebooks</a> should you want to know a whole lot more. All the music is wonderful but here are a few that stood out to me. <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&colid=26&id=1221143376375000\">Here</a> are <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&colid=26&id=1221143377656250\">two tracks</a> featuring postal workers whistling over a rhythm beat with scissors and stampers. <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&colid=26&id=1221143226546875\">Flute and drum ensemble</a>. <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&colid=26&id=1221143013593750\">Brass band blues</a>. And finally, <a href=\"http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&colid=26&id=1221142693250000\">twenty teenage girls singing over some nice rhythms</a>. <small>[requires RealPlayer]</small> <br><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?a=_xzYiETlaXY:YjG_Jw4ayVg:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?i=_xzYiETlaXY:YjG_Jw4ayVg:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "So You're Moving to San Francisco",
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"content" : "<h1>So You’re Moving to San Francisco</h1>\n<p>Writing about a place is difficult. You can spend months, years, even a lifetime in a city and still not really know it. More challenging still, everyone experiences a place differently. Two people who’ve grown up in the same place might fundamentally disagree on what the most scenic landmarks are, if the locals are friendly, the best places to eat, and so on.</p>\n<p>I’ve been in San Francisco for over a couple of years now. I’d hardly say I know the place exhaustively, but I know it well enough to have a moderately informed opinion. The purpose of this post is to share my particular opinion about the city so that a like-minded individual who is considering living here might have an additional perspective. I’m assuming that my audience for this post is largely other twenty-somethings considering moving to SF to work in the tech industry. I’m assuming that you’ve read at least a couple other posts by me, and (astoundingly) don’t think I’m a total dolt.</p>\n<p>This is not intended as a persuasive piece, and is particularly not intended for native San Franciscans. If you enjoy living in San Francisco, stop reading right now. I’m dead serious. If you don’t stop reading, you’ll probably come across something you disagree with, then you’ll want to leave a nasty comment, then you’ll realize I don’t accept comments, then you’ll email me, and then I’ll have to ignore your email because I warned you not to read this. This post <em>really</em> isn’t for you. If you like San Francisco, go write about the reasons why on your own site. Seriously. Stop reading.</p>\n<p>So. You’ve made it through the caveats. Let’s get into it.</p>\n<h2>First, The Conclusion</h2>\n<p>I’m going to skip right to the heart of what I want to say about this city: if you’ve never lived in a major city before, you’ll probably like San Francisco. However, if you’re coming from another notable city, you may be disappointed. Hopefully, that’s pretty uncontroversial.</p>\n<p>If you’re moving from, say, a New York or a Chicago or a London, you may end up loving San Francisco for its climate, its diversity, its food, or above all, its unique mindset. That mindset – decidedly Left Coast, laid back but not lazy, accepting of oddities and oddballs, always appreciating diamonds in the rough – resonates perfectly with some special people who are destined to be lifelong San Franciscans. If that way of thinking doesn’t jive with you, chances are good that, like me, you’ll just be passing through. Without appreciating that mindset, I don’t think the pros of the city outweigh the cons.</p>\n<p>With all that out front, let’s talk about the niceties and the frustrations of the city.</p>\n<h2>The Good</h2>\n<p>If you’ve ever followed my <a href=\"http://al3x.net/\">tweets</a>, you probably know that I live for good food and drink. When I came to San Francisco, my standards had been set reasonably high by the always-improving food scene in my hometown of Washington, DC, as well as by travels to other foodie destinations.</p>\n<p>I can say without reservation that San Francisco is a great city for food. Everything from hole-in-the-wall ethnic dives to Michelin rated dining is well represented. The proximity to Napa means there’s always good wine and a strong French influence to compliment the uniquely Californian approach to cuisine. It’s entirely possible to have a bad meal in San Francisco, but to do so is entirely your fault: Yelp and other social recommendation services are better represented here than anywhere else in the world, and a suggestion for a good restaurant is always just a couple clicks (or taps) away.</p>\n<p>SF is also a great town for coffee and cocktails, two of my other vices. You may not find a good coffee shop or bar in every neighborhood, but most of the trendier neighborhoods have at least one or the other. Similarly, you’ll find good wine bars around the city. Beer is somewhat underrepresented for such a major city (as I’ve written about previously), but you won’t go without. Cocktails are really the city’s standout for me, though. SF’s bartenders are not playing around.</p>\n<p>San Francisco boasts superb weather. Particularly if you come from the East Coast or Midwest, you’ll find that you can basically wear the same thing all year ‘round. A uniform of jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie or light jacket will basically get you through the entire thirty degree range of temperatures that occur in the city’s various microclimates. There may be some fog, or a bit of rain from time to time, but most of the time it’s sunny and hovering around the high 60s to lower 70s. This means you can basically always bike to where you want to go without any special gear, if that’s your thing.</p>\n<p>You won’t want for music, either. Again, SF doesn’t compete with other major cities in this regard, but there’s a healthy variety of musical styles represented and a fair diversity of venues to choose from. Music festivals are frequent, and there are plenty of opportunities to join a band or DJ at a club night if you’ve got the talent and time.</p>\n<p>If you’re coming here to make your startup dreams come true or land that Google job you’ll find that the sheer concentration of tech industry professionals makes the Bay Area a kind of mecca for driven geeks. You can spend every night of the week at an industry party or programmer meet-up. You’ll meet the people who write the blogs you love and develop the software and hardware you use and admire. You’ll generally feel like you’re with your kind. And if the city itself doesn’t have enough tech for you, Silicon Valley is less than an hour away. For me, the tech community is going to be the hardest thing about San Francisco to leave behind.</p>\n<p>Food, drink, weather, music, and maybe the tech industry, if it’s applicable to you. That’s the good stuff. Now, take a deep breath and let’s explore the city’s darker side.</p>\n<h2>The Bad</h2>\n<p>Just as the density of high tech in San Francisco is a boon, it can also a burden for geeks. As my social circle grew after moving to the city, I began to feel as if I always had to be “on” – always representing my job, always receptive to talking tech and hearing a stranger’s latest pitch. It’s easy to meet people through the tech scene in SF, but they’re professional contacts, not friends. I now count some of those contacts as true friends, but real friendships take work and time. When you first move here, it’s easy to confuse knowing people through your job or technical interests with having a solid social network. Just remember that someone who added you on LinkedIn isn’t going to help you out when you’re sick, or moving, or just need someone to talk to frankly without worrying about leaking a trade secret.</p>\n<p>San Francisco is also, perhaps infamously, an intellectual and cultural bubble in which ludicrous ideas can find support, particularly in the tech industry. Before long, you may find yourself nodding in sincere agreement as someone explains the inane first-world problem that their startup or pet open source project is trying to solve. It’s hard work to maintain perspective and not get caught up in a way of thinking that privileges the desires of young white men with high technical proficiency and lots of disposable income. But then, this is a double-edge sword: some ideas that seem silly at the outset have world-changing, democratizing potential (I’d like to think Twitter is one such idea, of course). Be open, but skeptical.</p>\n<p>There are far more fundamental problems with the city than the tech industry bubble. Perhaps the most visceral is that, for a first world city, San Francisco is dirty. No, filthy. No, disgusting. Whenever I travel outside of San Francisco, I’m amazed at what a disastrous anomaly it is. Sidewalks are routinely covered in broken glass, trash, old food, and human excrement. The smell of urine is not uncommon, nor is the sight of homeless persons in varying states of dishevelment. I frequented tough neighborhoods in DC and Baltimore – then the murder capital of the nation – and only in San Francisco have I been actively threatened on the street.</p>\n<p>What sickens me most about San Francisco is not its dirt, or its large homeless population, or its questionable safety, but that locals and the city government seem to accept these circumstances. Hipsters boast of how disgusting and unsafe their Mission living situations are, as if choosing to live amongst squalor when you have the means not to do so makes you a better person. The wealthy seclude themselves in the Marina, Russian Hill, and Pacific Heights, and lobby against public transportation that would bring undesirables to their pristine neighborhoods. Aging hippies in the Haight argue about marijuana legalization and anti-war referendums when men and women are dying – visibly dying – on the streets of the Tenderloin. It’s as if all parties don’t occupy the same city, see the same shameful sights on the street, and bear the same responsibilities to taxes and charity that might help address these deep-seated and difficult problems.</p>\n<p>Month after month, San Franciscans gather for festivals and parades: Pride, the Folsom Street Faire, LoveFest, Bay to Breakers, and so forth. The privileged fill the streets, dressed in gaudy costumes, embracing any excuse to celebrate their sexuality, their liberal views, their comfort with alternative approaches to life and social structures. Were San Francisco taking care of its own, creating an environment in which everyone had access to the same comforts and opportunities, I would encourage such celebrations every week. But, as liberal and libertarian as I am, I think there’s something disturbing and solipsistic and fundamentally broken about a place that seems to value a different <em>way of life</em> over better <em>quality of life</em>. It is this that I object to most strenuously about San Francisco.</p>\n<p>There are other nuisances and disappointments, to be sure:</p>\n<ul>\n\t<li>An obscenely high cost of living for comparatively poor real estate and social services.</li>\n\t<li>Unreliable and inadequate public transit, paling in comparison to most any other major city in the world.</li>\n\t<li>Lots of traffic and very little parking – factors that would be less of an issue if the public transit was adequate.</li>\n\t<li>Generally poor urban/civic planning.</li>\n\t<li>Limited and mediocre cultural institutions. It’s easy to exhaust museums, theater, and other forms of the arts in SF. Most of what you’ll find outside the mainstream is dim, amateurish, and – as above – obsessed with being different rather than simply being better. (The ballet is the major exception. It’s quite good.)</li>\n\t<li>Entirely a matter of personal preference, but I dislike much of the architecture in San Francisco. Some find the endless peeling Victorians quaint. I prefer buildings that are truly historic or aggressively modern.</li>\n\t<li>Vast dead spaces between and within neighborhoods. For a city of relatively small size, you’ll find that most of it isn’t worth repeated visits. Areas worth spending time in are usually just several blocks, scarcely enough to occupy an hour or two with window shopping and a stroll.</li>\n\t<li>Enormous competition for limited resources. You will wait for everything. The better a thing is (food, coffee, a nice place to sit), the longer you’ll wait for it. When you finally get what you want, you’ll be crammed in with others trying to enjoy the same place/thing, diminishing everyone’s enjoyment.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>There is, I’ve found, precious little to do here, particularly if you’re not inclined towards sports or the outdoors. I recall asking several locals what exactly people did on a Saturday afternoon, at a loss after having gone to the scant few museums and walked around the few worthwhile neighborhoods. “Hang out in the park or sleep, I guess” was the common answer. And indeed, that’s what many people do: the Mission’s Dolores Park is filled with idling throngs weekend after weekend, soaking up the sun, chatting, drinking, smoking, existing. Nothing wrong with the simple pleasures of friends and good weather, but there’s more to life than living from one hangout to the next.</p>\n<p>There are some things about the city that are harder to put a finger on, too. While people in San Francisco are endearingly open-minded, all too often they’re self-centered, passive aggressive, and cold. As above, it’s easy to meet people through work or a common interest, but harder to meet random friendly strangers. Rarely in San Francisco has a kindness been done to me by a stranger – offering directions when I look lost, for example. When traveling, I’m again shocked at how much better people are to one another in other places, even in reputedly hard and unfriendly cities like New York.</p>\n<h2>Finally</h2>\n<p>One has to ask, after all that: why are you still here? The answer is that I’m in San Francisco for as long as my work requires me to be. Once I’m able to work remotely with confidence, either for Twitter or another employer, I have every intention of moving with my fiancée and two cats to Portland, Oregon, a place which I feel/hope better reflects my values. Quite simply, I want to live somewhere that <em>works</em>, and San Francisco feels broken. Portland doesn’t work perfectly, particularly in terms of its high unemployment, but it feels closer to what I want in a place than any other city I’ve visited. I’ll miss San Francisco’s strong tech community and other things about the city, but I can’t say I anticipate much reminiscence about the place.</p>\n<p>I’m aware that all this is weighted more heavily towards the negative, but I don’t know that I should apologize for having had a negative experience of the city. I may be a critic by nature, but I try to look for the good in people and places. I feel like I’ve given San Francisco a fair go of it, but found in the end that it’s just not for me. Hopefully, the above assessment is useful to a like-minded person trying to make a decision about the city.</p>\n<p>If you do decide to move here, read <a href=\"http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2009/07/are-you-going-to-san-francisco.html\">Mat Honan’s guide to the ideal SF experience</a>. Mat has been here way longer than I have, knows the city better, and loves it. I agree with his assessment of where and how to live here, although I ended up moving to a less authentically San Franciscan neighborhood (<span>SOMA</span>) after having tried a more traditional neighborhood. It’s all a matter of personal taste and finding what resonates with you.</p>\n<p>Good luck.</p>\n<h2>Addenda</h2>\n<p><em>Monday, October 5th</em> — I’ve gotten a surprising amount of feedback about this post, most of it positive. One email in particular, though, had a portion worth reprinting:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>“For two years, I was the Development Director at a small SF health clinic that serves some of most under-privileged folks in the city. We participated in Folsom Street Fair’s beneficiary program – the gist of it is, money collected at the gates, and from the beverage booths, is divided amongst community based groups that apply to get a piece of the pie. It can be as little as $5000; sometimes, up to $20,000 per group. Folsom alone gives away a few hundred thousand dollars a year in this way. For struggling community orgs, especially those that rely on dwindling city and state funds, this money is crucial. Pride, LoveFest, and Castro Street Fair do the same.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I’m glad to hear that the events I called out are giving back to their community; indeed, I assumed they probably were, as most such events tend to have a charitable arm in this age of consumer guilt offsets. That’s something.</p>\n<p>The author of the above email mentioned that she has since moved to New York, frustrated by San Francisco’s seeming inability to get things done and improve itself.</p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/al3x/~4/gIiT9k_1ycw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "The Windowless Hall of Tides",
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"content" : "<img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2549/3967299393_58245973ca_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"305\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: The wastewater treatment plant at <a href=\"http://www.roseville.ca.us/eu/wastewater_utility/wastewater_facilities/pleasant_grove_wastewater_treatment_plant.asp\">Roseville</a>, California, unrelated to the poem discussed below].</small><br><br>For nearly four years now, without access to a good library, I've been looking for a poem called \"Staines Waterworks\" by the English poet Peter Redgrove; it's <a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Staines+Waterworks%22+%22peter+redgrove%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8\">impossible</a> <a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&num=100&q=%22Staines+Waterworks%22+poem+peter+redgrove&aq=f&oq=&aqi=\">to</a> <a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&num=100&q=Staines+Waterworks+peter+redgrove&aq=f&oq=&aqi=\">Google</a> and, though I knew I'd actually photocopied it for myself nearly a decade ago, I had apparently lost the photocopies. <br><br>But, then, amidst the weird rolling peaks of recovery and amnesia that come with cleaning through your old books and papers in the family basement, I found a sheaf of old photocopies in a box about an hour ago – and inside it was \"Staines Waterworks\" by Peter Redgrove. <br><br>The poem is incredible for a variety of reasons; but its most basic impulse is to describe the water purification plant at <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&q=staines&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Staines,+Middlesex,+UK&gl=us&ei=ocbCSuFYgaiUB-Ln8OAE&ll=51.435176,-0.508118&spn=0.575307,1.446075&z=10&iwloc=A\">Staines</a>, west London (the hometown of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_G\">Ali G</a>), as a kind of previously overlooked alchemical process. <br><br>It is water \"in its sixth and last purification\" that \"leaps from your taps like a fish,\" Redgrove writes.<ul>Rainwater gross as gravy is filtered from<br>Its coarse detritus at the intake and piped<br>To the sedimentation plant like an Egyptian nightmare,<br>For it is a hall of twenty pyramids upside-down<br>Balanced on their points each holding two hundred and fifty<br>Thousand gallons making thus the alchemical sign <br>For water and the female triangle.</ul>The poem is a stimulatingly odd collision of occult – many might say openly New Age – symbols and present-day civic infrastructure. In the process, it raises some amazing and fascinating questions of how we might more interestingly interpret the built structures surrounding us.<br><br>Redgrove describes the movement of water through its various steps of industrial filtration, saying that it \"reverberates... like some moon rolling / And thundering underneath [the] floors,\" passing through a \"windowless hall of tides.\" It is a surrogate astronomy, surging through the replicant gravity of pumps and steel holding tanks.<br><br>The processed river water is then decanted, surveilled by automata, and \"treated by poison gas, / The verdant chlorine which does not kill it.\" Beyond life, it is pushed through \"anthracite beds,\" where Water meets Earth in an engineered encounter between the elements. <br><br><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 6px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3426/3967299337_ea0e4fda77_o.jpg\" width=\"475\" height=\"356\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><small>[Image: A wastewater treatment plant in Macao, via <a href=\"http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Water_Treatment_Plant.jpg\"><i>Wikimedia</i></a>, unrelated to the poem discussed in this post].</small><br><br>Later, in what Redgrove might call its fourth purification, the water at Staines flows past an underground structure that resembles \"a castle,\" complete with \"turrets / And doors high enough for a mounted knight in armour / To rein in.\" Dials here are read \"as though [they are] the castle library.\" <ul>There are very few people in attendance, <br>All are men and seem very austere<br>And resemble walking crests of water in their white coats, <br>Hair white and long in honourable service.</ul>Civic water-filtration takes on the air of a Druidic ritual, with bespoke costumes, arcane electrical equipment, and the dull roar of the inhuman echoing both above and below. <a href=\"http://www.thameswater.co.uk/\">Thames Water</a> or, for that matter, <a href=\"http://www.brita.com/\">Brita</a> become strangely occult organizations obsessed with ritual actions and weird geometries, like something out of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley\">Aleister Crowley</a>. It is sustainability by way of the <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D0%26ref%255F%3Dnb%255Fss%26y%3D0%26field-keywords%3Db%2520p%2520r%2520d%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Daps&tag=bldgblog-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957\">B.P.R.D.</a><br><br>Redgrove's poem – and I refer only to \"Staines Waterworks\" here, as I am not that familiar with his other work – shows the transformative power of description: give something an unexpected context and whole new, extraordinarily vibrant worlds can be created. This is more important, more lasting, and more interesting than much of what passes for architectural criticism today. <br><br>Finally, the baptized liquid at Staines reaches a point of biological and chemical clarity, after which it is re-introduced to the city through a labyrinth of pipework that extends in wild curlicues, a machinic Thames beneath western London. Scalded, filtered, purified, made artificially natural and ready for drinking, it is water born again for future uses.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8663346-6867385504875169445?l=bldgblog.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p><em>The atmosphere on Mars is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 µm in diameter which give the Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface. When the Martian poles are exposed to sunlight at the start of summer, frozen CO2 sublimes creating enormous winds that sweep off the poles as fast as 400 km/h. These seasonal actions transport large amounts of dust and water vapor, contributing to the largest dust storms in our Solar System. These can vary from a storm over a small area, to gigantic storms that cover the entire planet. They tend to occur when Mars is closest to the Sun, and have been shown to increase the global temperature.</em></p>\n\n<p>I woke up this spring morning to discover this view from our hallway, our neighbours' tin roofs and gum trees being battered by 100km/h winds: </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947741728/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"View from the hallway\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e80813970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"View from the hallway\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946959673/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"View from the hallway\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5917e4b970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"View from the hallway\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947738358/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"View from the hallway\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5917f6d970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"View from the hallway\"></a></p> \n\nThese are shot through the upstairs clerestory window at around 6AM, windows rattling and wind whistling. Hannah, our 4 week-old daughter, was most unsettled - babies are extraordinarily attuned to multi-sensory input, more so than adults it seems to me - and when we looked out of the window we could see why she'd been snuffling and grunting.<p></p>\n\n<p>At first it seemed like a very odd sunrise. Then we realised the red wasn't a sunrise red, but something duller, earthier. A kind of powdered mineral deep orangey-red, like vermillion or cadmium perhaps with a dash of ochre ... or like dust from the parched interior of Australia, in fact.</p>\n\n<p>Which of course it was, as all your news networks will have told you by now. You can get the fairly extraordinary facts elsewhere, along with numerous first-hand experiences. Here are a series of reflections that occurred to me throughout the day.</p>\n\n<p>Moving downstairs, the odd light was both inside and out, casting everything in an orange haze. I moved over to my Macbook on the kitchen table and was surprised to see that its screen appeared blue. I thought it was broken at first, but realised this too was the effect of the strange orange filter newly overlaid onto the world. This is what the backyard looked like:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946966055/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Backyard\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e800b0970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Backyard\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946964359/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Ollie excited\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e801e8970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Ollie excited\"></a></p>\n\nNote: these colours aren't treated at all. If anything, they appear slightly less vivid than how I remember it.<p></p>\n\n<p>Slowly it became clear what was going on. It seemed on the scale of an eclipse. A thin film of dust was on everything, inside and out. Barely any windows had been left open, due to the wind and rain the night before, yet this new microscopic layer could be felt under the fingertips everywhere.</p>\n\n<p>(In a sign of the times) I turn to Twitter to find out what's going on, and tweet a little myself. My friend <a href=\"http://plasticbag.org/\">Tom</a> picks up on it and <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/plasticbag/galleries/72157622310168099/\">curates a fantastic set of the images being uploaded in real-time to Flickr</a>. Have a look at that set to see how eerily beautiful the whole thing was. My photos here don't approach them in terms of drama or quality, but are what I saw, and so just as affecting to me.</p>\n\n<p>The dust came from South Australia, via the distant mining town of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Hill,_New_South_Wales\">Broken Hill</a>. The distances involved here are indeed vast. The dust cloud covered half of New South Wales and then stretched 600km up the coast to Queensland, <a href=\"http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/brisbane-awakes-from-haze-as-dust-settles-20090923-g0wm.html?autostart=1\">where it would later appear in Brisbane in an altogether yellower guise</a>. It had travelled around 1500km to get to Sydney, dropping millions (billions?) of tons of dust over the east coast.</p>\n\n<p>It's almost beyond comprehension that the dust filling the air is from that far away; that you're inhaling South Australia. It's akin to the notion that you're constantly breathing in detritus from the Big Bang. One's reminded of the scale of the intercontinental weather systems around here, not least the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Oscillation\">El Nino</a>, which covers almost half of this side of the planet and is probably on its way soon, bringing further extreme weather conditions.</p>\n\n<p>By the time I leave the house, the red colour was beginning to become paler, settling on a glowing sulphurous yellow. The dust picked out the structural supports of a spider's web on our porch and covered the electricity cabinet in the street. All the cars were clearly covered in a thin film. Silver was not a good paint-job for a car this morning.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946970641/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Our street\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5916bb8970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Our street\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947747756/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Spider web\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e7ff01970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Spider web\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947749314/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Dust on electricity cabinet\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e7fd10970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Dust on electricity cabinet\"></a></p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p>The air quality was perhaps the filthiest on record. It seemed to have a sulphurous quality to it, but that may have just been projection. But despite this obvious sensory input, people - ourselves included - seemed to be essentially oblivious to the poor air quality and went about our business as any other day. <a href=\"http://www.smh.com.au/environment/sydney-dust-blanket-causes-highest-air-pollution-on-record-20090923-g1fw.html\">The <em>Herald</em> notes</a> that:</p>\n\n<blockquote>"A normal day would see around 10 micrograms of particles per cubic metre of air and a bushfire might generate 500 micrograms. Today, levels soared to 15,400 micrograms per cubic metre of air at one location."</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>To the naked eye, the dust appeared to all but dissipate by about lunchtime, yet on closer inspection visibility was still lower than normal. The light in Sydney is one of the most extraordinary things. It's without the blinding over-exposure of Queensland to the north, but is intense, vivid and so richly revealing in terms of colour, detail and texture. Today, it just wasn't there. Even when it appeared to have lifted, look beyond the crisp near distance and Sydney faded unusually quickly.</p>\n\n<p>The word "apocalyptic" comes up in conversation a lot today. Many argue that this particular phenomenon had no formal relation to climate change but many others made a connection nonetheless, given that the Australian interior has been reconfigured by the Big Dry. Sydney often offers up some fairly apocalyptic weather, being a place of natural extremes, but this was something else.</p>\n\n<p>I read a book about dinosaurs to my two year-old son Oliver every night. He loves it all but I'm privately fascinated by the pages describing their (most likely) demise due to an asteroid strike in New Mexico and the resulting giant dust clouds that enveloped the planet, extinguishing the dinos and much else besides, ushering in a near-ice age. It had been 30 degrees a few days ago - unseasonably warm, but it was maybe 15 degrees below that today. The wind was still fierce, and the sun couldn't penetrate the blanket of dust.</p>\n\n<p>The sun in Australia usually gives the impression it could penetrate steel if it wanted to, but here it hung uselessly in the sky, a hazy wan glow effortlessly subdued by the dust. Some fairly spectacular effects emerge as its distant gleam creates transient reflections in some passing car windows, a sudden focal point amidst the pervasive flatness of light elsewhere.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946984719/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Sun in window\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5918698970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Sun in window\"></a></p> \n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946983211/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Sun in car window\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e81917970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Sun in car window\"></a></p>\n\n<p>The sudden nature of the dust storm's appearance was one of its most curious, compelling aspects. While a cold front had been expected from the south, there had been no warning of this. It had finally rained the night before, after what seemed like months with barely a drop, and then we wake up to an entirely different landscape. How incredible that no weather forecast had been able to predict something on this scale.</p>\n\n<p>It occurs to me that the microscopic layer of dust has made Sydney marginally taller, bigger this morning. <a href=\"http://pruned.blogspot.com/\">Alexander Trevi</a> suggests that it's more likely that Sydney is slightly sinking.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946981917/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Sydney\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5918e10970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Sydney\"></a></p>\n\n<p>I'm heading for a workshop in Chowder Bay and a cab drives me out to the north shore. The traffic is horrendous, even for Sydney, meaning a slow crawl over the ANZAC Bridge and then the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Usually the giant structures of these bridges frame views of the perfect blue harbour and the thrusting concrete-and-glass CBD of Sydney. Here they float freely against a backdrop of nothing.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947753658/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"ANZAC bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a59191bd970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"ANZAC bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947756546/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"ANZAC bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e81dd5970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"ANZAC bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947766860/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Approaching the Sydney Harbour Bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a59185df970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Approaching the Sydney Harbour Bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947773870/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Sydney Harbour Bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5918370970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Sydney Harbour Bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947775546/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Sydney Harbour Bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e80fd9970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Sydney Harbour Bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946997333/\" style=\"display:block\"></a></p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946997333/\" style=\"display:block\"></a><p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947002971/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"North Sydney\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5919d0b970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"North Sydney\"></a></p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947002971/\" style=\"display:block\">\n\n</a><p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946997333/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"On Sydney Harbour Bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e824e3970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"On Sydney Harbour Bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946999333/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Exiting Sydney Harbour Bridge\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e8267e970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Exiting Sydney Harbour Bridge\"></a></p>\n\n<p>Over in north Sydney, several people in the street are wearing face masks. I was in Seoul last Friday, and had been reminded of the east Asian tendency to wear face masks when suffering a cold. Apparently face masks were <a href=\"http://www.smh.com.au/environment/red-dust-face-masks-flying-off-the-shelves-20090923-g1jc.html\">flying off the shelves</a> today in Sydney, a good business to be in today, just as tomorrow will be a good time to be in the car wash sector.</p>\n\n<p>My taxi driver is originally from Beijing, and he remarks he'd seen similar sights there a few times, though pointed out that was mostly through pollution rather than dust storms (though <a href=\"http://www.sinodaily.com/reports/Heavy_dust_storm_enshrouds_Beijing_999.html\">it's not immune to those either</a>, blown from Inner Mongolia). When he discovers I lived in London before Sydney, he asks whether the famous London fog has the same quality. He seems mildly disappointed when I tell him those smog-induced fogs don't really happen anymore in London.</p>\n\n<p>Moving over bridges suddenly robbed of their views, it occurs to me how odd it is to see Sydney without perhaps its signature quality - <a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2007/09/the-view.html\">the view</a>. It's one of the most remarkable, rewarding aspects of the city, but here there was apparently nothing beyond the edge of the road, over that cliff, behind those trees. Everything faded rapidly into a flat white haze, a void.</p>\n\n<p>It's not so much a new landscape, but the absence or removal of landscape altogether. The vanishing lines vanish after a few metres. It feels like one of Calvino's <em>Invisible Cities</em> all of a sudden, an impossible construction fading at the edges in all directions. There are echoes of those maps of the imagined <em>Terra Australis</em>, a land searched for in uncharted territory, of an Australia perched on the edge of the world, edges of the map fading into nothingness.</p>\n\n<p>We glide slowly by one of my favourite Sydney buildings, a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolist_Movement\">Metabolist</a>-like housing block just off the east edge of the Harbour Bridge. Usually this is lost in the thicket of skyscrapers behind it. Here, it appears bold in sepia, the previously overwhelming background reduced to faint ghosts hovering over its shoulder.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3946988225/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Housing\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5918444970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Housing\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947769746/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Housing\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5918511970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Housing\"></a></p>\n\n<p>By the time I'm at Chowder Bay, a former naval base on the north shore set amidst forests of gums, the light has lifted again. Having looked at a map, I'm aware that the spectral trees we're driving past are right on the shoreline. Yet it's still impossible to see the water only metres away. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947011429/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Trees\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a59196a1970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Trees\"></a></p> \n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947013043/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Trees\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a59197c7970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Trees\"></a></p>\n\n<p>The <a href=\"http://www.liw3.com/CFL/\">website for the venue</a> speaks highly of the view. It's somewhat academic at 9.30 this particular morning.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947800226/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Chowder Bay\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a591956b970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Chowder Bay\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947018031/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Chowder Bay\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a5e81e85970c-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Chowder Bay\"></a>\n</p>\n\n<p>Yet by lunchtime, the same view looked like this:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3947027047/\" style=\"display:block\"><img alt=\"Chowder Bay, clear\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/.a/6a00d83452a98069e20120a59194c1970b-800wi\" style=\"margin:0px\" title=\"Chowder Bay, clear\"></a>\n</p>\n<p>The dust storm was over, apparently.</p>\n\n<p>This island continent is an extraordinarily vivid place in terms of naturally-occurring phenomena. Whether the recent weather conditions are "naturally-occurring" or "carelessly invoked" is another matter - though this is clearly drought-related - but the range and intensity of the weather is constantly startling. Sydney is generally blessed with perhaps a perfect climate - a kind of subtle improvement on the southern Mediterranean - yet on days like today Australia seems to be building up to something. And we're still <a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2009/09/bushfire-season-is-here-again.html\">not yet in bushfire season</a>. Then again, tomorrow will probably be just another perfectly crisp, sunny spring Sydney day.</p>\n\n<p><em><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/23/australia-dust-storm-sydney\">The Guardian</a></em> dispassionately tacked this onto the end of their bulletin, followed by no comment:</p>\n\n<blockquote>"As dust blanketed the east coast last night, heavy rains lashed Adelaide in the nation's south, flooding streets. At dawn, two tremors shook Melbourne. Later in the day hailstones as big as cricket balls pelted parts of New South Wales. Heavy rain is expected to follow and flash-flood warnings have been issued. While residents in the south brace for rain, Queenslanders are preparing for fires to erupt with the unseasonally dry weather in the far north where firefighters battled several blazes yesterday."</blockquote>\n\n<p>That's Australia. It never rains but it pours, hails, burns, storms, dusts ...</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/cityofsound/JuiP?a=l3UjKG_0ooo:1Z81qGvCdgQ:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/cityofsound/JuiP?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/cityofsound/JuiP?a=l3UjKG_0ooo:1Z81qGvCdgQ:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/cityofsound/JuiP?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Kwame Nkrumah – Give Us Chocolate",
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"content" : "Cult creation was Kwame Nkrumah’s forte. By an almost unbelievable account, his Young Pioneers* would be amassed into a ‘Dogma’ room with tall walls, a door and upper windows. The thumb-suckers would be encouraged, by their adult minders, to pray to God for chocolate. “God, give us chocolate!” “God, give us chocolate!” Tens of times would they ask, but chocolate would not come down the Manna way. Then, the over-credulous nkwadaa would be ‘hocus-pocused’ to ask Kwame Nkrumah for chocolate. “Nkrumah, our father, give us chocolate.” Just asked once, and down rained confectionery like confetti from the high windows! <br><br><br>*Young Pioneers – A club of young followers of Kwame Nkrumah indoctrinated to be his eyes and ears in every home.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7564356874518161776-7917283196313646806?l=antirhythm.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "KFC Double Down",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.avclub.com/articles/kfcs-double-down-sandwich,32804/\">"God clearly did not mean for humans to eat chicken, bacon, and low-quality, gelatinous cheese at the same time."</a> Nathan Rabin tackles KFC's <a href=\"http://www.businesspundit.com/kfcs-new-double-down-sandwich-all-meat-no-bread/\">Double Down combo</a>. <br><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?a=81Ocu77YhOM:Gp6jEsLK3uI:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?i=81Ocu77YhOM:Gp6jEsLK3uI:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "A brief survey of the short story part 21: Saki",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/10648?ns=guardian&pageName=A+brief+survey+of+the+short+story+part+21%3A+Saki%3AArticle%3A1276415&ch=Books&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Fiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CSaki+%28Hector+Hugh+Munro%29+%28Author%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Chris+Power&c7=09-Sep-14&c8=1276415&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Books&c13=A+brief+survey+of+the+short+story+%28blog+series%29&c25=Books+blog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>The icy comedy of HH Munro's stories has kept their power to shock nicely preserved</p><p>What a strange bird <a href=\"http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/saki.html\">Saki</a> is. His stories, written between 1900 and his death at the Somme in 1916, bear the hallmarks of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, are as funny as Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh, possess plotting exquisite enough to bear significant elaboration but rarely last longer than three pages, and are brought off with a wonderfully light touch, while presenting a disturbingly chilling portrait of humankind.</p><p>Hector Hugh Munro's pen-name refers either to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, which is spoken of disparagingly in more than one of his stories, or a type of South American monkey. I prefer to think it was the latter: not only did Saki have an abiding love for animals, but his mischievousness and capability for sudden viciousness are traits that seem, at least to my limited zoological knowledge, eminently monkey-like.</p><p>Saki's stories form a connective tissue between Oscar Wilde's 1890s and Evelyn Waugh's 1920s. His settings – garden parties, country house weekends and gentlemen's clubs – are typically Edwardian, but their wit, polished to a stunning brilliance, is underpinned by a satirical urge that is pitiless, and at times seemingly malicious.</p><p>Indeed, if Saki's talents for humour and plotting weren't so pronounced his fiction's procession of vapid hostesses, venal politicians, sour endings, macabre incidents and the blithely murderous could potentially make for a dismal repast. Instead, the world he renders is at once horrific, recognisably our own and yet for the most part a thoroughly enjoyable – or at least stimulating – one in which to linger. </p><p>What both appeals and repels in Saki's writing is his utter and absolute lack of sentiment, which makes his skewering of society thrillingly acerbic. But the feeling one has when reading the stories is that his characters are as nothing to him. If they do receive some sort of esteem from the author it's primarily because they prove themselves adept at exploiting the weaknesses of others. There are many arch and satirical writers in English letters, but few of them are as relentlessly cold as Saki.</p><p>After a short time spent as a policeman in Burma (footsteps in which George Orwell would later follow) and the publication of a history of Russia that no one read, Saki turned to fiction in 1900 with a series lampooning Westminster politicians (a habit he happily never grew out of). While his stories cover a wide range of subjects and styles, the two characters to whom he most often returns are Reginald, a controversy-loving, foppish libertine, and Clovis, a slightly more fleshed out variation on the theme.</p><p>These two characters and their companions, particularly Bertie van Tahn, whom you could easily imagine having just come from lunch with Bertie Wooster whenever he crosses the path of Clovis, operate in the Wodehousian mode. Through boredom they generate scrapes, or help others escape scrapes, and in the process some element of polite society or public morality is shown to be ludicrous.</p><p>It should be noted that Jeeves and Wooster didn't make their debut until 1917, the year after a sniper's bullet put an end to Munro in a shell crater, but to call Wodehouse's creations \"Sakian\" would, for reasons of reputation and literary fame, be perverse. There's every reason for Saki devotees to believe this might change, however. Firstly because anyone who loves Wodehouse and hasn't read Saki is missing a trick, and secondly because, as Will Self noted in a 2007 documentary, \"Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant.\"</p><p>Another thing that recommends Saki to the modern reader and perhaps explains why he remains somewhat obscure is his ability to shock. Nestling in the gloomier crevices of his work are macabre pieces the horror of which the century since their composition has done nothing to dilute. Some take straightforward domestic shape, such as The Reticence of Lady Anne, in which a put-upon husband tries to patch up an argument with his wife, not realising that she is sitting in stony silence because she is dead. Others, including the pagan-themed The Music on the Hill, appear to take their cues from Munro's near contemporary MR James.</p><p>Even when Saki is not writing explicitly \"horrific\" stories, however, the unease is present. His stories are more subtle variations on what William Burroughs, writing of Naked Lunch, described as the \"frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork\". Or as VS Pritchett put it, \"Saki writes like an enemy. Society has bored him to the point of murder. Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.\"</p><p><strong>Next: </strong>Julio Cortázar<br></p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction\">Fiction</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/sakihectorhughmunro\">Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/chrispower\">Chris Power</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/8kf8j41glg0kjidva4o58ic684/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fbooks%2Fbooksblog%2F2009%2Fsep%2F14%2Fshort-story-saki-hh-munro\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"content" : "In the heart of Kumasi lies Ghana’s bistro capital. Bantama hosts a daily night carnival. After dusk, shops close, shop fronts clear, and seats and tables are set. Bars and pubs open. Drink and meat freely flow. Men and women pour into the streets in brightly coloured clothes. <br><br>We espied a guy in a custard-coloured suit and hat, and another all in scarlet. Many a young man streaks a medium, white towel out of his back pocket, almost scything the street. Many a woman spikes school-rules, short, natural hair. They leave their inflated bosoms fairly out to treat, and swim from sidewalk to sidewalk in miniskirts or hugging jeans. The more mature males don hats from far-flung cultures. <br><br>We were touring for the famous British Pub. Legend has all the city capos haunting it at night. We cruised through many connecting streets. We did not find the pub. I asked a kebab boy. For “British Pub” he heard “Spar”. Between horror and suppressed snicker, I did not resist the urge to ask if he had Cane-Rat kebab. <br><br>A cabbie stopped to help. He acquired a fatuous frown, and said he did not know the “Parrrrrrr”. We sullenly settled for the “Soul Bar”. It did not have half the soul its name promised. It is a hatchery for fat, blood-sucking mozzies, and a flower/sewer garden.<br><br>Bantama is a street. Bantama is a scene. Bantama is a curious crowd. Bantama is musical. Bantama is the heartbeat of Kumasi at night. The name “Bantama” suffers from the ugliness of English spelling. I gather it should properly be spelt something like Baantoma.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7564356874518161776-7709154432186440912?l=antirhythm.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "Early last week, our driver Ishmael told us his mother had died and requested to take leave to attend her funeral. He was given permission and promptly departed. Yesterday, we heard through the help-vine that Ishmael was back in town. Sister Y called him to find out how far. Although I prefer to drive myself and have issues with drivers that cannot remember where they went yesterday or, once reminded, how to get there again, I had an interest in seeing Ishmael – one of the tyres on my car had gone flat. The idea of fixing it myself did not thrill.<br><br>And so yesterday afternoon Ishmael found himself in our living room being interrogated by Sister Y. Her courtroom tactics proved effective, as his dead-mom alibi soon started to crumble. Papa, one of the security guards, was brought in as witness number one to unearth the real story. Bored of the banter, I left the living room to continue working, only to be alerted back a few minutes later by aggressive shouting and the staccato impact of fist on face meat. Papa and Ishmael had come to blows. Once separated, the bizarre truth then started to leak out.<br><br>It turned out that Ishmael had faked his mother’s death in the first place to get sympathy money from us, as well as time off. Papa had agreed to go along with the story and provide cover should it be needed, gaining a cut of our sympathy money as his side of the deal. Papa had his own interests in play – he needed to go to his village for a relative’s funeral (whether a real or fake death, we don’t know). Ishmael, on the other hand, wanted the time off and the money to visit a juju-man. Specifically, Ishmael wanted to have the ability to appear and disappear at will, so that he could be an effective robber and sprite in the night. Papa had apparently recommended a juju-man from his village who, for a mere N20k, could bestow such gifts. The arrangement was that Tweedledum and Tweedledee would visit Papa’s village together – Papa for the real/fake funeral, and Ishmael to obtain the requisite magical powers.<br><br>Separated, Ishmael and Papa stood facing each other in our living room, as the Nollywood saga spewed its truth all over our Turkish rugs. Sister Y commandeered Ishmael’s phone to source for elements of corroboration in the story. She called one number, stored as ‘mummy’ in his address book. It turned out to be Ishmael’s wife. She called another number, with ‘mummy x’ as the associated name. Ishmael volunteered that it was his girlfriend. She then discovered his father’s number, and after some back and forth, found out that Ishmael’s mother had in fact died several years ago. By this time, Ishmael’s eyes had become bloodshot, and an air of defeat hung heavy about him. The curse of stupidity (see an <a href=\"http://naijablog.blogspot.com/2009/03/consultancy-opportunity-terms-of.html\">earlier post</a>) had done battle with an innate sense of superiority and won.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-7575685351896059761?l=naijablog.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "In praise of books half-read",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/39391?ns=guardian&pageName=In+praise+of+books+half-read%3AArticle%3A1270179&ch=Books&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Fiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Suzanne+Munshower&c7=09-Sep-02&c8=1270179&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Books&c13=&c25=Books+blog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>I'm an inveterate unfinisher, and I think it's actually a useful habit to acquire</p><p>Some folks feel the need to finish any book once started; that this is something \"owed\" to the author. Some also won't walk out on a bad film because it's been paid for, or send back a plate of pricey dog food in this week's hot restaurant for fear of \"looking bad\". But if a close personal friend didn't write the book, take you to the cinema, or cook the meal, why care?</p><p>I'm an inveterate unfinisher, who encourages others to be the same. Call me barbaric, but once I cease to be interested, a book is usually finished for me, no matter how many pages remain unread. So, for me, the <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jan/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview26\">The Book Thief</a> will always be just a lugubrious novella, and <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/12/society\">The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable</a> no more than the briefest blast of pomposity. </p><p>Was I being unfair to What Was Lost author Catherine O'Flynn by abandoning at the halfway point a book I found tiresome and contrived? I doubt she'd care. After all, she's the one who won all the prizes and made the Booker longlist, not me. Will Christopher Brookmyre's feelings be hurt if he hears that I, an avid fan, couldn't get past more than a chapter or two of Snowball in Hell? That would un-Brookmyreish in the extreme.</p><p>I don't hold it against people, that I didn't finish their book, nor do I proclaim a lack of talent. All writers accept that not every reader will be charmed or satisfied. Giving up on any author because of a single book is unwise. I've bought many books, started to read, then put them aside, thinking they might \"work\" for me some other time. Sometimes, they do: I finished reading Zoë Heller's Everything You Know five years after starting it and losing interest. In the meantime, I'd moved on to Notes on a Scandal and liked it, so I went back and discovered I enjoyed the earlier novel. It took me three tries to get into English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, which turned out to be very readable and very entertaining.</p><p>Some days, on the other hand, I'll start a book only to decide I'm not in the mood for something new, and return instead to old favourites. Occasionally, friends get miffed when I return a borrowed book and admit I couldn't get through it. These might be the same people who don't share my passion for the fiction of Tim Parks or WG Sebald, so it evens out in the end. There is, after all, no accounting for taste – as a friend who saw the film Mouse Hunt on my recommendation has never let me forget.</p><p>There is, however, accounting for time, and time spent in reading an unappealing book can never be regained. On top of that, it's just too much like school. I'll die without knowing if Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, many decades after its having been force-fed, might have become my kind of book. Life really is too short.</p><p>So I toast all the half-read, half-unread books that have passed through my hands, saluting both the creativity of those who wrote them and the fortitude of those who read them. And finally, I confess to having read every last word of The Bridges of Madison County. I could have stopped after page one, but I found it, like a gruesome highway accident, horrifying yet impossible to look away from – until I got to the very last word and hurled it across the room.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction\">Fiction</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/suzanne-munshower\">Suzanne Munshower</a></div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/8kf8j41glg0kjidva4o58ic684/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fbooks%2Fbooksblog%2F2009%2Fsep%2F01%2Fin-praise-books-half-read\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"content" : "<div><br><p><img title=\"2_27762\" src=\"http://africasacountry.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/2_27762.jpg?w=500&h=499\" alt=\"2_27762\" width=\"500\" height=\"499\"></p>\n<p>A white South African who had overstayed his work visa in Canada, applied for refugee status on the grounds that should he return to South Africa, black South Africans would “persecute” him.</p>\n<p>He was granted refugee status by an immigration board tribunal in Ottawa last week.</p>\n<p><span></span><br>\nAccording to media reports the tribunal chair ruled that there was “clear and convincing proof of the state’s inability or unwillingness to protect him” and added: “I find that the claimant would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his colour in any part of the country.” Serious. Every South African–especially poor blacks who are majority of the victims of violent crime–can make such a case. Will Canada grant them refugee status. As for the second: that white people stand out in South Africa. That is so nonsensical, that it does not deserve comment.</p>\n<p>The claimant, Brandon Huntley, also told the tribunal: “There’s a hatred of what we did to them and it’s all about the colour of your skin.” I must have missed a race riot or forms of retributive violence against whites in the last 15 years since the end of Apartheid. Instead, poor black South Africans have turned on other blacks (immigrants, their neighbors) and largely hold the state and the ruling party (both majority black) responsible for their plight.</p>\n<p>This is the kind of nonsense peddled on blogs by a section of expatriate white South Africans. That it was taken serious by a Canadian court boggles the mind.</p>\n<p>What is also odd is <a href=\"http://www.ottawasun.com/news/ottawa/2009/08/28/10659546.html\">from reports of the case</a> is that violent crime–which as I said already, affects mostly blacks–is defined as a race war against whites. You got to be kidding me.</p>\n<p>This is all surreal yet there is some in and outside South Africa who will defend this.</p>\n<p>[By the way, this is a new tactic. In the past, a family of white South Africans applicants claimed there's <a href=\"http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=fe203437-0eac-432b-9a7e-b4042598a366\">too much sun in South Africa</a> to live in Canada. They won their case. Here in the US, a white South African woman was not so lucky.]</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/africasacountry.wordpress.com/956/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=africasacountry.wordpress.com&blog=8438986&post=956&subd=africasacountry&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><br><p style=\"text-align:justify\">Certain remarks are offensive, not merely because they are trite, but because they are inevitable. You brace yourself and think, “Oh shit, here it comes.” It isn’t enough that the phrase be discolored with overuse; the speaker must also think it clever.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">The more hackneyed the remark, the more urgent the expectation of congratulation. This is not mere cliché; this is cliché naked, wearing only socks, and holding a knife. “It was deja vu all over again.” The speaker pauses for smiles. “Yes, but everyone is a tiny bit racist.” The speaker awaits assent.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">There’s something Pavlovian about bromides. Without bromides, feel-good movies would simply not be possible. Empty language. Language that puts you to sleep. Pre-approved sentiments, formulated inflexibly, half-heartedly angling for a sophisticated sound.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">[In the comments, give me yours.]</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">———————————————</p>\n<p>AFGHANISTAN. Mention that it is undefeated since antiquity.</p>\n<p>AFRICA. Spectacular sunsets, very friendly people.</p>\n<p>AUSTRALIAN. British, but with excellent teeth.</p>\n<p>BLACKS. Either angry or articulate.</p>\n<p>BOB MARLEY. Love “Legend,” avoid everything else by him.</p>\n<p>BOYS. In Thailand, indistinguishable from girls.</p>\n<p>CARIBBEAN. The women are good babysitters.</p>\n<p>CANCER. The only illness that one battles.</p>\n<p>CHILDREN. Must be spoken to loudly on public transportation.</p>\n<p>CHINESE. Always “the.” See also TAMILS.</p>\n<p>CLASSIC. Anything amusing, or anything older than fifteen years .</p>\n<p>COMMUNITY. African-American.</p>\n<p>CRASH. All plane crashes must be described as tragic.</p>\n<p>CRICKET. Classy stuff.</p>\n<p>DALAI LAMA. Always mention the time you met him.</p>\n<p>DEJA VU. “It’s like deja vu all over again.”</p>\n<p>DERVISH. Exist solely to whirl.</p>\n<p>DICKENSIAN. A novel longer than 400-pages.</p>\n<p>FACEBOOK. At parties, thunder against it; the next day, friend everyone you met.</p>\n<p>FLAUBERT. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”</p>\n<p>FRENCH. Say “I have forgotten all the French I learned in high school”; mention that Parisians pretend to know no English.</p>\n<p>FREUD. Intone “tell me about your mother.” Shortly afterwards say, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”</p>\n<p>GAYS. “I have nothing against gays.”</p>\n<p>GENOCIDE. Never again.</p>\n<p>GENTRIFICATION. Reprehensible. Join other upwardly-mobile whites in the neighborhood in condemning it.</p>\n<p>GREEKS. Pederasts. Mention the flaws in their democracy.</p>\n<p>HARVARD. Denounce, particularly if you went there.</p>\n<p>HEAT. Or rather, the humidity.</p>\n<p>HEART ATTACK. If fatal, describe as “massive.”</p>\n<p>HIP-HOP. Mock it, or opine that it was better “back in the day.”</p>\n<p>INDIA. Colorful. Heart-breaking contrasts.</p>\n<p>INUIT. Countless words for snow.</p>\n<p>IRONY. Definition unknown; use freely.</p>\n<p>JAZZ. America’s classical music. Declare your love for it, and list only dead players.</p>\n<p>KAFKAESQUE. Definition unknown.</p>\n<p>MUSLIMS. Wonder why the moderate ones do nothing.</p>\n<p>NOVEL. Mention that you are also working on one.</p>\n<p>PASSIONATE. Italy.</p>\n<p>PIANO. Asians can play all the right notes, but lack interpretive insight.</p>\n<p>PORN. If it comes up in conversation, laugh dismissively, or quote a statistic.</p>\n<p>PRIZES. “Essentially meaningless”; follow closely.</p>\n<p>PROUST. Intend to read.</p>\n<p>QUESTION. “That begs the question.”</p>\n<p>RACISM. “Everyone is a little bit racist.”</p>\n<p>RAP. If you dislike it, declare this dislike loudly and often.</p>\n<p>RELIGION. Think hard for a moment before announcing “I am not religious but I am spiritual.”</p>\n<p>ROMANS. Inferior to the Greeks;</p>\n<p>ROOMMATE. In college, you had a wonderful roommate from a foreign country. “I wonder what Miko is up to these days.”</p>\n<p>SCANDAL. Primarily sexual. Thunder against, and threaten to lose all trust in politicians; suffix with “—gate.”</p>\n<p>SICK. “And twisted,” if a crime. “And wrong,” if droll. “As a dog,” if medical.</p>\n<p>SUSHI. Awesome. You could eat it everyday.</p>\n<p>TAMILS. Always “the.” See also CHINESE.</p>\n<p>TELEVISION. With remote in hand, sigh “five hundred channels and nothing to watch.”</p>\n<p>THEORY. Bemoan.</p>\n<p>TOURIST. 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"content" : "<div><p><em>When people who’ve lived in Boston talk to each other, their\nreminiscences are often wildly variable, depending on when they lived\nthere. A mentor of mine lived in Somerville in the 1980’s, and has a\nmemory of this city I can’t believe. It sounds like paradise. This is\nbecause I lived there during the Big Dig, the federal highway project\nwhich temporarily re-routed, demolished, then restored, several miles\nof superhighway through the city. The Dig affected every aspect of the\ncity, constricting traffic miles away by remote influence, and in my\nopinion infused the city with a powerful, unfocused daily rage. A\npredisposition toward hate. This is the second of a series of stories\nabout the eruptions of anger, difficulty and pain I witnessed. </em><em><br></em></p><p><em>Read “A Stain on Boston, <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/2009/08/20/boston1/\">Part I</a>," at <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/\">The Owls</a> site.</em></p><p><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a533fc10970b-popup\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Boston2\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a533fc10970b-320wi\"></a></p><p><strong>A Stain on Boston<br></strong></p><p><strong>By Ad Hamilton</strong></p><p>Eighty-year-old man hits the ground outside the Senior Center doing\nninety and dies. Splat. The jury’s back in the case of Mortal Coil v.\nBoston Department of Public Works Sidewalk, verdict unanimous. Unlucky,\nclumsy, depressed or pushed, who knows, another day in Boston, another\npoor fuck accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared toward nothing\ngood.</p>\n<p>To understand this tragedy, you have to understand architecture. The\ndiscipline, not the artifacts. Your affection for the Chrysler building\nrelates to Architecture just like your appreciation for Hubble photos\nrelates to Plasma Physics: which is to say that they have no relation\nwhatever.</p>\n<p>And to understand architecture, you have to understand architecture\nschool. The crucible that forms a deranged and flagellant tectonic\nculture. It’s kind of like Opus Dei, but much less important.</p>\n<p>This culture is international. My first year at a fairly prestigious\narchitecture school in Boston, there were almost as many Koreans and\nJapanese as Americans, and a prodigious crop of wealthy Chileans, for\nsome reason. The schooling is intensely, purposely anachronistic.\nFifteen years after I wrote my first term paper on a PC, I arrived to\nfind not a single computer on a desk in my section. A Korean kid showed\nup with one a few weeks in, and almost flunked out from the disdain\ncoming his way. Architecture is imagined here when graphite burns into\npaper, and blades shape wood and foam.</p>\n<p>The structure of labor is reminiscent of uranium mining in the\ndeveloping world: unnecessarily brutal and time-consuming, toxic and\nunproductive. The closest educational analogs are medical internships\nand Parris Island. Break ‘em down, build ‘em up.</p><p><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a58adb6c970c-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Boston1\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a58adb6c970c-320wi\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a> The two organizing elements of architecture school are courses and\nstudio. Courses are worthless, unless taught by celebrities, and are\npass-able by anyone with a positive integer for a TOEFL score.</p>\n<p>Studio dominates by an order of magnitude the students’ time and\nenergy, and refers at once to a place, to a pedagogical method, and to\na process, an arc of practice toward a target. The place looks like\nnothing but a garment district sweatshop, an aircraft-scaled room with\nhundreds of identical desks, each one an avalanche of paper, cardboard\nand industrial adhesives. The method is the frantic production of\nimaginary, client-less architecture, endless iteration, critique and\nrevision, over several months, of a cultural center, community library\nor other socially-minded construction that hasn’t been built in America\nsince World War Two.</p>\n<p>The process each term culminates in charette. Named for the cart\nthat came round at midnight to collect the projects of students at the\n19th century Ecole des Beaux Arts (the pupils sometimes jumped on to\ncomplete renderings en route to jury), the charette is a sprint at the\nend of the marathon. After three months of work, the project is\ncompletely redrawn, and often re-imagined, for presentation and jury.\nThis is when the normal sweatshop ambiance of the studio ramps up to\nPharaonic levels of punishment and exertion.</p>\n<p>I had been up for sixty hours. I had vomited twice from nicotine\npoisoning. I had just washed down my last white-cross ephedrine with\nthe last of a warm two liter bottle of Mountain Dew when the pigtailed\nlittle girl in a green jumper arrived at my desk. “Huh?” my neighbor\nChul-Oh grunted, and I pretended I’d been absentmindedly humming, not\nabsentmindedly hallucinating a full-blown 3-dimensional kindergartner\nwho held up her end of a conversation. I just stopped working an hour\nlater when a crumpled sheet of cardboard started singing like a\ndisemboweled Muppet. So my work ethic is a 61 or 62, I guess, about par\nfor my wing of the program.</p>\n<p>Understand, the work ethic isn’t about achievement. The project\ndoesn’t get substantially better in the last forty hours, and you don’t\nlearn anything (about buildings). No matter what you’ve drawn, you’re\ngoing to disappoint someone – certainly yourself. The key is to exhaust\nyourself so thoroughly, to wound your soul so deeply, that even if the\njury goes badly – and it can go very badly – you can’t possibly have\ndone anything else. You can’t be blamed, you can’t feel regret, you\njust can’t feel.</p>\n<p>There are stories about juries. Students attacking critics with\nrazors. Vomiting on purpose, faking a Section 8 wig-out, not faking…The\nwhole topic of the psychology of three or four architects of variable\ntalent and achievement judging the work of a student could fill a\nthesis or two. (Why discuss it in front of the poor bastard, and why at\nthe end, when there’s no time left to fix it?) This one went pretty\nbadly.</p>\n<p>Famous New York Architect (FNYA) told my classmate Erin, flat out,\n“…I’m not kidding, I think you should do something else with your\nlife.” (We’re two years into graduate school here.) Famous L.A.\nArchitect (FLAA) said something devastating to another student –\n“unresolved,” or something withering.</p>\n<p>But I got the worst of it.</p><p><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a533fe79970b-popup\" style=\"float:right\"><img alt=\"Boston3\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a533fe79970b-320wi\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a> </p><p>A Famous Spanish Architect (the hell with FNYA or FLAA, we all want\nto be FSA’s) nicknamed Paxti listens patiently to everything I have to\nsay about my proposed AmeriCorps Youth Leadership Training Center. (I\ncannot make this up.) He sucks wind in through his lips in a reverse\nwhistle, and says, slowly, “Mr. Hamilton…your talent is, ahh, well,\nit’s formidable. No question, formidable.”</p>\n<p>A little weird, arguably positive. But then he takes off his\nunnecessarily chunky glasses and looks deep into my eyes. He says:\n“…but I feel this talent of yours is…well, it’s quite possibly\ndangerous.”</p>\n<p>Brutality is pretty common here, but mostly it’s just confused\nanticlimax. Confusion from your mental state, anticlimax because you\nusually end up talking about things like stairs, or the location and\nspacing of voids (don’t call them windows), which can be pretty\ndamaging to the heroic image you’ve built around your creation. But\nI’ve never, before or since, heard Paxti’s next quasi-Jedi line before:\n“…your talent, deployed in the wrong way, err…” He looks back up to my\nprofessor, continuing: “…I think the author of this project is violent.\nViolent and anti-urban.”</p>\n<p>At least “urban” doesn’t mean “minority” in Spain, so I’m not a racist, but “anti-urban,” in this context, is probably worse.</p>\n<p>So, if I am not stopped, it is my work that will finish off the\nalready imperiled American City. We’ll be lucky if I just stop there.</p>\n<p>I look over at my professor, essentially my boss for this project,\nwho’s now pretending he’s never seen me before. “Yeah, where did this\nkid go off track, I wonder?” he seems to ask. This guy was the one-man\nHamilton cheering section no more than ten minutes before. The dick\nliterally said “go baby go,” to me the night before.</p>\n<p>I realize, for the first time, that I’m studying with someone who\nhas never built a building. Not even a shed. I’ll repeat that. This\nman, in his thirties, teaches people like me about architecture, at the\nhighest level of that admittedly debased discipline, and to my\nknowledge he hasn’t even a bus shelter to his name. I think back, and\nI’m pretty sure two of my three instructors to this point are in the\nsame boat. I can’t explain why this didn’t seem strange before, except\nthat it was so common. (The next year, I attended a reception for a\nhusband-wife veteran-faculty couple, presenting their new project,\nwhich turned out to be a bench. Next door, the Landscape Architecture\nDepartment feted a ditch.)</p>\n<p>It’s all kind of like being in a cult. After a couple of years you\nstumble upon your charismatic leader’s unpublished sci-fi trilogy, or\nhis anti-psychotic medication, or the tattered newspaper accounts of\nhis last Temple’s Tragic End in French Guyana. Uh-oh, I may have signed\nover the possessions / girlfriend to the wrong guy.</p>\n<p>I don’t remember anything after Paxti Wan Kenobi’s prophetic\ncomment. It probably got worse. I left. I never picked up my drawings.\nLost to history. I guess someone might have nicked them in case I\nturned out infamous. Auction them like Hitler watercolors.</p>\n<p>Next block for sale, the first known Violent and Anti-Urban project\nof the criminal Hamilton, wherein we see the young man’s disastrous\npotential…</p><p><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a53400a9970b-popup\" style=\"float:left\"><img alt=\"Boston4\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a53400a9970b-320wi\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px\"></a></p><p>I need a shower. This is the worst recent episode, but I grew up in\na trailer park, so believe me I know how to scrub off shame. Problem is\nI’ve got to walk through about fifteen minutes of Boston-in-February\nfirst, which will add disgust and generalized depression to the\nfilth-load on my skin. I get across the street and hit Massachusetts\nAvenue, and I realize I’m wearing a t-shirt in the middle of winter. I\nhaven’t been outside for longer than two smokes in days. Mass Ave is a\nparticularly violent wind tunnel in a city of contenders for most\npunishing urban vortex worldwide. Entering from a side street, you feel\nyour clothes snap taut to the West like a tacked sail. The way you deal\nwith it is first to cut through buildings wherever possible, and second\nto scream inaudibly, a whisper-scream, the whole time you’re in the\nwind-canyon. When it’s worst, I scream and imagine I’m in the surreal\nhellscape of a first-person-shooter game, bullets whizzing by in all\ndirections. It jukes the adrenal gland or something.</p>\n<p>I scream-walk three blocks, until I can cut through the Old Folks\nHome to my apartment. I call it the OFH to humanize it, but it’s a\npublic Senior Living Facility, and it looks the part. Nine stories of\nbush-hammered concrete and dusky windows, it looks like a stained tomb\neven in summer, and in winter it looks like suffering. Rounding the\ncorner I can see reflected flashing lights, which is depressing but\nfamiliar. Even as little as I’m home, I see an ambulance there every\nfew days.</p>\n<p>It’s not an ambulance. I wheel silent-screaming around the corner\nand the first cop is arriving to pick a fellow up off the sidewalk.\nStill not uncommon. I’ve probably passed three or four guys on the\nsidewalk, Listerine’d to fight the chill. But this man they’re picking\nup isn’t dressed for it. Bare feet. The cop and I look up at the same\ntime and see the open window on the top floor. Shit. The cop asks if I\nsaw anything, but I don’t get his meaning, due to the silent-screaming\nI’m still doing. So the two of us simultaneously look up, down and up\nagain, calculating the angles. The man looks about eighty, and he’s\nbounced out of some frost-withered arbor vitae and is expiring draped\nhalfway out of the concrete planters, feet dangling into the sidewalk.\nHard to describe the condition of the man’s body, except to say it was\nsoftened. Looked like any other elderly man’s body, but without the\nbone structure. The cop tells me to get the fuck out of there, as two\nmore of Boston’s Finest blast up on to the curb in a white Crown Vic.</p>\n<p>I comply with the officer’s instructions. I do what I’m told. I don’t want to see any more softened body.</p>\n<p>Presumably this isn’t just journalism, and I’ve thought some about\nthe experience. So maybe some conclusions. I’m not violent, that was an\nexaggeration, or a poor English word choice from the Spaniard, but I\nmay be anti-urban. In fact I’m pretty sure of it. The city certainly\nhasn’t done much for me today, and the city’s unit of construction, its\nunderlying plan, its architecture. Well, you can see the problem I have\nwith architecture.</p>\n<p>Whatever dementia or infirmity God devised for this old man to put\nhim in this facility, it was the building that killed him. The stained\nconcrete and peeled powder coated steel communicated clearly and\nunrelentingly to him what the entire world thought of him. Not much.\nThe architect gave him the void (don’t call it a window) and the\nelevation (106 feet) to do the job, and a thoughtful landscape\narchitect (it’s always a team effort) even left him a spot to plant\nhimself. New kind of homicide: Death by architecture.</p>\n<p>-Ad Hamilton<br>\nSent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry</p><p>***</p><p><em>Trained as an architect and urban planner, the author is a\nCharlotte-based developer of golf, equestrian, and active-senior\ncommunities.</em></p><p>***</p><p><strong><a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/\">The Owls</a></strong></p>\n<p>“A Stain on Boston” is the second in a series of posts in Ad Hamilton’s project <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/single-servings-premise/\">“Single Servings”</a> at The Owls site. Read “A Stain on Boston, <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/boston1/\">Part I</a>.” The Owls site is an ongoing writing experiment for the web, featuring recent work by <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/stamps-peter-kline/\">Peter Kline</a>, <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/stamps-obrien/\">Dan O'Brien</a>, and <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/stamps-swann/\">Stacey Swann</a>. Work from The Owls site appears here thanks to the generosity of 3QD.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.seanhill.org/sh_bio.html\">Sean Hill's</a> forthcoming project at The Owls site, "A Natural History of My _______", begins in September. Writers were asked to respond to the following prompt: "Focus in on one particular part of your self, tangible or\nintangible, and write a natural history of it based on your\nobservations in 50 to 1500 words (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction,\nor drama). This could be a natural history of almost anything; for\ninstance, your eyebrows, stretch marks, tongue, ingrown toenails,\nfrowns, tragi, tendency to embellish or ignore the truth, laughs,\nwanderlust, farts, pragmatism, shins, or asthma. I’m curious to see\nwhat starting out with such a tight focus will yield."</p><p>You may subscribe to updates from The Owls site using Live Bookmarks, Outlook, Bloglines, MyYahoo, Google Reader, etc., <a href=\"http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/feed/\">feed info here.</a> If you would like to receive updates via a free email newsletter at your Inbox, send an email to owlsmag(AT)gmail(DOT)com with "Join" in the subject header.</p><p></p><p><em><em></em></em><span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"></span></p></div>"
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"content" : "<div><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a520394c970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Early Lester\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a520394c970b-800wi\" title=\"Early Lester\"></a> </p><p></p><p>A couple of months ago I called Lee Konitz and the first thing he said was, “I heard that session of Benny Goodman and Lester Young together on the radio today. Benny was playing that clarinet, so full of vibrato, and then Lester came in, so clean and pure, and I started weeping. No one else has meant so much to me.” A photo of Lester Young hangs in Lee’s practice room.</p><p>\n</p>\n<p>---</p><p>I brought 18 classic pre-1941 Young solos up to Lee’s apartment recently, secretly curious as to how many of them he would recognize. Live recordings, alternate takes, and latterly released items weren’t included: It was all music that he could have studied in the 40’s. It was mostly music with Basie, but I put in a couple of Holiday tracks so we could discuss “Foolin’ Myself,” which is the least familiar standard on the classic Konitz album <em>Motion</em>. <br> </p><p>He could mime or sing along with 17 of the 18 solos. I am deeply impressed and moved by how well Konitz internalized Young’s music and created his own style out of it. </p><p>---</p><p>Of course, Lee studied with major guru Lennie Tristano, who also loved Lester Young. Indeed, Young’s name comes up repeatedly in all of the Tristanoite literature, always with much approbation for the 1936-1940 records. </p><p>Tristano then rejected post-1941 Young. Lee alludes to the same perspective below. Even today, younger followers of the Tristano tradition still insist that post-1941 Lester Young is not very interesting.</p><p>I’m not on the same page in terms of disregarding later Lester. However, early Lester is a body of work that is as transcendent as any artist in jazz history. For me, getting to know this era was the gateway into appreciating later Lester too. You just can’t start with the easy-to-find Verve recordings. You must hear the early work.</p><p>Since beginning work on this celebration six months ago, I have been informally polling my peers and friends, especially saxophonists. My impression so far is that Lester’s early work is all but unknown by most of my contemporaries (with some exceptions like Bill McHenry). One of the difficulties is that Lester didn’t make any records as a leader in the 30’s. Most of his playing is heard during relatively brief solos with Count Basie or Billie Holiday. You have to commit to listening to a lot of non-Young music to hear his contributions. Modern musicians aren’t used to working so hard to find the meat.</p><p>100 years in: it’s time that everybody who plays jazz realizes just how hip this music is. As the Mp3’s clearly show, my transcriptions of the 18 solos leave a lot to be desired. <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/9-footnotes.html\">[Footnote: On the Inaccuracy of These Transcriptions]</a> Walter Page and Jo Jones are on all of these tracks. For those that are inspired to find more, it's out there: these 18 are just part of Young's pre-1941 discography.</p><p>---</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> I think you’ll recognize most of these solos.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> I hope so!</p><p><em>On the canonical LBG (<a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/2-oh-lady.html\">transcribed in the next post</a>), Lee sang in the middle of the first phrases, “call and response,” and began snapping his fingers.</em></p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/35-konitz-responds-to-lbg.mp3\">Download 35 Konitz responds to LBG</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Harold Danko and I used to sing that solo together on gigs, and especially in workshops where we showed that learning a solo like this is essential, just for the discipline. How can you improvise two choruses like that? I suspect he laid for that, really. There’s no second take, right?</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> No, but on other live performances from the early years there are both similarities and differences. </p><p><strong>LK:</strong> What is it that makes this so accessible? And that sound: I’m always surprised, in a way, at how fast his vibrato is. He’s usually described as a no-vibrato player, but he is using one. But it never sounds corny or has the wrong feeling, that feeling “on the sleeve.”</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> He’s not sentimental, you mean.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Not in the least! On the slower pieces, some sentimentality was inevitable, especially in the later days when he had less energy. </p><p>He had the genes, I guess, and the good fortune to have a disciplinarian musical father. The father was probably a pain in the ass who taught him how to take care of business. </p><p><strong>EI: </strong> How did you first learn about the “Lady, Be Good” solo?</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Oh, just hearing the record. </p><p><strong>EI</strong>: Did you know about it before working with Lennie Tristano?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> I was studying Lester in those days, true; I’m not sure of the order of events. Actually, I played with a band in 1945 with a fine Lester Young-style tenor player, Stan Kosow. I remember smoking with him a little bit and listening to these records. I got great pleasure from that!</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee45a970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"WnAm25\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee45a970b-800wi\" title=\"WnAm25\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/02-shoe-shine-boy_pres.mp3\">Download 02 Shoe Shine Boy_pres</a></span></p><p></p><p><strong>LK:</strong> The first bridge sounds worked out.</p><p><strong>EI</strong>: The hits are not only worked out, but incorrectly played besides! </p><p><strong>LK:</strong> There is another take of this one: it’s got some of the same phrases, right?</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> Yeah. And there’s the Bird on tenor where he plays some of the exact same phrases, too!</p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/36-bird-on-tenor-plays-pres.mp3\">Download 36 Bird on tenor plays Pres</a></span></p><p><em>[This is Bird in a room at the Savoy Hotel in Chicago in 1943. It's been called different things; usually "Shoe" is in the title.]</em></p><p>Both these early Lester Young solos have two full 32-bar choruses, which is just so nice. There aren't so many others as long. It’s his first record date.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> He was waiting for this! He was ready.</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> You learned this solo too, right?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Oh yes. I need to review though, at this point. Leave this CD with me, will you? Today, with the computer, it’s so nice to hear the solo slower without the distortion we had in the old days when we slowed it down.</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> How did you learn the solos back then?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong>Picking up the needle and putting it back a little bit...</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> Because these were 78’s, right?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Yeah. But it would work, we still got the information. But now it’s really a well-constructed procedure. The kids are eating it up!</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> It’s a lot easier now. But maybe you got something else when it was just the needle chewing down a 78...?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> We had to be absorbed in it enough to learn it, true. </p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee4ef970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"NsQViW\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee4ef970b-800wi\" title=\"NsQViW\"></a></p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/03-boogie-woogie_pres.mp3\">Download 03 Boogie Woogie_pres</a></span></p><p><em>Here, Lee quietly listened at first, but than abruptly let loose and sang along with the first four bars the second chorus. I had already noted these phrases myself: they are three articulations of the same idea played differently each time.</em></p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b30b970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"E9FMN4\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b30b970c-800wi\" title=\"E9FMN4\"></a></p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/04-lester-leaps-in_pres.mp3\">Download 04 Lester Leaps In_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK:</strong> That is so perfect we wonder if could have been improvised. Is there a second take? No -- it doesn’t matter, if it’s that good, it doesn’t matter if it was really improvised.</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> You played this solo with Marshall Brown on a recording.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Really? That’s sort of egotistical...</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee678970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Ew8ZI6\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee678970b-800wi\" title=\"Ew8ZI6\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/05-dickies-dream_pres.mp3\">Download 05 Dickie's Dream_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> This is one of my favorites. My Jewish soul loves the minor keys, I guess.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Lester loved the major sixth degree in a minor key. I’m not sure, but I think Lester loved the minor keys more than most of his predecessors. I don’t associate Jelly Roll, Pops, or Hawkins with the minor key as much...</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> It’s a shame he didn’t compose more. There’s not much more than this and “Tickle-Toe,” right? That’s also in a minor key. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Also the later piece, “Blue Lester.”</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Some of those riffs in the Basie band, though: they must be his, even though they are uncredited.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b3cf970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"L7aSyh\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b3cf970c-800wi\" title=\"L7aSyh\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/06-tickle-toe-pres.mp3\">Download 06 Tickle-Toe-pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong>He just didn’t play like this later with other players like Johnny Guarnieri or Nat Cole. He needed Basie and the big band. These arrangements gave him something to work against. We also must give credit to Walter Page and Jo Jones, who play so strong. Sometimes I miss Walter Page in today’s bass players...</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b486970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"7Ln9VO\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b486970c-800wi\" title=\"7Ln9VO\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/07-you-can-depend-on-me-pres.mp3\">Download 07 You Can Depend On Me-pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Phew! On all these solos, there’s not an incorrect or misplayed note, but somehow you know he’s making almost everything up.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> After “Lady Be Good,” this is currently my favorite Young solo.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Oh, boy! It is magic, for sure.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee80e970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Br1dzq\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee80e970b-800wi\" title=\"Br1dzq\"></a> </p><p><span></span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/08-pound-cake_pres.mp3\">Download 08 Pound Cake_pres</a></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> The blues can be so corny in the hands of other players, but this is pure music. Warne Marsh and I played this as a head. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Did you learn the solos separately or did one of you learn them first and then show the other? </p><p><strong>LK: </strong>I think we both learned them and then could play them together without discussing them, really. I don’t remember showing each other any of the solos; we both just knew them already.</p><p>I’m pretty sure “Pound Cake” is on those tapes of Warne and I playing at the Jazz Showcase in the mid-1970s with Wilbur Campbell. Joe Segal recorded them on the crudest cassettes, but Mark Levinson has done an incredible job of cleaning them up. You’ll have to hear them someday. I’m pretty sure they will be released.</p><p>Warne was the most true to the Lester Young ethos. So many guys came out of Pres: Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Paul Desmond, Wardell Gray, Allen Eager...but Warne did not just an imitation, but embodied the actual spirit of Lester Young. </p><p>Have you been exploring Warne Marsh, too, Ethan?</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Yes, some things are just amazing...</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> What have you found?</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> “It’s You Or No One,” 1959 with Peter Ind and Dick Scott.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Ah hah. Well, I’ve said this before, but I really love those four tunes with Paul Chambers and Paul Motian on his first record. Not the other tracks as much...</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> Well, Paul Chambers is giving you some of that Walter Page there for sure!</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b5db970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"JwMxDZ\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b5db970c-800wi\" title=\"JwMxDZ\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/09-jive-at-five_pres.mp3\">Download 09 Jive At Five_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> He almost crosses the line in the second half: it is almost too sweet. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Oh, with those fourths?</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Yes. </p><p>He was a singer on his horn. He loved Frank Sinatra, you know. The only recordings we have of Lester actually singing are not very serious, but I’m sure he could have sung a standard just beautifully.</p><p>He always credited the white musicians Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey. Have you heard Trumbauer?</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Just enough to hear a little of where Lester comes from.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> It’s interesting that Lester was so forthright about admiring and emulating white musicians. Trumbauer is worth hearing, but as for Jimmy Dorsey, I thought he was an instrumental virtuoso but not really a jazz player.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Some people think he got saxophone “false fingerings” from Dorsey.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong>It could be. Lester's rhythm, though, comes from someplace else - probably Louis Armstrong.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee96a970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"FjUodT\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51ee96a970b-800wi\" title=\"FjUodT\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/10-time-out_pres.mp3\">Download 10 Time Out_pres</a></span></p><p><em>When the track started, Lee said, “That’s the other tenor player,” and I said, “What?” I didn’t realize that Herschel Evans gets the break and then Pres gets the chorus. Now it’s obvious but I was confused by the strange structure! The confusion was worth it just to have Lee be so certain: it was a great moment. </em> </p><p><strong>LK: </strong> These are hard changes for the day. But Lester doesn’t have any problem!</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eea35970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"ZPiWmr\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eea35970b-800wi\" title=\"ZPiWmr\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/11-jumpin-at-the-woodside_pres.mp3\">Download 11 Jumpin' At The Woodside_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>EI:</strong> The bridge is something else here.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Well, I don’t know who did it first, Charlie Christian or Lester Young, but they both could play swing riffs on the A sections, and then come up with something just so surprising for the bridge.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Oh, that was Christian’s thing, too? I haven’t listened to him much.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Charlie Christian played the best bridges! </p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eeabc970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"FwaVUP\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eeabc970b-800wi\" title=\"FwaVUP\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/12-twelfth-street-rag_pres.mp3\">Download 12 Twelfth Street Rag_pres</a></span></p><p><em>Lee sang this longish, fastish solo impeccably. He looked quite sad at the end. </em> </p><p><strong>LK: </strong> How can you talk about these jewels? Each one seems better than the next. Ethan, why are you exploring Lester Young now? </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> I’m trying to fill in some holes in my playing. But also, the more I listen to Lester Young, the more I hear how amazing he is. </p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Same thing here. I love him more all the time.</p><p><strong>EI: </strong>This tune is corny, in a way, but they make it so hip.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong>When you can play like this, the material becomes almost less important - it's just a springboard for pure improvisation and pure music.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b7c2970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"P6YR1D\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b7c2970c-800wi\" title=\"P6YR1D\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/13-texas-shuffle_pres.mp3\">Download 13 Texas Shuffle_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Ah, the metal clarinet. Clarinet was my first instrument. </p><p>Again, notice that surprising bridge. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> This is one of the early big band charts I dig the most. Herschel Evans is credited, actually...</p><p><em>Lee didn’t sing as much as dance and pantomime this one. He threw his head back at the start of the second A, miming the clarinet’s squall.</em></p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eeb56970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"H7A4uj\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eeb56970b-800wi\" title=\"H7A4uj\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/14-taxi-war-dance_pres.mp3\">Download 14 Taxi War Dance_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK:</strong> What's the name of this again? I know this one well...</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> "Taxi War Dance." This was one of his own favorites.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eebfe970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"VxzjOg\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eebfe970b-800wi\" title=\"VxzjOg\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/15-easy-does-it_pres.mp3\">Download 15 Easy Does It_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Lester loved the augmented triad. </p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Yes, I think that was as far out as he got. He expanded chords with 6ths and 9ths too, but didn’t really need more than that. Coleman Hawkins had more of the advanced harmonic information. “Body and Soul” alone...</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eec95970b-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"VomS99\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a51eec95970b-800wi\" title=\"VomS99\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/16-he-aint-got-rhythm_pres.mp3\">Download 16 He Ain't Got Rhythm_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> This one is less familiar - I don't think I know this one.</p><p><strong>EI: </strong>It's the first song Billie Holiday and Young recorded together. There’s some nice harmonic moves here.</p><p></p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b996970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Shb8kU\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575b996970c-800wi\" title=\"Shb8kU\"></a> </p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/17-foolin-myself_pres.mp3\">Download 17 Foolin' Myself_pres</a></span></p><p><strong>LK: </strong> You can’t respect a melody more than that. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Is this performance why it’s on <em>Motion</em>?</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Yes. </p><p>I remember that I suddenly felt like playing bass lines on the saxophone behind Sonny Dallas when he soloed...He said he liked it! Of course, that might have been a little arrogant, to think I could play a bass line next to Elvin Jones...</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> It’s a great track. Don’t go back and change a note!</p><p><span> <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575ba3c970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"ITmU72\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a575ba3c970c-800wi\" title=\"ITmU72\"></a> <br></span></p><p><span><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/files/18-when-youre-smiling_pres.mp3\">Download 18 When You're Smiling_pres</a></span></p><p><em>Lee sang this one too. </em> </p><p><strong>EI: </strong> I hear bebop suggested by that ornamented bit.</p><p><strong>LK: </strong> Charlie Parker took this approach and made it his own...which is what we are all supposed to do. I admired Charlie Parker the most when he played something like Lester. In the later years, sometimes Bird could get too bluesy for me. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> I read somewhere that you thought “Yardbird Suite” - which is almost the changes to “Lady Be Good” -- had the pure feeling.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Oh yes, that solo is one of the greatest. I remember what Lennie Tristano said about that solo. Almost at the end, Bird plays three C’s: "Dut dah dah!" And Tristano complained about the vibrato on those notes. He said that it was a perfect solo except for that momentary vibrato. </p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Well...<em>[Both of us laugh]</em></p><p><strong>LK:</strong> I heard Phil Schaap on the radio insisting a few Lester Young blues phases on something later with Basie were just like John Coltrane. There’s no doubt that John knew Lester’s style.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> Billy Hart says that John Coltrane comes from Lester Young and Sonny Rollins comes from Coleman Hawkins.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Ah hah. Well, that might be right.</p><p>People say that Lester played behind the beat, but do you hear him playing behind on any of these solos?</p><p><strong>EI: </strong> No, it’s right in there.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Exactly. Right in there. Well, maybe later on he was more behind.</p><p><strong>EI:</strong> I've been paying attention recently to how much your beat dances and swings while improvising, which is obviously something you learned from Lester Young.</p><p><strong>LK:</strong> Swinging remains the hardest thing to do, really - I'm still working on it! Lester had it <em>down</em>.</p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/2-oh-lady.html\">[Go on to Oh Lady!]</a></p><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/lester-young-centennial.html\">[Back to Contents]</a><br> </p></div>"
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"title" : "Lester Young Centennial",
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"content" : "<div><p><a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a5770458970c-pi\" style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"100\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cb9b653ef0120a5770458970c-800wi\" title=\"100\"></a> </p><p><br>Lester Young was born 100 years ago today. He died just over 50 years ago, in March 1959. </p><p>Young is the most important link in the chain between early jazz and modern jazz. He sounded good playing with both New Orleans-style musicians and beboppers. If he were around now he could probably go to Smalls tonight and sit in with whoever was on the bandstand without any problem. </p><p>---</p><p>While few other jazz musicians from the pre-1950 era continuously invented new phrases, serious Young lovers get every record he’s ever made because they know that there’s always the possibility that he will play something they haven’t heard before. In addition, Young had one of the most swinging beats in the history of the music. And though he could deliver a honking, stomping tenor, even his most frantic outbursts sound curiously relaxed. He never tried too hard or worked for the impossible. He just was: Cool. </p><p>In fact, he may have literally invented the word “cool” and given it to the English language, for his verbal jousting and pre-beatnik beatnik behavior gave him a iconic mystique almost inseparable from the sounds coming out of his horn.</p><p>The improvisation, the beat, the cool, and the mystique has made him one of the most well-loved musicians of the 20th century. These posts document my attempt to learn from Lester Young in the 21st. </p><p>I ask the forbearance of dedicated Young fans and scholars. They are sure to find errors and incorrect assumptions in my work. If I ever to decide to officially publish I promise to clean up all errata and double-check all suppositions. For now, this is just a private journey made public. </p><p>1) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/1-18-with-lee-k.html\">18 with Lee K.</a></p><p>2) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/2-oh-lady.html\">Oh, Lady!</a></p><p>3) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/3-calling-the-masters.html\">Calling the Masters</a></p><p>4) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/4-the-power-of-vulnerability-.html\">The Power of Vulnerability</a></p><p>5) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/5-miles-davis-and-lester-young.html\">Miles Davis and Lester Young</a></p><p>6) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/6-a-beginners-guide-to-the-master-takes.html\">A Beginner’s Guide to the Master Takes </a></p><p>7) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/7-the-end-and-the-future.html\">The End and the Future</a></p><p>8) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/8-top-and-bottom.html\">Top and Bottom</a></p><p>9) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/9-footnotes.html\">Footnotes</a></p><p>10) <a href=\"http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/08/10-further-reading.html\">Further Reading</a></p></div>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:justify\"><em>As it appeared in the <a href=\"http://businessdayonline.com\">BusinessDay</a> of July 21, 2009<br>\n</em>\n<p>I remember that growing up, the fabric from which my school uniform was made was manufactured in Nigeria, and that the ankara that was the aso ebi when my aunt was getting married was also made in Nigeria. If it were now, it is almost sure that the aso ebi would be made from imported fabric. I can also remember that by the nineties we had started seeing a steady increase in the influx of ‘China’, such that white fabric for school uniform came in different kinds, a particularly popular one of which was simply called China. At this point, consumption of textile products in Nigeria was shared between imported fabrics and locally produced ones. Sometime between then and now, Nigeria managed to lose the textile industry, an industry that, according to some sources, was the second largest employer after the government.</p>\n<p>One of the ready culprits for the problem with the industry is the inflow of imported products into the country. Before I go on I probably should mention that the Nigerian government prohibits the importation of textile products into the country, so whatever textile product you see in the market that is not made in Nigeria is actually not supposed to be there. Therefore, when people point to the influx of textile products into the country they are in effect pointing to smuggling as the reason for the problem with the Nigerian textile industry.</p>\n<p>In an interview with Punch newspapers last year, Mr. jaiyeola Olanrewaju, the Director-General of the Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association said that about 90 percent of the textile in Nigerian markets are imported, and that 80 percent of that 90 percent is from China. (Do I need to point to Hitarget and its various incarnations?) This means that 90 percent of the textile products in the country is smuggled. Alarming, right? Anyone who needs to get a better understanding of this should spend some time at the Dantokpa market in Cotonou. Most of the textile products imported into Benin come from China and almost all end up in Nigeria. </p>\n<p>Singling out smuggling as the biggest problem for the textile industry is very comfortable, but it is also misleading. One has to consider the reasons that smuggling is viable, in the first instance. This is of course because the importation of textile products is completely prohibited in the country. The standard argument for the prohibition of the importation of certain products is that it is an instrument for the protection of local industries. However, the route that many countries often take to protect the local industry is the imposition of high tariff on the importation of the products whose industries the government chooses to protect. This has the advantage of protecting the local industry on the one hand, and of being an actual income earner for the country. Imagine how much the government would be making if import duty were paid on the 90 percent of textile products in the Nigerian market. </p>\n<p>I was going through my notes when I came across a short article I wrote last year on the efforts of the government to revive the industry. It was an initiative that came towards the end of Mr. Obasanjo’s presidency. The investment bank arm of the United Bank of Africa Group was asked by the federal government to source 70 billion naira through bonds of five year duration. The money was termed the Textile Development and it was to be given to the Nigerian Export Import Bank (NEXIM) for further lending to actors in the textile industry. In that article, I wrote that the federal government should factor into any initiative that would resuscitate the textile industry an acceptance of the role that smuggling plays in the whole mix. Factoring in smuggling does not mean that the government should simply fold its arms, but that the government should look towards making policies that would make smuggling less attractive. This of course would include reviewing the total ban on imported textile products, and working towards a general improvement of basic infrastructure in the country.</p>\n<p>Just as I was thinking of these issues I came across a report in the Vanguard of July 8. It says that the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Industry, Mr. Solomon Agidani, said that the United Bank for Africa was unable to source the fund. And that was it; nothing more. I was so disappointed that I could only wonder whether it is simply that the federal government has not realized the potential that the textile industry holds for the country, or that it is totally unconcerned by what is happening to the industry. </p></div>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:justify\">With wide-eyed amazement, people ask me \"are you okay?\" when they hear that I'm living in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_del_este\">Ciudad del Este</a>, Paraguay. They've heard and read descriptions that make it sound like <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BVlARaJM74\">Mos Eisley</a>. My answer is usually a shrug and a comment about how all the restaurants are closed by 2pm and there isn't a single movie theatre in the city that supposedly brings in about 40% of Paraguay's GDP (read: not terribly exciting... also, how am I supposed to watch District 9???).<br><br>But today was a perfect maelstrom of the malevolent in Ciudad del Este, almost as if orchestrated for an <a href=\"http://cfolch.blogspot.com/2009/08/another-movie-about-triple-frontera.html\">action/adventure movie</a>:<br><br>1) Lebanese merchant (\"comerciante\") Ali Zaioun (Zaium?) narrowly<a href=\"http://www.ultimahora.com/notas/247511-Polic%C3%ADa-fue-quien-atent%C3%B3-contra-empresario-y-falleci%C3%B3-por-disparo\"> avoided being assassinated </a>in a clear hit job as he and his lawyer left the Palacio de Justicia this morning. As he approached his BMW, two men with helmets on a motor cycle approached and opened fire. Fortunately, Zaioun's guard pulled his gun and was joined by some cops. Zaioun was untouched. His car riddled with bullets. The assailant who died during the battle was also a police officer--badge and handcuffs in a pocket. The one who lived is wounded, in the hospital, and still to be questioned...<br><br>2) Meanwhile, today a Paraguayan immigration officer was arrested for <a href=\"http://www.ultimahora.com/notas/247514-Funcionario-de-Migraciones-fue-imputado-por-producci%C3%B3n-de-documentos-falsos\">issuing a false passport</a> and national id card to a Colombian woman. Colombian lady was supposed to fly into Spain on her fake Paraguayan passport. She, the immigration officer, and two Paraguayan women have been detained. We'll see what happens.<br><br>3) Two drug mules arrested in Brazil yesterday with <a href=\"http://www.diariovanguardia.com.py/detalle_articulo.php?id_contenido=12163\">137 kilos of marijuana </a>explained today that they acquired their cargo in the middle of Ciudad del Este and were headed to the capital of Paraná state, Curitiba. Wholesale value on the street? Some $300,000.<br><br>4) The son of a Brazilian couple (all living in Paraguay) is <a href=\"http://www.diariovanguardia.com.py/detalle_articulo.php?id_contenido=12155\">still missing </a>after being kidnapped Friday by cops (or perhaps a couple of men pretending to be cops).<br><br>Really? Does it have to be like this? This is also the only city in Paraguay where I know you can get bubble tea and the Korean food is excellent.<br></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4281969930440774536-4216278984006109508?l=cfolch.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><br><p>We’re standing around in front of the gallery in the soft, misty rain. People are smoking and talking with their hands. A very small woman in a curvy black dress is standing alone with her arms crossed, shiny black curls swinging around her bare shoulders. My friend says hello to her, and then I do too, it’s a friendly night, here in the rain. She seems both relieved and dismayed to have been noticed as a person who is waiting for something. I ask her why she’s standing around.</p>\n<p>“My friend is very very late,” she tells me, her shoulders rise and drop, punctuating her annoyance. She holds a palm up to the rain. She’s tapping her foot. She’s smiling through all of this. She’s performing something.</p>\n<p>“You could wait inside,” I say, pointing at the massive plate glass windows that separate us from the party.</p>\n<p>“Oh no,” she says. “I want to stay here and get even madder by the time he shows up.”</p>\n<p>Now I get it. Now I’m interested. “What are you going to say when he does?”</p>\n<p>She gives me a look that says, we’re in this together, we women, we know how this works, we know where the power lies. “I’m going to tell him,” she leans closer, “that he better buy me a drink before I’ll even say a word to him.”</p>\n<p>We both laugh, and she whisks some of the dewdrops off her pretty arms. A taxi pulls up, a man in a nice shirt and nice shoes tumbles out. He seems earnest even in the way he unfolds himself from the taxi, eager and clumsy. It’s not what I expected at all. I look back at her, she winks at me as he brushes past me to greet her.</p>\n<p>Over my shoulder, I can hear her. She’s not mad at all.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/municipalarchive.wordpress.com/280/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=municipalarchive.wordpress.com&blog=3626641&post=280&subd=municipalarchive&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"content" : "Rana Dasgupta writes of the <a href=\"http://www.granta.com/Magazine/107/Capital-Gains/1\">profligacy of Delhi's affluent</a>: their obsession for fancy foreign cars, diamonds, wasteful parties, bodyguards and the like. But what interested me most was this conversation with MC, the son of a billionaire, who has a <span style=\"font-style:italic\">major</span> business plan:<br><blockquote>‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’<br><br>He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.<br><br>‘Where?’ I ask.<br><br>‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it</span>. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’<br><br>MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.<br><br>‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’<br><br>Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.<br><br>‘Thank you,’ he says.<br><br>‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.<br><br>‘Nothing.’<br><br><p>MC is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded the time he allotted me. All of a sudden, I find him immensely charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.</p> <p>‘I’m only twenty-eight,’ he says. ‘Why not?’</p> <p>He becomes flamboyant.</p> <p>‘We’re going to be among the top five food processors in the world. You know the first company I’m going to buy? Heinz.’</p> <p>I’m interested in his <em>Why not?</em> Is it on the strength of such a throwaway reason that nearly three-quarters of a million acres of Ethiopia are being cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world? I wonder what the emotional register of this is for him. It seems as if, somewhere, it’s all a bit of a lark.</p></blockquote><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14626538-7423743477911633467?l=thirtylettersinmyname.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Jimmy Smith: \"Back at the Chicken Shack\" (1960); \"The Dynamic Duo\" (with Wes Montgomery, 1966)",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfHNAuyrI/AAAAAAAAAp4/A6q4QF7f8sE/s1600-h/jimmysmith.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:400px;height:339px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfHNAuyrI/AAAAAAAAAp4/A6q4QF7f8sE/s400/jimmysmith.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><b>NICK DERISO: </b>Though Jimmy Smith is the principal voice of the Hammond B-3 in jazz, finding an entry point in his long discography can be difficult.<br><br>Some might argue for 1956's \"At the Organ,\" featuring Cedar Walton, Pepper Adams and Chick Corea. For me, though, that one doesn't pop with enough grease.<br><br>Start with \"Back at the Chicken Shack.\" Perfectly named, even better played, this 1960 release is one of those dimly lit, back-alley Blue Note classics of singular brilliance.<br><br>Primarily, that's because Smith had, by then, completely inhabited his spot as the blues cat who played bebop.<span><br><br>Smith, see, was among the first to understand the importance of a foot in the organ style. A pioneer of the bassless trio, since he had such low-end dexterity, he also possessed a rare two-handed artistry -- having become equally adept at lefty chordal accompaniment as with solo lines on the right.<br><br>Throughout, everything had a deep soul -- even though, more often than not, the tunes on \"Chicken Shack\" were also up-tempo. It was great, great party music.<br><br>Thing is, in addition to all of this latent R&B street cred, Smith was clearly a fan of jazz's unique syncopations (so, notably, was labelmate Lou Donaldson) -- meaning he moved freely among both the roots and bebop crowds.<br><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfOEjWDXI/AAAAAAAAAqA/mG61XjtJuMY/s1600-h/smithchicken.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:200px;height:200px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfOEjWDXI/AAAAAAAAAqA/mG61XjtJuMY/s200/smithchicken.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>\"Chicken Shack\" was, for instance, also one of the first albums to properly feature tenorman Stanley Turrentine. The great Kenny Burrell is on guitar.<br><br>Full disclosure: I found \"Chicken Shack\" later, traveling backward in the Smith catalog, after \"The Dynamic Duo.\"<br><br>\"Duo,\" released in 1966 on Verve and featuring guitarist Wes Montgomery, was just the second jazz record I ever heard (after Julian \"Cannonball\" Adderley's \"At the Club\"). My father and I were into what was then called soul jazz -- and this record was one of the touchstones of our groove thing. That's why I still have \"Duo\" on vinyl -- both the copy we listened to, the one with my dad's name carefully written on it by my mother ... and the replacement copy for casual listening -- then the (never used, anymore) cassette tape, and now the (nearly worn out) compact disc.<br><br>This 1966 Verve release blows a gaping hole in the popular concept, really both for Smith and Montgomery, that they devolved into genre players -- former jazz stars now in a loveless courtship with pop music.<br><br>Many of their recordings, it's true, suffered with too many strings, and a penchant for quickly dated songs of their day. But that doesn't rule out the odd shimmering delight.<br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfSxSkN3I/AAAAAAAAAqI/WrSeYaOHO4s/s1600-h/smithmontgomerydynamic.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:200px;height:200px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9n816j7EPLw/SnUfSxSkN3I/AAAAAAAAAqI/WrSeYaOHO4s/s200/smithmontgomerydynamic.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>The sharp-edged \"Duo\" is one of them -- brassy and outsized, with orchestration by Oliver Nelson, and highlighted by a tough version of \"Down By the Riverside.\" It was as muscular and distinctive as anything either was doing separately.<br><br>The terrific backing band includes Grady Tate and Clark Terry, though Montgomery -- perhaps predictably -- very nearly steals the show. A favorite line from the original liner notes, concerning Wes, was a reference to his \"amazing, blazing guitar phrasing.\"<br><br>They find an emotional telepathy on the horns-free \"James and Wes\" that completes the circle for fans of Smith's down-home vernacular.<br><br>It's a romp in the style of Smith's earlier triumphs on \"Chicken Shack,\" but also an advancement of the sound in that Montgomery's rounder, fuller improvisations push Smith into more complex iterations of the bluesy runs he'd become rightly famous for.<br><br>Smith definitively shows across these two recordings that he could adapt his thunderously emotional sound into both the small-group and big-band contexts. They are legend-making, awfully fun, and essential.<br><br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/iqhN6rvfJt4%26hl%3Den%26fs%3D1%26&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe><br><br>Purchase: <strong>Jimmy Smith - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Back-Chicken-Shack-Jimmy-Smith/dp/B000UO8BDE\"><em>Back at the Chicken Shack</em></a></strong><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Back-Chicken-Shack-Jimmy-Smith/dp/B000UO8BDE\"><em></em></a>; <strong>Smith and Wes Montgomery - <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Jimmy-Wes-Dynamic-Smith-Montgomery/dp/B0000047D7\"><em>The Dynamic Duo</em></a></strong><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Jimmy-Wes-Dynamic-Smith-Montgomery/dp/B0000047D7\"><em></em></a><br><br><br><br><br></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8367705548617137551-979952993280595150?l=www.somethingelsereviews.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><p><a href=\"http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002730.html\">One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations: Number 16: How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy?</a>: The mother of the bride-to-be says:</p>\r\n\r\n<blockquote>\r\n <p>Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter XVII of Volume III (Chap. 59): Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would have thought it! And is it really true? Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it -- nothing at all. I am so pleased -- so happy. Such a charming man! -- so handsome! so tall! -- Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.... My dearest child.... I can think of nothing else! Ten thousand a year, and very likely more! 'Tis as good as a Lord! And a special licence. You must and shall be married by a special licence. But my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of, that I may have it tomorrow.</p>\r\n</blockquote>\r\n\r\n<p>So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?</p>\r\n\r\n<p>I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>Consider it first in relative income terms. Output per capita--annual GDP in America today divided by the number of people in America--is valued at some $36,000. Our crude estimates tell us that output per capita in Britain just after the Napoleonic Wars was valued at some 60 pound sterling a year.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>Thus in relative income terms--relative to the average of disposable incomes in his society--Fitzwilliam Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year of disposable income gave him about the same multiple of average income in his society as an annual disposable income of $6,000,000 a year would give someone in our society.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>On the other hand, my guess is that someone today with a disposable income of $300,000 a year can spend it to get the same or higher utility as Fitzwilliam Darcy could by spending his disposable income of 10,000 pounds a year. This is a guess--a guess that our material standard of living today is some twenty times that of Mr. Darcy's England.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>Nevertheless, it is an informed guess. By our standards, early nineteenth century Britain was desperately poor. Moreover, things are made much more complex by the fact that there are lots of things we take for granted--and that are for us trivially cheap--that Fitzwilliam Darcy could not get at any price. Consider that Nathan Meyer Rothschild, richest (non-royal) man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, died in his fifties of an infected abscess that the medicine of the day had no way to treat.</p>\r\n</div><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal?a=dt52xBAgp30:kM6YX_R53js:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal?a=dt52xBAgp30:kM6YX_R53js:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal/~4/dt52xBAgp30\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Adverse Selection in Relationship Markets",
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"content" : "<p>Adverse Selection is the name for a common syndrome in markets where “market participation is a negative signal.” For example: life insurance office, enters the husband and he announces: “Quick, I need a million dollar life insurance policy on my wife; by 6:45 this evening!” The agent thinks: “Yeah, quick commission! Ka-Ching!” Off stage the insurance company notes both agent and husband’s particpation in this insurance market are signalling a negative. <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/03/adverse-selection\">Adverse selection</a>.</p>\n<p>Markets can be structured to encourage adverse selection. When the guy in the plaid suit swoops down on you in the parking lot most of us think “oh dear, here comes the salesman” but the sophisticated observer of markets thinks: “adverse selection.” When a car company announces that their sales people aren’t paid a commission they are trying to signal the absence of this problem.</p>\n<p>When the mortgage industry rejiggered their risk management architecture they created a market with an abundance of adverse selection. The mortgage brokers were encouraged to ask few questions while gathering their commissions. Mortgage buyers where invited to murder their financial lives. Apparently the entire hierarchy of this financially innovative market encouraged adverse selection and everybody’s participation was a negative signal.</p>\n<p>Insurance contract often have clauses to temper the problem of adverse of selection. If you die shortly after buying a life insurance contract they will take a close look at that clause. The preexisting condition clauses in health insurance contracts are mutant versions of these. <a href=\"http://www.pri.org/health/ira-glass-health-insurance1517.html\">Horrible horrible stories</a> are common, insurance companies abusing these clauses to claw their way out of their contracts. But notice how any market with even a wiff of the taint of adverse selection problem suffers another problem.</p>\n<p>If you go to bar, or sign up for a dating site, or even sign up for a course at night school your entering a market for new relationships. Such markets are riff with adverse selection problems. So by walking thru the door you immediately become suspect. Your participation in the market is a negative signal? Who are these losers? In the healthcare debate the reluctance of optimistic healthy people to participate in the market would seem to have a bit of that. I.e. they aren’t just suffering from a naive misunderstanding about time, they are also reluctant to hang out with all those sick losers. It’s not just “I’m healthy I don’t need insurance, it’s I don’t want to be associated with that kind of people.”</p>\n<p>All the markets for creating new relationship have serious adverse selection problems; e.g. consulting, sales, hiring. The problems are greater the longer term the relationship is going to be.</p>\n<p>Hiring is a great example. If you list an opening anybody who applies is immediately suspect; particularly if they are unemployed. Their participation in your hiring process is a negative signal. This signal is probably more accurate when the economy is strong and applicants are few, but ironically when the economy is weak and the applicants are numerous then the need for a cheap rule of thumb for sorting the applicants increases. Here’s a <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203872404574257983795638374.html\">nice article</a> (thanks Luda) about this syndrome. The HR or head hunter jargon for this problem - two words: actives and passives. Anybody who is actively looking is immediately suspect.</p>\n<p>This is the Groucho Marx story: ”I sent the club a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”</p>\n<p>Since adverse selection taints relationship building markets you get a plethora of work arounds. There is demand for faux passivity. Eight percent of the folks at the evening drawing class maybe looking for a relationship, but the twenty percent who are there to learn a new skill provide a plausible cover story. Most of the folks in the bar maybe looking for new relationships, but if they can get a gaggle of their existing friends to head out to the bar with them then they have a good cover story. No doubt with a little effort you can think of lots of activities that include in their value proposition a dose of faux intended to treat the problem of adverse selection in relationship building.</p>\n<p>The problem is perfectly symmetric. These days you see lots of job listings that read along these lines: “paid opportunity!” or “grow into in-house and salaried positions” or “great resume experience”. Once you start thinking that every posting is a negative signal about the company in question it really changes the way you read the postings. And amazingly you can almost always see why this one is a looser. For example doesn’t this: “report directly to the _ and _ and work alongside _” raise a bit of concern? I suspect they mentioned that in the posting because it’s a problem and hence it is - more than you know - part of the job description. I worked for one large institution that had a policy that they would absolutely never pay for job listings - I now think that reflected their deep seated desire to never look so desperate as to be actively seeking a relationship.</p>\n<p>Middlemen provide one way to tackle the adverse selection problem. If I need to fill a position I’d rather, given the above, avoid the job posting markets. So I go to my social networks, or I go to a professional headhunter. I find that fascinating. I’d noticed before how the <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2007/11/romney-the-deal-maker\">middleman is two-faced</a> - offering one face to each side of the transaction he is intermediating. But this high lights another kind of duality in the middleman’s role. He is at one and the same time offering a service that tempers the market failures due to adverse selection while at the same time his incentive is that ka-ching of closing the deal.</p>"
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"content" : "<div><br><p style=\"text-align:justify\">For a long time I used to go to bed early but, believe me, that shit had to stop.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Stately, plump Buck Mulligan tried, once more, to lose the weight.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">A screaming comes across the sky, and the neighbors make a noise complaint.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía urinated on himself.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins…no, kid, <em>loins</em>. Not “lions.” Christ.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Call me, Ishmael.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">All happy families are lying.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">One morning, after an evening of unsettling dreams, Gregor Samsa woke up next to one of his students, a voluptuous 24-year-old Puerto-Rican named Consuela.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Mother died today. Or “father,” as she liked to be called.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">Mrs Dalloway said she would deflower herself.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:justify\">It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be fending off gay rumors.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/porousborders.wordpress.com/996/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=porousborders.wordpress.com&blog=7142945&post=996&subd=porousborders&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Mongolian Cashmere: Softer than a baby’s bottom",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712f30ce970c-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:right\"><img alt=\"Goats\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712f30ce970c-320wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:315px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Goats\"></a> Before I came to Mongolia, I thought the softest thing in the world was the rear end of a baby. But that was before I visited the Gobi Cashmere factory, where I saw the production process from smelly goat hair to high-quality clothes. It’s hard to believe that the scraggy goats you see in the countryside are the source of Mongolia’s fabulous cashmere products, but it’s true. Somehow, the tough conditions of Mongolia lead to incredible, wearable softness.</p>\n<p>Mongolia is the second largest producer of raw cashmere, after China. Estimates vary, but Mongolia produces about 20 percent of global supply. China produces about 70 percent. The rest comes from Afghanistan, Iran, India, Pakistan and Central Asia. In spite of this, Mongolia hasn’t succeeded—at least not yet—in branding its top-quality cashmere.</p>\n<p></p>\n\n<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"MARGIN-RIGHT:0px\"><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2011572241a8a970b-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:left\"><img alt=\"Spinning machines\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2011572241a8a970b-320wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;MARGIN:0px 5px 5px 0px;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:315px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Spinning machines\"></a> <a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e201157223adf2970b-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:left\"></a>The <a href=\"http://www.gobi.mn/eng/index.php\">Gobi Cashmere</a> factory is a sprawling, 10 hectare complex, with endless corridors. The Director, Mr Baatarsaikhan, is an energetic man, the kind of person who runs up stairs two steps at a time. He claims to walk at least 10 kilometers a day within the factory, and I believe him. He’s also visibly excited about his products, and with good reason. They’re simply beautiful.<br> <br>Cashmere supply is limited. All goats produce it, but in most places it’s not good enough to process. In Mongolia, cashmere fibers are especially long and fine, and make good-quality yarn and thread. The harsh climate must make a difference. In Australia, attempts to produce cashmere with Mongolian goats failed. Mild weather and good nutrition somehow led to coarser cashmere; I guess you can’t pamper your goats. </p>\n<p>The raw material is combed out of the goats every spring. It consists of cashmere, which is the soft, insulating undercoat that protects goats from the cold, and coarse outer hair. First it’s sorted by color and roughly by grade. Dirt and the coarsest hair are removed. All by hand. Only then do machines come in, for scouring, drying, and de-hairing (the combing process that separates fine cashmere from the rough stuff).</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712f3b48970c-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:right\"><img alt=\"Dehairing\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712f3b48970c-320wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:300px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Dehairing\"></a> It’s amazing to watch the clean, de-haired cashmere coming out of the combing machine. It looks like puffed-up spider webs. It’s so soft that you can hardly tell you’re touching something physical. These cashmere clouds are dyed into brilliant colors, spun into yarns and thread, and finally knitted or woven into well-designed, stylish garments. No wonder Mr. Baatarsaikhan is so proud.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2011572241e14970b-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:left\"></a><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712fa085970c-pi\" style=\"FLOAT:left\"></a>I once took my wife there to the Gobi outlet store. It was like dropping a hungry piranha into a tank of goldfish. She tore through the place, buying sweaters, hats, scarves, blankets, dresses, and even a roll of yarn. As she pointed out, cashmere makes a great gift, since it’s always appreciated and easy to carry in a suitcase.</p>\n<p></p>\n<p>With demand and exports down, the sector is struggling. It especially affects herders, who have seen prices fall from $40 per kilogram to under $25. But I’m sure that Mongolia’s cashmere industry will survive. As long as my wife’s in the country, at least.</p><br>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><strong><em><span style=\"TEXT-DECORATION:underline\">As fashionable as Champs-Élysées, but 1/10th the price</span></em></strong></p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2011572241f5f970b-pi\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Display\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e2011572241f5f970b-500wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:500px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Display\"></a></p><br>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><strong><em><span style=\"TEXT-DECORATION:underline\">It's time to go to Gobi</span></em></strong></p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712fa3c4970c-pi\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Billboard\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712fa3c4970c-500wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:500px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Billboard\"></a> </p><br>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><strong><em><span style=\"TEXT-DECORATION:underline\">Hard at work in the Gobi Cashmere factory</span></em></strong></p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\"><a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712fa974970c-pi\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Finishing\" src=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/.a/6a00d834515e9269e20115712fa974970c-500wi\" style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-TOP:#5b5b5b 1px solid;BORDER-LEFT:#5b5b5b 1px solid;WIDTH:500px;BORDER-BOTTOM:#5b5b5b 1px solid\" title=\"Finishing\"></a> </p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=2RFEJ8g3AKY:oPFqjuv8LG8:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=2RFEJ8g3AKY:oPFqjuv8LG8:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?i=2RFEJ8g3AKY:oPFqjuv8LG8:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=2RFEJ8g3AKY:oPFqjuv8LG8:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?a=2RFEJ8g3AKY:oPFqjuv8LG8:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PSDBlog?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PSDBlog/~4/2RFEJ8g3AKY\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p align=\"right\">“Impossible” must be eliminated from our vocabularies!<br>\n\t\t\t<br>—Napoleon Bonaparte</p>\n<p>Professor Pizier lives in a trailer. In order to be prepared, as he says. He’s set for his getaway. His bags are packed. He has ten canisters of gasoline and if need be, could escape to North Africa via Malaga and Algeciras without stopping at a pump. If “they” come, they won’t catch him. They caught him forty times. They locked him up in a camp forty times—but he always managed to slip out. I made a movie of the forty-first time. Watch my movie and you’ll understand.</p>\n<p>Pizier is a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he used to lecture on special education. He claims he believes in human educability. Moreover, even in the educability of idiots. There’s just one exception to prove the rule, he says. That’s Fascists. Fascists are not teachable. Fascists are born that way and remain that way throughout their lives. Fascism is a manifestation of lovelessness, he explains. A Fascist’s mind is cold. There is no cure for Fascists. All you can do is kill them or run from them. Pizier favors the second solution and is ready to run. By the way, he looks like van Gogh in his famous self-portrait. His hair is unkempt, his eyes are bewildered, but his lips form a gentle smile.</p>\n<p>Professor Pizier lives in a campground at Villaine near Paris. I met him while washing my shirts there. We’d barely exchanged a few words when my mind was made up: I’d shoot a TV movie about him. He stood facing me and warily asked if I were German. I said no. Did I have some detergent left, he then wanted to know. Of course I still had detergent. I’m not a German, but cleanliness is very important to me. So I gave him what he wanted, and we hit it off.</p>\n<p>From the subject of detergent to Franz Kafka was just a stone’s throw. The professor claimed this guy Kafka had been a strange mixture. Half German, half Jew.\n<p>“Why is that such a strange mixture? By the way, he was Austrian and not German. We need to make proper distinctions, I think.”</p>\n<p>“<em>C’est la même chose</em>,” he replied, “it amounts to the same thing. Anyhow, you can’t be a German and a Jew at the same time.”</p>\n<p>“You’re talking like Hitler now, Monsieur.”</p>\n<p>“I’m talking like Pizier. You can’t be pursuer and pursued at the same time. Imagine a cross between wolf and lamb. There’s no such thing.”</p>\n<p>“Do you speak German?”</p>\n<p>“Not one word and I’ll never learn it.”</p>\n<p>“Beethoven spoke German, Monsieur, and so did Bach.”</p>\n<p>“The exception proves the rule.”</p>\n<p>“How do you make your living, Monsieur Pizier?”</p>\n<p>“I used to teach pedagogy. My works have been translated into nine languages.”</p>\n<p>“And now?”</p>\n<p>“Now I’m insane. I have an ID card that says I’m schizophrenic. I’m drawing my monthly salary and living on private income.”</p>\n<p>“Surely you must be doing something, Monsieur.”</p>\n<p>“I write letters. To every agency on God’s earth.”</p>\n<p>“What for?”</p>\n<p>“I’m looking for my friend, Dr. Senison of L’vov, who may no longer be alive.”</p>\n<p>“Is that so important to you?”</p>\n<p>“It’s vital, because I murdered him.”</p>\n<p>I was left speechless. Was he serious? Or was this a manifestation of his mental disturbance? Pizier did not smile, but only bared his teeth. Grumpy and grim. This person aroused my curiosity.</p>\n<p>“What do you mean by saying you murdered him? If that’s true, then he’s dead, and inquiring about him makes no sense.”</p>\n<p>“But I’m telling you I’m crazy. I’ve got an ID to prove it. A doctor’s certificate. I murdered my friend, because, at the decisive moment, I abandoned him to his fate.”</p>\n<p>“And what does that have to do with Kafka?”</p>\n<p>“They asked Kafka where he was going. And do you know what he said?”</p>\n<p>“No.”</p>\n<p>‘”Away from here,’ Kafka replied. Away from here! That’s why I’ve got this trailer. Because I’ve got just one destination in life. Away from here!”</p>\n<p>“So you’re writing to all agencies on God’s earth. Have you ever had an answer?” </p>\n<p>“Hundreds of answers. No one knows anything about him. Dr. Senison is neither dead nor alive. He is a ghost. He haunts my conscience.”</p>\n<p>“Perhaps he’s alive, Monsieur. Where did you meet him?”</p>\n<p>“In L’vov. In 1943. Right during the apocalypse. I was a prisoner of war—they had caught me for the forty-first time. This time they were not joking. They put me in the worst camp they had. Rava-Ruska, two kilometers from L’vov. There was no breaking out of Rava-Ruska, no escape. In Rava-Ruska you could only die. No one was able to get away.”</p>\n<p>“Except you.”</p>\n<p>“How do you know?”</p>\n<p>“Because you asked me for detergent. That proves to me you’re still alive. So you got away.”</p>\n<p>“Yes, it was my forty-first time. I told myself what I remembered of Kafka: ‘Away from here!’ and decided to climb down into the underworld. Do you know what the underworld looks like?”</p>\n<p>“I can imagine.”</p>\n<p>“No, Monsieur. You can’t imagine. I went down into the sewer—<em>dans les égouts de Rava-Ruska</em>. Anyone else would rather die than crawl through shit. But I would rather crawl through shit than die. I was obsessed with staying alive. I wanted to be there when Hitler lost the war. I wanted to see the Fascist gang cry for mercy and swing from the gallows. I thirsted for the taste of peace. I longed for steaming hot coffee on a clean breakfast table. For snow-white linens in a closet smelling of lavender.”</p>\n<p>“And that’s why you climbed down into the underworld?”</p>\n<p>“I crawled on my belly through a labyrinth of concrete pipes. At snail’s pace. Overcome by nausea. I threw up everything inside me. It was pitch dark when I felt a slight prickle on my skin. I just knew: those were worms, intestinal parasites, spongers inhabiting human guts. Maw worms, trematodes, liver flukes. The eerie fauna of all Rava-Ruska’s feces. I reeled, close to insanity. I crawled, gasped, and struggled through hell for days, until I suddenly felt a draft blowing toward me. I couldn’t believe it: freedom! I am a godless rationalist, but at that moment I started praying. This was the end of the underworld. It emptied into a river peacefully murmuring by. The night around me was velvet-black, but it was the sweetest darkness ever. It was icy winter, but to me, the most intoxicating spring of my whole life. Shouting with joy, I rushed into the water to recover my old self. I washed with river sand until my skin tore. I scoured every inch of my body until I collapsed with pain. Though my prison garments still smelled of muck, I was a human being again.</p>\n<p>“As I peered through the December fog, I saw a pale gleam. A house must be very near, most likely a summer house. Cautiously, I crept toward the light—and indeed, someone was standing there. A silhouette was staring through the window. An old man. Why would he be peering outside at this hour? Was he afraid? If so, he was my comrade, a member of the army of the pursued. But maybe not. He could just as well be a pursuer. He could be a guard. A stool pigeon, an informer. And now he’d seen me. He appeared to wave to me. What was he trying to tell me? Should I come in? Should I watch out for approaching danger? Either was possible, but I had nothing to lose. I interpreted his gesture as an invitation and knocked on the door. A snow-white little man, frail and hunchbacked, opened up. ‘My name is Senison. Who are you?’</p>\n<p>“‘My name is Pizier and I’m an officer in the French army.’</p>\n<p>“‘Anyone can say that.’</p>\n<p>“‘I come from Rava-Ruska and don’t have any papers.’</p>\n<p>“‘An escapee?’</p>\n<p>“‘That should be obvious.’</p>\n<p>“‘You would be the first to have managed a getaway. How can you prove that you are a Frenchman?’</p>\n<p>“‘I speak French.’</p>\n<p>“‘So do I, Monsieur. Every educated Pole speaks French.’</p>\n<p>“‘I speak it without an accent.’</p>\n<p>“‘That, too, proves nothing.’</p>\n<p>“Then I had an idea. I clicked my heels, saluted and sang the ‘Marseillaise’ in a whisper. For the first time in years, while tears ran down my cheeks. And then he believed me. Rather, he didn’t believe me but my tears, and said, ‘Welcome to my house, dear friend. I salute you in the name of the Polish Resistance Movement. What is mine is yours as well. Come inside. I don’t have much, but from now on, you are in your own home. Help yourself!’</p>\n<p>“Those were no empty words. He shared his bread and milk with me and then showed me his quarters—a medium-sized room. He said I must hide. The Gestapo would come when least expected and search the house from top to bottom. He offered me his concert grand, but I didn’t understand what he meant. He meant exactly what he said: I was supposed to live in the case of his musical instrument. Between base and treble strings. Surrounded by hammer heads, lifter rods and wippens. That was no mean sacrifice for my host, because he was a piano teacher and needed the grand for his piano lessons. Indignant, I started to turn him down, because his idea seemed crackbrained to me. I was sorry, I said, but under those conditions I would need to find another refuge. I was about to make my exit, when he sharply ordered, ‘Stay!’ He was speaking in the name of the Polish Resistance, and insubordination was not an option. As he spoke, he put blankets in my sleeping place and sent me to the bathroom to wash up. My smell was bothering him. So I gave in and did what Senison wanted. That was the beginning of exile in my benefactor’s piano and the happiest days of my life.”</p>\n<p>I’d let the Frenchman have some detergent, but that didn’t mean I believed him. The story of his escape was, to put it mildly, implausible. A concert grand as a bedstead seemed absurd to me. That’s why I asked if he’d managed his sojourn in the wooden case without any physical or psychological problems. Pizier looked at me and rubbed his temples, calling back memory. “Physically it was like torture—thirteen months folded up like a court document. Jammed tight like a sardine in a can. Unbearable cramps shot through me again and again. My back was sore from constantly lying down. My muscles grew more and more flabby, and I nearly choked from lack of oxygen. I wondered if I was going to pieces. Though I was free, this freedom was destroying me—it was leading to gradual self-annihilation. I kept toying with the idea of giving up. I felt like breaking out of my coffin even at the risk of death. My friend, it certainly was a coffin and I was buried alive. But the cramps proved to me I was still living. The cramps and the fear that one day they’d come, would search and discover me.</p>\n<p>“We were indeed surrounded. The barbed wire fence was not far away, the hell that was Rava-Ruska. The torture factory. I could see the window through a crack in my piano. Behind it, a birch forest. A road that disappeared in the sand. Lungwort, corydalis, daphne, flowers of my childhood. The smells of my home came back to me. I thought of the Seine. Of poplar-lined avenues, barges gliding across the water. I heard the musette. I danced on the Pigalle, yet realized that, sooner or later, they would come. I told my rescuer that I couldn’t stay. That I was homesick. I had to return—to France. I’d sooner die than consume my life waiting. Senison answered in a shrill voice that I needed to stay, that I had to hold out till the end of the war. This was an order from the Polish Resistance—<em>un ordre de la Résistance Polonaise</em>.</p>\n<p>“He had barely finished speaking when our summer house shook. An arms transport was passing by. A tank column rumbled through the forest. Then silence returned and I resigned myself to fate. The piano teacher threw me a helpless glance, but from now on our relationship changed. No longer did he order me around. He was gentle. He did everything he could to make me happy, so that I would stay. To prevent having to live in his summer house alone, he organized performances for me. He invited artists in—members of the Resistance—musicians, actors, and young poets. They whispered poems by Mickiewicz and Slowacki to while away my time. One day I got permission to leave the piano, just when a golden-haired Wanda recited the glorious verses from the Polish national epic for me, from <em>Pan Tadeusz</em>. I didn’t understand one word, but it sent shivers down my spine. I felt her love for her dishonored native land, and tears ran down my cheeks as when I sang the ‘Marseillaise.’ Deep emotion is like music. Everyone can understand it. I had to walk up to the girl and kiss her. When was the last time I’d kissed a girl? When she hugged me, I felt that I, too, was a Pole. A Pole, a Frenchman and citizen of the world at the same time. We were victims of the same barbarians. That’s why we felt we were kindred spirits.</p>\n<p>“From then on I thought of escape less often, and Senison claimed that all danger was past. Until one day a giant knocked on the door. I nearly jumped in my concert grand. The piano teacher opened up and asked what the gentleman wanted. The gentleman spoke in a honeyed voice. He was a German officer and had heard that there was a genuine Bösendorf grand piano here. He was a concert pianist himself and longed to play on a real Bösendorf again. He didn’t mean to intrude and apologized for his unannounced arrival.</p>\n<p>“Senison turned white as a sheet. Through a crack in the piano I observed a nervous twitch around his mouth. After an embarrassing pause, Senison asked what the gentleman wished to perform. ‘An etude by Chopin.’ That was, to put it mildly, sensational. A German officer wanted to play Chopin, the Polish Chopin in a Polish private home. Senison was curious: which etude did he want to play? With an imperceptible bow, the officer answered, ‘The Revolutionary Etude, if you don’t mind.’</p>\n<p>“‘I don’t mind. On the contrary.’</p>\n<p>“The German briefly cleared his throat and struck a chord. The concert piano was out of tune, clattering like an old Bakelite record. Senison froze. He foresaw the next step. The officer rose, pulled a tuning key out of his pocket, opened up the piano—and there I was. Among the hammerheads and lifter rods, damper arms and bridle tape. I looked aghast, certain my last hour had come. Instead, I witnessed the most astonishing comedy of my life. The man pretended not to be aware of me. He tuned the strings until harmonious sounds rolled from the grand and started playing. I don’t know whether my ears were particularly sensitive at that time, but I felt as if I had never heard anything quite like it. The German played the Revolutionary Etude. No, better than that: he played the Revolution. The uprising against suppression. The passion of a tortured people transformed into music. He of all people, who was wearing the uniform of the master race. With the swastika on his cap. When he had finished playing, he bowed to Senison and left as he had come. Without a word. Without introducing himself. The piano lid was still open. I still cowered in my corner when Senison rushed toward me and said a horrified whisper, ‘You have to go now, my friend! Immediately. They will be here in less than an hour. Take this money. I’ll give you provisions for the road, and then—get out!’</p>\n<p>“‘I’m staying with you.’</p>\n<p>“‘I said get out. May God protect you!’</p>\n<p>“‘I’m going as soon as you join me. We’ll run away together or not at all!’</p>\n<p>“‘I am an officer in the Polish Resistance. My place is here in Poland.’</p>\n<p>“‘They’ll shoot you like a dog. As an accomplice to my escape.’</p>\n<p>“‘That is my problem, not yours.’</p>\n<p>“‘I can’t leave you in the lurch. We’ve become friends these thirteen months.’</p>\n<p>“‘Stop chattering and beat it!’</p>\n<p>“‘Not without you.’</p>\n<p>“‘To hell with you! Right now! This is an order. <em>Un ordre de la Résistance Polonaise.</em>‘</p>\n<p>“I obeyed and cleared out. ‘Away from here,’ to quote Kafka. I roamed through bleeding Europe for exactly one hundred days. Through demolished cities and burned villages. I crossed Bohemia and Austria, Italy and the Mediterranean coast. And then my dream came true: I saw my native country again. <em>La belle France</em>. I came upon a partisan group operating in Savoy. Soon after, the war ended. The world cheered. All of France partied. I alone sank into depression—for I suddenly realized that I had murdered my friend. My rescuer, who’d probably been arrested and shot. I was the culprit. Because I had put myself first.”</p>\n<p>My shirts were done washing, so I hung them up on a line. Pizier’s story distressed me, though it was nearly twenty years old. How did he know that Senison had been picked up and murdered? That could only be speculation. The German officer didn’t have to be a villain. He had played the Revolutionary Etude. Surely that could also be a sign of fellow feeling. Evidence of solidarity. I went back and forth over this. Granted, Senison had to be careful then. Who could afford carelessly reaching out to the enemy? No one in his right mind. And then this tuning key. That was suspicious. No one always carries a tuning key. Why had the German brought it along? Did he know the Bösendorf piano to be out of tune? Unlikely. So he came with the intention to open the case. Because he knew or thought that someone was hiding in it. And then that comedy, as if he hadn’t seen Pizier in the concert grand. That was particularly odd. He might have smiled or made some remark. That he was no enemy, for example. But he said nothing, revealing himself as a probable informer. But why did he play the Revolutionary Etude? Why so passionately? So genuinely? That was more than a demonstration of sympathy. An alliance was almost being forged there. A peace treaty between Poland, France and Germany.</p>\n<p>“Nonsense,” Pizier said. “The man was wearing the uniform of the mass murderers. He had the Fascist insignia on his cap. Therefore he was a Fascist, and you can’t educate Fascists. Maybe the feeble-minded, but not Fascists. He played the Revolutionary Etude in order to dupe two men, to calm their suspicions and lessen their vigilance. He had come specifically to track down an escaped prisoner. He did track him down and his accomplice, too. The punishment for aiding escapees was death. No, they picked up Senison and put him up against the wall. Senison is dead. According to logical calculation he can no longer be alive.”</p>\n<p>Thus reasoned Pizier, but I sensed that he doubted his own conclusions. Absolutely, for otherwise he wouldn’t have written so many letters. To every agency in existence. The UN, the International Red Cross. True, all of them had written back that the fate of Polish piano teacher Mieczýzlaw Senison was unknown. Nevertheless I said to Pizier, “Your line of thought is contradictory. You’re convinced that the German was a Fascist. And you claim with certainty that he had Senison arrested and shot. If you’re so sure of that, why are you still looking for him? There must be a flaw in your argument.”</p>\n<p>Pizier sat down on a low wall between the washateria and the campground office. Nervously he played with the detergent I’d given him, pouring it from one hand to the other. He said, “<em>Vous comprenez, mon ami</em>, you understand, my friend, that certain phenomena can’t be explained by logic. They’re impervious. We French, as heirs of Descartes, want to explain everything by logic. But in Poland I learned that the better half of reality is obscure. This German was so incredibly involved in his playing, it’s possible he was on our side. You know, music is beyond formal logic. Its secrets are unfathomable; therefore it’s not entirely out of the question that the German indeed was our friend. If so, then he was no villain, and Senison is still alive. Chances are at best one in a thousand, but don’t we clutch at straws?”</p>\n<p>“And that’s why you still write to all agencies in the world?”</p>\n<p>“Yes. Until I know whether he’s alive or not.”</p>\n<p>“And what if you never find out?”</p>\n<p>“Then no one can help me. Look: here’s my ID saying I’m schizophrenic. There’s only one remedy for my sickness.”</p>\n<p>“And that is?”</p>\n<p>“<em>La certitude, Monsieur</em>. Certainty.”</p>\n<p>This is where my own story began. Pizier was emotionally disturbed, apparently because he didn’t know whether Senison was still alive. He felt guilty, because he believed he had murdered him. That’s why I decided to intervene in the professor’s fate. I happened to be working in Poland. My job was with Polish television. This gave me opportunities to get at the truth. So I said to Pizier, “I want to investigate this matter. If there’s any hope at all of finding Senison, I’ll let you know.”</p>\n<p>“There’s no such chance. I wrote to every city administration, including those in Poland, but Senison is missing. He’s not listed in any population count. He’d be eighty-five today. I’m almost certain that he is long dead. Either shot by the Nazis, or taken by old age and grief. Because his old friend left him in the lurch.”</p>\n<p>“Senison did not die of old age. Nor of grief. Old soldiers never die! Such men live to be a hundred, because they’re as tough as army horses!”</p>\n<p>“Then they put him against the wall.”</p>\n<p>“I doubt it!”</p>\n<p>“Then, why doesn’t anyone know him?”</p>\n<p>“Because he’s not listed anywhere. In Poland thousands live underground. They’ve become used to illegality. First under the Germans and then under the Communists. Senison is one of those. I’m convinced of it.”</p>\n<p>“And where do you mean to flush him out?”</p>\n<p>” Somewhere in the western regions we took from the Germans.”</p>\n<p>“What gives you that idea?”</p>\n<p>“Because he’s from L’vov—the eastern regions the Russians chased us out of.”</p>\n<p>I was determined to track down Senison. I had a feeling he was alive, and if so, I’d reunite the two. In Warsaw, for instance.</p>\n<p>In brief, I told the story on my weekly program. Before I go on, let me explain my purpose for this program, a Monday talk show. I’d begun with the simple intention of attacking the expression “after all,” this little filler generally employed to underscore a statement’s unassailability. <em>After all</em>, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. <em>After all</em>, you see more clearly in an east wind than in a south wind. <em>After all</em>, women’s judgments are more often based on emotions than men’s judgments. I throw a fit whenever I hear <em>after all</em>. It makes me furious, because I don’t believe in foregone conclusions. I was trying to unmask the silliness of this term on my program. The peril of <em>after all</em>-ism, as I called it.\n<p>This was a difficult enterprise, because <em>after all</em>-ism is one of the most widespread imbecilities of our time. Not only that: <em>after all</em>-ism is reinforced by television. Television intensifies all forms of prejudice. What’s worse, it reinforces them and raises them to eternal verities. For instance, TV created the cliché of the long-haired slacker and the short-haired achiever, of the red-haired nymphomaniac and the dishwater blonde homebody, the olive-skinned con man from the Middle East and the faceless, reliable, untroubled precision worker from Germany or Switzerland. Week after week I told stories on my Monday talk show to challenge these clichés. I had decided to fight against the consequences of TV shows on a TV show, of all things, and to an extent, it worked. My show became a success, and tens of thousands of letters testified that it was setting thought in motion.</p>\n<p>The next Monday night, back in Warsaw, I told the story of Pizier and Senison—the story of the French professor who had lost his mind because he believed he’d caused a Polish friend’s death. The point of departure was favorable. The hero was a Frenchman, and in Poland, the public likes everything related to France. Besides, he was worried about the life of a Pole, a resistance fighter, an irreproachable fellow citizen. A story like that had to be well received. There was also the shady German, who <em>after all</em> must be involved in brave Senison’s tragedy. There could, <em>after all</em>, be no doubt. In my broadcast, I did nothing to cast doubt on the heroes of my story, but I asked the viewers to give me their opinion of the events I had told them about and to add possible helpful details for clearing up the case. Was Mieczýslaw Senison alive, and if so—as was unlikely—where might he be?</p>\n<p>Over the days that followed I received more than 20,000 letters. Some of these were so unusual that I asked their authors to come to the capital, in order to repeat what they knew on camera. Among the confused pile of comments, some read more or less as follows: “I know Senison. I met him years after the war in Gliwice. He was neither betrayed by a German nor anyone else. Though I hate the Germans, in this case the guy is innocent.”</p>\n<p>“I had a sister named Maria. She took her own life because no one would speak to her. People said she was a Nazi whore, a Hitler floozie, because she had been a German officer’s lover. His name was Wolfgang and he played the piano divinely. My sister loved him more than anyone. When he played for her she would weep with emotion. After the war they shaved her head. She was put on public display. The whole town passed by and spit in her face. She could not bear it. One day in November, she hanged herself.”</p>\n<p>“I know where Senison is. He is in Silesia. But he stays underground because he detests the Communists just as much as the Nazis. He is eighty-five now. He is still an officer in the Resistance Movement. He is waiting for the day of retribution.”</p>\n<p>“I’m still in nursing school. A year from now I’ll be twenty—but I know one thing: we Poles are no better than the Germans, and we don’t think logically at all. If Senison is still alive, the German did not betray him. So he was no Nazi, but our friend. I don’t understand why a German can’t be our friend.”</p>\n<p>“In our village cemetery there is a German named Wolfgang Wiesenroth. His gravestone says he was a musician. The last year of the war, our partisans killed him. War is war.”</p>\n<p>“If you guarantee that he’ll not be harmed, I’ll lead you to Senison. He knows you’re looking for him. He’s been told of your Monday program, and he’s willing to talk to you. He remembers the Frenchman and wants to see him again. Urgently. Nothing else would matter after that, and he could peacefully go to his grave.”</p>\n<p>I answered without hesitation that I’d vouch with my honor that Senison could safely appear on my next program. Then I gave my assistants the needed instructions and flew to Paris. From the airport I went straight to the campground in Villaine. I was able to locate the professor in his trailer right away. As soon as he saw me, he jumped up from his chair and lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “Were you able to find out anything?”</p>\n<p>“Maybe.”</p>\n<p>“Is he alive or dead?”</p>\n<p>“If you can identify him, he’s alive. But you need to come with me.”</p>\n<p>“Where?”</p>\n<p>“We’re going to Warsaw. We’ll meet him there—perhaps. But it’s not certain. Perhaps we’ll meet someone else sailing under false colors. There are many people in our country who are culpable—collaborators, criminals, those condemned in absentia—and have assumed a dead person’s name. Only you can determine if it’s Senison or not.”</p>\n<p>“When are we going?”</p>\n<p>“Whenever you wish, <em>Monsieur le Professeur.”</em></p>\n<p>“Immediately. Can we get on a plane today?”</p>\n<p>Several hours later we were on our way to Warsaw. Pizier had taken two shirts, underwear, and a toothbrush. He was confused and restless, unable to sit still in his seat, and kept calling the flight attendant to ask for such trifles as a toothpick. Or some cotton, because he couldn’t stand the rushing in his ears. And finally a handheld mirror.</p>\n<p>“Why a mirror, Monsieur?” the flight attendant asked.</p>\n<p>“Because I want to have a look at myself.”</p>\n<p>“You are vain, Monsieur?”</p>\n<p>“I can’t believe that I’m sitting in an airplane. I have to see this with my own eyes, because I feel as if I’m dreaming.”</p>\n<p>“You’re fully awake, Monsieur. Would you like something to drink?”</p>\n<p>“A vodka, Mademoiselle. And the hand mirror, please.”</p>\n<p>The flight attendant brought what he wanted, and he asked her if she knew a certain Senison.</p>\n<p>“Unfortunately not. Why?”</p>\n<p>“Because I killed him. I’m a murderer.”</p>\n<p>“But you look quite likeable. When did you kill him?”</p>\n<p>“No one believes me. Everyone laughs at me.”</p>\n<p>“I’m serious, Monsieur. You are the nicest murderer I’ve ever met. Another vodka?”</p>\n<p>“<em>Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle</em>—but I’m an actual murderer. I’m flying to Warsaw in order to find Senison, but I won’t find him because he is dead.”</p>\n<p>The professor emptied his second glass. He anxiously asked me when we would arrive. I answered, “Ninety minutes from now, if everything goes well.”</p>\n<p>“That’s too long for me. I want to get off.”</p>\n<p>“One and a half hours more, Professor. Have a little patience!”</p>\n<p>Pizier buried his face in his hands, and I seemed to hear him softly whimpering. But he pulled himself together and flatly said, “I’m schizophrenic. I see things that aren’t there. I am not sitting in an airplane at all. Senison is dead. I have murdered him. I want to get off and have a drink.”</p>\n<p>The flight attendant brought Pizier some orange juice spiked with a tranquilizer. The professor took the juice, soon fell asleep and did not wake up until the pilot announced the approach to Warsaw. Pizier started trembling, his face turned beet-red. Sweat ran from his forehead. I was worried about his condition and asked him if I could help. He did not answer, but stared through the window at the sea of lights below us.</p>\n<p>We landed and rumbled along the concrete runway, in Warsaw at last. We stopped. They rolled up a stairway. The door opened, and a warm June night wafted toward us. The professor rushed to the exit, wanting to be the first one to get off—but he stopped on the top landing. What he saw before him was incredible. Surrounded by twelve concentrically aimed floodlights stood a chair, and on the chair sat an old man. Right on the runway. Mieczýslaw Senison. My assistants had managed the impossible. They had brought the eighty-five-year-old from Gliwice to the capital. He had agreed to everything: he just wanted to see Pizier again and then die.</p>\n<p>The old man stirred in his chair. Then he pulled himself together, awkwardly clicked his heels, and saluted. As in the old days when he was still able to fight. And suddenly a man ran up to him. A lunatic. A screaming apparition shouting, “Senison, Senison!” Pizier stopped a few feet from the man he had believed dead. He apparently did not trust his senses and drew out his pocket knife. He cut into his upper arm, which immediately started bleeding. Pizier laughed, his face contorted with pain, and shrieked, “Where am I, my friend?”</p>\n<p>“<em>En Pologne, mon ami</em>. In Poland.”</p>\n<p>Pizier sobbed and approached the old man. He reached out his hand and felt the other, in order finally to be sure. “Are you Senison?”</p>\n<p>“Mieczýslaw Senison of L’vov. And you?”</p>\n<p>“André Pizier of Paris.”</p>\n<p>Now those around him heard the professor sing the “Marseillaise.” They saw tears running down the cheeks of both men. Then they were silent—until Pizier embraced his friend and whispered, “<em>La guerre est finie</em>. At last. The war has ended, my friend.”</p></p></p>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_u_7WUW_gtak/Skvai8A0BZI/AAAAAAAAATM/IMQkqGgtdWU/s1600-h/Dancing+Mermaid.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:178px;height:187px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_u_7WUW_gtak/Skvai8A0BZI/AAAAAAAAATM/IMQkqGgtdWU/s400/Dancing+Mermaid.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><span><p style=\"text-align:center\">The Lilac Vial</p><p style=\"text-align:center\">By Lost<br></p><p>I was surprised to hear my pastor say the other day that mermaids (or what I like to call Mammy Water and what he prefers to call Queens of the Coast) are mean. He clearly has never met a mermaid before—a sad soul obsessed with powers of darkness as he is.<br></p><p>Mermaids are creatures that love the sun and crave the smooth softness of water. Their fingers can send ripples through the river that, touching a girl, can make her fall in love. Mermaids are slimy and can never be caught. The slightest touch of their fins on your skin and your eyes harden into a very rare kind of emerald that makes you see the world as an enchanted place. Mermaids can sometimes transform into eels, but no eel can become a mermaid.<br></p><p>I saw a mermaid once. When she saw me watching her, she ran away into the middle of the muddy river but came back with three other mermaids that looked like her sisters. They sang songs of love, forgotten and regained, with voices too sweet to describe. When the birds joined them, I thought my heart would flutter away with my soul. The songs still ring in my ear even though I cannot sing them to you. They danced with a grace and beauty so delicate and yet so complex.<br></p><p>The more they danced, the more the dirt that made the river cloudy disappeared. I had never seen the river so blue and so pure. The night before, an unusual occurrence it was to see rain pouring monstrously from the clear and starry Harmattan sky. The rain washed away the copper-red dust for which Benin City is known. It ferried dust, dirt, and crud off streets, trees, roads and gullies and dumped them in the river. I remember sighing when I arrived at the banks before sunrise to capture frogs for my Introductory Anatomy class. Tip-toeing between globs of mud, I looked in vain through the turbid water for frogs. Even though I could hear their frightened croaks, I could not see them.<br></p><p>I cannot remember how long the mermaids danced, but by the time the morning sun came out to join the celebration, the water had gold shimmers. The river had become a bowl of greenish-blue liquid crystals, quivering in sheer delight at the touch of the mermaids' gyrating bodies.<br></p><p>Most of all, the mermaids were happy, skipping about in a world they had transformed by sheer joy into a garden. I found that even the trees swayed in childish excitement. The wind was perfumed and silky, chortling loudly and swirling around everything that caught its fancy. Grasses smiled a deep-green. Butterflies flapped in ecstasy, rousing moths, their nocturnal siblings dazed in deep sleep. The river bank on which I stood was a marble terrace, but jelly-like in texture. Around my feet, earth worms, caterpillars, bumble bees, and flowers laughed until tears fell from their eyes. I dare say I could not bring myself to capture frogs that made me chuckle by doing cartwheels on crystal-colored water. It was Eden.<br></p><p>Overwhelmed with surprised and half-sad that whatever it was that was unfolding before my eyes cannot last, I asked the first mermaid her name. It seemed for a brief moment that she was going to tell me. She did not. Her companions covered her mouth with their perfectly shaped hands, dripping with water, and off they went into the abyss of paradise where they dwelt beneath the river.<br></p><p>In an instant, everything returned to its former state: swampy river bank, coke bottles, FAN ice cream and pure water sachets, the awful smell from the catfish mud pits, my legs ankle-deep in marshy soil with decomposed twigs and God knows what else.<br></p><p>The mermaid paradise had, at last, been lost except for a drop of the crystal water caught in the air, the last to fall back down into the pit of mermaid heaven. I do not know what will-power propelled me, but I dived in the river and caught the droplet at the nick of time in my cupped hands.<br></p><p>There it is in that ornate vial you see on the dresser. You asked whether the vial is stained lilac. It is not. The color you see is one of the many strange moods of the enchanted droplet. As the day progresses, it changes its colors according to the many shades of the rainbow. That is why I expressed to you, earlier, my surmise that in the world beneath the sea, mermaids tell the time of day by color and not by a ticking machine.</p><p>Photo Courtesy: <a href=\"http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g151/La12lasp/dancing-mermaids.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.myspace.com/la12lasp&usg=__C98_nthuSX-BsuosmhMWziRzh2E=&h=499&w=370&sz=62&hl=en&start=34&sig2=p0gL4Cvfhw1OteHIpu1ugg&um=1&tbnid=ROQEsiNFXS0_PM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=96&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddancing%2Bmermaid%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rlz%3D1R1GGGL_en%26hs%3DkMn%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18%26um%3D1&ei=dtlLSviIEc6_lAeYwKimCg\">La12lasp</a><br></p></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5130271074587492895-8514474224342891666?l=lostathend.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "Dwele's Lovely Michael Jackson Tribute",
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"content" : "As the tragic news of <b>Michael Jackson</b>'s passing became the new reality for us all, tributes began flooding the internet. Amidst the heartfelt outpouring, <b>Dwele</b> quietly submitted a short video to his YouTube account wherein he uses a loop machine recreate the hook of MJ's \"Human Nature.\" It's simple, brilliant, and beautiful. He meticulously builds the snippet for over seven minutes but, like the actual song itself, it never grows old. A fitting, moving, and creative musical tribute to the King of Pop.<br>.<br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/_N1L3YwbLK0%26hl%3Den%26fs%3D1%26color1%3D0x3a3a3a%26color2%3D0x999999&width=480&height=295\" width=\"480\" height=\"295\"></iframe>"
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"title" : "The good times are over",
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"content" : "The Nigerian <a href=\"http://af.reuters.com/article/idAFLI3905120090618\">telecoms sector</a> has finally hit market forces and the mathematic of where supply and demand cross at a competitive pricing point. ARPU (average revenue per user) has brought Zain to its knees (sinking to US7 per month), hence the crisis a few weeks ago and the decision to outsource the meat of its operations to Ericsson earlier this year.<br><br>What a contrast with the sector 6 years ago in Nigeria. The MTN story is case in point.<br><br>I remember buying my first MTN sim card back then. I think it was N18,000. The good times were rolling - its not as if the price of producing a sim card has reduced significantly since. MTN was staking out London recruitment fairs, bringing plane loads of diasporics home - anyone with the word telecoms on their cv (no matter how fabricated or puffed up) got a ticket and an apartment in VI, their salaries paid for by the first million or so customers paying off the scale prices just to get connected. The A-bar on Adeola Hopewell was the place for the big MTN boys in their polo shirts to hang out.<br><br>Aspects of the senior management of the company became bloated with charlatans who were working many levels above their pay grade (no names mentioned). Since that time, MTN in Nigeria has matured, shaken out the diasporic chancers and now has a good senior management cadre which is a mix of Nigerians and international staff. It is easily the best placed operator in Nigeria and is sure to profit well when the big pipes land in Lagos mid-to-late next year and the country finally has genuine Internet Service provision, rather than the fake-broadband floggers of now.<br><br>The consolidation taking place currently in the telecoms sector is also going to hit the financial services sector in the next 12 - 18 months. The new Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido's strong risk analytical approach is sure to shake out the sharp practices the banking sector has relied on for so long and that are an open secret: buying each other's public offering shares (creating a phantom layer of valuations), round tripping currency trading and use of multiple books (to name just a few of the most popular tricks). Combined with the opening up to foreign ownership, another round of consolidation is somewhere between probable and imminent. I doubt many banks will be unaffected by the inroads Barclays, HSBC and the big American and Chinese banks will surely make.<br><br>So, the two juicy sectors of the economy that were the main draw for diasporic Nigerians outside of hyrdocarbons are closing up. I suspect we are now moving away from the returnee era, at least in terms of the corporate sector.<br><br>At which point, it might be an idea to begin to compare what the recent influx of diasporic Nigerians has done for the country's corporations. Compare and contrast with India.<br><br>Ten years ago, Indians with Californian technology experience started to return home during the dot com consolidation that began in late 1999/early 2000.<br><br>On the back of this migration, India's IT services sector began to boom from Bangalore to Pune, with the incumbent early-starters such as Infosys the tip of a large iceberg.<br><br>What have diasporic Nigerians brought to Nigeria? Which sectors have developed thanks to them? There has been no equivalent boom in IT services, and banking remains antediluvian. The perfect symbol of the level of sophistication of consumer banking in Nigeria is the Interswitch card - all your data stored on one easily replicable magnetic strip. It is strikingly similiar to my first 'cashpoint card' for Lloyds bank, back in 1986. Surprise surprise that Nigeria is currently awash with ATM fraud.<br><br>How are we to judge the impact of diasporic Nigerians that have returned back to Nigeria to work in its corporations? Have they 'added any value'? Certainly, in many organisations, they have generated mostly negative value: inadvertently importing a two-tier class system.<br><br>Those parading their recently acquired janded or yankee accents are earning multiples more than their stayed-home-didn't-get-the-break colleagues. They are almost completely blind to the hostility and resentment this has generated. Worse, they are in most cases not as effective as their 'local' equivalent.<br><br>The snob factor that they maintain meticulously stands in the way of them engaging with the world beyond Ikoyi and Victoria Island. In a complex and evolving society like Nigeria, they therefore forget to do the first thing that must be done in any new enterprise: map the territory. Many of the returnees simply didn't have the wisdom of local experience to do the job that needed doing.<br><br>The integration period - when an influx of diasporic Nigerians filled out the hot new sectors of the economy - is now over. Many of the most talented and experienced Nigerians overseas never bothered to come home. Those who made the Big Return in the past year or so are half-full of regrets. Accommodation is a joke in Lagos and Abuja (the only two cities they can return to) - all of it over-priced, jerry-built (sometimes dangerously so) and poorly managed. Quite a few will return with the realisation that home was in fact Maryland or Milton Keynes. Nigeria will return to being 'holiday for the kids'.<br><br>Anyone with smarts setting up nowadays in Nigeria in financial services, telecoms, the media etc. would do well to focus on how to develop local talent, rather than decide to bring in over-priced and over-entitled diasporic resource that is often afraid to wade in deep into the ways of the Nigerian market, for fear of getting too much mainland muck on the tyres of their Prado/Lexus. The future of business in Lagos (a city which generates 70-80% of Nigeria's tax base) will be increasingly defined by the thousands trying to get ahead from Isolo or Surulere, rather than those flying back home to stay with Mommy and Daddy in Ikoyi or VI. The more market forces come to play in Nigeria, the more on-the-ground talent and experience will come to the fore.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8686769-9079947084035251297?l=naijablog.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div><p><strong>Marco Vernaschi ©, for the Pulitzer Center</strong></p>\n<p>I was drinking a coffee at Baiana when the Afropop music played by the local radio suddenly stopped. A frantic speaker was trying to report about a blast that had just killed a few soldiers, destroying the military headquarters. </p>\n<p>I jumped in my car and drove toward the military compound. When I arrived everyone was shouting and running through the smoky ruins of the building. Bissau’s only ambulance was coming and going from the hospital to pick up the bodies of the victims. Four heavily armed soldiers pointing their AK-47 at my face discouraged me from taking photographs or asking questions. All they told me was that General Batista Tagme Na Wai, head of the army, had just been assassinated. I went back to the car and headed to the hospital. </p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pulitzercenter.org/showproject.cfm?id=114\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Soldiers outside military headquarters, a few hours after the assassination\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e2011570f787ce970b-800wi\" style=\"MARGIN:3px\" title=\"Soldiers outside military HQ, a few hours after the assassination\"></a> On this night last February Bissau’s sleepy routine was broken. I made some phone calls to find out what was going on, even as the Minister of Defense arrived at the hospital and ordered the police to keep journalists away. After two hours trying to get information I left the hospital, heading to my hotel. At the reception everyone was trading theories. Someone said it was a <em>coup d’etat</em>, others that it was an accident, a bomb, or the beginning of another civil war. I went to my room and tried to sleep. </p>\n<p>At six in the morning my friend and informant Vladimir, a reliable security man who works at the hotel, knocked on my door. He was frightened, and told me that the president had just been killed. When I asked him how he knew, he simply shook his head. I instantly left my room and went to the President’s house. Soldiers there were shooting in the air, to keep a little crowd of people away from the house. </p>\n<p></p>\n\n<p>A bunch of soldiers with machine guns and bazookas surrounded the block. The president’s armored Hummer was still parked in front of the house, the tires flat and its bulletproof windows shattered. The police cars from his escort were destroyed. A rocket shot from a bazooka had penetrated four walls, ending up in the president’s living room. Joao Bernardo Vieira was dead, after ruling Guinea Bissau for nearly a quarter of a century.</p>\n<p>After a few hours waiting in front of the house I understand I wouldn’t have been allowed any access this day. A soldier came toward me and seized my camera to check if I had taken any pictures. Fortunately I had not, and he gave me the camera back. It was time to leave.</p>\n<p>In just nine hours Guinea Bissau had lost both it president and the head of its army. Why so much violence? Was this double assassination the result of an old rivalry between Vieira and Tagme, or was it something more? The army’s spokesman, Zamora Induta, declared that the president had been killed by a group of renegade soldiers and that assailants using a bomb had assassinated General Tagme. He said there is no connection between the two deaths. Of course, nobody believed that this was so.</p>\n<p>In the last few years Guinea Bissau had become a major hub for cocaine trafficking. The drug is shipped from Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil to West Africa en route to its final destination in Europe. Were these assassinations linked to drug trafficking?</p>\n<p>After paying a useless visit to the president’s house, I headed back to the military headquarters, where the situation was still tense but the press was finally allowed in. I took some pictures of the destroyed building and sneaked out from the generals’ view, reaching a backyard where some soldiers were resting, sipping tea under a big tree. I joined them, trying to be friendly. I offered cigarettes and had tea in return, so we started to talk about what happened to General Tagme Na Wai and to President Vieira, when Paul -- the chief of a special commando unit from the region of Mansoa -- told me they had had a hell of night. He wore a denim cowboy hat and two cartridge belts across his body, in perfect Rambo style. </p>\n<p>At first I thought he was referring to the general situation, but then he proudly told me that he and his men were sent to the president’s house, to kill him. It was noon, the sun higher than ever. My blood froze. My first reaction was actually not to react. I simply answered with a skeptical “really”, and let him talk. </p>\n<p><em>“The President is responsible for his own death,”</em> said Paul, in French. </p>\n<p><em>“We went to the house, to question Nino (as the president was called) about the bomb that killed Tagme Na Wai. When we arrived he was trying to flee, with his wife, so we forced them to stay. When we asked if he issued the order to kill Tagme, he first denied his responsibility but then confessed. He said he bought the bomb during his last trip to France and ordered that it be placed under the staircase, by Tagme’s office. He didn’t want to give the names of those who brought the bomb here, or the name of the person who placed it.</em>” </p>\n<p>At this point, the quality of the details started to convince me that Paul wasn’t lying.</p>\n<p><em>“You know, Nino was a brave man but this time he really did something wrong. So we had to kill him. After all, he killed Tagme and made our life impossible… we are not receiving our salary since six months ago."</em></p>\n<p>“So, what happened after you questioned him” - I asked. </p>\n<p><em>“Well, after that we shoot him and then we took his powers away. Nino was a dangerous man, a very powerful person”. </em></p>\n<p>“And what about his wife?” </p>\n<p><em>“She doesn’t have anything to do with that, so we didn’t have any reason to kill her. She was crying and she urinated in her own clothes, so after shooting Nino we took her out of the kitchen. We respect Nino’s wife. She’s a good woman.” </em></p>\n<p>The whole tale was surrealistic and I didn’t quite understand what “taking his powers away” meant. </p>\n<p><em>“Nino had some special powers…”,</em> explains Paul, reflecting a strongly held local belief about the long-time ruler. <em>“…We needed to make sure he won’t come back for revenge. So we hacked his body, with a machete; the hands, the arms, the legs, his belly and his head. Now he’s really dead”</em>. Paul erupts in a smoky laugh, followed by his men. </p>\n<p>I give a quick look to the soldiers’ uniforms, and I see that three of them have blood on their boots and pants. I keep on playing the part, and tell them I understand what they did. Then I ask for permission to make portraits of them, with my camera. After I took the picture, Paul led me into an abandoned corner of a warehouse, within the military compound. </p>\n<p><em>“I have something you could buy, do you want to see?”</em> He called one of his men who came with a black bag. <em>“How much would you pay for that?”</em> - he asked me, his eyes wide-open, as he showed me the president’s satellite phone, stolen from his house few hours before. </p>\n<p>“Why should I buy a used satellite phone?,” I said, trying to show as little interest as possible. “I don’t know… what’s your price?” </p>\n<p>It was clear that Paul didn’t have a clue. “<em>…Nine thousand Euros, and it’s yours.</em>” I laughed, and said I couldn’t afford that price. So I offered him one more cigarette, and I left.</p>\n<p>I spent the next two hours thinking about all the information that was possibly stored in this device. The phone numbers and evidence that would possibly connect Guinea Bissau’s former president with some drug cartels in other countries.</p>\n<p>I absolutely needed this phone, but didn’t want to show my interest. I went back to the military headquarters, with an excuse, when Paul spontaneously approached me again. He offered me the phone, once again, and told me I could make the price. I offered 300 Euros. I bought it for 600.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pulitzercenter.org/showproject.cfm?id=114\" style=\"DISPLAY:inline\"><img alt=\"Aftermath of president's murder scene\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e2011570f78abc970b-800wi\" style=\"MARGIN:3px\" title=\"Aftermath of president's murder scene\"></a> The next day, I managed to visit the president’s house with my camera. One of his several cousins gives me a tour. He led me to the kitchen first, to show me where Nino Vieira was executed. The blood was all over the room. The machete was still on the floor and the bulletproof vest he always wore was on the chair where his wife sat during the questioning. All around there were hundreds of bullets from AK-47 and machine guns. The soldiers looted and destroyed the house. They took everything they could, including clothes and food. </p>\n<p>Nino Vieira’s and Tagme Na Wai’s brutal assassinations reflects much more than a mere confrontation between the Papel, the ethnic group to which the President belonged, and the Balanta, Tagme’s ethnic group. It certainly goes beyond the personal settling of accounts. </p>\n<p>The spiral of violence began in November 2008, when the head of the navy, Rear Admiral Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, suddenly left Bissau, after the president accused him of plotting a coup d’etat. A month later, in December, the international press reported what appeared to be a “failed attempt at a coup d’etat”, made by 12 soldiers who attacked the presidential compound. But this failed coup was actually about something more. </p>\n<p>According to Calvario Ahukharie, the incorruptible national director of Interpol and a crime expert, this escalation of violence is just one piece of a war to gain more control, and personal benefits, over drug trafficking. <em>“The Army, the Navy and the President are all involved – Nino was number one and Tagme number two, and they were competing,”</em> he told me. <em>“Someone had to fall.”</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.pulitzercenter.org/showproject.cfm?id=114\" title=\"Guinea Bissau: West Africa's New Achilles' Heel reporting project page at the Pulitzer Center\">Learn more about this reporting project</a></p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"TEXT-DECORATION:underline\">Reporting Sources:</span></strong></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.unodc.org/documents/about-unodc/AR08_WEB.pdf\" title=\"PDF Annual Report 2008\">United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Annual Report 2008</a> (PDF)</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/west_africa_cocaine_report_2007-12_en.pdf\" title=\"PDF\">"Cocaine Trafficking in West Africa: The threat to stability and development (with special reference to Guinea-Bissau),"</a> United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Dec. 2007. (PDF) </p>\n<p><a href=\"javascript:void(0);\"></a><a href=\"http://revistas.ucm.es/cps/16962206/articulos/UNIS0808130203A.PDF\" title=\"PDF\">Drugs, Organized Crime and Terrorism as the New Threats to Global Security</a>, by Philip de Anders, United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Jan. 2008. (PDF) </p>\n<p>"<a href=\"http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5549\"><a href=\"http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5549\"><a href=\"http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5549\">Guinea-Bissau: In Need of a State</a>," Africa Report N°142, International Crisis Group, 2 July 2008.</a></a></p>\n<p>"<a href=\"http://www.unodc.org/documents/publications/Perspectives-May08-WEB.pdf\" title=\"PDF\"><a href=\"http://www.unodc.org/documents/publications/Perspectives-May08-WEB.pdf\"><a href=\"http://www.unodc.org/documents/publications/Perspectives-May08-WEB.pdf\">Guinea-Bissau: New Hub for Cocaine Trafficking</a>," <span style=\"TEXT-DECORATION:underline\">Perspectives,</span> United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, 5 May 2008. (PDF)</a></a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/members/matthew_levitt/\">Levitt, Matthew</a>. F<font face=\"Arial\">ellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy</font>. </p>\n<p>"<a href=\"http://www.fride.org/download/COM_Achilles_heel_eng_may08.pdf\" title=\"PDF\"><a href=\"http://www.fride.org/download/COM_Achilles_heel_eng_may08.pdf\">Organised crime, drug trafficking and terrorism: the new Achilles' heel of West Africa</a>," Funcacion para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Dialogo Exterior. (PDF) </a></p>\n<p>"<a href=\"http://www.incb.org/incb/annual-report-2008.html\"><a href=\"http://www.incb.org/incb/annual-report-2008.html\">2008 report of The International Control Board</a>," Analysis of The World Situation: Africa and the Americas.</a></p>\n<p>Ahukharie, Calvario. National Director of <a href=\"http://www.interpol.int/Public/Region/Africa/Default.asp\">Interpol</a> in Guinea-Bissau. Personal Interview. </p>\n<p>Ahukharie, Lucinda Barbosa. Director of the Judiciary Police, Guinea-Bissau. Personal Interview. </p></div>"
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"title" : "Charles Taylor converts to Judaism",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/090605_charlestaylor.jpg\"></p><p>Madonna was bad enough, but this is really beyond the pale. </p><p>Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, currently imprisoned at the Hague awaiting trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone, has apparently decided to convert to Judaisim, <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/2009/06/090602_mrs_taylor.shtml\">one of his wives tells <i>BBC radio </i></a>(my transcript): </p><blockquote><p>Q. So he's now a practicing Jew?</p><p>A. He's now a Jew. He's practicing Judaism. </p><p>Q. Tells us about that? What led him to that?</p><p>A. Because of the difficulties, he always wanted to know God in a very diffent and special way. From a very small boy -- because we talk about his childhood a whole lot -- he asked himself questions about Christianity. Too many questions about why certain things happened. And why, this one and that one. Just too many question in Christianity and the whole thing about Christ because he does believe in Christ. When he got to the Hague, he got to know that he really, really wanted to be a Jew. Wanted to convert to Judaism. And that...</p><p> Q. Does that mean he has rejected Christianity then? Because that's quite a radical departure.</p><p> A. No, no, no he hasn't rejected Christianity. He has always been a\nChristian. He just decided to become a Jew. He wants to follow the two\nreligions. </p></blockquote><p>Least. Welcome. Convert. Ever. </p><p>I also can't help wondering if he got this idea from George Bluth on <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367279/\"><i>Arrested Development.</i></a> </p><p>(<b>Hat tip: </b><a href=\"http://allabuja.blogspot.com/2009/06/charles-taylor-even-more-handsome-than.html\">Shelby Grossman</a> via <a href=\"http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/\">Chris Blattman</a>) </p><p><span>MICHAEL KOOREN/AFP/Getty Images</span> </p>"
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"title" : "GEORGE PELECANOS' WAY HOME",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SieOcFQkQuI/AAAAAAAABHk/43Oga4wS8Pg/s1600-h/pelec+noway.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:81px;height:130px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SieOcFQkQuI/AAAAAAAABHk/43Oga4wS8Pg/s400/pelec+noway.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>George Pelecanos' novels arrange themselves, mostly, in series; the three Nick Stefanos books, the outstanding DC Quartet, which includes two of his very best, and the quartet featuring Derek Strange (and sometimes Terry Quinn). <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Shoedog</span>, another of his best, is a standalone, and <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Drama City</span> (thus far) appears to be one too. Although on the surface there are no concrete links to suggest that Pelecanos is in the process of building another series, I find it very easy to approach <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Way Home</span>, his excellent new novel, as very much part of a continuity with his previous two books, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Night Gardener</span> and<span style=\"font-style:italic\"> The Turnaround</span>; a trilogy concerned deeply with issues of parenthood, of how we as parents and we as a society raise our children, and in the changing perception of values within that society, and which may reflect some of his experiences writing for <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Wire</span> .<br><br>I am not suggesting that Pelecanos is writing a novelized version of the TV series, absolutely not. There is a sense, in a sprawling narrative like <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Wire</span>, that you can cover lots of angles and bring a multitude of perspectives to bear. But Dennis Lehane talked (see the IT interview <a href=\"http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/2009/02/its-hard-for-me-to-write-unless-what-im.html\">here</a>) of having to leave out lots of good material because it didn't drive the storylines forward. The brilliance of what Pelecanos has done in his last three books is to focus his story-telling within narrative arcs that enable him to focus on specific personal stories. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Night Gardener</span> had a framework of murder to be solved. But in <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Turnaround</span>, the crime was in the past, and it was the working out of the present that drove the story. In <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Way Home</span>, it is a crime not committed, a sense of values upheld, that provides the tension, and by keeping that central plot simple, the narrative is left free to consider the characters. Spareness was the key to <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Shoedog</span>; like a fine Gold Medal noir, there was no waste, which left you inside the characters. The same sort of spareness, but with a far more sensitive affinity for the quotidien society around those characters, makes <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Way Home</span> compulsive reading, and I think it's fair to say few Gold Medal books would strike such a chord of realism in the internal dynamics of an average working family in America in their own time as Pelecanos does today.<br><br>Chris Flynn is a teenaged screw-up, much to the consternation of his hard-working, blue-collar father Thomas. When Chris is sent to a juvenile prison, Thomas feels his son has to learn to pay the price for his actions, and in confinement, Chris eventually does. The story then shifts; Chris is working, laying carpet with his father, one of his prison buddies as his partner. He has a girlfriend, he has a straight life. Then, tearing up a floor, Chris discovers a bag of money...and leaves it. And from that point, the story escalates, with confrontation taking on an inevitability that will force Chris and his father to make hard choices, about exactly what it is men have to do, and exactly what fathers need to do for their sons.<br><br>Pelecanos writes movingly about the little things that make fatherhood; Flynn remembering the heat of his son's little hand as he rode in his bicycle seat. But that is part of a bigger picture. He states clearly what Flynn is: 'a guy who went to work every day, who took care of his family...and would pass on without having made a significant mark. He had been fine with this in the past. His aim was to install values, work ethic and character into his son, and see him through to adulthood, where he would become a productive member of society and in turn pass this along to his own children. But when Chris jumped the tracks, Flynn's belief in the system failed.' This is the central theme of this trilogy, and the failure of the system is not just one of kids going off the rails.<br><br>There is an element of melodrama about this; Chris' prison attitude is changed by a tragic event and the story is resolved with a piece of 'standing-up' whose roots may be a little more sentimental than realistic. Pelecanos' model is often the myth of the American west, where men have to do what men have to do, but where families, and houses, are signs of 'civilization' imposing itself on the lawless wilderness. Given the metaphor, the fact that Pelecanos is, at heart, a sympathetic writer, makes such hints of sentimentality work.<a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SieOcWdYqHI/AAAAAAAABHs/jeMLv2mA5sM/s1600-h/pelec.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:123px;height:125px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SieOcWdYqHI/AAAAAAAABHs/jeMLv2mA5sM/s400/pelec.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a> They also work because, in the other thing which seems like it might be Wire-influenced, this book has the structure and flow of a scene-by-scene screenplay: each scene works, leads to the next, keeps the flow moving. It's a bravura piece of writing, and would make a fine film in the right circumstances. One final point about the Wire influence: possibly the pressures of working on the show ended Pelecanos' novel-a-year pace, if only for one year, but I think it shows in both <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Turnaround</span> (see my original review of that book, the first post to IT, <a href=\"http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/2008/07/turnaround-by-george-pelecanos.html\">here</a>) and this book, in the sense that the personal stories are now foregrounded, the territory is staked out, and the crime elements are really there for structure. I think those two novels may have had a little longer to percolate, and they are among his best books as a result.<br><br>Sometimes, when people wonder why I'm drawn to crime fiction, I say because it addresses society as it is, not as we'd like it to be. The reality is, crime fiction doesn't actually do that very often. More often, it's addressing society as we dramatize it, without accepting that the dramatisation is real. The beauty of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Wire</span> was that the dramatization did become real, something you can't simply finish and walk away from and never think about again. That is what Pelecanos has done here. The beauty of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Way Home</span> is that you finish the novel and wonder whether, in the real world, living up to values alone is enough to get it done.<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">NOTE: This review also appears at Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk</span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/413013422636027916-1043524295888050451?l=irresistibletargets.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Ghanaian guitars",
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"content" : "<p>One of the qualities, I find, that is shared by many of the musics that most appeal to me is the ability to create and sustain juxtapositions between different, and often seemingly contradictory, moods or 'feelings'. The mysterious ways in which, for example, the best Brazilian Bossa Nova can simultaneously express contentment and melancholy, or in which Albert Ayler's music can be both ecstatic and reflective. Ghana's many highlife guitar-bands of the 1960s and 1970s seem to have mastered the secrets of this alchemical process; creating a music that is both communal and intimate, celebratory and wistful, light and heavy, hot and cold. The singles in this post feature undisputed masters of the genre.</p><p>Dr. K. Gyasi was born into a musical family, in 1929, and raised in Patasi, Ghana, a town south of Kumasi. By 1950 he was living in Accra, and polishing his skills playing guitar with Appiah Adjekum's band. Two years later, in 1952, Gyasi made his first recordings, at a mobile recording studio in Nsawam-a town about twenty miles north of Accra-that was probably operated by Philips (Decca had already built a permanent studio in Accra in 1948). By 1963, Gyasi was already popular enough that President Nkrumah invited him, along with several other musicians, to accompany his official delegation on a trip through the Soviet Bloc and North Africa. Almost forty years later, Dr. K. Gyasi still remembers fondly the golden years of the early 1960s, when his guitar-band, the Noble Kings, opened legendary nightspots like Accra's Tip Toe Nite club, and played every weekend for packed dance floors in Accra and Kumasi.</p><p>Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s the Noble Kings became one of Ghana's most popular guitar-bands. Dr. K. Gyasi was the first bandleader to introduce both the electric organ-he was inspired by Geraldo Pino's Heartbeats-and a horn section to guitar-band highlife. By the mid-1970s, Gyasi was touring Ghana with both the Noble Kings and his own theatrical group, entertaining villagers throughout the country with 'highlife operas'. In 1977, he released one of the best records of the era, his classic 'Sikyi highlife', a masterpiece of minor-key highlife. The political instability and military coups of the late 1970s, however, brought the glory days of guitar-band highlife and the Noble Kings to an end. With repeated curfews, police roadblocks and political pressure, the dancehalls stopped programming live music, and the open-air concert parties lost their audience. Dr. K. Gyasi currently lives in Kumasi, and his many recordings remain classics of guitar-band highlife.</p><p><img height=\"411\" width=\"400\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/pd_africanblog_gyasphil.jpg\"></p><p>Dr. K. Gyasi and the Noble Kings had a long relationship with Dick Essilfie-Bondzie and his Essiebons Enterprises; the first Ghanaian Gold Disc was a Dr. K. Gyasi and Noble Kings recording on the Essiebons label. These next two singles were produced by Essiebons, the first released on the Phillips label and the second on Essilfie-Bondzie's Dix label. Neither of the singles is dated, and Dr.K. Gyasi can't remember exactly when they were recorded, but based on the catalogue numbers I think they are both from the early 1970s.</p><p>The A-side of the Phillips single is \"Obaa Bako Agyegye Me', a Dr. K. Gyasi composition. He warns his young listeners to listen to their elders, 'My parents warned me not to marry that woman, but I didn't listen, I was hardheaded. Once we were wed, however, my bride started to show her true colors. Sometimes you have to listen to your elders'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/DR-K-GYASI_NOBLE_KINGSObaa_Bako_Agyegye_Me.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Dr. K. Gyasi & his Noble Kings 'Obaa Bako Agyegye Me'</a></p><p>'Obiara Beka Onka' is the B-side, and features some nice interplay between the saxophone, lead guitar, and organ (played by Honey, who is the only musician credited on the label). The group sings, 'Everybody talks. Say what you want and go on your way. There is so much trouble. You think you are the only one who can prosper; you don't think you are part of the struggle. Whatever it is, say what you want and go your way'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/DR-K-GYASI_NOBLE_KINGSObiara_Beka_Onka.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Dr. K. Gyasi & his Noble Kings 'Obiara Beka Onka'</a></p><p>The A-side of the Dix single is 'Sama Awo Deme', another Gyasi composition, again featuring Honey on organ, as well as some nice flute playing.</p><p><img height=\"414\" width=\"400\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/pd_africanblog_gyasi.jpg\"></p><p>The lyrics start, 'I traveled far from my country and didn't have any woman to keep me warm at night'. Then Gyasi goes into a verse warning those who mistreat orphans to be careful, to think of those who don't have anyone to protect them.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/DR-GYASI_NOBLE_KINGSSama_awo_deme.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Dr. K. Gyasi's Noble Kings 'Sama Awo Deme'</a></p><p>The B-side features Dr. K. Gyasi singing in Hausa. He remembers that this song came to him one day when he went to eat in a restaurant run by a Hausa women. He sings, 'Mother at least until I arrive, stop crying. I will tell you the story. I would like to come home but I don't have the means. I am praying to God that I will come back soon, may God make it possible'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/DR-GYASI_NOBLE_KINGSSei_Nazo.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Dr. K. Gyasi's Noble Kings 'Sei Na'zo'</a></p><p>During their many years of performing and recording the Noble Kings also served as a launching pad for many artists who went on to front their own bands, like the guitarist Eric Agyeman, the singer Bob Akwaboah, and the great Koo Nimo. Born Daniel Amponsah, in 1934, in the town of Foase- in the Atwima Kwanhoma district, not far from Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region- Koo Nimo grew up in a musical family; his father was a guitarist and trumpet-player in a local brass band. Introduced to European classical guitar at the age of 15, Koo Nimo eventually developed a repertoire that married classical playing techniques to the rhythms and melodies of the Ashanti.</p><p>In 1955, after a brief stint in Accra, Koo Nimo moved to Kumasi where he formed his first regular group. About ten years later, he made his first recordings with Dr. K. Gyasi, and in 1968 recorded his first album 'Asante Ballads'. By the early 1970s, Koo Nimo had committed himself to palm-wine guitar highlife, performing and recording his original repertoire with a seven piece acoustic ensemble.</p><p><img height=\"424\" width=\"400\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/pd_africanblog_koonimo.jpg\"></p><p>This next single, recorded at Ghana Film studios, and released on the Ghana Film label was probably released in 1974. The A side 'Koo Nimo Ne Gyasi' is a tribute to Koo Nimo's first wife who passed away on September 27, 1973; they had nine children together, of which four died young. Listening to this recording over the phone, from his home in Kumasi, Koo Nimo told me that this song remains close to his heart. He sings, 'In every family there is a person who pulls everyone together, who cements the bonds of the group, if this person should pass away the family can disintegrate'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/K_NIMOS_BANDKoo_Nimo_Ne_Gyasi.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Koo Nimo's Band 'Koo Nimo ne Gyasi'</a></p><p>The B side 'Kofi Gemfi III' is a tribute to a Mr. Kofi Gemfi, a friend who Koo Nimo greatly admired. Koo Nimo starts off singing, 'during the evening the orphan wants the mother. Koffi Gemfi if you are alone, it's sad to be alone. The orphan wants his mother'. Koo Nimo then goes into a spoken passage addressing the difficulties of being an orphan, 'It is so painful the life on an orphan. So those of you who take care of the orphan have patience. As our elders say, if you take care of others yours will get better'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/K_NIMOS_BANDKofi_Gemfi_3.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Koo Nimo's Band 'Kofi Gemfi III'</a></p><p>Pat Thomas was born in 1946, in the town of Agona, in the Ashanti region. Both of his parents were musicians, and Pat grew up singing. In 1968, he joined the Broadway Band and stayed with them until 1970, when he moved to Accra and joined Ebo Taylor's Blue Monks. The next year, Pat was in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire fronting his new band The Satellites. In 1972, Pat returned to Accra and joined the Sweet Beans (the band of the Ghana Cocao Marketing Board), with whom he stayed until he left Ghana in 1977. For the next twenty-three years Pat lived abroad, with extended stays in Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. He returned to Accra in 2000, and released his latest CD in 2008. He still performs regularly in Ghana and will soon start a weekly residency at the Jokodan nightclub in Accra.</p><p><img height=\"400\" width=\"400\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/pd_africanblog_ogyataana.jpg\"></p><p>This final single features the golden voice of Pat Thomas with the Ogyatanaa Show Band. The Ogyatanaa or 'burning torch' band was founded and directed by Kwadwo Donkoh, a Ghanaian diplomat turned bandleader and producer. These two tracks were released on Donkoh's Agona label. As the label indicates, Pat was a guest vocalist, and never a part of the Ogyatanaa band.</p><p>Pat recorded only a handful of songs with the group, and never performed live with the Ogyataana Band. At least one of these tracks was successful enough that Kwadwo Donkoh wanted to bring Pat back to the studio with the group, but financial disagreements sunk the idea.</p><p>'Mmobrowa', a Kwadwo Donkoh composition, and the A-side of this single, was the most commercially successful of the Pat Thomas/Ogyataana Band collaborations. It is a song about poor people who cannot afford to buy nice shoes or clothes. Pat advises them to work hard, keep struggling and things will work out.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/OGYATANAA_SHOW_BANDMMabrowa.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Ogyatanaa Show Band with Guest Vocal Pat Thomas 'Mmobrowa'</a></p><p>The B side is a tribute to one of the basic rhythmic building blocks of highlife, 'Yaa Amponsah'. As Pat explains it, 'Yaa Amponsah is the first rhythmic pattern that highlife musicians learn to play on the guitar. Everyone plays it in his own way, with his own style'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/OGYATANAA_SHOW_BAND_yaa_amponsah.Mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Ogyatanaa Show Band with Guest Vocal Pat Thomas '(Super) Yaa Amponsah'</a></p><p>This post is based on interviews with Koo Nimo, Pat Thomas, Dr. K. Gyasi, and Dr. John Collins. It also draws on the published research of Dr. Collins and Miles Cleret. Special thanks to Peter Clottey for his interpreting help and for his translations.</p>"
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"title" : "Luambo Makiadi et le T.P.O.K. Jazz - Candidat na biso Mobutu, MOPAP 1984",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7v8CSr9_K3Q/SiDlxdFTsMI/AAAAAAAABj4/BN9K0YQyLbk/s1600-h/Luambo+Makiadi,+front.jpg\"><img style=\"WIDTH:400px;HEIGHT:395px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7v8CSr9_K3Q/SiDlxdFTsMI/AAAAAAAABj4/BN9K0YQyLbk/s400/Luambo+Makiadi,+front.jpg\"></a> <p>\nCandidat na biso ( our candidate ) Mobutu is the sole subject<br>\non this here LP by Luambo Makiadi ( Franco ).<br>\nAs always, Franco delivers what we expect, great music.<br>\nAnother African treasure at the Global Groove, enjoy it. <p>\ntracks; <p>\n1 Candidat na biso Mobutu A<br>\n2 Candidat na biso Mobutu B <p>\n</p>\n<a href=\"http://www.mediafire.com/?n1uznmjtmbu\">new_link</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2988168377526999064-2979151413381409206?l=globalgroovers.blogspot.com\"></div></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling",
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"content" : "<div>Last Monday, May 25th, the annual Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake was held near Gloucester, England. In a tradition that dates back at least 200 years, possibly much longer, groups of fearless competitors chase an 8 pound (3.5 kg) round of Double Gloucester Cheese down an extremely steep and uneven hill, with a 1:1 gradient in some parts. Thousands of spectators gather to watch the five downhill and four uphill races, and to celebrate the winners and console the losers afterward. Injuries such as broken bones and concussions are commonplace, but the event continues to grow in popularity. The winner of each race is awarded the delicious round of cheese they were chasing. (<a href=\"http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/coopers_hill_cheeserolling.html\">17 photos total</a>)</div><div><a name=\"photo1\"></a><a href=\"http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/coopers_hill_cheeserolling.html\"><img src=\"http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/cheeseroll_05_27/c01_19133431.jpg\" style=\"height:659px;width:990px\"></a><br><div>Watched over by Rob Seex, the Cheese Rolling Master of Ceremonies (top hat), contestants in the men's race chase a Double Gloucester Cheese down the steep gradient of Cooper's Hill during the annual Bank Holiday tradition of cheese-rolling on May 25, 2009 in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, England. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images) <div></div></div></div>"
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"title" : "I'm allergic to AS Byatt",
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"content" : "<div><img alt=\"\" src=\"http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/32842?ns=guardian&pageName=I%27m+allergic+to+AS+Byatt%3AArticle%3A1221374&ch=Books&c4=AS+Byatt+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Stuart+Evers&c8=1221374&c9=Article&c10=Blogpost&c11=Books&c13=&c25=Books+blog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog&c42=Books%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog%2F%7CArticle%7C1221374%7CI%27m+allergic+to+AS+Byatt%7C\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"></div><p>After a traumatic experience with Still Life as a student, I'm now programmed to loathe everything she writes</p><p>My first reading list at university was a perplexing affair. I'd hoped for a blend of the classic and the contemporary, the obscure and the well-known: what I got, however, was almost all turgid religious Victoriana written by very unfamiliar names. Thankfully, there was one author on this list that I'd heard of – AS Byatt – and as I struggled through weeks of wearisome Christian metaphor and allusion, Byatt's novel of art, family and sexual awakening, Still Life, sat waiting for me like some great prize. </p><p>It took me roughly 20 pages to realise that I hated <a href=\"http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/byattas/slife.htm\">Still Life</a>. No, I didn't hate it: I loathed it, detested it, despised it. Reading it was like holding my own personal kryptonite. Its cosy Oxbridge smugness, its heavily-worn research and erudition, its wide cast of privileged academics and bohemians – to me, it was everything that a novel should never be. It was the first, but by no means the last, novel I threw to the floor in disgust. </p><p>My memory of Still Life is so vitriolic that in the intervening 15 years I have not picked up another AS Byatt novel. No matter how feted, how well reviewed, I have been utterly prejudiced against her by my first impression of her work. The fact that I can only remember a few scenes from the book, and couldn't tell you a great deal of what happens, is immaterial – the case against AS Byatt was prosecuted and tried in the autumn of 1994. </p><p>This is one of the great problems with readers. If they don't like the first book they read by a particular author, the chances of them signing on to read another are very slim indeed. Because reading takes so much time, and there are only so many books one can read in a lifetime, it seems wilfully masochistic to go back to someone you didn't like first time around. Musicians, playwrights, artists and filmmakers – who don't place so many demands on the people who consume their outpourings – are much luckier in this regard.</p><p>That said, I am not proud of my kneejerk prejudice against AS Byatt – and nor should she be in any way bothered by it. It might not be pleasant, but I suspect that everyone who considers themselves a regular reader has a literary <em>bête noire </em>sparked by one disastrous encounter with their work. It's pretty much inescapable; at some point you'll read someone whose fiction is everything you disagree with. The problem is, for me at least, is that everybody else seems to think that she is a truly great writer.</p><p>With this in mind, and with almost every reviewer <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/09/as-byatt-childrens-book\">falling over themselves to praise Byatt's latest doorstop</a>, <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/may/07/as-byatt-childrens-book\">The Children's Book</a>, I decided that enough was enough. Such blind, decade-and-a-half dislike needed to be challenged. As an older reader, perhaps I would be more attuned to her nuances? Perhaps with the benefit of having read hundreds more novels, I might appreciate her style and thematic progression? Perhaps, I would be won over and find that I'd been totally and utterly wrong.</p><p>Perhaps I should have read Possession.</p><p>While The Children's Book is compelling, atmospheric and darkly resonant, I also found it deeply, deeply irritating. The didactic nature of the narration, where everything is described in exacting, exhausting detail, was bad enough, and that's before you factor in the stilted dialogue and pleased-with-itself research-spouting.</p><p>And as a story it fails, at least for me, because Byatt is absolutely everywhere in this novel – a constant voice telling you everything, as though you're a slightly deaf and blind old maid. She even adds italics to show you where a sentence should be stressed, as though, dear reader, you might not have the intelligence to add it yourself. As a consequence the whole thing rings hollow, the characters resolutely remaining characters from a novel rather than living, breathing people. </p><p>As I put the book down, I wondered whether I would have been so harsh on The Children's Book had I not been forced to read Still Life all those years ago. It's hard to say. That first impression was so powerful that it would have taken a novel of almost impossible brilliance to overcome it.</p><div style=\"float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/asbyatt\">AS Byatt</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction\">Fiction</a></li></ul></div><div><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk\">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href=\"http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html\">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds\">More Feeds</a></div><p style=\"clear:both\"></p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/8kf8j41glg0kjidva4o58ic684/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fbooks%2Fbooksblog%2F2009%2Fmay%2F26%2Fasbyatt-fiction\" width=\"100%\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\"></iframe></p>"
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"title" : "Design & Technology Thesis: Lilliput",
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"content" : "<div><br><p>Lilliput is an interactive travelogue of personal photographs and recorded memories that explore the relationship between the seen and the remembered. The project derives its name from an island in Jonathan Swift’s fictitious travel novel <em>Gulliver’s Travels</em>. The island of tiny near-sighted people is at war with its neighboring island of Blefuscu over the proper end at which to crack an egg. This war is the source of the term endianness, a computer science convention for communication when information is broken into pieces for transmission and reassembled upon reception. The interactive travelogue of Lilliput attempts to produce meaning by assembling photographs and narrative memories in digital space.</p>\n<p>(Best viewed in Firefox. Be sure your audio is turned on.)</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://a.parsons.edu/~benec382/thesis/lilliput/\"><img title=\"Lilliput - Ida Benedetto\" src=\"http://idaimages.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/idabenedetto012.png?w=500&h=329\" alt=\"Lilliput - Ida Benedetto\" width=\"500\" height=\"329\"></a></p>\n<p>Many thanks to Gaelen Green for helping with project management, to Anand Krishnan for programming assistance, and to my thesis professors David Carroll and Adam Chapman.</p>\n<p>In producing this thesis for a Design & Technology major at Parsons, I interrogated documentary ethics as they might relate to digital storytelling. As much work has been done in developing digital methods for publishing, communication, and collaboration, it seems that techniques for digital, interactive storytelling have much room for development. The last decade of scholarship on Baroque art and science, specifically on the <em>Wunderkammer</em>, produced a vocabulary for defining traditions of interactive narrative leading up to digital media. Working with video game design this semester provided me with some immediate techniques for interpreting the art historians’ work on the Baroque for a contemporary digital art project.</p>\n<p>I began thesis with the hope of getting a better grasp on interactive storytelling. As production got under way, my familiarity with the ethics of visual representation hampered my ability to innovate. I end this project more intimately aware of the tensions in documentary traditions and humbled by what I still can learn about interactivity and narrative.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/idaimages.wordpress.com/1149/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=idaimages.wordpress.com&blog=1190202&post=1149&subd=idaimages&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Around the Hindu Kush, 30 is a Magic Number - An Update",
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"content" : "<div><p>Last August my piece <a href=\"http://www.moonofalabama.org/2008/08/around-the-hind.html\">Around the Hindu Kush, 30 is a Magic Number</a> quoted 16 media items about different incidents in Afghanistan between February 2006 and August 2008. Each of those incidents involved "30 militants", "30 insurgents" or "30 enemies". </p><p>Since then the number 30 has not lost its magic. Here is an update with 18 incidents since August last year all of which involve the magic number:\n\n\n</p><blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/southasia/news/article_1477124.php%20/At_least_30_Taliban_reported_dead_in_shelling_of_Pakistan_redoubt_\">At least<strong> 30 Taliban</strong> reported dead in shelling of Pakistan redoubt</a>, DPA, May 14, 2009<br>\nIslamabad - At least <strong>30 Taliban fighters</strong> were killed Thursday when government artillery fire destroyed their hideout in north-west Pakistan, residents and officials said, as concerns about the fate of thousands of refugees in the region grew amid an escalating humanitarian crisis.</p></blockquote><center>---</center>\n\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/clashes-kill-dozens-in-afghanistan-20090505-ast9.html\">Clashes kill dozens in Afghanistan</a>, AFP, May 5, 2009<br>Heavy fighting between Taliban and security forces in Afghanistan is believed to have killed about <strong>30 militants</strong> and several civilians, a governor says.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090502/wl_afp/afghanistanunrestlead\">Around <strong>30 militants</strong> said killed in Afghan attacks</a>, AFP, May 2, 2009<br>Afghan and international authorities said Saturday that around <strong>30 insurgents</strong> had been killed in new clashes in militant hotspots as a district police chief and his guard died in a bombing.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.military-world.net/Afghanistan/1217.html\">Gunships kill <strong>30</strong> in attack on Taleban</a>, MilitaryNews, April 28<br>Pakistan sent helicopter gunships and troops to attack <strong>Taleban militants</strong> in a district covered by a peace deal after strong United States pressure on the nuclear-armed nation to confront insurgents advancing in its northwest.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.voanews.com/bangla/2009-04-26-voa6.cfm\">Pakistani Forces Kill <strong>30 Taliban</strong> in Northwest</a>, VOA, April 26, 2009<br>Pakistani officials say paramilitary forces backed by helicopter gunships have killed at least <strong>30 Taliban</strong> militants, including a commander and five deputy commanders, in a northwestern district.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.newkerala.com/nkfullnews-1-14864.html\">Coalition airstrike kills 20 Taliban militants in Afghanistan</a>, IANS, April 2, 2009<br>\nTwenty suspected Taliban militants were killed in an airstrike carried out by the US-led coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, officials said in a statement Thursday.\n<br>...<br>\nThe Afghan police - backed by NATO troops - killed <strong>30 Taliban</strong>, including one of their commanders, in the same Kajaki district Tuesday. A day earlier, <strong>another 30 militants</strong> were killed in a separate operation in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center><blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.bt.com.bn/en/asia_news/2009/04/01/afghanistan_attacks_kill_mayor_30_militants\">Afghanistan attacks kill mayor, <strong>30 militants</strong></a>, April 1, 2009, AFP<br>THE mayor of an Afghan city was killed in a bomb attack and <strong>30 Taliban-linked militants</strong> died in a police operation, among separate incidents of violence reported in Afghanistan yesterday.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.centcom.mil/en/press-releases/ana-kill-30-militants-destroy-ied-cache-in-helmand.html\">ANA kill <strong>30 militants</strong>, destroy IED cache in Helmand </a>, US Centcom, March 19, 2009<br>KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan National Army soldiers advised by Coalition forces killed <strong>30 armed militants</strong> in Gereshk Disrict, Helmand Province Thursday.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.military.com/news/article/new-units-quickly-in-the-afghan-fight.html?ESRC=eb.nl\">New Units Quickly in the Afghan Fight</a>, AP, Feb 17, 2009<br>Militants have attacked several patrols with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, including one ambush by <strong>30 insurgents</strong>, Lt. Col. Steve Osterholzer, the brigade spokesman, said.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijYxqS5-gOg8T7vUIR-xG9zzx0YQ\">Troops kill around<strong> 30 insurgents</strong> in Afghanistan</a>, AFP , Jan 22, 2009<br>KABUL (AFP) — Afghan and international forces said Thursday they had killed around <strong>30 militants</strong> in Afghanistan, 22 of them in NATO air strikes after a patrol was attacked near the Pakistan border.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20081203/as-pakistan/\">Pakistan army says airstrikes kill <strong>30 militants</strong></a>, HuffPo, Dec 2, 2008<br>Pakistani airstrikes and a suspected suicide attack left 34 dead near the Afghan border on Wednesday, security forces said, as the U.S. urged broader action against militants after the Mumbai terror attacks.\n</p><p>\nAirstrikes in two areas of the Mohmand border region killed <strong>30 suspected militants</strong>, a military statement said. It said the strikes were "highly successful" but provided no further details, including whether any civilians were hurt.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/uncategorized/more-than-30-militants-killed-in-afghanistan_100119820.html\">More than <strong>30 militants</strong> killed in Afghanistan</a>, Xinhua , November 16, 2008<br>Afghan army backed by the US-led coalition forces have killed more than <strong>30 militants</strong> in southern Afghanistan, a coalition statement released here Sunday said. A group of militants Saturday night ambushed Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and coalition forces while they were conducting a reconnaissance patrol in the Nahr Surkh district of Helmand province, the statement said.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.newssafety.org/index.php?view=article&catid=110%3Aafghanistan-security&id=10576%3Amilitants-kill-afghan-governor-30-rebels-killed-officials-&option=com_content&Itemid=100106\">Militants kill Afghan governor, <strong>30 rebels</strong> killed: officials</a>, AFP, Nov 8, 2008<br>Afghan government and international military officials said Saturday that Taliban insurgents had gunned down a district governor overnight and about <strong>30 militants</strong> had been killed in various clashes.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4979208.ece\">Two German soldiers die in Afghan day of bloodshed</a>, Times Online, Oct 20, 2008<br>The deaths, and the murder of Gayle Williams in Kabul, follow a defeat for Taleban forces overnight near Lashkar Gar, the Helmand provincial capital.\n</p><p>\nIsaf and Afghan troops were reported to have killed more than <strong>30 insurgents</strong> and recovered weapons, ammunition, motobikes and other vehicles used by the Taleban, in a raid. \n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=14444\">Pakistan Officials: Air Strikes Kill <strong>30 Militants</strong></a>, AP, Oct 19, 2008<br> Pakistan killed <strong>30 militants</strong> close to the Afghan border Sunday as America's top diplomat in the region visited for talks with government leaders, officials said.</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Top_Headlines/30_militants_killed_in_northwest_Pakistan/articleshow/3483096.cms\"><strong>30 militants</strong> killed in northwest Pakistan</a>, ToI , Sep 14, 2008<br>ISLAMABAD: At least <strong>30 militants</strong> were killed and over 20 injured in air strikes by Pakistani security forces on Sunday in a troubled northwestern tribal region, where the army is conducting a crackdown on the local Taliban. \n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/25-worshippers-30-taliban-militants-killed-in-two-separate-incidents-in-pak_10094551.html\">25 worshippers,<strong> 30 Taliban militants</strong> killed in two separate incidents in Pak</a>, ANI , Sep 11, 2008<br>In a fresh spate of killings in Pakistan, at least 25 civilians were killed and 50 injured in a grenade-and-gun attack in a mosque in the Maskanai area of lower Dir, and Pakistani security forces claimed to have gunned down at least <strong>30 Taliban militants</strong> in the Bajaur tribal agency.\n</p></blockquote>\n<center>---</center>\n\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/internationalterrorism/30-Taliban--and-4.4430012.jp\"><strong>30 Taliban</strong> and 4 police are killed in Afghanistan clashes</a>, EveningNews, August 27, 2008<br>MORE than <strong>30 Taliban</strong> fighters and four policemen were killed in a series of clashes, airstrikes and bombings in Afghanistan, officials said today.\n</p></blockquote><p>\nObviously there is some bias towards the number 30 in the <em>news</em> and <em>reporting</em> from the Hindu Kush. The tells us how unreliable all of these reports really are.</p></div>"
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"title" : "Elegy for the American Dream",
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"content" : "<p>Remember us with our animals — tabby,<br>\nchihuahua, pot-bellied pig, their faces<br>\nalive with imputed thoughts<br>\nthat they thankfully never voice,<br>\nantidotes to the never-quiet<br>\nbarkers on our screens.<br>\nRemember us with our screens,<br>\nthose escape hatches.<br>\nRemember us lifting our pets<br>\nas we lift each other’s bodies<br>\nto our avid, lonely mouths,<br>\nsaying: these ones we will spare,<br>\nthese ones we will hold in our thoughts,<br>\nhemmed in by indifferent neighbors<br>\n& blank streets in subdivisions<br>\nwhere the last untended corners<br>\nhost colonies from Eurasia.<br>\nRemember us on our mowers<br>\nsailing alone around the yard,<br>\nfaithful as any pilgrim to a labyrinth.<br>\nRemember us on our toilets, learning<br>\nto let go (with the aid of laxatives) in<br>\nour most often remodeled room,<br>\nenthroned above the waters of a vast<br>\n& literal Lethe whose tributaries<br>\ndrain every home & office.<br>\nThis is what we love, more than anything:<br>\nthe privilege of absent-mindedness.<br>\nThis magic trick. We flush,<br>\n& our shit & piss, our used condoms<br>\n& tampons, our unused medications,<br>\nour extra-soft toilet paper made<br>\nentirely from tree pulp —<br>\nit all spins around three times & vanishes<br>\nwith a gurgle. Remember us<br>\nwith our exclusive membership cards<br>\n& our spent members. When we die,<br>\nfill us with preservatives & seal us away<br>\nbeneath an immaculate lawn.<br>\nRemember us who labored<br>\nso hard to forget.</p>\n\n\n<p>__________</p><p><em>Similar Posts</em></p><p><dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2004/05/in-the-american-dream/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: In the American Dream\">In the American Dream</a></dl><dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2004/05/the-cape-of-the-end-of-the-earth-dream-fugue/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: The Cape of the End of the Earth (dream fugue)\">The Cape of the End of the Earth (dream fugue)</a></dl><dl><a href=\"http://www.vianegativa.us/2004/01/dream-of-the-white-chamber/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link: Dream of the White Chamber\">Dream of the White Chamber</a></dl></p>"
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"title" : "The State of Jazz Fifty Years Ago",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959\">1959</a>. Fifty years ago. Some great jazz was caught on camera that year: <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qc3VaXtW5M\">Ahmad Jamal Trio: Darn That Dream (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOu5iWhexE0\">Horace Silver: Señor Blues (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_v7mUGoKDc\">Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: Night in Tunisia (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkTNa2iioE\">Gerry Mulligan/Art Farmer: Moonlight In Vermont (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFaK4q0pxcQ&feature=PlayList&p=96F0827043C6BA04&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=13\">Miles Davis / Gil Evans Orchestra (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgskZft40k4\">Bud Powell with Kenny Clarke - Get Happy (1959)</a>; <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgaqALyJJ4\">The Future of Jazz TV show: Billy Taylor/George Russell/Bill Evans/etc. (1959 or possibly 1958)</a>. That is all. <br><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?a=85WT8hE6glw:eI2nwTRDcCo:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Metafilter?i=85WT8hE6glw:eI2nwTRDcCo:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "another House of God",
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"content" : "A very dear family member of mine, a secular Jew, had chest pain which led to a bunch of interventions. This led to me flying back home to California one recent weekend to see him in the hospital. <br><br>His primary care doctor's practice, and his HMO, use a hospital run by a Catholic healthcare network. It has excellent cardiac outcomes, says the Medicare data. So keeping in mind that quality should be measured by outcomes and not by tenure, I haven't pushed for him to go to the academic hospital in town. I think for most people these days, the religious affiliation of a hospital, or the former affiliation, is just kind of a quirky detail. A hospital is a hospital. The HMOs are more powerful than the church. The doctors and nurses matter more than the priests and the nuns.<br><br>As far as the doctors, I was frustrated by the hospitalist, who had a Muslim name, and reassured by the pulmonologist, who also had a Muslim name; and I liked the Chinese American cardiologist just fine too. (The experience reminded me that for patients and patients' families, doctors loom large because they are very rarely seen; and nurses loom large because they are always around.) <br><br>Their nurses are unionized, but order their scrubs from the same mail order catalogs that our nurses order them from, and probably drive the same kinds of minivans too. There were fewer young nurses with <a href=\"http://www.uniformcorner.com/acatalog/Peaches_Fashion_V-Neck_Scrub_Top.html\">those kinda cooler scrub patterns</a>, more nurse's union pins, more Filipina accents, no one saying \"myocahdial infahction\". In other words, the variations from my own hospital only emphasized that it too was a hospital above all else, much more than it was a Catholic institution.<br><br>But still, on Sunday, there was a prayer over the loudspeaker. \"It goes on just long enough for you to start to get irritated, but stops right before you are about to go ballistic,\" another (definitely not Catholic) beloved family member observed. \"They've clearly timed it very carefully.\"<br><br>My dear family member is back home, now back in the warm embrace of secular humanism. Phew.<br><br><br>The hospital focuses on cardiac care...<br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5TZy9VDyI/AAAAAAAAAQY/Y--_IyTU7Iw/s1600-h/IMG_0051.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:300px;height:400px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5TZy9VDyI/AAAAAAAAAQY/Y--_IyTU7Iw/s400/IMG_0051.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5Tn0tJehI/AAAAAAAAAQg/__PUDzig0p8/s1600-h/IMG_0053.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5Tn0tJehI/AAAAAAAAAQg/__PUDzig0p8/s400/IMG_0053.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>...but doesn't let you forget that for this hospital administration, there is a celestial nurse manager above all others.<br><br><br>My family didn't know that \"S.O.B\" stood for \"short of breath\" so they thought this clinical plan, written next to the bed by the nurse to explain the plan for the day, seemed out of character for the hospital.<br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5Tvlh_KMI/AAAAAAAAAQo/QeGHdX6PoVs/s1600-h/IMG_0054.JPG\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:300px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Pq05wUsftTU/Sf5Tvlh_KMI/AAAAAAAAAQo/QeGHdX6PoVs/s400/IMG_0054.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/168082693469796351-2338198751201350682?l=hemodynamics.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Hemodynamics/~4/wMyFZ2BhjYs\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "News as art, continued",
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"content" : "Back to the \"what does this scene remind me of?\" category, previously <a href=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/art/\">here</a>, while still looking into further <a href=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/flu_news_from_china_detention.php\">flu news</a> in China. Many nominations for this painting, usually with apologies for the larger Messianic implications:<br><span style=\"display:inline\"><a href=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/LastSupper3.jpg\"><br><img alt=\"LastSupper3.jpg\" src=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/assets_c/2009/05/LastSupper3-thumb-550x292-7592.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"292\"></a></span><br>\n<br><br><span style=\"display:inline\"><a href=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/Portrait.jpg\"><img alt=\"Portrait.jpg\" src=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/assets_c/2009/04/Portrait-thumb-560x308-7527.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"303\"></a></span><br> <div></div><br>After the jump, for greater clarity of detail, an early non-Leonardo copy of the painting as it once may have looked. Plus another version not by Leonardo. More to come, with eventual wrap-up thanks to all contributors.<br><br><span style=\"display:inline\"><a href=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/LastSupper2.jpg\"><img alt=\"LastSupper2.jpg\" src=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/assets_c/2009/05/LastSupper2-thumb-550x301-7588.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"301\"></a></span> <div><br></div><span style=\"display:inline\"><img alt=\"Moes.jpg\" src=\"http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/Moes.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"242\"></span><br>\n<div><br>And, on the raised-finger gesture of Obama in the photo and of the disciple Thomas in the paintings, this from an informed reader:<br><blockquote>The image of Obama speaking struck me as very davinciesque, especially the finger pointing upward. It is supposed to point out to the person watching the painting either that John the Baptist was a great guy or alternatively that the fingers represent fire and water, which for Hermetics symbolizes purifying fire that transforms true believers from ?man? into ?super man?. It is called the "John gesture" among Da Vinci mysticists. See <a href=\"http://www.philipcoppens.com/johngesture.html\">http://www.philipcoppens.com/johngesture.html</a> <br><br></blockquote></div><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/JamesFallows?a=sE2L8treLPY:3FUB9lk_1xs:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/JamesFallows?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/JamesFallows/~4/sE2L8treLPY\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "Award-winning journalist Sorious Samura heads back to his native West Africa for a trip through his homeland of Sierra Leone and other neighbouring countries. \r\n\r\nIn part three Sorious returns to Liberia to follow the journey of a 26-year old woman called ‘Black Diamond’ as she travels hundreds of miles across Liberia in search of the daughter she calls ‘Beloved’. \r\n\r\nThe child was born after Diamond, then aged 15, was raped by government soldiers. During the rape her parents tried to defend her and were killed.\r\n\r\nFuelled by anger, she joined the rebels to become one of Liberia’s most infamous child soldiers. She tells Sorious her version of the war."
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"title" : "Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey & his Inter-Reformers Band -Operation Feed the Nation, Decca West Africa 1976",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7v8CSr9_K3Q/SfTYsUC27SI/AAAAAAAABdo/3PpMxlRi3t8/s1600-h/Ebenezer,+front.jpg\"><img style=\"WIDTH:400px;HEIGHT:399px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7v8CSr9_K3Q/SfTYsUC27SI/AAAAAAAABdo/3PpMxlRi3t8/s400/Ebenezer,+front.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><p>\nTo support the 1976 Campaign, Operation Feed the Nation, Ebenezer<br>\nmade this LP. \"If Japan, Guyana, Russia, the Philippines, and Ghana<br>\ncan do it\", Ebenezer said, \"Nigeria must not fail.\"<br>\nThese country's had succes with comparable programs.<br>\nJuju as good as ever by the hand of the master, hail<br>\nChief Commander Ebenezer Obey & his Inter-Reformers Band.<p>\ntracks;<p>\n 1 Operation feed the nation<br>\n 2 Edumare a dupe<br>\n - Ab anije enia<br>\n - Babu lukudi<br>\n - Ma ba e lo<br>\n - O ta won yo<br>\n - Ki oloriburuku enia ma ko ba e<p>\n<a href=\"http://rapidshare.com/files/226112547/Chief_Commander_Ebenezer_Obey_-_Operation_feed_the_nation.rar\">promo</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/2988168377526999064-1114621758308688296?l=globalgroovers.blogspot.com\"></div></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Social Collapse Best Practices",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-style:italic\">The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audio of the talk is available <a href=\"http://fora.tv/media/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2009-02-13-orlov.mp3\">here</a>. Video of the talk is available <a href=\"http://fora.tv/2009/02/13/Dmitry_Orlov_Social_Collapse_Best_Practices\">here.</a></span><br><br>Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that's gone wrong. I know it's a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn't you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk.<br><br>I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno – some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I'll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would seem.<br><br>You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight, because I am one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way?<br><br>I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from experience – luckily, from other people's experience – that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA (\"F\" is for \"Former\"). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn't make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.<br><br>I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.<br><br>Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that's my little intervention.<br><br>If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients \"The Superpower Collapse Soup.\" Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. Please don't be too concerned, though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.<br><br>I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time.<br><br>I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up straddling the two worlds – the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia, and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian can. But I went through high school and university in the US .I had careers in several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse first-hand.<br><br>By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since.<br><br>The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable.<br><br>The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term \"hyperpower\" and were jabbering on about full-spectrum dominance. All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan Greenspan chided us about \"irrational exuberance\" while consistently low-balling interest rates. It was the \"Goldilocks economy\" – not to hot, not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually more of a \"Tinker-bell\" economy, because the last five or so years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt pyramids, the \"whole house of cards\" as President Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now we can look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo.<br><br>While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During that time, I was watching the action in the oil industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles' heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half a decade. Perhaps you’ve noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here: people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So please make a mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am making a specific prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen, just silently add “plus or minus half a decade.”<br><br>In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn’t too far off. In June of 2005 I published an article on the subject, titled \"Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century,\" which was quite popular, even to the extent that I got paid for it. It is available at various places on the Internet. A little while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the \"Collapse Gap\" concept, which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The slide show from that presentation, titled \"Closing the Collapse Gap,\" was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then. Then, in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to follow, I published a short article titled “The Five Stages of Collapse,” which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that I am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made enough predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take half a decade, please remember that), collapse is well underway, and now I am just an observer.<br><br>But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It’s like looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.<br><br>In organizations, especially large organizations, “best practices” also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to “think outside the box” whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn’t feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think – a box better suited to the post-collapse environment.<br><br>Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.<br><br>Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.<br><br>If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head said so.<br><br>But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!<br><br>So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.<br><br>Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.<br><br>So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.<br><br>Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn.<br><br>The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms. Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem.<br><br>Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered, raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers’ markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once the economy collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest. The kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they made a huge difference.<br><br>The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period. Black humor has always been one of Russia’s main psychological coping mechanisms. A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it is completely empty. So he asks the butcher: “Don’t you have any fish?” And the butcher answers: “No, here is where we don’t have any meat. Fish is what they don’t have over at the seafood counter.”<br><br>Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued even during the worst of times, partly because has always been such an important part of the Russian diet, and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used public transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact cities. This combination of factors made for some lean times, but very little malnutrition and no starvation.<br><br>In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive.<br><br>Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.<br><br>Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren’t really burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.<br><br>Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest.<br><br>An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses.<br><br>How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money, right?<br><br>Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.<br><br>These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.<br><br>Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower? A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a “realistic” price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live.<br><br>Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container... The list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out.<br><br>As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution.<br><br>One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them.<br><br>Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards.<br><br>College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don’t we.<br><br>Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don’t get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings.<br><br>All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production. More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price.<br><br>Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s needed for some small but critical mission.<br><br>I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no belly.<br><br>So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced.<br><br>Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we run out of gas.<br><br>Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars. The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.<br><br>Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos don’t require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.<br><br>And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn’t safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how could I think of doing such a thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting observations along the way.<br><br>One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.<br><br>A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world’s largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting to happen as well, except for the currently planned little side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee – forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let’s give that one… half a decade?<br><br>But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.<br><br>And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not \"on the force\" and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.<br><br>I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or bad per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in a post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will not have time to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last thing we should have to worry about.<br><br>Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic – you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.<br><br>Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and distribute, a new agricultural implement. It's a sort of flail studded with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost-effective, and reasonably safe provided you don’t lose your head while using it, although people have taken to calling the “flying guillotine.” You think that this is an acceptable risk, but you are concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability. Once again, it is very helpful to have a large number of influential, physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever some legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine, and generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably, without any money changing hands, and without signing any legal documents.<br><br>Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if someone else has the firepower to bring the government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and convince it to be reasonable and to play nice.<br><br>Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you can provide some relief to people who wouldn’t otherwise have any health care. You don’t dare call yourself a doctor, because these people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life’s savings. But suppose you have some medical training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through the various licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally unstable friends.<br><br>Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department.<br><br>I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later.<br><br>So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this: “My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?” And I tell them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way.<br><br>So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them.<br><br>OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any money? How is that done? Good question.<br><br>As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better than living in a ghost town.<br><br>What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.<br><br>If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/28495039-4956380899552305789?l=cluborlov.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "<p>by Morgan Meis</p><p>\r\n\r\nA friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets you into a narrow hallway along the left side of the train car. You would prefer the train with a rudimentary toilet that flushes by means of a foot pedal, in which, as a man, you can watch yourself pee straight down through the rusty tube onto the track rushing by in a ruffle of wooden slats below. Clickety-clak, clickety-clak. \"Do not use the toilet while the train is in or near the station,\" says the sign. </p><p>\r\n\r\nEurope is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane won't do it, the fly by is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness of the American plains. That's when the immensity of it gets to you, that's when you understand something about space. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train. </p><p>\r\n\r\nYou sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. Benjaminian in temperament, they think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time. Thomas Mann said it like this, \"All good things take time; so do all great things. In other words, space will have its time. It is a familiar feeling with me that there is a sort of hubris, and a great superficiality, in those who would take away from space or stint it of the time naturally bound up with it.\" That's an extremely European thought. I'm not sure it's even true, but I like that fact that he said it. Of course, Thomas Mann was Europe. I suppose then, by logical extension, that Mann was a train.</p><p>\r\n\r\n*</p><p>\r\n\r\nThere's a specific way that European women walk. It can't be described but you know it. Perhaps we could say it is slightly more constrained than, for instance, an American gait. But it is oddly provocative in being so. You wouldn't use words like shake and shimmy. Maybe you would say, \"slink.\" </p><p>\r\n\r\nTry to slink on a moving train, though. Your ass is getting thrown from one wall to the other. The slink becomes a goddamn catastrophe. It really gets ugly when she gets to those doors between trains. Those doors are the enemy of elegance everywhere. You are a brute when you reach those doors, an animal fighting for survival. This is the humanity of trains. Nothing is more extraordinary than an aging European woman with well-tailored slacks sitting alone, by the window, in a compartment, chewing just a bit on the end of her pencil. And nothing is more ridiculous than that same woman stumbling toward the restroom as the train snakes up a pass through the Alps. The give and take of a train. The mystery and the baseness. </p><p>\r\n\r\n*</p><p>\r\n\r\nDo you remember the opening scene of Lars Von Trier's Europa (Zentropa)? The darkness, the camera moving along the train tracks. \"You are in Germany,\" the narrator says. The train, that European train. The narrator counting down from ten. The European train in 1945. What, oh what have you been doing with your trains, Europe? Why is Europe so fucking evil? No one knows. The bread is excellent, though. </p><p>\r\n\r\n*</p><p>\r\n\r\nEvery so often, as the train winds through the European countryside, the tracks will edge up against a local road. You sit staring out the window, sipping a can of German lager, perfectly bitter. Suddenly there is an old man standing at the side of the road, watching the train go by. It all happens quickly, the train is traveling at its top speed. But the human eye is fast too. You lock eyes with the old man and it is startling as hell. He is standing still by the road, and you are hurtling past in a compartment. But there is an uncanny intimacy. He is watching you, you are watching him. You both know it. The eyes have locked. Both of your mouths open just a little, simultaneously. A tiny gasp of mutual shock. The instant is infinite and then gone forever. </p><p>\r\n\r\n*</p><p>\r\n\r\nThere is no sadder place than the platform of a train station. I don't know why exactly. I'm reminded of a few lines by John Ashbery. </p><blockquote style=\"margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px\"><p>Only the wait in stations is vague and<br>Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much<br>Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there's no<br>Rule or that it's applied haphazardly. <br>Sadness of the faces of children on the platform,</p></blockquote><p>\r\n\r\nIt is that, vague and dimensionless. Then Ashbery adds, \"like oneself.\" That's a mean line, ruthless. But that's what you are at a train station, nothing. Standing alone on the concrete platform. Who am I fricking kidding? And it is true that the children are always looking at you funny. Run away, children, I don't even exist. </p><p>\r\n\r\nThen the train comes grudgingly to a halt from around the bend. That's the other thing of it. Trains don't like the station either. Out on the tracks, flying across the countryside a train is pretty damn cool. At the station, eh. Stations break the rhythm of the experience, bring the train-induced reverie down to earth again. You feel guilty standing at the station, knowing that you're the cause of the interruption. Of course, the train never actually leaves earth, that's its honesty. But it slides across the earth, it skirts across the mountains, it rushes along beside the great rivers in their coursing. This makes the brain slide too, skipping across time, memories, thoughts that jingle jangle in the evening light. \r\n\r\n</p><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~ah/zwTHLl7HkPa1x9jrStKgDwOZJRo/h?w=300&h=250\" width=\"100%\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:l6gmwiTKsz0\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=l6gmwiTKsz0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=e4q4-8VDd74:DXbyiI5YPds:TzevzKxY174\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=TzevzKxY174\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"content" : "Surprise, surprise, Newt Gingrich's decade of punditry and self-promotional book writing <a href=\"http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hGxKJGpoy-DMwaefjesJAn3jSSAQD97IGCP80\">may result in a 2012 presidential run</a>. That's about the least shocking news since FOX News aligned itself with the crazies and their tea bags, but it's interesting.<br><br>What most people don't know about Gingrich is that he's a card-carrying member of the overeducated elite. (My membership card and instructions for buying a navy blue Subaru hatchback and joining an organic food co-op should arrive any day now.) That's right: Newton Leroy Gingrich holds the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Modern European History from Tulane University in New Orleans. The subject of his dissertation? Education policy in the Belgian Congo.<br><br>(My adviser discovered the cite. We thought it was a joke.)<br><br>Just before handing in the final version of my dissertation, I finally sucked it up and headed to the basement microfilm room in the library to read Gingrich's dissertation. (When I say \"read\" here, I mean, of course, that I skimmed through until I found something interesting.) I think it's fairly safe to assume that I'm among a rather limited number of people to have actually looked at our possible future president's thoughts, so just in case you're wondering what he had to say, here's a synopsis. What did the young Mr. Gingrich think of Belgium's colonial administration of education in the Congo?<br><ul><li><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">He didn't actually go to the Congo.</span> From what I could gather, anyway. There's no evidence in the text suggesting that Gingrich actually went to Kinshasa to see what Belgium hath wrought. That's fair; his Ph.D. was in Modern European history, not African history. But the story about the Congo that's told in Brussels is vastly different from the reality on the ground. That was even more true when Gingrich was conducting his research.<br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"></span></li><li><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">He liked paternalism.</span> A lot. Belgium's policy with regards to the vast majority of the Congolese was to deny secondary-level education to all but a very few people. Boys were educated to be laborers and girls were trained as housemaids and for other domestic pursuits. All students (most of whom, it should be noted, were learning in government-subsidized Catholic schools) were taught the virtues of loyalty and obedience to their white masters. Until the post-World War II period, very few Congolese advanced beyond a sixth-grade education. It was the mid-1950's before the Belgian government allowed a Congolese man to attend university in Europe. (This policy stands in sharp contrast to that of the British and the French in particular, who were busy trying to assimilate their African subjects into \"Frenchness\" pretty much from the get-go.) The policy was known as paternalism; the colonial government saw itself as the protector of and provider for the Congolese, and as the entity who knew what was best for millions of central Africans. Gingrich doesn't seem to have an issue with the paternalistic policies. In fact, in some parts of the dissertation, he seems to embrace it. For example, towards the end, he praises the fact that the Belgians developed \"the largest pirimary and vocational school systems in Black Africa\" (280).<br></li><li><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">He saw Belgian rule as beneficent.</span> Gingrich argues that the Belgians prepared Congolese women for the challenges of modernity, by which he presumably means that learning to wash the dishes of wealthy white women with water from a faucet was a useful 20th century skill to have in place of, say, being able to critically reason or understand what the natural rights imply about subservience and racism.<br></li><li><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">He viewed the colonial administration of the Belgian government as technocratic. </span> A technocratic government is one in which most of the decisions that actually matter are made by bureaucrats with highly specialized training. Today, most technocratic regimes are in Latin America. That's an interesting way of describing the system, and I think it's a fair analysis.<br></li><li><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">He recognized some of the absurdity of it all.</span> There's a section in Gingrich's dissertation on the debate over bilingual education that took place in the halls of the colonial administration in Brussels. By \"bilingual,\" of course, the Belgian bureaucrats and politicians were arguing over whether Congolese children should be instructed in both French and Flemish, or just in French.</li></ul>The whole thing is kindof a glorified <a href=\"http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Ewldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/kipling.html\">white man's burden</a> take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970's. Gingrich wrote this as the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Consciousness_Movement\">Black Consciousness</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Power\">Black Power</a> movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly <span style=\"font-style:italic\">not </span>the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education. Then again, Gingrich finished his Ph.D. just before Mobutu systematically destroyed almost every aspect of Congolese society, including the education system. It's very fair to say that the Congolese were in some ways better off under the Belgians in the post-World War II era than they were in the mid-1980's as Mobutu stole from the public coffers and allowed the state to collapse under the weight of corruption and falling commodity prices on the global market.<br><br>And why, you might ask, did Gingrich leave the cushy, underpaid halls of academia for the madhouse of modern American politics? He was denied tenure by West Georgia College. (Rumor has it that this was in part because he was spending all his time on politics.) Still, let that be a lesson to us, academics. If the ambitious conservative in your midst won't shut up, at least give him the benefit of the doubt. West Georgia might could have saved the rest of us from a lot of trouble. Then again, at least I only had to read one Newt Gingrich publication on the Congo.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/15935618-8492780019303825907?l=texasinafrica.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"content" : "One difficulty in researching African cuisine is that African and African-American cookbooks are mixed together in collections, and often people think the two are basically inter-changeable. That's a problem. The obvious linkage of Southern regional cuisine, or "soul food," or "Creole" cooking to the perception of "African cooking" is part of the confusion (black-eyed peas, cooked greens, corn,"
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"title" : "Newspaper Classifieds: A franchise lost.",
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"content" : "<div><p>In the early 90's, and for some time afterward, the newspaper industry had an opportunity to lead in the development of online classifieds and, in a number of forums, <a href=\"http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/jun/last.html\">I actively encouraged them to take the opportunity</a>... Today, I argue that they shouldn't put much effort into online classified ads. What made sense 15 years ago is no longer sensible.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>In the early 90's, even as Internet technology was being rapidly deployed, there was still very little commerce on the Internet. The newspapers came to this new environment with an existing database of classifieds, relationships with vast numbers of advertisers, and a clear position in the minds of Internet users who had learned, through years of exposure to the paper-based pre-Internet world, that newspapers is where you went to find classifieds and job postings.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>Given this opportunity, the newspapers could have not only maintained the revenue streams that then supported them, they could have vastly increased those revenues. What is the ad business of Google today, what is eBay or Monster today, could have been (some would say *should* have been) a business created, owned and dominated by newspapers. Of course, as we now know, the newspapers forfeited their historical franchise in classifieds and advertising. The result is that they will probably never recover from the loss of those revenue streams. As a secondary result of their forfeiture of these revenues, we, as a society, are now faced with the problem of finding an alternative means to fund and organize the paper-free dissemination of the news and information that we require. The newspapers have done more than just hurt their stockholders, they have failed the society that they once claimed they had a special duty and privilege to support.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>But, by simply forfeiting the opportunity, it is probably the case that\r\nthe newspapers simply sped up the working of inevitable economic\r\nprocesses. The advantage the newspapers once had was a temporary one\r\nbased on the dynamics of an older and rapidly obsolescing technology.\r\nTheir advantage wasn't rooted in any inherent binding between the\r\nbusiness of journalism and the business of advertising. As such, it was\r\nalways inevitable that news and ads would become distinct businesses. </p><p>The situation of newspapers in the early 90's was much like that of the\r\nmany organizations that grew up as Internet Service Providers (ISPs).\r\nThose companies always knew that their opportunity was only temporary\r\nat best. It was always clear that the \"proper\" provider of Internet\r\nconnectivity was either the phone or cable TV companies. But, since the\r\nphone and cable providers were slow to move, there was a temporary\r\nopportunity to profit from their lethargy. Thus, we saw the temporary\r\ngrowth (sometimes spectacular) of companies like AOL, Earthlink, and\r\nmany thousands of others. Today, of course, inevitable economic\r\nprocesses have caused the \"right\" or \"natural\" thing to happen and the\r\nindependent ISPs are consolidating or simply going out of business.\r\nToday, Internet connectivity is normally provided by those who have the\r\ncost, service and technology advantage -- the phone and cable\r\ncompanies... Nonetheless, quite a few sport cars, homes, and college\r\neducations were paid for by the revenues from those who took temporary\r\nadvantage of the phone and cable companies' slowness to move. We have\r\nalso seen the creation of a great number of companies based on what was\r\nlearned by those who stood in temporarily for the phone and cable\r\ncompanies.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>\r\nThe classifieds and advertising business is very different from the\r\nbusiness of journalism. Thus, one might wonder why the two were ever so\r\nclosely tied. Of course, the connection was as loose one and, as we've\r\nseen, a fragile one. The connection between these two came about simply\r\nbecause both required access to the same limited, scarce resource --\r\nthe paper on which they were printed, the paper that was distributed\r\nthroughout communities. What developed early in the history of\r\nnewspapers was a pattern of printing what was really two publications\r\nin one. The paper was split into a news section (sprinkled with\r\nnon-classified ads) and a printed database of classified ads in the\r\nback. Since both rode on the same paper, it was only those who owned\r\nthe printing presses that owned both of these businesses.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>\r\nToday, the channel is the Internet. Paper is dying rapidly. No one owns\r\nthe Internet and access to it is essentially universal. As such, there\r\nis no channel-access driver that forces the classified ads and\r\njournalism to be owned in common. Given that there is no longer a\r\nnatural binding between these two businesses, we can be sure that they\r\nwould have eventually broken apart -- even if the papers had taken the\r\nopportunity that they once had to lead in online classified ads. We can\r\nalso imagine that there would have inevitably grown up competition in\r\nclassified ads from non-newspaper sources. For instance, we probably\r\nstill would have seen businesses like eBay, Monster or Craigslist\r\ninnovate in ways that newspapers didn't. The incumbent's inevitable\r\nefforts to expand their offerings to address competition would have,\r\nover time, caused those on the classified advertising side of the\r\nbusiness to demand that they be set free of their bonds to the news\r\nside of the business. In time, we would have gotten to where we are\r\ntoday -- online journalism and online classified ads being distinct\r\nbusinesses. But, what would have been different?</p>\r\n\r\n<p>\r\nHad the newspapers taken the opportunity to build serious classified\r\nbusinesses online, they would have also seen more clearly the\r\nopportunity and value in growing online audiences for news. The result,\r\nI'm sure, is that online news today would be very different than it is.\r\nWe would have benefited from the best minds in the newspaper businesses\r\nspending the last 15 years thinking about how to do online news better\r\nin order to increase traffic to their revenue producing classified ads\r\ninstead of what we got -- the best minds trying to figure out how to\r\nresist the pressure to go online and maintain their paper-based\r\nrevenues. My bet is that if the papers had enjoyed years of the same\r\nonline revenue streams that companies like eBay, Monster, etc. have\r\nseen, there would actually be far fewer paper-based newspapers today...\r\nThe newspaper business would have learned long ago that better margins\r\nare found online.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>\r\nSo, where does that leave us today? Should the newspapers try at this\r\nlate date to recover the online classified business? No. That would be,\r\nI am sure, a hopeless task. The opportunity is lost, the window closed.\r\nYou can only fight economics temporarily and then only at specific\r\nmoments in the development of an economy or market. The time for this\r\nparticular battle is long over. For a newspaper to build an online\r\nclassified business today would be sort of like someone building a new\r\nInternet Service Provider to compete with the phone or cable\r\ncompanies... It's just not worth the bother unless the technology is\r\ndistinctly and greatly different.</p>\r\n\r\n<p>\r\nbob wyman</p></div><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/bobwyman?a=pHBnwHqOZvY:vJt6LPgJIi0:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/bobwyman?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bobwyman/~4/pHBnwHqOZvY\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"plainContent" : "interesting. i wonder what the equivalent demises are in academia. the monograph? the journal? the academic society?",
"htmlContent" : "interesting. i wonder what the equivalent demises are in academia. the monograph? the journal? the academic society?",
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"content" : "<div><p>(for Siddhartha Mitter)</p>\n\n<p>So, o, my people, na so I order "Filet Americaine" for this restaurant near where I dey stay. I ask the waitress whether this filet wey them dey talk, whether na beef. Oh na beef now, no problem. I say, ehen, make you bring me that one. Them get other thing for the menu o, but I no dey feel adventurous. Walahi, I never chop since morning, so I no get time for sme sme.</p>\n\n<p>I don dey this side for few weeks now, and I don notice say some of the food dey do too much oyinbo. Dem go just combine anyhow, throw one leaf here, drizzle one sauce there. Na fight? "Filet Americaine," that one resemble something wey man pikin fit chop. At least, I know wetin be "filet," and I sabi "Americaine."</p>\n\n<p>The hunger come dey catch me one kind. Wey this food dey?</p>\n\n<p>Fifteen minutes pass, the thing come arrive. See me see trouble. E siddon for plate like so: two slice lettuce, one slice tomato, small bowl of mayonaise, even smaller bowl wey egg dey inside, egg wey dem never cook, e dey look person like eye wey don comot eye socket. And for the middle of the plate: mince meat. Uncook. The thing just dey tremble there. Now, when I say uncook, I know say some of una been-to's go immediately think "rare" or "medium" steak. You no understand me be dat. When I say uncook, I mean uncook. As in, fresh from the meat grinder, fresh from the butcher, fresh from the cow. Remain small make the thing dey moo sef.</p>\n\n<p>Which ones?</p>\n\n<p>I look the waitress, I look am say, lady, look me well well o, I resemble person wey dey craze? If I wan chop food wey dem never cook, why I do carry my head enter restaurant? She look me like, ehn, wetin? No be the thing wey you order be that? Bush man.</p>\n\n<p>I wan vex. But when I think say I no wan enter police palaver for foreign country, I come calm down small. I say—and na French I dey talk o, because the aunty no sabi English, talk less of pidgin—abeg, sil vu play, carry this thing comot my front, make you troway the egg, make you cook the meat, cook am well well, sotay, even Jesus himself no go fit resurrect am. Ehen, then bring am back. Sil vu play!</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, na beg I beg you, bring me some chips. God no go spoil your own.</p>\n\n<p>Wonder shall never cease sha, she gree me. She just take pity for man pikin, my eye don dey red.</p>\n\n<p>Chineke God of Africa, see me see trouble o. Person no suppose hungry again? Raw food, ha! Abi I resemble Japanese?</p>\n\n<p>[You fit hear audio version of this post if una click for <a href=\"http://modalminority.typepad.com/modalminority/files/VORC005.WAV\">here</a> . The music na Fela Kuti im intro to <em>Everything Scatter</em>.]</p></div>"
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"title" : "Questions 1: Is there an "African" cuisine?",
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"content" : "The word cuisine is often used to imply a cooking style that is somehow sophisticated and skilled and elaborate, as in haute cuisine. It seems everything sounds fancier to English speakers when said in French, even though the word literally means "kitchen." Technically, cuisine just refers to the way food is prepared and/or the food itself. Somehow the question above sounds a lot less profound"
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"title" : "Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo - Part 1",
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"content" : "<div><br><p style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6001.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6001\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6001.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6001\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a></p>\n<p>At SXSW 2009, Anthony Volodkin and I presented a panel on music recommendation called “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo”. Anthony and I share very different views on music recommendation. You can read Anthony’s notes for this session at his blog: <a href=\"http://fascinated.fm/post/89782283\">Notes from the “Help! My iPod Thinks I’m Emo!</a>” panel. This is Part 1 of my notes - and my viewpoints on music recommendation. (Note that even though I work for<a href=\"http://the.echonest.com\"> The Echo Nest</a>, my views may not necessarily be the same as my employer).</p>\n<p>The SXSW audience is a technical audience to be sure, but they are not as immersed in recommender technology as regular readers of MusicMachinery, so this talk does not dive down into hard core tech issues, instead it is a lofty overview of some of the problems and potential solutions for music recommendation. So lets get to it.</p>\n<p><strong>Music Recommendation is Broken.</strong></p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6002.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6002\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6002.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6002\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>Even though Anthony and I disagree about a number of things, one thing that we do agree on is that music recommendation is broken in some rather fundamental ways. For example, this slide shows a recommendation from iTunes (from a few years back). iTunes suggests that if I like Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One more time” that I might also like the “Report on Pre-War Intelligence for the Iraq war”.<br>\nClearly this is a broken recommendation - this is a recommendation no human would make. Now if you’ve spent anytime visiting music sites on the web you’ve likely seen recommendations just as bad as this. Sometimes music recommenders just get it wrong - and they get it wrong very badly. In this talk we are going to talk about how music recommenders work, why they make such dumb mistakes, and some of the ideas coming from researchers and innovators like Anthony to fix music discovery.</p>\n<p><strong>Why do we even care about music recommendation and discovery?</strong></p>\n<p>The world of music has changed dramatically. When I was growing up, a typical music store had on the order of 1,000 unique artists to chose from. Now, online music stores like iTunes have millions of unique songs to chose from. Myspace has millions of artists, and the P2P networks have billions of tracks available for download. We are drowning in a sea of music. And this is just the beginning. In a few years time the transformation to digital, online music will be complete. All recorded music will be online - every recording of every performance of every artist, whether they are a mainstream artist or a garage band or just a kid with a laptop will be uploaded to the web. There will be billions of tracks to chose from, with millions more arriving every week. With all this music to chose from, this should be a music nirvana - we should all be listening to new and interesting music.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-003.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-003\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-003.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-003\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a></p>\n<p>With all this music, classic long tail economics apply. Without the constraints of physical space, music stores no longer need to focus on the most popular artists. There should be less of a focus on the hits and the megastars. With unlimited virtual space, we should see a flattening of the long tail - music consumption should shift to less popular artists. This is good for everyone. It is good for business - it is probably cheaper for a music store to sell a no-name artist than it is to sell the latest Miley Cyrus track. It is good for the artist - there are millions of unknown artists that deserve a bit of attention, and it is good for the listener. Listeners get to listen to a larger variety of music, that better fits their taste, as opposed to music designed and produced to appeal to the broadest demographics possible. So with the increase in available music we should see less emphasis on the hits. In the future, with all this music, our music listening should be less like Walmart and more like SXSW. But is this really happening? Lets take a look.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-004.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-004\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-004.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6004-004\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a></p>\n<p><strong>The state of music discovery</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6005.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6005\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6005.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6005\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>If we look at some of the data from Nielsen Soundscan 2007 we see that although there were more than 4 million tracks sold only 1% of those tracks accounted for 80% of sales. What’s worse, a whopping 13% of all sales are from American Idol or Disney Artists. Clearly we are still focusing on the hits. One must ask, what is going on here? Was Chris Anderson wrong? I really don’t think so. Anderson says that to make the long tail ‘work’ you have to do two things (1) <strong>Make everything availabl</strong>e and (2) <strong>Help me find it</strong>. We are certainly on the road to making everything available - soon all music will be online. But I think we are doing a bad job on step (2) help me find it. Our music recommenders are<strong> *not*</strong> helping us find music, in fact current music recommenders do the exact opposite, they tend to push us toward popular artists and limit the diversity of recommendations. Music recommendation is fundamentally broken, instead of helping us find music in the long tail they are doing the exact opposite. They are pushing us to popular content. To highlight this take a look at the next slide.</p>\n<p><strong> Help! I’m stuck in the head</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6006.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6006\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6006.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6006\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>This is a study done by <a href=\"http://www.iua.upf.es/~ocelma/\">Dr. Oscar Celma</a> of MTG UPF (and now at BMAT). Oscar was interested in how far into the long tail a recommender would get you. He divided the 245,000 most popular artists into 3 sections of equal sales - the short head, with 83 artists, the mid tail with 6,659 artists, and the long tail with 239,798 artists. He looked at recommendations (top 20 similar artists) that start in the short head and found that 48% of those recommendations bring you right back to the short head. So even though there are nearly a quarter million artists to chose from, 48% of all recommendations are drawn from a pool of the 83 most popular artists. The other 52% of recommendations are drawn from the mid-tail. No recommendations at all bring you to the long tail. The nearly 240,000 artists in the long tail are not reachable directly from the short head. This demonstrates the problem with commercial recommendation - it focuses people on the popular at the expense of the new and unpopular.</p>\n<p>Let’s take a look at why recommendation is broken.</p>\n<p><strong>The Wisdom of Crowds</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6008.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6008\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6008.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6008\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>First lets take a look at how a typical music recommender works. Most music recommenders use a technique called <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering\">Collaborative Filtering</a> (CF). This is the type of recommendation you get at Amazon where they tell you that ‘people who bought X also bought Y’. The core of a CF recommender is actually quite simple. At the heart of the recommender is typically an item-to-item similarity matrix that is used to show how similar or dissimilar items are. Here we see a tiny excerpt of such a matrix. I constructed this by looking at the listening patterns of 12,000 last.fm listeners and looking at which artists have overlapping listeners. For instance, 35% of listeners that listen to Britney Spears also listen to Evancescence, while 62% also listen to Christina Aguilera. The core of a CF recommender is such a similarity matrix constructed by looking at this listener overlap. If you like Britney Spears, from this matrix we could recommend that you might like Christana and Kelly Clarkson, and we’d recommend that you probably wouldn’t like Metallica or Lacuna Coil.</p>\n<p>CF recommenders have a number of advantages. First, they work really well for popular artists. When there are lots of people listening to a set of artists, the overlap is a good indicator of overall preference. Secondly, CF systems are fairly easy to implement. The math is pretty straight forward and conceptually they are very easy to understand. Of course, the devil is in the details. Scaling a CF system to work with millions of artists and billions of tracks for millions of users is an engineering challenge. Still, it is no surprise that CF systems are so widely used. They give good recommendations for popular items and they are easy to understand and implement. However, there are some flaws in CF systems that ultimately makes them not suitable for long-tail music recommendation. Let’s take a look at some of the issues.</p>\n<p><strong>The Stupidity of Solitude</strong></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6009.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6009\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6009.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6009\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/thedebretts\">The DeBretts</a> are a long tail artist. They are a punk band with a strong female vocalist that is reminiscent of Blondie or Patti Smith. (Be sure to listen to their song ‘The Rage’) .The DeBretts haven’t made it big yet. At last.fm they have about 200 listeners. They are a really good band and deserve to be heard. But if you went to an online music store like iTunes that uses a Collaborative Filterer to recommend music, you would <strong>*never*</strong> get a recommendation for the DeBretts. The reason is pretty obvious. The DeBretts may appeal to listeners that like Blondie, but even if all of the DeBretts listeners listen to Blondie the percentage of Blondie listeners that listen to the DeBretts is just too low. If Blondie has a million listeners then the maximum potential overlap(200/1,000,000) is way too small to drive any recommendations from Blondie to the DeBretts. The bottom line is that if you like Blondie, even though the DeBretts may be a perfect recommendation for you, you will never get this recommendation. CF systems rely on the wisdom of the crowds, but for the DeBretts, there is no crowd and without the crowd there is no wisdom. Among those that build recommender systems, this issue is called ‘the cold start’ problem. It is one of the biggest problems for CF recommenders. A CF-based recommender cannot make good recommendations for new and unpopular items.</p>\n<p>Clearly we can see that this cold start problem is going to make it difficult for us to find new music in the long tail. The cold start problem is one of the main reasons why are recommenders are still’ stuck in the head’.</p>\n<p><strong>The Harry Potter Problem</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v60101.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v60101\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v60101.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v60101\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>This slide shows a recommendation “If you enjoy Java RMI” you many enjoy Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone”. Why is Harry Potter being recommended for a reader of a highly technical programming book?<br>\nCertain items, like the Harry Potter series of books, are very popular. This popularity can have an adverse affect on CF recommenders. Since popular items are purchased often they are frequently purchased with unrelated items. This can cause the recommender to associate the popular item with the unrelated item, as we see in this case. This effect is often called the Harry Potter effect. People who bought just about any book that you can think of, also bought a Harry Potter book.</p>\n<p>Case in point is the “The Big Penis Book” - Amazon tells us that after viewing “The Big Penis Book” 8% of customers go on to by the Tales of Beedle the Bard from the Harry Potter series. It may be true that people who like big penises also like Harry Potter but it may not be the best recommendation.</p>\n<p>(BTW, I often use examples from Amazon to highlight issues with recommendation. This doesn’t mean that Amazon has a bad recommender - in fact I think they have one of the best recommenders in the world. Whenever I go to Amazon to buy one book, I end up buying five because of their recommender. The issues that I show are not unique to the Amazon recommender. You’ll find the same issues with any other CF-based recommender.)</p>\n<p><strong>Popularity Bias</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6011.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6011\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6011.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6011\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>One effect of this Harry Potter problem is that a recommender will associate the popular item with many other items. The result is that the popular item tends to get recommended quite often and since it is recommended often, it is purchased often. This leads to a feedback loop where popular items get purchased often because they are recommended often and are recommended often because they are purchased often. This ‘rich-get-richer’ feedback loop leads to a system where popular items become extremely popular at the expense of the unpopular. The overall diversity of recommendations goes down. These feedback loops result in a recommender that pushes people toward more popular items and away from the long tail. This is exactly the opposite of what we are hoping that our recommenders will do. Instead of helping us find new and interesting music in the long tail, recommenders are pushing us back to the same set of very popular artists.</p>\n<p>Note that you don’t need to have a fancy recommender system to be susceptible to these feedback loops. Even simple charts such as we see at music sites like <a href=\"http://hypem.com/zeitgeist/2008/\">the hype machine </a>can lead to these feedback loops. People listen to tracks that are on the top of the charts, leading these songs to continue to be popular, and thus cementing their hold on the top spots in the charts.</p>\n<p><strong> The Novelty Problem</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6012.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6012\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6012.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6012\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>There is a difference between a recommender that is designed for music discovery and one that is designed for music shopping. Most recommenders are intended to help a store make more money by selling you more things. This tends to lead to recommendations such as this one from Amazon - that suggests that since I’m interested in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that I might like Abbey Road and Please Please Me and every other Beatles album. Of course everyone in the world already knows about these items so these recommendations are not going to help people find new music. But that’s not the point, Amazon wants to sell more albums and recommending Beatles albums is a great way to do that.</p>\n<p>One factor that is contributing to the Novelty Problem is high stakes evaluations like the <a href=\"http://www.netflixprize.com/\">Netflix prize</a>. The Netflix prize is a competition that offers a million dollars to anyone that can improve the Netflix movie recommender by 10%. The evaluation is based on how well a recommender can predict how a movie viewer will rate a movie on a 1-5 star scale. This type of evaluation focuses on relevance - a recommender that can correctly predict that I’ll rate the movie ‘Titanic’ 2.2 stars instead of 2.0 stars - may score well in this type of evaluation, but that probably hasn’t really improved the quality of the recommendation. I won’t watch a 2.0 or a 2.2 star movie, so what does it matter. The downside of the Netflix prize is that only one metric - <strong>relevance</strong> - is being used to drive the advancement of recommender state-of-the-art when there are other equally import metrics - <strong>novelty</strong> is one of them.</p>\n<p><strong>The Napoleon Dynamite Problem</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6013.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6013\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6013.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6013\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>Some items are not always so easy to categorize. For instance, if you look at the ratings for the movie Napoleon Dynamite you see a bimodal distribution of 5 stars and 1 stars. People either like it or hate it, and it is hard to predict how an individual will react.</p>\n<p><strong>The Opacity Problem</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6014.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6014\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6014.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6014\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>Here’s an Amazon recommendation that suggests that if I like Nine Inch Nails that I might like Johnny Cash. Since NiN is an industrial band and Johnny Cash is a country/western singer, at first blush this seems like a bad recommendation, and if you didn’t know any better you may write this off as just another broken recommender. It would be really helpful if the CF recommender could explain why it is recommending Johnny Cash, but all it can really tell you is that ‘Other people who listened to NiN also listened to Johnny Cash’ which isn’t very helpful. If the recommender could give you a better explanation of why it was recommending something - perhaps something like “Johnny Cash has an absolutely stunning cover of the NiN song ‘hurt’ that will make you cry.” - then you would have a much better understanding of the recommendation. The explanation would turn what seems like a very bad recommendation into a phenomenal one - one that perhaps introduces you to whole new genre of music - a recommendation that may have you listening ‘Folsom Prison’ in a few weeks.</p>\n<p><strong>Hacking the Recommender</strong></p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6015.jpg\"><img title=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6015\" src=\"http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sxsw-ipod-emo-v6015.jpg?w=450&h=337\" alt=\"sxsw-ipod-emo-v6015\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\"></a><br>\n</strong></p>\n<p>Here’s a recommendation based on a book by Pat Robertson called Six Steps to Spiritual Revival (courtesy of<a href=\"http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/~mobasher/\"> Bamshad Mobasher</a>). This is a book by notorious televangelist Pat Roberston that promises to reveal “Gods’s Awesome Power in your life.” Amazon offers a recommendation suggesting that ‘Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for ‘The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men’. Clearly this is not a good recommendation. This bad recommendation is the result of a loosely organized group who didn’t like Pat Roberston, so they managed to trick the Amazon recommender into recommending a rather inappropriate book just by visiting the Amazon page for Robertson’s book and then visiting the Amazon page for the sex guide.</p>\n<p>This manipulation of the Amazon recommender was easy to spot and can be classified as a prank, but it is not hard to image that an artist or a label may use similar techniques, but in a more subtle fashion to manipulate a recommender to promote their tracks (or to demote the competition). We already live in a world where search engine optimization is an industry. It won’t be long before recommender engine optimization will be an equally profitable (and destructive) industry.</p>\n<p><strong>Wrapping up</strong></p>\n<p>This is the first part of a two part post. In this post I’ve highlighted some of the issues in traditional music recommendation. Next post is all about how to fix these problems. For an alternative view be sure to visit <a href=\"http://fascinated.fm/post/89782283\">Anthony Volodkin’s blog where he presents a rather different viewpoint</a> about music recommendation.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/musicmachinery.wordpress.com/430/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=musicmachinery.com&blog=6500426&post=430&subd=musicmachinery&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "The GPT That Dares Not Speak Its Name",
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"content" : "<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">President Obama has been a little slow in building a narrative of the Whys and Wherefores of the situation he unexpectedly inherited.<span> </span>So it was a step in the right direction last week when he said at his press conference, “[T]his crisis didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t result from any one action or decision. It took many years and many failures to lead us here. And it will take many months and many different solutions to lead us out.”</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Not that it’s easy to build political consensus about a crisis. People are still arguing about the causes and cures of the Great Depression, after all. But it is critically important to make a beginning:<span> </span>the midterm elections are barely eighteen months away. So I was glad to see both Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan last week take a crack at explanation.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Greenspan, writing in the <em>Financial Times</em>, traced the origins of the system that broke down to “the extraordinary risk management discipline that developed out of the writings of the University of Chicago’s Harry Markowitz in the 1950s.”<span> </span>That skein of work had won several Nobel Prizes, Greenspan noted, for Markowitz and others. (The story of the first 35 years or so was beautifully told by Peter Bernstein in 1991 in <em>Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street.</em>) The discipline had been gradually embraced over a half century, the former Fed chairman noted, not just by academia but by a large majority of financial professionals and regulators around the world. Then in 2007, the risk-management structure cracked – overwhelmed, on the one hand, by the complexity of the instruments, and, on the other, by insufficient capital reserves put by against loss.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Krugman, not surprisingly, zeroed in on the deregulation of financial markets that followed the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, after which the financial sector began to grow rapidly. “Old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale,” he wrote in <em>The New York Times</em> last Friday. The size of the financial sector soon doubled – even in the go-go years of the 1960s, the finance and insurance industries had amounted to no more than 4 percent of the American economy, but by the eve of the current crisis they had grown to 8 percent of GDP – largely on the strength of the Markowitz-inspired process known as securitization, turning illiquid debt instruments such as mortgages into tradeable securities.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Myself, I thought of Nathan Rosenberg.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Not that Rosenberg, 81, ever worked for a bank of any sort, a hedge fund, an insurance company – or even a think-tank. He is a retired Stanford University economist, the author of several books, including <em>Inside the Black Box</em> and <em>How the West Grew Rich</em> (with L.E. Birdzell), one of the nation’s most distinguished historians of technology. There is not a rapacious bone in his body.<span> </span>But it was Rosenberg who, in 1962, clearly formulated an idea that, once it had passed through a great many hands, was used to justify policies in the Nineties and early Oughts that have proved to be ruinous, at least in the present day. By that time, Rosenberg’s idea had acquired a name – General Purpose Technology, or GPT.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">And while no one has done more to hone our sense of how economic growth unfolds to national advantage than Rosenberg, it is also true that, once everyone understands how a policy trick works, the trick stops working. (In central banking that’s called </font><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law\"><font color=\"#800080\" face=\"Times New Roman\">Goodhart’s Law</font></a><font face=\"Times New Roman\">.)<span> </span>The great thing about Rosenberg’s discovery – it is not too much, I think, to call it that – goes a long way towards illuminating what those wild and crazy bankers and their political enablers were thinking among themselves – to the extent they <em>were</em> thinking – as they levered up the Anglo-American financial system to nosebleed levels.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Let me explain.<span> </span>Consider, as did Rosenberg, in “Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry, 1840-1910,” the history of the turret lathe.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">In 1820, no machine tool industry existed in the United States (or, for that matter, anywhere in the world). There were plenty of machines, of course, but they were home-made affairs, built on an <em>ad hoc</em> basis by those who would ultimately use them.<span> </span>Forging and cutting metal into the precise shapes required for looms, gears, boilers and axles wasn’t easy. Not surprisingly, factories specializing in a final product – in textiles, especially – had the best machine shops. Lowell Mills, in Lowell, Mass., and the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co., in Manchester, New Hampshire,<span> </span>began selling textile machinery to other firms and then various other sorts of machinery as well:<span> </span>steam engines, turbines, mill machinery and, most important, the cutting, drilling and shaping tools they used to make their own machines.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">B</font><font face=\"Times New Roman\">etween 1840 and 1880, a vast wave of mechanization occurred. The Lowell Machine Shop became independent of its mills in 1845. Soon it was producing steam locomotives for the new railroads. The Baldwin Locomotive Works, in Philadelphia, emerged from a textile-printing firm to become the nation’s largest engine-maker. Arms manufacturers invented a series of lighter tools for making interchangeable parts that could be assembled smoothly into weapons – jigs, taps and gauges, turret lathes, milling machines, precision-grinders. Whole new industries emerged:<span> </span>shoe machinery, locomotives, dynamos, bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, and, of course, the machine tool industry itself, heavily concentrated in the Connecticut and Ohio River valleys, providing lathes, planers, drillers, borers, grinders, millers and shapers to all the rest.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">T</font><font face=\"Times New Roman\">hat this specialization proceeded by spin-off had long been noted, Rosenberg wrote.<span> </span>Less commonly recognized was the underlying process he called technological convergence – the process by which a solution to a problem in one industry is quickly employed to solve roughly similar problems in other industries. He illustrated it with the story of a series of lathes. Thomas Blanchard’s stocking lathe of 1818, invented to carve gunstocks, which previously had required whittling, boring and chiseling by hand, was quickly put to work making hat blocks, wheel spokes, oars, sculptured busts and shoe lasts. Stephen Fitch’s turret lathe of 1845, with its cluster of tools held on a vertical axis, made it possible to perform a sequence of operations without removing the piece from the lathe. Fitch built the first one to make parts for government pistols, but soon the principle was adapted by other hands to make components for watches, sewing machines, typewriters, locomotives, bicycles and, eventually, automobiles.<span> </span>Sewing machines provided a further example: mechanized stitching gave rise to huge industries of mass-produced boots and shoes, ready-to-wear clothing, and was employed in countless other ways, manufacturing everything from tents and sails to harnesses and books.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\"> </font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Rosenberg concluded:</font></p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">The interesting thing about the group of industries discussed here is that they were all dependent in their development upon technological changes dealing with a limited number of processes and that the solution to problems posed by these processes eventually became the specialized function of a well-organized industry. A question of more contemporary interest is whether similar technological convergences are occurring in twentieth century conditions; whether, for example, the chemical and electronics industries are playing the same roles for production and transmittal that machine tools played at an earlier stage of our history. </font></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Rosenberg’s paper, which appeared in the <em>Journal of Economic History</em> in 1963, became an underground classic among those who thought about the economics of specialization, along with essays by Adam Smith, Allyn Young and George Stigler, but it otherwise lay little read and unattended by economists concerned with macroeconomics. Its gist, on the other hand – that certain sectors contained the possibility for growth so rapid that they would cause compositional changes in the economy itself – gradually became part of the folklore of post-World War II America.<span> </span>The point was neatly encapsulated in the patronizing advice a businessman gives his partner’s 22-year-old son in the 1967 movie “The Graduate:” “I just want to say one word to you – just one word – ‘plastics.’”</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">There continued to occur such “revolutions,” (that being the word most often used to describe the advent of transformative new technologies) – microprocessors one decade, software the next, the Internet and the World Wide Web the decade after – and gradually economists took note. In 1990, Harvard Business School guru Michael Porter published <em>The Competitive Advantage of Nations</em>, with its emphasis on the advantages derived from the clustering of related industries, including financial services.<span> </span>The following year, Stanford economist Paul David gave a major push to such thinking with “The Computer and the Dynamo,” a paper comparing the history of the diffusion of the electric motor between 1880 and 1930 with that of the computer. And in 1995, Manuel Trajtenberg and Stanford University economist Timothy Bresnahan introduced a formal model to describe various “general purpose technologies” as engines of growth – the steam engine, electricity, the laser, the computer, the Internet.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Which brings us back to the current crisis. Until recently, the American and British banking and financial services industries were understood, however imperfectly, both by their practitioners and those who sought to regulate them, as embodying a GPT for the twenty-first century, a worthy successor to the Internet technology boom that sent American servers, routers and fiberoptic cable, and British media and advertising,<span> </span>around the world. To them , that compositional shift of financial services to 8 percent from 4 percent indicated success, not excess (though perhaps today no one doubts that it went too far)</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">If there is a good history of the modern financial industry, chronicling the development of its many recondite risk-management techniques, on the model of, say, Janet Abbate’s </font><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Internet-Inside-Technology-Abbate/dp/0262511150/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238291850&sr=1-1\"><font color=\"#800080\" face=\"Times New Roman\">Inventing the Internet</font></a><font face=\"Times New Roman\">, or M. Mitchell Waldrop’s </font><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/014200135X/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238291963&sr=1-8\"><font color=\"#800080\" face=\"Times New Roman\">The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal</font></a><font face=\"Times New Roman\">, I don’t know it. The closest probably is still Ross <a href=\"http://www.economicprincipals.com/wp-admin/Miller%E2%80%99s%20http:/www.amazon.com/Paving-Wall-Street-Experimental-Economics/dp/0471121983/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238292223&sr=1-1\">Paving Wall Street: Experimental Economics and the Quest for the Perfect Market</a>. Equally interesting, though heavier on the sociology of finance than the underlying economic rationale, is <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Engine-Not-Camera-Financial-Technology/dp/0262633671/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238340963&sr=1-1\"><font color=\"#800080\">An Engine Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets</font></a>, by Donald MacKenzie. Soon the histories of credit default swaps will begin rolling in, led by Gillian Tett’s <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Fools-Gold-Corrupted-Unleashed-Catastrophe/dp/141659857X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238269250&sr=1-1\"><font color=\"#800080\">Fool’s Gold.</font></a> (Matt Taibbi has a boisterous version of the many of the same events, <a href=\"http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print\"><font color=\"#800080\">The Big Takeover</font></a>, in the current <em>Rolling Stone</em>.) But capturing the broad outlines of the story of the rise of modern finance, perhaps from the moment when the old Chicago Butter and Egg Board reorganized itself as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and set out to create the first financial derivatives, trading futures on currencies, Treasury bills and interest rates, will be the work of many years. </font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">In the meantime, though, to understand the difference of opinion that has developed between the administration and its liberal critics over how to go about recapitalizing the banking industry, it helps to recognize that, from the quarterdeck at least, the question is as much one of industrial policy as public finance. For whatever combination of political and strategic reasons, the administration wants to keep the industry more or less intact.<span> </span>The critics would prefer to break it up to some degree.<span> </span>It is crucial that policymakers and their interpreters begin to fill in some of the blanks.</font></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0pt\"><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Hard as it is to see in this climate of fear and recrimination, the US must remain among the world’s leaders in banking and finance. It is a matter of national security – as is the even more urgent matter of raising the industry’s safety standards. The technologies of risk management that began with the work of Harry Markowitz are here to stay – option pricing, dynamic hedging, risk arbitrage, auction design and all the rest. Risk managers must be reined in, however, tethered, harnessed, contained, made to serve the public purpose, after having so grandly betrayed it. “Masters of the universe” no longer:<span> </span>financial engineering is the general purpose technology that dares not speak its name. </font></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://sharethis.com/item?&wp=2.3.2&publisher=ede6dc61-a729-4e1c-9972-61327a461687&title=The+GPT+That+Dares+Not+Speak+Its+Name&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economicprincipals.com%2Fissues%2F2009.03.29%2F396.html\">ShareThis</a></p>"
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"title" : "In Pencil",
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"content" : "<span><p>We write our lives in pencil.<br>\nPress firmly with our good deeds.<br>\nPress gently with mistakes.<br>\nLet the errs be soon forgotten,<br>\nThat the good shall take their place.<br>\nAnd there they'll be remembered<br>\n'Til the paper fades away.</p>\n</span>\n<p>~AFN. 3/21/2009</p>"
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"title" : "‘the aesthetics of vulgarity’",
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"content" : "<div><br><p><img src=\"http://leoafricanus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/09_03_pope.jpg?w=400&h=260\" alt=\"09_03_pope\" title=\"09_03_pope\" width=\"400\" height=\"260\"></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7300784.stm\">Paul Biya</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantal_Biya\">Chantal Biya</a> and <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7947460.stm\">Pope Benedict</a>. </p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http://www.chimurenga.co.za/page-124.html\">Chimurenga</a>.</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/leoafricanus.wordpress.com/6187/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=theleoafricanus.com&blog=2298523&post=6187&subd=leoafricanus&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws",
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"content" : "<div><p>In <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html\">my first article</a> in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I discussed only offers up the most rudimentary explanation of the dynamics, and that is because typically not all of the members of a group are equally involved.</p>\n\n<p>In order to better define <em>who</em> constitutes the tightly-knit "participant community" upon which the group thresholds act, we have to study power laws which let us measure the intensity of individuals' involvement in a group.</p>\n\n<h3>An Overview of Power Laws</h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3366611997/\" title=\"Pareto Principle by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Pareto Principle\" height=\"179\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3616/3366611997_95f255e4a3_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px;float:left\" width=\"240\"></a>The best-known power law is probably the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle\">Pareto principle</a>, which is otherwise known as the "80/20 law." It's been overused throughout the years; Pareto's actual law only said that 80% of the wealth would be held by 20% of the population.</p>\n\n<p>However, it offers a fine example of how power laws work. They generally describe a discrepancy between intensity and population: inevitably, some people do a lot more of the work in any social situation. Other examples include <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law\">Zipf's Law</a>, <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3367563212/\" title=\"Long Tail Curve by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img height=\"174\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3603/3367563212_8aa7a62c6f_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\" width=\"240\"></a>which suggests that the frequency of a word's usage is inversely proportionate to its ranking among words (making the second ranked word appear half as much, the third a quarter as much, etc), and the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail\">long tail</a>, which talks about selling a very large number of items in a very small individual quantity.</p>\n\n<p>For online communities, which have been the focus of most of my studies on the topic of community sizes, I've found that the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality\">participation inequality</a> power rule is very apt.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3366764093/\" title=\"Participation Inequality by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Participation Inequality\" height=\"192\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3613/3366764093_29495ce5b4_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px;float:left\" width=\"240\"></a>This term comes from Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories, who said, "A major reason why user-contributed content rarely turns into a true community is that all aspects of Internet use are characterized by severe participation inequality." It's often equated with the 1% law, though I like to be more precise and say that 90% of an online community tends to be lurkers, 9% tends to be intermittent participants, and 1% tends to be active participants.</p>\n\n<p>These values heavily influence online community sizes that are larger than the tightly-knit communities group thresholds that I previously discussed.</p>\n\n<h3>Power Laws & Group Thresholds</h3>\n\n<p>When I wrote about tightly-knit communities in my first article, I didn't consider the degree of participation. That's certainly an entirely valid model for some types of groups. Corporations, for example, ideally should be entirely filled with active participants, while Skotos' online game <a href=\"http://www.skotos.net/games/marrach/\">Castle Marrach</a> also fits into the category due to the implicit requirements it creates for participation. There are some challenges to grow this type of community, since you're only searching for a specific type of high-energy participant — but they can be overcome if you offer sufficient incentive (such as a salary or a lot of internal feedback).</p>\n\n<p>However, most communities, and in particular, online communities, will not fall into this category, and thus when we're looking at group thresholds, we have to measure them against the number of <em>active participants</em>, not against the number of total members. Thus, for groups which allow for non-participation, we'll often measure 10% (or maybe 1%) of the group size against the group thresholds.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.rpg.net\">RPGnet</a>, one of the community sites that Skotos runs, offers a good example of this. We regularly see monthly uniques of approximately 200,000 users. However we probably have about 20,000 active registered users, confirming the lurker:participant ratio. When we recognize that only 2,000 of those are particularly active participants and that they're divided upon 6 successful forums, we start to see how community numbers that actually match the group thresholds can gel.</p>\n\n<p>You can reverse this approach and look at active participants first. During some recent consulting for a local non-profit organization with 60 active online members, I was able to infer that their broader community was around 6000, which turned out to fairly accurately predict the total number of people who came to their live events over the course of a year.</p>\n\n<p>Generally, this logic can be applied to a community of any size. You first measure whether it's an all-participant community or one that matches an existing power law, and then you use the corrected community number to truly measure which of the group thresholds may apply to it.</p>\n\n<h3>Power Laws & Leaders</h3>\n\n<p>The power laws can also help you to measure the number of leaders in a community. Inevitably all of your participants will become leaders of some sort, while your high-level participants will become the top-tier leaders.</p>\n\n<p>I noted this in my first discussions of group threshold. In a group of 7 members, you can reasonably expect to have one higher level participant, and thus the one leader that we saw naturally appear. Similarly in a <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html#Judas_Number\">Judas group of 13</a>, there's the opportunity for more than one leader to appear, creating the possibility for the first hierarchical conflicts.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3367609602/\" title=\"Participation Inequality 90 9 1 by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Participation Inequality 90 9 1\" height=\"153\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3600/3367609602_4445e5cfb9_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px;float:left\" width=\"240\"></a>Understanding your count of leaders can help you see how to grow groups. For example when I first created <a href=\"http://www.iphonewebdev.com\">iPhoneWebDev</a> I had to do an immense amount of effort to grow the community. This is because with Participation Inequality I had to grow the group by 10 members before I got the least amount of help increasing the content of the group and I had to grow it by 100 members before I had someone who was doing as much work as I was to create content.</p>\n\n<p>At 100 members, with my first active participant, we continued to grow, but we were both were working hard and felt rather lonely.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3366786135/\" title=\"Participation Inequality 700 70 7 by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Participation Inequality 700 70 7\" height=\"196\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3564/3366786135_53f8ebcf47_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\" width=\"240\"></a>I finally saw the group stabilize, then take off on its own, when it hit 600-700 members, and that shows how beautifully the power logs work hand-in-hand with the group thresholds. With 700 members, I could reasonably expect there to be 7 leaders. In other words, I had a committee of leaders: the perfect size for a starting <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html#Working_Group\">working group</a>.</p><p></p>\n\n<p>From my experience with other online groups, if the iPhoneWebDev grows to over 10,000 members, I can expect that there will be some transition issues. As the core active community members exceed 100 people I will start having some <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html#Non-Exclusive_Dunbar_Number\">Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number</a> problems, typically social contract failures. These can be solved by either adding some hierarchy (appointing some people to be official "staff"), or by starting to break the group into sub-communities.</p>\n\n<h3>Varying the Power Laws</h3>\n\n<p>In my first article, I noted that it's possible to expend additional energy to make tightly-knit groups able to function effectively at non-optimal sizes. It is similarly possible for the values of the participation inequality sized groups to change by expending more energy. Conversely, a drain on energy may decrease this ratio.</p><p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3367609374/\" title=\"Participation Inequality - High Energy by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Participation Inequality - High Energy\" height=\"169\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3626/3367609374_3975fe9bf7_m.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\" width=\"240\"></a>For example when I used to run AOL forums I would frequently reward first-time participants with free time (at that time worth $5 an hour) if they asked good questions or offered valuable input. CompuServe similarly offered constructive feedback by telling users how many responses they'd received to a new comment when they logged back in, encouraging them to leave lurker status. More energy in the community — driven either by the moderators, good social software design, or by a greater commitment by its members — can allow you to increase the active participant percentage, maybe times 2, or even 4, but even with a lot of effort not by an order of magnitude.</p><p>As a group grows in size, I believe the participation inequality worsens. A huge Yahoo! group with a million members might have moved from a 90/9/1 ratio to 95/4.5/.5. I suspect this is because the energy required to change the participation inequality numbers is so large as to not be economical.</p>\n\n<p>There are also some interesting interrelations between the numbers of people at the various levels of participation. Though discovering 100 new members has a good chance of adding 10 new participants, 1 of whom is very active, my experience has been that things trickle-down in the other direction as well: that adding 1 new high-level participant can lead to the creation of 9 medium-level participants and 90 lurkers (though don't let that suggest that all of your effort should be expended on the high-level participants only).</p>\n\n<h3>Looking at Participation Inequality</h3>\n\n<p>Here is a close look at four online communities, using the <a href=\"http://www.quantcast.com/\">quantcast.com</a> metrics service, where you can see some participation inequality in action:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophera/3367609306/\" title=\"Participation Inequality - quantcast.com by ChristopherA, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Participation Inequality - quantcast.com\" height=\"235\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3472/3367609306_023c85652f_o.jpg\" width=\"961\"></a>\n\n</p><p>From this you can see a typical online community site shows the normal 90% 9% 1% participation inequality. RPGnet shows a slightly better then average participation inequality due to its longevity and the quality of the community. ObesityHealth shows evidence of a great community with its 4% active participants, probably because you have to be very committed if you are going to have bariatric surgery. Last, an example of relatively unhealthy community that is unable to sustain its active participants.</p>\n\n<p>You do have to be careful when analyzing quantcast numbers if you see active participants of greater then 6% — in almost all cases if you look deeper it is because there is some restriction that keeps people from lurking, either a fee or some other type of gateway, causing a distortion in the statistics.\n\n</p><h3>Conclusion</h3>\n\n<p>Multiple factors influence the success (or failure) or community. As we saw in my <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html\">first article</a> on community numbers, the first factor is the differing group thresholds of community sizes. In my <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html\">second article</a>, I show that personal limits on the number of people you can have intimacy and trust with is an important factor. In this article I show that larger groups are subject to the power law of participation inequality, causing a small fraction of a community to be subject to group thresholds. In all three articles I show how expending energy can allow you to change the numbers, but with limits.</p><p>I hope this discussion of community numbers will give you some tools to look at the communities you are in, or are trying to build, and to better understand how to make them more successful.</p>\n\n<hr>\n<blockquote><p><em><strong>Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:</strong></em></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html\">2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes</a><br>(also some really good <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html#comments\">comments</a>)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/02/dunbar_triage_t.html\">2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/03/dunbar_altruist.html\">2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/07/cheers_belongin.html\">2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/08/dunbar_world_of.html\">2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/10/dunbar_group_co.html\">2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html\">2008-09: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html\">2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p><em><strong>My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at <a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA\">delicious.com/ChristopherA</a> under some of the following tags:</strong></em></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/participation+inequality\">participation inequality</a> - more specifics on participation inequality.</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/power+laws\">participation inequality</a> - everything I have on the topic of power laws, including participation inequality.</li>\n</ul>\n <p><em><strong>If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them <a href=\"http://delicious.com/tag/for:ChristopherA\">for:ChristopherA</a> and I'll take a look.</strong></em></p>\n\n<p><strong><em>Illustrations by <a href=\"http://www.nancymargulies.com\">Nancy Margulies</a>. Many thanks to <a href=\"http://www.skotos.net/about/staff/shannon_appelcline.php\">Shannon Appecline</a> and <a href=\"http://randy.thefarmers.org/\">F. Randall Farmer</a> for their assistance with this series.</em></strong></p><p><strong>\n</strong></p></blockquote><hr></div>"
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"title" : "The Second World",
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"content" : "<p>\nThe defining characteristic of a Second World country is the non-absorbent napkin. From Moscow to Valparaiso, if your café napkin is a square of waxed paper that takes grease from your lips and spreads it to the rest of your face, you can be certain of encountering the whole constellation of other traits common to those industrialized countries where people make less than $20,000 a year (specifically: clean but strong-tasting running water, the Ford Fiesta or its local equivalent, new trains on old tracks, pavement as an ongoing process rather than an accomplished fact, metal buckets on dirty ropes, dogs of uncertain provenance, merchants hosing down their section of sidewalk, manhole covers left open, sixty-eight satellite dishes on one roof, cheap plastic washing machines that fit in a bathtub, paper currency that rapidly gets filthy, a complete absence of vending machines, streets that don't drain, iron fences around suburban homes, good but watery beer, kiosks full of cheap plastic toys, sidewalks with little square lakes where tiles are missing, affordable cigarettes, escalators with wooden steps, the cinder block as the unit of construction, toilet attendants who sell grey toilet paper by the square and receive tips in a little plate, train stations and theatres with fifty glass doors but only one of them open, rectangular buses that belch black smoke, elevators with little inner doors that have to be closed by hand, the complete inability to ever make change).</p>"
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"content" : "<p><span><img style=\"border:1px solid black;margin:4px 10px 10px 25px\" src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/Blog_Napkin_Ring.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" height=\"188\"></span>Here's something a little different to take advantage of our brief respite between Friday the 13th and the Ides of March. Yesterday Marian and I had lunch at Ruby's, and as usual our utensils came wrapped in a napkin that was held in place by a paper napkin ring. I have helpfully recreated this setup in the picture on the right.</p>\n<p>Seems ordinary enough, doesn't it? But as I unwrapped the silverware I noticed something: a patent notice. This little paper napkin ring, it turned out, was protected by U.S. Patent No. 6,644,498. I was intrigued. What was patentable about this thing? The stickum? It seemed like ordinary Post-It Note type stuff. The size and shape? Couldn't be. The logo? No.</p>\n<p>Luckily, the web knows all. When I got home I pulled up the patent to see what it was for. The answer is below the fold.</p>\n<p><span><img style=\"border:1px solid black;margin:4px 10px 10px 25px\" src=\"http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/Blog_Patent_6644498.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"266\" height=\"315\"></span>Did you guess? The patent is not for anything to do with the napkin ring itself but for the packaging method: they're sold on a roll instead of in a box. This is apparently <a href=\"http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F6644498\">a boon to wait staff and busboys everywhere:</a><br>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Currently [...] Individual paper napkin rings are typically supplied pre-cut into their individual size and stacked one on top of another into a brick of product.</p>\n<p>When the ring is to be installed on a napkin surrounding a set of silverware, the napkin ring must be peeled from the stack and formed in its ring shape around the silverware and napkin. Thus, a server <em>must use both hands</em> to peel the paper napkin ring from the stack.</p>\n<p>Therefore, a need exists for a new type of napkin ring configuration such that the napkin rings can be sequentially removed from a continuous strip to <em>eliminate the difficulty in removing a napkin ring from the supply stack.</em></p>\n</blockquote></p>\n<p>Fascinating, no? Putting things on a roll has been used for decades in such high-tech applications as, oh, postage stamps and carnival tickets, but apparently if you apply this to paper napkin rings it's patentable. We live in marvelous times, don't we?</p>"
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"content" : "\n\n<p><em>Editor's note: This article will appear in</em> Wired <em>magazine's April issue, on sale March 24, 2009. It is being published online now because the subject of the story, Leonardo Notarbartolo, was released from prison in Belgium this week.</em></p>\n<p><strong>Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls</strong> into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and wears the requisite white prisoner jacket, Notarbartolo radiates a sunny Italian charm. A silver Rolex peeks out from under his cuff, and a vertical strip of white soul patch drops down from his lower lip like an exclamation mark.</p>\n\n<p>In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.</p>\n\n<p>The loot was never found, but based on circumstantial evidence, Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years.</p>\n\n<p>Until now.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo sits down across from me at one of the visiting room's two dozen small rectangular tables. He has an intimidating reputation. The Italian anti-Mafia police contend he is tied to the Sicilian mob, that his cousin was tapped to be the next the <em>capo dei capi</em>—the head of the entire organization. Notarbartolo intends to set the record straight. He puts his hands on the table. He has had six years to think about what he is about to say.</p>\n\n<p>\"I may be a thief and a liar,\" he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. \"But I am going to tell you a true story.\"</p>\n\n<p><strong>It was February 16, 2003</strong> — a clear, frozen Sunday evening in Belgium. Notarbartolo took the E19 motorway out of Antwerp. In the passenger seat, a man known as Speedy fidgeted nervously, damp with sweat. Notarbartolo punched it, and his rented Peugeot 307 sped south toward Brussels. They hadn't slept in two days.</p>\n\n<p>Speedy scanned the traffic behind them in the side-view mirror and maintained a tense silence. Notarbartolo had worked with him for 30 years—they were childhood buddies—but he knew that his friend had a habit of coming apart at the end of a job. The others on the team hadn't wanted Speedy in on this one—they said he was a liability. Notarbartolo could see their point, but out of loyalty, he defended his friend. Speedy could handle it, he said.</p>\n\n<p>And he had. They had executed the plan perfectly: no alarms, no police, no problems. The heist wouldn't be discovered until guards checked the vault on Monday morning. The rest of the team was already driving back to Italy with the gems. They'd rendezvous outside Milan to divvy it all up. There was no reason to worry. Notarbartolo and Speedy just had to burn the incriminating evidence sitting in a garbage bag in the backseat.</p>\n\n<div>\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n<div>They were accused of breaking into the Antwerp Diamond Center’s supersecure vault and stealing $100 million in diamonds, gold and jewelry. The loot was never found, but their trash was.\n\n<div>\n\nFor more, visit <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/video\">wired.com/video</a>.\n\n</div></div></div>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Notarbartolo pulled off the highway and turned onto a dirt road that led into a dense thicket. The spot wasn't visible from the highway, though the headlights of passing cars fractured through the trees. Notarbartolo told Speedy to stay put and got out to scout the area.</p>\n\n<p>He passed a rusty, dilapidated gate that looked like it hadn't been touched since the Second World War. It was hard to see in the dark, but the spot seemed abandoned. He decided to burn the stuff near a shed beside a small pond and headed back to the car.</p>\n\n<p>When he got there, he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Speedy had lost it. The contents of the garbage bag was strewn amongst the trees. Speedy was stomping through the mud, hurling paper into the underbrush. Spools of videotape clung to the branches like streamers on a Christmas tree. Israeli and Indian currency skittered past a half-eaten salami sandwich. The mud around the car was flecked with dozens of tiny, glittering diamonds. It would take hours to gather everything up and burn it.</p>\n\n<p>\"I think someone's coming,\" Speedy said, looking panicked.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo glared at him. The forest was quiet except for the occasional sound of a car or truck on the highway. It was even possible to hear the faint gurgling of a small stream. Speedy was breathing fast and shallow—the man was clearly in the midst of a full-blown panic attack.</p>\n\n<p>\"Get back in the car,\" Notarbartolo ordered. They were leaving. Nobody would ever find the stuff here.</p>\n\n<p>The job was done.</p>\n\n\n\n<div>\n\t<img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamond26_f.jpg\" alt=\"\">\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\nLocation along the E19 motorway north of Brussels where Speedy dumped the garbage bag of evidence.\n\t\t</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n\n<p><strong>Patrick Peys and Agim De Bruycker</strong> arrived at the Diamond Center the next morning. They had just received a frantic call: The vault had been compromised. The subterranean chamber was supposed to be one of the most secure safes in the world. Now the foot-thick steel door was ajar, and more than 100 of the 189 safe-deposit boxes had been busted open. Peys and De Bruycker were stunned. The floor was strewn with wads of cash and velvet-lined boxes. Peys stepped on a diamond-encrusted bracelet. It appeared that the thieves had so much loot, they simply couldn't carry it all away.</p>\n\n<p>Peys and De Bruycker lead the Diamond Squad, the world's only specialized diamond police. Their beat: the labyrinthine Antwerp Diamond District. Eighty percent of the world's rough diamonds pass through this three-square-block area, which is under 24-hour police surveillance and monitored by 63 video cameras. About $3 billion worth of gem sales were reported here in 2003, but that's not counting a hidden world of handshake deals and off-ledger transactions. Business relationships follow the ancient family and religious traditions of the district's dominant Jewish and Indian dealers, known as <em>diamantaires</em>. In 2000, the Belgian government realized it would require a special type of cop to keep an eye on things and formed the squad. Peys and De Bruycker were the first hires.</p>\n\n<p>De Bruycker called headquarters, asking for a nationwide alert: The Antwerp Diamond Center had been brazenly robbed. Then he dialed Securilink, the vault's alarm company.</p>\n\n<p>\"What is the status of the alarm?\" he asked.</p>\n\n<p>\"Fully functional,\" the operator said, checking the signals coming in from the Diamond Center. \"The vault is secure.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"Then how is it that the door is wide open and I'm standing inside the vault?\" De Bruycker demanded, glancing at the devastation all around him.</p>\n\n<p>He hung up and looked at Peys. They were up against a rare breed of criminal.</p>\n\n<div>\n\t<img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds6_f.jpg\" alt=\"\">\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\n\t\t\tThe Diamond Center's vault after the robbery. \n\t\t</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n<p><strong>About 18 months earlier,</strong> in the summer of 2001, Leonardo Notarbartolo sipped an espresso at a café on Hoveniersstraat, the diamond district's main street. It was a cramped, narrow place with a half-dozen small tables, but from the corner by the window Notarbartolo could look out on the epicenter of the world's diamond trade. During business hours, Hasidic men wearing broad-brimmed hats hurried past with satchels locked to their wrists. Armored cars idled tensely while burly couriers with handguns wheeled away small black suitcases. There were Africans in bright blue suits, Indian merchants wearing loupes around their necks, and bald Armenians with reading glasses pushed up on their mottled heads.</p>\n\n<p>Billions of dollars in diamonds pass by the café's window. During the day, they travel from office to office in briefcases, coat pockets, and off-the-shelf rollies. At night, all those gems are locked up in safes and underground vaults. It's one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the world.</p>\n\n<p>It's also a thief's paradise. In 2000, Notarbartolo rented a small office in the Diamond Center, one of the area's largest buildings. He presented himself as a gem importer based in Turin, Italy, and scheduled meetings with numerous dealers. He bought small stones, paid cash, dressed well, and cheerfully mangled the French language. The dealers probably never knew that they had just welcomed one of the world's best jewel thieves into their circle.</p>\n\n<p>By his own account, Notarbartolo had pulled off dozens of major robberies by 2000. It wasn't just about the money anymore. He stole because he was born to be a thief. He still remembers every detail of his first robbery. It was 1958—he was 6. His mother had sent him out for milk, and he came back with 5,000 lira—about $8. The milkman had been asleep, and young Leo rifled through his drawers. His mother beat him, but it didn't matter. He had found his calling.</p>\n\n<p>In elementary school, he filched money from his teachers. As a teenager, he stole cars and learned to pick locks. In his twenties, he devoted himself to the study of people, tracking jewelry salesmen around Italy for weeks just to understand their habits. In his thirties, he began to assemble teams of thieves, each with their own specialty. He knew lock-picking experts, alarm aces, safecrackers, guys who could tunnel under anything, and a man who could scale the sleek exteriors of office buildings. Each job brought a different mix of thieves into play. Most, including Notarbartolo, lived in or near Turin, and the group came to be known as the School of Turin.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo's specialty was charm. Acting the part of the jolly jeweler, he was invited into offices, workshops, and even vault rooms to inspect merchandise. He would buy a few stones and then, a week or a month later, steal the target's entire stock in the middle of the night.</p>\n\n<p>Antwerp provided a wealth of opportunity and a good place to fence hot property. A diamond necklace stolen in Italy could be dismantled and its individual gems sold for cash in Antwerp. He came to town about twice a month, stayed a few days at a small apartment near the Diamond District, then drove home to his wife and kids in the foothills of the Alps.</p>\n\n<p>When he had stolen goods to sell, he dealt with only a few trusted buyers. Now, as he finished his espresso, one of them—a Jewish dealer—came in and sat down to chat.</p>\n\n<p>\"Actually, I want to talk to you about something a little unusual,\" the dealer said casually. \"Maybe we could walk a little?\"</p>\n\n<p>They headed out, and once they were clear of the district, the dealer picked up the conversation. His tone had changed however. The casualness was gone.</p>\n\n<p>\"I'd like to hire you for a robbery,\" he said. \"A big robbery.\"</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The agreement was straightforward.</strong> For an initial payment of 100,000 euros, Notarbartolo would answer a simple question: Could the vault in the Antwerp Diamond Center be robbed?</p>\n\n<p>He was pretty sure the answer was no. He was a tenant in the building and rented a safe-deposit box in the vault to secure his own stash. He viewed it as the safest place to keep valuables in Antwerp. But for 100,000 euros, he was happy to photograph the place and show the dealer how daunting it really was.</p>\n\n<p>So he strolled into the Diamond District with a pen poking out of his breast pocket. At a glance, it looked like a simple highlighter, but the cap contained a miniaturized digital camera capable of storing 100 high-resolution images. Photography is strictly limited in the district, but nobody noticed Notarbartolo's pencam.</p>\n\n<p>He began his reconnaissance at the police surveillance booth on the Schupstraat, a street leading into the center of the district. Behind the booth's bulletproof glass, two officers monitored the area. The three main blocks of the district bristled with video cameras: Every inch of street and sky appeared to be under watch. The booth also contained the controls for the retractable steel cylinders that are deployed to prevent vehicular access to the district. As Notarbartolo walked past, he began taking pictures.</p>\n\n<p>He headed toward the Diamond Center itself, a gray, 14-story, fortresslike building on the south end of the district. It had a private security force that operated a nerve center located at the entrance. Access was blocked by metal turnstiles, and visitors were questioned by guards. Notarbartolo flashed his tenant ID card and breezed through. His camera captured crisp images of everything.</p>\n\n<div>\n<div><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds11_f.jpg\" alt=\"\">\n<div>The 3-ton steel vault door.</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<p>He took the elevator, descending two floors underground to a small, claustrophobic room—the vault antechamber. A 3-ton steel vault door dominated the far wall. It alone had six layers of security. There was a combination wheel with numbers from 0 to 99. To enter, four numbers had to be dialed, and the digits could be seen only through a small lens on the top of the wheel. There were 100 million possible combinations.</p>\n\n<p>Power tools wouldn't do the trick. The door was rated to withstand 12 hours of nonstop drilling. Of course, the first vibrations of a drill bit would set off the embedded seismic alarm anyway.</p>\n\n<p>The door was monitored by a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the door itself and one on the wall just to the right. When armed, the plates formed a magnetic field. If the door were opened, the field would break, triggering an alarm. To disarm the field, a code had to be typed into a nearby keypad. Finally, the lock required an almost-impossible-to-duplicate foot-long key.</p>\n\n<p>During business hours, the door was actually left open, leaving only a steel grate to prevent access. But Notarbartolo had no intention of muscling his way in when people were around and then shooting his way out. Any break-in would have to be done at night, after the guards had locked down the vault, emptied the building, and shuttered the entrances with steel roll-gates. During those quiet midnight hours, nobody patrolled the interior—the guards trusted their technological defenses.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo pressed a buzzer on the steel grate. A guard upstairs glanced at the videofeed, recognized Notarbartolo, and remotely unlocked the steel grate. Notarbartolo stepped inside the vault.</p>\n\n<p>It was silent—he was surrounded by thick concrete walls. The place was outfitted with motion, heat, and light detectors. A security camera transmitted his movements to the guard station, and the feed was recorded on videotape. The safe-deposit boxes themselves were made of steel and copper and required a key and combination to open. Each box had 17,576 possible combinations.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo went through the motions of opening and closing his box and then walked out. The vault was one of the hardest targets he'd ever seen.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Notarbartolo leans toward</strong> me in the Belgian prison and asks if I have any questions so far. It is a rare break in his fast-moving monologue. There is a sense of urgency. He is allotted only one hour of visiting time per day.</p>\n\n<p>\"You're telling me that the heist was organized by an Antwerp diamond dealer,\" I say.</p>\n\n<p>\"Bravo,\" he replies, smiling.</p>\n\n<p>\"What about your cousin?\"</p>\n\n<p>His smile disappears.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo was born in Palermo, Sicily, and members of his extended family have long been dogged by accusations of Mafia connections. Those accusations reached a crescendo last year when anti-Mafia police arrested Notarbartolo's cousin Benedetto Capizzi, claiming he was about to become the new leader of the Sicilian Mafia. Notarbartolo says the Italian authorities traveled to Belgium soon after the heist to question him about Capizzi's possible role in the robbery. If there is an organized-crime link, Notarbartolo might be inventing a story about the Jewish diamond dealer to distract attention from what really happened.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo scoffs at this idea and insists that his cousin had nothing to do with the heist. The reality, Notarbartolo says, is that he thought the vault was impregnable. He didn't believe it could be robbed until the dealer went to extraordinary lengths to prove him wrong.</p>\n\n\n\n\n<table cellspacing=\"0\" border=\"0\" style=\"clear:both\">\n\t<tr valign=\"top\">\n\t\t<td style=\"padding:12px 12px 4px 12px;width:240px;background-color:#cce1e6;border-top-style:solid;border-top-width:4px;border-top-color:#ccc;border-right-style:solid;border-right-width:8px;border-right-color:#ccc\">\n\t\t\t<h3 style=\"text-align:right;font-size:1.3em\">\n\t\t\t\tThe Target\n\t\t\t</h3>\n\t\t</td>\n\t\t<td style=\"padding:12px 12px 4px 12px;width:390px;background-color:#f7eea0;border-top-style:solid;border-top-width:4px;border-top-color:#ccc\">\n\t\t\t<p style=\"padding-bottom:0px\"><em>The Antwerp Diamond Center vault was protected by 10 layers of security.</em></p>\n\t\t</td>\n\t</tr>\n</table>\n<img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds5_f.jpg\" style=\"display:block;clear:both\">\n<br>\n<table cellspacing=\"0\" border=\"0\" style=\"clear:both\">\n\t<tr valign=\"top\">\n\t\t<td style=\"padding-right:50px\">\n\t\t\t<p><strong>The Door</strong> \n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t1. Combination dial (0-99)\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t2. Keyed lock\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t3. Seismic sensor (built-in)\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t4. Locked steel grate\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t5. Magnetic sensor\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t6. External security camera\n\t\t</p>\n\t\t</td>\n\t\t<td style=\"padding-right:12px\">\n\t\t\t<p><strong>The Vault</strong> \n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t7. \t Keypad for disarming sensors\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t8. \t Light sensor\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t9. Internal security camera\n\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t10. Heat/motion sensor (approximate location)\n\t\t\t</p>\n\t\t</td>\n\t</tr>\n</table>\n\n<p><em>Illustration: Joe McKendry</em></p>\n<div style=\"width:630px\"></div>\n<br style=\"clear:both\">\n\n\n<p><strong>It took five months for the diamond</strong> dealer to call back after Notarbartolo told him the heist was impossible. He had even given him the photographs to prove it. Notarbartolo thought that would be the end of it, but now the dealer wanted to meet at an address outside Antwerp. When Notarbartolo arrived, the dealer was waiting for him in front of an abandoned warehouse.</p>\n\n<p>\"I want to introduce you to some people,\" he said, unlocking the battered front door.</p>\n\n<p>Inside, a massive structure was covered with black plastic tarps. The dealer pulled back a corner and they ducked underneath.</p>\n\n<p>At first, Notarbartolo was confused. He seemed to be standing in the vault antechamber. To his left, he saw the vault door. He was inside an exact replica of the Diamond Center's vault level. Everything was the same. As far as Notarbartolo could tell, the dealer had reconstructed it based on the photographs he had provided. Notarbartolo felt like he had stepped into a movie.</p>\n\n<p>Inside the fake vault, three Italians were having a quiet conversation. They stopped talking when they saw the dealer and Notarbartolo. The dealer introduced them, though Notarbartolo refuses to reveal their names, referring to them only by nicknames.</p>\n\n<p>The Genius specialized in alarm systems. According to the dealer, he could disable any kind of alarm.</p>\n\n<p>\"You can disable this?\" Notarbartolo asked, pointing at the replica vault.</p>\n\n<p>\"I can disable most of it,\" the Genius said with a smile. \"You're going to have to do one or two things yourself, though.\"</p>\n\n<p>The tall, muscular man was the Monster. He was called that because he was monstrously good at everything he did. He was an expert lock picker, electrician, mechanic, and driver and had enormous physical strength. Everybody was a little scared of him, which was another reason for the nickname.</p>\n\n<p>The King of Keys was a quiet older man. His age set him apart from the others—he looked like somebody's grandfather. The diamond dealer said that the wizened locksmith was among the best key forgers in the world. One of his contributions would be to duplicate the nearly impossible-to-duplicate foot-long vault key.</p>\n\n<p>\"Just get me a clear video of it,\" the man told Notarbartolo. \"I'll do the rest.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"That's not so easy,\" Notarbartolo pointed out.</p>\n\n<p>The King of Keys shrugged. That wasn't his problem.</p>\n\n<p>\"Don't worry,\" the Genius said. \"I'll help.\"</p>\n\n<p><strong>In September 2002, a guard stepped</strong> up to the vault door and began to spin the combination wheel. It was 7 am. He was right on schedule.</p>\n\n<p>Directly above his head and invisible behind the glare of a recessed light, a fingertip-sized video camera captured his every move. With each spin, the combination came to rest on a number. A small antenna broadcast the image. Nearby, in a storage room beside the vault, an ordinary-looking red fire extinguisher was strapped to the wall. The extinguisher was fully functional, but a watertight compartment inside housed electronics that picked up and recorded the video signal.</p>\n\n<p>When the guard finished dialing the combination, he inserted the vault's key. The video camera recorded a sharp image of it before it disappeared inside the keyhole.</p>\n\n<p>He spun the handle, and the vault door swung open.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Thursday morning, February</strong> 13, 2003. Two days before the heist. The <em>thud-thud-thud</em> of a police helicopter beat over a convoy of police cars escorting an armored truck through the heart of Antwerp. They blew past posters of Venus Williams—she was due in town to compete in the Proximus Diamond Games tennis tournament.</p>\n\n<p>The escorts bristled with firepower. They belonged to a special diamond-delivery protection unit, and each cop carried a fully automatic weapon. Their cargo: De Beers' monthly shipment of diamonds, worth millions.</p>\n\n<p>De Beers is the world's largest diamond-mining company. In 2003, it controlled 55 percent of the global diamond supply and operated mines in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, among others. The rough, unpolished gems were flown to London, where they were divided and placed in 120 boxes—one for each official De Beers distributor, many of which were headquartered in Antwerp.</p>\n\n<p>Every month, Antwerp's share of the boxes was flown into Belgium and transferred to a Brinks armored truck. Once the truck's doors slammed shut, the convoy sped away, sirens wailing. The vehicles rocketed past the guard gate at the entrance of the district, and the giant metal cylinders rose out of the ground behind them, blocking any further automotive access.</p>\n\n<p>The armed escorts fanned out on foot around the armored truck to form a perimeter. No one was allowed near the vehicle. The doors swung open, and the boxes were quickly carried through an unremarkable entrance in the middle of the block. It was payday. The Diamond District was flush.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Notarbartolo was</strong> buzzed into the vault the next day, Friday, February 14—the day before the robbery. He was alone. In his jacket pocket, he carried a can of women's hair spray.</p>\n\n\n<div><div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds9_f.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a>\n\n<div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/zoom.gif\"></a>\n\n</div>\n\n<div>\nNotarbartolo used women's hair spray to temporarily disable the vault's combined heat/motion sensor. \n</div></div></div>\n\n\n<p>A security camera recorded his movements—police would later watch the footage—but the guard had gotten used to the Italian's frequent visits and wasn't paying attention. Notarbartolo stepped away from the safe-deposit boxes and pulled out the aerosol can. With a quick, practiced circular movement, he covered the combined heat/motion sensor with a thin coat of transparent, oily mist.</p>\n\n<p>The vault was momentarily filled with the smell of a woman's hair.</p>\n\n<p>It was a simple but effective hack: The oily film would temporarily insulate the sensor from fluctuations in the room's temperature, and the alarm went off only if it sensed both heat and motion.</p>\n\n<p>Still, it was hard to guess how long the trick would work. Once the Monster was in the vault, he had to install the sensor bypass before his body heat penetrated the film. He might have five minutes—he might have less. Nobody knew for sure.</p>\n\n\n<div>\n\t\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\n\t\t\tThe path Notarbartolo's team took to enter the Diamond Center. \n\t\t</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Venus Williams</strong> smashed the ball crosscourt with a yelp, overwhelming her leggy Slovakian opponent. It was Saturday night, and Williams was dominating the semifinals of the Diamond Games, an event that hyped Antwerp's predominant position in the gem world. Many of the city's diamantaires watched as Williams beat down the Slovak and moved one step closer to winning a tennis racket encrusted with nearly $1 million worth of stones.</p>\n\n<p>Across town, the Diamond District was deserted. Notarbartolo drove his rented gray Peugeot 307 past the city's soot-covered central train station and turned onto Pelikaanstraat, a road that skirted the district. He pulled to the curb, and the Monster, the Genius, the King of Keys, and Speedy stepped out carrying large duffel bags. The King of Keys picked the lock on a run-down office building, and they disappeared through the door. It was a little past midnight.</p>\n\n<p>The Genius led them out the rear of the building into a private garden that abutted the back of the Diamond Center. It was one of the few places in the district that wasn't under video surveillance. Using a ladder he had previously hidden there, the Genius climbed up to a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace, but he approached it slowly from behind a large, homemade polyester shield. The low thermal conductivity of the polyester blocked his body heat from reaching the sensor. He placed the shield directly in front of the detector, preventing it from sensing anything.</p>\n\n<p>The balcony was now safe. While the rest of the team scrambled up, the Genius disabled an alarm sensor on one of the balcony's windows. One by one, the thieves climbed through the window, dropped into a stairwell, and descended to the darkened vault antechamber. They covered the security cameras with black plastic bags and flipped on the lights. The vault door stood imposingly before them. The building was quiet—no alarms had been triggered. The police never determined how the men had entered the building.</p>\n\n<p>The Genius pulled a custom-made slab of rigid aluminum out of his bag and affixed heavy-duty double-sided tape to one side. He stuck it on the two plates that regulated the magnetic field on the right side of the vault door and unscrewed their bolts. The magnetic plates were now loose, but the sticky aluminum held them together, allowing the Genius to pivot them out of the way and tape them to the antechamber wall. The plates were still side by side and active—the magnetic field never wavered—but they no longer monitored the door. Some 30 hours later, the authorities would marvel at the ingenuity.</p>\n\n\n\n\n<div>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds12_f.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/zoom.gif\"></a>\n</div>\n</div>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds13_f.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/zoom.gif\"></a>\n</div>\n\n<div>\nThe Genius used this custom-made slab of aluminum to reposition the magnetic field away from the vault door.</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Next, the King of Keys played out a hunch. In Notarbartolo's videos, the guard usually visited a utility room just before opening the vault. When the thieves searched the room, they found a major security lapse: The original vault key was hanging inside.</p>\n\n<p>The King of Keys grabbed the original. There was no point in letting the safe manufacturers know that their precious key could be copied, and the police still don't know that a duplicate was made.</p>\n\n<p>The King of Keys slotted the original in the keyhole and waited while the Genius dialed in the combination they had gleaned from the video. A moment later, the Genius nodded. The Monster turned off the lights—they didn't want to trigger the light detector in the vault when the door opened. In the darkness, the King of Keys turned the key and spun a four-pronged handle. The bolts that secured the door retracted and it swung heavily open.</p>\n\n<p>Speedy ran up the stairwell. It was his job to stay in touch with Notarbartolo, but there was no cell phone reception down in the vault. Upstairs, he got a signal and dialed his old friend.</p>\n\n<p>\"We're in,\" he said and hung up.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo put his phone back on the dashboard. He was sitting in the Peugeot and could see the front of the Diamond Center a block and a half away. His police scanner was quiet. He took a sip of cold coffee and waited.</p>\n\n<p>In the antechamber, the King of Keys deftly picked the lock on the metal grate. He shuffled backward as the Monster propped the grate open with two cans of paint he found in the storeroom. Like the rest of the team, the Monster wore plastic gloves—the police would find no prints on the cans. It was now up to him to disable the remaining systems.</p>\n\n<p>The Monster oriented himself in the darkness at the vault entrance. The only sound was the steady breathing of the others behind him. His body was already projecting heat into the vault—the hair spray on the infrared sensor wouldn't last. Every second he was there would raise the ambient temperature. He had to move quickly but keep his heart rate low.</p>\n\n\n\n<div><div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds15_f.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a>\n\n<div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/zoom.gif\"></a>\n\n</div>\n\n<div>\nThe Monster bypassed the vault security system's main inbound and outbound\nwires and then covered this light sensor with tape, rendering it useless.</div></div></div>\n\n\n\n<p>As he'd practiced in the warehouse, he strode exactly 11 steps into the middle of the room, reached for the ceiling, and pushed back a panel. He felt the security system's main inbound and outbound wires. An automatic electric pulse constantly shot into the room and back out along these wires. If any of the sensors were tripped, the circuit would break. When a pulse shot into the room, it expected an answer. If it didn't get one, it activated the alarm.</p>\n\n<p>With his hands over his head, the Monster used a tool to strip the plastic coating off the wires. It was a delicate task. One slip could cut through, instantly breaking the circuit and tripping the alarm.</p>\n\n<p>The police would later discover stripped wires in the ceiling and guess that the thieves considered cutting them, only to lose their nerve. But Notabartolo says that the Monster knew exactly what he was doing. Once the copper wires were exposed, he clipped a new, precut piece of wire between the inbound and outbound cables. This bridge rerouted the incoming electric pulse over to the outbound wire before the signal reached the sensors. It no longer mattered what happened further down the line. The sensors were out of the loop. It was now safe for the others to enter.</p>\n\n<p>Still, the men were cautious. They blinded the heat/motion detector with a Styrofoam box, covered the light detector with tape, and then set to work. The King of Keys unloaded a homemade, hand-cranked drill and fitted it with a thin shaft of metal. He jammed the shaft into one of the locks and cranked for about three minutes—until the lock broke, snapping open the box.</p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>The guys took turns yanking the contents out. Since they had memorized the layout of the vault in the replica, they worked in the dark, turning on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box.</p>\n\n<p>But in those muffled flashes, they could glimpse their duffel bags overflowing with gold bars, millions in Israeli, Swiss, American, European, and British currencies, and leather satchels that contained the mother lode: rough and polished diamonds. They resisted the urge to examine their haul; they were running out of time.</p>\n\n<p>By 5:30 am, they had opened 109 boxes. A tamped-down giddiness pervaded the dark vault, but they had to stop. The streets would fill with people soon, and they needed to transfer their bags into Notarbartolo's car. Speedy relayed the message to him. They were coming out.</p>\n\n<p>It took almost an hour for the team to haul the bags up the stairs, pass by the infrared sensor, lower the loot down the ladder, and gather in the hallway of the decrepit office building. Notarbartolo idled at the curb while on the phone with Speedy. A bus came and went, and then the street was empty.</p>\n\n<p>\"Now,\" he hissed.</p>\n\n<p>In the predawn half-light, the four men raced out of the building. They jammed the bags in the car, slammed the doors, and headed off on foot for Notarbartolo's apartment. He put the car in gear and slowly pulled away.</p>\n\n<p>In half an hour, they were huddled around the bags in the apartment. The Monster unzipped one and pulled out a leather satchel. It was time to celebrate.</p>\n\n<p>He opened the satchel and looked up, bewildered. It was empty.</p>\n\n<p>He took out another. It was also empty. A wave of anxiety swept the room. They unzipped all the other duffel bags and rifled through the satchels. More often than not, there was nothing in them.</p>\n\n<p>Something had gone wrong. The diamonds should have been there.</p>\n\n<p>\"We've been set up,\" Notarbartolo said.</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Notarbartolo stepped</strong> into a scalding-hot shower while the others made salami sandwiches in the kitchen. He needed some clarity—the fatigue was weighing on him. In the weeks preceding the heist, he had seen many of the satchels in the offices of the diamantaires, and they were always filled with inventory. He expected the total take to exceed $100 million. Now they were looking at a fraction of that—probably about $20 million.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo reflected on his interactions with the diamond dealer, and a thought flashed through his mind: Maybe the dealer wasn't operating alone. If he tipped off a group of his fellow merchants, they could have pulled their inventory out of the vault before the heist. Each could then claim that their gems were stolen and collect the insurance while secretly keeping their stones. Most had safes in their offices—they could have simply kept the stock there. Notarbartolo realized that the heist he had spent so much time planning might have actually been part of an elaborate insurance scam.</p>\n\n<p>He shut off the water. A half hour earlier he was a king. Now he felt like a pawn.</p>\n\n\n<p><strong>Speedy and Notarbartolo</strong> were on the E19 heading out of Antwerp. It was 6 o'clock on Sunday evening. Notarbartolo settled in for the 10-hour drive back to Turin. The garbage bag filled with incriminating evidence sat in the backseat. Notarbartolo planned to stop in France and burn it, leaving no trace of the crime.</p>\n\n<p>But Speedy was having trouble. His face was ashen, and his eyes darted madly at the cars around them. Finally, after only 20 minutes on the road, he snapped.</p>\n\n<p>\"I can't do the drive,\" he said.</p>\n\n<p>The guy was melting down. Notarbartolo told him to take it easy. He'd drop him at the train station in Brussels if that's what he wanted. It might actually be nicer to do the trip without his friend driving him crazy.</p>\n\n<p>"We can't take the garbage into Brussels," Speedy stammered. The city was crawling with cops—maybe they would be looking for them. They couldn't run the risk. They had to drop the bag immediately.</p>\n\n<p>\"Pull off up here,\" he said abruptly from the passenger seat.</p>\n\n<p>\"This is a ridiculous time to be having a panic attack,\" Notarbartolo muttered.</p>\n\n<p>\"Just pull off,\" his friend snapped.</p>\n\n<p>Notarbartolo took the exit and surveyed the darkened surroundings.</p>\n\n<p>\"There's a dirt road,\" Speedy said, peering into a forest. \"It'll be perfect.\"</p>\n\n<div>\n\t\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\nThe strip of forest alongside the E19 motorway where Speedy \ndumped the garbage bag of evidence.</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n\n<p><strong>August Van Camp</strong> likes weasels. The 59-year-old retired Belgian grocer had two—he called them Mickey and Minnie—and he enjoyed sending them down holes in the forest. Typically, a rabbit came rocketing out the other end. It was a lot of fun.</p>\n\n<p>In 1998, he bought a narrow strip of forest alongside the E19 motorway. It was about a five-minute drive from his house, and if you ignored the sound of cars hurtling past at 80 miles an hour, it was a pretty 12 acres of trees with a gurgling stream. There were also a lot of holes with rabbits in them.</p>\n\n<p>But because it adjoined the highway, Van Camp found a lot of garbage. The local teenagers once decided to have a party there and burned down a little hut he'd built. It made him fume with anger.</p>\n\n<p>When he found garbage, he phoned the police, who had gotten used to his calls. A typical conversation:</p>\n\n<p>\"The kids have made a mess on my land again.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"I am sorry to hear that, Mr. Van Camp.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"I demand that you send someone to investigate.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"We will pass along your request.\"</p>\n\n<p>Van Camp rarely heard back.</p>\n\n\n\n\n<div>\n\t<img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds7_f.jpg\" alt=\"\">\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\n\t\tThe garbage Van Camp found on his property that led to Notarbartolo's arrest. \n\t\t</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n\n<p>While hunting one morning—Monday, February 17, to be exact—Van Camp was incensed to find yet another pile of junk in the underbrush. After a flash of pique that made him puff out his cheeks, throw up his arms, and wonder what the world was coming to, he knelt down and glared at the refuse. He wanted to be able to describe to the cops what he had to put up with. There was videotape strewn all over the place. A wine bottle rested near a half-eaten salami sandwich. There were also some white envelopes printed with the words <span style=\"text-transform:uppercase\">diamond center, antwerp</span>. Van Camp's irritation increased.</p>\n\n<p>\"Kids,\" he grumbled.</p>\n\n<p>At home, he punched in the number for the police and asked to lodge a complaint. The officer listened as Van Camp tallied the mess. When Van Camp mentioned Diamond Center envelopes, the officer broke in. \"What was that?\" he said.</p>\n\n<p>\"Antwerp Diamond Center envelopes,\" Van Camp sputtered.</p>\n\n<p>This time, the police came running.</p>\n\n<p><strong>By mid-afternoon, a half-dozen detectives</strong> swarmed the forest, painstakingly gathering the garbage and collecting stray gems. Van Camp watched with satisfaction. The police were finally treating his litter situation with the proper respect.</p>\n\n<p>Within hours, the trash began to fill the evidence room at the Diamond Squad headquarters in Antwerp. A member of the squad bent over the clear plastic bags, looking for immediate clues. A pile of torn paper seemed promising. It didn't take long to reassemble the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. It was an invoice for a low-light video surveillance system. The buyer: Leonardo Notarbartolo.</p>\n\n\n\n\n<div><div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds20_f.jpg\" alt=\"\"></a>\n\n<div>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.wired.com/#\" title=\"\"><img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/zoom.gif\"></a>\n\n</div>\n\n<div>\nNotarbartolo's invoice for a low-light video surveillance system. </div></div></div>\n\n\n\n<p>Back at Van Camp's property, another detective knelt among the thorny brambles and peered at a small, jagged piece of paper poking out of the mud. He carefully lifted it free and held it up to the light.</p>\n\n<p>It was a business card that bore the address and phone number of Elio D'Onorio, an Italian electronics expert tied to a series of robberies. Notarbartolo has consistently refused to identify his accomplices, but all evidence indicates that D'Onorio is the Genius.</p>\n\n<p>The lab techs also bagged a half-eaten salami sandwich. They found Antipasto Italiano salami packaging nearby and sent it along to Diamond Squad headquarters.</p>\n\n<p>Four days later, the detectives executed a search warrant on the apartment Notarbartolo rented in Antwerp. In a cupboard, they found a receipt from a local grocery store for Antipasto Italiano salami. The receipt had a time-stamp.</p>\n\n<p>A detective drove to the grocery and asked the manager to rewind his closed-circuit television to 12:56 pm on Thursday, February 13. When the video came to a halt and snapped into focus, there was an image of a tall, muscular Italian purchasing salami. His name: Ferdinando Finotto—the man most likely to be the Monster.</p>\n\n<p><strong>On Monday</strong> — about 36 hours after the job was completed—the team of thieves reassembled at a bar in Adro, Italy, a small town about 50 miles northeast of Milan. They had agreed to meet the diamond dealer there and divide the loot. The dealer would get a third for financing the operation and putting the team together. The others would split the rest. They had anticipated a haul in the tens of millions each. Now they were looking at roughly $3 million per man. It was still a lot of money, but they couldn't help feeling they'd been played. Everybody had a lot of questions for the dealer.</p>\n\n<p>Hour after hour, he didn't arrive. Notarbartolo was already uneasy about what had happened in the forest. He knew he had made a mistake—he should have turned around after he dropped off Speedy at the train station and gone back to burn the garbage. It was an embarrassing oversight, but what really irked him was that he had vouched for his friend, and the guy had cracked.</p>\n\n<p>They waited at the bar until closing, drinking espressos and then beer. The dealer never showed.</p>\n\n<p><strong>On Thursday night,</strong> Notarbartolo ate dinner with his family at home outside of Turin. He tried to pretend that everything was normal. As usual, his 3-year-old granddaughter played with his cell phone and made him laugh. He momentarily forgot his worries.</p>\n\n<p>His biggest problem was that he needed to go back to Belgium; the rental car was due in Antwerp the next day. The plan had always been to return it and show his face at the Diamond Center. That way, if the cops were looking for tenants who'd disappeared, he wouldn't be on the list. It would also give him an opportunity to clean his apartment more thoroughly. He told his family that he'd be leaving early the next morning. His wife decided to come along; she hadn't seen much of him lately. They could even have a nice dinner party with some friends from the Netherlands.</p>\n\n<p>The next morning, as the Notarbartolos blew through the Swiss Alps, the police surrounded their home in Italy. Acting on the surveillance-system invoice discovered on Van Camp's land, the Belgian diamond detectives had asked the Italian police to search Notarbartolo's house. His 24-year-old son, Marco, was there and refused to open the front door. He frantically dialed his father's cell phone while the police smashed the door open.</p>\n\n<p>In Notarbartolo's jacket pocket, his phone flashed but made no sound. His granddaughter had accidently turned off the ringer the night before. Marco called his mother's phone—it was turned off. He tried his dad's phone repeatedly. It just rang and rang.</p>\n\n<p>Unaware, Notarbartolo sped toward Antwerp.</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<div>\n\t<img src=\"http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_diamonds_f.jpg\" alt=\"\">\n\t<div>\n\t\t<div>\nLeonardo Notarbartolo was part of a five-man team behind the heist of the century.<br>\n<em>Photo Courtesy Leonardo Notarbartolo</em>\n\n\t\t</div>\n\t</div>\n</div>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n\n<p><strong>As Notarbartolo</strong> drove back to Belgium, Peys and De Bruycker wondered whether they'd ever catch the thieves. They could be anywhere by now: Brazil, Thailand, Russia. It never occurred to the detectives that one of the robbers would walk right back into the district.</p>\n\n<p>But that's exactly what Notarbartolo did. While one of his friends from the Netherlands waited on the street outside the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo waved at the security guard and dropped in to collect his mail. The guard knew that the police were investigating Notarbartolo and phoned the building manager, who immediately called the detectives.</p>\n\n<p>When the police arrived, they found Notarbartolo chatting with the building manager and began peppering him with questions. The friend took off as Notarbartolo stalled for time, pretending to have trouble understanding French and claiming that he couldn't remember the exact address of his own apartment. He just knew how to walk there.</p>\n\n<p>\"Let's go then,\" Peys said and loaded the Italian into a car.</p>\n\n<p>Eventually, Notarbartolo pointed out the apartment.</p>\n\n<p>As the police car pulled to the curb, Notarbartolo's wife and the friends who'd come for dinner stepped out of the building. They were loaded down with bags and one carried a rolled-up carpet. Another minute and they would have been gone.</p>\n\n<p>The police took everyone into custody.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The bags contained</strong> critical evidence. The police dug out a series of prepaid SIM cards that were linked to cell phones used almost exclusively to call three Italians: Elio D'Onorio, aka the Genius; Ferdinando Finotto, alias the Monster; and the person most likely to be Speedy, an anxious, paranoid man named Pietro Tavano, a longtime associate of Notarbartolo's. On the night of the heist, a cell tower in the Diamond District logged the presence of all three, plus Notarbartolo. During that time, Tavano stayed in constant contact with Notarbartolo.</p>\n\n<p>The day Notarbartolo was arrested, Italian police broke open the safe at his home in Turin. They found 17 polished diamonds attached to certificates that the Belgian diamond detectives traced back to the vault. More gems were vacuumed out of the rolled-up carpet from Notarbartolo's Antwerp apartment.</p>\n\n<p>The Belgian courts came down hard. They found Notarbartolo guilty of orchestrating the heist and sentenced him to 10 years.</p>\n\n<p>With the cell phone records and the peculiarly precise salami sandwich evidence, the Belgian detectives persuaded French police to raid the home of Finotto's girlfriend on the French Riviera. They retrieved marked $100 bills that the detectives say belonged to one of the Diamond Center victims. Legal proceedings dragged on, but Finotto was finally arrested in Italy in November 2007 and is serving a five-year sentence there.</p>\n\n<p>When questioned by police in Italy, D'Onorio admitted that he had installed security cameras in Notarbartolo's office but denied any involvement in the crime. Nonetheless, his DNA was found on some adhesive tape left in the vault. He was extradited to Belgium in November 2007 to begin a five-year sentence.</p>\n\n<p>The high-strung Pietro Tavano is serving a five-year sentence in Italy for the crime. He has refused to allow his attorney to make any statements on his behalf.</p>\n\n<p>A fifth thief has never been identified, though police know of his existence via cell phone records and DNA traces. The King of Keys was never apprehended.</p>\n\n<p><strong>On January 4, 2009,</strong> I see Notarbartolo for the last time. Over the past 14 weeks, we have met seven times in the prison visiting room, and yet questions remain. Was $100 million stolen as the police estimate, or just $20 million as Notarbartolo insists? Does it make sense that the heist was part of a larger insurance scam or is Notarbartolo's story a decoy to throw suspicion on others? Perhaps Notarbartolo's cousin, the Mafia don, was behind the whole thing. Whatever the truth, where is the loot now?</p>\n\n<p>The murky nature of the diamond trade makes it difficult to get clear answers. For instance, detective De Bruycker says that three-quarters of the business is done under the table. According to Denice Oliver, the adjuster who investigated the robbery for insurers, there were roughly $25 million in claims, all documented by legitimate invoices. As a result, De Bruycker calculated that at least another $75 million in goods was stolen, bringing the total value of the heist to about $100 million.</p>\n\n<p>If Notarbartolo's insurance scam theory is correct, it went down like this: The dealers who were in on it removed their goods—both legal and illegal—from the vault before the heist and then filed claims on the legitimate gems. Oliver calls this the "double whammy"—these dealers would have gotten the insurance payouts and kept their stock. The $20 million found by the thieves belonged to traders not in on the scam.</p>\n\n<p>Or: There was no insurance scam. The thieves actually found $100 million in the vault and Notarbartolo has spun a story to cloud the true origins of the heist.</p>\n\n<p>Regardless of which theory is correct, there is agreement that the thieves got away with millions that were never recovered. Notarbartolo refuses to talk about what happened to the goods, adding that it is something best discussed once he is out of prison.</p>\n\n<p>In the meantime, his share may very well be waiting for him, hidden somewhere in the foothills of the Italian Alps.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Joshua Davis (</em><a href=\"http://www.joshuadavis.net\">www.joshuadavis.net</a><em>) wrote about the Kaminsky Internet bug in issue 16.12.</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/RRcJKiURnm5yyySTjHVzzizJhTI/a\"><img src=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/RRcJKiURnm5yyySTjHVzzizJhTI/i\" border=\"0\" ismap></a></p><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/wired/index/~4/jsFIv7uGLBQ\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "When Alice Russell Shows Up, She Shows Out",
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"content" : "<img alt=\"alice_russell_liv.jpg\" src=\"http://www.soulbounce.com/soul/blog_images/alice_russell_liv-thumb-473x310.jpg\" width=\"473\" height=\"310\">A few weeks ago we hipped you to the fact that <b>Alice Russell </b>would be <a href=\"http://www.soulbounce.com/soul/2009/02/new_alice_russell_tour_dates_a.php\">touring the US</a> during the month of March. Alice's tour is well underway after kicking off in Washington, DC at Liv last Thursday night and what a kick off it was. Backed by a tight group of musicians including producer/guitarist/singer <b>TM Juke</b>, fiddler/guitarist/singer <b>Michael Simmonds</b>, and two members of Bay area-based rhythm section <b>The Park</b>--<b>Derek Taylor</b> on drums and <b>Josh Lippi </b>on bass--Alice let everyone in attendance know that this wasn't a game. From the moment she hit the stage until the end of the second encore, Alice and the fellas went full throttle. But don't just take my word for it, check the visual and aural evidence after the bounce. <br><br> \n Stylishly attired in a black sequined dress, hot pink tights and a matching flower in her hair, Alice took to the stage to perform \"Two Steps\" from her new CD <i>Pot of Gold</i> as the show's opener. She came out singing and swinging. <br><br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D3519409%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3Dff0179%26fullscreen%3D1&width=474&height=356\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\"></iframe>\n\n\n\n<br><br>After that rousing start to the concert, it only got more intense as the night went on. Alice dug deep into her catalog of goodies to pull out songs from previous releases. From <i>My Favourite Letters</i> she performed \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYs5wxL8Wns\">Mean To Me</a>\" and \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzbK5V0FUlU\">Humankind</a>,\" then tackled \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJS4QqDOhZg\">Hold On Tight</a>,\" a song she did with <b>Quantic Soul Orchestra</b>. After those throwbacks, Russell returned to her new material and threw down the gauntlet on this hand-clapping, foot-stomping version of \"Living the Life of a Dreamer.\"<br> <br>\n\n\n\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D3519559%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3Dff0179%26fullscreen%3D1&width=474&height=356\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\"></iframe>\n\n<br><br>\n\nAlice continued with more hotness from <i>Pot of Gold</i>, including \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Of_x0fBjdI\">Hesitate</a>\" and one of my favorite songs from the disc, \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94nyqZc0H4U\">Let Us Be Loving</a>,\" which she turned into a up-tempo number instead of the laid back funk found on the album version. She then segued into \"Munkaroo,\" another gem from <i>My Favourite Letters</i>, and turned it out. Watch this performance all the way to the end. Just trust me on this one. <br><br>\n\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D3519649%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3Dff0179%26fullscreen%3D1&width=474&height=356\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\"></iframe>\n\n\n<br><br>See what I mean? Alice is no joke on stage. She continued with more songs from the past covering \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_JxyWh3_8\">Hold It Down</a>\" and \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPxhBLP07Rg\">Seven Nation Army</a>\" and led into current hits \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yOKJ39RtEo\">Lights Went Out</a>\" and \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvr6VW55BKM\">Got the Hunger</a>." The party train kept moving with her smoking rendition of "A Fly in the Hand." <br><br>\n\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D3554524%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3Dff0179%26fullscreen%3D1&width=474&height=356\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\"></iframe>\n\n<br><br>She brought more tracks from the new disc alive, including \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y6E2T5-e40\">Turn and Run</a>\" and \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n21xCxluYZ0\">Hurry On Now</a>,\" and made her fans happy with another QSO cut \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAhw4Mm5bu0\">End of the Road</a>.\" For her big finish, Alice brought the house down with a version of <b>Gnarls Barkley</b>'s \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEDObAeVLfM\">Crazy</a>\" that would have made <b>Cee-Lo</b> proud. But thankfully she didn't stop there, coming out for an encore after the audience made the club shake with applause and screams for more. During her encore, she debuted a new song for us that had everyone shaking a tailfeather along with her. I have no idea where Alice and the rest of the band got all of this energy from at the end of the show, but they got quite crunk. <br>\n<br>\n\n<iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D3554718%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3Dff0179%26fullscreen%3D1&width=474&height=356\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\"></iframe>As much as the DC crowd didn't want to the show to stop, all good things had to come to an end. Only Alice and Michael remained on stage to close the show with a <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLJnDxyYk98\">stripped down performance</a>. Alice's voice filled the room over his guitar playing in what turned out to be the perfect end to an incredible night of music. It's the rare artist who sounds just as good if not better live than they do on their albums and puts on a good show to boot. Alice Russell is that artist. Make sure to catch her in concert when she hits your city. <br><br>[Photo: Kimberly Hines/Butta]<br>"
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"title" : "Penne for Your Thought",
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"content" : "<div><strong>By Gerald Dworkin</strong></div>\r\n<div><em></em> </div>\r\n<div align=\"center\"><em>It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that.</em></div>\r\n<div align=\"center\"><br>--Clive Bell</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"> </div>\r\n<div><a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef01127940f92f28a4-popup\" style=\"FLOAT:right\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef01127940fb0f28a4-popup\" style=\"FLOAT:right\"><img alt=\"Penne\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef01127940fb0f28a4-800wi\" style=\"MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px\" title=\"Penne\"></a> Except for the purchase of a house my greatest expenditure has been on eating. I include in this total the amounts spent traveling to various gastronomical destinations --which is basically the same as my expenditure on travel for pleasure. And indeed most of my non-acceptances of various invitations to give talks, etc. is based on the fact that the destination is not an interesting place to eat. I also include a fairly substantial number of books--fewer cookbooks than essays on eating, reflections on cooking, and so forth. I cook but since my wife is an exceptional cook and I am only a good one the rational division of labor is for her to do most of the cooking. <br><br>I attribute my interest in food to my mother who from an early age used to take me to various restaurants in New York City (where I grew up). I remember in particular meals at the Automat, Schrafft's, and Patrissi's-- very different kinds of restaurants and all now closed. I also remember fondly a Spanish restaurant on 14th street called La Bilbaina where my favorite dish--at age 8-- was squid in its own ink. Obviously, being Jewish meant many Christmas meals in Chinese restaurants. Riddle: If, according to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5764, and, according to the Chinese calendar, the year is 5724, what did the Jews eat for forty years? Variation: The Jewish calendar begins in 5758; the Chinese in 4965. So the Jews had to do without Chinese food for 1063 years. (For an excellent ethnographic study of the Jewish-Chinese link see Gaye Tuchman and Howard Levine, \"Safe Treyf: New York Jews and Chinese Food\"). Not a joke.</div>\r\n<div> </div>\r\n<div align=\"left\">So much for biography. By and large two central interests in my life--food and philosophy-- have gone their separate ways. I propose in this essay to combine them by considering the question in aesthetics of whether cooking can be considered an art form. Now, philosophers since Plato have thought about what makes something a work of art and almost all the analyses they have come up with seem to exclude the invention of a recipe or the cooking of a dish as artistic forms. Plato thought that all art is representational, or mimetic. Kant thought not only was it representational butmade a sharp distinction between the fine arts, the crafts and agreeable art, i.e. mere entertainment. Even Mill whom one might have thought would give some serious attention to the pleasures of eating distinguished sharply between the physical pleasures of eating and drinking which are shared with the beasts and the mental pleasures which employ the \"higher faculties\" of human beings.</div>\r\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:left\">Contemporary aestheticians have either tended to be conventionalists--defining art as an artifact produced to be presented to the artworld or where the work and its interpretations requires an art historical context-- or list makers. By the latter I mean a collection of conditions, none of which is necessary and which together are supposed to be sufficient. Here is one:</p>\r\n<div align=\"left\">(1) possessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of emotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally complex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex meanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being original; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of a high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form; (10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art. (This is taken from an article on the definition of art in the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is an invaluable reference work for all things philosophical) Whatever one thinks of this list, conditions 2, and 5, seem to be in tension with the notion of cooking as an art form, and condition 9 begs the question.</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"></div>\r\n\r\n<p>The first question that has to be asked is what difference does it make whether cooking is classified as an art or not? The philosopher Quine once said that the only people who should be interested in certain kinds of classification are librarians. My own view is that classifications and definitions are either simply stipulative, ( here is what I shall mean by \"art\" ; I don't care whether you normally use the term the same way or not. If you don't like the way I use it, then let us call it \"zart.\" Let us now talk about zart.) or provide an interesting or useful or provocative or illuminating classification in order to think in fruitful ways about some problem or issue. </p>\r\n<p>For example, suppose we consider the issue of whether animals have linguistic abilities. One set of comparative psychologists use criteria such as whether animals learn from their mistakes or generalize from past experience to argue that they have something like a language. When some bonobo puts a ball in a box having heard the scientist say \"Put the ball in the box\" although that command has never been given before--but commands such as put the banana in the cage have been and the animal rewarded for obeying--the claim is made that linguistic competence has been demonstrated. These creatures should be classified as language using.</p>\r\n<p>Other psychologists resist this classification. Among the reasons for skepticism are the differences in ease with which human beings and apes can learn language, questions as to the whether there is a clear beginning and end to the signed gestures, and whether the apes actually understand language or are simply being conditioned to do something for a reward. Other scientists are studying the content of animal vocalizations in terms of their evolutionary and ecological significance, i.e. warning cries. They see no need to translate \"awk awk\" into \"watch out; predators near.\"</p>\r\n<p>Questions of classification here will be settled in terms of which research program proves most successful in making sense of animal communications and which leads to interesting new predictions. </p>\r\n<p>Now discussions of whether to classify some activity as an art form are not like this. We are not trying to investigate why humans engage in a certain kind of activity--thought that is a perfectly good thing to think about. Rather it is an interpretive exercise. We are trying to understand how certain forms of human experience give us pleasure, enlighten us, increase our human powers, bring us together (separate us), cultivate discrimination, have expressive dimensions, force us to pay attention to things, give meaning to some lives. </p>\r\n<p>We value art in certain ways and we want to understand the nature of that valuing and how it differs from other valuable forms of human activity such as science or athletic achievement or chess mastery. </p>\r\n<p>What issues might we be thinking about in trying to decide whether to classify cooking as one of the arts? Here are some.</p>\r\n<p>1) Is the person who says of the Chateau Petrus they have just tasted that it is a work of art to be taken literally? </p>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>2) Is the experience we have of a Beethoven String Quartet sufficiently different from that we have when eating a great meal so that we should <br>distinguish them as different kinds of experience?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>3) Does it make sense to say of someone that they have been moved by a meal?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>4) Is it significant for classifying something as an art form that a meal is consumed in the process of appreciation?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>5) When I say of Grant Achatz that he is an artist in the kitchen how does this differ from saying he is a genius at the stove?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>6) Why do we distinguish between the architect who designed Notre Dame and those who built it by designating the latter as craftsmen and the former as an artist? Is there a class bias exhibited by this distinction?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>7) A piece of music can express sadness. A pate cannot. So?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>8) Consider the following list: painting, Japanese flower arrangement, conceptual installations, origami, construction of Shaker chairs, weaving handmade rugs, ice dancing, architecture, calligraphy, films, Javanese shadow puppet shows, fireworks displays, beating out rhythms on a oil drum top, making Duchamps Fountain ( a toilet), drawing political cartoons. Would whatever unity this list possesses be retained or destroyed if we added cooking? Or is the original list more like Borges famous classification of animals into: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained,suckling pigs,mermaids,fabulous ones,stray dogs,those included in the present classification,those that tremble as if they were mad,innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, others,those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies.</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>9) We think that a civilized society ought to promote and, perhaps, subsidize the arts. Should we subsidize cooks, customers or restaurants? </div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>10) Are smell and taste different from the other senses in ways which prevent them from being organized in the way that sound is organized into music, or visual perceptions into film?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>11) The words on a page, or the images on a canvas, represent the world. But a great dish is not representational. It doesn't stand for something else. Does that matter in evaluating the aesthetic experience of the object?</div>\r\n<div align=\"left\"><br>12) The arts are thought to provide us with pleasure, but they also expand our world via the power of imagination. They sharpen and stimulate our emotional powers. They can transform us in such a way that we can say we are a different person before and after. They can provoke our anger or arouse our fears. Can the experience of eating, or the weaving of a quilt, do something comparable? If not, should we withhold the title of art from them?<br><br>Each of these questions deserves an essay of its own. I shall confine myself to presenting some kinds of considerations that have been taken to count against classifying cooking as an art form. Aquinas always presented at least three replies to any thesis he considered. I will not hold myself to such a high standard.<br><br>Objection: Food is destroyed by the very process--eating--which allows us to appreciate it.<br>Reply: True, but this is also the case with some conceptual art as well. It is also the case that the recipe allows the artist/chef to recreate the work of art--the dish-- so that we may re-appreciate it. In any case, what is the relevance of the fact that the process of appreciation destroys the instantiation of the artistic process? When he hear a particular performance of the Rasumovsky String Quartet our listening does not cause the sound to disappear but the sounds are gone as much as the osso buco.<br><br>Objection: Food is useful; it nourishes us. Art has to be appreciated for its aesthetic value only.<br>Reply: Architecture.<br><br>Objection: Art is defined by the intention of the creator to produce an object to be perceived by the senses for its own sake<br>Reply: Architecture, again. But if you don't like that reply consider the fact that objects which were originally intended for a practical use (worship) are not admired as artistic objects (cathedrals). Bach has been played to stimulate cows to give more milk. So original intentions cannot be decisive. <br><br>Objection: Tastes are not capable of being arranged in \"systematic, repeatable , regular combinations.\" (Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (1958))<br>Reply: As Elizabeth Telfer point out in her excellent Food for Thought, foods can be arranged in sequences from least salty to most salty, or from sweet to sour, and not all art forms have systematic, repeatable combinations, e.g. sculpture. In any case why doesn't the following count (from a review of Coi in San Francisco) as a culinary systematic, repeatable, combination: \"The chef's playful techniques work beautifully in a pea soup. The waiter brings a wide bowl with just a small knob of uncooked peas, mint and a scoop of ricotta sorbet, then puts it on the table and pours in a chilled broth. It's a multi-sensory sensation: cool, thick soup. Icy, milky sorbet. The fresh snap of peas. The subtle perfume of mint. \"<br><br>Objection: The cooking of food is a craft not a form of art.<br>Reply: There is a sense of craft,exemplified by the carpenter, which emphasizes a technique or skill. But many crafts--pottery, weaving, origami-- are instances of creativity not just technique. So some crafts can be art. Both army cooks making MRE's and Albert Adria ( El Bulli) cook using vacuum-packed bags. But the point of sous- vide techniques is to produce effects that enhance flavors, creating multi-layered tastes, new textures, and extraordinary colors. <br><br>Objection: Of course wonderful food can create great pleasure. But so can a well-done massage. There is more to art than the production of pleasant--even exquisite--sensations.<br>Reply: Agreed. But it is crucial what the \"more\" is. One seems to be that appreciation requires making sensitive discriminations. One can improve one's appreciation through wider experience with the art object and learn to see or hear ( or taste) new things in the object. This will often come about by having these things pointed out to one by those with more and more refined sensibilities. There will be a critical vocabulary which helps-- talk of hues and palettes, of jump cuts and montage, of unreliable narrators and diction. All of these are lacking in massages or jokes or listening to the sound of waves breaking against the rocks-- great pleasures all. Food seems to have the complexity of taste, aroma , texture which allows for this kind of learning and criticism. Here is a passage from a review of Alinea in Chicago. <br><br>On the menu is a dish... \"called snap peas, a dish that quite literally floats on air. It arrives to the table on an Irish linen pillow filled with lavender-scented air--the weight of the shallow bowl gently forces out the vaporized lavender so it wafts around and above the plate. \"Eat your peas,\" says the waiter with mock severity, and indeed you will gobble up these sweet shelled peas, along with sharp-tasting grilled ham (\"I wanted the ham almost burnt,\" Achatz says), crispy yuba (tofu skin), and bits of lemon puree and fresh tofu that add citrusy and creamy notes.\" (Vettel) <br><br>Here is a passage of a dish called Earth and Sea from a review of Coi in San Francisco.<br><br>It's a dish that works on many levels, both gustatory and intellectually. The combination offers an explosion of flavors and textures in a few bites, but for Patterson the dish captures the meeting of land and ocean. The black squid ink resembles rich soil. The grass and sea beans come from the salt water close to land, and the squid represents the deep sea. Even if diners don't understand his thought process, he believes this approach will subliminally deepen their enjoyment. (Bauer) <br><br>One need not agree with the judgments in these evaluations. We might think the pillow with scented air is \"over the top.\" Or that a dish that requires subliminal enjoyment is not for you. But the point is that such discussion is possible.<br><br>Objection: Food is not representational. A dish does not stand for something in the way that a stone can represent a person in agony.<br>Reply: Food can represent as the as the matzo at the Passover meal represents the haste with which the Jews fled Egypt and the bitter herbs <br>the bitterness of slavery in Egypt. And note the claim that the squid represents the sea in the previous reply. In any case what about non-representational painting? Look at Malevich's Black Square.<br><br>Objection: Great art must be capable of expressing deep emotions. We can be moved and transformed by art. Art is capable of stretching our knowledge by harnessing the power of imagination--particularly poetry and fiction. Having read Remains of the Day I know understand what it is to have a professional ethics--in this case that of a manservant-- in a way which I did not before.<br>Reply: I saved this for last because I think there is something right about it. . As the aesthetician Frank Sibley puts it: \" ...flavors, natural or artificial, are necessarily limited: unlike the major arts they have no major connections with emotions, love or hate, death, grief, joy, terror, suffering, yearning, pity or sorrow.\"<br><br>I would like to think about this some more. But my tentative conclusion is that, at most, what this shows is that cooking is what might be called a minor art form. It is not as deep as literature, or music, or painting. It is what it is, and our lives would be less rich without it.</div>\n<p><a href=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/fYXFKpOKZCm0NiVuHC7lFdaMjUc/a\"><img src=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/fYXFKpOKZCm0NiVuHC7lFdaMjUc/i\" border=\"0\" ismap></a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:l6gmwiTKsz0\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=l6gmwiTKsz0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:gIN9vFwOqvQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?i=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:gIN9vFwOqvQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?a=AQAkMJPGxIY:WQTpAhz6cKk:TzevzKxY174\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/3quarksdaily?d=TzevzKxY174\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Notificational Webs in Cricles of Friends",
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"content" : "In the most recent <span style=\"font-style:italic\">New Yorker</span>, a short story, \"<a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/02/090302fi_fiction_homes?currentPage=1\">Brother on Sunday</a>\" by A.M. Holmes, opens with a woman on the phone:<br><blockquote>“Are you sure?” she whispers. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. If it’s true, it’s horrible. . . . Of course I don’t know anything! If I knew something, I’d tell you. . . . No, he doesn’t know anything, either. If he knew, he’d tell me. We vowed we wouldn’t keep secrets.” She pauses, listening for a moment. “Yes, of course, not a word.”</blockquote>The scene is a delightful example of how notification expectations are intertwined with how we understand relationships. We get two quick \"network inspections\"--\"if I[he] knew, I'd[he'd] tell you[me]\"--that reassure the caller that silence doesn't indicate a fracture in the local information order. And the conversation ends with one more bit of meta-notification, the speaker assuring the caller that she understands the rules that attach to the information just obtained. <br><br>Sandy is the woman on the phone. Her husband, Tom, is overhearing the conversation and asks who it was.<blockquote>“Sara,” she says.<br>“And?”<br>“The usual.”<br>He waits, knowing that silence will prompt her to say more.<br>“Susie called Sara to say that she’s worried Scott is having an affair.”</blockquote>This rather personal bit of information is being shared third-hand -- Susie called Sara who called Sandy who is now talking with Tom. Lots of talking's been going on, along with lots of meta-talking about the talking : Sara finished by extracting a promise that Sandy wouldn't tell anyone. We can assume that Susie extracted a similar oath from Sara. As I've described <a href=\"http://djjr.net/papers/published/ryan-notification-norms.pdf\">elsewhere</a>, notification norms are famously honored in the breach.<br><br>The narrative takes Tom and Sandy to the beach with a circle of friends they've been seeing regularly for a long time and then, later, that day, to dinner with them at a nice restaurant. In the middle of dinner, another bit of \"information sharing\" goes on; Tom and a friend end up in the men's room at the same time:<br><blockquote>When they are side by side at the urinals, the friend says, “I’m leaving Terri.”<br>“What are you talking about?” Tom says, genuinely shocked.<br>“I can’t stand it anymore. I’m miserable.”<br>...<br>“Terri doesn’t know.”<br>“About the other woman?”<br>“About anything. I’m telling you first. I don’t know what to say to her. We’ve been married for twenty-six years.”<br>“That’s a long time.”<br>“She’ll be fine,” he says, “once she gets over the initial shock.”<br>At the sink, Tom checks his face in the mirror. “When are you going to tell her?” he asks, watching himself talking.<br>“I don’t know,” the friend says. “Please don’t tell Sandy. The girls can’t keep a secret.”<br>“Not a word.” </blockquote>The friend shines a light on his relationship with Tom by meta-notifying: \"I\"m telling you first,\" and this sets up one of the story's notificational punches when he suggests that it's the very length of his marriage that makes it so hard to tell his wife. And then, finally, we get the condescending bit of meta-notification -- don't tell the girls -- with a theory about how this particular network functions. But while it may read as condescending, we know from the the opening of the story that in this case, it's on the mark.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/37315114-8988075966390991332?l=soc-of-info.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<span><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaFp5csOyrI/AAAAAAAAAqI/utwyGWGtGOI/s1600-h/Yamoah%27s+Special+a.jpg\"><img style=\"width:480px;height:480px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaFp5csOyrI/AAAAAAAAAqI/utwyGWGtGOI/s1600/Yamoah%27s+Special+a.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><span>I've been on a Ghana kick lately, digging out a lot of semi-forgotten vinyl in my collection that I haven't listened to in years. I know you won't mind if I share it with you!<br><br>Other than falling under the general rubric \"Ghana Highlife,\" the tunes in this post don't follow any particular theme - I more or less pulled them out at random. There's the classic danceband sound and the more stripped-down guitar highlife style, and even an example of the controversial \"Burgher\" highlife genre. I've left for future posts some of the big names - the African Brothers, Alex Konadu, A.B. Crentsil and Jewel Ackah - as well as the multitude of Ghanaian artists who made careers in Nigeria during the '70s and '80s.<br><br></span></span><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaXXXcUIEKI/AAAAAAAAAq4/pOWNRbC5ZWQ/s1600-h/P.K.+Yamoah.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:180px;height:231px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaXXXcUIEKI/AAAAAAAAAq4/pOWNRbC5ZWQ/s400/P.K.+Yamoah.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span><span>Yamoah's Guitar Band, based in Kumasi and led by Peter Kwabena Yamoah (right), emerged from the Ghana<a href=\"http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=21168\"> concert party scene</a> in the 1950s and has been one of the most influential Ghanaian music outfits ever since, which makes its lack of recognition outside Ghana all the more unjust. Nana Ampadu of African Brothers fame got his start there, as did guitarist Smart Nkansah and the sublime vocalist Agyaaku, who later formed the Sunsum Band (more about which later). I'm not sure when <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Yamoah's Special</span> (Motorway MTL 3001) was released, nor does it feature any credits, but I suspect it came out in the early '70s and does feature Nkansah and Agyaaku. \"Saa Na Odo Te/Otan Gu Ahorow\" is a killer track, and \"Suro Nea Obesee Wo\" is almost as good:<br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Saa%20Na%20Odo%20Te%20-%20Otan%20Gu%20Ahorow.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Yamoah's Band - </span></a></span></span><span><span><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Saa%20Na%20Odo%20Te%20-%20Otan%20Gu%20Ahorow.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Saa Na Odo Te/Otan Gu Ahorow</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Suro%20Nea%20Obesee%20Wo.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Yamoah's Band - </span></a></span></span><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Suro%20Nea%20Obesee%20Wo.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"><span>Suro Nea Obesee Wo</span></span></a><br><span><span><br></span><span>Pat Thomas </span><span>served as a vocalist with the Broadway Dance Band, the Stargazers and the Uhurus before </span><span style=\"font-style:italic\">False Lover</span> (Gapophone GAPO LP 02, 1974) introduced him to the world fronting the Sweet Beans, official band of the government Cocoa Marketing Board. He went on to became one of Ghana's most popular vocalists, and while his star has dimmed somewhat since, his sweet voice and sparkling arrangements are hard to forget. Not content to dip his toes in the reggae sound then sweeping Africa, Thomas jumps in head-first in the first four songs on <span style=\"font-style:italic\">False Lover</span>, notably this one:<br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Revolution.mp3\"><br></a><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Revolution.mp3\">Pat Thomas & the Sweet Beans - Revolution</a><br><br></span>The rest of the album, billed as an attempt to revive the danceband sound, succeeds admirably:<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Don%27t%20Beat%20The%20Time.mp3\">Pat Thomas & the Sweet Beans - Don't Beat the Time</a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Merebre.mp3\">Pat Thomas & the Sweet Beans - Merebre</a><br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Wabe%20Aso.mp3\">Pat Thomas & the Sweet Beans - Wabe Aso</a><br></span><br></span><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaTBwS2MC5I/AAAAAAAAAqo/jt_gYprckpo/s1600-h/False+Lover+a.jpg\"><img style=\"width:480px;height:480px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaTBwS2MC5I/AAAAAAAAAqo/jt_gYprckpo/s1600/False+Lover+a.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>I mentioned in my <a href=\"http://likembe.blogspot.com/2009/02/exploring-ga-cultural-highlife.html\">last post</a> <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Guitar and Gun</span> (Sterns Earthworks STEW 50CD, 2003), which collects tracks from <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Guitar and the Gun Vol. 1</span> (Africagram A DRY 1, 1983) and <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Guitar and the Gun Vol. 2</span> (Africagram A DRY 6, 1985) John Collins' groundbreaking collections of Ghana highlife. Inexplicable to me is the exclusion of the African Internatonals' \"Noko Nya M'akire\" from <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Vol. 1</span>, probably the best track on either record. To correct this oversight, I make it available here:<br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Noko%20Nya%20M%27akire.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">African Internationals - Noko Nya M'akire</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaR13Mu1KmI/AAAAAAAAAqg/V-kmgTN5qCQ/s1600-h/Guitar+a.jpg\"><img style=\"width:480px;height:480px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaR13Mu1KmI/AAAAAAAAAqg/V-kmgTN5qCQ/s1600/Guitar+a.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Smart Nkansah and Agyaaku became friends when they were part of Yamoah's Band in the late '60s. A few years later Nkansah went his own way, eventually forming the immortal Sweet Talks Band with A.B. Crentsil in 1975, which recorded such classics as <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Adam and Eve</span> and <span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.sternsmusic.com/disk_info.php?id=ADC301\">Hollywood Highlife Party</a> </span>before falling apart.<br><br>Nkansah & Agyaaku later reunited to form the Black Hustlers before founding the Sunsum Band in 1981. Their album <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Odo (Love)</span> (ASA Records ASA 1001, 1984) features an exciting blend of guitar highlife, the classic danceband sound and the vocal stylings of Becky B, Smart Nkansah's sister-in-law. The title track was included in my compilation <a href=\"http://likembe.blogspot.com/2008/09/african-divas-vol-1.html\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">African Divas Vol. 1</span></a>. \"Mensee Madwen\" is a medley from Side 2 of the LP:<br><br><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Mensee%20Madwen.mp3\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">The Sunsum Band - Mensee Madwen</span></a><br><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaNVSZ9zPoI/AAAAAAAAAqY/u7Oy7xAfQuM/s1600-h/Odo+%28Love%29+a.jpg\"><img style=\"width:480px;height:480px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SaNVSZ9zPoI/AAAAAAAAAqY/u7Oy7xAfQuM/s1600/Odo+%28Love%29+a.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Over the years thriving Ghanaian communities have developed in the United Kingdom, Canada and the U.S. Interestingly, because of relatively liberal immigration laws at the time, a sizable Ghanaian population emerged in Germany during the 1970s, and this community gave birth to the so-called \"Burgher\" highlife phenomenon.<br><br>Excoriated and loathed by purists, Burgher highlife, along with <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiplife\">Hiplife</a>, has come to define the modern-day highlife sound in Ghana. George Darko's \"Akoo Te Brofo,\" released in 1983 with its funkified beat and heavy reliance on electronic instrumentation, is generally considered the first Burgher highlife hit. Musicians like Kantata, Rex Gyamfi and McGod were quick to follow in Darko's footsteps.<br><br>Charles Amoah's <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Eyε Odo Asεm</span> (Cage Records 01-18957, 1987) is pretty much your archetypal Burgher highlife record, recorded in Dusseldorf and featuring mainly German musicians, German producers, even a German art director! Amoah himself started out playing straight-ahead highlife music in the '70s with the likes of the Happy Boys led by Kwabena Akwaboah and Alex Konadu's Band. He ended up in Germany in the late '70s where he bounced around various bands before releasing <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Sweet Vibration</span> in 1984, the first of his many hit records.<br><br>Amoah has since returned to Ghana, where he has a prosperous career touring and recording. Here's a tune from <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Eyε Odo Asεm</span>:<br><br><span style=\"font-weight:bold\"><a href=\"http://likembe.net/Sounds/Highlife%20Time/Di%20Ahurusi.mp3\">Charles Amoah - Di Ahurusi</a><br><br></span><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SacfZ9I9KVI/AAAAAAAAArA/l3z_d5WxN3A/s1600-h/Eye+Odo+Asem+a.jpg\"><img style=\"width:480px;height:480px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DeabNDTNx68/SacfZ9I9KVI/AAAAAAAAArA/l3z_d5WxN3A/s1600/Eye+Odo+Asem+a.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>If you'd like to hear some more contemprary examples of Burgher highlife, go <a href=\"http://likembe.blogspot.com/2007/09/some-recent-tunes-from-ghana.html\">here</a>. Many thanks to Akwaboa of <a href=\"http://highlifehaven.blogspot.com/\">Highlife Haven</a>, who provided useful information.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5459104099060577976-2088593049265894014?l=likembe.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Blood Water: Liberia Narrowly Avoids the First Plague",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/story/haggadah/Plague%20of%20Blood%20(f11r)%20s.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:268px;height:320px\" src=\"http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/story/haggadah/Plague%20of%20Blood%20(f11r)%20s.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><br>Last night, two things startled me. The first was Nigerian-manned tanks rolling past my house as I stayed up late typing - tanks are rarely a sign of a good thing. The second came waking at 3:45, only to see the bridge outside my house full of with people, and pedestrians filing under my balcony.<br><br>The bridge, most say, should not be crossed by foot anytime after 11, and certainly not past midnight. A little surprising then that a line of people streamed across the bridge at such an hour, under some of the only streetlamps in the country. More so that many seemed to be women and children, not typical of the late-night scene of criminals. Also strange that most of them carried the 5-gallon water jugs that people collect their water from local wells in (running water remains rare). I stared for a while, struggling to come up with a reason for any of this, before drifting back to sleep, listening to the light rain that had started.<br><br>This hazy memory remained lay buried until speaking with some reporters this morning. It became clear that a 'crisis' gripped the city yesterday. A 'report' circulated, claiming that all the country's water supplies would turn to blood by morning, though other variations claimed the water would become bitter, or perhaps dry up. People acted quickly, with reports of the long lines all night at wells becoming especially feisty as dawn approached.<br><br>Origins of the report seem mixed. Truth FM definitely aired the first story about it during the day, but they were responding to already widespread knowledge, and caller's comments. It spread 'virally', in 2.0 terminology, though without any more technology than word of mouth/cell phone. Brothers called sisters called cousins called friends called coworkers all through the night, with virtually everyone in the nation aware of the problem by dawn. Many residents stocked up with water.<br><br>\"People here just believe anything,\" a local journalist said of the situation. \"They believe in powers and forces that don't actually exist, just because someone told them so.\" <br><br>CY Kwanue, a veteran Liberian journalist of 25 years, had this to say this afternoon: \"Many people are still traumatized by the war, they are easily convinced by fear. They just act on what people tell them.\"<br><br>Others <a href=\"http://afgen.com/juju.html\">blame juju</a> and related belief systems for believing the seemingly impossible.<br><br>Not surprisingly, water sources seem relatively free of <a href=\"http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerusonline/en/c0q.htm#t\">first plague</a> characteristics up to the present (3:03 pm). Still dirty, but no blood.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/3192577124620432658-6126441132476895744?l=esteyonage.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)",
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"content" : "<span title=\"ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Adc&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Focoins.info%3Agenerator&rft.title=I+thought+I+had+company+%28a+Mawu+dirge%29&rft.aulast=Dingemanse&rft.aufirst=Mark&rft.subject=Anthropology&rft.subject=Fieldwork&rft.subject=Poetry&rft.subject=Siwu&rft.source=The+Ideophone&rft.date=2009-02-17&rft.type=blogPost&rft.format=text&rft.identifier=http://ideophone.org/a-mawu-dirge/&rft.language=English\"></span>\n<div><img src=\"http://ideophone.org/files/dirge.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"dirge\">\n<div>Women performing a funeral dirge in Akpafu-Mempeasem</div>\n</div>\n<p>Funeral dirges (<em>sìnɔ</em> in Siwu) are a special genre of songs to be sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.</p>\n<p>The funeral dirge below was recorded August 17, 2007 in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana (along with six other dirges). It was transcribed and translated with the gentle help of Reverend A.Y. Wurapa.</p>\n<table cellpadding=\"10px\">\n<tr>\n<th>Siwu</th>\n<th>English gloss</th>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\nmɛ̀ sɔ màturi pia mɛ̀<br>\n sêgbe kàku kaɖè<br>\n sêgbe nnɔmɛ miɖè<br>\n sêgbe ìsoma iɖè<br>\n sêgbe àsekpe aɖè\n</td>\n<td>\n<em>I said, 'people are with me'<br>\n not knowing it meant mourning<br>\n not knowing it meant tears<br>\n not knowing it meant sadness<br>\n not knowing it meant graves<br>\n</em>\n</td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n<p>The Siwu is beautifully economic in expression. It contains only two verbs: <em>pia</em> 'be (with)' and <em>ɖe</em> 'be (existential)'. The <em>sɔ</em> that is translated as 'said' is actually a quotative complementizer. An English translation cannot do without marking tense, but in Siwu, the poem does not contain any tense or aspect markers, being set in an aorist-like default that can be interpreted as recent past or present.</p>\n<p>Some of the poetic devices at work here are lost in translation. One is the focus construction which emphasizes the content words in the last four Siwu lines ('mourning it is; tears it is; sadness it is; graves it is'). Another is the fact that these content words belong to four different grammatical genders in Siwu: the first is an noun in KA with locative connotation, the second a liquid/mass noun in MI, the third a singular noun in I, the fourth a plural noun in A. I'm not sure whether this pattern is as striking to native speakers as it is to me, but note that the gender is reinforced by the agreement morphology on the 'be'-verb (<em>ka-, mi-, i-, a-</em>). One could think of it as a case of 'subliminal verbal patterning in poetry' (Jakobson 1980). </p>\n<p>By fronting the content words and by presenting all four of them in the exact same frame, the dirge forces the reader to meditate on the inevitable consequences of being surrounded by mortality. We may think we're lucky to have company, but in the end it turns out to be mourning, tears, sadness, graves. The enumeration of closely related tropes is a common technique in the funeral dirges of the Mawu. </p>\n<h2>A Dutch translation</h2>\n<p>It is difficult to approximate the beauty and subtlety of this piece of poetry in another language. Nevertheless I have tried my hand at composing a translation in Dutch, my native language, if only because I am intrigued by the subtle interplay of words and grammar in this poem. This translation, then, is a modest attempt to translate not just the words but the terse form-feel of the original. I realize it will be difficult for non-native speakers of both Siwu and Dutch to judge whether the attempt has been successful, but I do provide some explanatory words below.</p>\n<table cellpadding=\"10px\">\n<tr>\n<th>Dutch</th>\n<th>English gloss</th>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\nIk was blij dat ik mensen had<br>\n het bleken tranen<br>\n het bleek droefheid<br>\n het bleken graven<br>\n het bleek afscheid\n</td>\n<td>\n<em>I was glad I had people<br>\n it turned out to be tears<br>\n it turned out to be sadness<br>\n it turned out to be graves<br>\n it turned out to be parting<br>\n</em>\n</td>\n</tr>\n</table>\n<p>The first line stays quite close to the Siwu, although in the original the expression of contentness remains only implicit (\"I said (to myself), 'people are with me'\"). A more literal translation would have been <em>Ik dacht dat ik mensen had</em> 'I thought I had people', but this implies a counterfactual ('but it turned out I didn't have anyone'), which is not exactly what we're after. Since the Siwu quite clearly implies contentness, I thought it not harmful to make this somewhat more explicit. The inflected verb form <em>dacht</em> 'thought' in the first sentence also establishes the temporal setting.</p>\n<p>Contributing to the terse style, the Dutch verb <em>blijken</em> 'turn out (to be)' nicely packages the Siwu <em>sêgbe</em> 'not knowing' together with the be-verb. Dutch verbs inflect not just for tense but also for number; hence the <em>bleken/bleek</em> alternation in the last four lines. To put this fact of grammar to poetic use, I have exchanged 'crying' for another word: <em>afscheid</em>. This makes it possible to couple the singular/plural alternation with two different rhyme patterns: <em>Droefheid</em> and <em>afscheid</em> are end rhymes, while <em>tranen</em> and <em>graven</em> are linked by assonant rhyme. The effect is an aesthetically pleasing ABAB structure in which the members of each pair agree in rhyme type and number. In the original, <em>àsekpe</em> 'graves' is the final word, but in the Dutch version it isn't; it somehow doesn't sound quite right to end with the plural <em>graven</em>; besides, <em>afscheid</em> (parting) is a very appropriate word to end the poem.</p>\n<h2>The future of dirges in Kawu</h2>\n<p>Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. <a href=\"http://ideophone.org/aaa-photo-contest/\" title=\"AAA Photo contest\">Elsewhere</a> I wrote that \"culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself\", yet at the same time I can't help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.</p>\n<p>However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.</p>\n<p><em>Next in this series</em>: <a href=\"http://ideophone.org/a-cultural-revival/\" title=\"Followup post\">a discussion of parallelisms in Siwu funeral dirges</a>.</p>\n<h2>References</h2>\n<ol>\n<li>Agawu, Kofi. 1988. Music in the funeral traditions of the Akpafu. <em>Ethnomusicology</em> 32, no. 1: 75-105.</li>\n<li>Fox, James J. 1991. Our ancestors spoke in pairs. In <em>Explorations in the ethnography of speaking</em>, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 65-85. 2nd ed. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</li>\n<li>Jakobson, Roman. 1980. Subliminal Verbal Pattering in Poetry. <em>Poetics Today</em> 2, no. 1a, Roman Jakobson: Language and Poetry (Autumn): 127-136.</li>\n<li>Kruse, F. W. 1911. Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu. <em>Der Anscharbote</em>, October 29.</li>\n</ol>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?a=0Ox9w65E\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?d=45\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?a=sUpjc8z5\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?d=41\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/ideophone/~4/scNKNnw_Rgg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "liberia",
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"content" : "You know you work(ed) and live(d) in Liberia when…<br><br>- “small small” has become your standard answer to a million questions<br><br>- you tell your driver you want to \"check tires\" when you need to stop to pee<br><br>- “bush” unambiguously refers to any place outside of Monrovia<br><br>- all billboards are about conflict resolution, diarrhoea, malaria, violence against women and the use of condom<br><br>- you’re a US citizen, and local people know more about your elections than you do<br><br>- you know that the first female President of Africa was elected because the only other candidate was a football/soccer player<br><br>- you've discussed the same issues 150 times in coordination meetings and they're still unresolved<br><br>- you dress in a polar fleece and sweat shirt and think it's freezing when it's 85°F/30°C outside<br><br>- the national currency isn’t on the international market, but can be exchanged for USD at a wooden booth on every street corner<br><br>- you can’t fall asleep without the sound of a generator<br><br>- you’ve lost the use of consonants, but still need interpretation from Liberian English into English and back<br><br>- a sentence that doesn’t end with “oh” doesn’t seem complete<br><br>- you get overexcited over lettuce, tomatoes and carrots<br><br>- things are “no easy-o”, but you’re “tryin’ small”<br><br>- going “to Town” feels like a five star break, and you know where to get the perfect salad, pizza and… sushi! to make it complete<br><br>- you don’t want to get out of your first hot running water shower in months<br><br>- you know what a “butta pear” is<br><br>- you traded Starbucks coffee for Nescafé and Nido<br><br>- potato greens, not potatoes, have become a staple in your diet; and you can tell the difference from cassava leaves and three other types of edible leaves<br><br>- you’re a “boss man” or “boss lady”<br><br>- you commonly refer to squirrel, monkey, boar, or any other living creature as “bush meat”; “very sweet!!!”<br><br>- you have an MD in diagnosing malaria<br><br>- “Thank you”, “Good morning” and “Hi” all trigger the same answer: “Fine!”<br><br>- the electric system of the only building in town rehabilitated by the government caught fire after 6 months<br><br>- you’ve watched at least one episode of an Africa Magic series<br><br>- “Ma’am, I need your assistance”, “Give me…” or “You need to…” have started a lot of your conversations lately<br><br>- you categorically refuse to pay more than 15 LD (0.25 USD) for an avocado and 90 LD (1,50 USD) for a pineapple<br><br>- things are usually “not bad-o!”, hardly ever “good”<br><br>- you know that dust can turn into mud and back in less than a split second<br><br>- your address sounds something like “in front of IRC”, “on top of the hill after UNDP”, or “18th street, third right, second compound on your left, with the white gate”<br><br>- you call your male friends “ma man” and your female friends “sista”, snap their fingers when shaking their hand, ask them “How da body?”, and they answer “Thank God”<br><br>- you pay 10 USD for a box of cereals and they taste like cardboard<br><br>- you celebrate Independence Day from no one, and Flag Day exactly a month later<br><br>- you can get Belgian beer in the middle of the bush, but hardly any vegetables<br><br>- locals insist that you build Western toilets for them, although all seats are broken because they squat on them<br><br>- all vehicles are either lorries, yellow taxis or white SUVs<br><br>- a pint of Haagen-Dazs costs 25 USD, and it’s totally worth it!<br><br>- you drink red wine with ice cubes to reduce the tart taste<br><br>- you go to a gym with sauna built by the UN peacekeeping mission in the middle of the rain forest<br><br>- you know that if your water smells putrid and it gets worse by the day, there probably is a dead lizard in your well; and you should consider yourself lucky it’s not a frog!<br><br>- you know where “White Man’s Village” is, how remote it is but that it once had electricity, and that it is named after either a Peace Corps Volunteer, a diamond smuggler, or a little bit of both<br><br>- “Where’s my weekend?” doesn’t refer to Saturday and Sunday<br><br>- it’s sometimes hard to find drinking water, yet the Monrovia Breweries and its Club beer find their way to the smallest village<br><br>- whenever you go on leave you’re asked to bring back a laptop, cell phone, external drive, iPod or overhead projector by at least one colleague<br><br>- you ask your landlord for a curtain for your bathroom window so the whole PAP won’t see you shower, but instead get the window and the walls around it brush painted<br><br>- after driving 8 hours on potholed roads you’re happy to be “home”<br><br>- the comfort food you brought from “town” and saved up for a down day has been expired for a month, but it still feels like the best thing you’ve had in ages<br><br>- you collects bullet shells to make souvenirs out of them<br><br>- you’ve tried at least once to make pepper soup, peanut soup or tobergee<br><br>- you can hardly get it wrong if you guess and call someone Kollie, Fallah or Ballah<br><br>- you can spot any new white face in town<br><br>- you definitely prefer the smoothness of dust roads over potholed tarmac roads, but still feel like you have reconnected with civilisation when you reach the latter<br><br>- in Monrovia there are quarters (communities) called \"Chicken Soup Factory\" (because they used to make bullion cubes in the area) or \"Chocolate City\" (because the rain makes the roads look like chocolate fondue)<br><br>- one of the quarters in Voinjama is called Telbomai (translation from the Loma is \"chicken poo poo\")<br><br>- there is a community in Lofa called Nikebouzu (translation \"inside cow dung\")<br><br>- you've been viciously attacked by an insect called Nairobi Fly (or Eye) and have had a yucky rash that lasts for 2 weeks<br><br>- you know someone named Saturday, Sunday, or Tuesday.<br><br>- you've driven by a group of amputees playing soccer in the rain without looking twice.<br><br>- your co-worker gets fired for stealing, and then sues for severance pay.<br><br>- someone has tried to sell you an ant bear on the street.<br><br>- you leave your wallet on the dresser for 3 days and it starts growing hairy white mold. I dont have a wallet anymore.<br><br>- you've seen an airport baggage carousel that's only 3 meters long.<br><br>- you personally know a notorious war criminal, and he/she's a really nice person.<br><br>- you habitually lock any door the moment you walk out of the room.<br><br>- your memory stick has 233 viruses on it.<br><br>- you've started peeing all over the toilet, with the door open.<br><br>- you just leave your broken down car in the middle of the street during rush hour.<br><br>- your food seems flavorless unless it contains three land animals, two sea creatures, and 3 maggi cubes.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8141625076412910384-6700229097979768311?l=pluminliberia.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"plainContent" : "What is Nairobi fly...interesting.\nAlso like the last one!",
"htmlContent" : "What is Nairobi fly...interesting.<br>Also like the last one!",
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"title" : "All of this has happened before ...",
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"content" : "<p>This month, IBM announced Project Match, a program to help laid off workers move overseas with their outsourced jobs … provided of course, that that they’re <a href=\"http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000389\">willing to accept local wages</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>“IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand. Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move.” [<a href=\"http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2009/02/ibms-project-match-gets-employees-to.html\">link</a>]</blockquote>\n\n<p>I can see it now, America’s best and brightest leave their homes and everything familiar to them to move overseas and start a new life, one fraught with cultural confusion. A new generation is born in India, one plagued by confusion and self-doubt. </p>\n\n<p>Novelist Juniper L. Harry depicts the lives of these American Indians with a series of stories about Boston Brahmins in Bengal. In her most famous book, the protagonist Tolstoy Thudpucker struggles to figure out where he truly belongs, whether in India or America. His classmates cruelly mock him for his name and for not having an unfamiliar cultural background. Everybody in India is different, they say. But not poor Tolstoy, he’s got no culture of his own:</p>\n\n<blockquote>“What’s your language? American English? That’s like what we speak, but with an accent, right? What do they eat in America? Pepperoni Pizza? What’s that - like Chicken Tikka Pizza but with dried out slices of dead pig on top? Sounds bland and gross! How come we can breakdance better than you? Don’t you even have a dance of your own to teach us?”</blockquote>\n\n<p>Tolstoy suffers through a series of happy marriages and confusing name changes until he attains enlightenment by transcending worldly duality and learning to dance. The Bollywood version of his tale wins plaudits from reviewers across India, none more so than the bloggers over at the IBCA blog Boston Chai Party.</p>\n\n<p>With apologies to <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003259.html\">Nabokov Ninnington</a>.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/5430\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p>"
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"title" : "Food Science of African Tastes: comminution and the asanka",
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"content" : "Anyone familiar with African cuisines knows that grinding and pounding are important cooking techniques, and texture matters. She or he also knows that while an electric blender is a lot faster and easier than a mortar and pestle or a grinding stone or bowl, it comes at a cost: a deterioration of flavor.Prof. Sefa-Dedeh, Professor of Food Science and Technology, and Dean of the Faculty of"
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"title" : "Choose Your Story",
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"content" : "<div><p>I grew up on a dusty, rural road by the lower Colorado River in the Mojave Desert. The occasional ride to the nearest city, Las Vegas, was a two-hour special event. The smog, sprawling stores, slums, and soaring signs of the Strip were the best of urban life that I knew. To this day, visiting the big library at the University of Nevada feels like arriving at the Library of Alexandria and being anointed with knowledge, olive oil, and cool water from a half-functioning drinking fountain. I didn't understand what I was missing until one morning when, as a sixteen year old boy, I landed in Paris. My perspective on Las Vegas changed dramatically, as did my perspective on most things in my life.</p>\n<p>There is something about cities that provokes people to make sense of their lives. In the extreme cases of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this meant establishing new schools at the edges of Athens. Cities have long provided spaces for public debate and economic exchange to happen in close proximity. If the denseness of the city suffocates the mind (and I am not claiming that it does), then a well cultivated garden placed just outside the city provides a good place from which to criticize what is happening inside.</p>\n\n<p>Critique of city life was, of course, no special province of the ancient Greeks. Showing one's taste for the city is an apt way to show one's taste for all of modernity. But here, taste is usually distaste: If one wishes to establish one's credential as a postmodern intellectual, then a bleak account of one's walk down a busy boulevard is a useful thing to publish. As I have learned this year as a student of the German literary critic Klaus Scherpe, some of our best models in this genre are "The Man of the Crowd" by Edgar Allan Poe, "À Une Passante" by Charles Baudelaire, and "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke.</p>\n<p>Unfortunately, these exemplars of city literature are often a little bit, well, creepy. In Poe, one develops a fixation with a stranger in an urban crowd and studies him in exquisite detail. In Baudelaire, one does not have the self-confidence to speak to an attractive woman on a loud street, though one may "drink" from her eyes. In Rilke, one confuses a Parisian hotel with a hospital, decides that history contains no progress, and to one's modest credit, enjoys a walk through the Tuileries on a beautiful autumn morning. For all of the cultural accomplishment that is happening here, one hopes that these works do not represent the imagination at its most hopeful. Cities are much too important, demographically, economically, and psychologically, to leave them here.</p>\n<p>Most of the world's population now lives in one city or another. According to Richard Florida and the research he cites in his book, <em>Who's Your City</em>, cities are coalescing into so-called "mega-regions." For instance, the coastal Southern California mega-region extends from Los Angeles through San Diego to Tijuana and forms something like a complete economic unit. While high-talent design labor happens north of the border, factories south of the border convert those ideas into physical goods.</p>\n<p>Beyond their economic significance, Florida also tells us that cities have distinct emotional lives. People with particular kinds of personalities tend to gather in particular cities. For instance, the "open-to-experience" types flock to a few places in the United States, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Boston. The research behind this idea is questionable, because it essentializes personality as psychologists are wont to do. Nonetheless, the idea is enough to change how one thinks about one's choice of surroundings.</p>\n<p>For it is that walking or driving through a city — and especially, doing so in multiple cities — is like walking or riding through one's own mind. It is also like reading literature. The American literary critic Giles Gunn has suggested that literature enables two functions: to speak what is unspeakable and to experience feelings which have been forgotten. When one reads about faraway lands in a book, one simultaneously visits strange feelings within oneself.</p>\n<p>A city has the same effect. What happens when one navigates an urban environment while not knowing exactly how near one is to the destination? A narrative suspense emerges, while one is potentially confronted with thousands of characters and countless different scenes. If the distance is long, then so much the better: One has more time to think.</p>\n<p>An unexplored city deserves the same anticipation as an unread book. Of course, like books, not all cities are created equal. Choose your story carefully.</p></div>"
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"title" : "Pedreres de s'Hostal",
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"content" : "<img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3444/3265709111_980f927d73_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"400\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br><a href=\"http://www.lithica.es/\">Pedreres de s'Hostal</a> is a disused stone quarry on the island of Minorca, Spain. In 1994, the quarry saw its last stonecutters, and since then, the non-profit organization Líthica has been hard at work transforming this industrial landscape into a post-industrial heritage park.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3458/3265709117_4cb9a1c120_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lara.)<br><br>While not yet complete, the quarry must already be quite something to experience. To enter, one has to take a deep plunge into an abyss, a descent that may or may not be reminiscent of ancient myths. Reaching the bottom of the central void room, you are compressed into insignificant atom by monolithic walls, whose patterned texture of machine incisions and impossible staircases add to a hallucinatory effect. The scale is repressive, destabilizing.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3406/3265709119_eda17511ea_o.jpg\" width=\"330\" height=\"440\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br>Should you regain back your bearing, there is a labyrinth of geometrically cut canyons to explore. You look up, and the eternally blue sky of the Mediterranean is framed by unnaturally straight edges, like a James Turrell skyscape, disorienting. <br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3127/3265709123_60cfcf4a2a_o.jpg\" width=\"330\" height=\"440\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Toni Vidal.)<br><br>This is where you get lost, where even time gets sucked into dark crevices. <br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3490/3265709127_d739967e41_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Líthica.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3453/3268070424_229c3db9d8_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Josep Triay Tudurí. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/beptt/2235206670/\">Source</a>.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3459/3268070432_d2823fb100_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br>Or would it be more accurate to say that time is preserved here? Centuries of chiseling and sawing, the gradual subduction of the earth, slabs of bedrock carted away: all are recorded on the rockface. Even the tools of the trade have been left to rust and decay out in the open, for instance, a sawing machine. There is even a short segment of a rail line.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3412/3265709131_3f614e30eb_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3383/3265711617_0b8850c0d1_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3467/3265711621_335382d23e_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lara.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3446/3265711637_82bdebe382_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3441/3265711639_f1bc1e7001_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Líthica.)<br><br>In any case, to add to your disorientation, there is a reconstruction of an enclosed Medieval garden, one cloistered by vertiginous cliffs.<br><br><i>What on earth is a Medieval garden doing here?</i><br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3430/3265712655_f6c9feb7a2_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Jaime García Pons.)<br><br>Are you actually walking through the excavated remains of a Medieval city, buried long ago under volcanic ash like Pompeii, then mineralized and now in the process of extraction after its recent discovery?<br><br>Or was this whole landscape the aborted attempt at imitating the underground cities of Cappadocia and the sculpted ruins of Petra, the reason for its termination long forgotten? Now Nature is busy everywhere reclaiming its momentary lost territory. Stay here long enough and you yourself might similarly be absorbed, turned feral.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3300/3265712663_9a94bde004_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, , Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br>In actuality, not only has the quarry been turned into an outdoor history museum decorated with artifacts, it's been landscaped as an arboretum showcasing native Minorcan flora. In keeping with the stonecutters' tradition of cultivating orchards and vegetable gardens in disused quarries, each excavated spaces plays host to a different plant community. So there is a quarry room for fruit trees, another for bushes and shrubs, and another containing cultivated olive trees and aromatic plants. In one quarry, there is a pond containing freshwater Minorcan plants.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3314/3266786658_d153cffd9a_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3335/3266786660_0d419383ab_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Líthica.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3319/3266786662_0afc6bc455_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Líthica.)<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3514/3266786668_55cd89da49_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Lluis Bertran.)<br><br>Once a landfill and fated to the amnesiac wilderness, divorced from collective memory, Pedreres de s'Hostal is clearly now a hotspot of activity.<br><br><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3432/3266051265_65747437b5_o.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"318\" alt=\"Pedreres de s'Hostal\"><br>(Pedreres de s'Hostal, Minorca, Spain. Photo by Líthica.)<br><br>And a model for the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes everywhere.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/13572111-8496395270895810826?l=pruned.blogspot.com\"></div><p><iframe src=\"http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~ah/8Uyt-liGYvKyLkOu4TVW8oenSGA/h?w=300&h=250\" width=\"100%\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?a=3GEyZZBg\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?d=41\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?a=JrKzyCAT\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?i=JrKzyCAT\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?a=IWsPxYZt\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?i=IWsPxYZt\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?a=pjeXAxuk\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?d=131\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?a=SBb1vk4m\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/Pruned?d=45\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "The Gold Coast's golden age of highlife",
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"content" : "(Consider this an unofficial companion piece to John B.'s great post on the golden age of Ghanaian highlife <a href=\"http://likembe.blogspot.com/2009/01/red-spots-black-beats-and-stargazers.html\">over at Likembe.</a>)<br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SYoM-h2FwqI/AAAAAAAABnM/3w7rzneh214/s1600-h/starsghana.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:397px;height:400px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SYoM-h2FwqI/AAAAAAAABnM/3w7rzneh214/s400/starsghana.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>When Ghanaian trumpeter E.T. Mensah arrived in Lagos with his Tempos band in 1950, he introduced Nigerians to a brassy and vivacious new dance sound that had been developing back in Accra since the late 19th century, combining the rootsy flavor of various street rhythms of the West African coast with the urbane elegance of Western ballroom music. <i>Highlife,</i> they called it back in the Gold Coast.<br><br>Within a few years, all the top Nigerian ballroom orchestras had ditched their waltzes, swings, foxtrots and quicksteps and hitched their wagons to the highlife train. From that point on, highlife would develop in parallel between Ghana and Nigeria, with the Nigerians devising quite a few innovative permutations of the genre through the 1970s and 80s. Still--for <i>this</i> listener at least--the definitive highlife sound will always be the jaunty, opulent music plied by the Ghanaian dance bands of the 1950s and 60s.<br><br><i>Stars of Ghana</i> was an influential compilation featuring a sampling of these Ghanaian bands as represented in Decca West Afrca's bestselling series of highlife recordings in the mid-to-late-60s. <br><br>The King of Highlife, <a href=\"http://www.retroafric.com/html/sl_notes/01xcd_3.html\">E.T. Mensah</a> with his Tempos; the Black Beats, led by the great <a href=\"http://www.afropop.org/multi/feature/ID/5\">King Bruce</a>; the Stargazers, featuring saxophonist Teddy Osei and drummer Sol Amarfio (both of whom would go on to found Osibisa) and led by legendary trumpeter <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/01%20Eddie%20Quansa.mp3\">Eddie Quansah</a>; and the Broadway Dance Band, led by Nigerian trumpeter Sammy Obot. <br><br>As much as I love the big brass brands, some of my favorite Ghanaian groups from this era were the guitar bands such as King Onyina's and Akompi's. Working with much smaller combos and without the added volume of horns, trap drums or (in some cases) even bass, they managed to approximate the voluptuous <i>texture</i> of the orchestras with just nimble fretwork, chromatic chording and wailing vocal harmonies.<br><br>The guitar playing on all these records is quite colorful, actually... Over the summer I was fortunate to attend a seminar on highlife at which Stan Plange of the Broadway (later Uhuru) Dance Band and guitarist <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N-iZ0DoKMw\">Ebo Taylor</a> both asserted that Ghana always had the best guitar players but suffered a dearth of decent trumpet players and and so always looked to Nigeria to recruit trumpeters.<br><br>The Ghanaian guitar bands also laid the template for the Eastern Nigerian guitar bands such as the Peacocks (whose \"Eddie Quansah\" is linked above) that would come to dominate the highlife scene after The War. (The Nigerian guitar bands would later take more inspiration from East and Central Africa, particularly The Congo.)<br><br>One band featured here that I know nothing at all about, though, is the African Tones. Does anybody know who they were? (And while we're at it, who were The Republicans?)<br><br><blockquote><span style=\"font-size:95%\"><b>VARIOUS ARTISTS - <i>STARS OF GHANA</i></b> (DECCA, WAP 21, 1960s)<br><br>SIDE ONE:<br>1. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/01%20Srotoi%20Ye%20Mli.mp3\">Srotoi Ye Mli - Black Beats Band</a><br>2. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/02%20Obi%20Nkabi%20Mmami.mp3\">Obi Nkabi Mmami - Stargazers Dance Band</a><br>3. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/03%20Odo%20Ye%20Owu.mp3\">Odo Ye Owu - Onyina's Guitar Band</a><br>4. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/04%20Gyae%20Su.mp3\">Gyae Su - Broadway Dance Band</a><br>5. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/05%20Odo%20Misu%20Fre%20Wo.mp3\">Odo Misu Fre Wo - Akompi's Guitar Band</a><br>6. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/06%20Owo%20Ko%20Ni%20Fe.mp3\">Owo Ko Ni Fe - Black Beats Band</a><br>7. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/07%20Me%20Da%20Ho%20Gyan.mp3\">Me Da Ho Gyan - African Tones</a><br><br>SIDE TWO: <br>8. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/08%20Wonma%20Menka.mp3\">Wonma Menka - Black Beats Band</a><br>9. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/09%20Odo%20Akoda%20Agyame.mp3\">Odo Akoda Agyame - Onyina's Guitar Band</a><br>10. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/10%20Keyere%20Mon.mp3\">Keyere Mon - E.T. Mensah & His Tempos Band</a><br>11. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/11%20Black%20Bra.mp3\">Black Bra - Akompi's Guitar Band</a><br>12. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/12%20Bu%20Duru%20Mana.mp3\">Bu Duru Mana - Black Beats Band</a><br>13. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/13%20Konkonsa%20Ni%20Be%20Bere.mp3\">KonKonsa Ni Be Bere - Onyina's Guitar Band</a><br>14. <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Stars%20of%20Ghana/14%20Nkae.mp3\">Nkae - Broadway Dance Band</a></span></blockquote><br>DOWNLOAD as <a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds2/Stars%20of%20Ghana.zip\">ZIP</a><br><br><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SYoM-iHpyZI/AAAAAAAABnU/0Ysd9eOR7J4/s1600-h/starsghana_back.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:388px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SYoM-iHpyZI/AAAAAAAABnU/0Ysd9eOR7J4/s400/starsghana_back.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/26746300-5705674270898486535?l=combandrazor.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Listening to the System",
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"content" : "<p>I have a rule of thumb that data in motion is more interesting than data at rest. Both from a business architecture point of view and when designing, managing, or diagnosing a system. Thus my interest in middlemen, who intermediate transaction flows. Thus my interest in the ping problem, aka how to do forward chaining on the Internet. Content isn’t king, the hubs are king. The conversation is more important than the library.</p>\n<p>Recently I’ve been kicking the tires on a bit of technology that goes by the name AMQP, or Advances Message Queue Protocol. It is for all intents an open standard for building your enterprise message bus. There are a couple reasonably mature open source implementations at this point. Active communities. Active standards process which, and this is important, are driven by the users of the system and haven’t yet been coopt’d by the vendors.</p>\n<p>Regularly through out my life I’ve worked on real time control systems. So I have big tangled set of design patterns for how those get built. Big sophisticated industrial control systems full of three problems I find interesting. They are very heterogenous, they are all about data in motion, and they feature power-law distributions in the event rates. Recently I’ve been finding it amusing to observe how much cloud computing is full of the same tangles. There is a hell of lot of commonality across these problems: real time control, enterprise message bussing, managing all the moving parts in your cloud computing application.</p>\n<p>To stay sane you can say there are three design patterns that stand atop your message bus. Broadcast, enqueuing work in progress, and the ever popular remote procedure call.</p>\n<p>Work in progress Q’s are everywhere. You see them at the bank when you Q up for a teller, at the grocery story with the check out lines, or when you s stick your mail into the mailbox on the corner. There is a nice term of art: “Fire and Forget”. When things go according to plan you slip your mail into mailbox, the magic happens, and your valentine gets your card. Fire and forget is great because you can decouple the slow bits from the quick (user response time) bits. It also enables separation of concerns (you don’t have to run a postal system). It also is trivial to add scaling (just hire a few more clerks, or spin up a few more computers). So one thing you can do with AMQP is set up virtual simulations of the queue at the bank. And AMPQ implementations provide dials you can adjust to decide how reliable (v.s. fast) you want that to be. For example you might set the dials to assure the messages are replicated across disk drives in multiple geographic locations. You might set the dials so the messages never leave wire and ram. There is a of latency/reliability trade off here.</p>\n<p>The fire and forget pattern doesn’t work of course. We all love to worry. You buy something online. You fire off your order and then you forget about it. Ah, no you don’t. You put it on the back burner. You get a tracking number. From time to time you poll to see how it’s going. Sometimes the vendor sends you status reports. Sometimes he sends you bad news. While AMQP has lots of nice and necessary mechanism it doesn’t have tools for handling the range of semi-forget modalities: monitoring, tracking, status reporting, raising exceptions. (As an aside, it is interesting to tease apart the attempts to address these found in SMTP.)</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/pipeline.png\"><img title=\"pipeline\" src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/pipeline.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"165\" height=\"173\"></a>In any case systems built around the Queue of Tasks design pattern are everywhere. This is the model seen in factories for everything: batch production, forms processing, continuous production lines, unix pipelines, etc. etc. I once heard a wonderful story about a big factory at the end of a pipeline. Pretty regularly the sun would come out and warm the pipeline. At that point a vast slug of vile material would rapidly explode out of the pipe and into multi-million dollar holding tank. They wished the tank was larger.</p>\n<p>When you build realtime control systems you often arrive after the fact. The factory already is chugging along and your goal is to try and make it run better, faster, etc. The first thing you do is try to get some visibility on what’s going on. At first you thrash around looking for any info that’s available. In software systems we look at the logs. We write code to monitor their tails. We tap into the logging system, which is actually just yet another message bus.</p>\n<p>That logging and monitoring are similar but different is, I find, a source of frustration. It is common to find systems with lots of logs but very little monitoring. What monitoring is going on is retrospective. Online, live, monitoring is sufficiently different from logging; that it drives you toward a different architecture. It is one of the places that data in motion becomes distinct from data at rest.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/recordvsbroadcast.png\"></a>One of the textbook examples of AMQP usage is the distribution of market data. A vast amount of data flows out of the worlds financial markets. Traders in those markets need to tap selectively into that flood so their trading systems can react. Which is exactly what you need when doing real time control. The architecture for this pushes the flood of data, contrast to what is commonly seen in log analysis. There you see a roll up of logs into an aggregated, archival, set where offline processes can then do analysis. </p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"> <img title=\"recordvsbroadcast\" src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/recordvsbroadcast-490x185.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"490\" height=\"185\"></p>\n<p>The distinction between data at rest v.s. data in motion is identical to the distinction between recording and broadcasting. I find you need both. In real time control systems it tends to be common to find good infrastructure for the broadcast. In software system I seem to encounter good infrastructure for the recording side. What the drawing demonstrates is how many more moving parts a system accretes as soon as you start to address these issues. In the drawing our simple ping-pong between workers and task queues now has now sprouted a fur of mechanism so we can get a handle on what it’s doing. Each component of the system needs to participate in that. Each part has to cough up a useful log; which we then have to capture, record, and broadcast. Standardizing all that would be good; but it tends to be at minimum tedious at at worse intractable. First off, it is a lot to ask of any component that it enumerate all possible situations it might fall into. Exceptions, and hence logging, are all about the long tail. Secondly a good log is likely to run at many times the frequency of the work; i.e. when the worker does one task he will generate multiple log messages.</p>\n<p>The long-tail nature of log entries means that our online monitoring, etc. has to be very forgiving and heuristic. One common trick for solving the problem that logging runs at higher rates than then work is to situate this part of the system at a lower-latency less-reliable point when you set the dials on your messaging hub. All that said it’s often a problem that these things get build, and spec’d out, late in the game.</p>\n<p>AMQP has some nice technology for implementing that messaging hub for the broadcasting side of things. One of the core abstractions in AMQP is the exchange, a place that accepts messages and dispatches them. Exchanges do not store messages; which is done by queues. In a typical broadcast setup market data floods into an exchange where different consumers of that have subscribed to get what they are interested in.</p>\n<p>For example I’ve recently been playing around with a system for keeping a handle on a mess-o-components running at EC2. I flood the logs from every component to a single AMQP exchange which I call the workroom. For example to get the machine’s syslog I add a line to syslog’s configuration so it routes a copy of every logging message to a unix pipe. On the other end of that pipe I run a python program that pumps the messages to the workroom. These messages are labeled with what AMQP calls a routing key, for example “log.syslog.crawler.i-234513.” At the same time I have daemons running on each machine that are mumbling at regular intervals into the work room messages about swapping, process counts, etc. If I want to listen on on all the messages about a single machine then I subscribe to the work room asking for messages who’s routing_key match “#.i-234513.#” or, if I want to listen in on all the syslog traffic can tap in “#.syslog.#’ messages. That for example revealed that one of my machines was suffering a dictionary attack on it’s ssh port. This framework makes it easy to write simple scripts that raise the alarm if there is a sudden change in the swapping, or process counts.</p>\n<p>One thing I like to do is to attempt to assure that every component mumble a bit. That way I can listen to the workroom to see who’s gone missing; and as new components are brought on line I can notice their arrival. I like to use jstat, vmstat, even dtrace, to get the temperature of various system components. It’s nice to know when that java process descends into a garbage collection tar pit.</p>\n<p>The workroom message hub is a huge help getting some modularity into the system. It’s easier to write single purpose scripts that tap into the workroom to keep an key on this or that aspect of the system.</p>"
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"title" : "Wordles and the Inaugural Addresses",
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"content" : "<p>In the days after the inauguration of #44, I saw many, many blog posts and newspaper stories featuring Wordles of the inaugural address. In my opinion, while they are lovely enough, they don’t really address what makes one person’s words distinctive. To see if I could do any better, I spent a couple of days making <a href=\"http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/inaugurals/\">Comparisons of Inaugural Addresses</a>. </p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><a href=\"http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/inaugurals/\"><img alt=\"thumbnail of lLincoln's 2nd inaugural\" src=\"http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/inaugurals/images/20lincoln2-vs-five-t.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a></font></p>\n<p> </p>"
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"title" : "“Slumdog” immigrant waits for U.S. Green Card lifeline",
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"content" : "<div>\n<table border=\"0\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><img title=\"Silicon Valley\" src=\"http://worldfocus.org/files/2009/02/imgw_braindrain_siliconvalley.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"307\" height=\"230\">\n<p>More than half of all Silicon Valley startup companies had one or more highly-skilled immigrants as key founders, according to a Duke University study.</p></td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n</div>\n<p>As unemployment continues to spike in the U.S., highly-skilled immigrants are more vulnerable to <a title=\"Layoffs mean more than lost wages for H-1B visa holders\" href=\"http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11593500?source=most_emailed\">lose their jobs and their visas</a>.</p>\n<p>The <span>U.S.</span><span> issues up to <a title=\"USCIS Cap Count for H-1B and H-2B Workers for Fiscal Year 2009\" href=\"http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=138b6138f898d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD\">65,000 H-1B work visas each year</a> for highly-skilled professionals. Foreign-born architects, engineers, computer programmers, accountants, doctors and other skilled workers are eligible to come to </span><span>America</span><span> under these visa provisions. </span></p>\n<p>Each year, approximately 20,000 more H-1B visas are reserved for those with master’s or doctoral degrees from the U.S.</p>\n<p>Holders of this visa can stay for a maximum of six years and apply for a Green Card and permanent residence if sponsored by their company. But applicants often<span> </span><a title=\"'I can't grow my business'\" href=\"http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/16/smbusiness/immigrant_visa_tech.fsb/index.htm?section=money_latest\">wait in line for years</a>, and up to 500,000 H-1B visa holders are waiting for a green card.</p>\n<p><em>Rajeet Mohan is an Indian living in the U.S. on an H-1B visa. He shares his frustrating immigration experience and offers some solutions to retain and leverage highly-skilled immigrants in the U.S.<br>\n</em><br>\n<strong>“Slumdog” Immigrant </strong></p>\n<div>\n<table border=\"0\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<p><strong>Click to listen: Online radio show on reverse brain drain. </strong></p></td>\n</tr>\n</tbody>\n</table>\n</div>\n<p>I saw the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” the weekend after my Green Card application had been denied.</p>\n<p>So many threads from the main character Jamal’s childhood connect to the moment he’s sitting in the hot seat of “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” competing for 20 million rupees. The movie made me think of how U.S. immigration policies seem to have played such a big role in shaping my destiny in this country and how I have no control over the results. This is my story of patience and frustration for the elusive “greener pastures” in my life.</p>\n<p>A lot has been written and debated about the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., however, little is published on highly-skilled immigrants.</p>\n<p>Who is a highly skilled immigrant? For the purpose of my story, it represents an individual (like me) who has earned a master’s degree or higher from an American university, and holds a job for which an American citizen wasn’t available.</p>\n<p>The life cycle of the legal immigrant is well defined: An F-1 student visa, followed by an H-1B (valid for six years) and — if the Goddess Fortuna blesses him/her — the prized Green Card (U.S. permanent resident card).</p>\n<p>I came to the U.S. from India on Jan. 3, 1998 with $1,000 in Traveler’s checks and $500 in cash — just enough to buy a return ticket if there was an urgent situation back home. Little did I realize that on that day I had stepped into the “slumdog” immigrant life cycle — a legal process of immigration that is so painful and uncertain that if I were ever to advise potential immigrants willing to take this path, I would oppose the decision with the same level of intensity that Lou Dobbs so effectively uses to make his case against illegal immigrants.</p>\n<p>I completed my master’s degree and went on to work for some of the finest American companies as an employee and a consultant. My Green Card application was filed in October 2002. After six years in line, I have never seen the Green Card and I’m not sure if I ever will get to see one.</p>\n<p>The reason: I changed jobs three years ago. Though the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act has made job changes for immigrants easier after a specified period of time, my case falls into what was a loophole in the system. In 2006, it was technically legal for my former employer to “transfer” my status (without my knowledge) to another immigrant professional when I left my job. This practice was addressed and made illegal by Homeland Security in 2007.</p>\n<p>How I found out: I logged on to my computer this past Thanksgiving to check my application status, as I often do, and it abruptly said “canceled.” I was not notified three years ago when I switched jobs or even now. Modern technology today allows us to track every packet via FedEx or UPS, so why do immigration applications, which are so crucial to the U.S. government and the applicant, get lost in a service center “black hole”?</p>\n<p>Defenders of <a title=\"United States Citizenship and Immigration Services\" href=\"http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis\">USCIS</a> say that there is a process to appeal such decisions, which I’m in the process of doing. The problem is that there is no definite time line for the appeals process to be resolved and usually the legal immigrant has to finally use his $1,500 to go back to his home country.</p>\n<p>I have listed several problems here, but the consultant in me wants to offer some solutions so that highly-skilled immigrants who find themselves in this predicament have more options than to simply quit their jobs, unwind their assets and return to their home countries.</p>\n<p>I’m a firm believer of free market principles and having a good understanding of supply and demand (something I still remember from business school), I propose the following solutions to the legal immigrants’ problem of being in the dark during the Green Card process.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">1. Decouple the link between the employer and the applicant after a specific stage in the Green Card process. In other words, take the middle-man employer or sponsor out of the process and make the contract between the immigrant and the government. I’m confident that this action will unleash the full potential of highly-skilled immigrant populations and America has all to gain from it — especially in today’s tough economic environment.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px\">2. In return for action mentioned in the first solution and the assurance of the Green Card, immigrants with master’s degrees or higher, should donate their time and expertise. For two hours a week for one year, these highly-skilled immigrants should teach/tutor kids of U.S. citizens. I am proud of the strong foundation of the Indian schooling system, especially when it comes to math and science. Both Alan Greenspan and Thomas Friedman have highlighted the huge gap in math and science education for American kids. Their analysis predicts detrimental long-term impact. Their writings enunciate how this knowledge gap could lead America to potentially lose its innovative spirit.</p>\n<p>Leveraging the skills of these immigrants could herald a new dimension to the grassroots movement that seems to be taking shape and ultimately restore America to the greatness for which we all left our homeland. The recent changes in the American political landscape have given me “hope.” President Barack Obama’s call for grassroots movement made me think of what immigrants could do for their adopted country.</p>\n<p>So, back to me as the “slumdog immigrant.” I’m in the “hot seat” situation as I wait for my rejected Green Card application to be reconsidered. The motion I will be filing has no expected resolution date and since my current work visa (my current backup) is valid only until June 15, 2009, my hopes now rest on the astronomical alignment of my fate. If my application doesn’t get reconsidered by June 15, I must quit my job, sell my house, unwind my assets and return to India.</p>\n<p>I don’t doubt that I can find work in India, and certainly, my family is there. But my wife, 2-year-old son and I have made a life and home in the U.S. and want to stay.</p>\n<p>In the game show, the contestant has one opportunity to use a “lifeline” to choose A, B, C or D. In my case, the only “lifeline” I have is to dial 1-800-375-5283 — USCIS Customer Service.</p>\n<p>- Rajeet Mohan</p>\n<p><em>The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.</em></p>\n<p style=\"font-size:9px\">Photo courtesy of Flickr user <a title=\"Link to ario_j's photostream\" href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ario/\">ario_j</a> under a <a title=\"Creative Commons\" href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en\">Creative Commons</a> license.</p>\nRajeet Mohan is an Indian living in the U.S. on an H-1B visa. He shares his frustrating immigration experience and offers some solutions to retain and leverage highly-skilled immigrants in the U.S.\n/files/2009/02/th_braindrain_siliconvalley.jpg"
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"content" : "We live here<br>where love comes<br>in wrapped words<br>tongues mumbling<br>in the belly<br>of the words<br><br><div>we live in a maze<br>where razor-in-cheek<br>cutting through the heart<br>wastes words<br>on deaf-dumb...<br></div><br><div>where wounded words<br>seized by the jungle<br>in return for justice<br>become the ruins<br>of our lion appetite<br>living lost dreams<br>in prodigal measures<br></div><br><div>yes, we live<br>down<br>here…<br></div><br><div></div><br><div><em>(c) Sumaila Umaisha.</em></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4465301569043526513-3756663383518200564?l=everythinliterature.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The High Road and the Low Road to Fibre",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://blogs.dialogic.com/2009/01/community-networks-the-robinhood-approach.html\">Telco 2.0 ally Brough Turner</a> points everyone to an interesting story from Lahore in Pakistan, where not only can you get fibre to the home, but it’s cheap as well. It’s well worth reading.</p>\n\n<p>Essentially, the government and the incumbent telco don’t know or can’t enforce their control of the right-of-way, which means that they have effective Layer Zero openness. Anybody can, in practice, string cable from the existing power and telephony poles; and it turns out that quite a lot do. Using basic IT gear, they place cheap Ethernet switches on the poles and run Cat5 or 6 cable into their customers’ homes, then get an aggregator to link the whole thing to a PC running an open source router implementation and a fibre-optic cable to their <span>HQ.</span></p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1290/1289275222_fe40dbdcd9.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"The Low Road: Rawalpindi\"> The Low Road in Rawalpindi. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/rehvonwald/\">temp 13rec</a></em>.)</p><p>Usually, the first router in a sense that <a href=\"http://www.stupi.se/Opinions/bbq4.pdf\">Peter Lothberg (pdf)</a> would recognise is at this stage. This gives you 100Mbits/s as far as the HQ; getting out to the Internet is more difficult, because capacity is scarce and expensive and the state telco controls interconnection. So most of them roll their own <span>CDN </span>- a file server stuffed with content which their customers can download at line speed, rather than hammering the backbone link.</p>\n\n<p>It’s impressive stuff. It’s also a fine example of the distinction <span>WELL </span>founder and scenario-planning expert <a href=\"http://sb.longnow.org/Bio.html\">Stewart Brand</a> drew in his book <em>How Buildings Learn</em> between High Road and Low Road architecture. You can see <a href=\"http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852\">Brand talking about the book here</a>. High Road buildings are like Chatsworth or a cathedral; they last because they are built massively strong, tailored to very specific uses with great care, and protected by the institutions that build them. Low Road buildings are like Brand’s office, a converted shipping container - cheap, generic, adaptable, liberated by indifference. If they survive, it’s because they can be altered to cope with change.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/85/215965487_cb71cad18f.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"The high road; Schönbrunn Palace, still beautiful 91 years after the end of its purpose\"> The high road; Schönbrunn is still beautiful although it’s been completely useless for the last 91 years. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tillysan/\">tillysan</a>.</em>)<br>\n <br>\nNeed to cable the place for a trading floor or a call centre or a developer team or a data centre? Cut a hole in the wall. Need more space? Build a mezzanine floor out of old pallets. Who will say anything? The planning committee? You’re not telling. Need fibre-to-the-home? Just nail the damn fibre to the lamp posts, and..hey, isn’t there an old PC in the corner. Just the thing for running a linux-based software router. Need voice? Set up Asterisk on Abdul’s old laptop.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2363/2763305351_9f925bfdce.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"The low road - building an instant house from containers in New Zealand\"> The low road - an instant house made from containers in New Zealand. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodrigoejuliana/\">rodrigoejuliana</a></em>)</p>\n\n<p>It’s an attractive vision; if you’re on the Right, it’s the triumph of individual enterprise, if you’re on the Left it’s an example of the poor organising to defeat their oppression, if you’re an anarchist it’s an example of mutual aid and community, and the sheer hacker glee of <em>hanging your own damn fibre on the bleedin’ lampposts</em> is irresistible unless you have a heart of stone.</p>\n\n<p>So, let’s hang the last regulator with the copper wires of the last telco. <span>FIBRE JIHAD</span>!</p>\n\n<p>Of course, it doesn’t quite work like that. Low Road buildings buy their adaptability at the cost of fragility and their easy repair and low cost at the cost of having no insulation and less soundproofing; Low Road fibre networks issue everyone with IP addresses out of someone else’s netblock (they’re free but not cheap) and have their customers <span>VPN </span>into a proxy server at headquarters that does have a real, globally routed <span>IP. </span></p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1311/1343359072_b39bd7ec06.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"Now that's low. But what happens when the horizontal rain starts?\"> Now that’s really low, but if there’s wind as well as rain…(<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/52912364@N00/\">ang morh</a></em>.)</p>\n\n<p>Remember the time young Wasim got his kite caught in the wires? Remember the time young Shoaib bowled a bouncer that hit young Inzaman in the occiput, glanced off, and went straight into the <a href=\"http://www.quagga.net/about.php\">Quagga</a> box? More seriously, just imagine when they start doing <span>BGP </span>routing. Fun…and games.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1183/1492145590_4f70a3a9ca.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"How is he?!\"> Howisheee? (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/20585900@N00/\">mjabbasi</a>.</em>)<br>\n <br>\nAnd, of course, if everyone can string cable all over the place, everyone will, and that’s a lot of cable. Further, if everyone can remove cable, some of them will; and this is a country where AK-47 ownership is common. Where there’s a commons there’s a potential tragedy of the commons.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/27/66725506_696e6d1a37.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"Low Road entropy, Quetta\"> Low Road entropy in Quetta. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cageitfallsinto/\">changezi</a>.</em>)</p>\n\n<p>Hence the need for the heavy engineering and interlocking committees of the High Road. What is the High Road to fibre? Surely it’s <span>STOKAB,</span> SingTel, CityLink, Reggefiber, et al - everything is set down in contracts and standard specifications, the government is frequently involved, cable is laid in sealed ducts built for the ages in reinforced concrete and steel. The capital requirements are huge and everything must be right first time, before the concrete sets. But if you get it right, it’s there for 150 years at least.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2133/2440194966_ec0face197.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"Mediocrity steals. Class steals from Doc Searls\"> The high road; Level(3) infrastructure. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsearls\">dsearls</a>. Haven’t we seen that monicker somewhere?</em>)</p>\n\n<p>If you get it right; that presupposes you actually made a start. This is the risk of going High Road - you don’t get the project started, or you start it and end up with a MagLev track in the middle of nowhere.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/183/387901082_0c5c261290.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"Completely useless - but too strong to knock down\"> The Aerotrain test track in France. Completely useless, but far too strong to knock down. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/effelbee/\">effelbee</a>.</em>)</p>\n\n<p>So, we have two contrasting traditions, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, requirements, and <a href=\"http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html\">affordances</a>, both of equal validity. If I take the High Road and you take the Low, we’ll both end up in Scotland. You’ll probably be there first, but the road may wash away in the next storm. But, as Brand concluded, there is no middle way - the alternative is No Road. You must choose. </p>\n\n<p>For example, if you bury services built to a Low Road standard in a massive High Road wall, you’re going to have serious trouble when a pipe leaks and the only way to get at it involves a pneumatic drill and extreme prejudice. If you build a cheap, adaptable structure of timber, you need to either make sure it’s always in use, or else accept that it will catch fire or fall down a few months after you stop maintaining it.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/368482477_aedbb61d83.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"Temporary.\"> Everything Low Road is temporary. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/38292931@N00/\">purplewon2000</a>.</em>)</p>\n\n<p>At the end of my street is a street cabinet used by a <span>DOCSIS </span>operator. The operator is a big publicly quoted company. The cable is buried in their trench, in the Queen’s highway. I’m not allowed to touch it; I’m not allowed to repair it; I’m even discouraged from reporting problems with it. Very High Road. But the cabinet is flimsy, and vandals break into it looking for copper - they don’t know about co-ax cable, and the BT cabinet next door is of heavy forged steel, with a great lock recessed into the steel for protection, so they break into the other one. And the big company doesn’t care enough to secure it, so it’s permanently exposed to the weather and they have no-notice multi-day outages. High, Low, or No Road?</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/141574073_05bd98e21a.jpg?v=0\"> Note the last maintenance visit was January, 2004 and this photo was taken in May, 2006. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/skuds/\">skuds</a>.</em>)</p>\n\n<p>Probably, over time, the greynets of Pakistan will get tired of <a href=\"http://www.renesys.com/tech/presentations/pdf/renesys-nanog34.pdf\"><span>BGP </span>routing leaks (pdf)</a> and digging cricket balls out of their equipment. They will subscribe to <a href=\"http://www.nanog.org/\"><span>NANOG</span></a>, design a proper addressing scheme, set up a <span>RADIUS </span>server, they may well discover the joys of Internet exchanges and all interconnect with each other. They will eventually decide to put the fibre in a conduit, or even dig a trench. And at this point they may even agree to share the conduit, trench, or the fibre itself.</p>\n\n<p>Stewart Brand concluded that although there was no synthesis between the High Road and the Low Road, there were common factors that held whether you were building for the High Road or the Low. Essentially, a building has to last, it mustn’t leak, and it must learn. </p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2176/2146237186_005bc350e9.jpg?v=0\"> St.Pancras Station is transformed, by its massive structure. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevin_r_boyd/\">Kevin R. Boyd</a>.</em>)</p>\n\n<p>So its structure should be strong and sufficiently overscaled to handle future expansion, because people always add to successful buildings, and it must be made of materials that last. Its roof should be pitched not flat, preferably built-up tile, slate, or metal. St Pancras Station, above, could be transformed for the new Eurostar terminal not because of the beautiful roof of the Barlow trainshed but because of the strong iron columns in the foreground, which were there to create a space for handling trainloads of beer barrels. And it should be of a design that makes it easy to alter, maintain, subdivide, and if necessary, demolish. (The lesson some buildings have to learn is that they shouldn’t exist.) The technical solution to make this possible is separation of the structure from the services, the skin, and the space plan.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3233/2508695373_2085cc58d3.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"You can't dodge the infrastructure\"> You can’t dodge the infrastructure - the original columns of St Pancras. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/icefuzion\">icefuzion</a>.</em>)</p>\n\nSo, fibre deployers should:<br>\n<ol>\n<li>build big and solid</li>\n<li>leave space for expansion</li>\n<li>provide openness at every level</li>\n<li>eliminate coercion from the architecture</li>\n<li>always separate functions</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1051/966876065_1ea566018a.jpg?v=0\" alt=\"This one is here because it's beautiful\"> This one is here because it’s beautiful. (<em>Flickr user <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/rahimr/\">RahimR</a>.</em>)</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:hdPvn2Pb5K0\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=hdPvn2Pb5K0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:cVN-8bUJP8g\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=cVN-8bUJP8g\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:IBeup6RJC6M\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=IBeup6RJC6M\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:nVKJB-ivDxU\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=nVKJB-ivDxU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?a=Qa7GMUtXtBU:VRJ-rvSIKQw:7YCFdcdasZE\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/Telco20?d=7YCFdcdasZE\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/Telco20/~4/Qa7GMUtXtBU\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<div><p><strong>by Gerald Dworkin</strong></p>\n<p>I have been thinking recently about lying. I don't mean I have been thinking of telling a lie. Many of the lies I tell do not need to be thought about very much. "I am fine." "Not at all. I think that color is quite flattering." "Let me pay. My university will reimburse me." "Yes, Dr. Phillips, I floss every day." I mean I have been thinking about what is a lie and is it ever okay to tell one and why, if we think lying is wrong, so many of us are liars.</p>\n<p>This thinking is not occasioned by some personal crisis of character, or being faced with a difficult decision to tell the truth. I am a philosopher and have just finished teaching a graduate seminar called "The Truth about Lying." That seemed a cool title last year when I had to propose one for the catalog. It seems to me now, well not quite a lie, but more like false advertising. If I really knew the truth about this difficult subject I would, as they say, be rich.</p>\n<p>I wanted to think about this topic because it seemed to me to have a number of features not shared by other moral concepts-- such as murder, cruelty, theft, or promise-breaking. First,while almost all of us would refrain from these acts, most of us lie on a daily basis. (As do doctors-- at least if you think prescribing placebos is lying. In a recent survey 45-58% , depending on how the question was phrased, prescribe them on a regular basis. If it's any consolation, the sugar pill seems to have been replaced by vitamins.) Second, if any of us were to act cruelly when this was pointed out to us we would either deny that was an appropriate description of our action or admit we were cruel and, at least, feel guilt or remorse. Whereas many of us are prepared to defend our lies--indeed, to glory in them sometimes ("Boy, did I have you going! Gotcha.") Third, there seem to be contexts in which not only does the fact that something is a lie not count in any way against what we are doing, but seems to count in favor--poker, spying, lying contests, getting someone to a surprise party, lying to the murderer at the door about where his victim is hiding. </p>\n<p>There seem to be very large differences between people as to what they regard as a lie. A , who makes a mistake about the day of the week, says, " Damn. I lied. It's Tuesday not Wednesday." But many people distinguish between being wrong and lying. B, who believes that today is Tuesday ( it is actually Wednesday) says to C, "Today is Wednesday". Some people think that B lied; others that he tried to lie but failed. Some people think that gross exaggeration-- "I haven't eaten for over a year"-- is a lie; others do not. Now most ethical concepts have borderline cases-- is not returning the lost wallet theft? is failing to rescue the drowning child murder?-- but with lying it sometimes seems that the borderline is the whole territory. </p>\n<p>Another interesting feature is that some people make a sharp moral distinction between lying and other ways of misleading by what one says. If you ask me what happened to your mail, and I say "Someone stole it from your box"without mentioning that the someone was me, some people will say "Well, at least you didn't lie" as if that somehow makes what I did less serious. The medieval Catholic Church elevated the idea of equivocation-- saying something true but meaning it one way rather than another, as in the Saint found who reported to would-be persecutors "That Saint is not far from here,"-- to Clintonian heights. Many people—myself included—see a difference between lying to someone and failing to tell them something that they have an interest in being told.</p>\n<p></p>\n\n<p>Finally, I find striking the variety of views as to what makes lying wrong when it is wrong. Here are some of them. </p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Because it is intrinsically wrong. This is philosophyspeak for “it’s just wrong, wrong because of what it is, wrong by its very nature.” </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because it produces bad effects, i.e. harms social trust, damages various kinds of relationships—personal, professional, political--- leads people to harm based on false information, etc. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because lying cannot be something that we all do. If we all did it, nobody would believe me when I lie and so it would be pointless to lie. But if we all cannot do it, why am I allowed to do it and not you and you and you… But then we are all doing it. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because it is an assertion of what you believe to be false and this violates a convention of language. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because of the intention behind the lie, i.e. to deceive another person. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because telling a lie is a violation of the autonomy of the hearer. It is an exercise of power over another rational individual—all the more insidious because it sometimes is undetected. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because telling a lie treats another person as a means to some end. This is true even of lies told to benefit the hearer. In such case he is treated as a means to his own good. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because telling lie is a violation of a duty to yourself to be truthful. </p>\n<li>\n<p>Because a principle forbidding lying would be agreed to by all of us if we were trying to find a principle to regulate our common behavior that we could all agree to. </p></li>\n</li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></ol>\n<p>Now some of these differences simply reflect the variety of moral theories that philosophers have come up with over the years. (Product differentiation is a feature of the academy.) But the issue of lying seems to have what economists call a “multiplier effect.” A unit of thought produces more than an additional unit of explanations of what is wrong with lying. </p>\n<p>Let me conclude today by inviting you to accept an assignment. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to define what it is to tell a lie. Here are some questions to start you off. I just heard on the radio someone listing the virtues of a friend claim that she never lied on purpose. Is it possible that she has lied unintentionally? Can one lie by not saying anything? By saying something true which is misleading? (Does the doctor who hands you a placebo and says, ”Try this. It has been found to be effective by many patients.” lie?) If one says something one believes to be false, but it turns out to be true, has one lied? Does lying involve an intention to deceive the hearer? What about bald-faced lies? (Think of the Monty Python Parrot sketch when John Cleese continues to profess that the dead parrot was “just resting.) Can one lie to oneself? Is there a difference between saying something, and meaning to be believed? (Is the actor on stage asserting to the audience that he has a terrible headache?) Is saying something ironically lying? (“Great dive” said to the person who just belly-whopped into the pool.) Suppose you say something that you do not believe false nor do you believe it to be true. You have no opinion as to its truth. It turns out to be false. Did you lie? Does your definition say anything about the rightness or wrongness of telling a lie? Should it?</p></div>"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-style:italic\">Note: You can also find this essay at Shotsmag Confidential, <a href=\"http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2009/01/sad-start-for-2009.html\">here</a>. Shots (www.shotsmag.co uk), is where I write a monthly American Eye column.<br><br></span>Most obituaries of Donald <a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NYor9jeI/AAAAAAAAAeI/DyHutLw9_DU/s1600-h/westlake.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:124px;height:127px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NYor9jeI/AAAAAAAAAeI/DyHutLw9_DU/s400/westlake.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>Westlake concentrated, rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate. <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how that Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, letting the characters find their own ways through situations which usually arise out of those flaws. Then they generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know what you're doing,' he said to me, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In <a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NYtANfvI/AAAAAAAAAeA/6orBLB5DuRw/s1600-h/stark.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:78px;height:132px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NYtANfvI/AAAAAAAAAeA/6orBLB5DuRw/s400/stark.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (the redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of 'Up Your Banners', a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved being reminded of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofield pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnapping<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9OZI7wJ-I/AAAAAAAAAeY/E19EN5TuaUg/s1600-h/hot+rock.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:138px;height:107px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9OZI7wJ-I/AAAAAAAAAeY/E19EN5TuaUg/s400/hot+rock.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>was while contemplating how one can write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called 'God Save The Mark', which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-parody paperback original, Comfort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America.<br>Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probab<a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9Pq4v4FJI/AAAAAAAAAeg/CPGmqxu2wFk/s1600-h/adios.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:84px;height:130px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9Pq4v4FJI/AAAAAAAAAeg/CPGmqxu2wFk/s400/adios.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>ly the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys never really know what it is they want. But you look at his best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series. Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books, although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, like all the adaptations, not called Parker). <a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NY2ay-UI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/kQw2KQ2564g/s1600-h/outfit.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:135px;height:105px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oSbKSEt1pNs/SV9NY2ay-UI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/kQw2KQ2564g/s400/outfit.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.</p> <p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was. You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.</p><p style=\"margin-bottom:0cm\">Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?</p>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5499/1986/1600/Alan_Dershowitz.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5499/1986/320/Alan_Dershowitz.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>With <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801017.html\">reports</a> that almost 6,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in May and June, bringing the death toll of civilians for the year to 14,388, and daily news reports of civilian death tolls in Israel, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, there is rising concern about the cost of war to those the liberal media refers to as \"innocent bystanders.\" The Bush Administration tried to alleviate some of this concern by <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/14/AR2006071400546.html\">calling</a> on Israel to \"limit as much as possible so-called collateral damage not only to facilities but also to human lives,\" in the eloquent words of White House spokesman Tony Snow. To show just how much they care about protecting the innocent, the Bush Administration is <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?hp&ex=1153627200&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=ccb5206208860925&ei=5094&partner=homepage\">rushing</a> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?ex=1311220800&en=e256f1d8872a835d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss\">delivery</a> of precision-guided <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html\">smart</a> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?ei=5065&en=f843a97f84eacaf6&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ex=1154232000&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print\">bombs</a> to Israel, which will make it possible for Israel to conduct more compassionate bombing raids in Lebanon. But others are questioning whether these civilians are really as innocent as they seem. Is it possible some of them may actually deserve what's coming to them?<br><br>\"I am not buying into the innocent civilians meme,\" <a href=\"http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/07/the_innocent_ci.html\">writes</a> the Atlas Shrugs' <a href=\"http://sadlyno.com/archives/003345.html\">Pamela</a>, the Internet <a href=\"http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/07/that-once-there-was-fleeting-wisp-of.html\">smart</a> bomb whose delivery Israel unaccountably <a href=\"http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/07/the_press_secre.html\">rejected</a>, though it is hard to imagine after watching this <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk07p1sRBoM\">video</a> who would make a more impassioned and articulate advocate not only for Israel but for world Jewry as a whole. \"If by ignorance, complicity, neglect or helplessness the Lebanese wouldn't throw Hezbollah out and establish a strong government, then they must pay the price for the sins of Hizbollah. And if people put up with dictatorships, theocracies, totalitarian regimes -- as they did in Nazi Germany -- they deserve what Hezbollah deserves.\"<br><br>Civilians, schmivilians, agrees Harvard Law professor and <a href=\"http://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/03/cnna.Dershowitz/\">torture</a> <a href=\"http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/legalizing-torture-distorting-hamdan.html\">advocate</a> <a href=\"http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail\">Alan Dershowitz</a>, who earned his reputation by <a href=\"http://johnmckay.blogspot.com/2006/07/dershowitz-butters-slippery-slope.html\">selflessly</a> rushing to the defense of clients like <a href=\"http://imdb.com/title/tt0100486/\">Claus von Bulow</a> and OJ Simpson who suffered unfair discrimination because of their extreme wealth. He would like the media to replace the whole notion of civilians with what he catchily calls a \"<a href=\"http://www.docstrangelove.com/2006/07/23/terrorist-lawyers-and-the-civilians-they-help-kill/\">continuum of civilianality</a>.\" Instead of lumping, say, women, children and goatherders into one vague category of <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/007586.php\">innocent</a> bystanderesqueness, he believes that each civilian death should be rated on a sliding <a href=\"http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/07/bar-talk.html\">scale</a> of <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/22/legitimate-targets\">complicity</a> not unlike the scale used by other less successful attorneys to calculate legal fees for indigent clients. Hovering around 9.0 on Dershowitz's <a href=\"http://roxanne.typepad.com/rantrave/2006/07/just_wars.html\">continuum</a> are victims of \"Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets\" that \"target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools.\" But while he believes \"the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear,\" Hezbollah and Hamas militants unfortunately are nearly indistinguishable from \"civilians,\" he says, putting the word in the print version of air quotes. \"Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians,\" he writes, an argument that may especially come in handy the next time he is on a sinking ship with too few lifeboats.<br><br>Regrettably, not only do innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and guilty militants all look alike, <a href=\"http://billmon.org/archives/002554.html\">Dershowitz</a> argues that those who insist on living in areas where terrorists live after receiving ample warnings from the Israeli Army to abandon their homes, are <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/07/hobbesian-libertarian-update.html\">guilty</a> by association and deserving of collective punishment. \"Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit,\" he writes though he does make an exception for those who \"cannot leave on their own\" presumably because they are old, sick, infirm or impoverished. While these unfortunates may lack the means to flee the carnage, they can at least take some solace in the fact that when the final tallies of body counts are toted up, they \"should be counted among the innocent victims,\" according to Dershowitz. While it's difficult for the military to make such distinctions in the heat of battle, he thinks the media should do so after it's all over instead of just broadcasting raw body count data.<br><br>For example, on the <a href=\"http://www.juancole.com/2006/07/dershowitz-and-grades-of-human-beings.html\">sliding scale</a> of tragedy that we might refer to, borrowing the title of another Dershowitz essay, as the \"<a href=\"http://smoothstone.blogspot.com/2006/07/dershowitz-at-his-best-arithmetic-of.html\">Arithmetic of Pain</a>,\" if terrorists are at 0.0 and babies are at 10.0, people from Lebanon would tend to fall below 5.0 while people from Israel would tend to fall above 5.0. So when the media says, for example, that a family of three Israelis died in a Hezbollah rocket attack in Haifa and a family of three Lebanese died in an air raid in Southern Lebanon, we are not getting the full picture. But if the media reported instead that a 9.2, a 7.3 and a 9.4 died in Haifa and a 3.7, a 4.1 and a 10.0 died in Southern Lebanon, wouldn't that give a more accurate, a more human picture of what really happened? Then all that you would have to do is average out the figures and you would see that the Haifa attack was an 8.6 in the \"Arithmetic of Pain,\" while the deaths in Southern Lebanon rated only a 5.9.<br><br><a href=\"http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20060723/continuum_of_civilianality\">Critics</a> of <a href=\"http://bustardblog.typepad.com/bustardblog/2006/07/there_is_no_que.html\">Dershowitz</a> claim that by fudging the lines between <a href=\"http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2006/07/24/5599/\">civilians</a> and soldiers he is making the same argument terrorists make to justify their attacks. But this could not be further from the truth. Terrorists don't value any life at all, not even their own. To them everyone is a 0.0. Some <a href=\"http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_digbysblog_archive.html#115362703415645075\">people</a> have also mistakenly compared Dershowitz's words to those of terrorist sympathizer <a href=\"http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html\">Ward Churchill</a>, who said after 9/11 that the people in the World Trade Center were not \"innocent\" because they \"formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire … both willingly and knowingly.\" But while <a href=\"http://xnerg.blogspot.com/2006/07/blog-post.html\">Churchill</a> believes no one is innocent, Dershowitz is merely saying that innocence is quantifiable. Paraphrasing a passage from George Orwell's <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Animal Farm</span>, <a href=\"http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/ignore_anything_i_might_have_e.php\">Dershowitz</a> concludes his brilliant essay by saying, \"Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.\" If the media adopted Dershowitz's simple idea, then we would all have a better idea of when to cry.<br><br><a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Alan+Dershowitz\" rel=\"tag\">Alan Dershowitz</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Atlas+Shrugs\" rel=\"tag\">Atlas Shrugs</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Continuum+of+Civilianality\" rel=\"tag\">Continuum of Civilianality</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Iraq\" rel=\"tag\">Iraq</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/War+on+Terror\" rel=\"tag\">War on Terror</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Terrorism\" rel=\"tag\">Terrorism</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Bush\" rel=\"tag\">Bush</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Tony+Snow\" rel=\"tag\">Tony Snow</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Ward+Churchill\" rel=\"tag\">Ward Churchill</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Lebanon\" rel=\"tag\">Lebanon</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Israel\" rel=\"tag\">Israel</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Middle+East\" rel=\"tag\">Middle East</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Foreign+Policy\" rel=\"tag\">Foreign Policy</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a>, <a href=\"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2006/07/beltway_traffic_jam-284/\">Beltway Traffic Jam</a>"
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"title" : ""Nobody wants war"",
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"content" : "<div><blockquote><p>Let me be clear:<strong> no one wants war</strong>.<br>...<br>If the<strong> international community</strong> once again shows a lack of resolve, there is no chance that Saddam Hussein will disarm voluntarily or flee - and thus little chance of a peaceful outcome.<br>...<br>17 times the <strong>UN</strong> has drawn a line in the sand - and 17 times Saddam Hussein has crossed that line. As last week's statement by the eight European leaders so eloquently put it: "<strong>If [those resolutions] are not complied with</strong>, the Security Council will lose its credibility and world peace will suffer as a result."<br><small>Donald Rumsfeld, <a href=\"http://www.securityconference.de/konferenzen/rede.php?menu_2003=&menu_konferenzen_archiv=&menu_2009=&menu_konferenzen=&sprache=en&id=102&\">The Global Fight against Terrorism: Status and Perspectives</a>, Munich, Feb. 8, 2003</small></p></blockquote><center>---</center><blockquote><p>"The issue is not war. <strong>Nobody wants war</strong>," Dr Singh told media persons outside Parliament when asked to comment on the present stand-off with Pakistan over the Mumbai terror attacks.\n</p><p>\nHe said India wanted Pakistan to make 'objective efforts to dismantle terror machine' and added that Islamabad 'knows what it implies'.\n</p><p>\n'Talk of war, surgical strikes is ill-advised'\n</p><p>\nReferring to 'many' UN resolutions prohibiting member countries from allowing terrorism to emanate from their territories, Dr Singh said Pakistan should "<strong>comply with those resolutions".\n</strong></p><p>\nAt the same time, he said: "The <strong>international community</strong> should use its power to persuade Pakistan (to end terrorism)."<br><small><a href=\"http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/23mumterror-nobody-wants-war-with-pakistan-pm.htm\">Nobody wants war with Pakistan: Dr Singh</a>, New Delhi, Dec. 23, 2008</small></p></blockquote></div>"
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"title" : "Q Tip and Prince. At the same time.",
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"content" : "The Innocent Man is sadly suspected<br>Of adultery and polygamy<br>The smart, Guilty One is wrongly respected<br>For merely playing Origami"
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"title" : "Down here in Sodom",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUfS37JcdcI/AAAAAAAABg4/Hp9zt5g187w/s1600-h/terakota_inlay.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:393px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUfS37JcdcI/AAAAAAAABg4/Hp9zt5g187w/s400/terakota_inlay.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>As 2008 winds to a close, I think I will spend the rest of the month mostly filling overdue requests and posting up old entries from the vaults that I never published for whatever reason. This one here is for my girl Tutu who requested it in, like, <i>January.</i><br><br>The 1984 release of <i>Lamentation For Sodom</i> by Tera Kota (<i>nee</i> Gboyega Femi) remains--in <i>my</i> mind at least--a major turning point in the direction of Nigerian pop music.<br><br>I was in Form One when the record came out. I remember sitting in the school art studio trying to stay awake through a highly abstract lecture on <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">the terracotta sculpture of the ancient Nok civilization</a> when the art teacher suddenly digressed and spent the rest of the period going on about this musician named Tera Kota and how awesome his album was.<br><br>I was unfamiliar with this Tera Kota fellow and considering myself a pretty hip cat, I set out to hear him. Over the Christmas break I caught the video for the album's title track on NTA 6 Aba. \"Oh, it's <i>reggae,</i>\" I thought, a bit disappointed.<br><br>Now, I listened to reggae back then, but I wasn't into it like <i>that.</i> Of course, \"raggae\" had enjoyed widespread popularity in Nigeria since the late 1960s and at least since Sonny Okosuns' <a href=\"http://combandrazor.blogspot.com/2008/04/help.html\">\"Help\"</a>, most Nigerian musicians routinely included a reggae cut or two on their albums.<br><br>The difference was that up until then, reggae was viewed primarily as <i>a style of music,</i> unburdened by any particular ideology or lifestyle. It was just a particular beat and tempo, not unlike jazz or rock & roll. Most of the Nigerian artists who specialized in reggae--Cloud 7, Iyke Peters, Yinka Abayomi and the like--and even the very popular foreign reggae artists like Honey Boy, Ginger Williams and Winston Groovy--all of them used the reggae beat as a vehicle for delivering songs featuring conventional pop subject matter <i>ie</i> kissing and dancing.<br><br>But <i>roots</i> reggae, with its militant message of righteousness, revolution and Rastafar-I (and the rampant smoking of Indian hemp that all this implied)... For me and my crew--clean-cut pop/funk/disco kids who were then gravitating towards the emerging hip-hop scene--roots was what we thought of as \"senior brother music\"; the kind of thing listened to mostly by <strike>people</strike> guys older than us but younger than our parents. Radical university students, Youth Corpers, the unemployed neighborhood dudes who hung out smoking cigarettes in the front of the corner shop, the more conscious-minded street touts... That was <i>their</i> music.<br><br>What Tera Kota did was drag this scene from the fringes and install it firmly at the center of the popular culture. <br><br><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUgjfV8-S-I/AAAAAAAABhI/3Sy19ySOEgM/s1600-h/basseyblack_front.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px;width:200px;height:200px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUgjfV8-S-I/AAAAAAAABhI/3Sy19ySOEgM/s200/basseyblack_front.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>While there had been other artists like Bassey Black & the Natty Messiah or even <a href=\"http://combandrazor.blogspot.com/2008/09/wa-ho-ha.html\">Pazy & the Black Hippies</a> who had made nods towards roots culture in the past, none had done it as uncompromisingly as Tera Kota, or on as large a scale. In contrast to the glamorous and decadent image of a lot of musicians during the boogie era, Tera Kota was aggressively ascetic and asexual, and projected an aura or personal purity that bordered on misogynistic. He made it abundantly clear that he did not mess with the opposite sex (whom he referred to as \"Jezebels\") and would not tolerate even the most casual interaction between himself and any Daughter of Eve.<br><br>Furthermore, <i>Lamentation For Sodom</i> was more slickly packaged than any Nigerian roots reggae before it. Producer Lemmy Jackson recorded the album in Lagos with top-of-the-line session players (including members of the Cameroonian Mighty Flames Metallik Funk Band) and then took the tracks to London for overdubs by leading lights of the UK reggae scene such as keyboardist Paget King (known for his work on records by Honey Boy, Dennis Bovell and Linton Kwesi Johnson) and the inventor of Lovers Rock, Nigerian-Scottish guitarist John Kpiaye. <br><br>The result was a Nigerian reggae album with a big, world-class sound that was the perfect soundtrack for a society in transition. <br><br>Nigeria was going through a turbulent period: the military had recently seized control of the government and instituted a repressive dictatorship, the economy was plummeting, corruption was running wild, public morale was crumbling. Roots reggae became the voice that expressed the frustration and disillusion of the people in a failing nation. And unlike the case with Fela's music, nobody got hurt--no names were named and all criticisms of the government were cloaked within Biblical imagery and rendered comfortingly ambiguous. <br><br>Femi explained his scriptural allusions and prophetic aspirations in a 1988 interview with <i>Prime People</i>:<br><br><a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUfPlbhu5UI/AAAAAAAABgg/GROIjOY_fbM/s1600-h/pp_terakota.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0;width:194px;height:320px\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUfPlbhu5UI/AAAAAAAABgg/GROIjOY_fbM/s320/pp_terakota.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><blockquote><span style=\"font-size:95%\">All the difficulties of the average Nigerian notwithstanding, Tera Kota says Nigeria still qualifies as 'Sodom.' 'Sodom' is Tera Kota's reaction to what Jamaicans call 'Babylon'. According to him, Babylon is oppression of blacks by whites, and Sodom is \"oppression of blacks by blacks, as in Nigeria.\" He claims that Africa is no Zion, a black paradise.<br><br>\"Nigeria is still 'Sodom'. If I had the foresight to sing about <i>Lamentation for Sodom,</i> and four years later people are still lamenting, then people should take cognizance of my messages. What I described in <i>Lamentation</i> is still happening.\"</span></blockquote>Thus was the new paradigm set. Right before my eyes, the students and even some of my younger teachers who had been wearing bowties and suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up and hotcombing their hair back to look like Michael Jackson all of a sudden were sporting berets and dark shades and had stopped combing their hair altogether. Reggae music was <i>the</i> Sound of Now. The floodgates were opened for The Mandators, Majek Fashek, Ras Kimono, Amos McRoy Jegg and scores of other Rasta reggae singers to follow and Tera Kota very quickly got lost in the stampede. He never scored another big success despite repeated attempts, but for a few months in 1984, he was the man.<br><br><a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Lamentation%20For%20Sodom/Lamentation%20for%20Sodom.mp3\">Tera Kota - \"Lamentation For Sodom\"</a><br><a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Lamentation%20For%20Sodom/Nitori%20Owo.mp3\">Tera Kota - \"Nitori Owo\"</a><br><a href=\"http://www.comb-and-razor.com/Sounds1/Lamentation%20For%20Sodom/On%20The%20Run.mp3\">Tera Kota - \"On The Run\"</a><br><br><a href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUcT7APV2LI/AAAAAAAABgY/Ovq8Zh8UE1Y/s1600-h/terakota_front.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center;width:400px;height:400px\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RyyWs_zK-Nw/SUcT7APV2LI/AAAAAAAABgY/Ovq8Zh8UE1Y/s400/terakota_front.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/26746300-8581609449519039672?l=combandrazor.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "More on Proverbs and Materials Science and Engineering",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DqKKvKaNFj4/ST66I5vKoyI/AAAAAAAAAH8/REoB20GQesk/s1600-h/Nigerianproverbs.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:158px;height:241px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DqKKvKaNFj4/ST66I5vKoyI/AAAAAAAAAH8/REoB20GQesk/s320/Nigerianproverbs.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>In September I posted some of the results of my efforts to teach materials science and engineering at the University of Ghana using <span style=\"text-decoration:underline\">African</span><a href=\"http://aqueousol.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-and-learning-materials-science.html\"> proverbs</a> as a starting point. In November (2008) in Abuja, Nigeria there was another opportunity, with students from the African University of Science and Technology (AUST). Here are some of the proverbs they shared, though there is not enough space to include the fascinating interpretations and applications to materials science and engineering:<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Uwikoreye ibumba ntaterana amabuye</span> \"When you carry a clay pot don't fight by throwing stones\" (Kinyarwanda, Rwanda)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Nwanya maramma ejihe akpa garri akwara ya akwa</span> \"We do not use a garri sack to sew cloth for a beautiful woman\"(Igbo, Nigeria)<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><br>Ankwerɛ hunu na ɛyɛ dede</span> \"Empty barrels make the most noise\" (Twi, Ghana)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Iti ogede ko to nkan a nlo ada ge</span> \"No sane person sharpens his/her machete to cut a banana tree\" (Yoruba, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Igiti kigororwa kikiri gito</span> \"The tree is dressed when it is still young\" (Kinyarwanda, Rwanda)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Zewuze torkornu wokpoe le</span> “The bigger of two pots can only be determined at the riverside” (Ewe, Ghana)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Iya ni wura baba ni jigi,ojo iya ba ku ni jigi eni baje, ojo baba ba ku ni jigi eni womi</span> \"Mother is like gold and father is like a mirror/glass. The day your mother dies is the day you lose your gold and the day your father dies your mirror is broken.\" (Yoruba, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Wankin hula ya kai ka dare</span> \"If you wash a cap in the evening you don’t have sunlight to dry it\" (Hausa, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Nkpume pee elu egwu atuwa ite</span> \"When the stone goes up the earthen pot becomes afraid\" (Igbo, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Ahweneɛ papa ɛnkasa</span> \"Good/excellent beads do not speak.\" (Twi, Ghana)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Igube ebejiri Orji</span> \"The locust has broken the mighty Iroko tree.\" (Igbo, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Ejihe ihe eji agba ba nti agba na anya</span> \"We do not use the same material to clean our ears as well as our eyes.\" (Igbo, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Vivivi hafi ebge zuna nyinoti</span> \"It is through a gradual process that the grass is transformed into cow's milk.\" (Ewe, Ghana)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Eha ti deka mete kplo anyigba O, ke bon ne wo so gbo hafi</span> \"A single broom straw can never be used to sweep. Many must be kept together before sweeping can be done.\" (Ewe, Ghana)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Nwaanyi muta ite ofe mmiri mmiri, di ya amuta ipi utara aka were suru ofe \"</span> If a woman decides to make the soup watery, the husband will learn to dent the foofoo before dipping it into the soup.\" (Igbo, Nigeria)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">E lelia nwa ite, o gbonyua oku</span> \"If you neglect the pot, it boils over and extinguishes the fire. (Igbo, Nigeria)<br><br>I would like to express my appreciation to my students who contributed the proverbs: Emmanuel Amankwah, Clement Atiso Domefafa, Nelson Yaw Dzade, Emmanuel Femi Olu, Hakeem Bello, Josephine Udeigwe, Kingsley Obodo Onyebuchi, Anthony Ogbuu Okechukwu, and Bizimana Stany Nzabarinda."
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"title" : "Ironies of Life",
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"content" : "To have been trained your whole life to succeed in the United States, then to realize that maybe success is to be had elsewhere is a strange thing indeed.<br><br>I wonder how many people headed home to China, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Indonesia etc for the New Year will stay and try their luck. When is the optimal time to leave the United States, the United Kingdom, France?<br><br>One Indian returnee <a href=\"http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081211.RMIGRATION11//TPStory/Business\">explains</a>:<br><p></p><blockquote><p>\"When I got on the plane and left the U.S. for India, my dad said, 'I worked my whole life to give you the opportunity to be educated and work in the U.S., and the first thing you do after a few years of work is fly right back to India,' \" said Samvir Sidhu, also 25, who recently left behind a Wall Street job - and his American citizenship - to join a private equity firm in New Delhi.</p> <p>\"It was quite an ironic revelation.\"</p></blockquote><p></p> I wonder how Obama feels, for example. After all this, would it be better to have been raised in Kenya or Indonesia? Power is for those who change the rules and anticipate when they are shifting. I remember a wedding I attended a couple years ago in Boston. Nearly everyone I spoke to was living in Asia, whites included. The newly weds were some of the wealthier friends I had from college and their friends were similarly poised to read the writing on the walls.<br><br>For those of us who stay, perhaps life will be mundane and fairly similar to the chances we might have had elsewhere. <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAbdulrazak_Gurnah&ei=tblBSYTBEqGiepuZpd8I&usg=AFQjCNEvLBae_acAFG8p0j-QTt0pg1c4Iw&sig2=LWoXUTZ3yMdCPFdFTULRkg\">Abdulrahzak Gurnah,</a> the Tanzanian novelist, writes in the voice of the narrator of <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=5&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DksHjAAAACAAJ%26dq%3DAbdulrazak%2BGurnah%26source%3Dan%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26oi%3Dbook_result%26resnum%3D5%26ct%3Dresult&ei=tblBSYTBEqGiepuZpd8I&usg=AFQjCNFmgRUNdH29-azrIcAW-1m2wfuB2A&sig2=Po9IHcNj2aspdI8LHt9J9A\">Desertion</a> (a small town college lecturer):<br><blockquote>\"When I contemplate myself and what I have become, I think of all those battles my mother and father fought to live and love as they wished. I think of their plans and anxieties for our futures, of my own labours with uncongenial material, of all that planning and striving to arrive at this life of small apathy that I could have arrived at with no effort. Irony is the unforgiving register which gives everything back to us.\"</blockquote>Ironic times. Ironic Lives.<br><p></p><blockquote><br><p><br></p></blockquote><p></p>"
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"title" : "Unlocking the potential of the spoken word?",
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"content" : "<span title=\"ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Adc&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Focoins.info%3Agenerator&rft.title=Unlocking+the+potential+of+the+spoken+word%3F&rft.aulast=Dingemanse&rft.aufirst=Mark&rft.subject=Anthropology&rft.subject=Linguistics&rft.source=The+Ideophone&rft.date=2008-12-10&rft.type=blogPost&rft.format=text&rft.identifier=http://ideophone.org/potential-of-the-spoken-word/&rft.language=English\"></span>\n<p>An intriguing article in <em>Science</em> two months ago suggests that advances in speech processing 'may soon place speech and writing on a more equal footing, with broad implications for many aspects of society'. It reminds us that most of humanity's approximately 50,000 years<sup>1</sup> with language was dominated by the spoken word, and that the balance was upset only some few thousands of years ago by the invention of writing. But was it?</p>\n<div>\n<img src=\"http://ideophone.org/files/joe-sutliff-cartoon.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"joe-sutliff-cartoon\">\n<div>An example of a multi-modal speech event. (Credit: Joe Sutliff)<sup>2</sup></div>\n</div>\n<p>The author, information retrieval specialist <a href=\"http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/\" title=\"Douglas Oard\">Douglas Oard</a>, starts by reviewing how writing caused a landslide in humanity's cultural landscape, in large part due to the fact that it provided its users with solid permanence and findability<sup>3</sup> — properties that the spoken word, due to its ephemeral nature, did not possess to any great extent. The argument is a familiar one, and although I think that the relative permanence of orally transmitted information in non-literate societies is often underestimated, the basic thrust of the argument strikes me as plausible. </p>\n<p>This leads to Oard's key observation: writing has been hugely succesful due to providing these advantages — but with todays' (and tomorrows') speech recognition technologies these advantages <em>are no longer exclusive to writing</em>. Why? </p>\n<blockquote><p>Digital storage is a great equalizer with regard to permanence: The same infrastructure that can reliably store digital text can equally well store digital speech. (...) Commercial “media management” systems can now reliably find specific content in the well-articulated speech of news announcers, and laboratory systems can handle much of the substantial variation in speaking styles that have made automatic transcription of interviews, meetings, and telephone conversations difficult. (Oard 2008:1787)\n</p></blockquote>\n<p> And thus, argues Oard, the comeback of the spoken word is upon us: <em>'We now stand at the treshold of a new era, one in which the spoken word can again rise to prominence.'</em> </p>\n<h2>Another conduit unlocked</h2>\n<p>These are exciting developments, not in the least for information retrievalists or for those of us doing conversation analysis of, say, well-behaved English telephone conversations. But one must not read too much into it. The rhetorical A-B-A structure of Oard's argument (50,000 years of speech, a few millenia of writing, and now the return of speech!) <em>suggests a radical turn where there is none.</em></p>\n<p>Looking back at the invention of writing, perhaps the most crucial change it brought about was that information could now be stored reliably and effectively in some other medium than human memory. The recent developments in speech processing are just a simple variation on that theme; another modality has yielded to the advantages of permanence (storage) and findability (retrieval). Oard's article, titled <em>Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word</em>, is thus primarily about unlocking it for information retrievalists, and as such it is a prime example of the conduit metaphor in action (Reddy 1979). Briefly, this metaphor suggests that words are simply vehicles for transporting ideas. One of its problems is that it trivializes the part played by the listener, who in fact faces the highly creative task of recreating ideas from the multi-modal signals uttered by the speaker.</p>\n<h2>Language is more than a series of tubes!</h2>\n<p>The actual potential of the spoken word is a lot more wide-ranging and interesting than suggested by this all-too-common metaphor (a more timely metaphor for this way of thinking may be 'language as a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes\">series of tubes</a>'). To be fair, Oard does mention in passing that 'to this day, people find spoken expression and its visual correlates (...) to be a fluid and compelling way of communicating' (p. 1787). It's easy to see why from an information retrieval perspective that seems the less important stuff, embellishments which may provide some fluidity but otherwise are immaterial to the goal of getting a message across (again in the conduit-metaphor paradigm). But try to analyse five minutes of conversational discourse and suddenly both of the underlying assumptions — that the extra stuff is mere embellishment, and that the spoken word merely functions to transport information — will be a lot less obvious.</p>\n<p>Consider the cartoon that came with the article (above). A man presents something by combining a pointing gesture with eye-gaze and a particular facial expression. Another man passes a judgment with his body language as much as with some words ("It'll never catch on...") There's not much that speech processing can do to unlock the potential of the spoken word here. 'But this is a cartoon! It's meant to use few words and lots of imagery!', I hear you protest. Sure — but then in reality, discourse throughout these 50,000 years has been a lot more like this cartoon than like a neat text with a high information density, ready to be data-mined. Words have always come to us in richly contextualized multi-modal speech events in which speaker and listener jointly construct meaning, relying on such things as common ground, social relationships, imagery, gestures and facial expressions.<sup>4</sup> To me, there lies the true potential of the spoken word.</p>\n<h2>References</h2>\n<ol>\n<li>Clark, Herbert H. 1996. <em>Using Language</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <span title=\"url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Using%20Language&rft.place=Cambridge&rft.publisher=Cambridge%20University%20Press&rft.aufirst=Herbert%20H.&rft.aulast=Clark&rft.au=Herbert%20H.%20Clark&rft.date=1996\"> </span></li>\n<li>Enfield, Nick J., and Stephen C. Levinson. 2006. <em>Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and human interaction</em>. Oxford: Berg.</li>\n<li>Lieberman, Philip. 2007. The Evolution of Human Speech: Its Anatomical and Neural Bases. <em>Current Anthropology</em> 48, no. 1 (February 1): 39-66. doi:10.1086/509092. <span title=\"url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Adoi/10.1086/509092&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=The%20Evolution%20of%20Human%20Speech%3A%20Its%20Anatomical%20and%20Neural%20Bases&rft.jtitle=Current%20Anthropology&rft.volume=48&rft.issue=1&rft.aufirst=Philip&rft.aulast=Lieberman&rft.au=Philip%20Lieberman&rft.date=2007-02-01&rft.pages=39-66\"></span></li>\n<li>Oard, Douglas W. 2008. Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word. Science 321, no. 5897 (September 26): 1787-1788.<span title=\"ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Science&rft.id=info:DOI/10.1126%2Fscience.1157353&rft.atitle=Unlocking+the+Potential+of+the+Spoken+Word&rft.date=2008&rft.volume=321&rft.issue=5897&rft.spage=1787&rft.epage=1788&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencemag.org%2Fcgi%2Fdoi%2F10.1126%2Fscience.1157353&rft.au=D.+W.+Oard&bpr3.included=1&bpr3.tags=Anthropology%2CLinguistics\"></span></li>\n<li>McNeill, David, ed. 2000. <em>Language and Gesture</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <span title=\"url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Language%20and%20Gesture&rft.place=Cambridge&rft.publisher=Cambridge%20University%20Press&rft.aufirst=David&rft.aulast=McNeill&rft.au=David%20McNeill&rft.date=2000\"> </span></li>\n<li>Reddy, M. J. 1979. The conduit methapor - a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In <em>Metaphor and Thought</em>, ed. A. Ortony, 284-297. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <span title=\"url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=bookitem&rft.atitle=The%20conduit%20methapor%20-%20a%20case%20of%20frame%20conflict%20in%20our%20language%20about%20language&rft.place=Cambridge&rft.publisher=Cambridge%20University%20Press&rft.aufirst=M.%20J.&rft.aulast=Reddy&rft.au=M.%20J.%20Reddy&rft.au=A.%20Ortony&rft.date=1979&rft.pages=284-297\"></span></li>\n<li>Tannen, Deborah. 1989. <em>Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse.</em> Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</li>\n</ol>\n<h2>Footnotes</h2><ol><li>Oard refers to Lieberman 2007 for this date.</li><li>This cartoon appeared with Oard's article in Science.</li><li>Oard mentions a third property, 'contextualization'. I have trouble understanding this one; he briefly mentions the invention of 'ways of writing that conveyed the needed context to a reader' (p. 1787), but it seems to me that multi-modal speech (richly contextualized as it is) is not at all at a disadvantage to writing on that point.</li><li>See e.g. Tannen 1989, Clark 1996, Enfield & Levinson 2006, McNeill 2000, to mention just a few random works from a huge literature.</li></ol><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?a=GkrUBbcp\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?d=45\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?a=13FeS6GO\"><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~f/ideophone?d=41\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/ideophone/~4/JmDfIPxrhDg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "“On the way coming” and other perplexing phrases from The Ginglish (Ghanaian-English) Dictionary",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOaLh6QvRI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/esUz81_AojQ/s1600-h/independence+square.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:192px;height:120px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOaLh6QvRI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/esUz81_AojQ/s320/independence+square.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">For the freshly arrived returnee, never-lived-in-Ghana Ghanaian or foreigner, communicating in Ghanaian English (Ginglish) can be quite challenging. One is suddenly confronted by a plethora of words, expressions and phrases understood only by Ghanaians. Some of these can leave you perplexed, worried and completely befuddled since the meanings are not always implicit</span></span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">. </span></span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> <span style=\"font-family:arial\">In her newspaper column and book </span></span><span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"><a href=\"http://theimportedghanaian.com/\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Imported Ghanaian </span></a></span></span></span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">, Alba Sumprim explored Ghanaisms with humour and cleared the fog for many of us. Anyway, here are a few Ginglish expressions I encounter on a daily basis: </span> <span style=\"font-family:arial\"><br></span></span><ul><li><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOnro6w9bI/AAAAAAAAAlo/fLRbMQIzN1Q/s1600-h/Ada+Field+032.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:216px;height:162px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOnro6w9bI/AAAAAAAAAlo/fLRbMQIzN1Q/s320/Ada+Field+032.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“On the way coming” [meaning]:<span style=\"font-style:italic\"> I am as far away from where you are as humanely possible but will lie and say I have already set off to meet you.</span> So let's say you have to meet Jack at the Accra Mall at 8am on a Saturday morning. When you call his mobile at 8:15am, He could tell you he is “on the way coming” which in reality means Jack is lying comfortably in bed at home with 1 hour to leave and a 2 hour ride in heavy traffic up ahead. Jack will show up at 11:15am and blame it all on the traffic.<br></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> <span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Filla” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">gossip, news, rumour</span></span><br></span></li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOhSz8BoJI/AAAAAAAAAlY/E3Vt-sXb0XY/s1600-h/chop.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:204px;height:114px\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOhSz8BoJI/AAAAAAAAAlY/E3Vt-sXb0XY/s320/chop.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Chop”</span></span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"> [meaning]: </span></span><span style=\"font-style:italic;font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"> To eat, enjoy, have. </span></span><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">One can chop food or even money.<br></span></span></li></ul><br><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> </span><br><br><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Chale”/”Charlie”: probably the most common hip Ghanaian expression but which does not really have any meaning….it is like adding “Dude.” To the start of your expressions.</span></span></li></ul><a href=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOiKm00r9I/AAAAAAAAAlg/NgzFQrPxTNM/s1600-h/chop2.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:247px;height:175px\" src=\"http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bqMtoMnTR3k/STOiKm00r9I/AAAAAAAAAlg/NgzFQrPxTNM/s320/chop2.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">You are invited” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">I’m pretending to be courteous by extending an invitation for you to join me as I eat my food but if you come anywhere near me and food, I will skin you alive.</span></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“You, if anything, I’ll call” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Stop harassing me with your calls! You are about to make me avoid you like the plague. Watch me never call you again.<br></span></span></span></li></ul><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> </span><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“You go come” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">I’m about to give you the biggest run-around of your life. Call me tomorrow and I will tell you to call me the next day. Call me the next day and I will tell you to call the next (next) day. This will go on and on and on until you get tired. </span></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“How far?” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">How much progress has been made on that thing I keep incessantly pestering you about?</span></span><br></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Don’t bring yourself” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Mind your own business</span></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Don’t mind him/her [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Whatever him/her says ignore it</span><br></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> <span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Try for me” [meaning]:<span style=\"font-style:italic\">I want you to do the impossible ….for me. Move mountains, turn water into wine and bend over backwards….just for me.<br></span></span></span></li></ul><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"></span></span></span><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> <span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Consider me” [meaning]: similar to try for me. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">I want you to do the impossible ….for me. Move mountains, turn water into wine and bend over backwards….just for me. </span></span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“That Abena she is another!”: this is one phrase that leaves me begging for more…Another what?! All I have been able to establish is that it is not meant in a positive light</span></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"> <span style=\"font-family:arial\">“She/he is someway” : Just like being another, this phrase leaves you on cliff-hanger…which way? It basically means I don’t understand She/he's behavior!</span><br></span></li></ul><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"> </span><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Vocabs” [meaning]: <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The English language repertoire that an individual has. Or can also mean ability to speak English.</span></span></span></li></ul><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"></span></span></span><ul><li><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"> </span></span><span style=\"font-family:arial\">“Slang”: Don’t be fooled, this word is not referring to local jargons, patois, pidgin or creole, [meaning] <span style=\"font-style:italic\">To speak with some sort of a foreign accent which could be a locally acquired or a genuine foreign accent. </span>Yes, when I first made my Ghana debut all those years ago, I was told incessantly that I had “slangs”.<br></span></span></li></ul><span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-family:arial\">Chale, I gradually got used to Ginglish and once everyone could understand my slangs I started chopping Ghana life and enjoying all the filla. Anyway fair readers, if you have other Ginglish expressions, Ghanaisms or feel my definitions are some way, please feel free to comment!<br><br></span></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/11894178-7034386089568315791?l=chardonas.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Mind, hands, and heart: John Leeke on Internet video for sharing knowledge about historic home preservation",
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"content" : "<div><br><p>This week’s ITConversations show suffered a tragic glitch that rendered the audio unusable, but I was able to transcribe it as text. My guest is <a href=\"http://historichomeworks.com\">John Leeke</a>, a carpenter who takes care of old buildings and shares his knowledge of the tools and best practices involved in doing that. His methods of sharing have evolved over many years. He started in the early 1980s as a writer for magazines like Old House Journal and Fine Woodworking, transitioned to Internet publishing when that became possible, and more recently has become a leader in the use of Internet video to communicate knowledge that’s embodied, as he likes to say, in the mind, the hands, and the heart.</p>\n<p>His approach to Internet video exemplifies and weaves together a number of themes that I’ve focused on in recent years, including <a href=\"http://delicious.com/judell/worknarration\">narration of work</a>, <a href=\"http://delicious.com/judell/apprenticeship\">online apprenticeship</a>, <a href=\"http://delicious.com/judell/tacitknowledge\">tacit knowledge</a>, screencasting to document our work in the virtual world, and video to document our work in the physical world.</p>\n<hr>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: We got <a href=\"http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/01/15/ambient-video-awareness-and-visible-conversations/#comment-252\">introduced</a> by way of the folks at the Open University, whom I met when I visited the UK in January 2007 to speak at the Technology, Knowledge, and Society conference. They were showing me their <a href=\"http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/\">FlashMeeting</a> videoconferencing system, and they cited you as an example of somebody who’s making very practical use of the medium in your work, which is historic home renovation.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Right. I’d been using FlashMeeting for about a year and half then. They had singled me out because I wasn’t doing education, or developing the FlashMeeting system, like they were there at the <a href=\"http://kmi.open.ac.uk/\">Knowledge Media Institute</a>, I was out in the real world doing things with it, demonstrating the horizontal movement of knowledge.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: That absolutely grabbed me. Ever since I got involved in Internet video, I saw there was a huge opportunity for horizontal, or direct, or peer-to-peer transfer of knowledge. In particular, of knowledge that is embodied, literally — it’s in your hands…</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: It’s in your mind, your hands, and your heart. I’ve been sharing what I know through print media since the early 1980s. I grew up working in my father’s shop, in the 1950s, and then was out in the field working on historic buildings as a preservation carpenter for fifteen years. Then I fell into writing about my work: Homebuilding Magazine, Fine Woodworking, Old House Journal. I got pretty practiced at that by the late 1990s.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: You’ve published books too, right?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Yes, I’ve self-published a series on caring for older buildings. Through the 1990s I knew that video would be important for my work, but I never came around to publishing anything in video. I didn’t have the time or dollars to put into it. But but 2003 and 2004, it was getting streamlined enough and easy enough to do over the Internet.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: As much use of online video as there is, I think we’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to the sort of sharing of practical knowledge that you’ve been doing.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: It’s starting to happen. Just yesterday a colleague sent me a link to a YouTube video about how to draw and sketch the classical forms, like Ionic capitals. It was an architect showing how he sketched, and how he developed a balustrade for a fancy classical building. It showed him actually doing it. This wasn’t happening in the 1990s. You could do it, but it was a huge expensive production. Now you can do it for a couple of hundred dollars, and sometimes even less.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Of course there’s still the question of why someone would do this. And in fact, the theme of the talk I gave at that conference was network-enabled apprenticeship. The idea was that throughout human history, people have learned trades and crafts by direct observation and imitation.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Yeah, workers working side by side. And it’s more than observation. It’s the guiding of hands that makes that work. Internet video, even when it’s live, doesn’t get you all the way there. But it’s certainly a dramatic next level beyond print media, that’s for sure.</p>\n<p>Expositional work online — presentation of words and pictures and even videos — it’s all presentational. Someone develops it, and as a separate event in time someone else comes and watches and learns. But when it’s live and interactive, that’s when you jump to the next level. Being there in person is best, of course, but this is a really valuable and powerful intermediate level because it opens up access to many more people than I can get together with personally, side by side.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Can you give an example?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: In our work we’re often restoring old windows. This is the time of year when you have to take care of them. One of the details of that work is reglazing, where the glass meets the sash — the wooden frame that slides up and down. There’s a material called glazing compound, or putty, and it’s easy enough to use so that any handy person can do it, but it’s hard to get it so that it looks nice and smooth and even, if you haven’t done it before. Once you learn, it’s a cinch. And it’s easy to show someone how. I’ve taught eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds how to run a perfect line. But you can’t do that with even a detailed series of photos.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: And you’ve tried…</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Yes, I’ve written three or four articles over the years, and each one is better, and you can learn a certain kind of thing from print and photos. You can learn what kind of putty to use, you can learn how to hold the putty knife. But until you see a putty knife in motion, and can respond in realtime — adjust the angle, a little more pressure — you can get it in thirty seconds if you’re side by side, and in a few minutes over interactive video.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: So you’re talking about a couple of levels here. The first is direct observation and imitation. My first revelation on that front was when I had to fix an old HP laser printer. I found a parts kit online that came with a video on a CD, and it enabled me to successfully disassemble and reassemble that printer. Later I realized there was no other way I could have done the job successfully. No written instruction would have gotten me there.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Right, that’s one level and it works well when the printer you’re repairing is just like the one in the video. And when the job involves mechanical parts that lock and fit together.</p>\n<p>But with the window putty, it’s different. You’re working with a plastic material. It’s as if you had to make those printer parts yourself. It’s basic stuff, not manufactured stuff.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: The motor skills are subtler, and the nonverbal communication is more critical.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Right, and with the nonverbal communication as well as the visual, you really need to be able to go back and forth between the learner and the teacher. If you can do that within seconds — or if you’re standing next to someone, microseconds — that feedback between the eyes, the mind, the hand, the muscles, the tool, the material the tool is shaping — that’s how they learn so fast in person. And it can happen in seconds when you’re doing interactive video over the Internet.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: What’s your setup for doing these interactive training sessions over the Internet?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: I take my notebook computer, plug in my Sony HandyCam, and shoot whatever it is we’re teaching or discussing. It’s getting to the point where it’s all plug and play, and if I can do it, many people can.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: So that’s the broadcast piece of it, what’s the setup for interacting with people who are following along?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: That happens on a page at my website, <a href=\"http://historichomeworks.com\">HistoricHomeworks.com</a>. Other people log in there to the FlashMeeting system, and if they have camera and audio at their end, I can see and hear them. Typical numbers are two or three participants, up to eight or ten. The live sessions are also catalogued for later viewing.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: The FlashMeeting system has some interesting features, including a method of visualizing the conversation so you can see who spoke when and for how long.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: That helps support the Knowledge Media Institute’s principal mission, which is to study and understand how knowledge spreads from person to person around the world. The analytical features built into FlashMeeting serve that mission.</p>\n<p>It fascinates me. For example, you can see displayed on a map of the world the locations of viewers of these recorded sessions showing how to restore historic windows, or painting and restoring exterior woodwork. I can see where the interest is, and it turns out that people everywhere care about this stuff, because there are wooden buildings all around the world. On six of the seven continents there are people using these videos streaming from my office in Portland, Maine. At KMI they joke that they’re waiting for someone to start watching in Antarctica.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: It’s an interesting point because in the world of online media there’s a lot of emphasis on what’s new, but you’re operating out on the long tail. Your piece on interior storm windows was very relevant to me because I just went through the exercise of doing the stretch-and-seal method, and your demonstration of how to build reusable interior storms really got my attention.</p>\n<p>That’s an idea a person might never encounter. But if you do, it doesn’t matter when. The publishing world calls this evergreen content, it’s valuable anytime.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Right. There’s also a discussion on my website about this topic. It’s more expositional — words and pictures — and that goes hand in hand with the video. One of the limitations of the FlashMeeting system is that I can’t annotate the video, after the fact, with links to those materials.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: A lot of folks will look at this and say, OK, John Leeke is an unusual guy. He doesn’t just do the work, he also documents the work, and that’s great for him, but it’s not really relevant to most people who won’t have the time or inclination. For them, this process seems tangential.</p>\n<p>But I think that’s often untrue. Here’s an example. I have a pellet stove, and there are a couple of maintenance procedures that I frankly screwed up the first time through because I didn’t absorb the understanding of how to do them from the manual. What struck me was that once I knew how to do it, I could have illustrated these procedures with a couple of five minute videos. And maybe I should just do that myself. But the thing is, if I’m the dealer, and I’m getting complaints from customers who are buying these things and then failing to understand the manual and screwing things up, it’s very much in my interest to do some of my own video documentation.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Of course. And by the way, I’m not special. I’m just a carpenter up here in Maine, taking care of my own house. It just turns out that my work is also helping other people to take care of their houses. Well, yes, it’s not unique but special that I have this compulsion to share what I’m learning and figuring out. But the ability to share it — well, no matter who you are, if your neighbor sees you fixing your windows, and comes over and knocks on your door and asks about how to do it, you would show him. This is just an extension of that. Now we can have neighbors further afield.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Yes. There was a time when the work people did was visible. You saw what they did.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: You saw what the people next to you did.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: That’s right. And you understood what the different kinds of work were, because you saw people doing that work. But then, in the industrial age, dad went off to work, he disappeared in the morning, and showed up again at the end of the day, and work was a black box. Who knew what dad did?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: That’s the industrial disconnect. And there’s a disconnect on the marketing side as well. Through the last half of the 20th century, as the industrial revolution gears up to grind itself into nothing — which is now happening — the method of marketing to more people than needed stuff was to disconnect the people from each other, so that everybody needed something, instead of sharing with their family or neighbors. Everybody needed their own lawnmower. But you figure your lawnmower is sitting idle in your garage for 99% of its time. One lawnmower could easily mow everybody’s lawn on the block.</p>\n<p>But that’s the consumer culture that was developed by manufacturers. So very few people now know to run that glazing compound to seal the glass to the wooden frame. This is purposeful. They don’t want people to know how to run glazing because that limits the market for vinyl plastic imitation windows.</p>\n<p>So I only have one person on the block I can teach locally, but I can connect with more people with interactive video. Because of the access to the long tail, I can be teaching lots of people who need to know that.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Here’s another aspect I wanted to ask you about. When it’s hard to see how work is done, it’s hard to know what it’s like to be a person who does that kind of work. Unless it’s in the family, you won’t see it, and even then you probably won’t. You don’t have the family or community scope in which to see other kinds of work being done. And lacking that, you can get pretty far down an educational path before you realize that the path isn’t for you at all.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Right. So, I’ve been focused on task-specific demonstration, but you’re talking about another thing that’s happening with video over the Internet — life blogging, or life broadcasting. I don’t think anybody’s doing that as a tradesperson. What is it like to wake up at 4:30 AM, so you can be on the site working on the windows, all day long, and then get in your pickup truck and drive back home? As you say, a lot of people could go all the way through school, and study building construction at the college level, and then take specialty courses in historic carpentry work, and by the time they’re in their early 20s they’re well-educated and have a good set of hands-on skills — and then realize that they don’t like to get up early in the morning.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: You’ve painted the downside, and that’s fair, people should understand that, but on the upside, the life blogging should also communicate how you feel when you drive by a house that you’ve restored, and how you know the people living there feel as a result of the work you’ve done.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Absolutely. This is the heart side of the work that the industrial revolution leaves out. It boils everything down to mind and hand, and leaves out the heart. That is the heart side, when you drive by those buildings you helped restore, last month or last year or 20 years ago. It is the reason why we get up early in the morning to go to work. You know that you’re helping people who live in and use those buildings.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Now there are certainly many people who will feel that these methods they get paid to practice are proprietary knowledge they wouldn’t want to reveal. My argument is that in a lot of cases, by demonstrating expertise you’ll attract more work than you lose, and that it’ll often be more interesting and rewarding work. What’s your experience?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Both of those ideas do play strongly in the building trades. It’s a real tradition to keep secrets. Going back hundreds and hundreds of years, with the guild systems, there were ways to control the sharing of that kind of knowledge. And it’s still the case. Not every plasterer who can do those decorative Ionic capitals wants everybody to know exactly how they do it. But they do want everybody to know that it can be done.</p>\n<p>You’re right, this is how artisans can do good marketing — by letting people know what is involved, by showing some of these methods, and they don’t have to give up all their secrets in order to do that. But you can help people to understand that it’s not just a machine spitting out product, it’s people making stuff with their minds and their hands and their hearts.</p>\n<p>That’s another part of how I use Internet video. I go to some of my colleagues’ shops, as well as my own, and show what this is all about, because it is not well understood by the public. Video can get to the nuances of the heart side of this work.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Also, if you can show me how to take care of some basic things for myself, maybe I can turn around and hire you to do something really special.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Yeah. I’m hoping that we’re now in a post-modern cultural movement, which is what I think you’re talking about. Back in the 1970s I was already working in this realm of making fine things by hand, and there was a groundswell of interest. That’s when Alex Haley’s Roots phenomenon happened. It was important because it touched the hearts of people in America. That’s really what our restoration work is about, it’s the connnection with the people who once lived in these buildings. It wasn’t the national trust and the President telling us to save buildings, it was people who wanted to save them because their grandfathers built them.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: So where do you fall along the continuum of trade secrets and knowledge sharing?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: I’m at the extreme end of sharing everything I know. I’m a one-person microbusiness and always have been. I grew up in the midwest where sharing what you knew, and helping people, was what life was about, for everybody. That was the culture. It was a natural for me. It didn’t seem like it was worth keeping secrets.</p>\n<p>My dad said that if you want to do well in trades, you have to let people know what you do. This is what it’s been all about for me — letting enough people know.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: And you have found incredible marketing power in doing what you do?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Oh yeah. As I was working as a tradesperson in the 70s, and a contractor in the 80s, I made a shift because I’d been doing a good job of documenting my work. That’s something else I learned from my father. I also had the documents he created for his work, going back to the 20s, this huge information resource that I had to share.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Really? What did he document?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: He documented his work in the arts and trades. He was a commercial artist through the 20s, then shifted into furniture and buildings at the craftsman/artisan level.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: And he left behind detailed logs of his practice?</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Yeah, detailed files of every project he ever worked on. So I learned that as part of my carpentry and woodworking, growing up in his shop, and continued it when I left his shop and came east to work on old buildings. So by the early 1980s I had this whole backlog of my own work to share. And by sharing it, I created extraordinary interest in my work. Back then it was through the print media — Fine Woodworking, Old House Journal, Fine Homebuilding — and a lot of people learned about the work I was doing to restore columns on old porches, saving windows, doing woodwork repairs. When I learned something I thought was worth sharing, I’d write an article about it. The editors loved it, and their readers did too, it was the authentic stuff, what was really going on out there in the field.</p>\n<p>With that body of knowledge, by the late 1980s I was consulting on projects, helping people solve problems with their buildings. That meant I could be on even more projects, helping more people, and if I was writing about what I was learning, then each project was an order of magnitude larger. If I’m doing hands-on work on buildings I might only be helping a few people. If I’m consulting, it might be tens of people. If I’m writing, we figured ten or fifteen thousand people were using my articles. Each is a jump in magnitude. Then of course the Internet, where I got an early start in 1994 and 95.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: I’m sure a lot of folks will look at your example and feel that, since they’ll never become featured writers for magazines, there’s no point in doing this kind of sharing in a more modest way. But I think there’s benefit at any level of engagement. You’ve clearly thought through the dynamics of the communication pattern here: one-to-many, multi-level distribution. But for a lot of people, even with electronic media, that isn’t obvious. They’ll still spend a lot of time doing one-to-one communication. They’ll write something up, they’ll even take some pictures, but then they’ll just email that to somebody else.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: Two birds with one stone. I realized that if I wanted to accomplish the things I want to get done in my life, I have to get more than one result for every action or activity. The print — and now online — publications that I do are my marketing program, so I don’t have to spend money on advertising. And now you call, and want to talk with me, and if I was only getting one benefit from that, I wouldn’t be able to say yes. But I can already see two or three things that’ll come from talking to you, so I can say yes.</p>\n<p>Say I’m thinking of taking on a project to help my neighbor rebuild her front steps. OK, I can earn some money. And I can take a series of photos for a print article, and that’ll bring some more income but it’ll also help with my personal goal of sharing more, and then I can easily shoot a little video that I can broadcast on the Internet and that will help an astonishing number of people. So I can’t say no, because I’m getting multiple benefits. But I would have to say no if the only benefit was getting paid to fix the steps.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: You’ve really thought it through.</p>\n<p><strong>JL</strong>: The key is that the video camera and the computer and the Internet are just tools, no different from my table saw and push stick, or my old wooden hand plane. They’re all just tools, and they’re all in the same kit for me, and I’m a tool user, and I help people with their old buildings.</p>\n<p>How can people do this? I’ve found a balance. Instead of watching television, I make television.</p>\n<p><strong>JU</strong>: Well said. Thanks John!</p>\n <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/jonudell.wordpress.com/848/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=blog.jonudell.net&blog=109309&post=848&subd=jonudell&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "What We Value Is What We Save In a Crisis",
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"content" : "<blockquote>“When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. . . . A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.”<br><br> -- Sherlock Holmes from A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle<br></blockquote><br>When a central bank thinks its house is on fire, it too will rush to save the thing valued most. In the United States, the central bank has rushed to save the bonuses and dividends of its Wall Street clientele by hiding away the bad assets that can no longer be foisted on gullible investors. In Europe too the response of central banks has been to save the wholesale banking and securities industry rather than the consumers and businesses underlying the real economy’s longer term productive strength.<br><br>For a comparative of what is valued elsewhere, it is worthwhile to look at what is being saved. I received in my inbox yesterday documents outlining the efforts being taken by the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to address the liquidity crisis in their respective jurisdictions. They are available online <a href=\"http://interact.winston.com/reaction/marketspotlight/clientbriefingnewsletter/2008/Briefing_11_25_08/Hong_Kong.pdf\">here</a> (Hong Kong) and <a href=\"http://interact.winston.com/reaction/marketspotlight/clientbriefingnewsletter/2008/Briefing_11_25_08/China_Government.pdf\">here</a> (PRC). The contrasts with the West are striking, and humbling.<br><br>Hong Kong is swiftly introducing a scheme to guarantee credit to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and exporters. China is introducing controls to limit bank credit to over-extended speculative sectors, accelerate rebuilding in the regions affected by the earthquake earlier this year, and promote improvements in local infrastructure, education and economic adjustment.<br><br>Holmes would have been disgusted by a married woman who grabbed her jewel-box in preference to her baby. In the same way, I am disgusted by the central banks preserving the privileges of the financial elite in preference to the jobs, incomes and businesses powering the real economy. The US and UK authorities may criticise the banks for their inaction in freeing up lending to commercial businesses constrained by the credit crunch. The Hong Kong and Chinese authorities are implementing guarantee schemes and innovating initiatives to rapidly address the problem.<br><br>As Holmes would have considered a child’s life worth more than jewels, I consider the workers and businesses in the real economy as meriting greater protection than the financial elite. It is not merely that I think the financial elite little better than criminals for their irresponsible excesses of recent years, but that I fear long term harm and political instability will come from neglecting the needs of the real economy.<br><br>Shortsightedness is a peculiar affliction of the Western economies. We cannot seem to project the consequences of our actions beyond the next quarterly report, fiscal year or - at most - election cycle. Eastern policy makers have a capacity for longer vision – and longer memory – which makes them appreciate sooner the potential consequences of bad policy. Perhaps this is a consequence of the longer term dedication required to gain political ascendancy in their less cyclical heirarchy.<br><br>That China's leadership is concerned with the implications for the real economy – and political stability – was confirmed this morning in an unusually blunt public statement by the chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission. From the <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/621f0ec4-bca1-11dd-9efc-0000779fd18c.html\">Financial Times</a>:<br><br><blockquote> The downturn in the Chinese economy accelerated over the past month and could lead to high unemployment and social unrest, the country’s top economic planner warned on Thursday.<br><br> Zhang Ping, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the government needed to take “forceful” measures to limit the slowdown in the economy, which included Wednesday’s large cut in interest rates and a sharp increase in fiscal spending. The rate cut was the fourth since September.<br><br> “The global financial crisis has not bottomed out yet. The impact is spreading globally and deepening in China. Some domestic economic indicators point to an accelerated slowdown in November,” Mr Zhang said on Thursday at a rare news conference.<br><br> Mr Zhang’s warning about the potential for social unrest as a result of factory closures underlined the mounting concern in Beijing about the fallout from the global financial crisis.<br><br> “Excessive production cuts and closures of businesses will cause massive unemployment, which will lead to instability,” Mr Zhang said.<br></blockquote><br><br>As Jim Rohm observed, “Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”<br><br>The crisis in debt markets has been rolling since the sub-prime collapse of August 2007. The increasing illiquidity of commercial paper, trade credit, municipal finance and other debt markets was foreseeable and inevitable. And yet the central banks and treasury authorities of the Western nations have done nothing to shield these essential sectors from the ill effects of the financial sector implosion while giving virtually unlimited funds to the banks authoring the collapse.<br><br>Any discussion of China always invites criticism of its anti-democratic governance. It is worth remembering that the philisophical defense of democracy lies in the proposition that it is more likely over time to serve the interests of the electorate than a system which disenfranchises the people from the determination of their leadership. If the democratically elected governments - through their appointed executives and central bankers - are free over an extended timespan to ignore the interests of the people, then how is a Western democracy superior to a Chinese bureaucracy? From looking at the policies and practices of the past year, the merits of Western democracy are not immediately apparent in ensuring that policy responses to the financial crisis are aligned with the interests of the people. Even over the past decade, it is not clear that the policies of the democratic Western governments have aimed to strengthen and broaden the economy to benefit of the electorate rather than a narrow, self-serving elite.<br><br><a href=\"http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2008/11/26/if-you-only-read-one-thing-on-china-this-fall-%E2%80%A6/\">According to Brad Setser</a>, the World Bank is projecting increases to China’s trade surplus in 2009 as falling commodity prices lower production costs. Those unelected bureaucrats are doing something right.<br><br>If China and Hong Kong recover sooner, prosper more, and gain global political and economic authority in consequence, it will be because they made fewer mistakes and made them less persistently than their Western counterparts. If the promoters of democracy want to strengthen their case, they might best do so by ensuring that their leadership adheres to policies which promote the longer term health and well being of the economy as a whole rather than the short term enrichment of an undemocratic elite.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/912107698547747613-3918299496078127765?l=londonbanker.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The Bible on credit default swaps?",
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"content" : "Do not be a man who strikes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts; if you lack the means to pay, your very bed will be snatched from under you.<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">--Proverbs 22:26-27</span><br><br>He who puts up security for another will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to strike hands in pledge is safe.<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">--Proverbs 11:15</span><br><br>A man lacking in judgment strikes hands in pledge and puts up security for his neighbor.<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">--Proverbs 17:18</span><br><br>Take the garment of one who puts up security for a stranger; hold it in pledge if he does it for a wayward woman.<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">--Proverbs 20:16 on the wisdom of demanding collateral when lending to AIG</span>"
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"content" : "<p>10 o’clock on a Saturday night. A UN canteen in the northern reaches of Liberia. Spanish soccer on the TV. Belgian beers on hand. Tuna fish sandwiches on the menu. </p><p>A Korean, a Kenyan, an American, a clutch of Pakistani peacekeepers, and… a karaoke machine. </p><p>At first I thought nothing could beat the Pakistani officer belting out Madonna’s <em>La Isla Bonita</em>, but a trio of Africans singing <em>We Are the World</em> brought down the house.</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?a=PSGwN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?i=PSGwN\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?a=vYehN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?i=vYehN\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?a=wFTNN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?i=wFTNN\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?a=xXqrn\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?i=xXqrn\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?a=FgSAN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/chrisblattman?i=FgSAN\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chrisblattman/~4/464031800\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<b>Rwandaland</b><br><br>A particularly annoying species of Afrobollocks is the use made in opinion journalism of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. I've written about this before - basically, for purposes of editorialising all one needs to know is that \"nobody intervened and therefore hundreds of thousands of people were killed\". The Rwanda Gambit is played by someone wishing to add a sprinkling of moral gravitas to whatever point they want to make, usually about the United Nations being tragically inadequate to the modern world because of its failure to endorse the bombing of a current enemy. It's irritating bullshit, and is not rendered any less so by the fact that Paul Kagame is all too inclined to play the same game at <a href=\"http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/15343\">the drop of a hat</a>.<br><br>And so we have <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/23/do2306.xml&posted=true&_requestid=5750\">Alasdair Palmer</a> in the Telegraph:<br><br><blockquote><i>If Kenya, South Africa or Uganda had intervened to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, for example, they would have been violating international law. China would certainly have vetoed any UN Security Council authorising an invasion of Rwanda, as would Russia: even Britain and America would probably have done so. </i></blockquote><br><br>Quite a lot to discuss here. <br><br>First, if South Africa had \"intervened to stop the genocide\", it would have to march its intervention force 1500 miles north through Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania (or the same distance up through DR Congo) in order to get there. This is rather like suggesting that Portugal might have intervened unilaterally in Croatia. Kenya is closer (about 450 miles from Nairobi to Kigali), but a) does not have a frontier with Rwanda either so would have to march through Uganda or Tanzania (depending which side of Lake Victoria they decided to go around) and b) was not exactly the world's most stable state itself in 1994, which was toward the back end of the Moi years. The geography here does not give one a whole load of confidence.<br><br>Second, this hypothetical four-party veto doesn't seem terribly consistent with the UNSC's actual behaviour. There was, actually, a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda (UNAMIR) at the time, and UNSC 929 was passed in June 1994, authorising the French government's Operation Turquoise. Neither UNAMIR nor Turquoise were effective, but this is a different issue and Palmer doesn't get to simply assert that his hypothetical South African intervention would have been an unqualified success. It certainly isn't the case that the UN Security Council in 1994 was so overcome with concern for Rwandan national sovereignty that it was prepared to quadruply veto any overseas intervention. In fact, the main opposition from Turquoise came from UNAMIR, which believed that the resources that France and the African Union were devoting to \"Zone Turquoise\" would have been better deployed to a toughened up UN force with more robust rules of engagement, and they were almost certainly right. If only the UNSC <i>had</i> been prepared to take more of a stand against unilateralism, things might have gone better.<br><br>I've made this point about Turquoise before but it's important so I'm making it again. There is a really annoying tendency among the pro-intervention lobby to pretend it didn't happen and that \"there was no intervention in Rwanda\". There was an intervention in Rwanda, it was Turquoise and it made things worse. It was a somewhat politically motivated, terribly badly planned and wholly counterproductive exercise. Or in other words, the normal kind. Using the example of Rwanda as a data point <i>in favour</i> of unilateral intervention requires you to have a theory about why Turquoise can be considered as irrelevant or <i>sui generis</i>. Without that (or even worse, to make rhetorical use of Rwanda without mentioning Turquoise at all) is a particularly toxic strain of Afrobollocks."
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"content" : "<div><p style=\"text-align:left;font-family:Verdana\">Pretentious enough title for you?</p><p style=\"text-align:center;font-family:Verdana\"><strong>I</strong><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"><br></span></p><p style=\"text-align:left;font-family:Verdana\"><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender systems - those algorithms that guess what you may be\ninterested in as you browse Amazon or listen to last.fm - are\ncommercially important. Netflix claims that 60% of its rentals are\ndriven by its Cinematch recommender system [</span><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"link\">link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">];\nthat's over half a billion dollars of business in 2008. As online\ncommerce continues to grow, recommender systems will only get more\nimportant.</span></p>\n\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>II</strong><br></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender\nsystems are culturally important too. As more of our culture moves\nonline, they will be responsible for more of our cultural experiences,\nand will play an important role in shaping the creative parts of our societies.</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>III</strong><br></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender\nsystems will get better. Ten years ago they were largely improvised. Now you\ncan do a Ph.D. in recommender systems and there are international\nacademic conferences all about them [</span><a href=\"http://recsys.acm.org/\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"link\">link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">].\nThe subject is ideal for academics - it is algorithmic and yet open\nended, with many different approaches and criteria for success. It's an\nendless playground for exploration and simulation.</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>IV</strong> <br></div>\n<p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">\nEven though they will improve, there is no such thing as an optimal recommender system. Accuracy is insufficient. The interests of\nrecommendees vary. Serendipity, intra-list variety, reliability and\ntrust-generation are just a few other considerations [</span><a href=\"http://www.grouplens.org/papers/pdf/mcnee-chi06-acc.pdf\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"link\">pdf link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">].</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>V</strong><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span><br><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Don't confuse the outcome of recommender systems with intrinsic merit.\nThe recommendations are highly dependent on history and are the\nproducts of cumulative advantage. Many think that "if the experts could\nonly figure out what it was about,\nsay, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed\nto so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will". But\nhits cannot be reliably predicted because our choices and preferences\nare too inter-linked. Clive Thompson writes that companies with\nrecommender systems can "track everything their customers do. Every\npage you visit,\nevery purchase you make, every item you rate — it is all recorded." [</span><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"link\">link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">] But other studies have shown the systems to be chaotic. Tiny, random fluctuations can lead to completely different outcomes. [</span><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"link\">link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">]</span></p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>VI<br></strong></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender systems can easily reinforce inequalities among recommended\nitems. A system that recommends popular items will increase those\nitems' popularity. Unpopular items will be left in the dust. Such\nsystems can make big hits even bigger, and can lead to an overall\ndecrease in cultural diversity.</span></p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>VII<br></strong></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender systems can increase the experience of diversity. By\ndrawing attention to items individuals have not found by themselves,\nthey can lead to new experiences. But individual diversity is different\nfrom overall diversity. Some systems can increase both individual and\noverall diversity. Other systems increase individual diversity but, at\nthe same time, prompt consumers to be increasingly similar to each\nother. Their selections then come from an increasingly narrow range of\nitems [</span><a href=\"http://digital.mit.edu/wise2006/papers/5a-1_recommendations%20wise%20sep%2008.pdf\" style=\"font-family:Verdana\" title=\"pdf link\">pdf link</a><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">].</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>VIII</strong><br></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Ownership matters. Given the variety of approaches, outcomes, and\nabsence of clear "best" alternatives, and given the ability of\nrecommender systems to shape the experiences of their users, there is\nample room for ulterior motives to become embodied in the system. The\nincentives for the recommender and the recommendee may be different.\nThe incentives for Netflix in a regime where they deliver physical DVDs\n(of which they have limited stock) may be to promote the back\ncatalogue. When they deliver movies digitally (as they are about to)\nthere may be no such constraint and they may be more tempted to promote\nexisting blockbusters. The most valuable recommender systems may be\nthose that are independent of producers and vendors.</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>IX<br></strong>\n</div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">\nTransparency matters. The unmarked presence of sponsored items in a\nrecommendation list would be widely viewed as a corrupt set of\nrecommendations, but just as some bookstores charge for premium display\nsites within the store, so sites on recommendation lists may be sold.\nRecommendees have a right to know if payola is part of the system.</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>X</strong><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span><br><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender systems will displace the filtering role\nof both reviewers and of publishers. But while bad\nreviewers and publishers would not be missed, good reviewers and\npublishers are not only filters; they are also an active part of cultural creation. The impact of recommender systems on these members\nof creative communities is important.</span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>XI</strong><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span><br><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">The word "community" is widely used in conjunction with\nrecommender systems, but they do little to build communities. Their use is essentially an individual, isolated\nact. Groups and networks are as important in the creation and experience of culture\nas individuals. Recommender systems will play a role in how culture is\nexperienced, but they are not necessarily a strong force pushing us\neither towards or away from a healthy culture.<br><br></span></p><div style=\"text-align:center\"><strong>XII</strong><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span><br><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\"></span></div><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">Recommender systems only filter culture, in various ways; the point is to create environments in which culture can prosper.</span></p><p><span style=\"font-family:Verdana\">[Final thesis updated to agree with Cosma Shalizi: "artists can prosper" -> "culture can prosper" ]</span></p></div>"
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"content" : "<p>I started reading V. S. Naipaul when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, in a little village in Togo, West Africa, in the early eighties. Those were not happy years. The human-rights experts are correct: solitary confinement is a form of torture. I became all too acquainted with the labyrinths of my own thinking, which are recorded somewhere in notebooks that I haven’t dared to open for the past quarter century. </p>\n\n<p>Somehow, Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” fell into my hands. It had been published a few years earlier and was making its way among book-starved volunteers with far too much free time. It appealed to me strongly on two levels. First, here was a picture of Africa as I was experiencing it at the very same time: the Africa of cults of personality, state-mandated campaigns of “authenticity,” frustrated secondary-school students with their heads full of half-understood concepts, village women living in an invisible universe, white expatriates whose ideals were slowly congealing into opportunism and loneliness relieved by sex. A great novelist had given my disorientation in this obscure place a form. Reading it made me think that my own experiences could have some value beyond their private importance for me, that they could be transposed into writing. (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Village-Waiting-George-Packer/dp/0374527806/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227300040&sr=8-1\">“The Village of Waiting,”</a> which came out in 1988, owes more than a little to Naipaul.) </p>\n\n<p>And then there was the form itself: it was brilliant. Naipaul’s sentences are terrifying and exhilarating in their clarity and exactness. They tell you that this writer misses nothing, and that he will tell you the truth, if you can stand it. “The world is what it is,” goes the opening sentence of “A Bend in the River.” “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” The concreteness of the prose led me to start observing the village where I lived and the people whom I met more carefully. It made me think that I was missing important things because of the obsessive inwardness of my thoughts. It wasn’t a cure for incipient psychosis, but it gave me a model of ruthless objectivity that I could only aspire to.</p>\n\n<p>Stateside, I read more Naipaul: “In a Free State,” “Guerrillas,” “The Enigma of Arrival,” “The Return of Eva Peron.” I was reading with the hunger and Talmudic care of an apprentice—trying to figure out how he got so much power out of his semi-colons. At the same time, Naipaul appalled me—especially as he appeared in his non-fiction, where his intense sympathetic imagination sometimes faltered and his irritable, unpleasant self came to the surface. He was obviously not a nice man, and if you happened to be the escort assigned to drive the great writer from the airport to his bookstore event, God help you. As for his politics, they were not mine, but they were not those of a benighted reactionary or contemptuous racist either (I wrote about Naipaul’s world view a few years ago in <a href=\"http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=590\"><em>Dissent</em> magazine</a>, where for a long time I made my literary home).</p>\n\n<p>None of this presented any conflict for me. I once met J. M. Coetzee and couldn’t get out of his frozen presence fast enough. I doubt Orwell would be an easy man to hang out with. Yet these were the writers who meant the most to me when I was starting to write.</p>\n\n<p>This week, I review <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/books/review/Packer-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=George%20Packer%20and%20Naipaul&st=cse\">Patrick French’s authorized biography of Naipaul</a> for the New York <em>Times Book Review</em>. It’s a wonderful book, engrossing to read, and it raises the question of the relation between the work and the man in its starkest form: how can a writer who is monstrously inhumane to the people closest to him endow his characters with such humanity? To the sophisticated, this is an impermissibly naïve question, but I can’t help being troubled by it. We don’t require, let alone expect, great artists to be model citizens or even decent people, but we do imagine them to be alive to the humanity of others in order to give it artistic form. How this aliveness could fail to guide the artist in life even a little is a mystery that I try to think through a bit in the review.</p>\n\n<p>A related question came up when I was reading through the soon-to-be-published first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, “<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Reborn-Notebooks-1947-1963-Susan-Sontag/dp/0374100748/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227302316&sr=8-1\">Reborn.</a>” Someone who knew her well told me, “It’s her best book. This is who she really was.” To say that who she was, at least in her teens and twenties, was an intensely self-absorbed, self-important, self-critical, other-critical, serious, <em>serious</em> young person would be to state the obvious. Her determination to devour the European avant-garde and check off the books as she swallows them is a little frightening. Many sentences read as if Kafka is sitting in the corner of the room, waiting to hear Sontag’s latest entry. </p>\n\n<p>She’s also deeply absorbed in her sexuality, which is directed almost entirely toward women—cruel women. Her intoxication keeps dissipating under the more powerful spell of her analyzing mind. The writer who famously declared, in “Against Interpretation,” “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” seems incapable of leaving physical pleasure alone for more than five seconds. And there are many pieces of literary reflection, in the form of little paragraph-long essays, like this:</p>\n\n<blockquote>One is either an outside (Homer, Tolstoy) or an inside (Kafka) writer. The world or madness. Homer + Tolstoy like figurative painting—try to represent a world with sublime charity, beyond judgment. Or—uncork one’s madness. The first is far greater. I will only be the second kind of writer.</blockquote>\n\n<p>Naipaul, of course, was the first.</p>\n\n<p>One of the truly unsettling aspects of these journals is that they are edited by Sontag’s son, David Rieff—an important writer in his own right, who staked out his own terrain in the shadow of his mother’s consuming ego and literary appetite. Reading journals edited by Sontag’s son makes one feel that he’s caught his mother naked and staring at her own reflection in the mirror, and continuing to stare as her son stands unnoticed in the doorway. In his self-assigned task, Rieff had to read and publish for the world’s inspection passages like this:</p>\n\n<blockquote><p>I am waiting for David to grow up the way I waited to get through school and grow up. Only it’s my life that will pass! The three sentences I’ve served: my childhood, my marriage, my child’s childhood.</p>\n\n<p>I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. Maybe I should give David up.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Rieff’s preface shows that he thought all the angles through before going ahead. The preface is as self-questioning, second-guessing, and morally severe as his book on humanitarianism, “<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Bed-Night-Humanitarianism-Crisis/dp/074325211X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227304086&sr=8-1\">A Bed for the Night.</a>” Perhaps there’s something unhealthy and narcissistic, perhaps even posthumously vengeful, in this presentation of his mother’s innermost self to the world. But I admire Rieff for having the courage to do it. And he has two more volumes to go.</p>"
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"content" : "<b>Nate: </b><em>“\"The world's most popular chair\"—this one with murkier, more recent origins than the venerable Thonet Model No.14. Still, when Bruce Cockburn sings about his visit to a Mozambique village, \"They stuck me in the only chair they had / while the cooked cassava and a luckless hen,\" there's no doubt which sort of seat he's talking about.”</em><br>\t\t\n\t\t<div style=\"float:right;padding:15px 5px 5px 5px\"><img src=\"http://culture-making.com/media/Plastic-Chair_210.jpg\" alt=\"image\"></div><p>Maybe you’re sitting on one right now. It has a high back with slats, or arches, or a fan of leaf blades, or some intricate tracery. Its legs are wide and splayed, not solid. The plastic in the seat is three-sixteenths of an inch thick. It’s probably white, though possibly green. Maybe you like how handy it is, how you can stack it or leave it outdoors and not worry about it. Maybe you’re pleased that it cost less than a bottle of shampoo.</p><p>No matter what you’re doing, millions of other people around the world are likely sitting right now on a single-piece, jointless, all-plastic, all-weather, inexpensive, molded stacking chair. It may be the most popular chair in history.</p><p>That dawned on me recently after I started noticing The Chair in news photographs from global trouble spots. In a town on the West Bank, an indignant Yasser Arafat holds a broken chair damaged by an Israeli military operation. In Nigeria, contestants in a Miss World pageant are seated demurely on plastic chairs just before riots break out, killing some 200 people. In Baghdad, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III, during a ceremony honoring Iraqi recruits, sits on a white plastic chair as if on a throne....</p><p>The plastic chairs in all those places were essentially alike, as far as I could tell, and seemed to be a natural part of the scene, whatever it was. It occurred to me that this humble piece of furniture, criticized by some people as hopelessly tacky, was an item of truly international, even universal, utility. What other product in recent history has been so widely, so to speak, embraced? And how had it found niches in so many different societies and at so many different levels, from posh resorts to dirt courtyards? How did it gain a global foothold?\n</p><hr>\n<div style=\"font-size:-1\">from \"<a href=\"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/seat.html?c=y&page=1\">Everybody Take A Seat</a>,\" by Mariana Gosnell, <a href=\"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/seat.html?c=y&page=1\"><i>Smithsonian</i></a>, July 2004 :: image via <a href=\"http://neetaexports.tradeindia.com/Exporters_Suppliers/Exporter12938.186559/Plastic-Chair.html\">Neeta Exports</a></div>"
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"content" : "<div><div>\n<p>A look under our floorboards.</p>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_l/3038666719/\" title=\"Under the floorboards by steve_l, on Flickr\"><img alt=\"Under the floorboards\" height=\"333\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3053/3038666719_0650e80322.jpg\" width=\"500\"></a> \n\n<p>The cables contain elecriticy and cable broadband. The pipe\ncontains hot water. And the funny thing between them: Something\nfrom 160 years ago so that when the owner pulled a bell on the\nfireplace, a cord was pulled that ran round corners and down the\nstairs to the servants in the basement. Alexander was fascinated by\nthis and the old bits of gas piping -from the days of gas lighting-\ndown here.</p>\n\nWhat I find funny is this: 160 years ago: one bit/second - a bell\nto the basement. Now, 2+ MBit/s to the outside world. But the way\nwe route round the house: that hasn't changed. Routing is eternal.\n<br>\n<br>\n<p>At this point someone is being smug and saying "oh not, I have\n3G broadband routing is not eternal for me", but there's more. The\ntop of my road -the top of the hill- is where bristol used to\nexecute criminals -it was a Hanging Hill. They chose hills near\ncities so the signal "don't be naughty" was widely transmitted to\nthe populace. Now, every couple of years, we have to deal with a\nmobile telco trying to stick a phone mast on the hill because even\nwith mobile phones, the routing is eternal - only the data and the\ndata rate changes.<br>\n<br>\n</p>\n</div></div>"
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"content" : "<p>From 8:02 until 8:58 this morning, I was in the care of an excellent <a href=\"http://www.dentalglossary.net/definition/811-Endodentist\">endodentist</a>, having a root canal. At the end of that hour, I was presented with a bill for $1,080, a number I associate more with high definition TVs than with hourly wages. </p>\n<p><p>My endodentist was excellent. She’s highly skilled and had great chair-side manner, narrating each step, and preparing me for every delightful little surprise ( “You’ll feel a dull thud as I jam this this phillips-head screwdriver into your tooth, handle first.” “The smell of your own body burning may be a little pungent.”) I am old enough to remember when root canal was the standard measure of pain, just as “the length of a football field” is the standard measure of distance and “as many books as in the Library of Congress” is the standard measure of volume, so I have no complaints about a procedure that has become merely uncomfortable with occasional sharp twinges.</p>\n<p><p>But $1,080 an hour? In Boston, that’s seems to be the going rate, albeit at the high end. On the other hand, after dental insurance, it only cost me $1,080….because there’s no practical way for me to get dental insurance.</p>\n<p><p> I seriously don’t understand the pricing model. The endodentist is part of my dentist’s general practice. She shares the facilities and uses the same rooms. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of complex special equipment involved, outside of some rasps, a keyhole saw, and a cash register. She’s had some specialized training, but are root canals really that much more complex than the range of procedures my general dentist can do, from reconstructing a tooth to diagnosing gum problems? Meanwhile, the endodentist is in danger of getting repetitive stress syndrome from doing the same motions — drill, scrape, fill, phone her broker — over and over.</p>\n<p><p>Is it pure scarcity that drives the prices up? At those prices, why is there a scarcity? And why aren’t other dental procedures broken off and priced as exorbitantly? Or is this a residue of the days when root canals were so painful that people wanted to feel like they were getting their money’s worth? <span>[Tags: <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/endodentists\" rel=\"tag\">endodentists</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/root+canals\" rel=\"tag\">root_canals</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/capitalism\" rel=\"tag\">capitalism</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/health+care\" rel=\"tag\">health_care</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/dentistry+crabby+after+a+root+canal\" rel=\"tag\">dentistry_crabby_after_a_root_canal</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/i+don't+understand+economics\" rel=\"tag\">i_don't_understand_economics</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/\" rel=\"tag\"></a> ]</span></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Visualizing last.fm",
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"content" : "<span style=\"text-decoration:line-through\">PhD student</span> Last.fm Employee <a href=\"http://home.mit.bme.hu/~nepusz/\">Nepusz Tamás</a> has created some nifty and rather intriguing plots of the last.fm artist similarity space at his site: <a href=\"http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/index.html\">Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with last.fm</a>\n<img src=\"http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/resource/_sixdegrees.png\" alt=\"sixdegrees.png\" border=\"0\" style=\"margin:10px\">. \n<p>\n<i>Update: There's a s<a href=\"http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/gallery/\">uper-zoomable version on the seadragon gallery page</a>. I can't figure out how to directly link to the image ... It is the 5th one from the right.</i>\n\nThe plot is created by crawling the similar artist graph of Last.fm (starting with Nightwish of all places) using the last.fm audioscrobbler webservices. The artists are arranged on the graph using a DrL graph layout algorithm (DrL is a force-directed layout algorithm that works with very large data sets. More info about this algorithm can be found in <a href=\"http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.14.2764\">this paper</a> ). The nodes in the graph are colored based upon the most frequent tags, while the edges are colored based upon their '<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality#Betweenness_centrality\">betweeness centrality score</a>'. The area of a node in the graph is approximately proportional to the popularity of the artist.\n<p>\nNepusz has also created an <a href=\"http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/interactive_map.html\">interactive map</a> that allows you to type in the name of a few artists to see where they live on the map - or you can just enter your last.fm user name and it will show you where all your favorite artists are in the world of music.\n<p>\nThe layout algorithm does a pretty good job of showing the large scale structure of the artist space. Artists with similar genre tags are well clustered. The ability to see where a particular artist is located on the map is very nice and the last.fm user integration is particularly sweet. Interesting too, is how the popular artists seem to be clustered in the graph. The larger vertices in the red-rock area form a very tight line. This may be an effect of using the Last.fm artist similarity which has a popularity bias (the top <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles/+similar\">10 artists similar to the beatles</a> are all very popular artists).\n<p>\nWhat I really wish I could do is to use these plots for music discovery - I'd like to be able to mouse over a vertex to see what the band is (and even be able to listen to the band). It would be really interesting, for instance, to explore the point where the electronic and the rock world meets (like in the subsection of the graph shown here on the left - what artist is represented by the large orange node?). <img src=\"http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/resource/_6d-outlyer.png\" alt=\"6d-outlyer.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"62\" height=\"84\" style=\"float:left;margin:5px\"> It'd be interested to see what the outliers are (I wonder what this reggae/ska artist is doing near the jazz, as seen in the subgraph on the right). <img src=\"http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/resource/_6d-outlyer2.1.png\" alt=\"6d-outlyer2.1.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"75\" height=\"53\" style=\"float:right;margin:10px\"> I'd like to be able to zoom in and see some of the finer structure (if I zoom in on the Nightwish neighborhood, do I find more finnish, gothic metal?).\n<p>\nI'm a sucker for such visualizations, I think they can be a powerful tool for helping people to understand and explore a music space, and they can reveal relations and structure that are not evident in simple lists of similar artists. But creating these visualizations are not easy. Without special care they can easily turn into meaningless blobs. Nepusz has done an excellent job finding the right embedding algorithm, color and sizing strategy for the data. I hope he continues to add interactivity to his plots. <b>Well done.</b></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Systemic Risk, Contagion and Trade Finance - Back to the Bad Old Days",
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"content" : "Back in the old days (pre-1980s), the term <span style=\"font-style:italic\">systemic risk</span> did not refer to contagion of illiquidity within the financial sector alone. Back then, when the real economy was much more important than low margin, unglamorous banking, it was understood that the really scary systemic risk was the risk of contagion of illiquidity from the financial sector to the real economy of trade in real goods and real services.<br><br>If you think of it, every single non-cash commercial transaction requires the intermediation of banks on behalf of – at the very least – the buyer and the seller. If you lengthen the supply chain to producers, exporters and importers and allow for agents along the way, the chain of banks involved becomes quite long and complex.<br><br>When central bankers back in the old days argued that banks were “special” – and therefore demanded higher capital, strict limits on leverage, tight constraints on business activity, and superior integrity of management – it was because they appreciated the harm that a bank failure would have in undermining the supply chain for business in the real economy for real people causing real joblessness and real hunger if any bank along the chain should be unable to perform.<br><br>As the “specialness” of banks eroded with the decline of the real economy (and the migration globally of many of those real jobs making real goods and providing real added-value services to real people), the nature of systemic risk was adjusted to become self-referencing to the financial elite. Central bankers of the current generation only understand systemic risk as referring to contagion of illiquidity among financial institutions.<br><br>They and we all are about to learn the lessons of the past anew.<br><br>We are now starting to see the contagion effects of the current liquidity crisis feed through to the real economy. We are about to go back to the bad old days. Whether the zombie banks are kept on life support by the central banks and taxpayers of the world is highly relevant to whether the zombie bank executives pay themselves outsize bonuses and their zombie shareholders outsize dividends with taxpayer money. It appears sadly irrelevant to whether the banks perform their function of intermediating credit and commercial transactions in the real economy along the supply chain. The bailout cash and executive and shareholder priorities do not seem to reach so far.<br><br>The recent 93 percent collapse of the obscure Baltic Dry Index – an index of the cost of chartering bulk cargo vessels for goods like ore, cotton, grain or similar dry tonnage – has caused a bit of a stir among the financial cognoscenti. What is less discussed amidst the alarm is the reason for the collapse of the index – the collapse of trade credit based on the venerable <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_credit\">letter of credit</a>.<br><br>Letters of credit have financed trade for over 400 years. They are considered one of the more stable and secure means of finance as the cargo is secures the credit extended to import it. The letter of credit irrevocably advises an exporter and his bank that payment will be made by the importer's issuing bank if the proper documentation confirming a shipment is presented. This was seen as low risk as the issuing bank could seize and sell the cargo if its client defaulted after payment was made. Like so much else in this topsy turvy financial crisis, however, the verities of the ages have been discarded in favour of new and unpleasant realities.<br><br>The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade.<br><br>Adding to the difficulties, letters of credit are so short term that they become an easy target for scaling back credit as liquidity tightens around bank operations globally. Longer term “assets” – like mortgage-back securities, CDOs and CDSs – can’t be easily renegotiated, and banks are loathe to default to one another on them because of cross-default provisions. Short term credit like trade finance can be cut with the flick of an executive wrist.<br><br>Further adding to the difficulties, many bulk cargoes are financed in dollars. Non-US banks have been progressively starved of dollar credit because US banks hoarded it as the funding crisis intensified. Recent currency swaps between central banks should be seen in this light, noting the allocation of Federal Reserve dollar liquidity to key trading partners <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9e4da3a-a620-11dd-9d26-000077b07658.html\">Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore</a> in particular.<br><br>Fixing this problem shouldn't be left to the Fed. They aren't going to make it a priority. Indeed, their determination to accelerate the payment of interest on reserves and then to raise that rate to match the Fed Funds target rate indicates that the Fed are more likely to constrain trade finance liquidity rather than improve it. Furthermore, the Fed may be highly selective in its allocation of dollar liquidity abroad, prejudicing the economic prospects of a large part of the world that is either indifferent or hostile to the continuation of American dollar hegemony.<br><br>.<br>If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruption starts. If the ore doesn’t go to the refinery, there is no plate steel. If the plate steel doesn’t get shipped, there is nothing to fabricate into components. If there are no components, there is nothing to assemble in the factory. If the factory closes the assembly line, there are no finished goods. If there are no finished goods, there is nothing to restock the shelves of the shops. If there is nothing in the shops, the consumers don’t buy. If the consumers don’t buy, there is no Christmas.<br><br>Everyone along the supply chain should worry about their jobs. Many will lose their jobs sooner rather than later.<br><br>If cargo trade stops, the wheat doesn’t get exported. If the wheat doesn’t get exported, the mill has nothing to grind into flour. If there is no flour, the bakeries and food processors can’t produce bread and pasta and other foods. If there are no foods shipped from the bakeries and factories, there are no foods in the shops. If there are no foods in the shops, people go hungry. If people go hungry their children go hungry. When children go hungry, people riot and governments fall.<br><br>Everyone along the supply chain should worry about their children going hungry.<br><br>When that happens, everyone in governments should worry about the riots.<br><br>Controlling access to trade finance determines who loses their jobs, whose children go hungry, who riots, which governments fall. Without dedicated focus on the issue of trade finance and liquidity from those in the emerging world most interested in sustaining the growth of recent years, little progress can be expected.Trade finance is rapidly communicating the stress on bank liquidity to the real economy. It presents a systemic risk much more frightening than the collapsing value of bits of paper traded electronically in London and New York. It could collapse the employment, the well being and the political stability of most of the world’s population.<br><br>The World Trade Organisation hosted a meeting on trade credit in Washington Wednesday to highlight the rapid and accelerating deterioration in trade finance as an urgent priority for public policy.<br><br>I look at the precipitous collapse of the Baltic Dry Index and I wish them Godspeed.<br><br>Further reading:<br><br><a href=\"http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h5DGrMMAe5N9uYLRcB18tTu1A4kg\">WTP warns of trade finance ‘deteriorating’ amid financial crisis</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSLC59451420081112\">Cost of some trade finance deals up sixfold – WTO</a><br><a href=\"http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/shipping-holed-beneath-the-waterline-995066.html\"><br>Shipping holed beneath the water line</a><br><br><a href=\"http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aoE181cv.tds&refer=home\">Shipowners idle 20 percent of bulk vessels as rates collapse</a><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/912107698547747613-6652158796910413047?l=londonbanker.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<b>Kapelwa Musonda</b><br><br>As promised for some while, I find myself marooned in JFK airport for a few hours, and so have typed in three of my favourite articles from the Zambian satirist, Kapelwa Musonda. These articles appeared in the 1960s and 1970s; the influence of Will Rogers and Myles na Copaleen is clear, but they're also quite original and wonderful in their own way. I've picked three here dealing with fairly universal themes; next week I'll post three more with more specifically Zambian content. I've also kept the introductions from \"The Kapelwa Musonda Files\", the compilation of his Times of Zambia columns printed in 1973.<br><br><i>THE HEATED DEBATE THAT BECAME A HIT</i><br><br><i>On the subject of sex, adults have been vying with each other to impress the young ones, especially the girls, with their superior and intimate knowledge about the facts of life. While the controversy on sex education was raging in Zambian society, a number of men fancied themselves as experts and harangued young girls on the subject at every opportunity.</i><br><br>Every time I think I am making a big impression on my listeners by intellectually discussing some current national problem, there comes along this fellow who upsets the applecart.<br><br>You have probably met the fellow. He comes along, takes the floor and makes you appear as though you didn't know what you were talking about. Experience has taught me that the only way out of this situation is to try and agree with him. In this way you make things look as though whatever he says is just what you might have said if he hadn't come along.<br><br>I was talking the other day to a couple of schoolgirls and I was discussing the touchy problem of those of their number who have had to abandon their education because of pregnancy. I remember clearly saying \"It is has been proved conclusively that pregnancy is prevalent among schoolgirls who attend all-girls boarding schools and therefore, we can safely assume that there is a tendency among our girls to be lax in their pre-marital sex attitudes in the holidays\".<br><br>As every man-about-town knows, a good vocabulary and skiful gesticulation rarely fails to impress our girls. They think a bright political career is in the offing for you. I developed the theme with all my resources and there was no doubt that the girls were fascinated. Then, out of the blue, appeared this fellow.<br><br>\"Well, what have we got here?\", he said, slapping me on the back and obviously fancying the girls. \"What you were saying, friend, is causing parents and teachers deep alarm and concern, but they could sleep better if they understood the conventional standard of moral behaviour of our girls.\"<br><br>\"Just what I was saying\", I said. \" The moral standard of our girls has become unconventional\".<br><br>\"That's where you are wrong my friend. There is nothing unconventional about the behaviour of our girls. They are just undergoing an evolution\".<br><br>\"That's what I mean\", I said, realizing that his intention was to put me in a spot. \"These girls have just been liberated from the bondage of traditional life and as you say, they are going through an evolution. Sooner or later they will know all the hurdles and will be able to say no.\"<br><br>\"I wouldn't be too certain about that\", he said, with a demeaning smirk. \"You see, it all depends on the evolution our boys go through All over the world now, there is an apparent relaxation of rigid sex attitudes, so its purely wishful thinking to hope that things will settle down\".<br><br>\"You seem to misunderstand me\", I said, wondering if there was no way of getting rid of him. \"What I mean is that we have to start by educating our boys to respect the girls. After all, they are the ones who make the advance\".<br><br>\"I'm afraid that will get you nowhere. The initiative has to start in the home. The responsibility rests squarely in the hands of the parents\".<br><br>I was really worried. I could see that he had no intention of accomodating me. All the big impressions I had made on the girls were completely quashed. However, I tried to persevere.<br><br>\"All we have said boils down to one fact\", I said \"That parents should give their children some form of sex education. It's the only way out of the mess we are in\".<br><br>\"That would be a waste of time. Sex education, unless it's well done could be fatal. It will just raise their curiosity. In fact, what do our parents know about courtship? All of them think their daughters know better until they discover that they will soon have grandchildren\".<br><br>\"Anyway\", I said, now on the verge of tears, \"our daughters stand a good chance of completing their educational careers because we are learning a great deal. Things like the cinema, television and new educational methods keep on improving us and accelerating us beyond our years. We shall certainly pass this knowledge on.\"<br><br>\"Maybe. We can only hope so since neither of us is a diviner, but that kind of attitude doesn't help anybody to sort out the problem as it stands now\".<br><br>\"Of course it doesn't, but I know that if we only find some way of bringing boys and girls together in clubs we could break the strangeness that exists between tham and in the process eliminate all thought of sex which is common now whenever a boy meets a girl\". Remembering that the best defence is attack, I continued. \"I try to think up solutions all the time unlike you who are only interested in arguments\".<br><br>\"Well you can go ahead with clubs. But you must be prepared to make a lot of room for new babies in the initial stages of your planning, and for your interest, it's not my habit, and it never will be, to argue with myself\".<br><br>That's when I began hitting him, although I lost the girls there and then. Everyone I have told the story to wonders why I didn't hit him earlier in the conversation.<br><br><br><i>ONE OF OUR OFFICES IS MISSING</i><br><br><i>Bureaucracy is a combination of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and the right hand itself not knowing what it is doing. Inter-departmental communications are some times so confused that there are times when it does seem as if the Government has gone to the dogs. Towards the end of 1971, Zambia was buzzing with speculation about the Second National Development Plan, which was due to be released by the Government in 1972,</i><br><br>With the launching of the Second National Development Plan only a few months away, there is a great deal of talk around the country about development. To most people, the only development they can see in the country is one that has an effect on their pockets. As for me, I measure the extent of development around me by observing what goes on on our city roads. <br><br>I think everybody has noticed that no sooner is a tarmac road made and opened for public use than some unit of the City Engineer's Department comes along and tears the road apart to install some sewage disposal drains. As soon as the sewage men are finished, the water preople come along too, to do their tearing apart to install water piping. As if this is not enough damage to the beautiful road which cost thousands to build, the electricity boys decide it's their turn and do their own damage. Not to be outdone, the Post Office people come along toom and break the road at some point where the traffic is rather heavy to lay their underground telephone cables. In fact, the extent of damage done to the road, legal or otherwise, is possibly the best indication of development in the surrounding areas. Unfortunately, there is never an end to the breaking and mending of the roads as long as the country is developing. <br><br>What has always worried me is that some lunatic - or anybody for that matter - just out for a prank decides to dig up the road. No one can tell whether he is from the City Engineer's Department or the Post Office until perhaps the damage is done and motorists are stranded.<br><br>Imagine what would happein if a couple of lunatics who have just escaped from Chainama come armed with shovels and picks and begin to break down the Secreteriat one Monday morning.<br><br>By 1000 hours, pandemonium has broken loose in the offices, nobody is able to do any work. The Secretary-General to the Government remembers that there had been tentative plans to renovate the Secreteriat building but wonders why he has not been officially informed when the workmen would arrive to start the job. What worries him most is that he doesn't recall that the renovations involved breaking down part of the building. So, he rings the Minister of Power, Transport and Works to get more details about the renovations/ The Minister informs him that he doesn't remember anything but he will get some details somehow.<br><br>Half an hour later, the Minister of Power, Transport and Works rings the Secretary-General and informs him that his Permanent Secretary and the Assistant Commissioner (Buildings) are away in India on a recruitment campaign but he has ordered some senior members of his staff to look into the matter.<br><br>By the lunch-hour, the lunatics have managed to break through into one of the offices and are now hammering their way into the adjoining lavatory.<br><br>It is realised that the job is of great magnitude. So the police are called in to protect the property at night as most of it could not be moved to more secure places.<br><br>By 1500 hours, there is so much confusion that noe of the Secretariat employees can do any work. The Secretary-General calls an emergency meeting of his most senior staff to map out evacuation procedures. It is decided that the army erect tents to be used as temporary offices.<br><br>The next day, the Ministry of Power, Transport and Works spokesman announces that they have not been able to find any plans but have sent a telegram to India for the Commissioner to come back and sort out the problem.<br><br>The next day a big government reshuffle affecting the Ministry of Power, Transport and Works is announced. The Minister, the Secretary-General, that is, will give the problem of office renovation to the Secretariat top priority.<br><br>The Commissioner returns from India, but as his office has been ransacked by those who had been instructed to look for the documents and plans regarding the renovations to the Secretariat, he can't find anything. However he promises to continue looking.<br><br>On the fourth day, the lunatics damage one of the water mains and a stream of water runs down the road, making it a hazard to traffic.<br><br>This deliberate wastage of water forces the Mayor, accompanied by the Town Clerk and the City Engineer to rush to the Ministry of Power, Transport and Works where they hold a crucial and heated three-hour meeting.<br><br>Both Ministry and city parties agree that in the absence of documents and plans relating to the renovation of the Secretariat, all work should be suspended pending a report from a special committee to look into the problems. Members of the special committee are duly appointed.<br><br>The special committee decides that it would do its assignment efficiently if it gets the advice of experts in London, New York and Moscow. Funds are made available for members of the committee to visit these towns to seek expert advice. <br><br>In the meantime, the lunatics decide they have had enough of the Secretariat building and so they leave it alone.<br><br>A couple of months later, the special committee produces its report and recommends immediate extensions and renovations.<br><br>At the official opening of the renovated buildings, the Secretary-General pays great tribute to the Ministry of Power, Transport and Works for the impressive work done and also for completing it on schedule.<br><br><br><i>YOU PAYS YOUR MONEY AND YOU TAKES YOUR CHOICE</i><br><br><i>The tax problem is always with us. This article, written after new tax measures were introduced in the budget in 1969, presents Musonda's view on how the Government can make the taxpayer part with his money without moaning. As always, it is a unique suggestion and was written with the common man in mind</i>.<br><br>Newspaper editors across the country have been receiving thousands of letters each day from indignant taxpayers complaining one way or the other about the increased duty on luxury goods and the new income tax. Perhaps, next to mini-skirts, complaints about the new income tax is the hottest item for regular writers to the Press.<br><br>However, I have been giving the problem of disappointed taxpayers a lot of though and have come up with a solution which, if adopted, would eliminate all the complaints against the new income tax measures. I must confess though that I am not the originator of this plan, but I have given it some modifications to suit local pay packets and conditions.<br><br>The new plan is based on the simple fact that nobody likes to pay taxes because he has no direct say on how the money he pays is spent. What happens is that all the tax money is placed in a large basket and then some government official shares it up among the different ministries without the slightest consideration for the feelings of taxpayers.<br><br>Under the new plan, each taxpayer would specify on what his tax money should be spent. This would give each and every taxpayer a definite sense of participation in government budgeting and spending of his hard-earned money Nobody would have any grounds for complaint since he could see dotted around the countryside the fruits of his tax contributions.<br><br>If, for instance, a taxpayer wants his money spent on salary increases for the Police and the improvement of highway patrols, he would so specify on his tax form. The taxpayer would have to be given an opportunity to pay occasional visits to the Police and see how the Police are making use of his money. In return, the Police would be expected to mount a guard of honour for the taxpayer to inspect. After all, if one is responsible for part of their salaries, the least one can expect them to to is to show some appreication in the normal way.<br><br>Perhaps the greatest attraction of this plan is that it would give every taxpayer a sense of power and perhaps eneable him to feel that he is part and parcel of the whole plan of nation-building. A feeling of patriotism would be generated in all. If, for instance, the taxpayer feels that his District Governor is pushing him too hard, he would so specify in his income tax return and say that none of his money should be used to pay the salary of the Governor And vice versa, if one felt that the Governor deserved the whole of one's tax.<br><br>If a taxpayer feels that his money should be used to finance a trade delegation to Moscow, he would note it onthe tax return form and it would be expected that when the delegation returned from Moscow, they would bring with them a few gifts like Vodka, fur hats, and pictures of Russion women driving tractors for the taxpayers who contributed finance for the trip. They would also be expected to write the contributors a \"thank you\" note.<br><br>Under this system, it wouldn't be necessary to confine oneself to one item only. A taxpayer could, for instance, say he wants Kwacha10.00 of his tax to be spent on new hospitals, K5.00 on salaries for parliamentarians, K30.00 on subsidising a local mini-skirt factory, K1.00 on a school near his house, 2 ngwee on agriculture and 1/2 ngwee on foreign aid. The advantage with this is that a taxpayer could walk into any government building, say the Post Office and warn the teller that if he doesn't work fast enough, he might reconsider his decision to finance his monthly pay. This could perhaps help a great deal to bring about a dedicated civil service and a disciplined nation.<br><br>I know there will be many sceptical people who will dismiss this plan as unworkable since there might be some ministries and projects to which taxpayers might not decide to contribute any of their monies. But this is the whole point of the plan. If taxpayers feel that one project is not all that necessary and they have no money to contribute to it then that project has to be shelved. The taxpayer doesn't want it. However, the Government can always find some money from other sources, such as the sale of stamps, tax on land, radio and television licences, court charges, duty on luxury items and so forth.<br><br>As perhaps everyone has noticed, the main beauty of this system of taxation is that if a taxpayer specified on his form that his money should be used to finance a project to send a Zambian astronaut to the moon and then the Government felt that it could not afford such a project, then all the money would have to be returned to the taxpayer.<br><br>Now I imagine every tax expert will be asking himself why he didn't think of it before, and I think that for the same reason they won't be interested in even giving it a trial period."
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/2824602726/in/set-72157607079076016/\"><img alt=\"Wifi1\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/wifi1.jpg\" title=\"Wifi1\"></a></p>\n\n<p>Following on from our recent 'post-occupancy evaulation' of the <a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/state-library-o.html\">State Library of Queensland's</a> wi-fi (<a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/post-occupancy.html\">see previous post</a>) in my role at <a href=\"http://www.arup.com/\">Arup</a>, I thought I'd share a couple of outputs. (Thanks to Tory Jones of the State Library of Queensland for permission).</p>\n\n<p>One of the ideas I've been exploring relates to how urban industry - in the widest sense of the word - in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today's information-rich environments - like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office - are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/2824085162/in/set-72157607079076016/\"><img alt=\"Wifi2\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/wifi2.jpg\" title=\"Wifi2\"></a>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>I've been developing a few ideas for exploring this industrial activity, which I hope to share here later, but the post-occupancy work on the Library's wi-fi involved creating a few representations of the service; a service which is all but invisible. Outside of monitoring the server logs, the wi-fi can only be perceived through the presence of users themselves, or of course via devices that detect wi-fi.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/2824130522/in/set-72157607079076016/\"><img alt=\"Wifi3\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/wifi3.jpg\" title=\"Wifi3\"></a>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>So as well as photo-essays, videos and in-depth interviews with users, and relating to this idea of making the invisible, visible, I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user (in this case a MacBook laptop and a Nokia e65 mobile phone), I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011845235/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi1\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi1.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi1\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3012681776/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi2\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi2.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi2\"></a>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>I then articulated this set of readings as a basic 3D model in SketchUp, with peaks representing good wi-fi signal strength (4 bars, for example) and troughs representing poor wi-fi signal strength (no bars/no connection, or intermittently 1 bar). Each ‘bar’ defined a level in the 3D model (1 bar = 1 metre, roughly). This gives a sense of the wi-fi as a shape, with a physical form. Although literally misleading, it helps to understand wi-fi as a discrete phenomenon, via a form of translation.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011846191/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi3\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi3.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi3\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"Library_wifi4\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi4.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi4\"> </p>\n\n<p>While this model is not intended to be totally accurate - wi-fi signals may change in different atmospheric conditions, and perceived signal strength will vary depending on the equipment used - it does convey a sense of the overall ‘shape’ of the wi-fi, as if we could perceive it in physical form. Sensing the wi-fi like this is almost akin to dowsing - detecting the presence of unseen forces - and mimics the sensation of users attempting to discern where the wi-fi signal is strong.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011845141/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi5.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi5\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011845421/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi6\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi6.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi6\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011844911/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi12\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi12.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi12\"></a></p>\n\n<p><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id%3D2185296%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26color%3D00ADEF%26fullscreen%3D1&width=469&height=313\" width=\"469\" height=\"313\"></iframe></p>\n\n<p>The model was initially overlaid onto a floorplan of level 1, and subsequently scaled up to sit over a snapshot of the site from Google Earth. When comparing with the built form, we can explain the strong signal over the north-western egress of the Knowledge Walk. Through our observations at the Library, we saw that users have figured out that this is a good spot - one of the 3 wireless access points currently on that floor is located in the nearby meeting rooms, not that users would know this. The presence of the ‘bench’ extruded from the wall provides useful affordances for users too, almost suggesting it’s a good spot to sit and access the wi-fi (although again, we suspect that is accidental coincidence of design). Similarly, the floor-to-ceiling windows from meeting rooms and open corridor leading outside means there is minimal concrete to block the signal. So this 3D model helps suggest a correlation between use of the space, the shape of the space, and the strong wi-fi signal.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/2823293757/in/set-72157607079076016/\"><img alt=\"Wifi4\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/wifi4.jpg\" title=\"Wifi4\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3012681974/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi7\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi7.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi7\"></a>\n\n\n<br>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>Following the central spine of the wi-fi model through towards the south-eastern edge, we can see how the wi-fi ‘leaks out’ of this end of the building, through the open end of the Knowledge Walk outside onto the concourse in-between the Library and the building destined to be The Edge. Elsewhere, thick concrete mitigates against wi-fi spreading far, unfortunately including the café and the fabulous deck areas on the river, where the signal falls off sharply (currently).</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/2824578702/in/set-72157607079076016/\"><img alt=\"Wifi5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/wifi5.jpg\" title=\"Wifi5\"></a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011845477/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi8\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi8.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi8\"></a>\n\n\n<br>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>I allocated the SketchUp model a skin of netting, in a nod towards the <a href=\"http://www.designmuseum.org/__entry/4692?style=design_image_popup\">Cedric Price-designed aviary at London Zoo</a>. This seemed to me a similar structure, and suggests that 'wi-fi cloud' might actually feel like a containing volume - a net of wi-fi, as if seen from a user’s or bird’s point-of-view.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011846833/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi9\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi9.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi9\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011846609/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi10\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi10.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi10\"></a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/3011846435/in/set-72157608755996528/\"><img alt=\"Library_wifi11\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/library_wifi11.jpg\" title=\"Library_wifi11\"></a>\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p>Formally, the result is hardly elegant, and bears little relation to the AIA <a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2007/11/the-raia-awards.html\">award-winning</a> structure by Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp. (Incidentally, it’s been a great pleasure to work with Timothy Hill on this and other projects recently). The sharp angles and abrupt faces are accidents of the crude construction in SketchUp and the simplicity in my measurements. I should probably take it into 3D Studio Max or something, to render it with more graceful curves, or a material that would more properly represent the qualities of radio waves - perhaps something like <a href=\"http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/dillerscofidio.html\">Diller+Scofidio's Blur Building</a>.</p>\n\n<p>There's a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/sets/72157608755996528/\">full set of screengrabs here</a>, <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/2185296\">here's a fly-through animation</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/wirelessstrength_shape_anim.skp\">here's the original SketchUp model</a>. I don't want to overplay the significance of this approach - it was simply one of several methods for expressing the presence of wi-fi in the Library, and partly just sketching out loud ...</p><p>Constructing another tangent on the wi-fi, I was struck by how users\nadopted the Infozone space - where the wi-fi is primarily located - and\nthe furniture provided for them. The low desks, small tables, various\nchairs, benches etc. afford numerous variations for wi-fi users, and\nsure enough people drape themselves all over them. </p>\n\n<p>Discussions with <a href=\"http://www.donovanhill.com.au/mainmenu.htm\">Timothy Hill</a>\nindicated how the design of furniture across the Infozone was intended\nto, in his words, “break up the traditional anthropomorphic\nrelationship between the user and their laptop”, based on observations\nof how intimately people actually relate themselves to their laptops.\nHill had noted how people rest the laptop on their knees, lie down with\nit, use it in bed, curl up around it on the sofa, and so on. So the\nfixtures and fittings in the Infozone were intended to suggest this\nintimacy - in common with the ‘domestic’ touches in the design of the\nLibrary in general - and provide a wide variety of options as to how to\nuse a laptop in the space.</p>\n\n<p>As well as the <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/sets/72157607079076016/\">hundreds of photos I took</a>\nin the space, I decided to do a few sketches of the more interesting\npositions, which I suggested might work something like a aircraft\nidentification manual or compendium yoga positions perhaps. With the\nlatter in mind, I was tempted to name a few, such as "The perch", "The\nfront crawl", "The huddle", "The sandwich", "Battleships", “Reverse\nBattleships", “The Horse", "Side saddle", "Lotus", "The NASA control\nroom", "The occasional-table hug" and so on.</p>\n\n<p>Below, a few of the quick sketches I did, illustrating some of these positions:</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"Sitting_on_bench\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_on_bench.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_on_bench\">\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"Sitting_astride_bench\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_astride_bench.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_astride_bench\">\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"Proper_sitting_at_table\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/proper_sitting_at_table.jpg\" title=\"Proper_sitting_at_table\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_reading_demurely\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_reading_demurely.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_reading_demurely\">\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"Watching_dvd_leg_up\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/watching_dvd_leg_up.jpg\" title=\"Watching_dvd_leg_up\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_crossed_legs\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_crossed_legs.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_crossed_legs\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_on_floor\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_on_floor.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_on_floor\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Reverse_battleships\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/reverse_battleships.jpg\" title=\"Reverse_battleships\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_watching_headphones\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_watching_headphones.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_watching_headphones\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_up_leg_up\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_up_leg_up.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_up_leg_up\"> \n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Hunched_deck\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/hunched_deck.jpg\" title=\"Hunched_deck\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Through_the_legs\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/through_the_legs.jpg\" title=\"Through_the_legs\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_properly\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_properly.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_properly\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Sitting_back_legs_up\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/sitting_back_legs_up.jpg\" title=\"Sitting_back_legs_up\"> <br>\n</p>\n<p><img alt=\"Propping_laptop_on_stand\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/propping_laptop_on_stand.jpg\" title=\"Propping_laptop_on_stand\">\n\n\n<br><img alt=\"Leaning_on_arm\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/08/leaning_on_arm.jpg\" title=\"Leaning_on_arm\"></p>\n\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofsound/sets/72157608755996528/\">Wi-fi shapes photoset [Flickr]</a><br><a href=\"http://vimeo.com/2185296\">Wi-fi shape animation [Vimeo]<br></a><a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/state-library-o.html\">State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp<br></a><a href=\"http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/08/post-occupancy.html\">Post-occupancy evaulations of wi-fi</a><br><a href=\"http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/\">State Library of Queensland</a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cityofsound/JuiP?a=AYWNN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cityofsound/JuiP?i=AYWNN\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cityofsound/JuiP?a=ZkqYN\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cityofsound/JuiP?i=ZkqYN\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://s225.photobucket.com/albums/dd106/blogbydaslob/?action=view&current=billevanstrio1.jpg\"><img src=\"http://i225.photobucket.com/albums/dd106/blogbydaslob/billevanstrio1.jpg\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\" style=\"margin:5px\" alt=\"Photobucket\"></a><br><em>Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans and Paul Motian (photo: Steve Schapiro)</em><br><br>What can be said about Bill Evans' classic <em>Sunday At The Village Vanguard</em> that <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2008/08/forgotten-series-bill-evans-complete.html\">hadn't already been said</a> so many times over? If you're new to jazz, here's what you need to know: it is the beginning and the end of piano-bass-drums music. It's one of the five or six most essential jazz records of all time. And it's one of the very finest live documents from <em>any</em> music genre.<br><br>When you listen to this record keeping in mind that the bass player Scott LaFaro---one of the most promising bassists ever to emerge---was dead ten days later at the tender age of 25, it brings about a bittersweet sentiment because one of the most spectacular moments in jazz was a fleeting one. In a bit of irony, Evans' producer and record company head Orrin Keepnews sensed that this unit was not going to hold together for much longer, which led to these monumental recordings.<br><br>When I last covered a Bill Evans record, it was to discuss the first one by of the pianist's then-new trio consisting of LaFaro and Paul Motian on drums. <a href=\"http://www.somethingelsereviews.com/2008/07/bill-evans-portrait-in-jazz-1959.html\"><em>Portrait In Jazz</em></a> was taped right at the end of 1959 after several months of the trio playing together to the point where Evans felt comfortable enough to document the rapport they've developed in that time. It would, however, take another thirteen months before Keepnews was able to get the threesome back in the studio again.<span><br><br>Those February, 1961 sessions, out of which the trio's LP <em>Explorations</em> came forth, was marked by some visible tension between LaFaro and Evans. It appears that Scott had begun to view his boss as an unreliable junkie and voiced his desire to be compensated accordingly. Although the matter ultimately died down and the boys got to work creating another superb record, Keepnews grew wary that LaFaro would leave the group before long. Thus, he soon convinced Evans to cut a live record just months later before the opportunity to capture one of their increasingly acclaimed club dates would be lost forever.<br><br>That chance came in the last Sunday of June, 1961, at the end of a two-week stint at New York's Village Vanguard club. Having played first on the road and then a couple of weeks at this club, the Bill Evan Trio machine was well-oiled and playing at peak level. Keepnews taped enough songs for two albums to insure that he had enough good material for one album, but it quickly became clear that there were really no missteps the entire day. Given the tragic circumstances of the bassist's sudden death, Evans decided to select six tracks that highlighted LaFaro's contributions, thus creating a de facto LaFaro-led album, as an official one doesn't exist (some of the leftover tracks were used to forge the more group-oriented album <em>Waltz For Debby</em>).<br><br>Two of those six tracks were composed by LaFaro himself, \"Gloria's Step\" and Jade Visions.\" As far as I know, these are the only two published songs credited to him, but are astounding in how advanced they are for someone who was just starting out at this. <br><br>The album opens with \"Gloria's Step,\" with its descending chord patterns that start somewhat bright and work its way down to a somber mood. Evans interprets the melody in short but rich phrases, and Lafaro is playing lines of his own that exhibit limitless range and yet never ignores what Motian and Evans are doing. After a solo brimming with full chords, Evans gives way to LaFaro who makes his bass sing and finds himself making a home in the upper register. As the second take of this song, it's the best overall performance of the entire day. <br><br>LaFaro's other tune, \"Jade Visions,\" was performed for the first time that night and played a second time at the end of the evening set. As the last song this trio ever played together, \"Jade Visions\" is a slow-paced meditative piece centered around a bass riff. Evans plays with much thoughtfulness, adding no more notes than needed, understanding that to do so would obscure that key riff. Motian, ever the master colorist, put that skill to great use for this song.<br><br>The rest of the songs chosen for the day are covers, most of which were familiar movie and show tunes. Throughout his career, Evans had a penchant for selecting easily recognizable, often overworked numbers and recasting them as harmonically robust songs that became distinctively his own. A notable exception to this Broadway pattern is the choice of Miles Davis' \"Solar,\" but even then, it's adorned with chunks of minor scale motifs in Evans' remarkable hands. All of these tracks of course feature LaFaro contributing expressive solos from an instrument not previously known to be so impressionistic.<br><br>After the Vanguard date, LaFaro did perform once again, at the Newport, R.I. Jazz Festival with Stan Getz on July 3 before returning to his hometown of Geneva, NY. On the early morning of July 6, LaFaro evidently fell asleep at the wheel while driving between friends' homes between Warsaw and Geneva. The car ran off the road, hit a tree, and burst into flames, killing both LaFaro and a childhood friend of his. <br><br>Forty-seven years after this fateful live performance, Keepnews overhauled the original <em>Sunday</em> tapes with a 24-bit remastering treatment courtesy of Joe Tarantino. The resulting sound brought some much needed clarity to the recordings, and seems to accentuate the remarkable group interplay even more. Additional takes of \"Gloria's Step\", \"Alice And Wonderland,\" \"All Of You,\" and \"Jade Visions\" have been tacked on to the end of the original track sequence. These versions aren't quite as good as the ones that made the first cut, but are still of high quality and demonstrate how these players took risks and subtly different approaches each time they tackled a particular song. <br><br>Out since this past September, the Keepnews Collection version of <em>Sunday At The Village Vanguard</em> is the definitive edition of Bill Evans' masterpiece. The accolades heaped on this magical club date performed one Sunday in June, 1961 are even more justified now than ever before. <br><br><br>Purchase: Bill Evans Trio - <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Sunday-Village-Vanguard-Bill-Evans/dp/B001D6OKJ2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1225690636&sr=1-2\">Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Keepnews Collection)</a></em></span>"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-size:130%\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">A Dinner Play or \"After Angola\"</span></span><br><br>The conversation at the other table at the restaurant was so fascinating, I started taking notes.<br>Between an older man and woman. The guy looked a proper ass, and when he went to the gents for the second time, I nearly went up to the woman to ask what was she doing with him?! Not sure if she was a wife, mistress, ex-lover. Almost a sibling, but too much sexual tension.<br><br>At first it was a lively banter about his work abroad, how he was never in England, but the money was good. Some snafu about a 2,000 pound rental car payment he'd had to cover, \"But with the money you're earning it can't be too difficult.\" Something about a plot with 8 bungalows on it. Request to the waitress for chili sauce for the shrimp crackers that was \"really hot\". \"Can you make it hotter? We like it hot.\" Then it got ugly...<br><br>W: Well you've been doing this for 18 years and you love it.<br>M: You have been to.<br>W: And, I've always given you the benefit of the doubt.<br><br>[this is when I pricked up my ears. It could only go downhill from there.]<br><br>W: Except for that horrible girl!! Oh, what was her name. She stayed with us in Richmond?<br>M: [man feigns ignorance.] The American girl.<br>W: The one you met in Amsterdam. What was her name.<br>M: Hmmm...<br>W: I got very jealous of her.<br>M: That was then, this is now.<br>W: And we went running in Richmond Park with her.<br>M: Now, now.<br>W: Which is why when we went to Richmond Park--<br>M: Have we been here this year?<br>W: We were here 6 weeks ago.<br>M: There's no way we were here 6 weeks ago.<br>W: We sat there. Why wouldn't we know if we were here?<br>M: Because we weren't.<br>W: This place was closed up for awhile, you know.<br><br>[I tuned them out for a few moments, noticed the Lady's black sweater top had clunky, dark, fake jewels sewn along the neckline. Here hair was in a sort of flipped bob that wasn't sure if it was brown or blond, and definitely needed a trim.]<br><br>W: We came here 4 weeks ago!<br>M: Nope, nope.<br>W: Well, I can get the credit card bills and check.<br>M: I'm sure you will find we weren't here.<br><br>[Then they choked in unison on the spicy hot soup they had slurped non-stop for 4 mins. Purple faces. Maybe the sex was good?]<br><br>W: We really must talk about. We must have this conversation.<br>M [pouring more and more clear, green wine into her glass]: Not now.<br>W: And what about Kay? What have you told her?<br>M: inaudible<br>W: It hasn't been easy, you know. All these years. You'll never live in England.<br>M: And your point is--<br>W: inaudible. Now that you've got this opportunity.<br>M: You dare say what?<br>W: what about Kay?<br>M: It's up to you.<br>W: What do you mean?<br>M: It's up to you.<br>W: After Angola, you'll never live in the UK again.<br>M: I hope to God not. I'm trying to avoid England like the Plague.<br>W [to waitress as I signed my check and rushed to the door]: Can we have our food?<br>Waitress: She's cooking it now.<br><br>**<br>I knew from the start that the man was ridiculous. He had a large satchel behind his chair that looked like it cost at least $500. Strung between the handles were two extremely long and thin baguettes in paper. Baguettes? Who needs baguettes at 8 pm on a freezing cold evening. Were they for later? In the morning when they'd be stale? And they were too thin to even cut and spread butter on. A full suit, white shirt, pointy shoes. And he gave me a sneer when I sat down near their table- only one other person was in there, also alone, towards the back, but I thought it best not to take one of the other tables set for 4 people. Then I realized he was actually checking me out, probably wondering which country I was from, as I'm sure he considered himself to be an expert on that sort of thing.<br><br>Kew, England<br>29 Oct 2008"
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"title" : "A Wordle Lesson Plan",
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"content" : "<p>Many teachers have written to me about their use of Wordle in the classroom. Miss <a href=\"http://www.misso.pagemagnet.co.uk/\">Fran O’Leary</a>, of the <a href=\"http://www.redruth.cornwall.sch.uk/curriculum/english/\">English & Media Studies</a> department of <a href=\"http://www.redruth.cornwall.sch.uk/\">Redruth School</a>, UK, has kindly given me her permission to share with you her lively account of one such use. I quote:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<div><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\">You asked me, if I remembered, to feed back on my use of Wordle for spelling and vocabulary. I'd love to share the success, so here we go.</font></div>\n<ul>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>First time:</strong> hmmm, not sure that the students really knew what to make of it. They did OK, but no better than you would imagine.</font></li>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>Second time:</strong> I changed the test slightly. I told them to take the sheet home and use it in any way they wanted to 'learn the words'. I then tested their knowledge with questions such as:\"only one of these words was longer than 9 letters, which one was it?\", \"choose any word you like, but it must be spelled 100% correctly\", \"which word has the most vowels?\" The results were still OK, but nothing amazing.</font></li>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>Third time:</strong> they asked if it would be like the second one; I said yes but without the 100% spelling thing. They blew me away with the test results. OK, not everyone answered all ten questions, but of the questions answered there were only 4 spelling mistakes; some incorrect answers, but they had spelled the chosen words correctly anyway.</font></li>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>Fourth time:</strong> similar positive result.</font></li>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>Fifth time:</strong> again, superb on the spelling front and yet I had long stopped asking them to 'spell'. Plus, this time the last of the hardcore \"I ain't doing it\" students had a go and surprised us both.</font></li>\n<li><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\"><strong>And so on...</strong></font></li></ul>\n<div><font face=\"Tahoma\" size=\"2\">I'm still puzzling as to the exact reasons why this method has been so successful in engaging students with new vocabulary, but I've come to the conclusion that it's a combination of: the vocabulary sheet allowing more interaction through physical turning and handling; colours allowing associations or categories to be formed; and testing for understanding and exploration rather than technical accuracy. Then again, it could just be as simple as the explanation given by one of the girls "it's kinda pretty and it's different. You like to use things like that, don't ya?"</font></div></blockquote>"
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"title" : "How to Become an Expert on the Congo in Just Five Minutes a Day",
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"content" : "Perhaps you've seen <a href=\"http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnJOE49914V.html\">recent</a> <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12437791\">news</a> <a href=\"http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1011/p25s07-woaf.html\">articles</a> about the Democratic Republic of the Congo and wondered to yourself, \"what are <a href=\"http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h8MUtsruQL9uPO6XL65tNpbmkU9w\">Rwandan rebels</a> doing in the Kivus?\" Or you saw that Laurent Nkunda had announced his intention to \"<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101503191.html\">liberate</a>\" the entire country and asked yourself, \"who is this guy, and where can <span style=\"font-style:italic\">I </span>get a '<a href=\"http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/2008/01/war-criminal-by-any-other-name.html\">rebels for Christ</a>' pin?\"<br><br>Then again, maybe you've just been reading our <a href=\"http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/search/label/Democratic%20Republic%20of%20the%20Congo\">recent Congo coverage</a> and thinking: \"I too would like to be <a href=\"http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/2008/10/hey-guys-lets-clean-out-old-barn-and.html\">publicly snarky</a> about events in a far away land that I've never visited, and perhaps make snide remarks at cocktail parties about other peoples' activism efforts, but I just don't feel confident enough in my background knowledge.\"<br><br>Well, never fear! \"WrongingRightsNotes™ - First and Second Congo Wars\" (yes, I was calling them CliffsNotes <a href=\"http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/2008/02/revisiting-rwanda.html\">before</a>, but then I realized, that shit is trademarked), and the much needed appendix to the new edition, \"Yes, They Ended a While Ago, But It's Still an Issue and Here's Why\" is here!<br><br>So, down to business. The world said \"someone really ought to do something,\" then decided to go out for Thai food as 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda during the spring and summer of 1994. Here's what happened next:<br><ul><li>Members of the Hutu militias responsible for the Rwandan genocide decide they'd be much more comfortable if they had a couple million of their countrymen between them and the advancing RPF forces, craftily spark general panic of retaliatory genocide, prompt mass militia-disguising Hutu flight into neighboring Zaire (now DRC).<br></li><li>Militias hidden among fleeing Hutu civilians join refugees in what UN Special Rep. Shahryar Khan describes as \"<a href=\"http://www.jha.ac/articles/a086.htm#_edn8\">a revision of hell</a>.\" Over-crowding, disease, and inadequate aid lead to the deaths of over 50,000 people in the camps in mid-1994.<br></li><li>Massive influx of aid leads to stabilization of the humanitarian situation, gives Hutu militias the opportunity to reorganize, take control of the camps, begin launching attacks on Rwandan Tutsis and the Banyamulenge (Congo's Tutsi group).<br></li><li>President of Zaire Mobuto Sese Seko looks other way, hums loudly as militias ship arms into the camps.<br></li><li>Humanitarian aid groups supplying the camps ask themselves if they really want their delicious Meals, Ready to Eat in the bellies of genocidaires, begin cutting off aid. </li><li>Global community, having not learned its lesson, ignores requests from UN for peacekeepers to separate out militias from genuine refugees in the camps.</li><li>Rwanda, pissed off at UNHCR for feeding its enemies, begins to arm the Banyamulenge.</li><li>The vice-governor of North Kivu decides in October of 1996 that it's time for things to go from bad to worse, orders Banyamulenge out of the country.</li><li>All hell breaks loose. Banyamulenge, well-stocked with Rwandan-supplied arms, rebel.</li><li>A seemingly already-prepared Laurent Kabila emerges as head of an surprisingly well-organized new rebel group incorporating the Banyamulenge militias called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo (ADFL). Mystery is later cleared up when Rwanda and Uganda admit: \"<a href=\"http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E4D71039F932A25754C0A961958260\">Oh yeah, we totally orchestrated that whole thing.</a>\"</li><li>As the ADFL sweeps through the Kivus clearing the camps, the Hutu militias decide it's time for Operation Massive Human Shield: Phase 2 and push hordes of long-suffering refugees ahead of them from camp to camp.<br></li><li>Rwandan and Ugandan troops appear on the scene, assist ADFL as it decimates Hutu forces and Mobutu's army. Angola, Burundi, and some Sudanese rebels show up for the party as well. ADFL insists that this was accomplished <span style=\"font-style:italic\">sans</span> any incidental massacring of civilians; demographic statistics and eye witness accounts <a href=\"http://www.hrw.org/reports97/congo/Congo2.htm\">suggest otherwise</a>.<br></li><li>ADFL, with Kabila at its head, begins march / amble to Zairian capital Kinshasa. Mobutu's government insists that <a href=\"http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E1DD153FF935A25757C0A961958260\">everything is FINE, thank you very much</a>. </li><li>Mobutu gives up and flees the country in May 1997. Kabila declares victory, appoints himself President and announces that he never liked the name \"Zaire\" anyway. Proving that even corrupt warlords have a sense of humor, country is renamed the \"Democratic Republic of the Congo.\"</li></ul>This concludes our discussion of the First Congo War. Stay tuned for tomorrow's installment \"the Second Congo War,\" in which Rwanda and Uganda have second thoughts about their hand-picked stooge, and virtually every country in Africa decides to field an army."
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/SP83ZQaHl5I/AAAAAAAAAYQ/xSsmVBEIY9w/s1600-h/soiling_old_glory.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/SP83ZQaHl5I/AAAAAAAAAYQ/xSsmVBEIY9w/s320/soiling_old_glory.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>There has been some <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/21/jon-stewart-clarifies-pal_n_136484.html\">confusion</a> over what Sarah Palin meant when she <a href=\"http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/17/palin_clarifies_her_pro-americ.html\">said</a>, “The best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.\" Unfortunately, Palin did not elaborate in her speech on just what she meant by “pro-America” and conversely, what constitutes “anti-America.” McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer offered one <a href=\"http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/18/real-virginia/\">example</a> of what Palin meant by pointing out that northern Virginia is not “real Virginia.” Rep. <a href=\"http://www.memeorandum.com/081022/p39#a081022p39\">Michelle</a> <a href=\"http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/22/bachmann-anti-american-3/\">Bachmann</a> then went on <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Hardball</span> and <a href=\"http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/michelle-bachmann-gives-voice-rights\">told</a> Chris Matthews, “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think the people would love to see an expose like that.” But many Americans are still unclear as to what is <a href=\"http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/22/bachmann-anti-american-3/\">pro-America</a> and what is anti-America, so I have made a handy chart that will give you some examples. This list is by no means exhaustive so please feel free to provide your own examples in the comments. (<span style=\"font-style:italic\">Photo by <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2188648/slideshow/2188675/\">Stanley J. Forman</a></span>)<br><br><table style=\"border:medium none;border-collapse:collapse;width:292px;height:3138px\" border=\"1\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\"> <tbody><tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border:0.5pt solid windowtext;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <h1><span style=\"font-weight:bold;font-size:100%\">Pro-America</span><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></h1> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:solid solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <h1><span style=\"font-weight:bold;font-size:100%\">Anti-America</span><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></h1> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Republicans</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Democrats</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Small towns</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Cities (except for Ground Zero in New York)</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">The South (except northern Virginia and the parts of Florida where liberal New York Jews live), the Midwest (except for Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin), the West (except for the Pacific Coast and Colorado), <a href=\"http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-real-mccain.html\">western Pennsylvania</a></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">The East (except western Pennsylvania), the Pacific Coast, Colorado, parts of the Midwest that have turned against God, northern Virginia</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Christians (except for Unitarians), Neocons</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-style:normal;font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-weight:normal\">Liberal Jews, Unitarians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other atheists</span></span> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader</span></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-style:italic;font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-weight:normal\">Saturday Night Live</span></span><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Country music (except for the Dixie Chicks), Christian rock</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Non-Christian rock, hip hop, electronica, classical, jazz, folk, blues, salsa, reggae, bossa nova, sea shanties, etc.</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Hank Williams, Jr.</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Hank Williams, Sr.</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">A six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">A venti soy milk latte </span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Iceberg lettuce</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Arugula</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:normal\">American Idol</span></span> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:normal\">Project Runway</span></span> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:normal\" href=\"http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/12453.html\">American Carol</a></span> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-size:100%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:normal\">A Christmas Carol</span></span> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Homeschooling</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Daycare</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040601799.html\">Regent University</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">The Ivy League</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Leaving Gs off the ends of words</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Pronouncing “nuclear” correctly</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Soccer moms</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Soccer</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Professional wrestling</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Olympic wrestling</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-conservatives-like-larry-craig.html\">A wide stance</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Coming out</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Shotgun marriages</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2005/12/gay-mariage.html\">Gay marriages</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">SUVs</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Hybrids</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_%28series%29\"><i>Twilight</i></a></span> </p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials\"><i>His Dark Materials</i></a></span> </p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><i><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/01/narnia-made-me-born-again-christian.html\">Chronicles of Narnia</a></i></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:normal\" href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/harry-potter-is-brat.html\">Harry Potter</a></span> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/02/conservapedia.html\">Conservapedia</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Wikipedia</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Pregnant teens who keep their babies</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Teens who use birth control</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2005/12/intelligent-design.html\">Intelligent Design</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Interior design</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/08/seven_house_army.php\">Seven houses</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">One house you can’t afford</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Anger</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Compassion</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Myspace</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-declares-war-on-blogosphere.html\">Facebook</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.godtube.com/\">Godtube</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Youtube</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-abstinence-only-sex-education-is-too.html\">Abstinence-only sex education</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Biology</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/07/looking-at-bright-side-of-world-war.html\">The Rapture</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/01/whos-afraid-of-global-warming.html\">Global Warming</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Fargo (the accent)</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116282/\"><i>Fargo</i></a> (the movie)</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Guns</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Lawsuits</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Death penalty</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Abortion</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Waterboarding</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Skateboarding</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Talk radio</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">NPR</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Aspirin</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/04/harry-and-louise-would-hate.html\">Socialized medicine</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Dr. Phil</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/01/some-conservative-advice-for-oprah.html\">Oprah Winfrey</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/02/anna-nicole-smith-americas-princess-di.html\">Anna Nicole Smith</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Princess Diana</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Supreme Court cases whose <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/29/latest-palin-gaffe-cant-n_n_130395.html\">names I can’t remember</a> where Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas are in the majority</span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><i>Roe</i> v. <i>Wade</i></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">William Buckley</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama\">Christopher Buckley</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Buckley\">Lord Buckley</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/09/05/sarah-palin-as-sexy-librarian.aspx\">Sexy librarians</a></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.cfm\">American Library Association</a></span></p> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/16/massive-rnc-robocall-may_n_135348.html\">Robocalls</a> that interrupt your dinner</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.polltrack.com/presidential\">Polls</a> that interrupt your dinner</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Legacy admissions</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Affirmative action</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Second Amendment</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Ninth Amendment</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">G. Gordon Liddy, Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">The Weather Underground</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Social Darwinism</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Theory of Evolution</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Signing statements</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Legislation</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/08/lieberman-refuses-to-cut-and-run-after.html\">Joe Lieberman</a></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27265369/\">Colin Powell</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Pakistan</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><a href=\"http://www.poligazette.com/2008/09/18/mccain-%C2%BFspain/\">Spain</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Stephen Baldwin</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p style=\"margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt\"><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Alec Baldwin</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><i><a href=\"http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2008/10/red-dawn-1984.html\">Red Dawn</a></i></span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><i><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/\">Dawn of the Dead</a></i></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style=\"height:33.45pt\"> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">White</span></p> </td> <td style=\"border-style:none solid solid none;padding:0in 5.4pt;width:2.05in;height:33.45pt\" valign=\"top\" width=\"197\"> <p><span style=\"font-size:100%\">Black</span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody></table><br>Carnivals: <a href=\"http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2008/10/carnival-of-insanities_26.html\">Carnival of the Insanities</a>, <a href=\"http://thebobofiles.com/?p=564\">Bobo Carnival of Politics</a>, <a href=\"http://www.tuibguy.com/?p=2218\">Carnival To Replace Michele Bachmann</a><br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a 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src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/10/pro-america-vs-anti-america.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/10/pro-america-vs-anti-america.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/10/pro-america-vs-anti-america.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/10/pro-america-vs-anti-america.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"20\" height=\"20\"></a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.<img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/19959879-3817165200029463882?l=jonswift.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "My five year old: “The Internet is the Computer”",
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"content" : "<p>I was playing KEXP on my computer over the weekend, and I say to my five year old “Hey isn’t it cool we can play a station from the Internet on the computer?”</p>\n<p>She looks at me like I’m stupid.</p>\n<p>“<strong><em>On</em></strong> the computer?” she says, quizzically.</p>\n<p>“Yes.” I say.</p>\n<p>She laughs. She thinks I’m being funny. “Daddy,” she says, “the Internet <em><strong>is</strong></em> the computer”.</p>\n<p>To a five year old the computer and the network are redundant terms.</p>"
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"title" : "Pentagon Still Uses My 'Make Your Own' Schema",
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"content" : "<div><p>Back in 2005 I came up with <a href=\"http://www.moonofalabama.org/2005/06/make_your_own.html\">this</a> "Make Your Own" schema to generate reports about U.S. successes against 'Al-Qaeda in Iraq'.</p><blockquote><p><strong>Headline:</strong> <br><strong>[</strong><em>top | important | most wanted | close | key</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>al-Zarqawi</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>aide | lieutenant | associate | "cell prince" | figure</em><strong>] [</strong><em>captured | arrested</em><strong>]</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>Dateline:</strong><br>(<em>some date</em>) (<em>some place in Iraq</em>)</p>\n\n<p><strong>Body:</strong><br><strong>[</strong><em>Iraqi | US | US and Iraqi</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>forces have</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>nabbed | captured | arrested</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>a | one | two</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>senior | middle</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>figure | operations chief | terrorist operative</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>Jordanian | al-Qaeda-linked | Iraq's most wanted</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>(<em>arabic name</em>)<strong>, also know as</strong> (<em>other arabic name</em>)<strong>, was</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>detained | picked up</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>on</strong> (<em>some date</em>) <strong>during an</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>Iraqi police | US military | US and Iraqi</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>raid | road block | operation</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>in</strong> (<em>some place in Iraq</em>). </p>\n\n<p><strong>[</strong><em>spokesman | US General | Iraqi minister</em><strong>]</strong> <strong>said</strong> <strong>[</strong><em>"major catch" | "significant impact" | "big step forward"</em><strong>].</strong></p></blockquote><p>\n\nThe old post <a href=\"http://www.moonofalabama.org/2005/06/make_your_own.html\">included</a> some 20 real life examples of its use. The schema was out of fashion for a while but today it is BACK!!! </p><blockquote><p>American troops acting on a tip killed the No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq — a Moroccan known for his ability to recruit and motivate foreign fighters — in a raid in the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. military said Wednesday.<br>...<br>U.S. troops killed Abu Qaswarah, also known as Abu Sara, on Oct. 5 after coming under fire during a raid on a building that served as an al-Qaida in Iraq "key command and control location for" in Mosul, the military said.<br>...<br>The insurgent leader became the senior al-Qaida in Iraq emir of northern Iraq in June 2007 and had "historic ties to AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and senior al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan," the military said.<br><a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081015/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq\">US troops kill No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq</a>, <strong>Oct 15, 2008</strong></p></blockquote>\n<p>Checking the above I should have made a special provisions for\n'al-Qaeda's No.2'. That guy seems to be an attractive and regular subject of schema generated success-news. Consider:\n</p>\n<blockquote><p>The Iraqi Interior Ministry said Abdullah Latif Al Jaburi was arrested in a raid by U.S.-led coalition forces in Duluiya, 90 kilometers north of Baghdad on March 4. Al Jaburi was identified as the<strong> No. 2 operative</strong> in the Al Qaida-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq.<br><a href=\"http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/07/front2454166.26875.html\">U.S. captures Iraq's number 2\nAl Qaida leader</a>, March 6, <strong>2007</strong></p></blockquote><center>---</center>\n<blockquote><p>Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said Hamed Juma Faris al-Suaidi, al-Qaida's <strong>number two commander</strong> in the country, told reporters today that he had been arrested last week.<br><a href=\"http://www.manchester.com/News/Defence/Iraqs_al_Qaida_number_two_arrested-17581651.html\">Iraq's al-Qaida number two arrested</a>, Sept 3, <strong>2006</strong></p></blockquote><center>---</center>\n<blockquote><p>Iraqi and U.S. forces claimed a major blow against one of the country's deadliest insurgent groups Tuesday, saying they killed the <strong>No. 2 leader</strong> of al-Qaida in Iraq who masterminded a brutal escalation in suicide bombings that claimed nearly 700 lives in Baghdad since April. <br><a href=\"http://pakistantimes.net/2005/09/30/top7.htm\">Number Two Leader of al-Qaida Killed in Iraq</a>, Sept 30, <strong>2005</strong></p></blockquote>\n\n<p>I guess McCain will tonight use today's "Make Your Own" generated Pentagon <em>news</em> to make some weird argument about staying in Iraq. </p>\n\n<p>That is likely the reason why this was put out in the first place.</p>\n\n\n\n</div>"
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"title" : "Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds",
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"content" : "<div><p><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/22/circle_of_hands.jpg\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"150\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/circle_of_hands.jpg\" title=\"Circle of Hands\" alt=\"Circle of Hands\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>\nWe often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Although many communities surely germinate and bloom on their own, purposefully creating communities can take a tremendous amount of hard work, and one factor their success ultimately depends upon is their <em>numbers</em>.</p>\n\n<p>If a community is too small you'll often have insufficient critical mass to sustain it. Conversely, if it's too large you can end up with a community that's too noisy, too cliquey, or otherwise problematic. These optimal and sub-optimal community sizes appear in strata, like discrete layers of rock. For a community to advance from one strata to the next often takes immense energy.</p>\n\n<p>We can analyze these community sizes in three ways. In this first article I'm going to talk about numerical group thresholds that have been observed in various sizes of tightly-knit communities, while in its sequel I'm going to talk about personal thresholds and how they relate to group thresholds. In my final post, I'm going to consider how power laws and inequalities of participation further complicate these simple values in the creation of larger communities. Together these three articles constitute what I call "Community by the Numbers," a theory of community size.</p>\n\n<p>Though I'm going to point to some studies which support these numbers, in general my goal here isn't to try and prove this theory of community size numbers, but rather to lay the theory out completely.</p>\n\n<h3>Tightly-Knit Group Thresholds</h3>\n\n<p>Groups can clearly exist at any size, from a partnership of two, on upward. However what I'm going to write about here are the threshold values: the ideal numbers where a community seems to function best, and the less than ideal numbers at which a community begins to grow unstable, remaining so until a new threshold number is reached.</p>\n\n<p>I'm also specifically talking about groups that are both tightly-knit and participatory communities. Clearly Ford Motor Company, with 250,000 employees, doesn't match any of these group thresholds. But any self-contained community within Ford probably will (and in fact, it will probably be either a "Working Group" or a "Non-Exclusive Dunbar Group", both terms I'll explain below). Similarly, a non-corporate community that doesn't <em>require</em> everyone to participate won't work quite the same as a community that does require participation from each member (though that's again the topic of the third article in this series).</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.singers.com/jazz/group7.html\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"132\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/group7.jpg\" title=\"Group7\" alt=\"Group 7\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>\n<strong>7, "The Working Group".</strong> <a name=\"Working_Group\"></a>\nThis community size probably runs from about 4-9 members, but 7 is a pretty good average, and one that shows up in <a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/workinggroup\">multiple studies</a>. This number may well relate to the general <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_seven\">rule of seven</a> (<a href=\"http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/\">original paper</a>), which suggests that 7 is a number that the brain can easily and intuitively comprehend.</p>\n\n<p>It has become increasingly clear that a tightly-knit group of 7 is the first group size which is truly an optimal community size. Groups below this size can function effectively, but risk not having\nenough manpower to deliver a result that everyone is happy with, or having insufficient viewpoints to avoid group think. </p>\n\n<p>Seven is not only an optimal size for a wide variety of corporate and government committees, it is also a healthy size for a small business and even a good size for a party of close friends. More importantly, 7 is a very comfortable group size as it "feels" relatively natural. At this size members find it easy to get to know the other members of the group, and they're able to function well together in a very intuitive and organic fashion.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/22/squadfireteam.gif\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"143\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Squad and Fire Team\" title=\"Squad and Fire Team\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/squadfireteam.gif\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px;float:left\"></a>\nAn interesting example of this group size is the modern infantry\n"squad", which consists of two fire teams of 4 people, and a squad\nleader, for a total of 9 people. Each fire team is is large enough to\nfunction on its own, but together the group of 9 can still have effective\nsmall group dynamics.</p>\n\n<p>It is typically at this size that the first signs of leadership in a group informally emerge, but the leadership usually isn't overbearing at this level, nor does there tend to be any rebellion against it — perhaps because the group may be too small to elicit multiple leaders.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"109\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/lastsupper.jpg\" title=\"Last Supper\" alt=\"Last Supper\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a><a name=\"Judas_Number\"></a>\n13—"The Judas Number".</em></strong> A group size of 13 doesn't represent a threshold ideal value, but rather a threshold nadir. It is one of the points where groups can change behavior and risk becoming dysfunctional. There's one of these nadirs beyond every group threshold, where the previously harmonious group dynamics become more difficult. I've chosen to highlight this specific number because it's a point that small communities often hit, particularly as entrepreneurial organizations try to grow above their startup beginnings.</p>\n\n<p>(I should note that 13 isn't a precise number, but rather one offered because it's in the right range and because it's poetically easy to remember. The exact number occurs somewhere between 9 and 25, but I suspect it is worst in the range of 12-15.)</p>\n\n<p>In a group of this community size no one ever feels like they get a fair share of time. Studies show that at this size participants underestimate the amount of time they contributed to the conversation, and thus will come out feeling like they were unfairly ignored despite having a fair share of the conversation. Groups of this size risk people being lumped into categories and ceasing to be trusted as individuals. In addition, problems start with the development of "too many chiefs," yet there is not enough enough variety of non-chiefs for them to direct. Furthermore, multiple leaders may struggle for hierarchical status, increasing the conflict in an already troublesome group.</p>\n\n<p>If your community is unfortunately stuck at this nadir, one of two things usually occurs.</p>\n\n<p>Most commonly, the group shrinks. This could be because participants unhappy with the group dynamics abandon it; or it could occur in a more organized way with the unwieldy large group breaking into two or more smaller groups. For example, a terrible group of 13 could become two more functional groups of 6 and 7.</p>\n\n<p>Alternatively, more energy could be expended. This could be in the form of more formal organization, rewards for participation, or more time to be casual and socialize in order to shake off the tensions of this size group. Though these efforts don't usually change the size of the group, they can improve its dynamics.</p>\n\n<p>Energy could also be spent to help push the group up to the next threshold. Though this could occur naturally — for example if the group focuses on a topic of particular interest that causes new people to continually be added. In addition, in order to grow a group to a new threshold it often requires the efforts of more than one leader to succeed.</p>\n\n<p>A group size of 13 isn't necessarily bad, just more difficult. Anthropological studies show that primitive hunting tribes often temporarily broke into "bands" of this size — my presumption is that the value of having that many people hunting together outweighed the social costs of the group. It is interesting that most juries are made up of groups this size. I believe that the social dynamics of this size of group with all new members creates some tension among the jurors, which may serve justice to make sure that all sides are considered by the jury without falling into groupthink. However, from my experience, the interpersonal conflict in a jury can also slow down the deliberation process and cause much frustration among the participants.</p>\n\n<p><strong><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/23/nonexclusivenetworks.png\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"166\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/23/nonexclusivenetworks.png\" title=\"Non-Exclusive Networks\" alt=\"Non Exclusive Networks\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>\n50—"The Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number".</strong> <a name=\"Non-Exclusive_Dunbar_Number\"></a>More properly this group size falls in the range of 25-75 participants, but it seems to feel the most natural in the range of 50-60. Studies of the sizes guilds in online games <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/08/dunbar_world_of.html\">support</a> this hypothesis. For instance, based on graphs of the guild sizes in Ultima Online, groups have a median of 61 members. Similar numbers hold true in studies of a more recent game, <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/10/dunbar_group_co.html\">World of Warcraft</a>.</p>\n\n<p>I call this value the "Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number" because it matches the lower end of a threshold that <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html\">Robin Dunbar</a> set for group sizes. However, at this size it applies to mostly non-exclusive groupings, which includes the above mentioned online guilds, many employee communities, and the majority of social gatherings that manage to rise above the size of a Working Group. Groups of this size <em>can</em> be serious or take up a lot of time, but in general they are not exclusive — they don't tend to be the only group that individual participants are involved in.</p>\n\n<p><strong>90—"The Dunbar Valley".</strong> As Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number communities grow, they reach a point where increased time obligations and the noise of socialization required to keep the group cohesive requires a much more serious commitment from the participants. Like the Judas Number, the Dunbar Valley is a threshold nadir where more energy is required to keep a tightly-knit community together; either the community agrees to a higher level of commitment and grows to the next level, or the community splits apart.</p>\n\n<p>I've found this to be true when growing a small business — where it is too small for any middle-management, but the sub-groups are too large for one person to manage effectively. I've also seen this with more ephemeral groups, such as when a small conference that worked well at 60 participants tries to grow and finds at at 100 participants they can't sustain a high enough intimacy level.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/22/legion_2.jpg\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"145\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/legion_2.jpg\" title=\"Roman Legion\" alt=\"Roman Legion\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>\nAnother illustration of the Dunbar Valley is the history of the ancient Roman "century", a grouping that was originally 100 soldiers. However, as the years went by, centuries tended to decrease in numbers to only include 70 or 80 soldiers. This might well be due to Non-Exclusive Dunbar constraints: even in a very devoted group of military men, there was still the need for relationships with other century groups, with support staff, and with camp followers, ultimately lowering the attention that could be spent on the century itself.</p>\n\n<p><strong>150—"The Exclusive Dunbar Number".</strong> Robin Dunbar got much of the discussion of group thresholds started with his <a href=\"http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/dunbar93coevolutionOf.html\">article</a>, "Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans." However, as I've written <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html\">previously</a>, and as I've described in this article, Dunbar's group threshold of 150 applies more to groups that are highly incentivized and relatively exclusive and whose goal is survival.</p>\n\n<p>Dunbar makes this obvious by the statement that such a grouping "would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming." </p>\n\n<p> The result of the grooming requirement is that communities bounded by the Exclusive Dunbar Number are relatively few. You will find hunter/gatherer and other subsistence societies where this is a natural tribe size. You'll also find these groups sizes in <a href=\"http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/03/what_is_the_opt.html\">terrorist and mafia</a> organizations. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/22/sopranos_dinner.jpg\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"129\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2008/09/22/sopranos_dinner.jpg\" title=\"The Sopranos at Dinner\" alt=\"The Sopranos at Dinner\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>Clearly, as we step up toward higher group thresholds, more and more\ntime is required to simply keep the group going. You see this in\ndepictions of mafia life — in the TV series <em>The Sopranos</em> a lot of time\nis spent dining, hanging out, and drinking together. That is part of that 42% social\ngrooming time required for that intense of a survival group.</p>\n\n<p>It is possible for a large company to force groups up to this size by expending lots of energy (which is to say money) to keep it healthy. Apple did this during the invention of the Macintosh, the first OS X operating system, and the iPhone, but the intensity required of such large teams is not sustainable for long periods of time.</p>\n\n<p>Without that extra energy, few modern tightly-knit communities can reach this threshold, or else can't hold it for very long. Instead they fracture into groups of individual interest (even if they continue to "meet" in the same real-world or online forum), which are more than more likely to be bounded by the Non-Exclusive Dunbar number.</p>\n\n<p>Given the difficulty in even arriving at the Exclusive Dunbar number, it may well be the highest limit of all for a tightly-knit community. Beyond this limit, communities are less cohesive, less trusted, and less participatory (and the topic of my third article in this series.)</p>\n\n<h3>Conclusion</h3>\n\n<p>There are many different ways to measure groups, and one is by counting its members. As I've discussed here, the number of members can have a huge impact on whether the communities are successful or not. Thus, as community organizers, social software engineers, game designers, or as sociologists interested in community dynamics, we must ultimately consider group thresholds and group nadirs; to understand how to create cohesive communities, rather than groups that fly apart.</p>\n\n<p>In my <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html\">next article</a> I'm going to talk about thresholds that are personal, rather then group-oriented.</p>\n\n<hr>\n<blockquote><p><em><strong>Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:</strong></em></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html\">2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes</a><br>(also some really good <a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html#comments\">comments</a>)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/02/dunbar_triage_t.html\">2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/03/dunbar_altruist.html\">2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/07/cheers_belongin.html\">2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/08/dunbar_world_of.html\">2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/10/dunbar_group_co.html\">2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html\">2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p><em><strong>My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at <a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA\">delicious.com/ChristopherA</a> under some of the following tags:</strong></em></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/group+threshold\">group threshold</a> - everything I have on the topic</li>\n\n<li><a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/workinggroup\">workinggroup</a> - on small groups such as committees</li>\n\n<li><a href=\"http://delicious.com/ChristopherA/dunbar+number\">dunbar number</a> - on larger groups such as tribes\n</li>\n</ul>\n <p><em><strong>If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them <a href=\"http://delicious.com/tag/for:ChristopherA\">for:ChristopherA</a> and I'll take a look.</strong></em></p>\n\n<p><strong><em>Many thanks to <a href=\"http://www.skotos.net/about/staff/shannon_appelcline.php\">Shannon Appecline</a> and <a href=\"http://randy.thefarmers.org/\">F. Randall Farmer</a> for their assistance with this series.</em><br>\n</strong></p></blockquote>\n</div>"
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"content" : "\"People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in tits room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence; at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.<br><br>What silence emanates from countries with overflowing prisons! In Somoza's Nicaragua–silence; in Duvalier's Haiti–silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice–of complaint or protest or indignation–disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the <span style=\"font-style:italic\">status quo ante</span>–the state of silence.<br><br>Silence has the capacity of spreading, which is why we use expressions like 'silence reigned everywhere,' or 'a universal silence fell.' Silence has the capacity to take on weight, so that we can speak of 'an oppressive silence' in the same way we would speak of a heavy solid or liquid.<br><br>The word 'silence' most often joins words like 'funereal' ('funereal silence'), 'battle' ('the silence after battle') and 'dungeon' ('as silent as a dungeon'). These are not accidental associations. . .<br><br>It would be interesting to research the media systems of the world to see how many service information and how many service silent and quiet. Is there more of what is said or of what is not said? One could calculate the number of people working in the publicity industry. What if you could calculate the number of people working in the silence industry? Which number would be greater?\" (189-190).<br><br><div style=\"text-align:right\">Ryszard Kapuscinski, <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Soccer War, </span><span>1986</span><br></div><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/7832622-8592584359565845716?l=janerubio.blogspot.com\"></div><img src=\"http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/janerubio/~4/bROZFzAck8s\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<div><br><p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Black Monday – look it up – Dublin, 1209, a group of five hundred recently arrived settlers from Bristol were massacred by warriors of the Gaelic O’Byrne clan. Folks are still upset about that. Well, not really.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">But more to the point, 28 October 1929 – the Wall Street Crash of 1929, or the start of it, the major stock market upheaval that led to the Great Depression. Or there’s 19 October 1987 – the second largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history. Those were both Mondays. </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">And now there’s Monday, September 15, 2008, with this:</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 0 .5in\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"><strong>DJIA: </strong>-504.48 (-4.42%) </span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 0 .5in\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"><strong>NASDAQ:</strong> -81.36 (-3.60%) </span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 0 .5in\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"><strong>NYSE: </strong>-410.59 (-5.07%) </span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 0 .5in\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"><strong>S&P 500:</strong> -59.01 (-4.71%)</span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 0 .5in\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">This was not good, a meltdown, and the New York Times headlines were dire. </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><a title=\"Despite reassurances by the Bush administration, stocks fell 4.4 percent on Monday, dragged by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch. \" href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/business/16paulson.html\"><span style=\"font-size:small;color:#002060;font-family:Tahoma\">Wall Street in Worst Loss Since 2001</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\"> – “In another unnerving day for Wall Street, investors suffered their worst losses since the terrorist attacks of 2001, as government officials raced to prevent the financial crisis from spreading.” </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">And </span><a title=\"The Federal Reserve is said to have asked two investment banks to put together $70 billion in loans to help prop up A.I.G. \" href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/business/16aig.html\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Fed Takes Steps to Aid A.I.G.</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\"> – “Federal Reserve officials were in urgent talks with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on Monday to put together a $75 billion lending facility to stave off a crisis at the American International Group, the latest financial services company to be pummeled by the turmoil in the housing and credit markets.”</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">And </span><a title=\"The collapse of Lehman has sent creditors scrambling to protect their assets. \" href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/business/16bankruptcy.html\"><span style=\"font-size:small;color:#002060;font-family:Tahoma\">A Fight for a Piece of What’s Left</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\"> – “A worldwide battle began on Monday over the remains of Lehman Brothers as the biggest bankruptcy filing in history sent creditors scrambling to protect their investments.”</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">So it was another Black Monday – with a full moon rising in the evening, to drive men mad, as the poets would have it, and those who write werewolf stories. But the full moon was probably a coincidence. Lehman Brothers was gone, filing for bankruptcy, and Merrill was purchased by Bank of America. That’s three of the big five investment banks gone – Bear-Stearns and now these two. It seems the lightly regulated, or hardly regulated, shadow banking system was going the way of the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. It’s called extinction, and all over lower Manhattan depressed-looking middle-aged men in Brooks Brothers suits were humming </span><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPmbT5XC-q0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">that Carpenters tune</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">, packing up their things.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">The depository banks were fine – those who hold your money and let you write checks, and play it safe. Well, that’s not exactly true – Washington Mutual had been doing that, and originating a whole lot of mortgages with special features for those who really couldn’t afford traditional payments – pay what you can, or what you want, each month, and what you’re short on will be added to the gross amount owed, so your loan amount just gets bigger and bigger. You remember what Woody Allen said about his mother’s pot roast – the more you chew, the bigger it gets. And for many that would have been fine if house prices kept rising and they could sell at a profit and move on, or refinance on different terms later. But it didn’t work out that way – prices started to fall, and kept falling. People owed much more than their home would ever be worth now – they were upside-down, as they say – and could neither sell the place – they’d still be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the difference between the sale price and what they actually owed the bank – nor could they afford the payments on the loan amount that they had made bigger month after month with the short payments. Add too all those people who took out loans on the equity in their homes – the cushion, the positive difference between what the place was worth and what was owed. That was gone. </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Yeah, that could lead to foreclosure – losing the house, which the bank really didn’t want anyway, but was all that they could recover. Add too all those people who took out loans on the equity in their homes – the cushion, the positive difference between what the place was worth and what was owed, providing collateral. That was gone – you may have borrowed money against that difference for a trip to Rio or a giant SUV or two, but no more. </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Washington Mutual seems to be holding many billions of dollars of such mortgages and equity loans – bad paper, losses they would have to write down. They’re barely hanging on, and late Monday there was </span><a href=\"http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/15/news/economy/wamu/?postversion=2008091518\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">this</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\"> – “Washington Mutual had its credit rating lowered to junk Monday by Standard & Poors amid continuing weakness in the housing market.” </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Their share price dropped twenty-seven percent on this new Black Monday – no one will be lending them short term funds for this and that, overnight funds and that sort of thing, except at exorbitant interest rates. Junk is junk, and what additional liquidity they need for operations will cost them dearly, if they can get any funds at all.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">That’s the crisis in a nutshell – there’s so much crap paper out there, outstanding obligations no one will ever meet, that no one is willing to move money one way or the other, as no one is sure who can pay it back. Washington Mutual, like many depository banks, has a mortgage and loan portfolio that is hardly an asset. That portfolio is no longer a sign of financial strength and solidity. Who is going to spare them a dime, expecting they can repay that dime later?</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">It’s a liquidity crisis, where everything seizes up – nothing moves. Sure, the Fed can pump in money – make the short term loans, saying they’ll accept the crap paper as collateral, as they have done. And they are assuming the obligations of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae when they took over those two firms which underwrite half the mortgages in the country – standing behind what seems worthless. They can be the lender of last resort, at reasonable rates, assuming the risk no one else will take. There are worse things to do with taxpayer money. Keeping things liquid – keeping the blood flowing through the body so the patient doesn’t die – is not a bad idea.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">But that sort of artificial heart is, in fact, artificial. There is something terrible wrong here. Think about the metaphor – this is like keeping the body of a brain-dead crash victim alive, depending on how you define life, with a bedside gizmo that gurgles away, keeping the cheeks rosy, even if no one is home.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Those of us who have worked in hospitals know about the Brain Death Committee – usually three people, a doctor, an ethics expert like a minister or something, and a hospital administrator – who have to decide dead, not-dead. In the financial word it is coming to that. Is the financial system dead?</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">And then there are the investment banks, not doing the mundane stuff of checking accounts and individual mortgages. These guys manage wealth – as a big shot or institution, give them your money and they’ll put it to work. Maybe they’ll buy into aggregate collections of outstanding mortgages, or collections of other obligations and assets, or bets on bets about bets about commodities or currencies, going long here and short there, or get you into investing in credit swaps, making money on who owes what and who is paying whom, or derivatives, bets on almost anything where you can make money. They invent new financial instruments all the time, and no one really quite understands those – but they can make a lot of money for you – and one dollar can be leveraged into several hundred if you play things right.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">That world is full of systems geeks, of the financial-modeling sort. All this can be carefully projected so risk is widely spread, and thus minimized, and profits maximized. It’s beyond complicated, and these guys are wizards. Yeah, sometimes the models didn’t work, but for the last decade or more they did. Investors made big money, until they didn’t. And frankly, investment banks provided most of the liquidity for markets worldwide – they kept the global financial system more than alive. They made it work – they kept the blood flowing – until it didn’t work. For all the fancy modeling, the investment banks ended up holding crap paper. Everyone was positioning themselves in relation to assets sixteen times removed from them, and torn apart and repackaged in odd combinations – assets that turned out to be not assets at all, and things had been sliced and diced and redistributed to such an extent that no one knew what anything was worth. Forget mark-to-market, where at the end of the day you see who bought what at what price and say, well, that’s its value at the moment. That turned out to be impossible. Of course this had to collapse.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">And an additional feature, of course, was none of this investment bank stuff was really regulated. Not much of it fell under the rules of traditional banks, and then, just how could what they were doing be regulated anyway? They were inventing new ways to put money to work that no one had ever seen before. The old rules were all from the folks in the thirties, reacting to how banking was done and the markets worked back then. Imagine a securities expert at a white-shoe Wall Street law firm who has a client who wants to register one of these new products – some sort of shares in an intricate investment plan that cross-references oil futures and short sales on pork bellies and the weather in Panama. You can help your client with all the filings to bring this Frankenstein monster to market, but that’s about it. It’s not your job to say this thing is nonsense to the tenth power, and probably dangerous. It’s no one’s job, actually. There are no rules that apply. The thing is registered. Individuals and institutions buy it – and that’s that.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">So we are where we are – the investment banks realizing that if someone says get me out of this crazy product or that, and that if many say that, they cannot cover all the leveraged debt they carry, as they’ve been juggling one thing against the other and shifting funds back and forth and up and down, according to what their financial-modeling gurus have calculated, betting one dollar will make forty here if they lose twenty there. They’re stuck, and have already written down billions of dollars. They’re running out of things to write down. And no one knows what anything is worth. Lehman Brothers found themselves there. It was a run on the bank, in an odd sort of way, as investment banks are not really banks. But that’s what happened. Merrill cried uncle and agreed to be bought out by Bank of America, with its hundreds of billions of dollars in actual deposits that are, shall we say, real. The whole investment bank model is in question, if you think about it. And liquidity – the lifeblood in the metaphor – is drying up.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Things aren’t much better with the depository banks – those holding failing mortgages and equity loans, backed now by nothing at all, with debtors who cannot now make even minimal payments and may lose their jobs anyway, as the economy sours – are now not any position to lend anyone money, even for a new car, unless terms are ironclad and the borrower can prove six ways from Sunday that they can make the payments, month after month, year after year. And that had better be countersigned by the pope. And, of course, in the course of business, when they need quick access to a few million for some short, special effort, no one is going to lend the bank itself those funds. Can they pay it back? That is now a consideration.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">So the system grinds to a halt. The blood stops flowing. It’s no wonder the markets tanked on this new Black Monday. The Fed is keeping things going, but it’s artificial life-support.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Of course everyone knows all this – but sometimes it helps to write it all down. And one thinks back to 1929, when October 28 was just one day of many, not the crash itself. Things kept falling. The bottom came much later. This could be like that.</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">That this should happen in the last of eight years of an unpopular Republican administration should mean Obama and the Democrats take the White House, although in Slate, John Dickerson </span><a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2200154/\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">argues that is not so clear</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">. </span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">But does it matter? The issue may be beyond politics. Whoever wins will have a mess to fix, and no real tools to use. What can a president do?</span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">Of course, McCain has several times said he really doesn’t understand economics, or the economy, and one gets the feeling he’s rather bored by policy matters and far more interested in war and the use of force internationally. That’s his thing – see </span><a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/mccain\"><span style=\"font-size:small;color:#002060;font-family:Tahoma\">The Wars of John McCain</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"> by Jeffrey Goldberg in the new issue of the Atlantic. He replies on Phil Gramm, the master of deregulation of everything, for what little he thinks about the economy. His vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, would be worse than useless – she’d be dangerous. How she handled things in Alaska, such as they are, and minimal at best, <span lang=\"EN\"><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin\"><span><span style=\"color:#002060\">is absurd</span></span></a>. </span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\">So if you don’t go with the fellow who graduated near dead last at Annapolis and the woman who boasts the she knows how to field-dress a moose she’s just shot, and you go with the guy who was brilliant at Harvard, edited the Law Review there and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and his no-nonsense sidekick with more than thirty years of both policy and legislative experience, there might be a better chance something might be done.</span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">But what can be done? Read </span><a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/candidates_economy;_ylt=AtmiQG.HYlZycM.OlWUBTAes0NUE\"><span style=\"font-size:small;font-family:Tahoma\">what they’re saying</span></a><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\"> – McCain saying the economy is basically sound and Obama pouncing all over him for that, and both saying regulation, regulation, regulation. Yep, better regulation might help, or shut things down further. Who knows? </span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\">The whole system is becoming locked up. They are both posturing – each wants to win the election.</span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\">And this column would usually end with some sort of it-really-is-simple statement. Not this time. It isn’t simple. And it is beyond presidential politics.</span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"><span lang=\"EN\"><span style=\"font-size:small\"><span style=\"font-family:Tahoma\">Does anyone have any ideas?</span></span></span></p>\n<p style=\"margin:0\"> </p>\n<img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/categories/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/tags/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/justabovesunset.wordpress.com/1820/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=justabovesunset.wordpress.com&blog=880780&post=1820&subd=justabovesunset&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "Monday Musing: Useless Calculations",
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"content" : "<div><p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">I am a nerd. I used to be an engineer and so I like calculating stuff in my head. I hardly ever use electronic calculators, even when exact calculations of something are needed, preferring to do them by hand (try it, it can be a soothing thing) on chit’s of paper, backs-of-the-proverbial envelopes, etc. But a lot of the time, I am just calculating really stupid things for fun in my head, especially if I am sitting somewhere (doctor’s office, airport, porcelain throne, bed-before-sleep) with nothing to do. I also have other ways of amusing myself in such situations. For example, I might endlessly rewind and replay a conversation I had with someone over and over in my head, like a TV program, which I realize makes me weird but also remarkably patient with things like flight delays. But mostly, I calculate.</span></p>\n\n<p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\"><a href=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/12/full_moon_large.jpg\"><img title=\"Full_moon_large\" height=\"250\" alt=\"Full_moon_large\" src=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2008/09/12/full_moon_large.jpg\" width=\"250\" border=\"0\" style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>Another thing I do is collect weird quantitative facts about stuff in my head (I have a pretty good memory for numbers; for other things... well, not so much--as unfortunately many people have found out upon meeting me for the <em>second</em> time! ;-). Quick, how much does a fully loaded 747 weigh? How much of that weight is fuel? How dense is gold compared to water? What is the radius of the moon? What is Avogadro’s number? I happen to know these and many other (mostly) useless things. I don’t know why, but I suck them up out of magazines and things like that, and some I remember from high school and college textbooks. (It helps that I am a big rereader of books.) I am also the type of person who reads his car manual from beginning to end, and idiotically remembers what the capacity of the windshield-washer-fluid tank is.</span></p>\n\n<p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">I use these useless things to calculate even more useless things (while waiting in the aforementioned doctors’ offices, airports, etc.). But I don’t calculate things <em>exactly</em> (most of the time), I just like to estimate stuff very roughly. Today, for example, I estimated (by looking while sitting on my balcony) that the amount of water flowing by in the river next to me (the Eisack) every <em>minute</em> is enough for everyone living in my city of Brixen to flush his/her toilet about 10 times each day (or enough for about 200,000 flushes). This was pretty simple to do:</span></p>\n\n<ul dir=\"ltr\"><li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\"><a href=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/12/screenhunter_02_sep_12_1543.gif\"><img title=\"Screenhunter_02_sep_12_1543\" height=\"333\" alt=\"Screenhunter_02_sep_12_1543\" src=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2008/09/12/screenhunter_02_sep_12_1543.gif\" width=\"250\" border=\"0\" style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>Sometimes, the water management authorities dam up most of the water temporarily in the river, so I have seen the bottom of the river (or at least the larger rocks on the bottom--some water is always flowing), and so I can estimate the (higher today) average depth of the river just by looking at it. I'd say it's about 2 feet.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">The river looks about 50 feet across over here. (It's wider in the photo at the right, which I took at a different spot.)</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">I timed a bit of driftwood floating down the river and in 10 seconds (one-thousand one, one-thousand two...) it went about 60 feet--it flows fast because of the steep downhill grade in this mountainous area--so about 6 feet per second.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">I confirm my estimate of 60 feet in ten seconds in my head by noticing that the driftwood is floating just a tiny bit faster than a person walking fast in the same direction on the path next to the river. A fast walking person goes about 4 miles per hour, and 6 feet/second X 3600 seconds/hour = 21,600 feet/hour, and 21,600 feet/hour X 1 mile/5,280 feet = (approximately) 4 miles/hour. Checks out. Good.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">The cross-sectional area of the river is 50 feet X 2 feet = 100 square feet.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">The volume of water flowing by in a second is therefore 100 square feet X 6 feet = 600 cubic feet.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">Newer commodes often have written on them the amount of water they use per flush. Most often I have seen the figure 6 liters/flush. Now, the problem is converting cubic feet to liters.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">To do this, I think the following: I know that a cubic meter is 1000 liters. How many cubic feet are in a cubic meter? Well, I remember that there are about 3.3 feet in a meter, so 3.3 X 3.3 X 3.3 = (approximately) 36 cubic feet/cubic meter.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">So, we have 1000 liters/cubic meter X 1 cubic meter/36 cubic feet = (very approximately) 30 liters/cubic foot.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">Now 1 flush/6 liters X 30 liters/cubic foot = 5 flushes/cubic foot of water.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">5 flushes/cubic foot X 600 cubic feet/second (from above) = 3000 flushes/second.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">3000 flushes/second X 60 seconds/minute = 180000 flushes/minute of river flow.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">180,000 flushes/20,000 persons = 9 flushes/person, from a minutes worth of water flow, which I rounded up to 10 just 'cause it sounds better when I tell my wife this astoundingly impressive fact. :-) (Yeah, yeah, I know she's sick of crap like this...)</span></div></li></ul>\n\n<p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">Incidentally, it just occured to me as I write this that the amount of water flowing by every <em>second</em> (600 cubic feet) in the river weighs as much as about 18 Toyota Corollas (and this is not a very big river). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to convince him/herself of the approximate truth of this.</span></p>\n\n<p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">*************************************</span></p>\n\n<p style=\"MARGIN:0in 0in 10pt\"><span face=\"Calibri\">Here is one more example: recently (on a train) I wondered how<span> </span>much the air in the Empire State Building weighs. Here is how I went about estimating the answer:</span></p>\n\n<ul><li><div><span face=\"Calibri\"><a href=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/12/empire_state_building.jpg\"><img title=\"Empire_state_building\" height=\"825\" alt=\"Empire_state_building\" src=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2008/09/12/empire_state_building.jpg\" width=\"250\" border=\"0\" style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>I read somewhere that a north-south NY city block is about a 20 of a mile. I confirm this rough figure in my mind by thinking that Manhattan is about 12 miles long and the northernmost streets are numbered around 215 or so. Since there is a bit of Manhattan below 1st street, I figure 200 blocks divided by roughly 10 miles gives a nice round number of 20 blocks per mile. Good.</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div><span face=\"Calibri\">A mile has 5280 feet, so a 20th of that is half of 528 feet, about 250ish feet. (It's a <em>rough</em> calculation!)</span></div></li>\n\n<li><div>It seems to me that the area of the footprint of the building (from having seen it many times) is probably close to the square of a city block (it actually is more rectangular, with the north-south dimension a bit less than a block and the east-west one a bit more), so let's just say 250 X 250 feet, which is 62500 square feet, or roughly (remember, I have to keep this stuff in my head! And I'll round up this time, since I rounded down last time) 70,000 square feet.</div></li>\n\n<li><div>It's a little broader at the bottom floors and tapers sharply starting at the 86th through the 102nd floors, I think, so I'll just say it is 90ish stories.</div></li>\n\n<li><div>Let's say 10 feet (surprise, a nice round number!) of height for each floor, so multiplying by the area of the footprint, we get 10 X 90 X 70000 = 900 X 70000 = 63,000,000 cubic feet of internal space. You with me?</div></li>\n\n<li><div>I'll say about a sixth, or <em>roughly</em> 13 million cubic feet of this is probably taken up by solid stuff including people, internal supports, furniture, etc., so we're left with a nice round number: 50 million cubic feet of air.</div></li>\n\n<li><div>Now I just happen to know that the density of air is about 0.08 pounds per cubic foot (at sea level and normallish temperatures), but even if I didn't, I just remembered reading somewhere that air is about 800 times lighter than water, and knowing the density of water I could have figured it out easily enough.</div></li>\n\n<li><div>So, the weight of all the air in the Empire State Building is... 0.08 X 50,000,000 or 8 X 500,000 which equals... (drumroll, please) 4,000,000 pounds!</div></li></ul>\n\n<p>Which, as it happens, is 2,000 Toyota Corollas, or ten times the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 767 (by now you know not to ask why I know this!), like the one which crashed into the World Trade Center. Each tower of the WTC was bigger than the Empire State, so it is interesting to note that the weight of each of the planes that struck it (the other plane was slightly smaller), was less than a tenth of just the weight of the <em>air</em> inside the building.</p>\n\n<p>What's surprising about such estimates is how often they are very close to the reality. This is especially true in a multi-step approximation, where over- and underestimates at various steps tend to cancel each other out, usually resulting in something not too far off from the truth. To convince you of this, I emailed my friend, the mathematician John Allen Paulos, and asked him to estimate the weight of the air inside the Empire State Building. I told him he could look up the density of air, but nothing else, and to tell me his reasoning. This is what he wrote back:</p><blockquote dir=\"ltr\"><p>Here's my quick back of the envelope rough calculation of the weight of the air in the Empire State Building:</p>\n\n<p>The building is about 1200 feet high and at ground level it a large square which then tapers as the building rises. I guess that on average it is about 200 feet by 200 feet. This gives us 48,000,000 cubic feet for its approximate volume. Since the density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/cubic meter or, translating into English units, roughly 2.5 pounds/35 cubic feet, the approximate weight of the air in the building is 48,000,000 x 2.5/35 or about 3.4 million pounds, somewhere around 3 or 4 million pounds.</p></blockquote><p dir=\"ltr\">The thing to notice here is that while John's individual assumptions are significantly different from mine (for example, my estimate of the area of the footprint of the building, 70,000 square feet, was 75% greater than his estimate of 40,000 square feet), in the end things kinda' even out and my answer of 4 million pounds is less than 20% greater than his answer of 3.4 million pounds. </p>\n\n<p>But how can we know the actual figure? We cannot. We can only get closer and closer approximations by measuring things more and more accurately (the volume, not just of the building, but of everything in it, which must be subtracted). It's not like there's an easy way to pour the air out of the building and weigh it!</p>\n\n<p>The fun in doing these estimates is in NOT looking anything up, and instead trying to answer questions by using, along the way, what we <em>do</em> know to estimate everything we <em>need</em> to know to answer our question.</p>\n\n<p>*************************************</p>\n\n<p>Suppose you have a baterium cell of a kind which divides into two every minute. (Normal bacteria like E. Coli divide about twenty times slower than that, but it's just an example.) Now you put this cell into a large jar (with lots of bacterium food) at 11 AM. In one hour, at 12 noon, the jar has just completely filled with bacteria. Can you work out the time between 11 AM and 12 noon when the jar was half full? Can you estimate it? Go ahead and keep the figure in your head. I'll give you the answer later.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, let me say a few words about doubling times. Let's say you have an investment which is earning 10% interest per year. How long will it take for you to double your money?</p>\n\n<p>There is a very simple little rule which works quite well in approximating doubling times for rates of growth between -25% (that's "minus" 25%) and 35% or so (and very accurate for single digit percentage rates of growth), which goes like this: just divide 70 by the percentage rate of growth, and you have the time needed to double the quantity. (The reason this works is a little complicated and would require me to explain stuff I don't want to get into at the moment.)</p>\n\n<p>So, what is the answer to the question above: how long will it take to double your money if it is growing at 10% annually? The answer is simply 70 divided by 10, or 7 years. Say a country's population is growing at the rate of 2% annually. How long before it doubles? 70 divided by 2, or 35 years! This rule is very useful in doing the rough mental estimates that I like to do.</p>\n\n<p>I'll give one last example: I read somewhere recently that the total energy consumption of the world is currently approximately 5 X 10<sup>20</sup> Joules per year, and worldwide energy consumption is increasing at a little over 2% annually. (This rate is expected to go up, not down, in the next couple of decades. China's energy consumption has been growing at double-digit rates!) The following question occured to me: at this rate, how long will it take before we outrun the total amount of energy which is coming in from the sun? (Fossil fuels are just a stored form of this solar energy, and renewable forms of energy like wind power, are also just a small subset of the total radiant energy we receive from the sun daily.) Here's how I went about estimating how long it would take:</p>\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/12/screenhunter_04_sep_12_1554.gif\"><img title=\"Screenhunter_04_sep_12_1554\" height=\"468\" alt=\"Screenhunter_04_sep_12_1554\" src=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2008/09/12/screenhunter_04_sep_12_1554.gif\" width=\"250\" border=\"0\" style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 5px 5px\"></a>I know (I did some research on solar panels a few years ago) that the total radiant power coming in from the sun per square meter is about 1400 Watts (1 Watt of power is a Joule of energy per second).</li>\n\n<li>Half the world's surface (the side facing the sun) receives energy at this rate. What is the area of this region? Well, it is just a circular cross section of the Earth, and the radius of the Earth is about 6,000 kilometers.</li>\n\n<li>The area of a circle is Pi X radius X radius, which is 3 X 6000 X 6000, or approimately 100 million square kilometers, in our case.</li>\n\n<li>One square kilometer is 1000 meters X 1000 meters = 1 million square meters, so we have a total area receiving solar energy of 100 million square kilometers X 1 million square meters/square kilometer, or 100 trillion square meters.</li>\n\n<li>100 trillion square meters X 1400 Watts/square meter = 1.4 X 10<sup>17</sup> Watts of power, or 1.4 X 10<sup>17</sup> Joules per second.</li>\n\n<li>So in a year we have 60 X 60 X 24 X 365 seconds or approximately 60 X 60 X 20 X 400 = 28,800,000, or about 30 million seconds = 3 X 10<sup>7</sup> seconds.</li>\n\n<li>1.4 X 10<sup>17</sup> Joules/second X 3 X 10<sup>7</sup> seconds/year = roughly 4 X 10<sup>24</sup> Joules of total radiant energy from the sun every year.</li>\n\n<li>Let's just round it up to 5 X 10<sup>24</sup> Joules. Remember, our current world wide consumption is 5 X 10<sup>20</sup> Joules annually, or only <em>1/10,000th(!)</em> of the total radiant energy of the sun that falls on the Earth every year. This seems a tiny fraction, but consider:</li>\n\n<li>At 2% annual growth in worldwide energy consumption, we double consumption every 35 years (by the approximate doubling time rule given above).</li>\n\n<li>How many times do we need to double consumption to reach 10,000 times our current level? This is just log<sub>2</sub> (10,000). I know that 2<sup>14</sup> is 16,384 (I was a programmer!) and this is more than the factor of 10,000 that we need. So let's just say we need 14 doublings.</li>\n\n<li>At 35 years/doubling X 14 doublings, we get 490 years.</li></ul>\n\n<p>In other words, given our current worldwided energy consumption, and the fact that it is growing at more than 2% per year, if it were to continue to grow at that rate, we will have outstripped ALL the energy coming in from the sun in less than 500 years! Pretty shocking, no? And if we took into account the solar energy that is absorbed by the atmosphere before reaching the surface of Earth, and things like that, we have MUCH less time during which we can sustain 2% growth in energy consumption. I know very little about economics, but I wonder if economic growth rates are related to energy consumption rates in any straightforward way. (Robin?) If so, this points to a cap on economic growth as well. So that's my nerdy column for today.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and yes, the answer to the bacteria question: the jar will be half full at 11:59 AM. Just think about it for one minute!</p>\n\n<p>All my previous <em>Monday Musings</em> can be seen <a href=\"http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/MondayMusings.html#abbas\">here</a>.</p>\n\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Have a good week!</p></div>"
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"content" : "It’s nearing 11:00 PM as I write this. I’m sitting in my bed, under a mosquito net and a ceiling fan which is struggling against one of the hottest nights I can remember. It is not just the heat that’s keeping me awake, though; it’s the incredibly loud yelling and clapping coming from the Community Center forty yards away.<br><br>The Community Center gets a lot of use, from meetings of the youth wings of the two major political parties, from community meetings with the chief and his elders, and from bogus-sounding medical screenings. However, I know without asking what’s going on tonight, because there’s only one draw that would get villagers, who are normally asleep by 8 PM, to stay up so late: Jesus.<br><br>It was only a matter of time before they started using the place for prayer meetings. Southern Ghana is the most emphatically Christian place I’ve ever been. I know I said the same about Kenya last year, but I was a fool; in comparison, Kenyans come off looking like a bunch of Gomorrans. Kenyan Christianity is, if not discreet, at least discrete. Sure, the airwaves are completely taken over by God, but just on Sundays. Kenyans will speak at length about their faith, but usually only when you ask them about it.<br><br>In Ghana, Christianity is everywhere, all the time, to an extent that probably would have made Jerry Falwell uncomfortable. On a 4 AM Tuesday morning bus ride, I was treated to a window-rattling radio sermon urging me to resist the temptation of fornication (thankfully, too- you know how 6-hour pre-dawn bus rides get people all hot and bothered otherwise). I think I was the only person bothered by this, though, as most Ghanaians are very much prepared to recite Biblical verse and have Biblical verse recited to them at any moment, much the way my brother and I quote lines from Will Ferrell movies to each other. I used to regret not knowing enough Twi or Sefwi to eavesdrop on people here and strike up conversation, but my trip to Accra, where English is fairly widely-spoken, cured me of that curiosity. It was as if the whole English-speaking population of the capital was in competition to see how many times they could fit “Thank God” and “God Bless” into their conversations.<br><br>Accra was educational in other ways, too. Throughout my time in Ghana, I’ve occasionally seen or run into Western missionaries, which always strikes me as funny. There are apparently enough of them that any white person is usually called <em>Kwasi Bruni</em> (“Sunday-born White Person”). What can all these missionaries do here? They are quite literally preaching to the converted. Perhaps Ghana is where they send missionaries with self-esteem issues, to buck up their confidence or something, as I can’t think of a place where they’d be more warmly received. At any rate, Accra showed me the other side of coin. <br><br>I was loitering in the neighborhood of Osu when a Ghanaian woman approached me and asked me if I had a minute to speak. I was so obviously killing time that I did not even try to lie, and it turns out she was from the Baptist church down the street and wanted to know the “exact nature of my relationship” with Jesus (“Just really good friends, thanks”). A few hours later, in a cab stuck in one of Accra’s many, many traffic jams, we were approached by a boy who came up to my window. It’s pretty common here for vendors to come up to car and bus windows proffering their wares, so I looked straight ahead and prepared to ignore him in order to convey my lack of interest. I was surprised, then, to feel a book fall into my lap. It was the New Testament. The boy announced that it was free, and when I told him that I had no need for it and tried to give it back, he thrust it towards me again. The driver said, “Go away, of course he already has a Bible.” The boy shook his head; there are enough <em>brunis</em> hanging around Osu for him to have known that we are more-or-less heathens. “Most of these <em>brunis</em> do not believe in Jesus, or even God,” the boy said with disgust. The driver looked at me, his face contorted by shock and his eyes reflecting a sense of betrayal. “No, no,” I stammered, hoping to restore peace and reward the driver for sticking up for me in the first place, “It’s just that I already have several Bibles at home. But thank you.” The boy shrugged and moved along.<br><br>Even here in the village, after one of the American volunteers declared himself agnostic, a local took it upon herself to convince him that God existed. It was a painful week of debate, like watching a Scopes Monkey Trial in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had been replaced by the hosts of Crossfire, but I must admit that whether in Accra or the village, I enjoy the irony of Ghanaians targeting Americans and Europeans for their evangelizing. How long until Samoan ministers are building mission churches to save the godless New Yorkers, Ugandan Mormons start knocking on doors in San Francisco and Amazonian tribesmen begin telling European sunbathers that God wants them to cover their breasts? Papal watchers say we will probably see a Latin American or African pope in our lifetime, and why not? In religious fervor, we have nothing to teach the colonized and converted, and they have much to teach us. It may have taken a few centuries, but it’s about time they return the favor."
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"content" : "<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use “later.”</p>\n<li>\n<p>I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I divided a single-serving DingDong in two, and had it for dessert on two consecutive days. </p>\n<li>\n<p>I listened all the way through to a Metallica song emanating from my neighbor’s radio, but closed my window when the commercial came on.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I remembered the movie times in my newspaper from the day before so I wouldn’t have to buy a copy of the paper today.</p>\n<li>\n<p>When a friend’s cat chose my lap to sit in, I petted it, precisely to discourage it from moving to the lap of its rightful owner.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I said “What a long, strange trip it’s been” without air quotes.</p>\n<li>\n<p>On the Amtrak “quiet car,” I listened to a man in the seat ahead of me explaining to the bored woman next to him how he gets such a great shine on his shoes. I have since used his technique, successfully.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I have stared carefully at reproductions of great paintings.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I asked for and received a “tasting spoon” of mint pistachio ice cream, anticipating, correctly, that I would not like it.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I smelled the aromatherapy candles through their wrappings at the Stop ‘n’ Shop.</p>\n<li>\n<p>Frequently have I browsed stores with absolutely no intent to purchase. On some such occasions, I have felt fabrics I did not intend to buy.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I placed a bag on the seat next to me on the subway.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I continued to wear in public running shoes after the Nike “swoosh” wore off.</p>\n<li>\n<p>In a Italian restaurant, I entered their “win a free lunch” contest by putting into the jar a business card from a job I had recently left, with my new phone number written in by hand.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I have retold the joke about the man who meets a pirate in a bar without ever once explicitly acknowledging that I was not its author.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I gazed with lust at another man’s bikini-clad wife.</p>\n<li>\n<p>I deeply inhaled the smell of popcorn in a movie theater, but I did not buy any. </p>\n<li>\n<p>One late summer evening, I purposefully and with intent committed to memory the purple of the clouds. That I still remember the edge of the chill was unpremeditated, however.\n</p></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></li></ol>\n<p><span>[Tags: <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/berkman\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/copyright\" rel=\"tag\">copyright</a> ]</span></p>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//50billion-sm.jpg\" alt=\"Zimbabwean bank notes, including a ZW$50,000,000,000 Special Agro-Check\" border=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"338\"></p>\n<div style=\"text-align:right\"><sup>(Photo courtesy <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/villes/\">ZeroOne</a>.)</sup></div>\n<p>It’s a cruel irony: As the citizens of Zimbabwe sink into bitter poverty, they are becoming millionaires and billionaires. Inflation is eroding the value of the Zimbabwean dollar so rapidly that everyday transactions turn into lessons in the arithmetic of large numbers. When the photo above was made on July 17, the largest currency denomination in circulation was a note for ZW$50,000,000,000. Last week the nation’s central bank issued a ZW$100,000,000,000 bill. (I’ll spare you the trouble of counting zeroes: That’s 10<sup>11</sup>, or 100 billion by American reckoning.)</p>\n<p>The Zimbabwean inflation is the worst in the world at the moment, but it is not (yet) setting all-time records. Probably the most famous episode of extreme inflation was that of the German Weimar Republic (a story told vividly in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel <em>The Black Obelisk</em>.) In 1921, German marks traded at about 60 to the U.S. dollar; two years later, in December of 1923, the exchange rate was 4.2×10<sup>12</sup> per dollar. The Hungarian inflation following World War II reached even greater numerical heights. In a single year the exchange rate for the Hungarian pengo went from 100 per U.S. dollar to 4×10<sup>29</sup>. <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman\">As Feynman said</a>, astronomical numbers are dwarfed by economical ones.</p>\n<p>Takayuki Mizuno, Misako Takayasu and Hideki Takayasu have analyzed the German and Hungarian episodes of “hyperinflation.” (Citation: <em>Physica A</em> 308 (2002) 411; there’s also an <a href=\"http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0112441v1\">arXiv preprint</a>.) Inflation at its worst, they find, proceeds at a doubly exponential rate. In other words, prices rise not just as an exponential function of time—exp(<em>t</em>)—but as an exponentiated exponential—exp(exp(<em>t</em>))—or:</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//doubleexpt.png\" alt=\"doubleexpt.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"79\" height=\"19\"></div>\n<p>This growth law has a simple meaning in terms of everyday experience. With “ordinary,” single-exponential inflation, prices have a constant doubling time. If bus fare was 1 million last month and 2 million this month, it will be 4 million next month. Under double-exponential growth, the doubling time itself decreases exponentially. In the last months of the Hungarian inflation the doubling time fell from about 20 days to 15 hours.</p>\n<p>On a logarithmic scale, a simple exponential function yields a straight-line graph. Here is the Mizuno-Takayasu evidence that the final phase of the Hungarian inflation was superexponential:</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//Mizunofg1.jpg\" alt=\"Mizunofg1.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"350\" height=\"225\"></div>\n<p>And here are the data for the final six months plotted as log(log(<em>p</em>(<em>t</em>))), showing a simple linear trend:</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//Mizunofg2.jpg\" alt=\"Mizunofg2.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"350\" height=\"225\"></div>\n<p>How does the Zimbabwean economy look when submitted to this kind of scrutiny? I don’t know of a reliable source of data on prices in Zimbabwe, but <a href=\"http://www.oanda.com\">foreign exchange rates</a> can serve as a rough proxy. Until three months ago, the official ZW$ rate was pegged at roughly 30,000 per US$, but on May 10 the currency was allowed to float free, and the rate immediately jumped to 190,000,000 ZW$ per US$. By July 31 the rate had reached 57,381,544,140. Thus the 50 billion ZW$ note in the photo above was worth a little less than a 1 US$ by the end of last month. And that’s at the official rate of exchange; the street value is reportedly about a tenth of the official quote.</p>\n<p>Here’s how the official exchange rate has varied in the 84 days between May 10 and August 1, as plotted on a linear scale:</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//ZW-rates.png\" alt=\"ZW-rates.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"448\" height=\"302\"></div>\n<p>And here’s the same data after a logarithmic transformation:</p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//ZW-log-and-fit.png\" alt=\"ZW-log-and-fit.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"448\" height=\"302\"></div>\n<p>Although there’s more bumpiness here than in the Mizuno-Takayasu data, the trend looks reasonably linear to me. The fitted line has slope 0.03358, which yields a doubling time of about nine days. I see no hint of superexponential growth. I’d like to think this is an encouraging sign, a glimmer of hope that Zimbabwe will be spared an even more pernicious phase, when even inflation has inflation.</p>\n<p>Runaway inflation is usually blamed on the incompetence or malevolence of governments and the central banks that implement their policies. In the case of Zimbabwe, the government of Robert Mugabe certainly has a lot to answer for. The country was once the shining success story of southern Africa—I have friends who migrated across the continent to go to school there—but the nation is now a basket case, and inflation is only one of many urgent crises. (The unemployment rate is reported to be 80 percent.) The Mugabe regime can’t escape blame for this situation. Still, it seems that hyperinflation is not to be explained purely in terms of fundamental economic imbalances—too many dollars and not enough goods. Sometimes it seems there is also a psychological component. When you believe that prices will double next week, you raise your own prices in anticipation. It’s a self-reinforcing process.</p>\n<p>One sign of such a feedback loop in the inflationary spiral is that inflation sometimes stops even though the underlying economic situation hasn’t really changed. The Weimar hyperinflation ended with the introduction of the Rentenmark, which was set equal to 10<sup>12</sup> old marks but really had no firmer backing than the earlier Papiermark. The change in currency did nothing to solve Germany’s problems of debt and unemployment, but the inflation ended anyway. Evidently, people chose to believe that the value of the Rentenmark would remain stable, and it did.</p>\n<p>The central bank of Zimbabwe has just announced a similar effort at currency reform, devaluing the ZW$ by a factor of 10<sup>10</sup>. In other words, the ZW$100,000,000,000 note introduced a week ago is equal in value to a new ZW$10 bill. According to press reports, the main motive for the change was simply logistical convenience:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Gideon Gono, the Central Bank governor, … acted because the high rate of inflation was hampering the country’s computer systems. Computers, electronic calculators and automated teller machines at Zimbabwe’s banks cannot handle basic transactions in billions and trillions of dollars. (<a href=\"http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.zimbabwe31jul31,0,795792.story\">AP/Baltimore Sun</a>)</p></blockquote>\n<p>But perhaps one can hope that the newly denominated currency will bring more than numerical benefits. Over the weekend, the official exchange rate has held at 6.569 new Zimbabwe dollars to the U.S. dollar. We’ll have to wait a few more days to see if the curve has really flattened out.</p>\n<p><strong>Update 2008-09-04</strong>: With another month of exchange-rate data, here’s what the situation looks like:</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//ZW-rates-904.png\" alt=\"ZW-rates-904.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"447\" height=\"304\"></p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content//ZW-log-and-fit-904.png\" alt=\"ZW-log-and-fit-904.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"448\" height=\"337\"></p>\n<p>The blue line in the semilog graph is the same as the one in the corresponding earlier graph—that is to say, it is fitted to the first 80 days of data. It appears that the inflation rate has diminished slightly since the revaluation at the end of July. But that slightly lower rate is still formidable; in a little more than a month the value of the new Zimbabwe dollar has fallen from about 15 cents (U.S.) to about 2 cents.</p>\n<p><strong>Update 2008-10-02</strong>: After another month, what passes for good news is that the rate of exponential growth does not seem to be growing:</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bit-player.org/wp-content/ZWlogandfitO02.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"315\"></p>\n<p>On the other hand, <a href=\"http://bit-player.org/http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02world/africa/02zimbabwe.html\">news reports</a> suggest that the situation in Harare is bleaker than ever. Money is scarce as well as nearly worthless; people stand in line all night for the privilege of withdrawing the equivalent of a dollar or two from their own bank accounts. (Note that the equivalent of $1 U.S. is $ZW137 in the devalued currency issued in August. In pre-devaluation Zimbabwe dollars, it comes to $ZW1.37 trillion.)</p>\n<p>Isn’t it curious that both here in the U.S. and in Zimbabwe, the financial pages are filled with such enormous numbers.</p>"
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"title" : "When the world was our lobster",
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"content" : "So, those <a href=\"http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/14/oyster_computer_problems/\">Oystercard</a> <a href=\"http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/25/oyster_fails_again/\">outages</a>. I wrote a sizable post on this immediately before going on holiday, but something odd happened with Wordpress's clever ajaxy bits and it vanished. Computers...anyway, we can work out various things about the problem from the few details supplied.<br><br>In the first incident, around 1% of the cards somehow became nonfunctional. We don't know how; we do know, however, that it was indeed the cards, because the fix was to bring them in and issue new ones. This raises an interesting question; why did new physical cards have to be issued? The process of issuing a card involves writing the data TfL holds on you to the blank card; there isn't much difference between this and overwriting whatever is on the card with the details held in the database. This suggests either that the affected cards suffered actual physical damage - unlikely, unless someone's running about with a really powerful RF source and a bad sense of humour - or else that TfL can't trust the information on file, and therefore needs to erase the affected records and set up new user accounts.<br><br>So, how could it happen? Card systems can work in various ways; you can do a pure online authorisation system, like debit or credit cards, where information on the card is read off and presented to a remote computer, which matches it against a look-up table and sends back a response, or you can do a pure card system, where your credit balance is recorded on the card and debited when you use it, then credited when you pay up. Or you can have a hybrid of the two. Oyster is such a hybrid. TfL obviously maintains a database of Oyster user accounts, because it's possible to restore lost cards from backup, to top-up through their Web site without needing a card reader, and to top-up automatically. But it's also clear that the card is more than just a token; you can top up at shops off-line, and the transaction between the card and the ticket barrier is quick enough that you don't need to break stride (consider how long it takes to interact with a Web site or use a bank card terminal).<br><br>Clearly, the actual authorisation is local (the barrier talks to the card), as is offline top-up, but the state of the card is backed up to the database asynchronously, and changes to your record in the database are reflected on the card, presumably as soon as it passes through a card reader. To achieve this without stopping the flow of passengers, I assume that when a card is read, the barrier also keeps the information from it in a cache and periodically updates the database. Similarly, in order to get online top-ups credited to the cards, the stations probably receive and cache recent updates from the database; if the card number is in the list, it gets an \"increment £x\" command.<br><br>We can probably rule out, then, that 1% of the Oyster card fleet were somehow dodgy when they started to flow through the gatelines that morning, and that the uploaded data from them caused the matching records to become untrustworthy. It's possible - just - that some shops somehow sporked them. It's also vaguely possible that bad data from some subgroup of cards propagated to the others. But I think these are unlikely. It's more likely that the batch process that primes the station system with the last lot of online and automatic top-ups went wrong, and the barriers dutifully wrote the dodgy data to the cards.<br><br>This is also what TfL says: <blockquote><em>We believe that this problem, like the last one resulted from incorrect data tables being sent out by our contractor, Transys.</em></blockquote> People of course think this was somehow connected with the NXP MiFare class break, but it's not necessary.<br><br>In this scenario, some sort of check incorporated in the database was intended to detect people using the MiFare exploit (probably looking for multiple instances of the same card, cards that didn't appear in the database, or an excess of credit over the cash coming in), but a catastrophic false positive occurred. This is a serious lesson about the MiFare hack, and about this sort of public-space system in general; the effects of the security response may well be worse than those of the attack. Someone using a cloned, or fraudulently refilled, card could at best steal a few pounds in free rides. But the security response, if that was what it was, first threatened a massive denial-of-service attack on the whole public transport system, and then caused TfL to lose a whole day's revenue."
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"title" : "POLY RHYTMO REALNESS",
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"content" : "This is too good for a mere Soul Sights inclusion:<br><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/aX21YIMBbPI%26hl%3Den%26fs%3D1&width=425&height=344\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"></iframe><br><strong>Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey: Gbeti Madjro<br>Edited together by Mario Stahn</strong><br><br>First seen at <a href=\"http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/2008/06/orchestre-poly-rythmo-de-cotonou-gbeti_25.html\">Analog Africa</a>. <br>"
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"title" : "The Obama New Yorker Cover",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/SHv9lnJ9Z-I/AAAAAAAAAWs/idJkNkJRt4A/s1600-h/obama_new_yorker.bmp\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/SHv9lnJ9Z-I/AAAAAAAAAWs/idJkNkJRt4A/s320/obama_new_yorker.bmp\" border=\"0\"></a>This week's <em>New Yorker</em> has a cover by artist Barry Blitt of Michelle and Barack Obama dressed in their native garb, which has apparently <a href=\"http://www.memeorandum.com/080714/p91#a080714p91\">offended</a> many in the liberal <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071500836.html?hpid=topnews\">blogosphere</a>. My first impression on seeing this cover was that the <em>New Yorker</em> had written an exposé revealing that Barack Obama is indeed a Muslim, Michelle Obama was a member of the Black Panthers (or the Mod Squad) and that the Obamas hate America and burn American flags in their fireplace. Then David Remnick, the editor of the <em>New Yorker,</em> issued a <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/13/david-remnick-on-emnew-yo_n_112456.html\">statement</a> saying that the illustration is actually intended to be <a href=\"http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/9864.html\">satire</a>, a decadent form of humor invented by the Romans shortly before their civilization was overrun by barbarians.<br><br>I loved the illustration, which I thought was a very powerful statement about how Barack Obama should not be elected President, and as Jonah Goldberg <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzY3OGU2NTcwNDk0NGVlMzBlYWM2YTEyN2Y4OTI4Yjc=\">noted</a>, it could have been a cover illustration for the <em>National Review</em>, which used to be called the <em>Harvard Lampoon</em> before it went national and changed its name. But I must say I also <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/03/no-joke.html\">agree</a> with many in the liberal blogosphere who <a href=\"http://firedoglake.com/2008/07/14/about-that-new-yorker-cover/\">believe</a> that <a href=\"http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2008/07/lame-satire.html\">satire</a> and most other kinds of <a href=\"http://pbrla.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-yorkers-obama-cover.html\">humor</a> should be <a href=\"http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16187.html\">avoided</a> at all costs. I have long been opposed to satire, which just causes unhealthy confusion and, like fluoridated water, weakens our body politic. How can we fight an enemy that doesn't have any sense of humor at all if our media is distracting us with such esoteric and ill-advised attempts at comedy?<br><br>I don't even understand the point of satire. If the editors of the <em>New Yorker</em> actually believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, Michelle Obama is not a dangerous revolutionary and that they do not actually burn American flags, as Remnick now claims, couldn't they have just said that? Wouldn't it have been simpler and clearer to run the illustration with a big X over it so that we knew what they were trying to say? We are not mind readers. It doesn't make much sense to say the opposite of what you mean and then attack people for being <a href=\"http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/07/the-second-most.html\">unsophisticated</a> because they thought you were sincere. Do New Yorkers always say the opposite of what they mean and then expect you to <a href=\"http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/07/new-ironic-new.html\">understand</a>? Real Americans, I think, prefer straight talkers, like John McCain, who means what he says when he tells us that he doesn't know very much about economics, can't figure out how to use a computer and believes that we will be in Iraq for 100 years.<br><br><a href=\"http://www.waveflux.net/archives/satire-is-a-tough-business/\">Satire</a>, I believe, is supposed to be <a href=\"http://tomwatson.typepad.com/tom_watson/2008/07/my-mental-reces.html\">funny</a>, though I don't see how being dishonest is humorous. I think it's just sad. If the <em>New Yorker</em> wanted to run a humorous cover that showed Obama is not a Muslim, they could have accomplished that goal by depicting him slipping on a banana peel on the way to church. That would have made the same point and it would also have had the virtue of being funny.<br><br>Although this modest blog has twice been nominated for a Weblog Award for Funniest Blog and I have sometimes been unfairly accused of being satiric by my enemies, as I have said many times I am no expert on comedy and any humor in this blog is purely unintentional and deeply regretted. So I must defer to the liberal blogosphere, many of whose members are indeed experts at comedy. Although liberals are often unfairly accused of being <a href=\"http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2008_07_13_archive.html#118241406799015522\">humorless</a>, the truth is that they are so knowledgable about what makes something funny that they rarely find humor that meets their very tough standards. They are like connoisseurs of fine wine who are unable to drink anything that is not the finest vintage. When a liberal says, \"That's not funny!\" it is a cry from the heart from someone who longs to see something that really is funny. It's too bad the editors of the <em>New Yorker</em> did not consult them first before they made their ill-fated attempt at comedy.<br><br>Atrios, for example, whom many consider to be the Benny Hill of the blogosphere, but pithier, <a href=\"http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_07_13_archive.html#8221443699199095547\">points out</a> that for satire to be effective, it must exaggerated beyond all reason so that even a moron will know it is supposed to be funny. Only satire that is way, way over the top has even a chance of making people laugh. Subtlety has no place in satire because it could easily be taken at face value. If someone like Atrios is fooled into believing that something intended to be satire is real doesn't that just defeat the whole purpose? It would be like an episode of <em>MASH</em> without the laugh track, which wouldn't be funny at all because you wouldn't know when to laugh. Many liberals believe that if they don't get a joke, it stands to reason that it would probably go over the heads of most people, who are not as smart as they are. Just to be on the safe side, it would probably be better if humor were avoided altogether.<br><br>If a magazine decides, however, that it does want to take the risk of publishing satire, in order to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, satire should always be clearly labeled. As a reader of Andrew Sullivan <a href=\"http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/07/the-new-yorker.html\">pointed out</a>, one of our greatest African-American clowns, Spike Lee, opened his film <em>Bamboozled</em>, with a definition of satire, so that no one would think he was being racist -- against black people, that is. If he had not put up this warning before the movie, many people in Hollywood (who might not have realized that Spike Lee is himself black -- yes, it's true! -- because most of them are completely color blind) would have thought that <em>Bamboozled</em> was a racist film and he would have had to go to rehab for alcoholism to save his career. The next time the <em>New Yorker</em> tries to run a satiric cover, they should include a label that says \"Satire\" in very big letters just as they label all of their advertisements. Although I am not generally in favor of solving problems with <a href=\"http://sideshow.me.uk/sjul08.htm#07150404\">legislation</a>, the time may have come when the government needs to mandate warning labels for satire like they do for cigarettes.<br><br>The illustration might also have been acceptable if the <em>New Yorker</em> ran it on the inside of the magazine where people who are sensitive to mockery would not have run across it casually on a newsstand. Or they might also have enclosed this issue in a brown paper bag the way pornographic magazines sometimes are to keep it away from the eyes of children and people with heart trouble (how many children have been traumatized for life and how many deaths this cover has caused will only be known in the coming weeks). While the cover may have met the community standards of a place like New York where people apparently don't mean what they say, there are some parts of the country where satire is just not acceptable in public.<br><br><a href=\"http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_07/014079.php\">Kevin Drum</a>, whose <a href=\"http://thepoorman.net/2008/07/14/liberal-blogosphere-death-spiral-watch/\">expertise</a> in comedy is rivaled only by his knowledge of politics, helpfully suggested that the illustration should have been in a thought <a href=\"http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=10835\">balloon</a> emanating from the head of John McCain. Of course, thought balloons are in and of themselves funny because the whole notion of a person having a balloon coming out of his head is very comedic. Just thinking about it makes me laugh as I type this. I think his main point, however, is that if you are going to use satire, you must make it very clear that you are distancing yourself from the ideas you are expressing. It is much easier to do this in person because you can express the ideas in a funny voice or contort your face or body in a bizarre way so that the listener knows that you are pretending to be someone else, but in print a device like a thought balloon can have the same effect. You would think the editors of the <em>New Yorker</em> would know that. If they need a crash course in what makes something funny, I suggest they take a look at <em><a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-favorite-comedy-explained.html\">Interiors</a></em>, one of Woody Allen's earlier, funnier films. The entire film is like a thought balloon coming out of Ingmar Bergman's head.<br><br>There is not much the members of the liberal blogosphere and I agree on but I salute them on their efforts to <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/07/brief-note-on-latest-silly-season.html\">stamp out</a> humor and especially satire and bring more earnestness to our political discourse. The readers of The Daily Kos have been especially <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/01/swift-reactions-8.html\">vigilant</a> in their War Against Comedy and I commend them for it. I hope that the <a href=\"http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/07/with-friends-like-new-yorker-barack.html\">conservative</a> blogosphere, which sometimes <a href=\"http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/14/grow-a-pair-obama/\">succumbs</a> to very awkward and embarrassing attempts at humor, but fortunately is usually not funny at all, will join with liberals in this crusade. This past week, in fact, <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/iran-condemns-mccains-cig_n_112504.html\">both</a> <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/12/bernie-mac-heckled-rebuke_n_112296.html\">campaigns</a> learned that comedy and presidential politics don't mix. I hope that we can spend the rest of the campaign with the candidates and their surrogates not trying to be funny especially since we are living in very unfunny times. Elections are serious things and there is no room for levity in such a process unless that levity has been carefully scripted by a campaign speechwriter and sometimes not even then.<br><br><strong><em>Update:</em></strong> Kevin Drum wrote me a very nice note: \"Ann Althouse misunderstood my point too, so you're in good company......\" It is indeed an honor to be in Ms. <a href=\"http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/07/everybodys-talking-about-new-yorker-and.html\">Althouse</a>'s company even if only metaphorically and not <em>literally</em>, which is what I think Mr. Drum meant.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a href=\"http://www.wikio.com/vote?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html\"><img style=\"VERTICAL-ALIGN:middle\" src=\"http://www.wikio.com/shared/img/vote/wikio3.gif\" border=\"0\"></a> <a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a title=\"digg\" href=\"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"digg\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/digg.png\"></a> <a title=\"Fark\" href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&new_comment=\"><img alt=\"Fark\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\"></a> <a title=\"Furl\" href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&t=\"><img alt=\"Furl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\"></a> <a title=\"LinkaGoGo\" href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"LinkaGoGo\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\"></a> <a title=\"Ma.gnolia\" href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Ma.gnolia\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\"></a> <a title=\"NewsVine\" href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&h=\"><img alt=\"NewsVine\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\"></a> <a title=\"Reddit\" href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Reddit\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\"></a> <a title=\"Simpy\" href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Simpy\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-new-yorker-cover.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" height=\"20\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" width=\"20\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><a href=\"http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2008/07/carnival-of-insanities-july-20.html\">Carnival of the Insanities</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "<blockquote>Have I been blind? <br> Have I been lost inside myself and my own mind?<br> Hypnotized, mesmerized by what my eyes have seen…<br> <br> —Natalie Merchant, from “Carnival”<br> </blockquote> <p>I was out running this morning when I came around a bend and saw a little girl pushing a stroller that was taller than she was. I glanced down at the stroller half-expecting it to be empty or for there to be a baby doll in there. It wasn’t empty and the baby in there was no doll. I looked up, expecting (or possibly, hoping) to see an adult. Not another soul in sight except for a little boy who looked even younger than the girl. The girl said something to the boy in Spanish. In response, the boy ran to catch up with the girl. All the way home, I wondered where could they have been going with that baby and why.<br> <br> A few months ago, my sister Asante and I were walking to Bronx Pizza on Washington Ave. in Hillcrest. We saw this grizzled-looking white man of thirty-five or forty sitting at a taco shop on the corner. Even though he was sitting, he looked unsteady enough to fall over. Just before I looked away, a Hispanic teenager with a long stride, a black t-shirt, crisp white sneakers and a dangling, silver crucifix strode past the man. It amused me to think about how much energy the kid had vs. how little had the man. We got in line to order our pizza.<br> <br> For about three weeks in May of this year (2008) an old homeless lady took up residence at the bus stop in front of the Blockbuster Video on the corner of Fairmount and University. Each day on my way home, I’d cruise past that bus stop and look to see if she was still there. She was always still there. The thing I couldn’t get over was how many bags she had. She had so many, she’d made the bus stop practically unusable: she had bags piled beside her on the bench; bags stacked on the ground all around her; bags shoved under the bench; she even had bags on her lap. More interesting than the bags was that she was always looking for something. Every time I passed, she was searching through one of the bags. Maybe she was trying to find her life. One day I passed and she and all her bags were gone.<br> <br> I was in my work truck at a red light on the corner of Sports Arena and Rosecrans in Point Loma when I saw a cop talking to a homeless guy. It’s a long light and I’m nosy, so I cut the engine. The cop was saying, “You know any other guys who moved around here from P.B. or Mission Beach?” The homeless guy shook no. The cop said, “What about you? How long have you been around here?” I couldn’t hear the answer. The cop said, “Where are your buddies? I haven’t seen them in a while.” The green light for the crossing traffic turned yellow and I cranked up my engine, drowning out the rest of the conversation.<br> <br> I’ve been subpoenaed to appear next Wednesday (06.25.08) at the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego – El Cajon Judicial District. Why? Because on Easter Sunday of this year, I was on my way to my friend Danny’s house when I saw a young black dude standing on the corner masturbating. Normally, I don’t care what people do with their personal time or where, but this was Easter Sunday, there were kids everywhere (including one of my own in the backseat of my car) and this dude looked liked he’d intentionally picked a spot where he was most likely to be seen. Danny’s house was only two blocks down the street. When Danny heard the story, he said, “Let’s go get that —- off the corner.” The cops beat us to it. To make a long story short, I ended up performing a citizen’s arrest (not as involved as it sounds; it entailed nothing more than filling out paperwork right there on the corner) and now I have to testify in court. I don’t like it – I’ve never been a fan of cops or courts – but then again, I don’t like people getting off on masturbating in front of little kids either.<br> <br> I always catch the red light under the 805 at the spot where Sorrento Valley Rd. turns into Mira Mesa Blvd. If it’s the afternoon, there’s usually a long line of cars to my right – all the people starting there daily homeward commute. I have a game a play where I count how many cars pass me by getting onto the freeway and how many have more than one occupant. Then I try to calculate a percentage. Usually, it’s pretty easy because the number of cars with more than one occupant is zero.<br> <br> Years ago in New Orleans, I was waiting at a bus stop on Canal St. It was late at night. There was a middle-aged black man next to me. He didn’t look quite messed-up enough to be homeless, but he didn’t look like he was cashing payroll checks on a regular basis either. You see people like that all the time on and around Canal St., but something about this guy made me watch him out of the corner of my eye. Something just wasn’t right. After standing there for a while, the man leaned forward, opened his mouth and out came an discomforting amount of clear liquid. The oddest thing was, he wasn’t gagging or retching. The liquid was just pouring out. It was as if his head was a bottle that had been tipped over. I shifted a couple of steps in the opposite direction. Whatever that stuff was, I didn’t want it splashing on me.<br> <br> Last April, my sister Kiini sent out a “Happy Birthday To Me” email. Except, instead of writing about her birthday as she’d intended, she ended up writing about a fish market vendor, a crazed street singer, a well-dressed panhandler and “other skewed characters in varying states of decay.” The story that stuck with me the most was this one:<br></p> <blockquote> So today while on the [subway] platform, watching the rats frolic, I saw a woman, obviously on the edge, walking with a slight twitch. What was she doing? Pushing a baby stroller. The baby stroller had a mismatched wheel that looked like it was wobbling on its last leg. Inside the baby stroller was a baby…a real live, fresh-faced baby. Everyone was in shock. I heard whispers of speculation of what would happen to that baby. Was the baby currently in danger? I’m not sure if I was the only one who asked was that her baby. They [the woman and the baby] seemed to be of different ethnicities. The baby looked all wide-eyed and serene. It was a bizarre scene.<br> </blockquote> <p> Two days ago, I was unloading freight at the NBC building on Broadway when I saw a female bike messenger skid to a stop in front of me. Something about the way she stopped seemed strange. It took me a moment to realize what it was: her bike had no brakes. I watched her (blond hair in two pony tails, blue-eyed, fresh-faced, baggy fatigue-style cut-offs, heavily tattooed right arm) lock up her bike and get ready to deliver whatever it was she had slung over her shoulder in her bike bag. As the businessmen in suits and businesswomen in incongruous sneakers and all the assorted downtown street people passed us on the left and right, I asked the blond bike messenger about her bike. She called it a “track” bike and explained that it has only one fixed gear, which means, the back wheel moves forward when the rider pedals forward and the wheel moves backwards when the rider pedals backwards. There is no coasting, no gear-changing and no braking. So strange. When I came back from my delivery, I saw her on her bike, heading towards Horton Plaza. She was pedaling, of course.<br> <br> Thursday or Friday of last week, I was running south on Fairmount Ave when I passed a man and a woman camped out in front of the recycling center. The man was black and tall with a scraggly, bushy beard and no shoes. The woman, who appeared to be Filipino or Thai, had multiple facial piercings and strangely clumped-together jet-black hair. Her t-shirt, which was probably white at one time, was now the color of dirt. She was reclining between two of their many bags of recyclables with her shoeless feet (she was barefoot too) up on another of the bags. The bottoms of her feet looked like she should have been sitting in a hospital emergency room instead of at the front gate of a recycling center. The two were arguing in an animated fashion, but her accent was indecipherable and his words were garbled by last night’s alcohol. I couldn’t make out anything they were saying.<br> <br> Back on Washington Ave., Asante and I were walking past the taco shop again, heading back to the car, pizza in hand. The unsteady-looking white guy was sitting in the same place, but now he was bent over with his head between his knees. Of all the available seats at that taco shop, the overly-energized teenager had picked the one directly across from the man.<br> The two made a strange pair: a bent-over, middle-aged white guy slowly rocking from side to side; and across from him, a freshly-groomed, crisply-dressed Latino youngster chewing off huge chunks of a burrito but only after dumping a glob of salsa verde on each bite.<br> “Hey, old man!” the teenager yelled between swallows, “You alright?”<br> “No,” the man muttered into his knees, “No, no, no.” Then, as if on cue, his upper body convulsed and he began to vomit all over his own shoes.<br> The teenager shrugged, still chewing. He didn’t even bother to move his feet. “Old man got problems,” he announced to no one in particular.<br> I looked at Asante.<br> “Jesus Christ,” she said.<br> “No shit,” I answered.<br> <br> By the way, in case you happen to live in San Diego, the pizza was great, although the service was predictably surly. With a name like Bronx Pizza, what do you expect?<br> <br> </p> <div align=\"center\">* * *<br> </div> <p><br> Get your city songs here:<br> <img width=\"228\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"297\" border=\"0\" title=\"forss.jpg\" alt=\"forss.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/forss.jpg\"><br> Forss’ <b>“Using Splashes”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSoulhack-Forss%2Fdp%2FB00009AHUN%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213815457%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Soulhack</i></font> </a>(Sonar Kollektiv, 2003)<br> <br> Something starling and wordless to get us started: atonal and unsettling yet oddly lush.<br> <img width=\"236\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"325\" border=\"0\" title=\"elaine elias.jpg\" alt=\"elaine elias.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/elaine%20elias.jpg\"><br> Eliane Elias’ <b>“Slide Show”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FAround-City-Eliane-Elias%2Fdp%2FB000FQJP1O%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213815280%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Around The City</i></font></a> (RCA, 2006)<br> <br> An evening cruise through the concrete, steel and asphalt – sleek and sensual.<br> <img width=\"300\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"200\" border=\"0\" title=\"d*note.jpg\" alt=\"d*note.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/d*note.jpg\"><br> D*Note’s <b>“A Place In The City”</b> – From <b><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCriminal-Justice-D-Note%2Fdp%2FB000000GRQ&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Criminal Justice</i></font></a></b> (TVT, 1995)<br> <br> An epic sound-painting cataloguing the grime and splendor of the urban crush.<br> <img width=\"242\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"363\" border=\"0\" title=\"natalie merchant.jpg\" alt=\"natalie merchant.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/natalie%20merchant.jpg\"><br> Natalie Merchant’s <b>“Carnival”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FTigerlily-Natalie-Merchant%2Fdp%2FB000002HHB%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213815072%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Tigerlilly</i></font></a> (Elektra, 1995)<br> <br> Natalie muses; the drum machine swings; a wild-eyed mystic prophet raves.<br> <img width=\"341\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"146\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/nas%20&%20olu.jpg\" alt=\"nas & olu.jpg\" title=\"nas & olu.jpg\"><br> Olu Dara & Nas’ <b>“Jungle”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWorld-Natchez-New-York%2Fdp%2FB000002JF9%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213814943%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>In The World: From Natchez To New York</i></font></a> (Atlantic, 1998)<br> <br> Steady and cool; slightly sinister too. Things may be quiet, but they’re far from calm.<br> <img width=\"243\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"364\" border=\"0\" title=\"cibelle.jpg\" alt=\"cibelle.jpg\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/cibelle.jpg\"><br> Cibelle’s <b>“City People”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FShine-Dried-Electric-Leaves%2Fdp%2FB000EZ8ZSA%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213814833%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>The Shine Of Dried Electric Leaves</i></font></a> (Six Degrees, 2006)<br> <br> The air is so hot that the city people’s foreheads drip with sweat. And there’s Cibelle, lost in her play-dreams.<br> <img width=\"255\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"308\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/blackalicious%2001.jpg\" alt=\"blackalicious 01.jpg\" title=\"blackalicious 01.jpg\"><br> Blackalicious’ <b>“Sleep”</b> – From <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FNia-Blackalicious%2Fdp%2FB00004KD4V%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1213814590%26sr%3D1-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Nia</i></font></a> (Quannum Projects, 2000)<br> <br> Back at home. Nighttime falling. Tomorrow’s on her way.<br> <b><br> —Mtume ya Salaam</b><br> <br> <br><b><font color=\"#ffffff\"><span style=\"background-color:rgb(0,0,0)\"> 2 More City Songs </span></font></b><br> <br>I like this theme, like it a lot even though I’m not so hot on a couple of the songs—you know in some other universe that Natalie Merchant might even sound good. Might. Wouldn’t bet on it, but I hear the backbeat, so I know (hear) all the influences. On the other hand, the Eliane Elias is cool even though I’m generally not a big fan of her music. That D*Note jam reminds me of Natalie Merchant in some small ways except I (hugely) prefer Ms. Anderson’s vocal work. You know I dig Cibelle’s kookiness, not enough to listen to it on the regular but enough to recognize something is happening whenever I do listen. The Forss is cool too in its own electronic way, especially the outro where they try to kick the drums hard. Of course, Nas & Olu are happening, got to like a strong father/son team, especially when they drop some nastiness like this. And Blackalicious, well, they are one of my favorite rap groups. They drop science and not just so-called intelligence designed to be popular.<br> <br> So, Mtume, within your mix, I’ve drop two too dangerous cuts. One old school and one thoroughly modern. I’m sure you’re already down with both.<br> <img width=\"339\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"281\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/keziah%20jones%2002.jpg\" alt=\"keziah jones 02.jpg\" title=\"keziah jones 02.jpg\"><br><b> “72 Kilos”</b> is by Nigerian artist Keziah Jones from his <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBlack-Orpheus-Keziah-Jones%2Fdp%2FB00008LOI8%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1214119321%26sr%3D8-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Black Orpheus</i></font></a> album. It starts off irresistibly tongue-deep-in-cheek paraphrasing Stevie Wonder and then it goes global (well at least Western global) and has this great line about having a college degree but only be qualified to drive a cab in New York—but hey that’s the Big Apple, rotten to… This is a drug song that’s not about getting high but about trying to find a niche in a commercial world where what you are best at is slinging.<br> <img width=\"340\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"335\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/rakim%2003.jpg\" alt=\"rakim 03.jpg\" title=\"rakim 03.jpg\"><br><b> “Living For The City”</b> by Rakim from <font color=\"#000000\"><i>The Rakim Collection</i></font> (an underground mixtape not commercially available) almost needs no introduction, except to say this is one of the greatest rappers ever laying down his personal description of the game. And I like the beat too; as they used to say, you can dance to it.<br> <br> Alright, I’m out.<br> <br><b> —Kalamu ya Salaam</b><br> <br> </p>"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-weight:bold\">A guest post from Teju Cole</span><br><br>In the shower yesterday morning, I found myself thinking about hyperbole.<br>The day before, in a bookshop, I had seen a book about Chuck Norris. It<br>had been printed on the basis of the internet phenomenon of<br>exaggerated statements about that actor. You might know what I’m<br>talking about: “There is no 'ctrl' button on Chuck Norris's<br>computer. Chuck Norris is always in control” or “Chuck Norris<br>destroyed the periodic table, because he only recognizes the<br>element of surprise.”<br><br>The conceit of these hyperbolic statements, of course, is that Chuck<br>Norris is such a tough guy that normal rules don’t apply to him.<br>“Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.” The game is to come up<br>with wilder and wilder statements that mention the name Chuck<br>Norris. “Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.”<br><br>In any case, these are adynata invented for the sake of humor.<br>Adynata—the singular is “adynaton”—are figures of speech taken to<br>such extremes that they become impossible. We’re familiar with<br>adynata in the form of biblical sayings like, “it is easier for a<br>camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to<br>enter the kingdom of God.”<br><br>But what I thought about, yesterday, as I stood wasting water in the<br>shower, wasn’t so much about the kingdom of heaven as it was about<br>the way we occupied so many of our hours when I was in school in<br>Lagos in the 80s. We had “wording” or “you mess” jokes, “mess”<br>being, as you’re probably aware, Nigerian pidgin for “fart.”<br><br>“You mess, akara wear coat,” was one classic. Another was, “You<br>mess, all the fish wey dey for river Naija say, ‘ARE WE SAFE?’” The<br>pleasures of this ribaldry was partly in the rigor of the form,<br>partly the performance of the person telling the joke. “You<br>mess”—to which the clever boy or girl had to supply a suitable<br>zinger of a conclusion—“garri grow bia-bia.” You remember these,<br>don't you?<br><br>And, as the hot water ran and my skin began to shrivel just a bit, I<br>began to think, too, of the African-American tradition of “yo momma”<br>jokes, which also depend on the adynaton effect for their<br>effectiveness. “Yo momma so fat, when she was in school, she sat<br>next to everybody.” “Oh yeah? Well if ugliness was a brick, yo<br>momma would be a housing project.” The wonder of it is that - at<br>least in the case of both the “you mess” jokes and their<br>transatlantic “yo momma” cousins - the form is so tight,<br>evolving out of a call and response performance. The circle of boys<br>(it was usually boys), the improvised joke or revised classic, the<br>collapse of the group into hilarity and, hopefully, the “dissed”<br>party mustering up a fitting response.<br><br>“Yo momma so hairy, Bigfoot be taking her picture.” “Aight, you know<br>what? Let’s get off mommas. Cause I just got off yours.” Cue mass<br>collapse.<br><br>Finally, I turned the shower off, and, as I stepped onto the mat, I<br>suddenly remembered another one, lines that hadn’t crossed my<br>mental screen in twenty years: “you mess, five agbalumo form<br>Voltron.”<br><br>And suddenly, I was laughing so hard I had to hold my sides.<br><br>Yeah, you had to be there."
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"title" : "A Weekend on the Ghanaian Coast; or "Accuracy no Rasta"",
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"content" : "It may seem obvious, but a visit to an old slaving fort is not the best way to start a fun beach vacation. This is, I would think, one of the main impediments to Ghana developing a conventional tourism industry- its long coastline along the Gulf of Guinea is punctuated, at regular intervals, by old slave castles. Nowhere on the coast is too far from the forts that you could justify not visiting one- it would be willful ignorance, burying your head in the sand.<br><br>So it is that Ray and I came to Cape Coast Castle. The most famous of them all, it sits above the small harbor in the old capital of the Gold Coast colony. The city of Cape Coast is an atmospheric place; the British colonists contributed much of the design and the architecture and the local inhabitants contributed much of the color and life. Its focus, however, is unquestionably the Castle. Western tourists troop there, not so much with a sense of excitement, but one of obligation, even dread.<br><br>My first thought was that the Castle was far too pretty a building for the purposes it served. A slave fort should be austere, even scary- dark stone walls, parapets and turrets, distorted gargoyles, spikes and bars. Cape Coast Castle looks like the nicest administrative building in Gibraltar or Santa Barbara. It is white walls, red tile roofs, balconies and staircases- the exterior fortifications and the cannons seem like after thoughts. It was originally built in the seventeenth century, changed hands many times, and ended up, after the close of the slave trade, as the administrative center for the colony, which perhaps explains its current benign look. Regardless, coming upon this place was a bit like finding Auschwitz set in a sun-dappled meadow, traversed by clean, babbling brooks. <br><br>The real horror of the place comes below, however, in the slave dungeons. This is where the captives were held, for weeks or months, in near total darkness, awaiting the ships that were to carry them to the Americas. The thing that strikes visitors, and unsettles them when it does, is just how small the dungeons are. A thousand slaves at a time were kept in a handful of chambers the size of classrooms. This was spacious compared to what was to follow in the Middle Passage.<br><br>The tour itself is, if not light, as far from maudlin and melodramatic as you could make it. It is understated in its horror, I should say. At the end, there is even a display about the positive impacts of the slave trade. And while those of us from the West- white and black- were stony-faced the whole time, the Ghanaians were more laid back, trying to lift up the old ammunition rusting away by the cannons and letting their children run around on the ramparts. There is just one real gut-punch stop on the tour and it comes near the end. There is a doorway through which the slaves passed, on the way out of the dungeon and towards the transport ships. It is labeled The Door of No Return.<br><br>We emerged from the fort destined for days at the beach, but I was hardly in the mood for it. We traveled down the coast to the twin villages of Butre and Busua. Ghana does not receive many normal tourists, but it does do good business with the do-gooders, volunteers and NGO workers not just in Ghana, but from throughout West Africa. Busua is the center of this trade, the place to which every Peace Corps volunteer from Togo to Ouagadougou seems to turn for relaxation. It is like any other small town in Ghana, except much of it is given over to serving the whims of homesick foreigners. As such, it provides an interesting look at what we miss when we’re far from home: pancakes (there are dozens of places advertising them), Thai food and pool tables. Mostly, though, I’d guess that they miss each other, which is why they all flock to one otherwise non-descript section of coast.<br><br>That is in-season, of course, and this was decidedly out of season. Rain, clouds and wind mark this time of year, the rainy season, and keep the foreigners away. There were as many tourists in town as hotels, making it a sad, sleepy place. In one restaurant, the proprietor had to have us pay in advance so that he could afford to buy the ingredients. After the meal, he got on his knees and begged for money so that he could pay his electricity bill and have his lights restored. On the walls, the messages scrawled by past diners- “Your food is SO FETCH- Chrissy, USA”, “Wish I could live in this restaurant- Owen, PCV, Burkina Faso”- seemed, like Mayan glyphs on an old temple wall, to be legacies of a glorious, but ancient, past. The dates, however, were from just seven, eight, nine months ago.<br><br>Across the headland in Butre, I stayed in a small place on the beach which had also, incidentally, lost its electricity for some number of months. The place was owned by a Swede, but came with a number of hangers-on, mostly Rastafarians. I’ve found my tolerance for Rastas lasts about five minutes, after which every banal piece of advice (“Gotta live wit’ no worries”), every verse of a cappella reggae they sing, every utterance of “Respect!” just adds to my aggravation. I was not happy. Ray is a member of an ultimate Frisbee team, so he pulls out the disc whenever he gets the chance. We were tossing it around on the beach with one Rasta who, I suppose aiming it towards me, threw it 90 degrees in the wrong direction and into the deep ocean. After many minutes of searching, we finally found the Frisbee. The Rasta pulled me aside.<br>“You got to work on your pursuit, young man.”<br>“You have to work on your accuracy.”<br>“Accuracy no Rasta.”"
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">On 30th December 1993, six members of the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA) opened fire on patrons of the Heidelberg Tavern in Observatory, Cape Town, killing four people (Jose Cerqueira, Lindy-Anne Fourie, Bernadette Langford and Rolande Palm) and injuring several others. The attack took place a mere 5 months after the better-known St James Church massacre in Kenilworth, Cape Town.<br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">The full story surrounding the attack makes for interesting (if horrifying) history itself (ask Google or the TRC) and scandal surrounding what really happened, and who was involved dragged on as recently as 2005<br>(see:http://www.mg.co.za/search/Search2007.aspx?EndDay=30&EndMonth=4&EndYear=2007&StartDay=1&StartMonth=1&StartYear=2005&keywords=sibaya&section=<br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">...So that's what the Goldstone Commission was about?!) </span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\"><br><br>I only want to draw attention to 2 particularly remarkable things:<br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Firstly, the phenomenal, forgiving, and healing approach to the trauma of the loss of her daughter, on the part of Ginn Fourie. Stories like this restore my dwindling faith in humankind..<br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">see: http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/fourie-letlapa, and http://www.lyndifouriefoundation.org.za/.<br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">And secondly, the fact that the site of the attack - formerly the Heidelberg Tavern - still exists in very recognizable form (disguised by a coat of red paint and the name 'Mojo') opposite the Hawkes and Finlay hardware store, cnr Lower Main & Station Rd in Obs. As a new-ish resident in the area (and an '84 baby, who remembers rubber necklaces on the news, the '94 elections & Mandela's inauguration but was too young to really take it all in at the time) I was quite shocked to discover the below pics, and work out that the ex-Heidelberg is just around the corner from where I now live! I just find it astonishing how history layers itself like a well-baked cake. And how little really stands between us and our collective past (in this instance, it's just a few years, a coat of paint and a name change).<br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Photos taken shortly after the attack:<br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">Note - the traffic light on the right hand side still stands there today, in front of what is currently Barmooda (which has had some renovations done to its facade)</span><br><br><a style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\" href=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyEXMpjI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/5kTExltIvww/s1600-h/heidelberg0.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyEXMpjI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/5kTExltIvww/s320/heidelberg0.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></span><div style=\"text-align:left;font-family:trebuchet ms\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/7416557/</span><br><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">The tavern itself - (now called Mojo, with exactly the same windows & entrance, just a different colour)</span></span><br></div><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><a style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\" href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyUXMplI/AAAAAAAAAlg/uI9KeBOMssM/s1600-h/heidelberg2.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyUXMplI/AAAAAAAAAlg/uI9KeBOMssM/s320/heidelberg2.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/7416571/in/photostream/</span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\"><br><br><br>Note: the shop in the far right of this pic is today the window of the Mzansi (sp?) fabric & print shop.</span><br><a style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\" href=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyUXMpkI/AAAAAAAAAlY/3HcruVNO7ok/s1600-h/heidelberg1.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5xyUXMpkI/AAAAAAAAAlY/3HcruVNO7ok/s320/heidelberg1.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/7416563/in/photostream/<br><br><br></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">At some point between 1993 & 2008. Note the original sign is still up in the left window in this photo - in fact, said sign is still in the window today.</span><br><a style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\" href=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5yrkXMpmI/AAAAAAAAAlo/QzyrCz3x-yI/s1600-h/heidelberg4.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mghK57KHvrA/SD5yrkXMpmI/AAAAAAAAAlo/QzyrCz3x-yI/s320/heidelberg4.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">http://www.flickr.com/photos/mallix/1103836674</span><br><br>Now how<span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms\">'s that for a bit of food for thought, next time you walk/drive/stagger up Station Rd in Obs? Funny how history never lets us forget... Although perhaps that's just the way it should be.<br><br>(Thanks & full acknowledgement to the Flickr peeps mallix & koranteng for the pics)<br></span></span>"
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"content" : "<p><img title=\" Jouet fabriqué avec du matériel de récupération\" src=\"http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3107/2553939364_c8c959515e_o.jpg\" alt=\"Jouet fabriqué avec du matériel de récupération\"></p>\n\t<p>Ça m’a fait bizarre, alors que je me promenais dans les rues de mon quartier de voir un enfant traîner derrière lui une voiture fabriquée totalement avec du matériel de récupération. Le jeune a dû me prendre pour un fou quand je lui ai demandé de s’arrêter pour que je puisse photographier son automobile qui m’a beaucoup rappelé mon enfance.</p>\n\t<p>Mes amis et moi passions nos journées à réunir les pièces nécessaires pour fabriquer nous-mêmes nos jouets. Je ne touchais presque jamais aux jouets high-tech importés que m’offraient mes parents que je trouvais beaucoup moins drôles.</p>\n\t<p>En plus d’un savoir-faire particulier et d’une bonne dose de débrouillardise, la fabrication de ces voitures nécessite un bon nombre de petits trucs pas toujours faciles à trouver. Pour commencer, nous allions chez le Quado (réparateur de pneus) du coin de la rue pour récupérer son stock de pneus abîmés que nous brûlions pour récupérer les fils de fer servant à monter la carrosserie. L’électronicien du quartier nous refilait ses haut-parleurs déclassés que nous éventrions pour récupérer les fils de fer très fins servant pour les joints. Les bars recevaient ensuite notre visite parce que nous avions besoin de quelques bouchons pour en faire des pneus. Le tout assemblé nous donnait alors une belle voiture fabriquée de nos propres mains. Pas besoin de moteur, une petite corde attachée à la voiture sert à la tirer derrière soi. Concours et courses s’en suivaient, de quoi nous occuper pendant les vacances.</p>\n\t<p>À la reprise de l’école, nos voitures allaient au garage. La technologie évoluant très vite, nous étions obligés d’en fabriquer de nouvelles, avec des options en plus pour les vacances suivantes.</p>\n\t<p>J’ai noté une évolution avec les voitures que fabriquent les enfants actuellement. Ce sont pour la plupart des 4×4 et ils se servent de boites de tomate découpées comme pneus. Bien pratique pour les nids-de-poule et les routes cabossées de Kinshasa !\n</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/congoblog?a=YXeHmb\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/congoblog?i=YXeHmb\" border=\"0\"></a></p>"
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"content" : "<div><p>I received an email containing several interesting insights from regular visitor M'Liz Dupree, and I asked her if I could share them with other <a href=\"http://www.financialarmageddon.com/\">Financial Armageddon</a> readers. Fortunately, she agreed, and here is what she had to say (with a few slight tweeks for clarity):</p><blockquote dir=\"ltr\"><p>In the horticultural world, in which I work, the science of phenology tracks the relationship between natural events and plants and animals. I've been applying phenology lately to the economy. Observation is the key; little things that didn't register previously now offer insight to the future of the markets, individual stocks and trends.</p>\n\n<p>For instance, when General Motors (GM) announced deep cutbacks at their plants which manufacture SUVs, I saw "For Sale" signs on more than 60 percent of the rental units in Janesville, Wisconsin, where one of the affected plants is located. One shift was cut, but that wouldn't normally precipitate widespread rental vacancies. That is, unless you deduce that the Janesville plant will be shuttered by the end of 2008. Given GM's losses and the recent $200 million concession to American Axle, a supplier of truck and SUV parts, more plant closings are a distinct possibility.</p>\n\n<p>Kroger (KR) announced last week that it would give a 10-percent bonus to customers who purchase Kroger gift cards with their tax rebate check. A $300 card would yield an additional $30 in credit, etc. The fine print reads that no personal checks will be accepted for the card purchase, only rebate checks. A quick trip through the local Kroger store during the past few days was an eye-opener. All prices were up from a week ago, from canned goods to meat to cleaning supplies, by about 8 percent. No free samples in the deli or bakery were offered. Usually, one can cruise those sections and munch enough for a small lunch. Goldman Sachs changed its rating of Kroger from "neutral" (based on fundamentals and recent underperformance) to a "buy." They noted the benefits from fiscal stimulus package as a reason for the upgrade.</p>\n\n<p>Then we come to the 500-pound gorilla, oil. Goldman Sachs also said recently that oil may go to $200 a barrel. My ringing telephone verifies that prediction. I inherited the mineral rights to three parcels in the Permian basin of West Texas and Oklahoma, both beehives of oil and natural gas production. Until, that is, the early part of this century. About 2002, before the election of George Bush, oil companies stripped out as much as they could and then shut down numerous wells rather than drill deeper. Middle Eastern assets were more profitable for them. </p>\n\n<p>Hundreds of new wells have come online in the last 90 days, according to The <em>Tulsa World</em>'s weekly drilling completion report. Played out fields are being drilled as deep as 19,000 feet to tap larger pools (as late as 1999, drillers in the Gulf of Mexico were hesitant to go more than 15,000 feet). It's worth the expense with the prospect of $200 oil. Leasing agents are giving you anything you want for your mineral rights now. You can name your cash bonus and easily negotiate 25 percent royalties. Two-hundred dollar oil may be conservative, if you read the financial phenology.</p></blockquote></div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/financialarmageddon?a=qioGB0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/financialarmageddon?i=qioGB0\" border=\"0\"></a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=pbaD8H\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=pbaD8H\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=Qu3qah\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=Qu3qah\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=ZzCPAh\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=ZzCPAh\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=1iP5YH\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=1iP5YH\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=oe11vh\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=oe11vh\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=hx4OQH\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=hx4OQH\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?a=gxmedH\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/financialarmageddon?i=gxmedH\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/financialarmageddon/~4/288362830\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p>What impels us, damn near forces us, to do wrong? I’m talking about those moments in our lives when we knowingly cross the line and do something we would never want anyone to do to us. <br> <br> After the teenage years, lust is not a good enough answer. Nor is it good enough to simply say we thought we could get away with it. I’m not talking minor infractions and miscellaneous misdemeanors. No. We are well past the city limits, indeed, we have crossed all (and any) borders to engage ourselves in something that generally turns out awful, or at least the results nowhere near compensate for the price we eventually pay, even if the bill never comes publicly due and remains simply our own private shame.<br> <br> Why?<br> <br> I don’t think there is a reasonable explanation for every thing we do.<br> <br> Notwithstanding how common the occurrence, in the context of personal relationships, cheating invariably hurts or harms us, diminishes us and yet… we do it. <br> <br> Time and time and time again we have seen how awful the mess turns out in the long run (sometimes don’t even be that long of a run) but we engage in ruinous activities believing in the moment when we are caught up that the laws of reciprocity, karma and gravity will all be suspended for us. <br> <br> I suppose the answer to the question of “why” is found in its inverse, i.e. at the time of the occurrence when the “why” question was most pressing, for whatever reason, we simply could not come up with a good answer to the immediate, even more important, most fundamental query: why not?</p><p>When we can not tell ourselves why not, all bets are off.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/ann%20peebles%2009.jpg\" alt=\"ann peebles 09.jpg\" title=\"ann peebles 09.jpg\"> <br> 1. Ann Peebles – <b>“Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” </b>(<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBrand-New-Classics-Ann-Peebles%2Fdp%2FB000EZ7VNA%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209865547%26sr%3D8-11&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Brand New Classics</i></font></a>)<br> Most of us know this song. Most of us have felt this way at one time or another, felt like: to hell with being lonely, I’m going to…. This is not the original version but rather from an album of remakes. I’ll not argue that this one is better than the first, I’ll simply say I enjoy it a lot and prefer the slow burn of this “up to no good but damn I’ma do it anyway” version that is both more bluesy and more jazzy than the original, which had a strong Al Green vibe.<br><img width=\"340\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"267\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/candi%20staton%2001.jpg\" alt=\"candi staton 01.jpg\" title=\"candi staton 01.jpg\"> <br> 2. Candi Staton – <b>“Another Man’s Woman, Another Woman’s Man”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCandi-Staton%2Fdp%2FB0000DG5N0%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209866148%26sr%3D1-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Candi Staton</i></font></a>)<br> Candi sings like it’s Sunday in church after being with somebody she shouldn’t have on Saturday night. The song virtually begs for redemption, pleads for some God, or some somebody, to end the torment of an untenable relationship. This is what used to be called Southern Soul. The chorus of moaning women. The subtle guitar picking and the churchy piano chords, and of course, the horns in the corner urging on the perfidy. Two and a half minutes of perfect debauchery.<br><img width=\"340\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"542\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/meshell%2025.jpg\" alt=\"meshell 25.jpg\" title=\"meshell 25.jpg\"> <br> 3. Me’Shell Ndegeocello – <b>“If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPlantation-Lullabies-MeShell-Ndeg%C3%A9ocello%2Fdp%2FB000002ML4%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209866281%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Plantation Lullabies</i></font></a>)<br> This kind of braggadocio is grounds for murder or at least a rationale for actions intent on severe bodily harm. Funky, freaky boasting about stealing and cheating without even an ounce of remorse. There is absolutely nothing redeemable about these lyrics even as the music blows the funk needle into the red on the audio meter.<br><img width=\"332\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"330\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/nancy%20wilson%2016.jpg\" alt=\"nancy wilson 16.jpg\" title=\"nancy wilson 16.jpg\"> <br> 4. Nancy Wilson – <b>“You Can Have Him”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FNancy-Wilson-Show%2Fdp%2FB000V6I5KK%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209866392%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>The Nancy Wilson Show</i></font></a>)<br> Sentiments from the fifties, from the precursor to what we now know as old skool. Nancy is on the case here singing in a youthful, clear voice un-marred by later tendencies to exaggerate and make clichés out of what was originally a personal and innovative update on Dinah Washington. Nancy Wilson has probably induced more adult male fantasies among men of economic substance than any vocalist of the last forty years or so. <br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/gladys%20knight%2002.jpg\" alt=\"gladys knight 02.jpg\" title=\"gladys knight 02.jpg\"> <br> 5. Gladys Knight – <b>“I Don’t Want To Do Wrong”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWere-Your-Woman-Standing-Ovation%2Fdp%2FB000JCES8Y%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209866518%26sr%3D1-4&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>If I Were Your Woman</i></font></a>)<br> So much for class, we’re back to raw libido taking charge. In the lyrics Gladys claims it’s her heart telling her what to do but the way she sings, it’s obvious some other part of her anatomy is directing her actions. This is sort of the excuse one tells one’s self when you can’t stop doing wrong and are unwilling to fess up to the person being cheated on.<br><img width=\"341\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"160\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/joan%20armatrading%2023.jpg\" alt=\"joan armatrading 23.jpg\" title=\"joan armatrading 23.jpg\"> <br> 6. Joan Armatrading – <b>“The Weakness In Me”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLive-All-America-Joan-Armatrading%2Fdp%2FB0002IQB7Q%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209866674%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Live</i></font></a>)<br> Joan is the Shakespeare of pop songs that dissect adult relationships. But it’s not just the lyrics, it’s also the deep ache in her voice. You could hook up a lie detector to this recording and she would pass, that’s how much honesty is in this portrait of weakness.<br><img width=\"279\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"390\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/aretha%2034.jpg\" alt=\"aretha 34.jpg\" title=\"aretha 34.jpg\"> <br> 7. Aretha Franklin – <b>“Dark End Of The Street” </b>(<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FRespect-Very-Best-Aretha-Franklin%2Fdp%2FB000066SBB%3Fie%3DUTF8%26n%3D5174%26s%3Dmusic&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Respect: Very Best Of…</i></font></a>)<br> This is some of that crucial up-south Detroit soul music. Working class. Straight up, strong, full throttle, way pass knee-deep, all the way in, with the water line well over our heads. We’re not waving for help, we are knowingly drowning in a sea of love.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/shirley%20brown%2001.jpg\" alt=\"shirley brown 01.jpg\" title=\"shirley brown 01.jpg\"> <br> 8. Shirley Brown – <b>“Woman To Woman”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWoman-Shirley-Brown%2Fdp%2FB000000ZHQ%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209867144%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Woman To Woman</i></font></a>) <br> This is "the" classic of the genre (songs by or about the “other woman”). Ms. Brown can blow, no doubt, and when she raps, she speaks her mind in no uncertain terms. Even though social mores have changed and even though monogamy is no longer as critical as it once was, this song, and indeed the whole album, remains an emotionally charged articulation of female (although not necessarily consistently feminist) views on relationship issues.<br><img width=\"340\" vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"254\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/joan%20armatrading%2019.jpg\" alt=\"joan armatrading 19.jpg\" title=\"joan armatrading 19.jpg\"> <br> 9. Joan Armatrading – <b>“Lost The Love”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhats-Inside-Joan-Armatrading%2Fdp%2FB000003ET3%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209867233%26sr%3D1-2&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>What’s Inside</i></font></a>)<br> Joan redux. Why the repeat? Well, this is one of the few songs I’m aware of that gives the full 411 on the downside of cheating. This is the blues! In spades with a big joker trumping the ace and the little joker. Almost makes you feel sorry for the cheater. It’s a hell of a song.<br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/betty%20carter%2012.jpg\" alt=\"betty carter 12.jpg\" title=\"betty carter 12.jpg\"> <br> 10. Betty Carter – <b>“30 Years”</b> (<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDroppin-Things-Betty-Carter%2Fdp%2FB0000047AU%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1209867344%26sr%3D1-1&tag=breathoflife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\"><font color=\"#cc0000\"><i>Droppin’ Things</i></font></a>)<br> This is a clear-eyed inspection of an impending divorce when reconciliation seems neigh impossible. What’s interesting to me is that Betty does not sound desperate nor broke-down rather this is some adult reckoning of a crisis. This one sounds as though they might, maybe, be able to stay together. It’s a cool jazz plea. Cool albeit swinging harder than a lynch rope. <br><img vspace=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.kalamu.com/bol/wp-content/content/images/nina%20simone%2056.jpg\" alt=\"nina simone 56.jpg\" title=\"nina simone 56.jpg\"> <br> 11. Nina Simone – <b>“The Other Woman”</b> (<i>Live At Drury Lane 1977</i> - bootleg)<br> This is from when Nina decided to give up on living in America. Here the weariness is palpable. And unlike all of the other “Other Woman” songs, Ms. Simone invests this reading with a feminist perspective. It’s just Nina and piano. And the audience. And it’s brilliant. Simply brilliant.<br> <br> I don’t know what all makes us be who we be but I do know that our music perfectly expresses the diverse facets of our being: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, i.e. the totality of our humanity.<br> <b><br> —Kalamu ya Salaam<br> <br> </b> <br> <br> <b><font color=\"#ffffff\"><span style=\"background-color:rgb(0,0,0)\"> Why not</span></font></b><b><font color=\"#ffffff\"><span style=\"background-color:rgb(0,0,0)\">? </span></font></b><br> <br> Yeah, that’s the question, ain’t it? Why not. </p>Legacies have been tarnished, families have been destroyed and kingdoms have even fallen, all because some man or woman (though usually a man) couldn’t come up with a good enough answer to that "why not?" question. God knows Bill Clinton wishes he could’ve come up with an answer to that question. Today, instead of being the punchline to numerous jokes, Clinton would probably be regarded as one of the most effective presidents in the history of the presidency.<br> <p>The problem is all of that damn temptation. It’s like Nina Simone—a genius at play—says: at home there’s nothing but work and grief and aggravation and work and tension and work and toys and dishes and shit scattered all over the place. But the other woman? She’s got enchanting clothes and French perfume and fresh flowers. "And," Nina says, "When her old man comes to call on her / He’ll find her waiting like a lonesome queen." I’m feeling that, which is precisely the problem.<br> </p><p>Or like Joan—another genius—says: "Why do you come here and pretend to be just passing by?" "Why do you call when you know I can’t answer the phone?" And then, in other song, Joan says, after all kinds of apologizing and excuse-making, "I’ll be good." But like she says in the first song: "I need you…<i>and</i> you." So, OK. Tell that "I’ll be good" stuff to somebody who’ll believe it.</p><p>And then there are the soul queens: Aretha, Gladys, Candi and Ann. They all know they’re wrong but they don’t stop doing what they’re doing. Sometimes, though, that "other woman" shit is dangerous. And I don’t mean morally or emotionally. I mean mortally. (I’m thinking of Shirley Brown. When a woman calls your house talking like that, you’re either concerned for your health or you’re a fool.) Ask Jimi Hendrix. He had a Louisiana woman putting voodoo on him. Ask Al Green. He met up with a potful of hot grits. That couldn’t have been pleasant. Hell, ask Sam Cooke. My man actually met his maker over some "other woman" drama. He wasn’t the first, and he damn sure won’t be the last.</p><p><b>—Mtume ya Salaam</b></p><p> </p><p><b><font color=\"#ffffff\"><span style=\"background-color:rgb(0,0,0)\"> When a house is a home! </span></font></b> </p><p>Son, you said a mouthful. And check this: when you said: "When a woman calls your house…" you said a double mouthful. Back in the day among Black nationalists we called our spouses (both male and female) our "house" because we said we lived one inside the other. So when another person called your "house," they weren’t just calling your residence. The more things change…</p><p><b>—Kalamu ya Salaam</b></p><p><br> </p>"
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"title" : "i wrote an article...for jesus.",
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"content" : "<em>Well, sort of. I wrote this small piece on religion in Ghana for a newsletter my mom puts out through the Presbyterian Church of Canada. It's a little treacly - did you know you can't swear in articles for the Presbyterian Church of Canada??? What cheek! - but the sentiments are heartfelt. Mostly. And yes, I was born and raised in the Presbyterian Church. So I wrote this piece from the perspective of a lapsed religious person. It's not particularly offensive but I hope it doesn't offend anyone - particularly the Ghanaians who might read this blog. To them I say this is just my way of saying, \"I wish I could be invited to your party.\"</em><br><br><br>I am sitting in a rickety, cramped VW van in a parking lot filled with hundreds of rickety, cramped VW vans, in a giant dusty parking lot, in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, a country on the coast of West Africa. The van is called a “tro tro” and it is the most prevalent form of public transit in the city. It is 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of the dry season, and the driver will not take us to our destination until the van is stuffed to the brim with commuters. Sweat drips off my nose and onto my jeans as I sit with the other passengers and wait. And wait. We sit stock still, trying not to move. I wonder if it is possible to be any more uncomfortable. And then suddenly, a man leaps onto the bus with us. Despite the heat he is dressed in a grey suit and tie. He is smiling. His eyes gleam huge and brown and ecstatic.<br>“May the Lord be with you!” he roars.<br>A silence follows - as thick as the hot, polluted air.<br>The man’s expression is inscrutable. He pauses, and then, more insistently:<br>“MAY THE LORD BE WITH YOU!”<br>“And also with you,” murmurs the crowd on the tro tro. Finally full, the vehicle is set to move off. The man remains with us. For the entirety of our 45-minute ride, he remains. And he preaches, and preaches, and preaches, at the top of his lungs, looking at all of us in turn. And the people in the tro tro sit, and some of them listen, and most continue to murmur their assent when he pauses in his lecture; “Ah-men.”<br>At the end of the ride, before everyone stumbles out into the hot, swarthy streets, hands reach forward to take some of the damp pamphlets our preacher has been wielding throughout the drive. <br><br>I’ve been here for six months – but it took me all of two days here to realize that this type of Public Display of Piety was omnipresent, and constant, and would take a great deal of getting used to.<br><br>In Ghana, faith is everywhere. It floods onto the streets from stalls selling gospel CDs. It lights up buildings at three in the morning as members of the charismatic church wander around the room, speaking in tongues to each other as you walk home from a night out. It causes the country’s electoral commission to consider changing the day that the country goes to the polls to elect Ghana’s next president in December – because that day happens to fall on a Sunday. And yes, sometimes it rides with you to work and back in the form of an evangelical tro-tro preacher, and there is no way to get away from it.<br><br>And the pervasiveness of religion in Ghana is by no means exclusive to Christianity. I recently took a trip to the capital of Ghana’s northern region, Tamale, where the population is overwhelmingly Muslim. I visited a colleague’s workplace only to see reporters leaving halfway through the day to pray at the mosque. During a break on the 14-hour bus ride to the area, I sat on a bench and watched as dignified Muslim women, their heads wrapped in scarves and eyes lined with kohl, spread out a mat in the parking lot, removed their shoes, bent their heads to the earth and worshipped in silence. And, more disruptively, I was awakened every morning by a four-thirty am call to prayer broadcast from the mosque right beside my rooming house.<br><br>Although we pride ourselves on our tolerance for different cultures and religions in Canada, I can’t help but wonder how we would deal with a presence as impassioned - and inescapable - as the tro-tro preacher. No doubt he would have subject to an onslaught of rolling eyes and irritated glares from other passengers – and maybe even forcibly ejected from the car itself. Canadians – and in my experience, Presbyterians – keep their love of God to themselves. When we pray in church, we bow our heads in silence as the minister recites the benediction. We sing nicely arranged hymns in a reverent and orderly fashion. We rejoice, sure, but our rejoicing happens on the inside, or in privacy. <br><br>In Ghana, the opposite occurs. The people in this country celebrate their faith in a completely open and unselfconscious manner, and quite often, it’s beautiful. Sometimes, it can be annoying. And it’s especially jarring to see this element in the newsroom where I work. Generally most of us don’t think of newsrooms as the most pious of places. Most journalists I know in Canada haven’t been to church in years. Not so at JOY FM. Every morning before the editorial meeting, we begin with a prayer. It was easy enough to get used to this – until the day that we switched newsrooms and a preacher was brought in to christen the new working space. As he sang and asked for God to bless the pristine white walls of our working space, my colleagues whispered, shuddered and shouted beside me. It was an intimate moment and I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Afterwards, I was ashamed by my reticence. Why is this awkward? I asked myself.<br><br>Although I lapsed into lazy Presbyterianism when I hit my twenties, I was once a good Presbyterian. I did youth group. I sang in the choir. I taught Sunday School, for heaven’s sake. There’s no need for embarrassment. So I reigned in my confused expression, smiled and went along with it. I feel anything else would be....rude. And yet, these completely open displays of faith will forever retain an elusiveness that makes this erstwhile skeptic wistful, and maybe a little sad. Despite myself, I wonder, \"Why can't I feel like that?\" It's like when you go to a party at your friend's house and all their friends are there and you don't really know any of them. Meanwhile they know all the same songs and inside jokes, and are laughing their faces off. You try to join for some of the time, smiling goodnaturedly. Sometimes the people invite you in and are really quite hysterical and you are having a riot and loving everyone. And then some of the time you feel awkward and sad and wish more of your own friends were along for the ride. For me, that's the crux life in Ghana.<br><br>One Sunday, my roommate and I took a walk around the dusty red roads of our neighbourhood. We literally stumbled across the ruins of a half-completed building – the neighbourhood church. Inside, men and women in beautifully patterned traditional clothes sang their lungs out while a preacher swayed at the front of the room and a man banged out the melodies on an old piano. A woman pulled us onto a bench and we stood quietly with the congregation in our jeans and tank tops. We felt grubby and conspicuous in this humble setting and didn’t know any of the words to the hymns. And yet, as the gentle unadorned voices rose around me in one sweet melody, and as the women held hands and smiled at us, I didn’t feel out of place in the least. It was a nice way to feel.<br><br>Although I don’t entirely understand expressions of faith and devotion here, I know it all comes from a place that is good, a place deep down that provides release and for many, some kind of enlightenment. I haven’t resolved my own dealings with my faith and I’m not sure I ever will. But as a stranger in this country, wandering far from home, I do feel I’ve been privy to something that is as intimate as a secret and really quite powerful and inexorable all at once.<br>And to take that away with me, I think, is enough."
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"title" : "The Lords of Hedgistan",
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:justify\">The top 50 hedge fund managers in 2007 made a combined personal income of $29 billion and now plan to incorporate themselves as a country. They are looking at Antarctica, which is getting balmier all the time. Despite record high crude oil prices ($115/bbl) that may restrict consumption and cause fewer greenhouse gases, they are nevertheless going ahead with plans to eventually grow cotton in the vast lands of the South Pole. Apparently, the Founding Lords of Hedgistan - for that is to be the name of their new nation - are betting heavily that burning coal will more than compensate.<br><br>Antarctica will be obtained from its current owners/claimants in exchange for immunity from speculative attacks on their currencies and domestic financial markets. America's McMurdo Station is widely expected to be renamed the Dead Buck Station as a warning to other countries that may resist surrender.<br><br>The new nation will have a tiny population (50 plus household members and serfs), but based on the earnings of its residents its GDP will exceed that of 100 out of 180 countries tracked by the IMF. Next on the list is Kenya (pop. 32 million, 2007 GDP $29.3 billion). One of the Lords suggested its outright purchase, but he was voted down. \"Why waste equity when we have leverage?\" was the sensible objection from the other 49.<br><br>The fifty Founders are to award themselves hereditary titles of aristocracy proclaiming their exalted station. Heraldic work is already under way for Order of Quantum, Lord of The Citadel, Harbinger of Perpetual Good News and Rex of Renaissance. The new nation's highest recognition for financial bravery has already been established, and is called <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pour_le_M%C3%A9rite\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Pour</span> </a><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pour_le_M%C3%A9rite\">Les Cochons Volants</a>. </span>The medal of solid gold depicts two winged piglets encircled in a wreath of cocktail sausages.<br><br>And since <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnObI25aN1k\">(exploding) penguins come from the Antarctic...</a><br><br>I bid you all a fine weekend with the above Monty Python skit. The penguin bit comes near the end.<br></div>"
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"content" : "Well, I never imagined Robert Mugabe's new survival gambit would be just to pretend it wasn't happening. But it does permit us to answer the question of just how small a state can get and still function; to be clear, I don't mean a state in the juridical/diplomatic sense, but rather in the political, realist sense. The Grand Master of the Knights of Malta's house in Rome has some diplomatic privileges, probably because nobody cares enough to change this. But Mugabe's continuing occupation of the office of president of a political entity called \"Zimbabwe\" certainly does have consequences; specifically that while he's in there no-one else can get in. This has fairly serious negative consequences for Zimbabweans in general, and also for anyone who believes in the principle that tyrants should be held responsible, as his residual occupation of the presidency gives him non-trivial bargaining power.<br><br>As far as we know, he's closeted in Government House with a small group of officials, notably including military leaders, political thugs, and the governor of the Central Bank, who has the keys to the remaining foreign exchange and knows how to start the printing press. <a href=\"http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12700700.htm\">Noises are being made</a> that the military will not \"fight the people of Zimbabwe over election results\"; that might mean they would fight over something else, or else define the targets as something other than the people of Zimbabwe, or it might mean the army is unwilling to take any action.<br><br>Other than, presumably, protecting Comrade Bob himself. A few weeks ago, it emerged that the political entity known as \"Chad\" actually extended precisely to the radius of action of an Mi-24 helicopter based in N'Djamena. But now, it appears that \"Zimbabwe\" in the political sense consists of Government House, the central bank, and a small field of fire around them, and the numbers to Robert Mugabe's bank accounts. Not even the top level domain or the corporate or aircraft registry.<br><br>The obvious answer to this is secession; make local arrangements, set up a shadow administration, and simply ignore them right back."
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"title" : "Rwanda: A Time to Remember",
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"content" : "<em>We began this </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/\"><em>blog</em></a><em> a year ago to mark the anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide. Since then, we’ve gone from </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/04/it-is-october-1997.html\"><em>Rwanda</em></a><em> to </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/04/sudan-has-anything-changed.html\"><em>Sudan</em></a><em> and </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/04/beach-boys-in-somalia.html\"><em>Somalia</em></a><em>, to </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/06/burundian-cabinet-minister-says.html\"><em>Burundi</em></a><em> and the </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/11/interview-with-dead-man.html\"><em>Congo</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/04/natural-catastrophe.html\"><em>Mozambique</em></a><em> and </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/12/sewer-kids-of-luanda-its-not-just-that.html\"><em>Angola</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2008/03/zimbabwe-2000-scoop-sinister.html\"><em>Zimbabwe</em></a><em> and </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2008/01/happy-new-year-to-all.html\"><em>scores of other destinations</em></a><em>. We’ve taken a look at the </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2008/03/iraq-five-years-ago-it-starts-with.html\"><em>Iraq war</em></a><em> as it started five years ago and also the claim Iraq was </em><a href=\"http://reporterregrets.blogspot.com/2007/07/no-evidence-of-new-nuclear-material.html\"><em>seeking uranium in Africa</em></a><em>. We plan to explore the US war on terror in Africa in the coming weeks, along with an African nuclear reactor security issue. But today, in memory of the victims of the Rwandan genocide on the 14th anniversary of the killings, we return to where we started and the visit I made to a massacre site soon after the bloodshed erupted. I post no photo. The images generated by these words are as vivid to me today as then. This is the transcript of what I saw and dictated live-to-tape in 1994:<br></em><br>We've just driven several kilometers along a dirt road north from the Rwandan town of Rusumo and we've arrived in a small town called Nyarubuye. And right here on the ground in front of me is the decomposed corpse of a child -- its skull bleached white, its dress still lying on what's left of the body. In the tall grass, another body. Here even more. This body has been flatted, its skull crushed...<br><br>These bodies are lying in front of a church. Just in the courtyard here in front of the church I can count ten bodies. Assorted bodyparts. There's a decapitated child. We're now about to go into the church itself and right at the steps is a body.<br><br>And inside the church are several more bodies, again badly decomposed. There are none on the altar but in the sacristy behind the altar it's clear the building was ransacked, looted, priests' vestments cast about.<br><br>Obviously people fled here to take shelter and obviously they didn't find it.<br><br>In the gardens outside the church are spectacular flowers, amaryllis, marigold, daisies, a huge explosion of color and just down the steps from those plants more bodies. A mother and her child. The child appears to have been decapitated.<br><br>The entire complex appears to have been ransacked, looted, papers with the church's symbol on it scattered about, drawers emptied, cloth material just ripped apart and again more corpses. And flies. And here what seem to be shotgun shells, cartridges from shotgun shells which raises, of course, the question of whether some of these people were blasted.<br><br>In this small room, there are some wooden crucifixes on the floor and what is left of the body of a small baby.<br><br>Our guides have told us that in the direction we're heading now outside the church complex there is a place where there are many bodies and they're right. In front of me I can see a dozen corpses in one group. They appear to be mainly women, some children.<br><br>The stench is really overwhelming and I've put a mask on so that may muffle my voice. But in this courtyard there are easily a hundred bodies, all of them very badly decomposed, many with obvious hack marks.<br><br>And here is a room of horror, dozens upon dozens of bodies, piled on one another. I think it's fair to say there are hundreds of dead here. Well there's three rooms that must contain about 250 bodies. That's not counting the 100 in this courtyard and there are still rooms we have not seen. And everywhere, flies.<br><br>This village we are told by a woman who lives here -- and still lives here -- was a predominantly Tutsi village and that this massacre was carried out by predominantly Hutu Interahamwe, the dreaded militia whose name is so associated with the unspeakable atrocities of this war...<br><br>For a place of such idyllic beauty, it will certainly be remembered for one of the most unspeakable horrors of this war.\""
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-style:italic\">- for Millicent, upon the street clearing of Accra, February 2007.</span><br><br>at makola women earn pennies porting twice their weight on their heads, their thin sandals sliding just over the thick concrete cloth draped and folded delicately atop the panting earth. at makola smallboys clip toenails and dig knives into the fleshy corners, scrape out filings of dirt and blow them off their glinting blades then open their palms meekly to the shadows. at makola old men sell tabloids on rape, incest, priests and politicians for fifty cents a pop, old women sell live crayfish and crabs in metal bowls, keep them at bay with long wooden sticks. at makola children in uniforms move briskly through corridors, hold books tight against their chests as they wind their way home. at makola the invisible rich extend hands out lowered tinted windows to buy bread and rice from bruised, scrambling saleswomen. at makola the streets are shut down every saturday for funerals to men who died months earlier and the market whirls in red and black kente, mourners dancing slowly, hawkers behind them sweating over crates of beer and minerals. at makola half the stalls are built illegally and many of the market women are smuggled in from war zones. at makola people talk of business, football, america – people yell and shake. at makola vendors are starting to complain, the police are getting anxious – someone is going to die, though there may not be bullets or blood. at makola the shops will close and reopen, will be torn down and rebuilt – lives will be buried and excavated. at makola the earth will again shed its clothes, lay itself down amongst the swirling throng, disappear, and wait to be remembered."
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"title" : "Leaving Ouagadougou for Abidjan: Can West Africa Compete with a Peaceful Cote d’Ivoire?",
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"content" : "<p>By <strong>John Liebhardt</strong>, Burkina Faso: My friend Ahmed left today for Abidjan. He is from Burkina Faso, so it’s not world-breaking news. Before Cote d’Ivoire’s ethnic troubles became entangled into a civil war, somewhere around 2 million Burkinabé had lived and worked in the country. </p>\n<p>You could say that Ahmed’s decision to immigrate shows that the wounds of Cote d’Ivoire are finally healing. The fighting is over, and the political resolution is far enough along that people from the region feel safe to return. That’s all good. </p>\n<p>But his departure brings up some mixed feelings, also. First, if the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire taught West Africans anything, they learned they must put their own houses in order to prosper. Beforehand, millions of Burkinabé, Malians, Nigeriens, Togolese, whomever headed Felix Houphouet-Boigny’s call to come help and build his country. It is unknown how many houses and boutiques and other little dusty offices around West Africa were launched because of these untold millions in remittances from Cote d’Ivoire. </p>\n<p>When the war sent everyone but the strongest (or most foolish) back to their home countries, most returnees didn’t know what to do with themselves after spending so long in prosperous Cote d’Ivoire. “How do people make money here,” a returnee asked me once. “There’s no food for my kids.” </p>\n<p>Apparently, the region’s governments didn’t know what to do, either. Burkina Faso, which previously sent much of its cotton and the few other goods it traded to port in Abidjan, had to invest in its roads to handle the traffic that now runs to ports in Togo and Ghana. Malian trucks have become common sights on Burkina’s roads, so the transportation system had to be expanded and strengthened. Five years on, it’s a problem that still persists, as the highway connecting the country’s two largest cities has been the victim of poor engineering – and most likely a hefty theft of funds – forcing untold repairs of the pizza-thin asphalt and untold damage (and delays) to trucks, buses and other transport. </p>\n<p>Finally, there’s the human element. It seemed that the governments of the Sahel had to figure out what to do with the young upstarts who for generations headed directly from their fields to work in Abidjan or the plantations of Cote d’Ivoire. Ahmed was 14 when a lack of funds forced him to drop out of school, leave his village and move to Ouagadougou. He arrived alone and soon began selling cell phone units on a street corner not far from my house, which is how I met him. Those were the early years of the cell phone boom, and he and his colleagues rode it well. Work was hard, the sun unforgiving, but money was relatively good. How many 15-year-old African former farm kids have a disposable income? It wasn’t much, but Ahmed – and his friends – had spending money. The rotation of their new shirts and hats proved that. He led the way and talked his friends into enrolling in night school and finishing out their curtailed educations. </p>\n<p>Over the years, Ahmed soured on Ouagadougou. The streets do that to people, he told me. Crime became a problem; more than once he was robbed by men in fancy 4×4s wielding pistols. He received forged bills twice, and a few times people blatantly drove off with his cards in their hands. After becoming an independent seller, Ahmed lost his entire stock, and I loaned him $100 to restart his business with the idea that he’d pay me back in a year’s time. That was 2005. The boom decelerated and he found himself chasing the same customers with even more competitors on the street. Profits shrank; buying food and paying rent became full-time worries. </p>\n<p>He began learning life’s lessons, too. Like hard work only gets you so far in Ouagadougou. Playing soccer for a local club, Ahmed fumed when he wasn’t chosen to go to France to play on a scholarship. He was denied, he said, even after French trainers inquired about him, because his head coach was against the kid whose father is merely a cultivator. </p>\n<p>I, of course, hate to see Ahmed go. Most of my reasons are completely selfish. As a journalist, I could always go to him with questions and he’d patiently explain to me what I was really looking for. I’ll miss him on other levels, too: He’s a bright, honest kid and a hard worker. </p>\n<p>Although he never seemed to know what he was going to do to get himself off the street, Ahmed will most likely thrive in Abidjan under the care of his older brother, who sounds like he’s worked equally hard to keep the boutique in Abidjan running through the tough years. </p>\n<p>But I can’t shake the feeling that somehow Burkina Faso failed him. The nations of the Sahel – and the rest of West Africa – have changed considerably since the people of Cote d’Ivoire began chasing immigrants away. Economies grew. Businesses sprung up. Governments reformed (somewhat). Most importantly, West Africans understood that the economic miracle of Cote d’Ivoire wasn’t ever coming back, so they began investing at home, creating businesses and enterprises. </p>\n<p>Apparently things haven’t changed enough. They say that during the prime years, Cote d’Ivoire accounted for a super majority of the region’s GDP. Even after a decade’s worth of political instability and untold violence, the country remains a regional powerhouse. Try as much as the rest of the region did – and that may be open for debate – West Africa’s countries still rely heavily on Cote d’Ivoire to provide the jobs for people most desperate for work. </p>\n<p>We could consider the stark statistics from the UN and surmise the region’s inherent poverty will take decades to overcome. But we all know something the UN doesn’t admit: Working behind the counter in even the most poorly stocked boutique doesn’t pull anybody out poverty – at least statistically – but in West Africa, a job on a chair is a step in the right direction. It provides a guaranteed salary, however pitiful. It provides lunch, however greasy. It may even provide a place to sleep. Most importantly, it provides experience and the room to grow. </p>\n<p>As much as Ahmed tried, this hard-working, honest, well intentioned kid couldn’t even find one of those coveted jobs on chair in Ouagadougou. He remained one of the sunburned masses, with no way to leverage his talents to pull himself ahead. Before he left, I wished him the best of luck in Abidjan and we joked about that $100 I loaned him. We both laughed, and then he hopped the Abidjan train that millions before him rode down to the promised land of Cote d’Ivoire. Like I said, he should do fine. In the back of my mind, though, I can’t help but wonder if Burkina Faso hasn’t somehow missed a golden opportunity.<br>\n<em><br>\nJohn Liebhardt is the editor of the blog Africa Flak, found at: <a href=\"http://africaflak.blogspot.com/\">africaflak.blogspot.com</a><br>\n</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.africanloft.com/?p=1599&akst_action=share-this\" title=\"E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc.\" rel=\"nofollow\">Share This</a>\n</p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=VLLq1cF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=VLLq1cF\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=CuwSPWF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=CuwSPWF\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=9IIGcxF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=9IIGcxF\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=wBVPOfF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=wBVPOfF\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=OFihyzf\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=OFihyzf\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?a=B2QYv5F\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Africanloft?i=B2QYv5F\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Africanloft/~4/246789354\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Waugh scooped",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/DeedesScoop.jpg\" alt=\"\"></p>\n\t<p>If, like me, you love Evelyn Waugh’s <em>Scoop</em>, then you’ll love Bill Deedes’s <a href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-War-Waugh-Story-Scoop/dp/033041268X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204385737&sr=8-1\">account</a> of what it was actually like in Abyssinia during the Italian invasion and afterwards. Deedes was supposed to be the model for William Boot, <em>Scoop</em>’s hapless hero, but it’s clear that the only aspect of the young Deedes that really corresponds with Boot was his luggage. When Deedes was setting out for the war-zone, few people in London really had a clue about the Abyssinian climate, so he was — perhaps understandably — equipped for every eventuality.</p>\n\t<p>Here’s Waugh, describing Boot’s sartorial and other preparations:</p>\n\t<blockquote><p>The Foreign Contacts Adviser of <em>The Beast</em> telephoned the emporium where William was to get his kit and warned them of his arrival; accordingly it was General Cruttwell, F.R.G.S., himself who was waiting at the top of the lift shaft. An imposing man: Cruttwell Glacier in Spitsbergen, Cruttwell falls in Venezuela, Mount Cruttwell in the Pamirs, Cruttwell’s Leap in Cumberland marked his travels; Cruttwell’s Folly, a waterless and indefensible camp near Salonika, was notorious to all who had served with him in the war. The shop paid him six hundred a year and commission, out of which, by contract, he had to find his annual subscription to the R.G.S. and the electric treatment which maintained the leathery tan of his complexion.</p>\n\t<p>Before either had spoken, the General sized William up; in any other department, he would have been recognised as a sucker; here, among the trappings of high adventure, he was, more gallantly, a greenhorn.</p>\n\t<p>‘Your first visit to Ishmaelia, eh? Then perhaps I can be of some help to you. As no doubt you know, I was there in ‘97 with poor “Sprat” Larkin…’.</p>\n\t<p>‘I want some cleft sticks, please’, said William firmly.</p>\n\t<p>The General’s manner changed abruptly. His leg had been pulled before, often. Only last week there had been an idiotic young fellow dressed up as a missionary…</p>\n\t<p>‘What the devil for?’ he asked tartly.</p>\n\t<p>‘Oh, just for my dispatches, you know.’</p>\n\t<p>It was with exactly such an expression of simplicity that the joker had asked for a tiffin gun, a set of chota pegs and a chota mallet. ‘Miss Barton will see to you,’ he said, and turning on his heel began to inspect a newly-arrived consignment of rhinocerous hide whips in a menacing way.</p>\n\t<p>Miss Barton was easier to deal with. ‘We can have some cloven for you,’ she said brightly. ‘If you will make your selection I will send them down to our cleaver.’</p>\n\t<p>William, hesitating between polo sticks and hockey sticks, chose six of each. Then Miss Barton led him through the departments of the enormous store. By the time she had finished with him, William had acquired a well-, perhaps over-furnished tent, three months’ rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, a hand-pump and sterilizing plant, an astrolabe, six suits of tropical linen and a sou’wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, guaranteed to preserve cigars in condition in the Red Sea, and a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand, and a cane for whacking snakes. Only anxiety about the time brought an end to his marketing. At the last moment he added a coil of rope and a sheet of tin; then he left under the baleful glare of General Cruttwell.</p></blockquote>\n\t<p>And here’s Deedes, describing his:</p>\n\t<blockquote><p>“At Austin Reed in Regent Street, where Ellis [Mervyn Ellis, the Morning Post’s news editor] and I made most of our purchases, the notion of preparing me for an extended siege was greeted with enthusiasm. We were persuaded to buy, among other things: three tropical suits, riding breeches for winter and summer, bush shirts, a sola topi, a double-brimmed sun hat, a camp bed and sleeping bag, and long boots to deter mosquitoes at sundown. To contain some of these purchases we bought two large metal uniform cases and a heavy trunk made of cedar wood and lined with zinc to keep ants at bay…</p>\n\t<p>At the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street, we found a department that specialized in kitting out those bound for the tropics. They knew where Abyssinia was and could suggest the right medicines for the region. These included bottles of quinine pills which were then reckoned to be the best protection against malaria. The Army and Navy also produced slabs of highly nutritious black chocolate — an iron ration for emergencies to go inside the zinc-lined trunk. Our purchases in all weighed just under 600 pounds — a quarter of a ton.”</p></blockquote>\n\t<p>I prefer Waugh’s version. You can tell that this all took place before the invention of RyanAir — who now impose a strict 10kg limit on cabin baggage and 15kg on anything that’s going in the hold.\n</p>"
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"title" : "The African American Experience in Photographs",
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"content" : "Missouri's <a href=\"http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/digital/browse.asp?coll=African%20American%20Portrait%20Collection&proc=browse&offset=0\">digital archives </a>of African American portraits. African American <a href=\"http://www.floridamemory.com/PhotographicCollection/photo_exhibits/harper.cfm\">portraits</a> from Florida's archives. The <a href=\"http://www.blackarchives.org/faceted_search/results/na/extract/relevance/na/taxonomy%3A117\">Black Archives </a>of Mid-America. Missouri's <a href=\"http://www.virtuallymissouri.org/vmdigcoll.aspx\">archives</a>, with a specific section for the <a href=\"http://digital.hannibal.lib.mo.us/\">African American community</a> in northeast Missouri. <br> <a href=\"http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf7p3006fv&chunk.id=dsc-1.3.9&brand=oac\">Cased photos</a> from California. <a href=\"http://haldigitalcollections.cdmhost.com/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fp4006coll3\">Civil War soldiers</a> from Michigan. Just for <a href=\"http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/results.asp?keyword1=Donahey,%20William%20:%20Papers,%201914%20-%201970&search_field1=collection_name&search_type=advanced&sort_by=date&boolean_type1=and&boolean_type2=and\">fun.</a>"
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"content" : "Who doesn't love a good reading list? It is that time of year again and the <a href=\"http://www.commonwealthfoundation.com/culturediversity/writersprize/\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Commonwealth Writers' Prize</span></a> shortlist has been announced. As I've previously mentioned, I like the eccentric democracy of the IMPAC/Dublin. With the Commonwealth Writers' Prize I enjoy the genuine focus on books published regionally, and often overlooked in western countries. The 2008 Africa region candidates are:<br><br><u>Best Book, Africa Region</u><br><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVyidKl48x8\">Barbara Adair</a> (South Africa) <a href=\"http://www.jacana.co.za/cms/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=242&category_id=33&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1\"><em><strong>End</strong></em></a> Jacana Media<br>\"...the Johannesburg and Maputo of the 1980’s; where wars of varying violences erupt and conjure the edgy, war-torn world of the film Casablanca.\"<br><br>Ifeoma Chinwuba (Nigeria) <a href=\"http://www.spectrumbooksonline.com/details.aspx?isbn=978-029-687-5\"><em><strong>Waiting for Maria</strong></em></a> Spectrum Books<br>\"The cost of maintaining death row inmates has skyrocketed, resulting in high costs for the Department of Prisons. Government is anxious to implement the death sentences passed in the last few years but stalled by the absence of an executioner...\"<br><br><a href=\"http://southafrica.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=5374\">Finuala Dowling</a> (South Africa) <strong><em><a href=\"http://www.penguinbooks.co.za/book_info.php?p%5BIGcat_book_items%5D%5BIGuid%5D=157211\">Flyleaf</a> </em></strong>Penguin Books SA<br>\"Violet Birkin is a teacher, and since she’s paid to teach by the hour, she imagines she’ll have to teach forever. But her life is changing: she’s shedding her hair and her husband...\"<br><br><a href=\"http://voiceofguyana.com/2007/01/09/karen-king-aribisala/\">Karen King-Aribisala</a> (Nigeria) <a href=\"http://www.peepaltreepress.com/single_book_display.asp?isbn=9781845230463\"><em><strong>The Hangman's Game</strong></em></a> Peepal Tree Press<br><span>\"A young Guyanese woman sets out to write an historical novel based on the 1823 Demerara Slave Rebellion and the fate of an English missionary who is condemned to hang for his alleged part in the uprising, but who dies in prison before his execution. She has wanted to document historical fact through fiction, but the characters she invents make an altogether messier intrusion into her life with their conflicting interests and ambivalent motivations.\"<br><br></span><a href=\"http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/author.htm?authorID=4807\">Susan Mann</a> (South Africa )<em> <a href=\"http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0099502674\"><strong>Quarter Tones</strong></a></em> Harvill Secker<br><span>\"When Ana returns to the ramshackle cottage of her youth in the seaside village of Noordhoek, near Cape Town, she does so with the intention of sorting out her father’s affairs. It soon becomes clear that more is at stake. After a decade in London, where she has failed to find work as a musician, her return to South Africa puts further distance into an already strained marriage, not only because she is out of reach, but because Michael, her husband, has lost faith in the country.\"<br></span><br><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakes_Mda\">Zakes Mda</a> (South Africa) <a href=\"http://www.penguinbooks.co.za/book_info.php?p%5BIGcat_book_items%5D%5BIGuid%5D=102510\"><strong><em>Cion</em></strong></a> Penguin Books SA<br>\"Toloki, the Professional Mourner who is the main character in Zakes Mda’s earlier novel Ways of Dying, returns in Cion, but is now travelling ‘to seek other ways of mourning’...\"<br><br><u>Best First Book, Africa Region</u><br>Sade Adeniran (Nigeria ) <a href=\"http://www.amazon.co.uk/Imagine-This-Sade-Adeniran/dp/0955545307\"><em style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:bold\"><strong>Imagine </strong></em><span style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:bold\">This</span> </a>SW Books<br>\"A compelling story about the human spirit and resilience against the odds. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Imagine This</span> is the journal of Lola Ogunwole which she starts at the age of nine; it charts her survival from childhood to adulthood...\"<br><br><a href=\"http://www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/archives/20/08/Stories/Grad-student-novel.html\">Ceridwen Dovey</a> (South Africa) <a href=\"http://www.penguinbooks.co.za/book_info.php?p%5BIGcat_book_items%5D%5BIGuid%5D=157619\"><em><strong>Blood Kin</strong></em></a> Penguin Books SA<br>\"A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a bloody coup to overthrow their boss, the President...\"<br><br><a href=\"http://www.dayoforster.co.uk/author.html\">Dayo Forster</a> (Gambia) <a href=\"http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=65&pid=618477&er=9781416527640\"><em><strong>Reading the Ceiling</strong></em></a> Simon and Schuster<br>\"Three men. Three paths. One will send Ayodele to Europe, to University and to a very different life -- but it will be a voyage strewn with heartache. Another will send her around the globe on an epic journey, transforming her beyond recognition but at the cost of an almost unbearable loss. And another will see her remain in Africa, a wife and mother caught in a polygamous marriage. Each will change her irrevocably: but which will she choose?\"<br><br><a href=\"http://www.kenkamoche.com/\">Ken Kamoche</a> (Kenya)<em><strong> <a href=\"http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844713202.htm\">A Fragile Hope</a></strong></em> Salt Publishing<br>\"These are poignant stories of love, betrayal, dreams and tribulation, corruption and redemption. Whether we’re reading about the Hong Kong girl who reconciles with her estranged father following a chance encounter with an African musician, or the hangman whose life is torn apart by demons from the past, these stories take the reader on a journey that is as emotional as it is culturally rich.\"<br><br><a href=\"http://www.nb.co.za/listing/lee/2805/\">Sumayya Lee</a> (South Africa) <a href=\"http://www.nb.co.za/product/story-of-maha--the/2806/\"><strong><em>The Story of Maha</em></strong></a> Kwela Books<br>\"The child of a forbidden marriage, Maha grows up happily with her parents in Cape Town. But her world changes forever when her parents are killed at a political rally, and at the age of eight, Maha is reclaimed by her loving but staid Indian grandparents and taken to live in Durban.\"<br><br><a href=\"http://www.umuzi-randomhouse.co.za/cvandermerwe.html\">Carel van der Merwe</a> (South Africa) <a href=\"http://www.umuzi-randomhouse.co.za/noman.html\"><em><strong>No Man's Land</strong></em></a> Umuzi<br>\"36-year-old Paul du Toit, a covert army operative in the twilight years of white-ruled South Africa, believes he has buried his violent past, until events force him to apply for amnesty from the TRC for the deaths of two anti-apartheid activists.\"<br><br>As always, descriptions taken from pubishers' websites. If you can't find these at your local independent bookshop, remember the <a href=\"http://www.africabookcentre.com/\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Africa Book Centre</span></a>, which ships worldwide.<br><br>Zakes Mda, of course, is the big heavy hitter who might be expected to win. But there are lots of fresh voices in this list, so the field is wide open at present. Back to my groaning TBR pile, and perhaps I will hazard a guess before the winners are announced in March.<br><br>The full shortlists, including other regions of the world, are available <a href=\"http://www.commonwealthfoundation.com/culturediversity/writersprize/2008/shortlists/\">here</a>."
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"content" : "<p>Company-wide memo from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang earlier today, capitalization <em>sic</em>, <a href=\"http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1011006/000095013408001763/f37757exv99w1.htm\">as filed with the SEC</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Subject: Building on our strengths</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Subject: Shitting our pants</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>first off, I want to thank you for the great job you’re doing\n staying focused on executing our priorities. there’s obviously been\n a lot of talk about yahoo! in recent days and we won’t let it\n distract us from pursuing our transformation strategy.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Thank you for not quitting last Friday.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>roy and I have communicated about the thorough review process our\n board is going through right now. the board is focused on maximizing\n the value of yahoo!’s tremendous assets for our shareholders. and it\n is going to take the time it needs to do it right.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>We very much want to say “no” but can’t figure out how without triggering a shareholder revolt.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>as we’ve said, no decisions have been made about microsoft’s\n proposal. our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of\n potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving\n landscape. and we’ve hired top advisors to assist through the\n process.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Does anyone have any wealthy relatives with 40 or 50 billion dollars to invest?</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>what’s become clear in the past few days is how much people care\n about this company. we’ve seen a strong show of support from our\n users, advertisers, and publishers, reminding us how much they love\n our products and services. and i’ve heard from many of you — and\n from other friends and colleagues from around silicon valley and\n across the globe — that we need to do what’s best for yahoo! and our\n shareholders. i promise you that the board is going to do that.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Everyone seems to agree that Microsoft would fuck Yahoo up but good.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>the microsoft interest highlights the tremendous strength of the\n yahoo! brand and assets: our half billion users around the world,\n our leading products and services, our open ad network, our\n technology, and most of all, our amazingly talented people.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yahoo’s stock was clearly undervalued by the market, which means those bastards in Redmond are getting a good deal and there’s nothing we can do about it.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>we have a lot to be excited about and there’s more good news to\n come.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Where by “more” I mean “some”.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>yesterday we announced a digital music partnership with\n rhapsody and our acquisition of foxytunes, maker of the popular\n music toolbar plugin.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>We are completely irrelevant in digital music.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>today we launched zimbra 5.0, a next\n generation e-mail and collaboration suite that’s a great milestone\n in our open platform and starting point strategies.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Zimbra will be the first product taken out back to be shot in the head once the Microsoft takeover goes through.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>as we look to build on the progress we’ve been making, i want to\n make sure you all realize how essential you are to yahoo!’s success.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Please don’t quit.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>as this process moves forward, we’re going to keep you informed.\n your hard work and strong commitment are more important now than\n ever before.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Welcome to Microsoft.</p>"
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"content" : "<p>Today I have got a few tracks from one of my favorite recordings in our collection for you. The tape (reel) in question was sent to the Voice of America by the US embassy in Brazzaville back in October of 1961. A memo accompanying the tapes (the Bantous reel was accompanied by an Orchestre Novelty reel) explains that these recordings were 'graciously provided' to the Voice of America by 'the Director of Radio Congo, Brazzaville'.</p><p><img height=\"415\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/pd_africanblog_orchestreban.jpg\"><br><br>I have always found Congolese recordings from the late 1950s and early 1960s frustrating. I have listened to lots of the earliest recordings of the African Jazz, the Bantous, the O.K. Jazz, and the Rock-A-Mambos and, while I love much of the singing, the ensemble playing and the compositions, I've often thought that these recordings sounded somewhat inhibited. Maybe it was the time limits imposed by the 78 rpm and 45 rpm-single format, or maybe the awkwardness of playing in a recording studio. When listening to these old recordings I have often wondered what the groups would have sounded like live... playing through the night in one of Kinshasa's (which was Leopoldville at the time) or Brazzaville's open-air dance halls. I have always wished I could have heard these great groups of the early 1960s stretch out their legs and take a few extra laps. <br><br>The tracks I want to share with you today maybe the closest I am ever going to get to being transported back in time to one of Brazzaville's bar-dancing, circa 1961. Unfortunately, our Bantous reel did not come with track or personnel listings, and I haven't yet been able to identify all the tracks or the exact lineup of the musicians featured on the recordings. The group probably was the lineup that included singer Edo Ganga, bassist, Daniel Lubelo aka \"De la Lune\", Nino Malapet on tenor Sax, Nedule Papa Noel playing the guitar and the clarinet and alto sax of the bandleader Jean Serge Essous. This first track is a nice mid-tempo rumba.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/bantousmamatitina.mp3\"><img height=\"9\" alt=\"\" width=\"12\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Orchestre Bantous de la Capitale "Mama Titina(?)"<br></a><br><br><br>Of all the great Congolese guitar players of the 1960s I have long found Papa Noel one of the more elusive. If you listen to O.K. jazz recordings of the early 1960s you can already hear Franco's personality coming through in his guitar playing, the same goes for Dr. Nico. Papa Noel, on the other hand, always seemed to get swallowed up by the Orchestre Bantous horn section. In this next track, however, he jumps to the front and drags the rest of the group behind him!! Also check out Jean Serge Essous's clarinet playing.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/bantousjesuisunquelqu_un.mp3\"><img height=\"9\" alt=\"\" width=\"12\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Orchestre Bantous de la Capitale "Je Suis un Quelqu'un (?)"</a><br><br><br>Like most musicians, Congolese modern musicians have been, and still are, musical omnivores. Over the course of the last seventy years they have digested many different genres; from the Cuban Son, Martiniquian Biguine and Polka Pique, to French Ye-Ye, North American Soul and Funk, through Psychedelic Rock and most recently Rap. Each of these styles has been incorporated, at various times, into modern Congolese music. There have been many questions, however, about if and/or how much influence Jazz had on the Congolese musicians of the 1960s. Were the names of the groups African Jazz, Ry-Co Jazz or O.K. Jazz intended as tributes to Duke Ellington? Did they indicate a passion for Louis Armstrong? Or, as many have reasonably argued, was Jazz simply a word that the Congolese at the time associated with 'modernity'? All of the commercial recordings of the early 1960s seem so well arranged, so scripted that it is hard to see any evidence of a jazz influence. On the other the hand, Orchestre Bantous of Brazzaville were big enough jazz fans to have worked up this arrangement of Thelonius Monk' s composition 'In Walked Bud'.</p><p><a href=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Media/inwalkedbud.mp3\"><img height=\"9\" width=\"12\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://author.voanews.com/english/africa/blog/images/Image/audio_icon.gif\"> Orchestre Bantous de la Capitale "In Walked Bud"</a></p><p>If you enjoyed these... sometime in the future I'll post some of the tracks from the Orchestre Novelty reel. </p>"
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"title" : "Manufacturing content",
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"content" : "<p> </p>\n<p><strong>Architectures of control.</strong></p>\n<p>Google mission statement: \"<span>to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful</span>\"</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html\">Knol:</a> \"encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.\"</p>\n<p>The most revealing observation on Knol so far is from <a href=\"http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html\">Google's official weblog</a>:</p>\n<p>\"But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable.\"</p>\n<p>Knol is a case of not so much of changing the Google mission, but the battlefield. Google now realise it's easier to organise well marked up content and have figured out a way to deal with what is known as <a href=\"http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm\">metacrap</a> by centralising where content is manufactured.</p>\n<p>This is an interesting shift in the way nofollow was interesting shift a few years ago. Before nofollow, <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2005/01/we_the_observers.html\">Google felt an entirely statistical approach was sufficient</a> - the idea of marking up a comment to deal with link spam and agressive\nSEO techniques to help Google technology not be gamed represented a\nsignficant change in technical doctrine.</p>\n<p>The vision of being able to pick out authors and other content metadata is akin to the semantic web or metacrap, depending on your point of view. When I reviewed the dev track papers for the W3C's WWW2007 conference, there were a lot of submissions around extending things like wikis with strutured metadata, so it seems this is an area of applied research that Google has bought into. On the face of things Knol also has social graph like qualities to it due to the focus on authors. However what will make Knol viable is centralisation of metadata and content, and that's the most distracting aspect.</p>\n<p>Becoming a platform for web authoring has entirely different implications than being an indexing service for externally authored content. You might call it a vertically integrated strategy. <a href=\"http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/12/dominating_the.php\">Nick Carr has commented</a>, but his angle is as ever is about economics and IT utlisation The person whose opinion I'd really like to hear is <a href=\"http://www.lessig.org/blog/\">Lawrence Lessig</a>.</p>\n<p><strong>Manufacturing content.</strong></p>\n<p><img src=\"http://americanhistory.si.edu/powering/images/69231.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"pearl street station\" width=\"545\" height=\"573\"></p>\n<p>My first degree was industrial design. In that degree you studied the history of industrialisation, back as far as Wedgewood right up to Japanese mass-customisation with occassional segues into things like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System\">TPS</a>, Italian design culture, and Kanban. You learned interesting things like how the shape of a car derives from a horse drawn carriage, that you can use terracotta and water to refrigerate, <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2006/01/the_draw_boy.html\">that computers and cloth making have a common history</a>, that there is pasta designed to have an optimal surface for sauce, or that the one-piece flossbox represented a major breakthrough in packaging design. You also learned less obvious things like how big electrical companies actively encouraged first the creation of things like irons, kettles and vacuum cleaners to drive electricity consumption, and then their use throughout the day to even out that consumption at powerstations. Right up to my twenties it was a standing joke in Ireland that the the first ad during the Late Late Show caused a massive draw on the nation's electrical grid, because everyone turned their kettles on to make a cup of tea. Basically you learned that <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media\">the way you live your life</a> in what used to be called \"the West\" is in part to help make utilities scale to be an efficient proposition globally. Knol is a bit like that for utility computing and associated services like search and storage, except we're writing articles instead of ironing shirts.</p>\n<p> </p>\n<p><strong>Studied Inefficiency.</strong></p>\n<p><img src=\"http://bapoumba.free.fr/wordpress/wp-content/screenshot_lp.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"launchpad\" width=\"329\" height=\"422\"></p>\n<p>A while back I was talking to a colleague about software issue tracking an whether it should be folded in with support desk software. My opinion was that the software issue tracker should be physically separate from front line, as far as requiring a person to rewrite the ticket and for those tasked to have to follow the duplicated information. The counter-argument was that this was inefficient and error-prone. But I stell felt that introducing an "inefficiency" at that point is no such thing - instead it's introducing judgement - it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated. In other words introducing a deliberate inefficiency in a process can be useful*. Granted, it's a hard sell in a world when efficiency and optimisation and zero slack are considered to have their own value. The question remains as to whose problem Knol optimisation is solving, Google's or the readers'.</p>\n<p><strong>Tilting.</strong></p>\n<p><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/138732978_da837a6b0a.jpg?v=0\" border=\"0\" alt=\"morpheus\" width=\"270\" height=\"169\"></p>\n<p>Recently <a href=\"http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/12/12/XBRL-Web\">Tim Bray described centralisation as a \"bug\"</a>. Except it's not - centralisation is an optimisation, and when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else. Knol seems like such an optimisation, tho' it's not clear yet to me what the expense might be socially. It does seem thought that having your own datacenter and big databases is increasingly like having your own <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermill\">watermill</a> in a world of <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/news/276/On-the-importance-of-being-megadata\">powerstations and batteries</a>.</p>\n<p> </p>\n<p>* update: happy coincidence; I've just seen that <a href=\"http://www.danah.org/\">Danah Boyd</a> has <a href=\"http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/14/valuing_ineffic.html\">a nice post on inefficiency</a>, well worth a read.</p>"
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"title" : "A Sanitized AFRICOM Story",
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"content" : "<div><p>by <strong>b real</strong><br><small>(lifted from a <a href=\"http://www.moonofalabama.org/2007/11/ot-07-76.html#c89034492\">comment</a>)</small></p>\n\n<p>There was a widly circulated November 5th Associated Press story on skepticism and distrust greeting AFRICOM: </p><blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/05/africa/AF-GEN-Americas-Africa-Command.php\" rel=\"nofollow\">Skepticism, distrust greet America's new military command in Africa</a>. </p></blockquote>\n\n<p>The story was heavily reissued again this afternoon under the headline: </p><blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/06/AR2007110601210_pf.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">Skepticism Greets New US Africa Command</a>. </p></blockquote>\n\n<p>The word "distrust" was dropped and the command is no longer "military". There are other subtle but interesting changes, the most significant of which I've noted below. </p>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Africans are concerned the new command <em>is an American attempt to project military might, unnecessarily bringing</em> the global war on <em>terror to their own backyard</em>.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><em>They also</em> wonder <em>whether</em> it is <em>a ruse</em> to\nprotect America's competitive stake in African oil and other resources\nincreasingly sought by rising powers like China and India.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p><em>Some</em> Africans are concerned the new command <em>could draw</em> the <em>continent deeper into the</em> global war on <em>terrorist groups</em>.\n\n</p>\n\n<p><em>Others</em> wonder <em>if</em> it is <em>meant</em> to protect\nAmerica's competitive stake in African oil and other resources\nincreasingly sought by rising powers like China and India.</p></blockquote>\n\n<center>---</center><p>\n\n.. more below the fold ..</p><p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Instead, it aims to help Africans <em>"help themselves"</em> through military training <em>programs</em> and support for peacekeeping and <em>humanitarian</em> operations crucial to stability and preventing conflict...</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Its aim is to help Africans <em>with</em> military training and support peacekeeping and <em>aid</em> operations crucial to stability and the prevention of conflict...</p></blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Interesting that they drop the 'helping africans help themselves' slogan. To quote chomsky, from <em>what we say goes</em> [p. 124]<br>\n</p><blockquote><p>When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have\nto have a reason. You can't just say, "I'm a son of a bitch and I want\nto rob them." You have to say it's for their good, they deserve it, or\nthey actually benefit from it. We're helping them.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Regional powers including Libya, Nigeria and South\nAfrica have expressed deep reservations, partly because they believe\nAfricom could undermine their <em>authority</em>, analysts said. So far, only Liberia has publicly stated <em>it would</em> host Africom, though even critics like Nigeria welcome the continuation of the American military training programs <em>they say have been beneficial</em>.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Regional powers including Libya, Nigeria and South\nAfrica have expressed deep reservations, partly because they believe\nAfricom could undermine their <em>influence</em>, analysts said. So far, only Liberia has publicly stated <em>a willingness to</em> host Africom, though even critics like Nigeria welcome the continuation of the U.S. training programs.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>A big difference between "authority" -- as in sovereignty -- as\nopposed to "influence" and dropping the qualifier on Nigeria's interest\nin military programs is a bit misleading.</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>"Africom is being pitched as a kind of non-kinetic military command," Shillinger said, "and that seems to be an oxymoron."</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>[excised]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>AFRICOM --> moron -- obviously someone was offended.</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Other analysts said there has been criticism within the U.S. government itself, notably from State Department officials <em>concerned the authority of diplomats could be confused or usurped</em>.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Analysts said there has been criticism of the command\nwithin the U.S. government itself, notably from State Department\nofficials.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Remove context for criticism; easier to pretend it doesn't exist ...</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Africom, he said, would "not be taking the lead" in <em>humanitarian</em> operations or U.S. foreign policy. <em>Rather, it would support them by making available a massive military infrastructure that could help both.</em></p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>It will "not be taking the lead" in <em>aid</em> operations or U.S. policy, he said.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>After all, whoever thought of soldiers in a <strong>combatant command</strong> as "humanitarians"? And there goes the reference to military infrastructure, when it implies dependencies.</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Since 2002, about 1,800 American <em>troops</em> have been stationed in Djibouti...</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Since 2002, about 1,800 American <em>military personnel</em> have been stationed in Djibouti</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Some "military personnel" based on your continent is much more benign than "troops".</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>The U.S., he said, <em>would</em> work with "African partners to make sure the resources that emanate from the continent are available to the global community."</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>The U.S. <em>wants to</em> work with "African partners to\nmake sure the resources that emanate from the continent are available\nto the global community," he said.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>A change from authoritative stance toward one of influence.</p>\n\n<center>---</center>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 5th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>An internal conflict in Nigeria has sporadically\ndisrupted the local flow of oil there, and offshore platforms\nthroughout the region are little-protected <em>and highly vulnerable</em> because most countries have only tiny navies.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Nov 6th version</strong><br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Internal conflict in Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil\nproducer, has sporadically disrupted the flow of its crude, and\noffshore platforms along the western coast are little-protected because\nmost countries have only small navies.</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>It wasn't a good idea to make fun of the size of anothers navy and\ncall them "highly vulnerable" when you're trying to appear "helpful"\nrather than conquering.</p>\n\n<p>This is an interesting rewrite and republishing effort. </p>\n\n<p>Does this happen often or did someone <del>command</del> demand it?</p></div>"
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"title" : "Shipping containers as housing",
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"content" : "<img src=\"http://craphound.com/images/shippingocntaonerhjouseing.jpg\"><br>\n\nA discussion thread on using shipping containers as housing on Making Light turned up a fantastic wealth of material on the subject (it turns out that the world's imbalance of trade with China means that most ports have mountains of abandoned containers originating in China that no one wants to ship back there). Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who doubles as Boing Boing's comment-moderator) did a round-up post organzing dozens of links thematically. Clicktrance ahoy!\n\n<a href=\"http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009454.html#009454\">Link</a>\n<p>\n(<i>Photo credit: <a href=\"http://www.nghm.nl\">Naomi Schiphorst's</a> photo of student housing made from shipping containers in Amsterdam, found on <a href=\"http://www.mimoa.nl/projects/Netherlands/Amsterdam/Studenthousing%20Oslofjordweg\">Mimoa</a></i>)\n \n \n \n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=Jx0AQ6\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?i=Jx0AQ6\" border=\"0\"></a></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~4/169348802\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"></p>"
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"title" : "Dictator chic",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaOKptXRI/AAAAAAAAApQ/vXNPwnEcP5E/s1600-h/ATT21343.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaOKptXRI/AAAAAAAAApQ/vXNPwnEcP5E/s400/ATT21343.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>These are images [allegedly] of a former Nigerian dictator. Guess who? Answers on a postcard (or in the comments section) please. The winner gets a free polystyrene chandelier.<br><br>It doesn't matter whether they really are pictures of a former Nigerian dictator's home or not. Fact is, we can <span style=\"font-style:italic\">imagine </span>it to be the case. We can imagine that the resources that were diverted from elsewhere (to build hospitals, to pay teachers, to buy books, to pay the police...) ended up paying for this rococco chintz.<br><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaJKptXQI/AAAAAAAAApI/c1v0w6tElX4/s1600-h/ATT21342.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaJKptXQI/AAAAAAAAApI/c1v0w6tElX4/s400/ATT21342.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>We gawp at the Ovation-to-the-power of Ovation tackiness and we think: yes, someone could have stolen that much, and used it, that badly, with no consciousness of what they have done.. As our eyes cast across these symbols of tasteless opulence, we can almost hear the swish of the yards of agbada fabric of the courtiers and sycophants as they whisper in the marble anterooms of the ex-tyrant, watching out for the ghost of an echo of a power that was.<br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaFKptXPI/AAAAAAAAApA/n2Bsjx9bNUM/s1600-h/ATT21341.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaFKptXPI/AAAAAAAAApA/n2Bsjx9bNUM/s400/ATT21341.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaA6ptXOI/AAAAAAAAAo4/fC7q_wBRgFQ/s1600-h/ATT21340.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlaA6ptXOI/AAAAAAAAAo4/fC7q_wBRgFQ/s400/ATT21340.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZ9KptXNI/AAAAAAAAAow/65kFzRKgJxI/s1600-h/ATT21339.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZ9KptXNI/AAAAAAAAAow/65kFzRKgJxI/s400/ATT21339.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZ4KptXMI/AAAAAAAAAoo/DNHjd3gzI3c/s1600-h/ATT21338.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZ4KptXMI/AAAAAAAAAoo/DNHjd3gzI3c/s400/ATT21338.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZzqptXLI/AAAAAAAAAog/VduZ4xbT3Yc/s1600-h/ATT21336.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZzqptXLI/AAAAAAAAAog/VduZ4xbT3Yc/s400/ATT21336.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZvaptXKI/AAAAAAAAAoY/5oM1xSx1hZ8/s1600-h/ATT21335.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZvaptXKI/AAAAAAAAAoY/5oM1xSx1hZ8/s400/ATT21335.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZrqptXJI/AAAAAAAAAoQ/whf8aQkAOoY/s1600-h/ATT21334.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZrqptXJI/AAAAAAAAAoQ/whf8aQkAOoY/s400/ATT21334.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZnKptXII/AAAAAAAAAoI/I5f2dmUBpeQ/s1600-h/ATT21333.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZnKptXII/AAAAAAAAAoI/I5f2dmUBpeQ/s400/ATT21333.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZjqptXHI/AAAAAAAAAoA/CX-QKVRsHsw/s1600-h/ATT21332.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZjqptXHI/AAAAAAAAAoA/CX-QKVRsHsw/s400/ATT21332.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZgKptXGI/AAAAAAAAAn4/px5UEJKR6DA/s1600-h/ATT21331.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZgKptXGI/AAAAAAAAAn4/px5UEJKR6DA/s400/ATT21331.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZa6ptXFI/AAAAAAAAAnw/UmT4TMpd97o/s1600-h/ATT21330.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZa6ptXFI/AAAAAAAAAnw/UmT4TMpd97o/s400/ATT21330.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZVqptXEI/AAAAAAAAAno/s5_V9TYcHpw/s1600-h/ATT21329.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_KOq6AlodkJI/RwlZVqptXEI/AAAAAAAAAno/s5_V9TYcHpw/s400/ATT21329.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>"
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"title" : "Yours, Very Sincerely Indeed",
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"content" : "I recently read about a Zimbabwean refugee who was sent a letter by the Home Office, which stated that his presence in the UK was <a href=\"http://society.guardian.co.uk/offdiary/0,,1099133,00.html\">\"not essential for him to enjoy family ties with his new partner and her family\"</a>. The letter went on to demand that he leave \"without delay\" and that this might be \"enforced\". Well, it wouldn't; the courts having ruled that Zimbabwe is too dangerous to send people back to, their hands are tied.<br><br>Somehow, though, the government continues to contend that although the legal test of refugee status is \"a well-founded fear of persecution\", the fact that asylum-seekers cannot be returned to Zimbabwe for fear they might die does not imply that their fear of this fate is well-founded. This pernicious fuckery just keeps going; it is one of the most repellent features of the post-Michael Howard Home Office that it has so little respect for legality. An unfavourable judgment is not a fact that should alter behaviour, but an unreasonable caprice to be reversed by superior power as soon as possible.<br><br>Therefore, it is still worth menacing \"Thomas\" in the hope he might bugger off; and if he was to do so, and later die in some unpleasantly public fashion in Zimbabwe, the government would bear no responsibility for it. (Even if they paid for his ticket.)<br><br>But what was the official who signed this document <em>thinking</em> when they signed their name to the statement that his presence was \"not essential to enjoy family ties with his new partner and her children\"? What on earth does this <em>mean</em>? Are we to believe that he could pop around at the weekend? Perhaps videoconferencing might be a solution, if he can find a computer and an operational Internet connection whilst keeping away from the Central Intelligence Organisation and not starving to death?<br><br>Clearly, this sentence should read something along the lines of \"We are aware of your family, and we are indifferent to them,\" or perhaps just \"We don't care.\" But this would make it a far harder document to sign; it's traditional to cite Orwell's <em>Politics and the English Language</em> at this point. I prefer Vaclav Havel's parable about the baker, who every year put a sign in his window on Revolution Day that read: Workers of the world, unite! Havel asked if he was actually enthused at all about the idea of unity among the workers of the world - of course not. He did it because the Party wanted him to.<br><br>But, Havel wrote, had the Party demanded that he put the sign's actual meaning there - a sign that said <em>I am afraid, and therefore obedient</em> - he would have been far less indifferent to its content. If we were to rewrite the letter, we might frame it like this: <em><blockquote>Dear Sir, <br>We want you to go back to Zimbabwe because we think you are a liar. Unfortunately, the courts do not agree with us and will not permit us to force you, but this makes no difference to our opinion. We are aware of your family, but we do not care.<br><br>If I don't sign this they'll sack me.<br><br>Yours,<br><br>Civil Servant X.</blockquote></em> I agree that the tone is harsh, but it could hardly be more distressing for the recipient than the original. I'm not sure what the correct formula of politeness is. (<em>Yours faithfully</em>? Surely not. <em>With kind regards</em>? Nuh. <em>Yours sincerely</em>? That's more like it, I suppose - this version is nothing if not sincere.) But at least, it is clear to the writer what is meant; it would be considerably harder to sign this without examining your conscience, and you could not sign very many without altering your opinion of yourself.<br><br>That such a programme of ruthless honesty, and specifically honesty with self, would be a good first step is a cliché. But sometimes, I doubt it. Consider this <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1651173e-67e4-11dc-8906-0000779fd2ac.html\">column in the <em>FT</em></a>, by ex-<em>Sunday Torygraph</em> editor Sarah Sands. <em><blockquote>So, my Polish builder first worked on my house only a year ago. Seven days a week, 14 hours a day with his crack team. Barely spoke a word in English. Refused tea or coffee, just smoked and consumed Coca-Cola and chocolate biscuits. I was so swelled up with pride at my good fortune that, last December, I recommended him to a liberally inclined film director. I waited for grateful e-mails but none came. I grew a little uneasy.<br><br>Then a few months ago, I commissioned my Pole to do a bathroom. He returned without his team. Where were they? He was a little vague; they had disbanded/gone back to Poland/were busy elsewhere, but I should not worry about that.<br><br>I didn’t, until it became clear that he was arriving at 10 and knocking off at five. The driven gang was gone. Now he had a baby-faced apprentice who spilt his fizzy drinks on the carpets and broke the window. Every couple of hours they would down amateurish tools for a break. Finally my tight-lipped resentment spilt over.<br><br>“What on earth has happened to you?” I cried. “Why don’t you work any more?” </blockquote></em> Well, you cannot accuse her of not being conscious of the literal meaning of her words. You could accuse her of class prejudice, exploitation, snobbery, and just being fucking gratuitiously unpleasant <em>because she can</em>, like a dog licking his balls. But you cannot imagine that she was not fully aware of her own meaning, and so, responsible for it.<br><br>It's also hypocritical; by her own lights, why didn't she put in more time at the <em>Torygraph</em>? Maybe she would still be there - and then, I could more thoroughly avoid the risk of reading her thoughts. Anyway, if you doubt that this little tale is serious, <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2174680,00.html\">you might read this, published the same day</a>. <em><blockquote>Listening to all these experiences, it was as if all the Factory Acts and health and safety regulations had suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke, along with 150 years of trade union gains. None of this protection existed in the minds of these workers. The government will point to an avalanche of legislation, but the devil is in the detail.</blockquote></em> I refer the honourable gentleman to <a href=\"http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2007/03/you-didnt-stand-by-me-no-not-at-all.html\">this post</a>, <a href=\"http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/01/gangmasters-etc.html\">this one</a>, and <a href=\"http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2004/07/that-migrant-flood-crime-and.html\">this one</a>."
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"title" : "Willo’s Laws",
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"content" : "<p>These sardonic laws do not appear to be widely available; so as a public service I’m posting them:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Communication usually fails; it succeeds only by chance.</li>\n</ol>\n<ol>\n<li>If there is any way a communication can fail, it will.</li>\n<li>If there appears to be no way a communication can fail, be sure it still will.</li>\n<li>If communcication seems to have been successfully achieved, it must have happened in a way that was unintentional.</li>\n<li>When you are certain your communication is bound to succeed, it is bound to fail.</li>\n</ol>\n<li>If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just the way that does the most harm.</li>\n<li>Somebody else always knows what you actually meant to communicate, better than you do.</li>\n<li>The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.</li>\n<ol>\n<li>The more communication there is , the more misunderstanding will occur.</li>\n</ol>\n<li>In mass communication, appearances are more important than the reality of how things actually are.</li>\n<li>The importance of a particular topic or issue depends on how closely it affects the life of the sender. it is inversely related to the square of the distance.</li>\n<p>Willo was, I assume, a friend of Mr. Murphy. See also, for example, <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?q=%22communication%20usually%20fails%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&esrch=BetaShortcuts&rls=%7Bmoz:distributionID%7D:%7Bmoz:locale%7D:%7Bmoz:official%7D&um=1&sa=N&tab=wp\">Google Books </a>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Idea Festival: Dollar bills and epidemeology",
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"content" : "<p>I’m here at the <a href=\"http://ideafestival.com\">Idea Festival</a> in Louisville, Kentucky for the next couple of days. Idea Festival was good enough to invite me to speak last year, and invited me back this year to give a talk alongside my Global Voices colleagues, Amira Al Hussaini and Georgia Popplewell. In the meantime, I’m hanging out with Idea Festival blogger <a href=\"http://ideafestival.typepad.com/my_weblog/\">Wayne Hall</a> and blogging as much of the conference as I can.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.chaos.gwdg.de/staff/Brockmann.html\">Dirk Brockmann</a> is a physicist at the Department of Non-Linear Dynamics (or maybe the Dynamics and Self Organization… or maybe the Institute for Fluid Dynamics) at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. No one is doing fluid dynamics at Max Planck anymore, but the basic philosophy of the institute is the same - take the methods of theoretical physics and apply them to a very different field. In Brockmann’s case, this means looking at currency circulation as a proxy for human travel, which ends up being a way to study epidemeology. </p>\n<p>The data Brockmann uses is from <a href=\"http://www.wheresgeorge.com/\">WhereIsGeorge.com</a>, a long-running web experiment that tracks currency. Studying this data statistically gives insight into ways that people travel around the world, which is critical to understand in figuring out how SARS and other diseases spread around the world. </p>\n<p>When you think of space, time and disease, Brockmann begins, the first disease most people study is the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century. It started in southern Europe, spread in waves, at a speed of a few kilometers a day, eventually wiping out a quarter of the European population. Waves are familiar to physicists - perhaps the wave equations we understand from light can help us understand this spread? Unfortunately, other diseases - the spread of measles in the UK, for instance - are much more complicated. Complex phenomena are usually the product of multiple forces. To study them, you can build complex models that incorporate the key causes… but these generally fall short, and don’t fully model the systems under consideration.</p>\n<p>One technique for building better models is to look at different examples and look for common features - Brockmann shows us a chart of pandemics over the past millenia. For the past few centuries, the major pandemics are influenza pandemics. He invites us to look at H5N1 - bird flu - because it’s so scary: while the disease doesn’t currently affect humans, if it crossed over from an avian population, it would be devestating. HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are two other pandemics we should be worried about, but tend to ignore because TB, in particular, strikes primarily in developing nations. SARS killed as many people as HIV/AIDS and TB kill every two hours, despite the fact that media attention focused so heavily on SARS.</p>\n<p>Estimates for the impact of a pandemic like bird flu were between 2 million and over a hundred million - that’s two orders of magnitude, which implies that a) the press does a lousy job of reporting science numbers and b) there’s great uncertainty about what a real-world pandemic would look like. Brockmann shows us what a disease looks like in a small population - a school or a town - they reach a peak quickly, then drop down gradually. There’s a model - <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIR_Model\">SIR dynamics</a> - in which patients are susceptible, infected then recovered - which goes a long way towards predicting epidemic spread in an isolated group. Key factors in building these models are the mean transmission rate and the mean disease duration. If you take the product of these two, you get a single factor, the “basic reproductive rate”, that characterizes the spread of an epidemic quite neatly.</p>\n<p>While we can predict the spread of “compartmentalized” diseases quite neatly, it’s lots harder to predict the transmission of bird flu, because transmission of disease is directly related to our transportation networks. If you want to understand how to build a better model, you have to understand how we travel in space and time. Brockmann shows us a 3D model of air traffic networks, showing links between nodes and the volume of travel. This travel, of course, is very different from travel in the 14th century - we can cross the world in a day, and this means that disease dynamic can be very, very different. While Black Death moved at a couple of kilometers a day, SARS crossed the Pacific Ocean within a few days.</p>\n<p>To model SARS, Brockmann began by combining a local disease model with a global travel system model - the results predicted were quite close to what actually happened in the spread of SARS. This is a pretty good indicator that following travel is a great clue to understanding disease spread. But air travel is only one factor - people travel through lots of other methods, including cars, trains, buses, on “all length scales”.</p>\n<p>Once Brockmann realized that an accurate disease model would require a much more robust travel model, he found himself somewhat depressed. He mentioned the problem to his friend, cabinetmaker <a href=\"http://www.dennisderryberry.com/\">Dennis Derryberry</a>, who suggested WhereIsGeorge, which allows people to track the movement of dollar bills, as a possible proxy for actual US travel. Because the WIG data set is so large, it’s possible to do a great deal of statistical extrapolation from it.</p>\n<p>A quick check of report density on WIG to population density shows a pretty clear correlation - people seem to participate in the game from all over the country. Marked bills seem to get injected into the system from all over the US as well. After bills are injected, most are next sighted near their injection point… but a small set are discovered a long way from home, which is consistent with the nature of long-distance travel. The distribution follows an inverse power law - which is a mathematical distribution that physicists know well. Power law distributions are characteristic of data sets that are “scale-free”. To explain “scale-free”, Brockmann suggests we all guess the mean height of an adult human being - our estimates will tend to cluster pretty tightly, probably in a bell curve distribution, because there are no humans one inch tall, and none a mile tall. But if we estimate mean human income, we’ll be all over the map, because there are no scale constraints for the equation.</p>\n<p>A dollar bill moving around the world is a “<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk\">random walk</a>” in mathematical terms. There’s a variety of mathematics that help us understand random walks and scale-free phenomena that might inform how we build models on the spacial spread of disease. </p>\n<p>Brockmann shows us a map of Kentucky, with each county represented as a node, and links that show the strength of the ties in the network - how much currency flows from one to another. We can compute the transportation network based on the currency flows in Kentucky, and in the US as a whole. Something that becomes immediately apparent is that the short-distance connections are more relavent than the small-distance ones, confirming the intuition that airtravel data alone is insufficient to build a model.</p>\n<p>Currently in vogue in network theory is identifying “communities” in complex networks. Using a moularity function, you can detect communities within the graph of a network, areas where connections to the community are strong and connections to other communities are weak. Doing this in the WIG/transportation network gives us information that can be quite counterintuitive. A map of Europe shows us one type of communities - nations. But those communities may not map neatly to realworld communities. The national boundaries have evolved over time, but they aren’t neccesarily the “effective communities” or Europe. The community analysis of a transport network shows us what the effective divisions might be - lots of people transit from New York to Los Angeles, so perhaps they are functionally the same community.</p>\n<p>Doing this analysis on the WIG data divides the US into ten segments. One covers almost all of Texas (except El Paso, which is part of a Southwest cluster); another covers all of New England and the Atlantic states, down to Virginia. They’re very different from the ways we’re used to breaking our nation into regions… but these are the communities that a mathematical analysis of data tells us are created by transportation and trade networks.</p>\n<p>The new, richer model built with the WIG data predicts the spread of a disease through the US in a very different fashion than a pure wavefront model, the sort of model we would use to model the Black Death. This model moves very quickly, and it’s fractiline - a disease spreads from one major city to another and then spreads from those urban centers into rural areas. </p>\n<p>The final message of Brockmann’s talk: the creator of Where Is George, who is in the audience for the talk, had no intention of creating a tool for scientific research. But it’s possible that this data may be a key set in predicting the spread of disease in the future.</p>"
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"title" : "MAFFICKING.",
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"content" : "<p>I used the verb <i>maffick</i> (OED: \"To celebrate uproariously, rejoice extravagantly\") last night, and my wife asked where it was from. I said \"That's one of my favorite etymologies,\" and when I told her she agreed it was pretty damn good. So I'm sharing it with you, in case you don't already know it.</p>\n\n<p>The <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War\">Boer War</a> ended with the absorption of the independent Boer republics into the British Empire, but it began with the British on the receiving end of a terrible shock: their invincible troops were unable to prevent the insurgent Boers from invading Cape Colony and Natal Colony in late 1899 and successfully besieging the towns of Mafeking (now <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafikeng\">Mafikeng</a>) and Kimberley. Food became very scarce, and attempted relief expeditions were wiped out in a series of terrible British defeats. It wasn't until May 17 of the following year that Mafeking (defended, incidentally, by troops under the command of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell—yes, the same Baden-Powell, pronounced BAY-d'n POE-'l, who later founded the Boy Scouts) was successfully relieved, and when the news reached London the next evening the city erupted in wild celebration which went on for days. The similarity in sound between the name of the town and an English present participle was irresistible, and soon the celebration was called "mafficking" (the first citation in the OED is from the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> of 21 May: \"We trust Cape Town.. will ‘maffick’ to-day, if we may coin a word, as we at home did on Friday and Saturday\"). The earlier edition of the OED said \"The words appear to be confined to journalistic use,\" but they've withdrawn that statement in the March 2000 draft revision of the entry, and with good reason: the word is so much fun that people have kept using it long after the siege has faded into the farther reaches of historical memory.</p>"
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"title" : "Remember 9/11",
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"content" : "<div><p>September 11 was a catastrophe. </p>\n\n<p>The event and its aftermath were heavily influenced by the shenanigans of Cheney, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bremer. The actions were based on bi-partisan support. They led to thousands and thousands of maimed people and many dead.\n</p>\n\n\n\n<p>History again demonstrated the urge of the U.S. to eliminate any government that doesn't support its model of greed. This again delivered hunger and poverty to a people that committed nothing but the heresy of independence.</p>\n\n<p>The target country had been isolated by sanctions for quite some time. The economy was in bad shape. Then tanks rolled through the streets and the presidential palace was bombed.\n</p>\n\n<p>\nAfter 'regime change' followed the implementation of the models of one of the <a href=\"http://www.zeitguy.com/wp-content/files/greider.htm\">most destructive economists</a>, Milton Friedman. </p>\n\n<p>The 'economic shock treatment', disguised as 'freedom', was aiming at privatizing the extraction of the countries resources for the benefit of U.S. companies. It destroyed the society's fabric.\n</p>\n\n<p>\nThe people protesting the machinations were exposed to state sponsered terrorism, imprisoned, tortured and executed.\n</p>\n\n<p>It took many, many years for Chile to overcome the disaster.\n</p>\n\n<p>\n9/11 was a very bad day in 1973. It was a bad day in 2001 too. Those two bad days were not unrelated.</p><p>\nFurther readings:</p>\n\n<p>\n<a href=\"http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4162\">Remembering Chile's 9/11</a><br>\n<a href=\"http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KOR309A.html\">The Chile Coup -- The U.S. Hand</a><br>\n<a href=\"http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Chile_KH.html\">Killing Hope - Chile 1964-1973</a><br>\n<a href=\"http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm\">Chile and the United States:\nDeclassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973</a>\n</p></div>"
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"title" : "Process Angioplasty - Passport Office",
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"content" : "<div><p>I am dying to get the new US passport. I drooled about it on my <a href=\"http://florence20.typepad.com/renaissance/2007/04/technology_inno.html\">New Florence</a> blog.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, I had also heard about passport delay horror stories as in the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-05-31-passport-woes_N.htm\">USA Today</a> article. But I am out of excuses - on my last few trips US and other immigration officers have started to give me hell. I have run out of pages for them to stamp my passport. While it's only 4 years old, the passport office tells me I qualify for a new one - the id page is a bit frayed so I can apply for a replacement passport. Then they tell me the likely turnaround time. Since my next international flight is within a month, I decide it is safer to just apply for new pages.</p>\n\n<p>And I am told, even then I should use a courier service. Costs $ 75. And pay the State Department a $ 60 expedite fee. And of course, fedex both ways - $ 50. </p>\n\n<p>$ 185 for what should be a free 24 page addition. And I am stuck with the frayed ID page, which I am sure I will get hell from airline and immigration employees for the next few years.</p>\n\n<p>Now that the State Department and the courier lobby has tasted\nthese "expedite" revenues, what are the chances of some serious process\nangioplasty to the application process? </p> </div>"
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"title" : "16 Core Observations of Social Design",
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"content" : "<p>Here’s a quick list of 16 observations about life that have serious effects on social design. Note that none of these are how people interact with interfaces, per se, but how we interact with other people. Interfaces are an intermediary, an arbiter of exchange between people on either end, and are therefore crucial to how we communicate. </p>\n<ol>\n<li>Humans are complex social animals.</li>\n<li>Technology doesn’t change us very fast.</li>\n<li>Humans constantly search out ways to communicate more efficiently.</li>\n<li>The primary use of the Internet is communication.</li>\n<li>People play different roles in different parts of their life.</li>\n<li>People tend to connect to those people they are similar to.</li>\n<li>Who we are similar to depends upon our situation and goals.</li>\n<li>Over-similarity can lead to group-think.</li>\n<li>Unpredictable behavior emerges within groups over time.</li>\n<li>People act differently in groups than they do individually.</li>\n<li>The people we know greatly influence how we act.</li>\n<li>People usually compare themselves to those in their social group, not society at large.</li>\n<li>Humans aren’t always rational, but are usually self-interested.</li>\n<li>When humans are uncertain, we rely on social connections to help us out.</li>\n<li>We have biases that we aren’t conscious of.</li>\n<li>Because life in not deterministic, we cannot always predict human behavior.</li>\n</ol>"
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"title" : "Ripped Asunder",
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"content" : "<p>India and Pakistan are now 60 years old, as is the bloody partition that created them. My father’s family was caught up in what became arguably the largest mass migration in history: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India#Independence_and_population_exchanges\">14.5 million people</a> were moved, roughly the same number in each direction, and somewhere <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6926464.stm\">between 500,000 and one million</a> of them died in the process. <a href=\"http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?pid=578966\"><img height=\"300\" hspace=\"20\" src=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/images/BC_1.jpg\" width=\"199\" align=\"right\" vspace=\"10\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n\n<blockquote>Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order [<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India#Independence_and_population_exchanges\">Link</a>]</blockquote>\n\n<p>The management of partition was badly botched; if you think <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Brown\">Brownie</a> did a heck of a job, Mounty makes him look like a paragon of engagement and sensitivity. <font style=\"background-color:#ffd2bd\">Mountbatten insisted that the partition line be drawn in only six weeks</font>! Think of how slowly the US government moves today, and that will give you a sense of how ridiculous and uncaring that deadline was. The line was drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe; this is what his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, had to say about the process:</p>\n\n<blockquote>“The viceroy, <font style=\"background-color:#ffd2bd\">Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres</font> in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes. “The handover of power was done too quickly…” \n<p></p>\n<p>… it was “irresponsible” of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline - despite his protests. [<a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6926464.stm\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><p>Mountbatten was a pretty boy from a royal family whose track record during WWII led him to be “known in the British Admiralty as the Master of Disaster.” [<a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra?printable=true\">Link</a>] His track record in India seems similar - he was charming and glib, but unconcerned about the feasibility of plans or the lives which would be lost. \n<p>As Viceroy of India, <font style=\"background-color:#ffd2bd\">he advanced the date of independence by nine months</font> (no reason was ever given), making the problems associated with partition worse. <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Mountbatten,_1st_Earl_Mountbatten_of_Burma#The_Last_Viceroy\">Critics argue</a> that he foresaw bloodshed and didn’t want it to happen on British watch; he was willing to make things worse as a form of CYA rather than take responsibility for the situation. \n<p></p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p>So how did the Last Viceroy spend the evening of August 14<span style=\"font-size:xx-small;vertical-align:super\">th</span>, having put calamity into motion? Was he apprehensive? Concerned about the lives he had condemned? Not at all: \n<blockquote>… on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette…” [<a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra?printable=true\">Link</a>]</blockquote>\n<p>In the end he was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Mountbatten,_1st_Earl_Mountbatten_of_Burma#Death\">killed by the IRA</a> rather than <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_Massacre#Assassination_of_Michael_O.27Dwyer\">O’Dwyered</a> by one of his victims from India. Mountbatten had a very difficult job to perform, but from what little I have read, he did not do it well. \n<p>Related links: <a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/13/070813crbo_books_mishra?printable=true\">Exit Wounds</a>, the New Yorker book review of <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Indian-Summer-Secret-History-Empire/dp/0805080732\">Indian Summer</a> by Pankaj Mishra </p>\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/4454\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "What's it about?",
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"content" : "<p>In recent technology trends, such as SOA, or EA, or \"Social Computing\", I often observe crusaders that want so badly to accomplish something useful under the umbrella of investment, hype, and energy surrounding their selected trend that they try very hard to make the idea as \"abstract as possible\". They do this so the trend doesn't melt away as soon as the underpinning technology proves itself fatally flawed. </p>\n\n<p>\"It's not about the technology\" is the byline of such approaches. </p>\n\n<p>Recently I read an entry by Andrew McAfee that <a href=\"http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/its_not_not_about_the_technology/\">crystalized</a> what has always annoyed me about this phrase over the years. </p>\n\n<p><i>\"Sometimes, at least in part, it is about the technology.\"</i><br>\n</p>"
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"title" : "L'Afrique de Nicolas Sarkozy, par Achille Mbembe",
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"content" : "Lors de sa récente visite de travail en Afrique sub-saharienne, le président de la République française, Nicolas Sarkozy, a prononcé à Dakar un discours adressé à « l'élite de la jeunesse africaine ». Ce discours a profondément choqué une grande partie de ceux à qui il était destiné, ainsi que les milieux professionnels et l'intelligentsia africaine francophone. Viendrait-il à être traduit en anglais qu'il ne manquerait pas de causer des controverses bien plus soutenues (...)\n\n-\n<a href=\"http://www.congopage.com/rubrique217.html\" rel=\"directory\">Le Blog d'Alain Mabanckou</a>"
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"title" : "The Grand Illusion",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/styx-tgi.jpg\" title=\"Styx The Grand Illusion\"><img src=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/styx-tgi.jpg\" title=\"Styx The Grand Illusion\" alt=\"Styx The Grand Illusion\" align=\"right\" width=\"200\"></a><em>So if you think your life is complete confusion<br>\nBecause your neighbors got it made<br>\nJust remember that it’s a Grand illusion<br>\nAnd deep inside we’re all the same.<br>\nWe’re all the same…</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/styx/the_grand_illusion.html\">The Grand Illusion</a> — Styx</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://youtube.com/watch?v=XuIY_-CAV9Y\">Link to Music Video</a></p>\n<p>I find pretense very distasteful. There is a large subculture in Southern California that expends a great deal of money and energy trying to make other people think they are happy and successful. It is an illusion they cultivate within themselves.</p>\n<p>Status is an internal perception about what people believe other people think about them. It has nothing to do with what other people actually do think about them (as if that mattered anyway).</p>\n<p>For instance, I think the women on the <a href=\"http://www.bravotv.com/Real_Housewives_2\">Real Housewives of Orange County</a> are soulless, gold-digging <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slag_(slang)\">slags</a>. My derision is only eclipsed by my disrespect for the way they live, what they believe, and what they represent. However, they think I, and everyone else who knows them through the show, believes they are something special, something to envy as if they really have it “going on.” They have status. Not because people regard them highly, but because they <em>think </em>people do. But I digress…</p>\n<p>For people who don’t have the internal strength to base their self worth on what they believe about themselves, they end up basing their self worth on their perceptions of what other people think about them. Once they have given their power away to others in this manner, people will expend tremendous amounts of time, energy and money in a vain attempt to influence other people — hence we have fancy cars, opulent houses, designer clothing, and all the other trappings of conspicuous consumption. In my opinion, this is a sickness (their mind control fails on me.) It is a consuming disease which fed on the borrowed money made available during the housing/credit bubble.<br>\n.<br>\n<br>\n.</p>\n<p>Southern California’s prosperity over the last 7 years has been The Grand Illusion. Our entire economy has been built on borrowed money; our collective self worth has been built on borrowed money. As the credit crunch takes hold and our economy contracts, it will not just be difficult on people financially, it will also be difficult on them emotionally because many people will be forced to abandon their illusions of wealth, prosperity and happiness. One day with their vanity stripped from them, some of the most pretentious will look in the mirror and see how pathetic and insecure they really are.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/14222-matisse-front.jpg\" title=\"14222 Matisse\"><img src=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/14222-matisse-front.jpg\" alt=\"14222 Matisse\"></a></p>\n<p><strong>Asking Price: </strong> $624,900<a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/irvine-renter.jpg\" title=\"IrvineRenter\"><img src=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/irvine-renter.jpg\" alt=\"IrvineRenter\" align=\"right\"></a></p>\n<p><strong>Purchase Price: </strong> $572,040</p>\n<p><strong>Purchase Date: </strong>5/29/2007</p>\n<p><strong>Address: </strong><a href=\"http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/printable-listing?listing-id=1015109&rc=blg_irvine&utm_source=irvinehousingblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_nooverride=1\">14222 Matisse Avenue, Irvine, CA 92606</a></p>\n<p>Sales History<br>\nDate Price<br>\n05/29/2007 $572,040<br>\n03/11/2004 $535,000<a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/henri-matisse-interior-with-eggplants-25543.jpg\" title=\"Matisse 1\"><img src=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/henri-matisse-interior-with-eggplants-25543.jpg\" title=\"Matisse 1\" alt=\"Matisse 1\" align=\"right\" width=\"300\"></a><br>\n04/18/2003 $410,500<br>\n06/07/1990 $231,000</p>\n<p>Beds: 3<br>\nBaths: 2<br>\nSq. Ft.: 1,381<br>\n$/Sq. Ft.: $452<br>\nLot Size: 5,000 sq. ft.<br>\nYear Built: 1974<br>\nStories: 1<br>\nType: Single Family Residence<br>\nCounty: Orange<br>\nNeighborhood: Walnut<br>\nMLS#: <a href=\"http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/printable-listing?listing-id=1015109&rc=blg_irvine&utm_source=irvinehousingblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_nooverride=1\">U7003278</a><br>\nStatus: Active<br>\nOn Redfin: 39 days</p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/printable-listing?listing-id=1015109&rc=blg_irvine&utm_source=irvinehousingblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_nooverride=1\">Redfin</a>, “THREE BEDROOM TWO BATH HOME IN THE SOUGHT TRACT OF ‘THE COLONY’ THIS HOME IS IN ONE OF THE VERY BEST CITIES IN ORANGE COUNTY, IRVINE!! GREAT SCHOOLS, PARKS, CLOSE TO ENTERTAINMENT, TRANSPORTATION AND ALL THE GOOD STUFF. ASSOCIATION POOL AND MORE. THIS HOME IS BEING SOLD ‘AS-IS’ AND ‘WHERE-IS’ WITHOUT WARRANTY. COME HOME TO IRVINE TODAY AND START LIVING THE ‘O. C. ‘ LIFESTYLE TODAY!”</p>\n<p>Even the banks seem to have a CAPS LOCK problem.</p>\n<p>.<br>\n<br>\n.</p>\n<p>As you have probably noticed, we are starting to see an increased activity among banks to liquidate their REOs. Unfortunately, they are getting them faster than they are selling them. This is a trend that will likely continue.<a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/matisse12.JPG\" title=\"Matisse 2\"><img src=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/matisse12.JPG\" title=\"Matisse 2\" alt=\"Matisse 2\" align=\"right\" width=\"300\"></a></p>\n<p>Think back to the mass delusion that was the bubble: it was the Grand Illusion. People accepted the absurd as unquestioned truth. Does it seem reasonable that banks would continually offer negative amortization loans with 1% teaser rates; that it would be possible to refinance from one to another as each teaser rate period expired? Is it logical to think serial refinancing could go on forever? I had people tell me this was the new paradigm.</p>\n<p>Is it logical to think that real estate can only go up in value? Do you remember the thought experiment in this post: <a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/2007/03/05/how-sub-prime-lending-created-the-bubble/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link to How Sub-Prime Lending Created the Housing Bubble\">How Sub-Prime Lending Created the Housing Bubble</a>? Does it make sense that you could live off the appreciation of your house; that none of us would actually have to produce anything; that all we would have to do is own real estate to make a living? How can such silly beliefs make it into our collective consciousness? Are we so enamored with our fantasies of wealth that common sense can be ignored?</p>\n<p>I don’t have any answers for you. I never did drink the kool aid, so I cannot fully empathize with this system of belief. Each of you that suffered from these delusions, even for a brief time, will have to answer those questions for yourself.<br>\n.<br>\n<br>\n.</p>\n<p>You will have to pardon my ranting and sermonizing today. Sometimes the insanity of it all builds up inside of me until it finds an outlet — generally on this blog. Remember, I still have my <a href=\"http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/2007/06/11/the-reservoir-of-schadenfreude/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permanent Link to The Reservoir of Schadenfreude\">Reservoir of Schadenfreude</a> I am trying to empty.</p>\n<p>This concludes another week at the Irvine Housing Blog. My motivation is strong, and my energy level is high, so I will keep on keeping on. I hope you come back next week as we continue to Chronicle ‘the seventh circle of real estate hell.’ Have a great weekend.</p>\n<p>.</p>\n<p>The artwork was by <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse\">Henri Mattise</a> as a reference to the street name. I don’t know who designed the cover of the Styx album, but the similarities in styles was an interesting coincidence.</p>\n<p></p>"
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"title" : "Driving test",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/wp-content/photos/rulesoftheroad.jpg\" alt=\"a truck, a 4x4 and a heavily laden bashed up old peugeot head for a bend in the road\"></p>\n<p>Q: Which of these two cars should be overtaking the lorry?</p>\n<p><a></a></p>\n<p>A: Neither. All three vehicles are approaching a blind corner, and a similar circus could be coming the other way… Everybody made it this time, though.</p>\n<p>Bonus question: How do you get a Congolese driving license?</p>\n<p>A: You produce the cash after negotiating a fair price.\n</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=i4Li3x6m\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=i4Li3x6m\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=pvYR8Ipd\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=pvYR8Ipd\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=ZXzSZGL3\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=ZXzSZGL3\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/extra-extra/~4/146862527\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "War on Terror vs. Meek Acquiescence to Terror",
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"content" : "Strange how we oscillate between waging War on Terror and meek Acquiescence to Terror depending on who is doing the terrorising. If Al-Qa'ida had targeted a British citizen with Polonium-210 and left a radioactive trail across London we'd, almost certainly, be bombing some 3rd world country back to the stone age by now."
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"title" : "The elephants of Flickr",
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"content" : "<p><img style=\"border:0\" src=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-720x2430.jpg\" alt=\"[elephants of flickr]\" width=\"720\" height=\"2430\" usemap=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/08/13/cc-elephants#elephantmap\"></p>\n\n<p>Why? Because the internet needs a page with 648 elephants. You may not have realized that, but now that I say it, you’re thinking, “Of course! Where are my elephants?” I got your elephants right here.</p>\n\n<p>Once again, here’s some high-quality 4320×6480 (20″×30″) posters suitable for printing: <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-1.jpg\">1</a>, <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-2.jpg\">2</a>, <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-3.jpg\">3</a>, <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-4.jpg\">4</a>, <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-5.jpg\">5</a>. In case you were wondering, I really will print one of these on poster paper and find wall space to hang it. Probably in the kids’ room, although my <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/03/05/cc-dogs\">dogs of Flickr</a> poster is hanging in my office upstairs.</p>\n\n<p>Here’s a <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-landscape.jpg\">30″×20″</a> landscape poster for good measure. And an elephantine <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-8640x12960.jpg\">40″×60″</a> poster. Yeah, that’s 8640×12960. Use it as your desktop wallpaper in 20 years. You think I’m kidding, but 20 years ago my state-of-the-art Apple ][e had a resolution of 280×192, and now it sits next to dual monitors that are each 1920×1200. You do the math. No, really, you do it; I’m cross-eyed with elephants.</p>\n\n<p>All collages are licensed under a <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en-us\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Here’s a “to the fairest” kind of question for the portion of my readers that like to quibble about licensing. The above image is a clickable image map; each thumbnail links back to the original Flickr page, with the original image title in the <code>alt</code> attribute. Is that enough to satisfy the attribution clause of CC-BY-2.0? <strong>Update:</strong> added photographer’s name along with the image title.</p>\n\n<p>Previously: <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/08/12/cc-butterflies\">the butterflies of Flickr</a>, <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/03/05/cc-dogs\">the dogs of Flickr</a>.</p>\n\n<map name=\"elephantmap\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/merec0/519012416/\" alt=\"インドゾウ by merec0\" coords=\"0,0,59,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/forsterfoto/168970528/\" alt=\"Elephants by ForsterFoto\" coords=\"60,0,119,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528685612/\" alt=\"20070602_086 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"120,0,179,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tubby/415616338/\" alt=\"Elephant and tree by Ben Tubby\" coords=\"180,0,239,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/argenberg/472501733/\" alt=\"Elephant camp near Chiang Rai (2007-02-386) by Vyacheslav Stepanyuchenko\" coords=\"240,0,299,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199506189/\" alt=\"Elephants at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"300,0,359,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/heschong/137783246/\" alt=\"Elephant by Christopher Heschong\" coords=\"360,0,419,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/240304520/\" alt=\"IMG_4325 by KevBow\" coords=\"420,0,479,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dream_weavers/513178245/\" alt=\"elephant by Lijo Johnson John\" coords=\"480,0,539,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/london/75872538/\" alt=\"submarine elephant by J RAWLS\" coords=\"540,0,599,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211745083/\" alt=\"Field of elephants by S B\" coords=\"600,0,659,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/london/75869998/\" alt=\"elephant gang by J RAWLS\" coords=\"660,0,719,44\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191024025/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"0,45,59,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frumbert/120190866/\" alt=\"DSCN2179 by tim\" coords=\"60,45,119,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/medapt/430279600/\" alt=\"Elephants unite by Wen-Yan King\" coords=\"120,45,179,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/london/64495988/\" alt=\"Elephant sunset by J RAWLS\" coords=\"180,45,239,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/twistedlens/535412322/\" alt=\"Elephant Eyes by Rich DeYoung\" coords=\"240,45,299,89\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965544420/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Close Up 2 by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"300,45,359,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/233341984/\" alt=\"Elephant, Phimai by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"360,45,419,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dorothyhess-pictures/537903219/\" alt=\"Elephants by Dorothy\" coords=\"420,45,479,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lizyoo/363511979/\" alt=\"Elephant by visualcuriosity\" coords=\"480,45,539,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509685120/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"540,45,599,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/49823770@N00/807489114/\" alt=\"elephants by Rob & Dani\" coords=\"600,45,659,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jessehull/163903587/\" alt=\"Image08.jpg by Jesse Hull\" coords=\"660,45,719,89\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429426499/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"0,90,59,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219823024/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"60,90,119,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/heschong/469385981/\" alt=\"Elephant by Christopher Heschong\" coords=\"120,90,179,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/chrisada/338743491/\" alt=\"Elephant Tour by Chrisada Sookdhis\" coords=\"180,90,239,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sheasphotos/583913891/\" alt=\"Elephant by Shea\" coords=\"240,90,299,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sladesma/236641744/\" alt=\"Elephant by Simon Ladesma\" coords=\"300,90,359,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/medapt/430287978/\" alt=\"Bathtime! by Wen-Yan King\" coords=\"360,90,419,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965448864/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephants Fighting by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"420,90,479,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kymai100/64176253/\" alt=\"African Elephant by Brenda\" coords=\"480,90,539,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/123900378/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"540,90,599,134\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211745475/\" alt=\"Elephant family by S B\" coords=\"600,90,659,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458726367/\" alt=\"Baby elephant by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"660,90,719,134\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/nickbutcher/462005030/\" alt=\"Elephant in Crater by Nick Butcher\" coords=\"0,135,59,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394391227/\" alt=\"Time out by Chris Eason\" coords=\"60,135,119,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/thecareyfam/319105645/\" alt=\"DSCN2088 by Ben & Whitney Carey\" coords=\"120,135,179,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964586765/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephants at Ewaso Ng'iro by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"180,135,239,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394312957/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,135,299,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ingamun/100216960/\" alt=\"African elephant by Inga Munsinger Cotton\" coords=\"300,135,359,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234505442/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"360,135,419,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211744997/\" alt=\"Field of elephants by S B\" coords=\"420,135,479,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ansik/401686517/\" alt=\"tattoo by Anssi Koskinen\" coords=\"480,135,539,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/angela7/85016411/\" alt=\"majestic elephants of the Masai Mara by Angela Sevin\" coords=\"540,135,599,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/171299303/\" alt=\"Elephant @ Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"600,135,659,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/makelessnoise/132596043/\" alt=\"Snacky-derm by makelessnoise\" coords=\"660,135,719,179\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404701015/\" alt=\"DSC03337 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"0,180,59,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ahoklah/535909075/\" alt=\"zoo06 by Adam Mutum\" coords=\"60,180,119,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/arifv/321064144/\" alt=\"Who gets the right of way Elephant or Car? by Arifv\" coords=\"120,180,179,224\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199508823/\" alt=\"Baby Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"180,180,239,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/210326332/\" alt=\"Elephants by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,180,299,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/nickbutcher/462011767/\" alt=\"Elephant 2 by Nick Butcher\" coords=\"300,180,359,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/97964364@N00/207379377/\" alt=\"Elephant at Louisville Zoo by Aaron\" coords=\"360,180,419,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211747596/\" alt=\"Elephant family sharing food by S B\" coords=\"420,180,479,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/hungry-mind/222901450/\" alt=\"Elephants' Walk #2 by Marie\" coords=\"480,180,539,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/41737155@N00/271234849/\" alt=\"elephant orph playing by farmgirl\" coords=\"540,180,599,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404701244/\" alt=\"DSC03340 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"600,180,659,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965527542/\" alt=\"The Mara - Baby Elephant by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"660,180,719,224\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394399516/\" alt=\"Rough and tumble by Chris Eason\" coords=\"0,225,59,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/matteo-gianni/271177796/\" alt=\"Washing Lucky by Matteo\" coords=\"60,225,119,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevincure/112293960/\" alt=\"DSC00468 by kevincure\" coords=\"120,225,179,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/44603071@N00/514260155/\" alt=\"100_1479 by Kathy\" coords=\"180,225,239,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/flametree/411574255/\" alt=\"Elephants by Mara 1\" coords=\"240,225,299,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/49823770@N00/806604373/\" alt=\"elephants-1a by Rob & Dani\" coords=\"300,225,359,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/steveslep/1026249211/\" alt=\"DSC01666 by Steve Slep\" coords=\"360,225,419,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/pavelrybin/164382310/\" alt=\"DSC_0066 by Pavel Rybin\" coords=\"420,225,479,269\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399004262/\" alt=\"DSC03292 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"480,225,539,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/photocatcher/150327044/\" alt=\"Ride it baby by Diricia De Wet\" coords=\"540,225,599,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/171314067/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"600,225,659,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/soylentgreen23/154317293/\" alt=\"An elephant waits, having forgotten why he's here by Christopher Walker\" coords=\"660,225,719,269\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/justin/360206569/\" alt=\"Muddy Elephant by Justin Hall\" coords=\"0,270,59,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458725518/\" alt=\"Mother elephant by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"60,270,119,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/twonickels/90917813/\" alt=\"untitled by Laura\" coords=\"120,270,179,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jhollington/427510002/\" alt=\"Elephant by Jesse David\nHollington\" coords=\"180,270,239,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404701378/\" alt=\"DSC03341 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"240,270,299,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/57307262/\" alt=\"Circa 1925 Anne Hutton Zoo by Robin Alasdair Frederick Hutton\" coords=\"300,270,359,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458710008/\" alt=\"IMG_5653.JPG by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"360,270,419,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jackversloot/389032601/\" alt=\"Elephant Family by Jack Versloot\" coords=\"420,270,479,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394398064/\" alt=\"You're my friend by Chris Eason\" coords=\"480,270,539,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211747768/\" alt=\"Huddling together by S B\" coords=\"540,270,599,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/415395166/\" alt=\"IMG_3780 by John Haslam\" coords=\"600,270,659,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458740547/\" alt=\"Elephant ride by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"660,270,719,314\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/adamtina/199998418/\" alt=\"Africa2- 228 by Adam Annfield\" coords=\"0,315,59,359\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/faraz27989/315116782/\" alt=\"Elephant Man by Faraz Usmani\" coords=\"60,315,119,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191042529/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"120,315,179,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/15072698@N00/466835408/\" alt=\"elephant salad by Markus\" coords=\"180,315,239,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429430822/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"240,315,299,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408994443/\" alt=\"Elephant Taking A Swim by alex.ch\" coords=\"300,315,359,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/flametree/62864750/\" alt=\"Elephant Sanctury. by Mara 1\" coords=\"360,315,419,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rouan/415562154/\" alt=\"IMG_3587 by Rouan van der Ende\" coords=\"420,315,479,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/41737155@N00/271234825/\" alt=\"elephant orph guides by farmgirl\" coords=\"480,315,539,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/638058370/\" alt=\"DSC_0217 by Dylan Walters\" coords=\"540,315,599,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/justin/356038864/\" alt=\"Elephant Near Camp by Justin Hall\" coords=\"600,315,659,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/angela7/75791155/\" alt=\"elephant view by Angela Sevin\" coords=\"660,315,719,359\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/matteo-gianni/271178054/\" alt=\"Elephant Salute by Matteo\" coords=\"0,360,59,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frogbelly/340933913/\" alt=\"Knoxville zoo elephant again by The_Gut\" coords=\"60,360,119,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jgrandy/519282626/\" alt=\"DSC_0111.JPG by Jim Grandy\" coords=\"120,360,179,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458725379/\" alt=\"IMG_5660.JPG by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"180,360,239,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234507318/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"240,360,299,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jhollington/427510705/\" alt=\"Elephant by Jesse David\nHollington\" coords=\"300,360,359,404\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/1037160492/\" alt=\"India - Trips - Jaipur - 018 - Dad atop his elephant at the Amber Fort by McKay Savage\" coords=\"360,360,419,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/adamtina/199998535/\" alt=\"Africa2- 235 by Adam Annfield\" coords=\"420,360,479,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/shaggypaul/141764118/\" alt=\"IMG_4645.JPG by Shaggy Paul\" coords=\"480,360,539,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rachellogan/184652777/\" alt=\"Roadblock by Rachel\" coords=\"540,360,599,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/genvessel/533179289/\" alt=\"elephants by genvessel\" coords=\"600,360,659,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sladesma/236639299/\" alt=\"Elephant by Simon Ladesma\" coords=\"660,360,719,404\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/shwetamisra/499605646/\" alt=\"The Elephant by ♠ѕнωєтα♠\" coords=\"0,405,59,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/indi/144731362/\" alt=\"Elephants by Indi Samarajiva\" coords=\"60,405,119,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/twyford/61269976/\" alt=\"Fight by Ray Booysen\" coords=\"120,405,179,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964581255/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Feeding by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"180,405,239,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/derrtongkw/340574546/\" alt=\"DSC_0148 by derrick tong k.w.\" coords=\"240,405,299,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509555364/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"300,405,359,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528772347/\" alt=\"20070602_083 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"360,405,419,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/80415664@N00/116284115/\" alt=\"Elephant taking bath by Nerelle Ring\" coords=\"420,405,479,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/wildcat_dunny/87669920/\" alt=\"Elephants by Greg Dunham\" coords=\"480,405,539,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408992388/\" alt=\"Elephants on their Way to the Pool by alex.ch\" coords=\"540,405,599,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/medapt/407811772/\" alt=\"Chitwan Elephants by Wen-Yan King\" coords=\"600,405,659,449\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/genvessel/533176433/\" alt=\"elephants and giraffes by genvessel\" coords=\"660,405,719,449\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/171309605/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"0,450,59,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/387796540/\" alt=\"climbing up the platform to meet my beast by eric molina\" coords=\"60,450,119,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/amerune/1076960030/\" alt=\"Elephant taking a dust bath by Maureen\" coords=\"120,450,179,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/otakuchick/1044358592/\" alt=\"Unhappy Elephant by Natalie Greco\" coords=\"180,450,239,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mvisosky/862285498/\" alt=\"Old man by Mister V\" coords=\"240,450,299,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234509510/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"300,450,359,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/wills/124102425/\" alt=\"Elephants by Will Ellis\" coords=\"360,450,419,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408997243/\" alt=\"Elephant Taking A Swim by alex.ch\" coords=\"420,450,479,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/fantomdesigns/175177314/\" alt=\"_MG_1029 Chiang Mai - Elephant and Bamboo Rafting (outside of the city) by fantomdesigns\" coords=\"480,450,539,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399005109/\" alt=\"DSC03316 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"540,450,599,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528772097/\" alt=\"20070602_082 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"600,450,659,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rouan/415562490/\" alt=\"IMG_3618 by Rouan van der Ende\" coords=\"660,450,719,494\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/49823770@N00/256965820/\" alt=\"Elephant - Ngorongoro Cater by Rob & Dani\" coords=\"0,495,59,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/post406/541698165/\" alt=\"African Elephants (3) by Jeff Egnaczyk\" coords=\"60,495,119,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/other_neither/281998382/\" alt=\"102806WashingtonParkZoo03 by Andrew\" coords=\"120,495,179,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dnorman/142386986/\" alt=\"Shrine Circus 2006 - 6 by D'Arcy Norman\" coords=\"180,495,239,539\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458711352/\" alt=\"Mother & Child by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"240,495,299,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ctsnow/202671582/\" alt=\"Si Satchanalai Historical Park in northern Thailand by ctsnow\" coords=\"300,495,359,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394332378/\" alt=\"You boys be careful, now by Chris Eason\" coords=\"360,495,419,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/webber0075/558305883/\" alt=\"DSC_0046.JPG by huw\" coords=\"420,495,479,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/fantomdesigns/175174122/\" alt=\"_MG_0995 Chiang Mai - Elephant and Bamboo Rafting (outside of the city) by fantomdesigns\" coords=\"480,495,539,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/evank/185207136/\" alt=\"dsc_0170 by Evan\" coords=\"540,495,599,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429412148/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"600,495,659,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394295611/\" alt=\"Those marula fruit sure are tasty by Chris Eason\" coords=\"660,495,719,539\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/icelight/48093988/\" alt=\"Elephant by tanstaafl5813\" coords=\"0,540,59,584\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/djnike/251302067/\" alt=\"Only 2 of the 7 Elephants by Karl Wright\" 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/yadav1/398915868/\" alt=\"elephant by yadev\" coords=\"300,585,359,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509515153/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"360,585,419,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219830891/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"420,585,479,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kaylin/394032881/\" alt=\"Thailand 2007 by -Kaylin-\" coords=\"480,585,539,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/43278209@N00/205768274/\" alt=\"Приют для слонов в Пиннавеле, Шри-Ланка by Eugene Kotlyarov\" coords=\"540,585,599,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211750340/\" alt=\"Mother and baby washing by S B\" coords=\"600,585,659,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509724546/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"660,585,719,629\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191967349/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"0,630,59,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/junhao/146138664/\" alt=\"very real elephants by Junhao\" coords=\"60,630,119,674\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/maddcovv/207744685/\" alt=\"An elephant at the houston zoo. by John Reese\" coords=\"120,630,179,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234509022/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"180,630,239,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/markbold/577442733/\" alt=\"elephant by Mark Bold\" coords=\"240,630,299,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429414926/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"300,630,359,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/whetzel/44497713/\" alt=\"Who's afraid? by Jennifer\" coords=\"360,630,419,674\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191967347/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/395644283/\" alt=\"DSC03216 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"180,675,239,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/393950533/\" alt=\"Flapping ears by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,675,299,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/danieldainty/129099012/\" alt=\"Elephants by Daniel Dainty\" coords=\"300,675,359,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/drmtoiber/329393759/\" alt=\"elefantes chiang rai2 by drmtoiber\" coords=\"360,675,419,719\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404700630/\" alt=\"DSC03328 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"420,675,479,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/hollyberrie05/822717208/\" alt=\"Louisville 042 by Holly\" coords=\"480,675,539,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/markus941/387363840/\" alt=\"elephant chewing by Markus\" coords=\"540,675,599,719\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509506964/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lovingshiva/115593618/\" alt=\"baby elephant bath by Jennifer Jordan\" coords=\"120,765,179,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jason-b/114465174/\" alt=\"CRW_3701.jpg by jason-b\" coords=\"180,765,239,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/vorty/496673636/\" alt=\"Zoo - Elephants by Stian Martinsen\" coords=\"240,765,299,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/41737155@N00/271237027/\" alt=\"male elephant by farmgirl\" coords=\"300,765,359,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/babasteve/94332334/\" alt=\"Sri Lanka by Steve Evans\" coords=\"360,765,419,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528773891/\" alt=\"20070602_088 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"420,765,479,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/polisciencegirl/822574295/\" alt=\"Elephant Butt by Chrissy\" coords=\"480,765,539,809\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/thumbling/92290246/\" alt=\"P1020177 by Wouter van Vliet\" 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frank-wouters/524347090/\" alt=\"olifant by belgianchocolate\" coords=\"300,810,359,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stephenlai/340613317/\" alt=\"An Elephant Massage by Stephen Lai\" coords=\"360,810,419,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/190740565/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"420,810,479,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404699986/\" alt=\"DSC03320 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"480,810,539,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211744484/\" alt=\"Family of Elephants at the Pinnawela elephant orphanage, Sri Lanka by S B\" coords=\"540,810,599,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234509956/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"600,810,659,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/post406/541695995/\" alt=\"African Elephants (2) by Jeff Egnaczyk\" coords=\"660,810,719,854\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/74698556@N00/336275831/\" alt=\"PICT1191 by Graham and Sheila\" coords=\"0,855,59,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/michielvandenheuvel/964328531/\" alt=\"Old Soul by Michiel van den Heuvel\" coords=\"60,855,119,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394296026/\" alt=\"Another branch bites the dust by Chris Eason\" coords=\"120,855,179,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/240301461/\" alt=\"IMG_4311 by KevBow\" coords=\"180,855,239,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jackversloot/389030621/\" alt=\"Close Encounter of the Elephant Kind by Jack Versloot\" coords=\"240,855,299,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396275383/\" alt=\"stalking the jungle trails by eric molina\" coords=\"300,855,359,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964677875/\" alt=\"The Mara - Elephant Shephards it's baby by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"360,855,419,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/thumbling/92502037/\" alt=\"P1020494 by Wouter van Vliet\" coords=\"420,855,479,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396260809/\" alt=\"elephant traffic by eric molina\" coords=\"480,855,539,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394398769/\" alt=\"Fight Club by Chris Eason\" coords=\"540,855,599,899\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394380917/\" alt=\"Touche by Chris Eason\" coords=\"600,855,659,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394327816/\" alt=\"Cold shower by Chris Eason\" coords=\"660,855,719,899\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/benkaffsblog/485304331/\" alt=\"Elephant Ride by Ben and Katherine\nSinclair Travel\nPhotos 2007\" coords=\"0,900,59,944\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rich_childs/499217681/\" alt=\"Elephant by Rich Childs\" coords=\"60,900,119,944\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394395056/\" alt=\"You startin'? by Chris 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jackversloot/389029172/\" alt=\"Elephant on the Move by Jack Versloot\" coords=\"600,900,659,944\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/indi/144733034/\" alt=\"Elephant Chained by Indi Samarajiva\" coords=\"660,900,719,944\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kaylin/394032887/\" alt=\"Thailand 2007 by -Kaylin-\" coords=\"0,945,59,989\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tomsly/93941508/\" alt=\"IMG_2093 by thomas_sly\" coords=\"60,945,119,989\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/pavelrybin/164361886/\" alt=\"DSC_0058 by Pavel Rybin\" coords=\"120,945,179,989\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458741955/\" alt=\"Elephant ride... iGallop? by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"180,945,239,989\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394392020/\" alt=\"Mucking around by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,945,299,989\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/637170485/\" alt=\"Squirming Brad & Elephant by Dylan 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/196148030/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"60,990,119,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frank-wouters/143834447/\" alt=\"meet the giant by belgianchocolate\" coords=\"120,990,179,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/francapicc/516275231/\" alt=\"At the Pilanesberg reserve, South Africa by jespahjoy\" coords=\"180,990,239,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/69697452@N00/470211447/\" alt=\"elephant by andorabonyi\" coords=\"240,990,299,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/395644481/\" alt=\"DSC03218 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"300,990,359,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/239279286/\" alt=\"Elephants barge their way across the road by Chris Eason\" coords=\"360,990,419,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458725651/\" alt=\"IMG_5655.JPG by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"420,990,479,1034\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219827233/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"480,990,539,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/neilrickards/369292244/\" alt=\"IMG_3010 by Neil Rickards\" coords=\"540,990,599,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394397287/\" alt=\"Not so fast by Chris Eason\" coords=\"600,990,659,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199507144/\" alt=\"Baby Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"660,990,719,1034\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lucagorlero/429268898/\" alt=\"DSCF0378 by Luca\" coords=\"0,1035,59,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/maltesenwordpresscom/931364104/\" alt=\"Elephant by Maltesen\" coords=\"60,1035,119,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/argenberg/472486318/\" alt=\"Elephant camp near Chiang Rai (2007-02-385) by Vyacheslav Stepanyuchenko\" coords=\"120,1035,179,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234513138/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"180,1035,239,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/201350677/\" alt=\"He's a democrat now... by Michael Neel\" coords=\"240,1035,299,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509713837/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"300,1035,359,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jessehull/163707589/\" alt=\"Image84.jpg by Jesse Hull\" coords=\"360,1035,419,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frank-wouters/508176417/\" alt=\"may tagu by belgianchocolate\" coords=\"420,1035,479,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/395645242/\" alt=\"DSC03227 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"480,1035,539,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/1037155400/\" alt=\"India - Trips - Jaipur - 017 - Elise and I atop our elephant at the Amber Fort by McKay Savage\" coords=\"540,1035,599,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/aprillynn77/404755470/\" alt=\"Bahlule Game Reserve / Kruger National Park by April Killingsworth\" coords=\"600,1035,659,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191042524/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"660,1035,719,1079\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/drmtoiber/329393752/\" alt=\"baño de elefantes chiang rai by drmtoiber\" coords=\"0,1080,59,1124\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394331562/\" alt=\"You'll have someone's eye out by Chris Eason\" coords=\"60,1080,119,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396250563/\" alt=\"dude bathing his chang. by eric molina\" coords=\"120,1080,179,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396271308/\" alt=\"big brother is watching by eric molina\" coords=\"180,1080,239,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tomsly/93941170/\" alt=\"IMG_2086 by thomas_sly\" coords=\"240,1080,299,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/462523073/\" alt=\"Elephant ride, Amber Fort by John Haslam\" coords=\"300,1080,359,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mgessford/578514495/\" alt=\"Elephants by mgessford\" coords=\"360,1080,419,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211747310/\" alt=\"Washing down at the river by S B\" coords=\"420,1080,479,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ingamun/100216963/\" alt=\"African elephant by Inga Munsinger Cotton\" coords=\"480,1080,539,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frogbelly/340935102/\" alt=\"Knoxville zoo - elephant by The_Gut\" coords=\"540,1080,599,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/benfurneaux/256763843/\" alt=\"Cheeky Elephant by Ben Furneaux\" coords=\"600,1080,659,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/maddcovv/207745038/\" alt=\"An elephant by John Reese\" coords=\"660,1080,719,1124\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/415391222/\" alt=\"HPIM1579 by John Haslam\" coords=\"0,1125,59,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/45882720@N00/257682515/\" alt=\"Elephant, Katavi by Calle v H\" coords=\"60,1125,119,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458726115/\" alt=\"IMG_5651.JPG by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"120,1125,179,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/fyunkie/944627194/\" alt=\"Elefeel by Fionn Kidney\" coords=\"180,1125,239,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jamoker/79793454/\" alt=\"The Introverted Elephant by The Jamoker\" coords=\"240,1125,299,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kinjosan/453618811/\" alt=\"San Diego Wild Animal Park by kkinjo\" coords=\"300,1125,359,1169\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/twyford/61268974/\" alt=\"Thats Good by Ray Booysen\" coords=\"360,1125,419,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211749927/\" alt=\"Showering water over the group by S B\" coords=\"420,1125,479,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/indi/144736297/\" alt=\"Five Feet by Indi Samarajiva\" coords=\"480,1125,539,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/34731946@N00/289554264/\" alt=\"Elephant in Etosha water hole by Erwin T\" coords=\"540,1125,599,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lizard_queen/96891578/\" alt=\"Watching by TheLizardQueen\" coords=\"600,1125,659,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/philms/394958102/\" alt=\"Elephant at the zoo by Philms\" coords=\"660,1125,719,1169\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199487472/\" alt=\"Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"0,1170,59,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964630429/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Young Elephant by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"60,1170,119,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191938321/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"120,1170,179,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/bojo/315780936/\" alt=\"Hello elephant! by Bobbie Johnson\" coords=\"180,1170,239,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/196148300/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,1170,299,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458709170/\" alt=\"IMG_5672.JPG by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"300,1170,359,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/shazron/334873622/\" alt=\"Baby Elephant Show by Shazron\" coords=\"360,1170,419,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/wildcat_dunny/87669829/\" alt=\"Elephant by Greg Dunham\" coords=\"420,1170,479,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394320118/\" alt=\"Marula snack by Chris Eason\" coords=\"480,1170,539,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211750008/\" alt=\"Mahout washing the elephant by S B\" coords=\"540,1170,599,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211750111/\" alt=\"Elephant River by S B\" coords=\"600,1170,659,1214\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/8213785@N05/493159564/\" alt=\"IMG_0188 by planetkestrel\" coords=\"660,1170,719,1214\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lizard_queen/98220664/\" alt=\"Siblings by TheLizardQueen\" coords=\"0,1215,59,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/387797008/\" alt=\"elephant on sand looking for a snack by eric molina\" coords=\"60,1215,119,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/shaked_fotos/481050507/\" alt=\"Elephant Face by Alex Estevez\" coords=\"120,1215,179,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kiteland/329439028/\" alt=\"Elephant by kiteland\" coords=\"180,1215,239,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/49823770@N00/247367382/\" alt=\"Elephant - Maasai Mara by Rob & Dani\" coords=\"240,1215,299,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/637136413/\" alt=\"DSC_0231 by Dylan Walters\" coords=\"300,1215,359,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211749437/\" alt=\"More elephants by S B\" coords=\"360,1215,419,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/apium/450169058/\" alt=\"elephant by apium\" coords=\"420,1215,479,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199492640/\" alt=\"Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"480,1215,539,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408995385/\" alt=\"Elephant Affection by alex.ch\" coords=\"540,1215,599,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394389228/\" alt=\"Thump!! by Chris Eason\" coords=\"600,1215,659,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/637100581/\" alt=\"Elephant Darts by Dylan Walters\" coords=\"660,1215,719,1259\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396275584/\" alt=\"ok you know you're going slow when the elephant outside is about to pass you by eric molina\" coords=\"0,1260,59,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ktylerconk/518589856/\" alt=\"Baby Elephant by ktylerconk\" coords=\"60,1260,119,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219826381/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"120,1260,179,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/adamtina/199997557/\" alt=\"Africa2- 150 by Adam Annfield\" coords=\"180,1260,239,1304\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/shawnzlea/794490701/\" alt=\"IMG_2907 by Shawn Lea\" coords=\"240,1260,299,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tubby/297004165/\" alt=\"Regal Elephants - Jaipur Fort by Ben Tubby\" coords=\"300,1260,359,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/livinginthelandofsmiles/334777825/\" alt=\"Daniel Feeding Elephant a Banana by Living in the Land\nof Smiles\" coords=\"360,1260,419,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kafeole/268729370/\" alt=\"Elefantes africanos by Kafeole\" coords=\"420,1260,479,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394325527/\" alt=\"P1000939 by Chris Eason\" coords=\"480,1260,539,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/twyford/61269547/\" alt=\"Hide the Baby by Ray Booysen\" coords=\"540,1260,599,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/definingdavid/516892482/\" alt=\"Little Rock Zoo - Elephants by David Quinn\" coords=\"600,1260,659,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509369860/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"660,1260,719,1304\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/heschong/469386533/\" alt=\"Elephant by Christopher Heschong\" coords=\"0,1305,59,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/snake3yes/229886487/\" alt=\"Spot the Elephant by Snake3yes\" coords=\"60,1305,119,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/210326428/\" alt=\"Elephants crossing the road by Chris Eason\" coords=\"120,1305,179,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/francapicc/516251608/\" alt=\"At the Pilanesberg reserve, South Africa by jespahjoy\" coords=\"180,1305,239,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/matteo-gianni/75490582/\" alt=\"Koh Samui- Elephant Trekking, by Matteo\" coords=\"240,1305,299,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/adamtina/199997749/\" alt=\"Africa2- 153 by Adam Annfield\" coords=\"300,1305,359,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/415394156/\" alt=\"Elephants taking tourists up to the Amber Fort, Jaipur by John Haslam\" coords=\"360,1305,419,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234506940/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"420,1305,479,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/greggoconnell/146910172/\" alt=\"Elephant Tongue by Gregg O'Connell\" coords=\"480,1305,539,1349\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399004786/\" alt=\"DSC03305 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"540,1305,599,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/london/71462369/\" alt=\"Elephant glow by J RAWLS\" coords=\"600,1305,659,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/239278669/\" alt=\"Elephant with a stick by Chris Eason\" coords=\"660,1305,719,1349\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394394379/\" alt=\"Crunch by Chris Eason\" coords=\"0,1350,59,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399004369/\" alt=\"DSC03298 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"60,1350,119,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/223954706/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"120,1350,179,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/34731946@N00/335153186/\" alt=\"untitled by Erwin T\" coords=\"180,1350,239,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/diametrik/354982422/\" alt=\"Meera the Elephant by Lian Chang\" coords=\"240,1350,299,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lucagorlero/429269037/\" alt=\"Elephants north of Sigiriya by Luca\" coords=\"300,1350,359,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211749624/\" alt=\"Elephants all huddled together by S B\" coords=\"360,1350,419,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/207933245/\" alt=\"IMG_1696-copy_edited-1 by KevBow\" coords=\"420,1350,479,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/aprillynn77/404755513/\" alt=\"Bahlule Game Reserve / Kruger National Park by April Killingsworth\" coords=\"480,1350,539,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396271068/\" alt=\"looking as cute as dumbo by eric molina\" coords=\"540,1350,599,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/thumbling/92335237/\" alt=\"P1000619 by Wouter van Vliet\" coords=\"600,1350,659,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/justin/360206928/\" alt=\"Elephant walking across the Okavango Delta by Justin Hall\" coords=\"660,1350,719,1394\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509741293/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"0,1395,59,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/amagill/524836606/\" alt=\"Hamburg - Hagenbeck: Elephant by Andrew Magill\" coords=\"60,1395,119,1439\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/41737155@N00/271234917/\" alt=\"elephant rumps by farmgirl\" coords=\"120,1395,179,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528682654/\" alt=\"20070602_076 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"180,1395,239,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394389682/\" alt=\"Pow!!! by Chris Eason\" coords=\"240,1395,299,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exposed4life/461141854/\" alt=\"elephant by Ryan Reddy\" coords=\"300,1395,359,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/476777038/\" alt=\"Temple Elephant 2 by Michael Coghlan\" coords=\"360,1395,419,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394326255/\" alt=\"P1000940 by Chris Eason\" coords=\"420,1395,479,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399004671/\" alt=\"DSC03301 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"480,1395,539,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458725282/\" alt=\"Ride down town by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"540,1395,599,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/danieldainty/129098103/\" alt=\"Elephant by Daniel Dainty\" coords=\"600,1395,659,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408996261/\" alt=\"Elephant Affection by alex.ch\" coords=\"660,1395,719,1439\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tigpan/540615424/\" alt=\"Elephant Crossing by Tigpan\" coords=\"0,1440,59,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/snake3yes/229883148/\" alt=\"Elephant by Snake3yes\" coords=\"60,1440,119,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stephanridgway/933391597/\" alt=\"Elephant grooming by Stephan Ridgway\" coords=\"120,1440,179,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404699800/\" alt=\"DSC03319 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"180,1440,239,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/pavelrybin/164382308/\" alt=\"DSC_0064 by Pavel Rybin\" coords=\"240,1440,299,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/alex-photos/408991207/\" alt=\"Elephants on Their Way to the Pool by alex.ch\" coords=\"300,1440,359,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/thumbling/92499802/\" alt=\"P1010035 by Wouter van Vliet\" coords=\"360,1440,419,1484\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/fred_dela/403332152/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking by Frédéric della Faille\" coords=\"420,1440,479,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/240312960/\" alt=\"IMG_4367 by KevBow\" coords=\"480,1440,539,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/45882720@N00/241654489/\" alt=\"Elephant by Calle v H\" coords=\"540,1440,599,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/angela7/75822620/\" alt=\"elephant family by Angela Sevin\" coords=\"600,1440,659,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/49823770@N00/807487666/\" alt=\"elephant-dani by Rob & Dani\" coords=\"660,1440,719,1484\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/aasg/861208100/\" alt=\"Elephant at Knysna by Angela\" coords=\"0,1485,59,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211747368/\" alt=\"Elephant babies by S B\" coords=\"60,1485,119,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/skyepascall/409665966/\" alt=\"Elephant by Skye Pascall\" coords=\"120,1485,179,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/williamnyk/891582265/\" alt=\"P1050258 by William Ng\" coords=\"180,1485,239,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/drmtoiber/329393755/\" alt=\"elefantes chiang rai by drmtoiber\" coords=\"240,1485,299,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394393615/\" alt=\"Water fight by Chris Eason\" coords=\"300,1485,359,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528683492/\" alt=\"20070602_079 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"360,1485,419,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/pavelrybin/164382306/\" alt=\"DSC_0061 by Pavel Rybin\" coords=\"420,1485,479,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/1027372659/\" alt=\"India - Colours of India - 013 - Painted elephant at Jaipur by McKay Savage\" coords=\"480,1485,539,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/neilrickards/369290917/\" alt=\"IMG_3008 by Neil Rickards\" coords=\"540,1485,599,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/amagill/524836598/\" alt=\"Hamburg - Hagenbeck: Elephants by Andrew Magill\" coords=\"600,1485,659,1529\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/a_of_doom/551404215/\" alt=\"here we go... by A of DooM\" coords=\"660,1485,719,1529\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stuseeger/159098898/\" alt=\"Dusty by Stuart Seeger\" coords=\"0,1530,59,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965432382/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Close Up by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"60,1530,119,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dorothyhess-pictures/537899369/\" alt=\"elephant by Dorothy\" coords=\"120,1530,179,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/babasteve/366886331/\" alt=\"Jaipur, India by Steve Evans\" coords=\"180,1530,239,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lynnmwillis/496516083/\" alt=\"Laughing elephant by Lynn Willis\" coords=\"240,1530,299,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/snake3yes/229885822/\" alt=\"Intelligence by Snake3yes\" coords=\"300,1530,359,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/bcfaircloth/507923181/\" alt=\"Elephants (wild ones!) by bcfaircloth\" coords=\"360,1530,419,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211749685/\" alt=\"Mahout getting the elephant in the water by S B\" coords=\"420,1530,479,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/madpai/249387090/\" alt=\"Elephant by Madhav Pai\" coords=\"480,1530,539,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/klauspost/92789219/\" alt=\"Elephant in Zoo by Klaus Post\" coords=\"540,1530,599,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/symphoney/506150889/\" alt=\"Elephant Rider by Symphoney Symphoney\" coords=\"600,1530,659,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211748143/\" alt=\"IMG_7071 by S B\" coords=\"660,1530,719,1574\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/greggoconnell/145587858/\" alt=\"Elephant Roooooar! by Gregg O'Connell\" coords=\"0,1575,59,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/maltesenwordpresscom/931201726/\" alt=\"Elephant by Maltesen\" coords=\"60,1575,119,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234499827/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"120,1575,179,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199488731/\" alt=\"Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"180,1575,239,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/zoonabar/458585301/\" alt=\"Painted Elephant by Chris Brown\" coords=\"240,1575,299,1619\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/54951409@N00/401930619/\" alt=\"Elephant by gudi3101\" coords=\"300,1575,359,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stuseeger/159103300/\" alt=\"Close by Stuart Seeger\" coords=\"360,1575,419,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/daylmer/757587486/\" alt=\"IMGP0826 by Deb Johnson\" coords=\"420,1575,479,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/415395237/\" alt=\"IMG_3782 by John Haslam\" coords=\"480,1575,539,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ndave/930361291/\" alt=\"Just gimme dat! by David Nagy\" coords=\"540,1575,599,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ingram/339651510/\" alt=\"What could happen next...? by sanomme\" coords=\"600,1575,659,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/191042526/\" alt=\"Safari in Mole by Stig Nygaard\" coords=\"660,1575,719,1619\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/indi/144739716/\" alt=\"Elephants on Way To Bath by Indi Samarajiva\" coords=\"0,1620,59,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frank-wouters/856724140/\" alt=\"dame by belgianchocolate\" coords=\"60,1620,119,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tubby/415634802/\" alt=\"3 Elephants by Ben Tubby\" coords=\"120,1620,179,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/96147639@N00/363936599/\" alt=\"Elephants, Taronga Zoo, Sydney by Rob Chandler\" coords=\"180,1620,239,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/calebcabral/439163537/\" alt=\"Elephant by Caleb Cabral\" coords=\"240,1620,299,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528685038/\" alt=\"20070602_084 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"300,1620,359,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/vorty/496705223/\" alt=\"Zoo - Surreal Life by Stian Martinsen\" coords=\"360,1620,419,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/nesposit/66501704/\" alt=\"Pai (une maman éléphant et son petit) by Nicolas Esposito\" coords=\"420,1620,479,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/madpai/249356528/\" alt=\"Dubare Elephant Camp by Madhav Pai\" coords=\"480,1620,539,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/a_of_doom/551404041/\" alt=\"climb aboard by A of DooM\" coords=\"540,1620,599,1664\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tomsly/93941243/\" alt=\"IMG_2088 by thomas_sly\" coords=\"600,1620,659,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/flametree/145019107/\" alt=\"Elephant in Zimbabwe. by Mara 1\" coords=\"660,1620,719,1664\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tomeppy/516964227/\" alt=\"untitled by tomeppy\" coords=\"0,1665,59,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234505855/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"60,1665,119,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/8753258@N02/536956227/\" alt=\"Male Elephant keeping cool! by Traveller07\" coords=\"120,1665,179,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211749827/\" alt=\"Taking a drink by S B\" coords=\"180,1665,239,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/nickbutcher/462014970/\" alt=\"More Elephants by Nick Butcher\" coords=\"240,1665,299,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396260468/\" alt=\"blazing the trail by eric molina\" coords=\"300,1665,359,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/superdavechen/435880897/\" alt=\"elephants by dave\" coords=\"360,1665,419,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tubby/297001003/\" alt=\"Elephants have eyes too by Ben Tubby\" coords=\"420,1665,479,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rouan/415562585/\" alt=\"IMG_3619 by Rouan van der Ende\" coords=\"480,1665,539,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/porkfork/137118371/\" alt=\"love tractor by porkfork6\" coords=\"540,1665,599,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965446972/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephants Fighting by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"600,1665,659,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/234508747/\" alt=\"Elephants, Kinabatang by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"660,1665,719,1709\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/387795001/\" alt=\"elephant and tree by eric molina\" coords=\"0,1710,59,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/96208357@N00/95076013/\" alt=\"Elephant by ff137\" coords=\"60,1710,119,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396265251/\" alt=\"snack time by eric molina\" coords=\"120,1710,179,1754\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/34731946@N00/335133573/\" alt=\"untitled by Erwin T\" coords=\"180,1710,239,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/soham_pablo/524228797/\" alt=\"Strong fella by Soham Banerjee\" coords=\"240,1710,299,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/nate_kate/359678030/\" alt=\"Playful Elephant by Nathan Bittinger\" coords=\"300,1710,359,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404700451/\" alt=\"DSC03327 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"360,1710,419,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/vevck/162876156/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Bandipur Wildlife Sanctuary by Vivek Kondur\" coords=\"420,1710,479,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429419225/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"480,1710,539,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/paulshaffner/282428428/\" alt=\"Tuskless Female Elephant by Paul Shaffner\" coords=\"540,1710,599,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/toofarnorth/109910431/\" alt=\"elephant eye small by K C\" coords=\"600,1710,659,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/diaphanous/89387997/\" alt=\"elephant by di_ana\" coords=\"660,1710,719,1754\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/danieldainty/129098560/\" alt=\"Elephant by Daniel Dainty\" coords=\"0,1755,59,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rich_childs/499217909/\" alt=\"Elephants by Rich Childs\" coords=\"60,1755,119,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/74698556@N00/336276226/\" alt=\"PICT1192 by Graham and Sheila\" coords=\"120,1755,179,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964588105/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephants Drink at Ewaso Ng'iro by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"180,1755,239,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509692926/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"240,1755,299,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/68955428@N00/453788962/\" alt=\"elephants 2 by Yusi Barclay!\" coords=\"300,1755,359,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964687623/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Baby and Mother by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"360,1755,419,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219825956/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"420,1755,479,1799\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219823880/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"480,1755,539,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/michaelhoward/386662805/\" alt=\"Elephant waving by Michael Howard\" coords=\"540,1755,599,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/justin/360206793/\" alt=\"Mad Elephant by Justin Hall\" coords=\"600,1755,659,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/paulshaffner/380365876/\" alt=\"elephant_trunk by Paul Shaffner\" coords=\"660,1755,719,1799\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/diametrik/354971446/\" alt=\"An elephant at rest by Lian Chang\" coords=\"0,1800,59,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jvh33/487526673/\" alt=\"Elephant, Washington DC Zoo 1976 by John VanderHaagen\" coords=\"60,1800,119,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/41737155@N00/283995916/\" alt=\"elephant by farmgirl\" coords=\"120,1800,179,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/theyoungthousands/982268802/\" alt=\"IMG_4070 by connelly\" coords=\"180,1800,239,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jackversloot/389030800/\" alt=\"Elephant grazing by Jack Versloot\" coords=\"240,1800,299,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/239279564/\" alt=\"Elephant crossing by Chris Eason\" coords=\"300,1800,359,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/bakau64/347040126/\" alt=\"Elephant by Marc\" coords=\"360,1800,419,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219823396/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"420,1800,479,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/robertmorris/532494827/\" alt=\"DSC_0423 by mrmedia99\" coords=\"480,1800,539,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/adamtina/199997258/\" alt=\"Africa2- 117 by Adam Annfield\" coords=\"540,1800,599,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/rickyrhodes/523647942/\" alt=\"elephant by ricky rhodes\" coords=\"600,1800,659,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219829309/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"660,1800,719,1844\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396276629/\" alt=\"on the side of the road by eric molina\" coords=\"0,1845,59,1889\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394312070/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"60,1845,119,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/wills/109678528/\" alt=\"Turning on the tightrope by Will Ellis\" coords=\"120,1845,179,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/7yearslater/458740209/\" alt=\"Saying Hi by 7 Years Later...\" coords=\"180,1845,239,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/g-hat/199486549/\" alt=\"Elephant at Addo Elephant National Park SA by Gemma Longman\" coords=\"240,1845,299,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509676028/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"300,1845,359,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jessehull/163713996/\" alt=\"Image53.jpg by Jesse Hull\" coords=\"360,1845,419,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jessehull/163710581/\" alt=\"Image22.jpg by Jesse Hull\" coords=\"420,1845,479,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/399004019/\" alt=\"DSC03286 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"480,1845,539,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964585341/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"540,1845,599,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965445142/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephants Fighting by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"600,1845,659,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396275800/\" alt=\""ah, screw it. it's too hot out here." by eric molina\" coords=\"660,1845,719,1889\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211744555/\" alt=\"Baby elephant being bottle fed milk by S B\" coords=\"0,1890,59,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/ingamun/100216962/\" alt=\"African elephant by Inga Munsinger Cotton\" coords=\"60,1890,119,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/superfem/350981259/\" alt=\"Chained elephant, Mysore Palace by Erin Pettigrew\" coords=\"120,1890,179,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/chewywong/221703553/\" alt=\"elephants by justin wong\" coords=\"180,1890,239,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/acme/404700769/\" alt=\"DSC03331 by Leon Brocard\" coords=\"240,1890,299,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/katemonkey/432185737/\" alt=\"African Bull Elephant by KateMonkey\" coords=\"300,1890,359,1934\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/parislemon/873397768/\" alt=\"Elephants in the Water by MG Siegler\" coords=\"360,1890,419,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429417273/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"420,1890,479,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/aasg/861204986/\" alt=\"Small Ellie by Angela\" coords=\"480,1890,539,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219828938/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"540,1890,599,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211744785/\" alt=\"IMG_6979 by S B\" coords=\"600,1890,659,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/383603288/\" alt=\"elephant eye by eric molina\" coords=\"660,1890,719,1934\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/415394230/\" alt=\"untitled by John Haslam\" coords=\"0,1935,59,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/171301888/\" alt=\"Elephant @ Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"60,1935,119,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/211747894/\" alt=\"Family by S B\" coords=\"120,1935,179,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/webber0075/558021974/\" alt=\"DSC_0044.JPG by huw\" coords=\"180,1935,239,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/indi/144735279/\" alt=\"Elephant Family by Indi Samarajiva\" coords=\"240,1935,299,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dameetch/614131349/\" alt=\"Dirtball Elephant by Dmitry K\" coords=\"300,1935,359,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/171310320/\" alt=\"Elephant @ Addo Elephant Park, South Africa by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"360,1935,419,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/francapicc/516286145/\" alt=\"At the Pilanesberg reserve, South Africa by jespahjoy\" coords=\"420,1935,479,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/219824276/\" alt=\"Elephants @ Kinibatang, Sabah, Malaysia by Tim Parkinson\" coords=\"480,1935,539,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/radialmonster/528683756/\" alt=\"20070602_080 by Phil Hart\" coords=\"540,1935,599,1979\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/387795223/\" alt=\"bigger elephant strutting 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394312384/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"300,1980,359,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/khutti/221887434/\" alt=\"Chang chang chang chang chang... by kHutti~dReam\" coords=\"360,1980,419,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/lizard_queen/114587853/\" alt=\"Big 5 - Elephant by TheLizardQueen\" coords=\"420,1980,479,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/fred_dela/403330856/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking by Frédéric della Faille\" coords=\"480,1980,539,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429439101/\" alt=\"Addo Elephant National Park by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"540,1980,599,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mjc/239990912/\" alt=\"Other folks on the elephant tour by Matthew Clark\" coords=\"600,1980,659,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/eismcsquare/44030072/\" alt=\"Sorry.. by Gary\" coords=\"660,1980,719,2024\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394396521/\" alt=\"Thwack!! by Chris Eason\" coords=\"0,2025,59,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/80415664@N00/120909743/\" alt=\"Elephant by Nerelle Ring\" coords=\"60,2025,119,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/majorvols/327333225/\" alt=\"elephant by majorvols\" coords=\"120,2025,179,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/240313585/\" alt=\"IMG_4369 by KevBow\" coords=\"180,2025,239,2069\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/135024146/\" alt=\"Two-way communication by Jacob Bøtter\" coords=\"240,2025,299,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396273666/\" alt=\"profile shot by eric molina\" coords=\"300,2025,359,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/kevinbowman/240303903/\" alt=\"IMG_4322 by KevBow\" coords=\"360,2025,419,2069\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/heschong/469387331/\" alt=\"Elephant by Christopher Heschong\" 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href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/965542876/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Baby and Mother by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"540,2295,599,2339\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/frank-wouters/128833553/\" alt=\"Ivoor by belgianchocolate\" coords=\"600,2295,659,2339\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/jamestemple/312324208/\" alt=\"Elephant by James Temple\" coords=\"660,2295,719,2339\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mathaywarduk/964583551/\" alt=\"Samburu National Reserve - Elephant Looking at Us by Mat Hayward\" coords=\"0,2340,59,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/natalieguinsler/933883535/\" alt=\"elephants by natalie guinsler\" coords=\"60,2340,119,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/yadav1/398915861/\" alt=\"elephants by yadev\" coords=\"120,2340,179,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/peterbecker/253119595/\" alt=\"Big fat elephant bottom by Peter Becker\" coords=\"180,2340,239,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/637992212/\" alt=\"Jamie and Baby 2 by Dylan Walters\" coords=\"240,2340,299,2384\">\n\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/exfordy/429430653/\" alt=\"File0445 by Brian Snelson\" coords=\"300,2340,359,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/iamagenious/396251770/\" alt=\"thinking "oh shit, he's starting to stand up" by eric molina\" coords=\"360,2340,419,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/mister-e/394406014/\" alt=\"Elephant by Chris Eason\" coords=\"420,2340,479,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/webber0075/558305309/\" alt=\"DSC_0045.JPG by huw\" coords=\"480,2340,539,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/teagrrl/167655457/\" alt=\"untitled by tracy ducasse\" coords=\"540,2340,599,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/509742538/\" alt=\"Elephant trekking - Koh Chang by Gaetan Lee\" coords=\"600,2340,659,2384\">\n<area href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/archangel11/216080028/\" 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"title" : "BNP Paribas: mark those miettes to market, mes braves",
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"content" : "August 1, 2007<br>"As far as the U.S. subprime crisis is concerned, BNP Paribas's exposure is absolutely negligible,''Baudouin Prot, CEO“We'll benefit from having had a particularly prudent risk policy”Georges Chodron de Courcel, COO<br><br>August 9, 2007<br><br>BNP Paribas freezes three of its negligibly exposed prudent funds due to the "complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S."
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"title" : "La Vie Sur Terre (1998) directed by Abderrahmane Sissako",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.cinemah.com/var/php04770caa.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:200px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://www.cinemah.com/var/php04770caa.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><div><a href=\"http://www.biosagenda.nl/film_image.php?ID=1976&max_w=180&max_h=1000&q=70\"></a><div><div>In Achille Mbembe’s essay, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” he engages with Braudel’s notion of temporal pluralities—that there are multiple kinds of time: “temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous deviations, the quickest being the easiest to detect” and “the exceptional character of World Time” (22). In Braudel’s thinking, world time has control over certain spaces, while others completely escape it. Mbembe relativizes Braudel’s thesis by maintaining that 1) temporalities overlap and interact with each other. They are not completely segregated. 2) There is no place completely separate from “world history,” but there are modalities, or categories in which it is manipulated to fit with local variables (23). </div><br><div><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0803066/\">Abderrahmane Sissako</a>’s 1998 film <em>Vie sur terre (Life on Earth)</em> illustrates Mbembe’s idea of temporal modalities and plays with the idea of “world time.” In the village of Sokolo, everyone knows what is going on in the outside world. In the local radio station, ancient radios are interspersed with glossy images cut from foreign magazines: including an image of a happy Prince Charles, Princes Diana, and baby Prince William frozen in time years after Diana’s divorce and death. A young man enthuses over a Japanese SUV in a magazine, and tells the photographer about the doors in Abijan that open by themselves. The young men sit all day listening to RFE radio from France, on which the millennium celebrations in New York, Paris, and Tokyo are reported. The voice on the radio says: “Not all countries have the same time, but those that do are celebrating the millennium.” This statement seems to get at the heart of the film in which global knowledge from the outside permeates the village, but in which knowledge from the village cannot be found on a larger global scale or even in the next village. One suspects that in the nearby villages similar young men listen to RFE and know world news but do not know the news of the neighboring village. </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>This is illustrated in the multiple characters who try to make phone calls but cannot get through. The dusty sign “telephone a priority for everyone” is ironic. While on the “outside” everyone may have a telephone, this is obviously not the case here, where the telephone serves as the metaphor for the “inability to speak” to the outside world. The soldier cannot get through to his camp. Nana cannot get through to a nearby town. The character played by Sissako attempts to make a phone call to Paris, but it is misdirected to London. The characters wait for people to call them back—since the telephone seems to work like the news, only in one direction. When the person from Paris gets through the disabled postmaster leaves the phone off the hook and sets off on his crutches to find Sissako. He disappears into the village, and nothing more is heard of him or of the call. Information seems to be lost in a time warp.<br></div><div>The gap in communication and time is contradicted by the visual movement of the film. Far from being a place where “nothing happens.” Sokolo is characterized by constant bi-directional movement. If communication moves soley from the outside to the inside, the daily activities of the villagers movement of the village crisscross. Throughout the film, if a bicycle or other vehicle passes from the right to the left of the frame, a canoe or a donkey cart, or another bicycle will cross from the left to the right. The visual back and forth of the film performs multiple times on a small scale, what Sissako does on a large scale with the form of the film. The initial opening in the French supermarket fades into the large tree (representative perhaps of history?), and then the old man reading the letter from Sissako in Paris. If the film opens with communication pointed toward Sekolo, The rest of the film is an outward response to this initial letter from the outside. The man dictating the letter to his brother in Paris does on a small scale what the entire form is doing: taking the news of Sokolo to the outside.<br></div><div></div><div></div><div>At the very end of the film, Nana, with a determined set to her face, pedals off on her bike, apparently to the neighboring town she has been trying to call. If she cannot get through on the phone, she will go there in person. This resolve to take herself there is what Sissako has done with the film: he has brought the village, like a letter, into the global discussions of the millennium, where its existence in time can no longer be ignored.<br><br><strong>Work cited in addition to the film:<br></strong>Mbembe, Achille. trans, Steven Rendall. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa” in <em>Globalization.</em> Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>For more information, see also this <a href=\"http://newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0101\">interview</a> with Sissako.</div></div></div>"
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"content" : "In 1998, Nigeria’s brutal dictator General Sani Abacha died in bed with two prostitutes. The exact details of his death are not common knowledge, but the rumours abound. Some say his death “by heart attack” was Vi<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/chambre.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:320px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/chambre.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>agra induced; others spin tales of the prostitutes assassinating him with a poisoned apple. The myths that surround this historical incident point to the importance of the event in the national imagination, and have inspired oblique references in quite a few creative works.<a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]</a> In “The Last Sleep” a short story by Sunday Ayewanu, several mammy water spirits disguised as foreign prostitutes overcome the evil ruler of “Benueria.” In a sexual/spiritual struggle, they insist on him giving them government contracts and leave him dead with exhaustion.<br><br>The sleaze surrounding the corrupt government of the Abacha regime and the almost spiritual nature of his fortuitous death, as imagined in Ayewanu, is what I thought of when I saw Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s striking and disturbing film <em>Les Saignantes</em>, the winner of the 2007 Silver Stallion at FESPACO film festival. Set in the year 2025, the film opens provocatively with an almost naked young woman floating over a stout elderly man.<a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]</a> Strapped into a harness, she performs acrobatic sexual maneuvers— pointing her fingers in an imitation of shooting while thrusting her pelvis into his. Although the harness might seem to indicate the servile nature of the woman, here Majolie is in complete control. The old man lies back passively, waiting for her to swoop down upon him. The next thing we know the old man is dead. Whether this is an accident—he died of heart failure and old age—or whether this is a spiritual assassination performed in her shooting position, we are never quite sur<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/pretes2.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:320px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/pretes2.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>e, but it soon becomes apparent that Majolie has on her hands the death of a high ranking government official, the SGCC, who had been going to give her a government contract before he died in flagrante. The rest of the film traces the bizarre adventures she and her friend Chouchou go through to first dispose of the body, reconstruct it, and then hold an elaborate W.I.P (Wake of Important Person) to advance their own careers<br><br><br><br>A futuristic film set in a dystopian Cameroonian city vaguely reminiscent of the dystopian Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s classic <em>BladeRunner</em>, <em>Les Saignantes</em> is shot in high contras<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/rokko%20mamba.tif.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 10px 10px;WIDTH:320px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/rokko%20mamba.tif.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>t lighting in what seems to be one long continuous night. The throbbing bass soundtrack of the film underscores the pulse of its rapid, jump-cut, music-video style editing. The characterization of the future city is a pessimistic allegory of the contemporary nation in Africa. By the year 2025, nothing has progressed; rather the country is still ruled by abusive power-drunk leaders who promise contracts to their mistresses; the police still take bribes and have no authority to actually investigate the crimes of the rich and powerful. Near the end of the film the smooth woman’s voiceover, which has performed the narrator’s function throughout the film, intones “We were already dead.” Re-watching the film with these words in mind, one wonders if the film, set a few years ahead in the future in 2025, is not the portrait of the spiritual aftermath of nation that has already died.<br><br>The entire culture seems to revolve around rituals of death. The W.I.P.’s become the ceremonies where political con<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/pretresses.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:320px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/pretresses.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>nections are made. At an elegant cocktail party or at home with Chouchou’s mother, the sophisticated revelers munch distractedly on maggots and drink what looks like radio-active embalming liquid from giant martini glasses. The mysterious women with their uniform of red headscarves, who cluster around Chouchou’s mother, flicker in and out like ghosts. The narrator makes it ambiguous whether any of the women in the film are spirits or ghosts, dead or alive. With the mysterious force mevoungou, referenced throughout the film, there seems to be little differentiation between the two.<br><br>Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye argues in <em>Tradition and Modernity</em> that “[t]he conception of modernity may give the impression that modernity represents a break with tradition and is thus irreconcilable with it; such an impression would clearly be false. For one thing, every society in the modern world has many traditional elements inherited and accepted from previous, that is ‘premodern’, generations…” (Gyekye 271). While Gyekye’s conception of modernity is optimistic, Bekolo seems to invoke death to illustrate the end results of a corrupted modernity. He visualizes the “mammy water” universe of “tradition,” in which the spiritual is inextricably tangled up in the tangible. Mevoungou the mystical power that controls the bodies of the young women after the death of the SGCC is a kind of lifeblood that lies at the heart of the society and which seems to provide the only hope for a “resurrection.”<a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftn3\" name=\"_ftnref3\">[3]</a><br><br><div><br><div><div>Given, Bekolo’s fascination with the process of filmmaking itself, I couldn’t help wondering if his portrayal of witchcraft and mevoungou does not have something to do with the medium of film.<a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftn4\" name=\"_ftnref4\">[4]</a> The film opens, like so many other African films, with a voiceover reminiscent of an oral storyteller and is then interspersed with chapter captions: metaquestions about the possibility of filmmaking in postcolonial Cameroon: 1) How do you make an anticipation (futuristic/science fiction) film in a country with no future? 2) How can you make a film in a country where acting is subversive? 3) How can you make a horror film in a place where death is the party? 4) How can you film a love story, in a place where love is impossible? 5) How can you make a crime film where investigation is forbidden? 6) How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards? After the opening chapter heading, almost half of the film passes before the second chapter comes, but the rest follow in a rapid succession, pounding home the point. If none of these tidy European genres (Science fiction, Horror, Romance, Crime/Investigation) can capture the paradoxes of postcolonial Cameroon, Bekolo indicates that he will create an uneasy amalgam of them all. His refusal to follow the “rules” of filmmaking, which has alarmed so many Western critics, indicates the subversive potential available to those who wield the camera.<a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftn5\" name=\"_ftnref5\">[5]</a> </div><br><div><em>Les Saignantes</em> references the grotesque humour of Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood horror films in the cliché of the chain-saw wielding cannibal, as well as the excesses of postmodern Hollywood cross-genre films (one of the pin-up posters in Chouchou’s bedroom is of Baz Luhrmann’s <em>Moulin Rouge</em>), but he also draws on African orality and urban-legend so often captured in Nollywood videos: government officials who use witchcraft to reinforce their corrupt power. Mevoungou used as a counter-witchcraft against the patriarchal order in <em>Les Saignantes</em>, works similarly to the sorceress’s sex-changing challenge to the patriarchy in Bekolo’s first film <em>Quartier Mozart</em>. Filmma<a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/essomba%20fumee%20pere.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 10px 10px;WIDTH:320px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2607/732/1600/essomba%20fumee%20pere.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>king, Bekolo implies, like mevoungou allows one to 1) expose the decay at the heart of power in the postcolonial nation and 2) to imaginatively overcome the powerful and corrupt leaders of the nation, using the subaltern figure of the young woman. As the girls prepare for the W.I.P., one of them expresses her fear that their plan will fail: “what if it doesn’t work? We’re just two holes that get screwed in the end.” However, if the postcolonial nation is often represented as a woman raped by the military, if in a crime-ridden urban environment, young women find that they are most often exploited for their sexuality, Majolie and Chouchou turn this symbol of the exploitation of women, their sexuality, into a weapon with which to destroy the powerful minister of state. Mevoungou becomes a potent source of agency and of imagination. As the camera lingers on dark city streets, the final few sentences of the woman’s voiceover clinch the parallel between the witchcraft and filmmaking: “It was mevoungou dancing, dreaming. Mevoungou danced, dreamed in technicolour. We were living in 2025, children behaving as if we had no parents, no children. We had to move on. The country could not continue like that. We had to change” </div><br><br><div>Read through the metaquestions that structure the nonlinear narrative, Bekolo’s film can be interpreted as a call to action. As the gigantic moon sinks behind trees, the final chapter caption emerges: “How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards?” The tangled plot recedes leaving his questions in relief. This is not merely a pessimistic vision of the future but an indication of imaginative possibilities opened up through the medium of film.<br><br></div><br><div>NOTES</div><div></div><div>For a trailer of the film see <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRK-Nb0_Mp0\">this you tube clip</a>:</div><br><div></div><br><div><a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]</a>Nigerian novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in <em>Purple Hibiscus</em> and Helon Habila in <em>Waiting for an Angel</em> both subtly reimagine what Christopher Okonkwo calls the “woman-implicated death” of Sani Abacha. Okonkwo notes that Beatrice’s poisoning of the abusive and authoritarian Eugene in <em>Purple Hibiscus</em> re-enacts Abacha’s death. I argue in my MA thesis on <em>Waiting for an Angel </em>that the mob of women who break down the billboard with a smug condom-wielding man foreshadows Abacha’s death that occurs on the margins of the narrative.<br><a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">[2]</a> The costume that Majolie wears in this scene is visually reminiscent of the famous metal bikini Princess Leia wears in George Lucas’s classic science fiction film <em>Return of the Jedi.</em> The intertextual link here is significant in that Princess Leia is also involved in a struggle against corrupt male-dominated government structures.<br><a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftnref3\" name=\"_ftn3\">[3]</a> Chouchou’s mother and the women in her house who appear and reappear on beat visually echo the witches in Bekolo’s earlier film <em>Quartier Mozart</em>. In <em>Quartier Mozart</em> the neighborhood witch and a young girl named Queen of the Hood change sexes to infiltrate the world of men and expose hidden corruptions at the heart of the patriarchy/nation, represented by the policeman MadDog.<br><a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftnref4\" name=\"_ftn4\">[4]</a> My word choice here is intentional. The definition of the medium as a person through which a spirit is channeled and the medium as the material out of which art is created seem to be conflated in <em>Les Saignantes</em>.<br><a title=\"\" href=\"http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7697839995138385673#_ftnref5\" name=\"_ftn5\">[5]</a> In a quick survey of film reviews on blogs, most of the ones I found were overwhelmingly negative--much of the criticism centred around Bekolo’s assumed inability to follow the rules of filmmaking: <a href=\"http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003429.html\">http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003429.html</a>, <a href=\"http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_les_saignantes.html\">http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_les_saignantes.html</a>, <a href=\"http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/les_saignantes_at_tiff/\">http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/les_saignantes_at_tiff/</a></div><br><div></div><br><br><div>Works Cited:</div><br><br><div>Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. <em>Purple Hibiscus</em>. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003</div><br><div>Ayawanu, Sunday. “The Last Sleep.” <em>Cramped Rooms and Open Spaces: An Anthology of New Short Fiction from the Association of Nigerian Authors</em>. Ed. Ibrahim Sheme. Lagos: Nayee Press, 1999. 16-28.</div><br><div>Bekolo, Jeanne-Pierre, dir. <em>Les Saignantes</em>. Quartier Mozart Films, 2005.</div><br><div>_____________________. <em>Quartier Mozart</em>. 1992.</div><br><div>Gyekye, Kwame. <em>Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience.</em> New York: Oxford UP, 1997.</div><br><div></div><div>Habila, Helon. <em>Waiting for an Angel.</em> New York: Norton, 2003.</div><br><div>Lucas, George, dir. <em>Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi.</em> 1983.</div><br><div></div><div>Lurmann, Baz, dir. <em>Moulin Rouge</em>. 2001.</div><br><div>Okonkwo, Christopher N. “Talking and Te(x)stifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post-War Nadir: 1984-1998” presented at ASA Conference 2005, Washington D.C. 17 November 2005.</div><br><div></div><div>Scott, Ridley, dir. <em>Bladerunner.</em> 1982.</div><br><div></div><br><div>Photo Credits: All from <a href=\"http://quartiermozart.blogspot.com/\">Bekolo Films.</a></div></div></div>"
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"content" : "<p>It's time for this year's <a href=\"http://www.blackweblogawards.com\">Black Weblog Awards</a>! Vote carefully, thoughtfully and without any attachment to an outcome, and you might learn something and find a few new folks to add to your own list of regularly read sites. (See any good ones? Pass them along, please.) The best part of blogging is not about glory or gain, but knowing your own mind more truthfully over time, not to mention deepening worthwhile connections and forging new and fruitful ones.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, back in my browser?</p>\n\n<p>Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed article <a href=\"http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/ap\">\"Should AP Add African-American History?\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Jose Antonio Vargas' Washington Post article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501580_pf.html\">\"A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators: At the Yearly Kos Bloggers' Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Tom Zucco's Tampabay.com article <a href=\"http://www.sptimes.com/2007/08/05/Business/When_all_the_banks_sa.shtml\">\"When all the banks say no: Many African-American business owners are underserved by banks. That's where the Black Business Investment Corp. steps in\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Jim Galloway's Atlanta Journal-Constitution article <a href=\"http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/stories/2007/08/05/SCLCpolitics_0805.html\">\" Candidates duel over Georgia's black votes\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Casey Lartigue Jr. and Eliot Morgan's Washington Post op-ed essay <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR2007080201751.html\">\"Talk Radio Can't Handle the Truth\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Dionne Walker's Associated Press (via Washington Post) article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/04/AR2007080400835_pf.html\">\"More Black Women Consider 'Dating Out'\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Susan McCord's Albany Herald article <a href=\"http://www.albanyherald.com/stories/20070804n1.htm\">\"Minority buying power up: Black buying power nearly doubled in the Albany area since 1990\"</a></p>\n\n<p>DeNeen L. Brown's Washington Post article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/03/AR2007080302212.html\">\"A Filmmaker's Attempt To Peel Off the Labels: 'What Black Men Think' Tackles Stereotypes\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Gregory Stanford's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel column <a href=\"http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=642337\">\"Empathy needed for immigrants\"</a></p>\n\n<p>NPR's News and Notes clip <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12447450\">\"Inside the Black Literary Imagination\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Vanessa E. Jones' Boston Globe article <a href=\"http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/07/31/race_the_final_frontier/?page=full\">\"Race, the final frontier: Black science-fiction writers bring a unique perspective to the genre\"</a></p>\n\n<p>GateHouse News Service's Somerville Journal story <a href=\"http://www.townonline.com/somerville/homepage/x1663147743\">\"Tufts mourns passing of Gerald R. Gill, historian of Boston’s Civil Rights movement\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Eve Conant's Newsweek article <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20072722/site/newsweek/\">\"Black and White: A new study finds that blacks who kill whites are more likely to face execution\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Jennifer Parker and Lindsey Ellerson's ABC News article <a href=\"http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Decision2008/story?id=3441976&page=1\">\"<br>\nStrategist Says Blacks Are Obama's 'Base': Top Strategist Says Obama Alone Can Mobilize Democratic Black Voters\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Talea Miller's Online NewsHour article <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/july-dec07/blacks_08-02.html\">\"Iraq War Impacts Enrollment of Blacks in Military\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Monica Davis' Kansas City InfoZine article <a href=\"http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/24221/\">\"No Land, No Power for African-American Farmers in the United States\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Deirdre Williams' Buffalo News article <a href=\"http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/132332.html\">\"Obama’s candidacy sparks mixed views in Western New York's African-American community\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Carly Zakin's NBC News article <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20041755/\">\"Michelle Obama plays unique role in campaign: Not an adviser, she openly mocks her husband on the stump\"</a></p>\n\n<p>The mighty-might J. Douglas Allen-Taylor's Berkeley Daily Planet article <a href=\"http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=07-31-07&storyID=27651\">\" NPR Initiative Coming to East Bay to Collect Historical African American Stories\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Patti Bond's Atlanta Journal-Constitution article <a href=\"http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/2007/07/31/blackbuying0731.html\">\"Georgia's black consumer market booms\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Sue Schultz's Baltimore Business Journal article <a href=\"http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2007/07/30/daily5.html\">\"Afro-American to open newspaper archive with aid of grant\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001270.html\">\"Obama and the 'They' Sayers\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Kevin Boyle's Washington Post op-ed essay <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072701672.html\">\"The Fire Last Time: 40 Years Later, the Urban Crisis Still Smolders\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Scott Eyman's Palm Beach Post article <a href=\"http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/entertainment/arts_entertainment/epaper/2007/07/29/a1j_feabook_bookstores_0729.html\">\"The keepers of black culture: For two African-American bookstore owners, their specialty shops are more than just a business. They are an expression of pride, history and identity\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Afi-Odelia Scruggs' Washington Post essay <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072701673_pf.html\">\"What Kind of Black Are We?\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Sharon Mizota's special to the Los Angeles Times <a href=\"http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-gaines29jul29,0,3918652.story?coll=cl-art-features\">\"For Charles Gaines, crisis is clarity: In probing disaster, the artist reveals the nature of human truth\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Alec MacGillis and Perry Bacon Jr.'s Washington Post article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072702455.html\">\"Obama Rises in New Era Of Black Politicians: Most Have Similar Résumés, Ideology\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Nikita Stewart's Washington Post article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072700004.html\">\"D.C. Official Proposes Black Caucus\"</a></p>\n <p>\n <a href=\"http://www.negrophile.com/type/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1672\">TrackBack (0)</a> |</p>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/wp-content/photos/coffin480.jpg\" alt=\"a coffin on a car roof\"></p>\n<p>There are some fine old hearses doing the rounds here - great hulking things with red beacons on the roof. But sometimes there aren’t enough of them to go round, or perhaps the asking price is too high, and it’s time to <a href=\"http://cedric.uing.net/1802/page_d_accueil.html?b_st=0&b_d=20070319&b_cd=20070303&b_m=&b_u=&b_pi=0&b_k=0&b_s=&b_o=DESC\" title=\"Cedric documents hard times, back in March\"><em>se debrouiller</em></a> (manage somehow).\n</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=l7F8cIw8\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=l7F8cIw8\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=abwrXPR4\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=abwrXPR4\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=Dqvj01Dp\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=Dqvj01Dp\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/extra-extra/~4/146862529\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Antonioni and Bergman Bite the Dust",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RrHqV_uTFAI/AAAAAAAAAKc/uSFTx32R0PY/s1600-h/blow-up.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RrHqV_uTFAI/AAAAAAAAAKc/uSFTx32R0PY/s320/blow-up.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>Obituaries for film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and <a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070730/ap_on_en_mo/obit_bergman\">Ingmar</a> <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073000291.html\">Bergman</a> hailed them as cinematic giants. <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/movies/30cnd-bergman.html?ex=1343534400&en=ace26e6dab6f9b02&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink\">Bergman</a> was called \"probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera\" who brought \"metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen.\" <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/movies/01antonioni.html?ex=1343620800&en=5232998f27e0cb4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">Antonioni</a>, we were told, \"challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for conventions like plot, pacing and clarity.\" Both of them \"rose to prominence at a time, in midcentury, when filmgoing was an intellectual pursuit.\" But times have changed and some critics have refused to toe the party line. After decades of being terrified into silence by liberal movie snobs who haunted cafés and cocktail parties ready to pounce on anyone who said that the latest art film was boring or incomprehensible, some brave souls have begun to speak out, unafraid of being labeled ignorant <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/08/beyond-embarassment.html\">philistines</a>.<br><br>\"Only hours after Ingmar Bergman's death was announced, his fellow existentialist filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died,\" wrote <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2I0MjAzMTZmZmZkYjg3OTlmZjMwMzU5YWJkMmFlZGI=\">John Podhoretz</a> on The Corner. \"Kind of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, if you think bummer movie directors are analogous to the Founding Fathers.\" Ding dong, the bummer movie directors are dead, Podhoretz proclaimed to the cheers of intellectual munchkins everywhere.<br><br>In a piece for the <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">New York Post</span> he <a href=\"http://www.nypost.com/seven/07312007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/death__the_director_opedcolumnists_john_podhoretz.htm\">savaged</a> Bergman for making films that were just too hard to understand and no fun at all. \"Not so long ago, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most celebrated and famous men in the world -- the recipient of universal praise for having transformed the corrupt young medium of the movies into a vehicle for difficult, punishing, sobering, existentialist high art,\" <a href=\"http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2007/08/good-old-boys.html\">wrote</a> <a href=\"http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2007/07/podhoretz_vs_be.php\">Podhoretz</a>. \"Art, in this view, wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities.\"<br><br>It's bad enough that so many of his films were in black and white and had subtitles, they were depressing, too. Taking a brave stand in favor of easy, pleasurable films Podhoretz declared, \"You can only tell people to sit down and eat their spinach for so long,\" no doubt hearkening back to that life-changing moment in his childhood when he threw his bowl of spinach on the floor and demanded that his mother, Midge Decter, give him some ice cream instead.<br><br>Jack Warner once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them and Podhoretz has been judging movies by his ass for years. Antonioni's <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjlkZTQ5MWU3YTRlOTgxNzI0MWRkNzVmMWNiNTI1YTU=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">L'Avventura</span></a> is \"disastrous fare,\" he says. <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTE5NmRjZTZhZDZlODgzOTA1ZjNjMjIxODQwNWYzZTE=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">West Side Story</span></a> is \"an unintentional laff riot.\" (Only elitists spell words correctly.) <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWY5NDZlYzQyMDM3ZmM5M2EwZDk0OGJkMGFmMjI2ZTQ=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Raging Bull</span></a> is \"the most unpleasant American movie\" and \"torture to sit through.\" <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWY5NDZlYzQyMDM3ZmM5M2EwZDk0OGJkMGFmMjI2ZTQ=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Vertigo</span></a> is \"silly.\" <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjExNzZjZWU2NTIyYjEwMWJhZjIxM2IyZDE4ZmUyNmU=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Searchers</span></a> is \"a turgid, wooden, boring and weird movie.\" <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTE5NmRjZTZhZDZlODgzOTA1ZjNjMjIxODQwNWYzZTE=\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">2001: A Space Odyssey</span></a> is \"a crashing bore.\" On the other hand Podhoretz is a big fan of <a style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\" href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWNlYjliODZlNzgyNzVkOWQ5MDBkZTBhNTgyZjBhOTI=\">Road House</a>, <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/05/toady.html\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Phantom Menace</span></a> and <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/05/whatta-card.html\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Cinderella Man</span></a>.<br>.<br>Podhoretz is not the only film critic inspired by Jack Warner's critical method, which we might call <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Derrièrism</span>, since most critical theories have French names for some reason. The deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have given Derrièrism a shot in the arm, or a shot somewhere anyway.<br><br>Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult. They don't see the need for new narrative structures when the old ones work just fine. They believe that films should be as literal and clear as the Bible. They are tired of movies that always focus on the bad news the way the media always focuses on the bad news from Iraq. And they prefer clearly resolved, preferably happy, endings.<br><br><a href=\"http://nehring.blogspot.com/2007/06/blowup-1966.html\">Nehring the Edge</a> gives us a perfect example Derrièrism with his very succinct review of Antonioni's <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Blow-Up</span>: \"This is candy for film geeks and crud for everyone else. The average viewer will probably find Michelangelo Antonioni's groundbreaking film to be pompus, confusing and maybe a tad stupid. If you're the kind of person who would find this film interesting, you're probably the kind of person who would have already of tracked it down and watched it. If you're a normal person, skip this one.\" Normal people should not even subject themselves to a film like <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Blow-Up</span>, lest they be confused by its enigmatic themes.<br><br>Although Ann Althouse cried for, like, minutes when <a href=\"http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/07/ingmar-bergman-has-died.html\">Bergman</a> died, she had a very Derrièrist reaction to <a href=\"http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/07/in-empty-silent-spaces-of-world-he-has.html\">Antonioni</a>. <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Blow-Up</span>, affected her because it was the first movie she had ever seen that featured actors \"naked and having sex,\" but she never quite made it to the end of the DVD of <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">L'Avventura</span> and she only liked a scene that Pauline Kael exulted over in <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Passenger</span> \"because it meant that the movie would soon be over.\" Michael Medved, perhaps our greatest living Derrièrist critic, listed <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Zabriskie Point</span> as one of the 50 Worst Films of All Time. His protégé <a href=\"http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/?p=5986\">Jason Apuzzo</a>, whose website Libertas is dedicated to exposing the liberal Hollywood agenda, was not a big fan of Antonioni but did think he made Monica Vitti look sexy (perhaps that critical judgment belongs to a school that deserves the name of another <a href=\"http://www.whytraveltofrance.com/?p=652\">body part</a> translated into French.)<br><br>To <a href=\"http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2003/11/tt_up_there_on_a_visit.html\">Terry Teachout</a> Bergman films were once a good way to impress a date but have long outlived their usefulness. \"Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn't Hollywood,\" he wrote in 2003. \"Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn't cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen's ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who've never seen any of his work.\" Now that he is older, and his ass has grown more sensitive, Teachout knows better. \"<span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Wild Strawberries</span> is a beautiful movie -- one that knows how beautiful it is, and wants you to know, too. The older I get, the less readily I warm to that kind of art, be it film, painting, music, the novel, or what have you.\"<br><br>Coincidentally, the week Antonioni and <a href=\"http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2007/07/ingmar-bergman-1918-2007.html\">Bergman</a> died, online film critics released a list of their <a href=\"http://www.cinemafusion.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/the_online_film_communitys_top_100_movies/\">100 top films</a>, which included only 11 subtitled films (only one of which made it into the Top 20) and two films each in the Top Ten by Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. Missing from the list were <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light</span> and <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Persona</span>. Nor did the list include <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">L'Avventura, <a href=\"http://www.idyllopuspress.com/meanwhile/?p=924\">Blow-Up</a>, L'Eclisse, La Notte or Red Desert</span>. In fact, not a single <a href=\"http://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2006/07/ingmar-bergman-1918-2007.html\">Bergman</a> or Antonioni film were anywhere to be found. And anyone looking for the films of such tedious, long-winded foreign directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, F.W. Murnau, Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray or Kenji Mizoguchi would have to look to the snooty <a href=\"http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/critics-long.html\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Sight and Sound</span></a> poll for satisfaction. It is a list that is steeped in Derrièrism.<br><br>There are still some hold-outs who resist the onslaught of <a href=\"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2176098.ece?openComment=true\">Derrièrism</a> like Japanese soldiers hiding on islands who don't realize the war is over. <a href=\"http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/08/eclipse-losing-bergman-and-antonioni.html\">Dan Callahan</a> laments the \"pop mindset that rules today\" and inadvertently reveals the liberal agenda behind the adulation heaped on Antonioni and Bergman by some critics. \"More than one commentator has termed their mid-twentieth century, fearing-the-atom-bomb, discuss-our-alienation-over-black-coffee-later modernism as \"'quaint,'\" he writes. \"We live in a period where some of those in power have termed the central tenets of the Geneva Conventions 'quaint.' Can the term 'elitist' be far behind?\" <a href=\"http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/07/ingmar-bergman.html\">Robert Stein</a> says that Bergman's films were full of \"ideas,\" as if this were a good thing. \"You might feel drained after the movie, you might never want to watch another Bergman for ten years, if ever, but you don’t feel you’ve been talked down to,\" writes <a href=\"http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/07/31/bergman-the-last-of-the-great-ones/\">Dan Leo</a> at New Critics. \"You haven’t been lied to.\"<br><br>The Rightwing Film Geek, <a href=\"http://cinecon.blogspot.com/2007/08/michelangelo-antonioni-1912-2007.html\">Victor Morton</a>, who calls Podhoretz a \"twit,\" also resists the triumph of Derrièrism. \"I don't think sneering 'over-rated' is very productive,\" he says. Although he confesses that Antonioni is not a \"personal favorite\" of his, he nevertheless has subjected himself to watching his films anyway. \"Rather than sneer,\" he suggests oddly. \"Why not consider that this is a blind spot of yours and a personal shortcoming.\" At the end of his post he reveals that after seeing Antonioni's <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Passenger</span> recently, something \"clicked,\" but regrettably, it wasn't his revolver upon hearing the word \"culture.\" \"I made a mental note to give his other films a fresh look in light of <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Passenger</span>,\" he writes. \"In fact, now we all have more reason than ever to do so.\" Morton may already be too far gone, but imagine if more <a href=\"http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2007/08/post_10.html\">young</a> film critics got off their asses and actually saw <a href=\"http://d-day.blogspot.com/2007/07/kante-de-durst-not-kante-de-dur.html\">Bergman</a>'s and <a href=\"http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni.html\">Antonioni</a>'s films and made some effort to appreciate them. Fortunately, that isn't likely to happen.<br><br><strong><em>Update:</em></strong> Mr Podhoretz responds via email: \"Let me say, after close consideration of your deep critical faculties, that you're a dope.\"<br><br><em>Crossposted at </em><a href=\"http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/08/03/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-the-dust/\"><em>New Critics</em> </a><br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-dust.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-dust.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" 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Althouse</a>, <a href=\"http://nehring.blogspot.com/2007/08/carnival-of-cinema-episode-xxxxii.html\">The Carnival of Cinema: Episode XXXXII</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/wp-content/photos/fashion480.jpg\" alt=\"two faces look in through a window\"><br>\n<small>Roll up, roll up! Mundele visits tailor’s workshop!</small></p>\n<p>Expats who venture beyond their habitual haunts tend to attract a lot of attention. Yesterday I visited a tailor (<em>couturieur</em>) whose workshop is a converted shipping container with chipboard walls decorated with myriad chalked measurements and an array of colourful bolts of cloth. Within minutes, the place was full of curious onlookers who took turns to interview me on all aspects of my life.</p>\n<p>This sort of thing can be bothersome for those who prefer to be left alone, but it’s much more fun for everyone if you play along and engage in a bit of repartee.\n</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=TSGSUmKx\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=TSGSUmKx\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=JfcRMtBz\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=JfcRMtBz\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=10gnBFE0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=10gnBFE0\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/extra-extra/~4/146862530\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"content" : "<p>I’ve been toying with a short story of this title for years, ever since hearing – or thinking I heard – a Radio 3 announcer say, with predictably risible stuffiness: ‘During the winter of 1772, Haydn, then resident in London, found himself unable to compose, so troubled was he by a nasal polyp…’. There was something about the notion of Haydn’s nasal polyp – rather like Flaubert’s parrot, or Lenin’s brain, or Churchill’s black dog – that seemed almost purpose-built for a story title. Not that I really wanted to write anything serious about Haydn: this was going to be more a piss-take of that particular strain in contemporary letters, perhaps exemplified by the titles above, that seeks out profundity by yoking a mundane, or curious, thing – parrot, brain, polyp – to a<br>\ngreat name.</p>\n<p>My story (I’m definitely going to write it) will focus on the effects of the polyp on Haydn’s sense of his own musicality. I think it will revisit some of the torments I visited on Simon Dykes in my story Chest (collected in Grey Area). Anyway, I wrote it on a Post-it note, this title, and stuck it on my wall, as is my wont. It’s now been there for years, unremarked on by anyone until Ian Rankin came to film a short interview with me for a documentary he’d been making on Stephenson’s Dr Jekyll &<br>\nMr Hyde. </p>\n<p>On seeing the projected short-story title, Rankin expostulated: ‘Haydn’s nasal polyp! That’s uncanny! Why have you got it written up on your wall?’ I explained, and he told me in turn that he and his crew had just been to the Hunterian Museum (named after the celebrated anatomist and surgeon, John Hunter), where they had been told the story of Haydn’s nasal polyp by the curator. For, it transpired, Hunter, as well as being the real-life model for Dr Jekyll, was also called upon to operate on the offending polyp.</p>\n<p>I offer this to you all as an example of the merest literary coincidence.</p>"
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"content" : "<p>I’ve thought and read about cities for decades so it is extremely cool to encounter a new idea. I’m currently on vacation in Ithaca NY, and before hand I wandered into the Architecture library at work to pick up a book about the Finger Lakes region. That book was a disappointment, but nearby was a big thick book confidently called City about New Haven Connecticut and as is my wont I picked it up too. <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/City-Urbanism-Institution-Social-Policy/dp/0300107749\">City: Urbanism and Its End</a> by Douglas Rae adds two new, to me, pieces to the puzzle of what happened to the American cities.</p>\n<p>My father used to tell a story about a scholarly study of what climate is most suited to civilization. The scholars plotted latitude of the great civilizations down through the ages. Fitting a curve to their data they showed conclusively that the current optimal location of a civilization was New Haven Connecticut. Needless to say the scholars were at Yale. I grabbed the book in the hope it would turn out my father’s story wasn’t entirely tongue and cheek.</p>\n<p>Geography does shape civilizations of course. The presumption that Yankee thrift and innovation is a consequence of the Puritan culture, to take a common example, is thrown into question by the story of how the Puritans who migrated to Central America at the same time ended up being slave owning oligarchs. In that case the distinguishing factor appears to be labor availability. In New England labor was dear, land wasn’t; while in the Central America it was the other way around. Dear and innovation go hand and hand.</p>\n<p>The thesis of “City: Urbanism and Its End,” beautifully and delicately presented in the first chapter, states that cities, like New Haven, made sense as a coordinating device only for a short period, less than a century. It’s conventional to say that the automobile killed the center cities and in models of that kind the primary driver of how concentrated our settlements are is the transportation system used to glue them together. Old cities in Italy have narrow streets because they were used on foot while modern urban spaces care more about tractor-trailers than tricycles.</p>\n<p>The usual complement to the transportation based models of city concentration are ones about endowment. First there were the natural endowments, a good and defensible harbor or along an existing trade route for example early London or New York’s are examples of that. Later cities became their own endowment; aggregating social networks, capital, functional governance, etc. etc. San Jose, and Silicon Value, is a modern example and Venice or Amsterdam a older one. This model of cities as aggregating increasing returns in their endowments is my preferred model for what shapes the concentration of populations into cities; in part because it seems to fit well the power-law distribution of city sizes.</p>\n<p>In the years prior to the rise of cities like New Haven the population was concentrating into what he calls Fall Line Cities, i.e. cities build along a river that was rapidly descending so as to take advantage of water power. Labor, capital, expertise, the whole complex knot needed to make industrialism work, had to migrated to the power source. That changed with the advent of steam power, railroads, coal, etc.</p>\n<p>So that’s new to me. Energy was no longer dear, or at least no longer immovable,it could no longer command all the other elements of the party to show up where ever it happened to be. Once energy stopped being the key endowment other factors became the hard thing coordinate. The city became the party. One consequence of that insight is to wake up to the key role that electricity plays in blowing apart the 20th century central city. It is, possibly, just a critical to the story as the automobile. Before electricity you wanted to be near a rail or flat water to get your coal, to run your steam engines. This reminded me of another of my father’s stories. He had a friend who started a company making fiber optics, and that factory was carefully sited to be adjacent to a high tension power line near a small New England town with a concentration of optics expertise.</p>\n<p>But there is yet another part to the story that is new to me. Some years ago I was shocked to watch how real estate interests in Massachusetts were able to override the governance of the states principle cities using a statewide proposition. Rae highlights how cities are seriously handicapped in the US by how their governance is structured. In 1907 the Supreme Court wrote: “The State .. at its pleasure may modify or withdraw all [city] powers, may take without compensation [city] property, hold it itself, or vest it in other agencies, expand or contract the territorial area, unit the whole or a part of it with another municipality, repeal the charter and destroy the corporation. All this maybe done, conditionally or unconditionally, with or without the consent o the citizens, or even against their protest. In all these respects the State is supreme.”</p>\n<p>That’s why, for example, suburban and rural voters could pass a referendum over the objections of city dwellers in Massachusetts. That’s why New York city can’t get it’s hands on a <a href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2007/07/09/new-york-states-mind-boggling-economic-irrationality\">half a Billion dollars from the feds</a> for congestion pricing without sharing a large portion of the money with the rest of New York state. Why New York is attacked by terrorists and we send money not to cities but to states where it buys toys for rural police departments rather than improved harbor security. It’s why when the automobile began to undermine the numerous endowments that cities has accumulated they had such a hard time fighting back; and it goes a long way toward explaining why European cities were more successful in tempering the displacement of those endowments.</p>\n<p>Of all the endowments cities have the diversity and richness their social and knowledge networks are the ones I find most fascinating. My father’s friend needed electricity and a pool of optics expertise he could draw upon. I’ve thought that eBay and Google couldn’t have happened in any other situation; they desperately needed the pool of expertise that only the bay area could provide. These endowments are the ones that Jane Jacob’s emphasises in her works. By the time she was writing cities were created innovation but as firms grew they threw their factories out into the periphery. Just as Apple manufactures in Taiwan, or Google puts it’s servers next to hydroelectric plants. It is, just possible, that the Internet will displace these social/knowledge endowment as well. While I don’t know how that will play out for cities what I do know is that it’s harder than it looks replicating those in on the fabric provided by the net.\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p>Michael Froomkin’s musing that toll collector might be the <a href=\"http://www.discourse.net/archives/2007/07/what_is_your_nightmare_job.html\">worst job</a> has lead to some to be <a href=\"http://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/19/worst-job-ever/\">less than amused</a> but, yeah; I was amused for the self centered reason that I’ve thought a lot about toll collecting. You see my favorite business model is the two sided network, i.e. a hub that coordinates the transaction traffic between two groups and for the longest time my preferred visualization for this model is as a bridge between the two populations. The toll taking funds the owner’s house on the beach. These are very profitable businesses that are very hard to create. They are like the old and foolish idea of selling to China where in you fantasize making a vast sum of money by charging a vast population a tiny tiny amount of money. Businesses like this are easy to find, because they have to touch vast populations, but they are very hard to build because you have to coordinate the millions, or billions, of transactions. Not just get those transactions to take place, you have to charge a toll on each one.</p>\n<p>I love the saying the economics takes as it’s area of interest solved political problems, e.g. that each simple economic transaction marks a solution to some political problem. Of course every transaction is a political act. My choice where to buy Harry Potter is a vote in a political negotiation about the nature of modern retailing; the currency system I use, the store I select, the discounts (bribes) I garner, etc. etc. all fold into that politics. I suspect, for example, that the average cost to merchants of credit card transactions is around 5-7% of the transaction. Contrasting that to the total tax burden it seems like a very high cost for an alternate currency system. The regulatory framework around that, for example the bankruptcy rules, are of course a part of negotiating those taxes; a political problem. We have, depending upon our mood, various names for the processes that frame the politics of these negotiations about how to coordinate the transactions and who gets to collect the tolls if any. We can call it creative destruction, entrepreneurship, institution building, politics, revolution, etc. etc.</p>\n<p>Sometimes we even call it <a href=\"http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/07/10/the_internets_output_is_data_but_its_product_is_freedom.php\">freedom</a> not so much because each time you succeed in creating a new high volume widely used from of exchange you create a bloom of new options for fun things in it’s penumbra; but because often the new institutional framework routes around an existing system’s constraints. It maybe the relaxing of constraints that creates the sense of freedom more than the bloom of fresh options. (I think there is something in that which is related to Clay’s recent point about “<a href=\"http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/06/16/the_future_belongs_to_those_who_take_the_present_for_granted_a_return_to_fred_wilsons_age_question.php\">taking for granted</a>“; e.g. that those freed have a hard time taking full advantage of the fresh option space because their muscles are somehow stiff; but I’m not clear exactly what.)</p>\n<p>In the folk tale I recall the ferryman tricks one of his passengers into taking over his job. I have a few fluffy theories as to why that is. The toll collector is not the owner of the hub; he’s just a cog in the machine. In fact the hub owner would prefer that he never gum up the works. Heaven forbid that he should enter add complexity to the transaction. The toll taking is added complexity already the owner would prefer that tax be as invisible as possible.</p>\n<p>There are two other reasons though; that extend beyond just the toll taker and effect the hub owner. The owner of a successful hub has a captured something of a monopoly; what a military man might call a high value target. Keeping everything running smoothly is tough work. Meanwhile each of those travelers passing over the ferry are going someplace, doing something, they are on holiday, going to town, moving on. They are free. He is not; he’s got a job to do.</p>\n<p>Delegating to the toll booth collector the tedium is all well and good; but after a bit the toll booth collector has the worst of all perspectives. He sits in the center of a monopoly touching each coin of the monopoly rents but keeping none of it while watching all the happy travelers exercising the options created enabled by the solution to the coordination problem in which he can not share. No wonder, after a while, the begins to fantasize trading places with one of the travelers.</p>\n<p>Delightfully, in <a href=\"http://www.4literature.net/Jacob_and_Wilhelm_Grimm/Devil_s_Three_Gold_Hairs\">the folktale</a> the ferryman finally manages to foist the gig off on the king.\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p>Exhibit 1: <a title=\"InfoQ: Using ETags to Reduce Bandwith & Workload with Spring & Hibernate\" href=\"http://www.infoq.com/articles/etags\">Wads and Wads about using ETags to reduce bandwith and workload with Spring and Hibernate</a>. Too much to distill into a quote. But Gavin Terrill's article is a great read; he does things like making sure not to use any machine/physical context to calc the Etag, so it'll be consistent across a cluster of servers. Frankly, awareness of this sort of thing is lacking in the Java space. As Floyd Marinescu <a href=\"http://www.infoq.com/articles/etags#view_8493\">observed in the comments</a>: \"It would be cool to see a generalized etag caching framework added to some of today's modern Java webframeworks.\" Yes it would.</p>\n\n<p>Exhibit 2: <a href=\"http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/middleware/#django-middleware-common-commonmiddleware\">Django's support for ETags</a>, which I can quote: \"django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware: Handles ETags based on the USE_ETAGS setting. If USE_ETAGS is set to True, Django will calculate an ETag for each request by MD5-hashing the page content, and it'll take care of sending Not Modified responses, if appropriate.\" That's it - you're done. </p>\n\n<p>Exhibit 3: <a href=\"http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6158\">Rails support for Etag</a>, again quotable in full: \"Rendering will automatically insert the etag header on 200 OK responses. The etag is calculated using MD5 of the response body. If a request comes in that has a matching etag, the response will be changed to a 304 Not Modified and the response body will be set to an empty string.\"</p>\n\n<p>The relative verbosity of programming languages isn't the interesting thing; nor is typing doctrine. What's interesting is the culture of frameworks and what different communities deem valuable. My sense of it is that on Java, too many web frameworks - think JSF, or Struts 1.x - consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware. Whereas a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web; integrating with the internal enterprise is a non-goal. </p>\n\n<p>ETag support is just one example; there are so many things frameworks like Rails/Django do ranging from architectural patterns around state management, to URL design, to testing, to template dispatching, to result pagination, right down to table coloring that the cumulative effect on productivity is startling. I suspect designing for the Web instead of around it is at least as important as language choice. </p>\n\n<p>It's hard to explain sometimes just how time-consuming it can be to get Web things done on some Java frameworks. This post will be a handy thing to point at next time I'm lost for words :)</p>"
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"title" : "Rules For JavaScript Library Authors",
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"content" : "<p>I wrote this about six months ago before starting work on <a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/03/yet-another/\">base2</a>. I decided not to post it at the time as I thought it sounded a little pompous. On reflection, they aren’t bad rules and I managed to stick to them. So, here the rules I wrote for myself back in October.</p>\n<dl>\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule1\">1.</a> Be <a href=\"http://onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejavascript/\" title=\"Unobtrusive JavaScript\">unobtrusive</a></dt>\n<dd>My <abbr title=\"HyperText Markup Language\">HTML</abbr> doesn’t want to know about your JavaScript.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule2\">2.</a> Object.prototype is verboten!</dt>\n<dd>This is so important that it needs <a href=\"http://erik.eae.net/archives/2005/06/06/22.13.54\" title=\"Thus sprake Erik Arvidsson\">a rule all to itself</a>. Objects are the basic building blocks of JavaScript functionality. Don’t mess with them.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule3\">3.</a> Do Not Over-extend</dt>\n<dd>The less you extend JavaScript’s built-in objects the better. Don’t get me wrong. Native JavaScript objects are a little sparse on useful methods. You will feel obliged to add one or two of your own. But “one or two” is not enough for the creative (library) programmer. Stop! Just add what you need. <em>The less you extend JavaScript’s built-in objects the less you will clash with other libraries.</em></dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule4\">4.</a> Follow Standards</dt>\n<dd>As a library writer you are defining patterns of JavaScript code. <a href=\"http://blog.plover.com/2006/09/11/#design-patterns\" title=\"Design patterns of 1972\">Patterns are signs of weakness in programming languages</a>. Remember, JavaScript and the <abbr title=\"Document Object Model\">DOM</abbr> are continually being <a href=\"http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.7\" title=\"JavaScript 1.7\">specified</a>. If you are going to “fix” something then look to see if it has not already been fixed. Consider <a href=\"http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/\" title=\"WHATWG\">available solutions</a>. If you follow standards, then follow them closely (e.g. don’t skip a parameter on a <a href=\"http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Objects:Array:forEach#Parameters\"><code>forEach</code></a> method).</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule5\">5.</a> Or Follow The Leader</dt>\n<dd>Mozilla leads the way in JavaScript. The creator of the language, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich\" title=\"Mr JavaScript\">Brendan Eich</a>, <a href=\"http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/05/javascript_2_ecmascript_editio.html\" title=\"JavaScript 2.0\">continues to develop</a> it. New language features are available in <a href=\"http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/\" title=\"Get Firefox!\">Mozilla browsers</a> before any other. If you are going to add language features to JavaScript then look to <a href=\"http://www.mozilla.org/js/\" title=\"JavaScript: a dynamic scripting language supporting prototype based object construction\">Mozilla standards</a> first. For example, if you want to extend <code>Array</code> to allow an enumeration method, then call that method <code>forEach</code> instead of <code>each</code>. If you <em>do</em> provide missing language features then follow existing standards <em>closely</em> (see above).</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule6\">6.</a> Be Flexible</dt>\n<dd>What if I want to modify behaviour without changing the source code of your library? How easy is that? Not easy enough. Make it easier.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule7\">7.</a> Manage Memory</dt>\n<dd><a href=\"http://ajaxian.com/archives/caring-about-quality-in-our-javascript-libraries\">People care</a> about <a href=\"http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/ie_leak_patterns.asp\" title=\"Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns\">memory leaks</a>. Do your job.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule8\">8.</a> Eliminate Browser Sniffing</dt>\n<dd>It seems that browser vendors will forever compete by adding new features. <img src=\"http://deanedwards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif\" alt=\";-)\"> As a library author you must keep up with the latest fashions. It is not good enough to browse <a href=\"http://www.ajaxian.com/\">Ajaxian</a> occasionally. You must slavishly read every blog to find the next hack. <em>Browser sniffing can be addictive.</em></dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule9\">9.</a> Small is Better</dt>\n<dd>JavaScript libraries have come of age. <a href=\"http://script.aculo.us/\" title=\"script.aculo.us\">Some of them</a> now power <a href=\"http://digg.com/\" title=\"digg.com\">premier sites</a>. But we are not all on 2MBit <abbr>DSL</abbr> lines. So keep your library small. Better yet, provide a <a href=\"http://mootools.net/download/release\" title=\"mootools\">build page</a> that allows me to efficiently build my library according to my needs.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule10\">10.</a> The Tenth Rule</dt>\n<dd>Good ol’ tenth rule. You can always rely on the tenth rule. The tenth rule is: <em>be predictable</em>. I should be able to guess what your methods do. And if I don’t know what a method is called then I should be able to guess that too.</dd>\n\n<dt><a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog#rule11\">11.</a> Bonus Rules</dt>\n<dd>\n<ol>\n<li>Documentation. Annoying but true.</li>\n<li>The more namespacing you use, the less likely I am to remember your phone number.</li>\n<li>Remember that potentially millions of people will be executing your code.</li>\n</ol>\n</dd>\n</dl>\n<p>For the record, <a href=\"http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/03/yet-another/\">base2</a> does not alter any native JavaScript objects.</p>"
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rprah6s7cvI/AAAAAAAAAPE/N5Ubn68F7Qg/s1600-h/city%26slum.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rprah6s7cvI/AAAAAAAAAPE/N5Ubn68F7Qg/s320/city%26slum.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>I read an interview today with Mike Davis about his book, <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1844671607/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-1900654-2315040?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184553025&sr=8-1\">Planet of Slums</a>. I have copied some key quotes from the article, though I recommend reading the <a href=\"http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=139\">whole article</a>. It has implications for people on every continent. It has relevance to the US and US policies, most immediately in Iraq. It also has particular relevance to West Africa and citizens of the countries of the Gulf of Guinea. <a href=\"http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=139\">Here follow some passages from the interview</a>:<br><br><blockquote>Sadr City, at one point named Saddam City, the Eastern quadrant of Baghdad, has grown to grotesque proportions — two million poor people, mainly Shia. And it’s still growing, as are Sunni slums by the way, thanks now not to Saddam but to disastrous American policies toward agriculture into which the U.S. has put almost no reconstruction money. Vast farmlands have been turned back into desert, while everything focused, however unsuccessfully, on restoration of the oil industry. The crucial thing would have been to preserve some equilibrium between countryside and city, but American policies just accelerated the flight from the land.<br>. . .<br>In my book, I looked at the relationship between the pervasive global slum, everywhere associated with sanitation disasters, with classical conditions favoring the rapid movement of disease through human populations; and on the other side, I focused on how the transformation of livestock production was creating entirely new conditions for the emergence of diseases among animals and their transmission to humans.</blockquote><br><br>We have the:<br><br><blockquote>. . . urbanization of livestock . . . millions of chickens living in warehouses, in factory farms. Bird densities like this have never existed in nature and they probably favor, according to epidemiologists I’ve talked to, maximum virulence, the accelerated evolution of diseases.<br>. . .<br>At the same time, wetlands around the world have been degraded and water diverted.<br>. . .<br>This is a formula for biological disaster and avian flu is the second pandemic of globalization. It’s very clear now that HIV AIDS emerged at least partially through the bush-meat trade, as West Africans were forced to turn to bush meat because European factory ships were vacuuming up all the fish in the Gulf of Guinea, the major traditional source of protein in urban diets.<br>. . .<br>the future of guerrilla warfare, insurrection against the world system, has moved into the city. Nobody has realized this with as much clarity as the Pentagon, or more vigorously tried to grapple with its empirical consequences. Its strategists are way ahead of geopoliticians and traditional foreign-relations types in understanding the significance of a world of slums…<br>. . .<br>The question of the exchange of violence between the city of slums and the imperial city is linked to a deeper question — the question of agency. How will this very large minority of humanity that now lives in cities but is exiled from the formal world economy find its future? What is its capacity for historical agency?<br>. . .<br>Well, here you have an informal working class with no strategic place in production, in the economy, that has nonetheless discovered a new social power — the power to disrupt the city, to strike at the city, ranging from the creative nonviolence . . . to the now universal use of car bombs by nationalist and sectarian groups to strike at middle-class neighborhoods, financial districts, even green zones. I think there’s much global experimentation, trying to find out how to use the power of disruption.<br>. . . I’ll tell you what I suspect may be the greatest of disruptive powers — the power to disrupt global energy flows. Poor people with minimal technology are capable of doing that across the thousands of miles of unguardable pipeline on this planet.<br>. . .<br>The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. <span style=\"font-weight:bold\">Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it’ll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway</span>. <p>One of the major problems, however, is: We’re building cities without urban qualities. Poor cities, in particular, are consuming the natural areas and watersheds which are essential to their functioning as environmental systems, to their ecological sustainability, and they’re consuming them either because of destructive private speculation or simply because poverty pours over into every space. All around the world, the crucial watersheds and green spaces that cities need to function ecologically and be truly urban are being urbanized by poverty and by speculative private development. Poor cities, as a result, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disaster, pandemic, and catastrophic resource shortages, particularly of water.</p> Conversely, the most important step toward coping with global environmental change is to reinvest — massively — in the social and physical infrastructures of our cities, and thereby reemploy tens of millions of poor youth.</blockquote>"
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"title" : "Pygmies at the zoo",
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"content" : "<strong>David Pescovitz</strong>:\nA group of Pygmy musicians were temporarily lodged in a Republlic of Congo zoo while visiting Brazzaville for a music festival. Visitors to the zoo snapped photos as the 22 pygmies collected wood from the zoo forest and cooked their meals. From the Associated Press:\n<blockquote>Congolese officials, who invited the band of Pygmy musicians to perform at the Festival of Pan-African Music, or Fespam, said their intention was to place them in a \"familiar setting.\"\n<br><br>\n\"It's not a case of discrimination,\" said Yvette Lebondzo, the director of arts and culture for the Republic of Congo. \"We lodged them in the park near running water and a forest simply because that will remind them of their usual surroundings — which is the forest.\" <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/14/africa/AF-GEN-Republic-of-Congo-Pygmies.php\">Link</a><br><br>\n</blockquote>Spurred by protests from civil rights groups, the pygmies were moved this weekend to a local school. According to a Reuters article, \"All the other musicians playing at the July 8-14 pan-African FESPAM festival were provided with hotel rooms.\" <a href=\"http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/15/1978766.htm\">Link</a>\n\n<br><br>\n<a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/common/image_enlargement.php?imageResId=5788125\"><img src=\"http://www.boingboing.net/images/_programs_atc_features_2006_09_ota_benga_bronx200.jpg\" height=\"150\" width=\"200\" border=\"1\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\" Programs Atc Features 2006 09 Ota Benga Bronx200\"></a>\n\nInterestingly, this isn't the first time that tourists have come to a zoo to see real, live pygmies. Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman puts this latest bizarre episode in historical context. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo opened a new exhibit in the monkey house featuring a 22-year-old pygmy named Ota Benga. According to a National Public Radio profile of Benga last year, \"it's estimated that 40,000 visitors a day came to see him.\"<br> <a href=\"http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/pygmies-zoo/\">Link</a> to Cryptomundo, <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5787947\">Link</a> to NPR profile\n\n<br>\n<br><br>\n<font color=\"red\">UPDATE:</font> BB reader Chris Zable says, \"My first question when I read the item about the pygmies lodged at the zoo instead of a hotel was, has anyone asked THEM what they want?\" He found the answer in a BBC report:\n<blockquote>\"It's not good for men, women and children to all be in this one tent. We need some space,\" dancer and musician David Motambo told the BBC. \"We can't live here where there are so many mosquitoes. Here in the city we can't stay in the forest.\"</blockquote> <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6898241.stm\">Link</a>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=MlfLrF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?i=MlfLrF\" border=\"0\"></a></p><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~4/133957934\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Cock-a-Doodle-Don't",
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"content" : "Where food is concerned, the relationship between what things look like and how we respond exists at its most primal level: what is a gut reaction, after all, if not something that attacks your gut?"
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"title" : "Kookoo aduro - traditional, herbal medicine and curing AIDS",
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"content" : "<p><img align=\"left\" src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/43/87398035_3fe9fbd16c_m.jpg\">\n<p><strong>...Sounds on da ground and seens on the see-ins</strong></p>\n<p>My first reaction was to laugh it off. Ghanaweb is at it again, sensationalising another headline. But as I continued to read, it sounded more 'authentic'. Besides, I have strong beliefs in traditional medicine and KNUST was ever present in this scenario. We have heard all the facts about HIV-AIDS but with the recent pronouncement from Gambia about a cure/treatment and now with this revelation <a href=\"http://ghanaconscious.ghanathink.org/node/439\">from Kumasi (Ghana)</a>, should we paying some more attention and giving more credit to traditional medicine? 4x4's <a href=\"http://dictionary.kasahorow.com/node/41159\">Kookoo</a> Aduro is a <a href=\"http://www.museke.com/node/348\">tribute</a> to our herbalists and medicine men.<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.museke.com/node/348\">Kookoo aduro</a> is one of the hit songs from 4x4's debut album, Siklitele. Jama, which I previously <a href=\"http://ghanaconscious.ghanathink.org/node/250\">blogged about</a> is on the same album. Recently, they were in the news for planning to introduce crunk music into the hiplife scene. Kookoo aduro talks about the work of the herbalist, how they move from trotro to trotro selling their medicines, the kinds of diseases they cure, etc. Kookoo is the <a href=\"http://dictionary.kasahorow.com/node/41159\">Twi word</a> for 'piles' or 'haemorrhoids'. The herbalist sells medicine for various kinds of ailments and is a walking pharmacy. It is quite a funny song, reminds me of the countless times I've been riding buses in Ghana only to have one passenger request permission from the driver to address the passenger crew so (s)he can sell something. I can never forget the Akobalms and Mercy Creams of yesterday, their jingles are stuck in my head.</p>\n<p>I don't think a lot of people doubt the ability of herbalists in Ghana. A lot of people still entrust their health in the hands of traditional priests. If you think I am lying, get off your high horse in Accra and go to the villages. :-) Even Hollywood is agreeing - remember when the older doctor (white) in 'The Last King of Scotland' told the Scottish gentleman who had just arrived to assist him that 80% of the people he was supposed to serve preferred the native doctor to him? When my friends and I bruised ourselves playing gutter-to-gutter back in the day, we often sought herbs to treat our wounds. I also guess Madam Catherine must be a successful business for its promoters to continue advertising the product left, right, center.</p>\n<p>So generally, when we hear of an AIDS cure/treatment in Kumasi, is our first reaction to laugh it off? Are our herbalists not capable of pulling such a feat? I think they are. This time around, Mr. Kamara Agyapong has been running trial tests over a long period of time with medical personnel from KNUST (the self-proclaimed 5th best technical university in the world). 2 of his patients have reportedly been cured/treated of AIDS due to the brilliance of Koankro, the herbal mixture. Koankro apparently means non-curable. Hmm.</p>\n<p>It's nice to hear that KNUST is involved in this effort, but this story could become more remarkable, if we paid more attention to herbal medicine on an institutional level. Too many biochemistry and chemical engineering students in Ghana complain about lack of job opportunities in those fields and end up setting up wholesale or retail businesses. There is only one Noguchi memorial insitute the last time I checked. We need more Noguchis, more to make sure these brains do not go to waste. Heck, there is even a whole major called herbal medicine in KNUST and they share the same building as the pharmacy students. There is also the <a href=\"http://www.kccr-ghana.org/\">Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research</a>. So academia is doing its bit, bit by bit. I hope the herbal medicine students are not being trained to prescribe drugs. The raw materials are there, the personnel is available, Mercy cream is a lucrative business, so what are we waiting for?</p>\n<p>Which brings me to my next point. I was wondering the other day, what can you find in a typical pharmaceutical store in Ghana? The tide is changing. Many pharmacies sell herbal medicine too and as you can see in the picture, some shops exclusively deal in herbal medicine. The ease in selling them is no more a problem since they are well packaged and marketed. Kinapharma is one of the major players in this industry and they even sponsored Ghana's premier football league a couple of years ago. Collectively, people know about Kinapharma, but how many people can identify three or four of their products? When someone comes to your pharmacy/drug store to buy Kinapharma, you should know there's a communication problem.</p>\n<p>I hope this is not the last that we'll hear of Mr. Agyapong and Koankro. I suppose the Gambian president is quietly working on his own cure so as to broadcast more good news at a later time. I am positive about the abilities of traditional and herbal medicine in Ghana and once, we marry our roots with technology, we should go a long way. AIDS is destroying the social fibre of the African people and it would be appropriate if we could arrive at a cure/treatment to stop the bleeding.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://museke.com/node/348\">Full Kookoo aduro lyrics</a>.<br>\nScroll down at <a href=\"http://museke.com/node/348\">this link</a> to listen to the song<br>\nPhoto by <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/blackwize/\">Blackwise</a> shows a herbal centre</p></p>"
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"title" : "photo op: Maasai Market panorama (Nairobi)",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.ntwiga.net/linked_to/images/panoramas/Maasai.Market.Nairobi.June.2007.jpg\" title=\"Maasai Market panorama - June 2007\"><img src=\"http://www.ntwiga.net/linked_to/images/panoramas/Maasai.Market.Nairobi.June.2007.small.jpg\" alt=\"Maasai Market panorama: June 2007. Zoom in to see some very cool details\" width=\"480\"></a></p>\n<p>Maasai Market panorama taken June 2007. </p>\n<p>Zoom in to see some very cool details.</p>\n<p>A full version of the image is available at <a href=\"http://www.ntwiga.net/linked_to/images/panoramas/Maasai%20Market%20-%20Nairobi,%20Kenya%20-%20June%205th%202007.jpg\" title=\"Maasai Market panorama: June 2007\">this link</a>. It is a ridiculous 10934 x 3090 pixels - not for the faint of heart and sure to suck up all your bandwidth.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Of No Fixed Abode",
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"content" : "My initial response to the 2005 London bombings was in the vein of whimsy: <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/07/londons-got-soul.html\">London's got soul</a>, a trilogy celebrating the place, my favourite town. I then considered <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/identity-theft.html\">a case of identity theft</a> last year to kick off the present <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/things-fall-apart.html\">Things Fall Apart series</a>. After the news of the past few days, I can now give you the second part of a trilogy focused on the people. This time a look at my \"fourth man\": the fifth bomber, a man of no fixed abode. Some notes ripped from the headlines, a few musings and some poetry...<ul><li><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/07/of-no-fixed-abode.html#indictment\">\"Thought to be Bukhari\": A Paper Trail</a></li><li><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/07/of-no-fixed-abode.html#redacted\">A Redacted Note</a></li><li><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/07/of-no-fixed-abode.html#reflection\">Reflection</a></li><li><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/07/of-no-fixed-abode.html#abode\">\"Of No Fixed Abode\"</a></li></ul><br><h3><a name=\"indictment\"></a>\"Thought to be Bukhari\": A Paper Trail</h3><br><blockquote>You lived with him<br>You stole his name...<br><br>They trained you well<br><strong>Your name is cursed</strong>...<br><br>No one knows the identity of this man who performed the identity theft.<br><br>— <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/identity-theft.html\">Identity Theft</a></blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">Identity:<blockquote><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/07/of-no-fixed-abode.html#redacted\">[Redacted]</a> 32, from West London. A Ghanaian, <strong>his real name is thought to be Bukhari</strong>. Said to have abandoned his bomb at Little Wormwood Scrubs after losing his nerve. Represented by Stephen Kamlish, QC.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article1293339.ece\">21/7: the trial</a>, January 16, 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">Motivation:<blockquote>Mr Kamlish, representing [redacted], said to Mr Ibrahim: \"You wanted to do a copycat of 7/7 - four bombs on 7/7, four bombs two weeks later on 21/7. That was your plan.<br><br>\"We say your 21/7 bombs were to be bigger and better in your twisted thinking than that of 7/7.<br><br>\"Four real bombs on the Tube and one block of flats, a tower, destroyed, going up in a ball of flames. That was your plan, wasn't it?\" <br><br>— <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6479333.stm\">Man 'planned tower block blast'</a>, March 22 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">During the trial the man I called cursed continued to be referred to by his alias and that inevitable suffix, <cite>\"of no fixed abode\"</cite>.<br><br>Tricksters, gremlins and parasites; who is which?<blockquote>Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury was told was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was \"used and abused\" by Mr Ibrahim who was a \"cowardly, manipulative schemer\".<br><br><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6563757.stm\">21/7 suspect 'saved tower block'</a>, April 17 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\"><blockquote>On Tuesday, he took to the witness box for the first time and told the court his real name was in fact Sumaila Abubakhari and that <strong>he is 28 - not 34</strong>. Wearing a crisp white shirt, dark blue tie and grey suit, [redacted] said he came to the UK in December 2003 <strong>using a passport in someone else's name</strong> and applied for the Army. He said he did not consider what countries he might be sent to on active service.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/diaspora/artikel.php?ID=122596\">Ghanaian suicide bomber 'wanted to join Army'</a>, April 17 2007</blockquote><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/17054815/\" title=\"Aburi mask - strange days\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/9/17054815_38bf0cd7ed_m.jpg\" width=\"155\" height=\"240\" alt=\"Aburi mask - strange days\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br><br>Muddied waters:<blockquote>A terror suspect dismantled a bomb and saved the lives of people living in a tower block, his lawyers have claimed...<br><br>Prosecuters say he was the fifth bomber who allegedly lost his nerve at the last minute.<br><br>But Stephen Kamlish QC, defending, said his client had ditched his bomb - made of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour - at Little Wormwood Scrubs after \"making it safe\".<br><br>Woolwich Crown Court heard claims he also dismantled a booby-trapped sideboard at a \"bomb factory\" allegedly set up by a co-defendant in Curtis House, New Southgate, north London.<br><br>Mr Kamlish said: \"<strong>He's not asking for any applause</strong>, but if he hadn't have done it and it was a bomb that actually worked ... he was in fact responsible - potentially - for saving the block and all the people in it.\"<br><br>Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury heard was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was \"used and abused\" by Ibrahim, a \"cowardly manipulative schemer\".<br><br>The barrister told the jury that [redacted] had been under intense pressure, and was even threatened by another defendant, since deciding to \"break ranks\".<br><br>He described his client as <strong>a \"decent\" and \"somewhat childlike, sometimes naive\" man</strong>.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1261094,00.html\">'Not Asking For Applause'</a>, Sky News, April 17 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">A theatrical man, he makes good copy with his African emotions; consider the headlines generated in under an hour a few months ago:<ul><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6597505.stm\">21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6576649.stm\">21/7 suspect 'encouraged to lie'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6568205.stm\">Accused breaks down in court</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6572041.stm\">21/7 suspect 'defused booby-trap'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6563757.stm\">21/7 suspect 'saved tower block'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6545597.stm\">21/7 suspect's claim 'is amazing'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6504011.stm\">'Bomber' admits lying to police</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</li></ul><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/8894699/\" title=\"Aburi masks\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/8/8894699_1c6ed0c9d4_m.jpg\" width=\"92\" height=\"240\" alt=\"masks aburi\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br><br>A compromised man:<blockquote>Anthony Jennings QC, defending Hussain Osman, accused Mr [redacted] of crying when he told police about his supposedly dead father.<br><br>Mr [Redacted] has since admitted that his father is still alive.<br><br>\"You were doing exactly what you were trying to do to this jury, which is pull the wool over their eyes by starting to cry when you were lying,\" said Mr Jennings.<br><br>The barrister went on to accuse Mr [redacted] of being <strong>a \"self-confessed liar\", a \"fraudster\", and a \"sly and devious liar\"</strong>.<br><br>Mr [Redacted] denied lying, saying: \"I was remembering the time as <strong>I'm staring death in my face and you're telling me not to cry?</strong>\"<br><br>— <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6597505.stm\">21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar'</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">Bukhari or Abubakari?<blockquote>The prosecution says <strong>his real name might be Sumaila Abubakari but his nationality is unclear</strong>.<br><br><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6264839.stm\">'Bomb plot' trial</a>, BBC, April 17 2007</blockquote>Bukhari or the other moniker Abubakari are Muslim names typically found in West Africa (from Northern Ghana, Nigeria to Sierra Leone). In Ghana at least, the north is much poorer and less developed than the rest of the country. Northern muslims tend to settle in the <a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=123154\">zongos</a> (slums). Regardless of nationality, the experience of these dwellers is much like that in <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/05/books-of-nima.html\">the slums of Nima</a>, rough and hardscrabble lives. As an often itinerant people, they are deliberately opaque and insular. This served them well in their dealings with the colonials and beyond but this opacity gives rise to much uncertainty as in the present case. We simply don't know what the nationality is.<hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\"><ul><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm\">21/7 suspect speaks of fear (video)</a></li><li><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm\">21/7 suspect 'not a fanatic' (video)</a></li></ul><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/8894701/\" title=\"Aburi mask\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/5/8894701_1a5af5df57_m.jpg\" width=\"93\" height=\"240\" alt=\"masks-aburi-thin\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br><br>Emotional:<blockquote>Mr [Redacted], who is said by the prosecution to have lost his nerve and dumped his device, has said he was not a \"fanatic\".<br><br>He told the court he left the device he was given in a west London park as he \"just wanted to get rid of it\".<br><br>He said Mr Ibrahim had told him the devices would \"not hurt anyone\".<br><br>He told the jury: \"It didn't make sense to me. I didn't know whether this was hoax or real or anything to do with terrorists.<br><br><strong>\"But I didn't want anything where the police got involved in it.<br><br>\"I thought: 'I don't want to listen no more. I have heard enough. I just don't want to have anything to do with it.\" ...</strong><br><br>At one point, Mr [redacted] needed several minutes to compose himself in the witness box.<br><br>He broke down after telling the court of how Mr Ibrahim demonstrated the rucksack device on the morning of 21 July 2005 - two weeks after suicide bombers struck in London on 7 July 2005.<br><br>\"He started to explain for the first time as if he has been talking to me before,\" Mr [redacted] told the court.<br><br>\"I was waiting for him to tell me if this was a suicide bombing or not.<br><br>\"This was my belief, that this was going to be a suicide bombing because it just happened two weeks ago.\"<br><br>He told the court: \"I wanted to live. I wanted to have a good life. I wanted to support my family. <strong>It is just something that I have never thought of in my life</strong>.\"<br><br>— <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6568205.stm\">21/7 accused breaks down in court</a></blockquote><br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/17054786/\" title=\"Aburi mask\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/14/17054786_6d2e99c827_m.jpg\" width=\"153\" height=\"240\" alt=\"aburi mask\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br><br>Lies and Truths:<blockquote>But he agreed with Mr Sweeney's description that he had lied to police on an \"epic\" scale, including not telling them his real name, religion or background, about buying the peroxide or what he did after the \"attacks\" had failed.<br><br>He said: \"<strong>It is unbelievable when I look back at these lies...I lied about the whole day of July 21</strong>.\"<br><br>Mr Sweeney said: \"You lied through your teeth as to who the bombers were.\"<br><br>[Redacted] replied: \"Yes I did. I did not want to associate myself with them after realising what they had put me through.\"<br><br>[Redacted] denied lying to cover up his own guilt, maintaining that he was initially manipulated by co-defendant Muktar Said Ibrahim to follow the story that the attacks were meant only to be a hoax but <strong>realised once the trial had started that he had to tell the truth</strong>. <br><br>— <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6600479.stm\">21/7 suspect 'lied on epic scale'</a> April 27, 2007</blockquote><hr width=\"10%\" align=\"center\">Assessment<blockquote>The jury deliberating the cases of the alleged July 21 bomb plotters was today discharged after <strong>failing to reach a verdict</strong> on the final two defendants.<br><br>The decision by the trial judge, Mr Justice Fulford QC, came during the eighth day of deliberations by the jury at Woolwich crown court in south-east London.<br><br>He asked prosecutors to decide by tomorrow whether they want to seek a retrial for [redacted].<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2122936,00.html\">Jurors fail to reach verdicts on two 21/7 defendants</a>, Guardian, July 10, 2007</blockquote><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4955728.html\">Jury deadlocked in UK transit bomb case</a>, AP, July 10, 2007</li></ul><blockquote>The jury was discharged yesterday after failing to reach a decision on two other defendants, [redacted], both of whom deny conspiracy to murder.<br><br><strong>[Redacted], 34, of no fixed address, ... will face a retrial</strong>, prosecutors said today.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2123749,00.html\">Four July 21 plotters jailed for life</a>, The Guardian, July 11, 2007</blockquote><br><h3><a name=\"redacted\">A Redacted Note</a></h3><br>It has been known since September 2005 that the man I called cursed, a man of \"no fixed abode\" and now \"thought to be Bukhari\" was not the man his identity papers claimed, yet in the proceedings of the trial and the journalistic coverage, he is continually referred to with his stolen name. Perhaps this is as it should be, the slow workings of the law and the wheels of justice, an administrative decision. Yet each mention of the name is an open wound for a family in Ghana and London, a reminder about the continuing trauma in their lives. We are all collateral damage, the walking wounded of <a href=\"http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/06/proliferation_t.html\">these</a> <a href=\"http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/files/seitz_harvard_terrorism_report_q6hx29v.pdf\">interesting times</a>. <br><br>I'll note in passing that the western journalistic tic of attaching an age and provenance to every name leads to the stilted formulations of the copy we have seen. Indeed these details detract from <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099478420/\">the heart of the matter</a> and obscure rather than enlighten the complexities of this <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140185399/\">very human story</a>. As we have seen, the name, age and nationality are still undetermined and the reporting has been wrong throughout. The only certainty is that he is \"of no fixed abode\". If we do have to name, place and date in tangible words, I suggest in this case that we stick to the following:<blockquote>\"<strong>[redacted], undetermined age, unclear nationality, of no fixed abode</strong>\"</blockquote><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/8894702/\" title=\"aburi mask dark\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/5/8894702_c2e9e7c073_m.jpg\" width=\"56\" height=\"240\" alt=\"aburi mask dark\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br> <br><h3><a name=\"reflection\">Reflection</a></h3><br>A few more leading indicators to round off our notes:<blockquote>Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting \"jihadists with different backgrounds. <strong>I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to.</strong>\"<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042700550.html\">George Tenet: Tenet Details Efforts to Justify Invading Iraq</a>, April 28, 2007</blockquote>No country is immune from these things, consider this clipping from last summer:<blockquote><strong>Two Nigerians</strong>, whose identities were not disclosed at press time, have become victims of the exchange of artillery fire between Israeli authorities and <strong>Hezbollah forces in Lebanon</strong>.<br><br><a href=\"http://allafrica.com/stories/200607240045.html\">Two Nigerians Confirmed Killed in Lebanon bombings</a>, July 24, 2006</blockquote>The footsoldiers of <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/03/great-game.html\">The Great Game</a> know no boundaries, indeed their variety is a historical commonplace.<blockquote>So when I watched the recent protests in Kyrgyzstan, I thought not to the recent people-power outings in Ukraine and Georgia or even to the collective courage that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall (<a href=\"http://slate.msn.com/id/2116428/nav/ais/\">not pope-inspired by the way</a>). Rather I thought back to Christmas 1990 sitting in Nancy, France, watching images from Bucharest alongside a true-believer socialist as his worldview finally succumbed to that ineffable and unrelenting pull of gravity. <br><br>It is no comfort to have learnt, as I did a few years later, that there were Ghanaians who died fighting for that reptilian man, Nicolae Ceausescu, alongside his <a href=\"http://www.securitate.org/\">Securitate</a> during the Romanian overthrow of that macabre communist regime. <strong>I thought about the kind of world in which someone would send young Ghanaian men to train in interrogation techniques in far-flung places like Cuba, East Germany and Romania to come back and oppress their people.</strong> <br><br><strong>I thought about what it meant for a young man to find himself in that position, in a foreign land, dodging bullets and shooting at people, in their own country mind you, trying to overthrow a rotten regime. I thought about how miserable and brutish their lives must have been to have undergone that kind of journey.</strong> And what about their peers who did come back from their various schools of grist to wreck havoc on their compatriots? I'm sure that some of these trained killers are among those who carry out weekly armed robberies in our towns.<br><br>— <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/04/strange-bedfellows-and-journalistic.html\">Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse</a></blockquote>Perusing these notes, the obvious questions remain unanswered. Depending on where you stand, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2004/07/on-political-theatre-and-politics-as.html\">the actors</a> range from convenient scapegoats like John Walker Lindh, to the convinced and morally convicted ciphers such as Richard Reid, to the more ambiguous cases like that of the man I call cursed. There is perhaps a full spectrum of responses: from moral courage, through the mistaken and misguided indiscretions of youth, to <a href=\"http://www.hbo.com/thewire/episode/season3/episode33.shtml\">moral midgetry</a>. That is the terrain of <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002X7GY8/\">fallen angels</a>.<br><br>As with all things about <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099288524/\">the human factor</a> and <a href=\"http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm\" title=\"On the Marionnette Theatre by Heinrick von Kleist\">the theatre of our existence</a>, our <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140424393/\">fall from grace</a> perhaps renders this melancholy mystery unknowable. One cannot but stare at the trainwreck when it comes. But how does one equip oneself to face the abyss? Where does one buy soul insurance? <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674445392/\">In a dark time</a>, perhaps <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009KTWC/\">social living is the best</a>.<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/748637594/\" title=\"Masks\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1236/748637594_64c112898b.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"332\" alt=\"masks maame\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div><br><br><h3><a name=\"abode\"></a>\"Of No Fixed Abode\"</h3><br>Identity theft<br>Open wounds<br><br>Fallen angels<br>Damaged goods<br><br>Brutish living<br>Scarred consciences<br><br>Devious schemers<br>Lost nerves<br><br><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000HOL67U/\">Enemy combatants</a><br><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6259560.stm\">Collateral damage</a><br><br>Modern travellers<br>Prison shelters<br><br>Stolen verdicts<br>Jury deadlocks<br><br>Bomb factories<br>Moral blinders<br><br>Hostile lives<br>Fractured dislocations<br><br>Cultural interplay<br><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/things-fall-apart.html#social\">Social living</a><br><br>The aliases of exiled souls<br>Alienated, \"of no fixed abode\"<br><br><h3><a name=\"soundtrack\">Soundtrack for this note</a></h3><br><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00025ETIM/\">Antibalas - Indictment</a><br>An angry afro-beat meditation with dissonant horns that presents a bill of goods, if not some <a href=\"http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/143205/elizabeth_de_la_vega_indicting_bush\">articles of impeachment</a>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/05/on-george-w-bush.html\">on our current situation</a>. The song is also a humourous indictment of <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/526642349/in/set-72157600300569893/\">all those rogues</a> in a musical court of law. One wished everyone expressed their grievances in music or words. The cover art is prescient about the flight of that man \"thought to be Bukhari\", the confusion and urgency are the same, as is the mistaken resort to violence. It is the mask of a man of no name, of indeterminate age, of unclear nationality and of no fixed abode. The only missing thing is the discarded, bomb-laden rucksack.<br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00025ETIM/\"><img src=\"http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/5138MQ84E9L._AA240_.jpg\" alt=\"Antibalas - Indictment\" width=\"240\" height=\"240\" border=\"0\" style=\"display:inline\"></a></div></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001XTRCI/\">Prince - Reflection</a><br>A simple song: light drums and an acoustic guitar that sticks in your head and gets you singing along before you know it. The melody is <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/03/wistful-zingers.html\">wistful</a> and, befits the title, reflective. We're reminiscing about innocence lost, the good old days when decisions were without consequence and life itself was carefree. Not everyone has that luxury but we can all empathize with that sentiment<blockquote>Sometimes I just want to sit out on the stoop, play my guitar just watch all the cars go by</blockquote></li><li><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005PJFV/\">Angie Stone - Soul Insurance</a><br>Her warm voice endears as does the music; Angie assures you that she has got your back. Soul assurance. Soul insurance. Where do I sign up for mahogany soul?</li></ul><br><br><em>Update August 29, 2007</em><br><br>The following passage should give much pause for those sympathetic to this man \"thought to be Bukhari\"<blockquote>He said that Mr Omar had <strong>offered a bed to a mentally ill African refugee</strong>, took in a homeless Indian man and paid visits to people in hospital. He never heard Mr Omar speak out in support of any act of terrorism. Mr Dixon said: \"He was against the Iraq war, but... he said nothing radical.\" Mr Dixon became an unwitting helper of the alleged conspirators when he accompanied Mr [Redacted] on a trip to buy dozens of litres of hydrogen peroxide, the chemical that formed the key ingredient of the rucksack bombs.<br><br>— <a href=\"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/newspapers/sunday_times/britain/article1295437.ece\">Witness was unwitting helper with 21/7 purchase</a></blockquote>So not only did [redacted] use people unwittingly to help buy bombmaking equipment but, if my reading is correct, he also stole the identity of that \"mentally ill African refugee\" who his accomplice had taken in. No one has connected these particular dots but I would lay even odds that said refugee was indeed the man who woke up to learn that the police were calling him a bomber. That would certainly round out the circle of infamy of tricksters using anyone who falls into their orbit. One wonders if there really are any more shades of gray to this story.<br><br>Next: Ode to Betty Brown<br><br><span>File under: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/London\" rel=\"tag\">London</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/Ghana\" rel=\"tag\">Ghana</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/bombing\" rel=\"tag\">bombing</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/terrorism\" rel=\"tag\">terrorism</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/loss\" rel=\"tag\">loss</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/waste\" rel=\"tag\">waste</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/crime\" rel=\"tag\">crime</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/anomie\" rel=\"tag\">anomie</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/identity\" rel=\"tag\">identity</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/theft\" rel=\"tag\">theft</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/reflection\" rel=\"tag\">reflection</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/globalization\" rel=\"tag\">globalization</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/Africa\" rel=\"tag\">Africa</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/culture\" rel=\"tag\">culture</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/immigrant\" rel=\"tag\">immigrant</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/diaspora\" rel=\"tag\">diaspora</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/observation\" rel=\"tag\">observation</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/perception\" rel=\"tag\">perception</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/poetry\" rel=\"tag\">poetry</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/FallenAngels\" rel=\"tag\">Fallen Angels</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/ThingsFallApart\" rel=\"tag\">Things Fall Apart</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tags/toli\" rel=\"tag\">toli</a></span><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7618276-8838602950681729172?l=koranteng.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rosm70Wb1jI/AAAAAAAAAOM/mWTz5su8TYo/s1600-h/GhanaArch.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rosm70Wb1jI/AAAAAAAAAOM/mWTz5su8TYo/s320/GhanaArch.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">A great message, anywhere anytime.</span></span><br></div><a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=126598\"><span><span><span style=\"width:750px\"><span> </span></span></span></span></a><br><a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=126598\">Some are disappointed</a> that some of the Leaders rejected the pan-African dream. But these kinds of things don't come easily or fast. Everyone has to have their say. And everyone has to think they are gaining more than they are losing. <span style=\"width:750px\"><span><blockquote> Southern and East African leaders have rejected plans to set up a pan-African government . . .<br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">although</span><br>. . . <span style=\"width:750px\"><span> Ghana's Foreign Minister believes problems are inevitable but can be overcome as the European Union has done.</span></span></blockquote></span></span><br>But this summit was a good step on the road to regional and continental cooperation and integration. The Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund is a significant point for pride. In his remarks <a href=\"http://allafrica.com/stories/200707030026.html\">Ghana's president</a>:<br><blockquote>. . . threw the challenge to his colleague Heads of State to sincerely commit to implementing protocols dedicated to the integration programmes, which include the free movement of people and goods, the establishment of customs unions, common currencies and markets, and the harmonization of the security policies and programmes.</blockquote><br>People may not be entirely happy with the results of the summit, but this passage from <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/excellent-discussions.html\">Koranteng's Toli</a> has been running through my mind. The 2007 AU Summit is on the right track, and a far cry from this:<br><blockquote>I've often wondered what it was like to attend, say, an <acronym title=\"Organization of African Unity\">OAU</acronym> meeting circa 1989. That must surely have been a rogues gallery <em>sans pareil</em>. Could you shake hands with everyone in that room and look at yourself in the mirror the next day? For that matter, could you sleep that night? And what did the small talk of the nifty fifty sound like? Scratch that, what exactly was their big talk? Inquiring minds want to know.<blockquote>Comparing notes about fiscal looteries past<br>Idle boasts of military efficiencies<br>The minutiae of collateral damage<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><br>Regional cooperative agreements are a beginning, and are making accomplishments in a variety of places. Regarding the current summit, in the absence of a unified commitment and approach, as <a href=\"http://regionswatch.blogspot.com/2007/07/venezuela-s-looking-at-mercosur-fine.html\">E.K. Bensah so astutely points out</a>:<br><blockquote><br>. . . the plethora of regional economic communities <span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">(RECs)</span></span> offer necessary comparative advantages--both economic and otherwise--to countries.<br>. . .<br>In the specific context of the African Union government . . . it brings into sharp relief the utmost importance of fine-tuning and harmonising the RECS. </blockquote><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"></span></span>"
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"title" : "Oil Violence in the Niger Delta - Root Causes",
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RpAarUWb1oI/AAAAAAAAAO0/VOq8ifIMe2Q/s1600-h/oil-explosion_big.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RpAarUWb1oI/AAAAAAAAAO0/VOq8ifIMe2Q/s320/oil-explosion_big.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://www.berdeak.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1091\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Oil explosion</span></span></a><br></div><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">I think this may have been the explosion on Dec. 26, 2006, that killed more than 500 people. It is a powerful picture and I wish I could give credit to the photographer, but I don't have that information.<br><br></span></span></div><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:130%\">Root Causes</span><br></div><br>According to what I read, there are three root causes of the oil violence in the Niger Delta.<br><ol><li>50 years of exploitation, indifference, and short sighted greed on the part of the oil companies.</li><li>Nigerian state and federal officials allocating and stealing the oil money for themselves, with approval and collusion from the oil companies.</li><li>Violent actions and reprisals by the Nigerian Army acting as security forces for the oil companies, often acting against towns and people unrelated to an initial incident.</li></ol>In any discussion of oil and Nigeria, it is important to keep this in mind, <a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/2007/02/us_marines_the_niger_delta.html#more-1335\">it is not sustainable</a>:<br><blockquote><span style=\"font-size:130%\">80% of oil wealth is owned by 1% of the population; 70% of private wealth is abroad whilst 3/4 of the country live on about $1 a day - at least 15 million of those live in the Niger Delta<a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/2007/02/us_marines_the_niger_delta.html#more-1335\">.</a></span></blockquote><br>As a consequence of the three root causes, there is now a 4th cause of violence, guerrilla entrepreneurs, as mentioned in the <a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.blogspot.com/2007/07/oil-violence-in-niger-delta.html\">previous post</a>. Initially these were a reaction to the three root causes. But now they are also an escalating cause of violence.<br><br>Had the oil companies and the Nigerian government been willing to act in good faith, and to think long term at any point in the process, the present situation could have been averted.<br><br>As a result of short sighted attention to the bottom line, and lack of long term attention to the bottom line, which would have included paying attention to the wellbeing of the people and the environment where they operate, the oil companies are losing money as their production is shut down throughout the Delta.<br><br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:130%\">The Oil Companies</span><br></div><br><blockquote><a href=\"http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/1518254\">The role of the oil companies at this point is quite simple</a>, but they talk about it as being very complicated. They are a major player in the future and the current state of this country. They claim, whenever you ask them critically what they’re doing, they claim that they should not be involved in the affairs of a foreign nation, which is of course absurd, because they’re engaged in influencing the affairs of foreign nations every day. In Nigeria, they literally sit down at the table with the Nigerian government and work with them every day to determine what’s going to happen with petroleum-use laws, with the environment, with actually how to deal with the resistance itself. . . . With the military as their own security. . . . The JTF, which means joint task force, serves as private security forces in, in essence, occupied villages.<br></blockquote><br>Prince Wegwu, head of the youth association in the village of Mbodo Aluu:<br><p></p><blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/2007/05/theft_payment_justice.html\">What we are agitating for is 25 percent of all oil revenues</a>. We know that the oil companies give money to people in secret and we want them to stop that. The companies should give part of the money to the oldest men in the village and the other part of it to the head of each family.</p> <p>Sure some elders don’t always use the money correctly but that is where our youth associations come in: We would make sure the money does not go missing and ensure there is no violence.</p> <p>But we don’t want money; we want jobs. We are all unemployed here.</p> <p>As long as oil companies and the government give nothing, the youth will be angry. And it’s not good to get angry because that’s when things get violent.</p></blockquote><p></p><br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:130%\">The Nigerian State and Federal Officials - Misappropriation and Theft</span><br><div style=\"text-align:left\"><br>The following specifically describes <a href=\"http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/01/28/nigeri15204.htm\">problems in Rivers State</a>. But these problems are not confined to Rivers State. This report describes the basics of how state officials allocate or steal all public money for their own interests, and the problems for the citizens that result. <a href=\"http://hrw.org/reports/2007/nigeria0107/\">Chop Fine</a>, the Human Rights Watch report, tells us the following:<br><p></p><blockquote><p>Human Rights Watch found that the government’s failure to tackle local-level corruption violates Nigeria's obligation to provide basic health and education services to its citizens. </p> <p>Since 1999, the revenues accruing to the 23 local governments in Rivers have more than quadrupled. And in 2006, the Rivers state government's budget was US$1.3 billion, larger than the budgets of many countries in West Africa. But that windfall has not translated into efforts by local governments to bolster basic education and health care systems that have teetered on the edge of collapse for many years.<br>. . .<br>The report documents how revenues flowing into local government treasuries in recent years have been grossly misallocated or stolen outright. Many local governments have lavished funds on new government offices and other massive construction projects that dwarf spending on health care and education. One local government dedicated only 2.4 percent of its revenues to maintaining its crumbling primary school infrastructure while spending 30 percent of its budget on salaries and expenses for the offices of its chairman and legislative councilors. Some local government chairmen have set aside more money for their own travel and \"miscellaneous expenses\" than they allocate to the schools and health clinics they are charged with running.<br><br>As one embittered resident put it, \"All they do is build their headquarters, massive things, air-condition them, and buy vehicles to drive around in.\"<br><br>Significant revenues are also lost to apparent theft.<br>. . .<br>Civil servants, health workers and others told Human Rights Watch that money set aside in local government budgets for health care and education had never reached its intended destination. The salaries of many health workers are months in arrears, even though the money to pay them is included in the budget. The head teacher of one primary school told Human Rights Watch that when he complained to local officials about his school's lack of materials, such as chalk, he was told that the local government had no money for education. Human Rights Watch visited clinics so under-equipped that their demoralized staff could offer almost no services, and in some cases staff had padlocked the doors and abandoned their posts altogether. Many primary schools in Rivers state have no desks, textbooks or other teaching materials, and classes are held in crumbling buildings without access to water or toilet facilities.<br><br>\"We started to produce oil in 1957 here but look at the town – government has done nothing for us,\" a teacher interviewed in Akuku/Toru local government told Human Rights Watch. \"Local government is supposed to help the school but they don't. They have not given us any support . . . The most important things we need are textbooks, instructional materials, and a toilet.\"<br><br>The Rivers state government is charged with overseeing the conduct of its local governments. But many of the problems of local-level governance in the state are mirrored by the state government's own conduct. For example, the office of the state governor had a travel budget of roughly US$65,000 per day in 2006, along with budgets for unspecified \"grants,\" \"contributions\" and \"donations\" that totaled an additional US$92,000 per day. This official extravagance contrasts sharply with the virtual absence of state services for much of the population.<br><br>\"Local government corruption in Rivers is astonishingly brazen and has caused untold suffering,\" said Takirambudde. \"Yet neither Rivers state nor the federal government has done nearly enough to address the problem of local corruption or punish those responsible.\"<br>. . .<br>The human impact of the government's failure to live up to its responsibilities to provide basic health and education services is not limited to Rivers state. One in five Nigerian children dies before the age of five, a statistic that translates into more than 1 million child deaths per year. Many are struck down by illnesses that could be easily prevented by the basic health infrastructure Nigeria's local governments are tasked with maintaining. Public primary schools, part of a school system that was once among the best in Africa, have fallen into an appalling state of disrepair and dysfunction across much of Nigeria.</p></blockquote><br><br></div><span style=\"font-size:130%\">Nigerian Military Violence</span><br></div><br>The Nigerian military serves in essence as private security for the oil companies, though I would argue that its actions do not make them more secure, certainly not in the long run.<br><br><blockquote>With the military as their own security. . . . The JTF, which means joint task force, serves as private security forces in, in essence, occupied villages. These villages are the places where pump stations are right literally in the middle of town. Gas flares right next to where people live. And the JTF is serving as security for Chevron and Shell.</blockquote><br>There are plenty of documented cases of military atrocities and destruction. The Nigerian government has repeatedly used collective punishment on communities, such as <a href=\"http://www.unitedijawstates.com/odi.htm\">Odi</a>, <a href=\"http://www.amnestyusa.org/Chevron_Corporation/Chevron_Nigeria__Death_and_Devastation_by_Gunboat/page.do?id=1101659&n1=3&n2=26&n3=1242\">Odioma</a>, or <a href=\"http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/29/nigeri14087.htm\">Aker Base</a>, and many more. Often the perpetrators they are seeking are long gone in their boats, and the local community suffers instead.<br><br><a href=\"http://www.unitedijawstates.com/odioma.htm\">From Odioma</a>:<br><p face=\"verdana\" style=\"margin:0cm 0cm 0pt;line-height:150%;text-align:justify\"></p><blockquote><p face=\"verdana\" style=\"margin:0cm 0cm 0pt;line-height:150%;text-align:justify\">“When the soldiers arrived at the community yesterday with their gunboats, our people thought they came for peace, and so no one raised any dust. Our chiefs gathered immediately at the palace of the Amanyanabo to await the soldiers to explain their mission, but the next thing that happened was shooting, shooting, shooting…. firing and firing. The soldiers were shooting at everyone, and started burning houses at the waterside” – Philemon Kelly Dickson, Odioma community spokesperson<br></p> “We are so surprised. Government says they are for peace but it is killing and killing. We never killed anybody, so why this?” – Reuben Diepre, Odioma community youth president</blockquote><br><a href=\"http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/29/nigeri14087.htm\"><br>From Aker Base</a>:<br><blockquote>. . . at least two pickup trucks full of uniformed soldiers entered the Aker Base community carrying canisters of gasoline, residents told Human Rights Watch. They spread out inside of the settlement, moving from building to building, dousing homes and businesses with gasoline and setting them ablaze. It is not clear how many soldiers were involved in the attack, but the burned area covered an area roughly equivalent to four football fields.<br>. . .<br>Residents of Aker Base described their community as having been a settlement where many people ran bars, shops or other businesses out of their modest homes. When Human Rights Watch visited the scene two days after the attack, there was not a single structure left standing, and tin roofing lay in twisted piles atop the charred ruins of what had been a crowded expanse of homes and businesses. Dozens of former residents were standing together in the rain amid the wreckage. “We came back here just to stand around,” one man explained. “We have no other place to go.”<br>Many lost everything they had along with their homes, and some did not even have the money left to buy a change of clothes. “I have only my clothes,” one woman told Human Rights Watch. “For the children there is nothing – we did not even bring one Naira out of the house.”<br>. . .<br>One woman who owned a small bar that was reduced to ashes during the attack said:<br>“All of the struggle of my life is for nothing – look at my property. I used up my whole life serving different men to build this place of my own and now it is all gone just like that, in one night, just because of nothing.”</blockquote><br>The picture at the top of this post is from the aftermath of a pipeline explosion, when people were trying to steal oil by tapping in to one of the pipelines, called illegal bunkering. The government blames this entirely on the militias, calling them rascals and oil thieves. Since illegal bunkering from the pipelines is not simple and requires special equipment, and since the quantities of oil bunkered and sold on the black market are not carried away in oil cans, but are carried away by oil tankers, it is a safe bet that military officers and government officials are involved, at least some of the time. Local citizens may collect oil for themselves after the initial theft, taking advantage of the availability, and exposing themselves to danger from explosions.<br><br><br><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:130%\">So what can be done?</span><br></div><br>In Ogoniland, where much of Shell's operations have been shut down, the environment is beginning to make a comeback. I remember reading, but can't find the link right now, that the people in Ogoniland are saying they would rather Shell not come back. They prefer to have their environment back, to farm and fish, rather than have the oil extracted. This could be a serious problem for oil dependent countries such as the US if it catches on.<br><br>The <a href=\"http://hrw.org/reports/2007/nigeria0107/2.htm#_Toc157225627\">Recommendations of the Chop Fine Report</a> would make an excellent beginning to a solution. Briefly, it recommends transparency and accountability in moneys collected or donated, and moneys spent. These recommendations would yield positive results regarding all three of the root causes of the violence. With some action, and given some genuine good will, it may not be too late. Unfortunately there is no visible sign of genuine good will, or good intentions, on the part of those with the power and the money.<br><br>Oil companies should have, and might still be able to work directly with local communities, helping with environmental cleanup, providing micro credit loans, building donated facilities such as schools and clinics, and donating equipment. But they show no inclination to serve their own interests in this manner.<br><br><blockquote><a href=\"http://www.alertnet.org/printable.htm?URL=/db/crisisprofiles/ng_vio.htm\">Analysts say the key to solving the crisis</a> will be improved governance, free and fair elections, and public provision of services such as water, electricity, roads, public transport, schools and small business development.</blockquote><br>Increased militarization, and US involvement via the Africa Command will make the situation infinitely worse. I'll go into that a bit more in a subsequent post."
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"title" : "David Vitter: Another Victim of Gay Marriage",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RpON-i78bGI/AAAAAAAAAJs/h9QkgecUSVI/s1600-h/david_vitter.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RpON-i78bGI/AAAAAAAAAJs/h9QkgecUSVI/s320/david_vitter.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>In 2004 when David Vitter was running for Senator in Louisiana, he warned of the terrible toll gay marriage would have on our society. In <a href=\"http://www.vitter2004.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=20\">statement</a> on \"Protecting the Sanctity of Marriage\" he said, \"The Hollywood left is redefining the most basic institution in human history, and our two U.S. Senators won't do anything about it. We need a U.S. Senator who will stand up for Louisiana values, not Massachusetts's values. I am the only Senate Candidate to coauthor the Federal Marriage Amendment; the only one fighting for its passage.\" Vitter once <a href=\"http://www.gayapolis.com/news/artdisplay.php?artid=535\">compared</a> the devastation of gay marriage to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which as someone from Louisiana should know is pretty destructive, and <a href=\"http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/06/same.sex.marriage/\">said</a> during the debate on the amendment, \"I don't believe there's any issue that's more important than this one.\"<br><br>Despite his efforts, however, the Federal Marriage Amendment failed to pass and Massachusetts did redefine marriage by legalizing gay marriage. With the sanctity of marriage so severely degraded it was inevitable that Vitter's own marriage would suffer. Yesterday, we learned of the terrible personal cost to <a href=\"http://www.correntewire.com/louisiana_senator_caught_with_dick_in_madams_phone_records\">Vitter</a> when it was <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070902030.html\">revealed</a> that his <a href=\"http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/07/09/late-nite-fdl-magic-numbers/\">telephone</a> number <a href=\"http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-r-la-is-whoremonger-and.html\">appeared</a> in the <a href=\"http://www.examiner.com/blogs/Yeas_and_Nays/2007/7/9/DC-Madam-Posts-Phone-Records-Online\">records</a> of the \"DC Madam,\" Deborah Jeane Palfrey, <a href=\"http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/07/d-c-madam-more-discreet-than-media.html\">which</a> were <a href=\"http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2007/07/dc_madams_phone.htm\">released</a> <a href=\"http://guntotingliberal.com/?p=1634\">online</a>.<br><br>\"This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible,\" he <a href=\"http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0707/4850.html\">said</a> in a <a href=\"http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_07_08_archive.html#250268679654275783\">statement</a> released by his <a href=\"http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288740,00.html\">office</a>. \"Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there--with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.\"<br><br>Though it is very magnanimous of Vitter to accept responsibility for his transgressions, is he really to blame? After the Hollywood left redefined marriage, it must have been a very difficult and confusing time for him. The failure of the passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment must have taken a severe toll on him as he struggled to figure out what marriage really is if even gays can do it. As he grappled with the issue, is it any surprise that he found solace in the embrace of a disinterested paid companion?<br><br>Rated 100% by the Christian Coalition for his <a href=\"http://stateoftheday.blogspot.com/2007/07/another-fine-member-of-moral-majority.html\">pro-family</a> voting <a href=\"http://www.shakesville.com/2007/07/republican-senator-on-dc-madam-phone-list/\">record</a> and his <a href=\"http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/and-weve-got-our-first-hit/\">support</a> of such issues as <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-abstinence-only-sex-education-is-too.html\">abstinence-only</a> sex education, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter\">Vitter</a> first went to Congress in 1999 when he was elected to fill the seat vacated by Speaker of the House Robert Livingston after it was revealed that Livingston, who had attacked Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair, had himself had extramarital affairs. (In fact, Clinton's support of the Defense of Marriage Act may have been an acknowledgment of the role gay marriage played in his own transgressions.) Vitter later had to scuttle plans to run for governor when a newspaper planned to write a story about an affair he was having with a New Orleans prostitute. \"Our [marriage] counseling sessions have ... led us to the rather obvious conclusion that it's not time to run for governor,\" he <a href=\"http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/10/29/lousiana_race/index.html?pn=3\">said</a>. Already the insidious influence of gay marriage was starting to weaken his own marriage.<br><br>Vitter is a strong <a href=\"http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DavidVitterTheodoreBOlson/2007/06/11/rudys_adoption_agenda_and_proven_effectiveness&Comments=true\">supporter</a> of Rudolph Giuliani, who also knows about the havoc that gay marriage, and just being around gay people, can have on real marriages. <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/010484.php\">Giuliani</a>'s problems with his marriage were probably the result of his association with the gay couple he lived with after he was thrown out of Gracie Mansion by his wife because he was having an affair with another woman. When Vitter was appointed as <a href=\"http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=8379\">Giuliani</a>'s Southern Regional Chairman, he said, \"It's very clear to me that he's not running for president to advance some liberal social agenda\" and the contact that he has had with good family men like Vitter already seems to have changed Giuliani's position on gays.<br><br>The nefarious influence of gay marriage is already spreading around the country as <a href=\"http://tomwatson.typepad.com/tom_watson/2007/07/just-hatin.html\">Errol Louis</a> points out in a <a href=\"http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/06/21/2007-06-21_courtin_trouble.html\">column</a> in the <span style=\"font-style:italic\">New York Daily News</span>. \"There are disturbing signs all over the country that conservatives were right to predict that proponents of odd and radical sexual practices would try to slip through the political and legal doors opened by the gay rights movement,\" he wrote yesterday of the slippery slope of gay marriage. \"Advocates of same-sex marriage should recognize that you don't have to be a religious fanatic or a bigot to wonder, with a certain uneasiness, where all of this is heading,\" said Louis, who no doubt realizes that the loosening of the meaning of marriage began with the Supreme Court's 1967 <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Loving</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Virginia</span></a> case, which overturned miscegenation laws. Mildred Loving herself recently <a href=\"http://www.positiveliberty.com/2007/06/mildred-lovings-statement.html\">acknowledged</a> the case's ramifications when she came out in <a href=\"http://www.republicoft.com/2007/06/13/dreaming-loving/\">favor</a> of gay marriage on the 40th anniversary of the case. Hopefully, our new <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html\">Supreme Court</a> will overturn this ill-considered ruling soon.<br><br>It is <a href=\"http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2007/07/vitter-apologizes-for-adultery.html\">unfortunate</a> that <a href=\"http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2007/07/theyre-always-coming-and-going-and.html\">liberals</a>, who like to <a href=\"http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/07/welcome-david-vitter-to-publically.html\">pry</a> into people's <a href=\"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/07/vitter_outed_in_dc_madam_scandal/\">personal</a> <a href=\"http://mvdg.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/dc-madam-publishes-numbers-of-clients/\">lives</a>, felt it necessary to <a href=\"http://www.rightwingnews.com/mt331/2007/07/what_is_the_world_coming_to_wh.php\">divulge</a> information about Vitter's sexual transgressions when God and his wife already told him that they forgave him. Although we don't know what God said, we do know that his wife's forgiveness seems to be a bit of a change from what she said in 2000 about Hillary Clinton's response to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. \"I'm a lot more like <a href=\"http://www.blogger.com/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_Bobbitt\">Lorena Bobbitt</a> than Hillary. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me,\" she said, referring to the woman who famously emasculated her husband with a kitchen knife. If she hasn't already carried out this threat, then perhaps it is because she, too, realizes that her husband was powerless to stop himself in the face of the threat gay marriage poses.<br><br>I wonder what it is going to take wake America up to the damage gay marriage has already done. To the long list of gay marriage casualties, which includes <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/11/save-britneys-marriage.html\">Britney Spears</a>, <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/11/ted-haggard-shows-virtue-of-hypocrisy.html\">Ted Haggard</a> and <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/when-giuliani-is-president-every-day.html\">Rudy Giuliani</a>, we can now add another name. How many more is it going to take? For the sake of David Vitter's marriage, I hope that Congress revives the Federal Marriage Amendment and renames it the David Vitter Marriage Amendment, in honor of one man who tragically exemplifies the havoc that gay marriage has wrought in our society.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br> <a href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"blinkbits\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\" alt=\"blinkbits\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&Title=\" title=\"BlinkList\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\" alt=\"BlinkList\"></a> <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"del.icio.us\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\" alt=\"del.icio.us\"></a> <a href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&new_comment=\" title=\"Fark\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\" alt=\"Fark\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&t=\" title=\"Furl\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\" alt=\"Furl\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"LinkaGoGo\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\" alt=\"LinkaGoGo\"></a> <a href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"Ma.gnolia\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\" alt=\"Ma.gnolia\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&h=\" title=\"NewsVine\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\" alt=\"NewsVine\"></a> <a href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"Reddit\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\" alt=\"Reddit\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"Shadows\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\" alt=\"Shadows\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"Simpy\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\" alt=\"Simpy\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"Spurl\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\" alt=\"Spurl\"></a> <a href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&title=\" title=\"TailRank\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\" alt=\"TailRank\"></a> <a href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html&=\" title=\"YahooMyWeb\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\" alt=\"YahooMyWeb\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-vitter-another-victim-of-gay.html\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" title=\"RawSugar\" border=\"0\" height=\"20\" width=\"20\"></a><br><br>Tchnorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/David+Vitter\" rel=\"tag\">David Vitter</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Deborah+Jeane+Palfrey\" rel=\"tag\">Deborah Jeane Palfrey</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Gay+Marriage\" rel=\"tag\">Gay Marriage</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Federal+Marriage+Amendment\" rel=\"tag\">Federal Marriage Amendment</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Giuliani\" rel=\"tag\">Giuliani</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "<div><p>Pat Lang <a href=\"http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/07/build-up-in-leb.html\">comments</a> on a WaPo editorial about an alleged military build up by Hizbullah in Lebanon:</p><blockquote><p>What are the Israelis doing? They are preparing for a drive into Syria across the Golan heights, a "decisive" battle with the Syrians between there and Damascus and then a left "hook" into Lebanon to execute a "turning movement" against Hizbullah.</p></blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Preparing the information battlefield for Israel's coming attack are two editorials today in major U.S. newspapers. Both, of course, blame Syria. Both, the <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401385.html?referrer=email\">Washington Post</a> and the <a href=\"http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-syria5jul05,0,4466828.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail\">LA Times</a>, take a recent U.N. report by the U.N. Secretary General to the Security Council as a main point. </p>\n\n<p> The U.N. report, the editorials say, alleges weapon smuggling via Syria to Hizbullah. But one wonders why that report is not linked and is also <a href=\"http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/sgrep07.htm\">not made public</a> on the U.N. website. Maybe because it is a bit fishy? Or because it also <a href=\"http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=83440\">includes</a> these Israeli misdeeds?</p><blockquote><p>UNIFIL has reported a <strong>significant increase in Israeli air violations</strong>, through jet and unmanned aerial vehicle overflights of Lebanese territory. These <strong>violations</strong> occur on an <strong>almost daily basis frequently numbering between 15 and 20</strong>, and have even reached <strong>32 overflights in a single day</strong>. </p></blockquote><p>The alleged massive weapon smuggling is characterized by the Washington Post in the editorial's subtitle as: </p><blockquote><p>"Heavy weapons flow freely across the border from Syria, the U.N. Security Council is told." </p></blockquote><p>As you will see, that is a deliberate half-truth. This is what the U.N. Secretary General's report says:</p><blockquote><p>[T]he LAF and UNIFIL <strong>did not detect</strong> any illegal transfers of arms south of the Litani River.<br>...<br>The Government of <strong>Israel continues to claim</strong>\nthat Hizbullah is rebuilding its military capacity primarily north but\nalso south of the Litani River. UNIFIL, in collaboration with the LAF,\nstands ready to immediately investigate any such claims or alleged\nviolations of resolution 1701 (2006) <strong>once the necessary specific information and evidence is received</strong>.\n<br>...<br>[T]he Government of <strong>Israel continues to allege</strong>\nsignificant breaches of the arms embargo across the Lebanon-Syria\nborder, which it states, pose a serious strategic threat to the\nsecurity of Israel and its citizens. It has claimed that the transfer\nof sophisticated weaponry by Syria and Iran across the Lebanese-Syrian\nborder, including long-range rockets (with a range of 250 miles),\nanti-tank and anti-aircraft defense systems, occurs on a weekly basis,\nenabling Hizbullah to rearm to the same levels as before last year's\nwar or beyond. <strong>It has not provided any further specific evidence to back up these claims.</strong></p></blockquote>\n<p>What the "U.N. Security Council is told" by the Secretary General is\nthat there are Israeli allegations of weapon smuggling. The U.N. says\nit has not an ounce of proof that such smuggling is taking place and\nthat Israel is not able or willing to give any specifics for its\nclaims. That is all the "U.N. Security Council is told." </p>\n\n<p>\nThe LA Times editorial is warning of a war and blames Syria for an arms buildup:</p><blockquote><p>War\nfears have been fanned by a notable Syrian arms buildup. Damascus has\npurchased surface-to-surface missiles, antitank weapons and\nsophisticated air-defense systems. It is also believed to have received\nIranian funds to pay Russia for missiles and a reported $1-billion\npurchase of five advanced MIG-31E fighter jets.</p></blockquote><p>Now that's nearly funny. A recent Israeli oped <a href=\"http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3419529,00.html\">says</a>\nthat Russia rejected to supply decent surface-to surface missiles to\nSyria. Air-defense and anti-tank missiles are, as their names say,\ndefensive. Five downgraded <a href=\"http://www.testpilot.ru/russia/mikoyan/mig/31/e/mig31e_e.htm\">export version</a> MIGs are a sad joke against Israel's <a href=\"http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/israel/iaf-equipment.htm\">three-hundred</a> U.S. supplied F15s and F16s which include the most modern variants.\n</p>\n\n<p>\nMeanwhile the Israeli military is conducting <a href=\"http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/878427.html\">massive maneuvers</a> on the Golan Heights and seems to be disagree with the LA Times:</p><blockquote><p>"Our emergency supplies have been renewed, there is a multi-year plan for weapons and personal equipment."<br>[...]<br>[The officers] believe <strong>Syria's army has limited capabilities and its air force is far inferior to Israel's</strong>.\nTherefore, a new war would resemble last year's fighting in Lebanon -\ncommando combat in difficult terrain with large areas controlled by\nanti-tank units.<br>[...]<br>In recent months the Golan Heights has become one of the IDF's main\nexercise areas. At times this requires closing off roads. Infantry\ntroops and rows of tanks, armored personnel carriers and jeeps raise\nclouds of dust in grazing fields and the air is filled with low-flying\nhelicopters and echoes of explosions. </p>\n</blockquote><p>A new Israeli <a href=\"http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2007/06/marine_israel_combattraining_070624/\">training village</a>, build and payed for by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is designed to resemble Lebanese and Syrian townships. </p>\n\n<p>\nWhile there have been multiple offers from the Syrian side for\n<a href=\"http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070703-030331-1333r\">unconditional talks</a> with Israel, there has been no response from the Israeli side. \n</p>\n\n<p>Is there any wonder Syrians <a href=\"http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/878657.html\">believe</a> that the Golan maneuvers are in preparation of an Israeli attack?</p>\n\n<p>Lang seems to be pretty sure about this. He adds a question:<br>\n</p><blockquote><p>Will that coincide with American action against Iran? Someone should ask the Chenians that.</p></blockquote></div>"
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"content" : "<p>Just before leaving China last month, I showed up in the pre-dawn haze (referring to my state of mind, not the weather) at the Shanghai Media Group TV studios for an interview with Jeff Brown, of the Lehrer News Hour, about the nature of Chinese factory life. Streaming video is <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">here</a>; RealAudio <a href=\"http://media.pbs.org/ramgen/newshour/expansion/2007/06/25/20070625_china28.rm?altplay=20070625_china28.rm\">here</a>; MP3 <a href=\"http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/06/25/20070625_china28.mp3\">here</a>; transcript <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june07/china_06-25.html\">here</a>.\n</p>"
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"title" : "the land of culture; africa",
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"content" : "Culture is not very easily defined. Anthropologists give us a few attempts at definition and the real meaning must lie somewhere in there. In 1871, Tylor called culture, \"That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a member of society.\" Keesing and Stathern stress the idea of culture in their definition, \"systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that human beings live.\" We can at least gather that culture is a set of guidelines, whether written or unwritten, which are meant to direct a society. We think less about our cultures as being guidelines and can see culture as more of a means or way of seeing things from a perspective. In <em>Culture, Health, and Illness</em>, we can learn that there are different levels of culture: culture as a 'facade to the world at large,' culture as the assumptions known to a group, and culture where the rules are taken for granted and implicit, impossible for the average person to be aware. <br><br>Africa is often called the 'land of culture.' This I believe is an accurate title. From my studies and travels I have come to see that there is most definitely these three levels of culture and so it is easy to see why this title was given. There is the outside view, often ignorant view, of Africa as a vibrant land, etc. There is the level of culture within the people, depending on where you travel, which you can easily be a part. There is the level of culture where it is easy to see that there is no way that you as a traveler can ever hope to understand or take part. Culture exists at these three defined levels and so much more. Africa truly is a land of culture. But what more is there to culture that we miss when we travel or study a country, a group of people, or a society? Do we often miss the deep nature of culture? <br><br>Here is a glimpse of the culture of Ghana by way of drum and dance. I had the joy of seeing this display of culture in my travels of Ghana and in each region we visited. <br> <iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/sazS28H4eWg&width=425&height=350\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe> <br><br> <iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/Zj5XTJfCQmk&width=425&height=350\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe> <br><br> <iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ5jiqE51iE&width=425&height=350\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe> <br><br>An aspect of culture that I found very intersting to my work and studies is the idea of investing in death. On our travels of Ghana we visited a special business of coffin making. These were no ordinary coffins. They were in the shape of fish, cars, trucks, castles, coke bottles, artillery, and deer. The coffin is made to represent the life of the deceased person. However there is a greater issue in the coffin business. Often there is no money spent on healthcare or medicines, but when the person finally dies from that lack of healthcare they are given a funeral where expenses are relatively lavish and much is spent to celebrate the person's life. No matter how easily they could have been saved from an investment in their life, instead of their funeral and death. For this reason funeral ceremonies and deaths constitute a large part of Ghanaian life. Yes, death is part of life, but in this case death is becoming life. The Medical Health Insurance Scheme being promoted and launched in Ghana, so there is hope that there will be a greater investment in health and life."
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"content" : "<p>Jori Finkel's New York Times article <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/arts/design/10fink.html?ex=1339041600&en=56e2d1dbc801bc4a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink\">\"A Reluctant Fraternity, Thinking Post-Black\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Audra D.S. Burch's Miami Herald article <a href=\"http://www.miamiherald.com/579/story/134745.html\">\"Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice\"</a> (with <a href=\"http://pod01.prospero.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-miamitm&action=message&msg=1261\">comments</a> and related content)</p>\n\n<p>Mike Gross' Lancaster Online commentary <a href=\"http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/205480\">\"The economics of baseball and race\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Howard W. French's International Herald Tribune article <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/07/africa/letter.1-70823.php?page=1\">\"Tattered French African empire looks toward China\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Warren Brown's indispensable Washington Post article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/07/AR2007060701582.html\">\"The Potholes of Multicultural Marketing\"</a></p>\n\n<p>Dionne Walker's Associated Press (via Washington Post) article <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/10/AR2007061000525.html\">\"Loving Reflects on Interracial Marriage\"</a></p>\n\n<p>(special shoutout to Dr. Steve B's DailyKos diary <a href=\"http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/8/162016/9015\">\"White Kossacks Should Read Some Black Blogs\"</a>)</p>\n <p>\n <a href=\"http://www.negrophile.com/type/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=1670\">TrackBack (0)</a> | <a href=\"http://www.negrophile.com/phile/articles/a_ghettofabulous_conceptualism_based_on_reality_and_the_intricacies_of_daily_life.html#comments\" title=\"Comment on: A ghetto-fabulous conceptualism — based on reality and the intricacies of daily life.\">Comments (1)</a></p> \n <p>Comments on this Entry:</p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>(<a href=\"http://selfra.blogspot.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">DanTresOmi</a> on \n Jun 25, 2007 6:36 PM) \n\n\n\n\n thanks for the Burch article, appreciate it. </p>\n "
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"title" : "The Humanity of Loose Systems",
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"content" : "<p>One of our graphic designers returned from Paris the other day with the most extraordinary set of photographs.</p>\n<p>Her and I had had a long talk before she went about how the concept of ”brand” was overrated in visual design, frequently doing more harm than good. We both agreed our website could tolerate considerably more visual diversity than it currently has.</p>\n<p>She came back from Paris with a set of photos to prove that:</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://mikecaulfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/metro.jpg\" title=\"metro.jpg\"><img width=\"461\" src=\"http://mikecaulfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/metro.jpg\" alt=\"metro.jpg\" height=\"129\" style=\"width:461px;height:129px\"></a></p>\n<p><em>Hold on, you say, these Metro signs look different! There’s no BRAND!</em></p>\n<p>Yes, I say. Isn’t it great? That’s why when you say “Paris” people think of love, and when you say “America” people think of Big Macs.</p>\n<p><em>But, wait, you say, what if someone needs to find the Metro quickly? Won’t they get confused?</em></p>\n<p>I don’t think so. My guess is that they’ll just read signs to next flights of stairs that dissappear under the street.</p>\n<p>At least, that’s how I’d do it.</p>\n<p><strong>Visual diversity is refreshing, and most systems can tolerate quite a bit of it</strong>. Yet somehow we still take <strong>visual uniformity</strong> as the given. We’re forced to make arguments for why things should be <em>allowed</em> to look or act differently.</p>\n<p>The <strong>Cult of Brand</strong> and the <strong>Church of the Great Beige Website</strong> is very much with us. Modernity died years ago, but its effects linger on.</p>\n<p>People may ask: Shouldn’t the Recycling Center page look like the Arts Center page? Shouldn’t these student pages look the same as the college pages?</p>\n<p>I really believe the answer is no, unless it can be proved otherwise in the specific instance.</p>\n<p>Variety doesn’t make you look slipshod, it makes you look human. And if it can be accomplished while keeping the system visually appealing and ”usable”, it’s something to be admired, not avoided.</p>"
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"title" : "5½ lessons that legitimate retailers can learn from pirates",
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"content" : "<p>This is not the usual “DRM sucks, piracy rocks” screed. Everybody in my regular audience knows about DRM (I’ve been talking about it <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday\">since my very first post</a>), and everybody knows you can illegally download pirated material for free (until you get caught). There’s interesting stuff beyond that, if you’re willing to learn.</p>\n\n<p><small>Disclaimer: I have neither bought nor pirated this movie. Seriously. I saw it in the theater, and that was more than enough. Everything here is based on my personal analysis of public information.</small></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.binnews.info/_bin/nfo.php?id=131418\">Here’s the NFO</a> for a pirate release of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” The NFO gives us:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Title</li>\n<li>Genres</li>\n<li>Plot summary</li>\n<li>Exact theatrical release date</li>\n<li>Running time</li>\n<li>User-submitted rating</li>\n<li>Link to movie page on IMDB</li>\n<li>Source (retail Blu-ray)</li>\n<li>Video codec</li>\n<li>Video bitrate</li>\n<li>Video resolution</li>\n<li>Video framerate</li>\n<li>Audio codec</li>\n<li>Audio language</li>\n<li>Audio bitrate</li>\n<li>Subtitle languages (note: this release features subtitles in 11 languages)</li>\n<li>Recommended playback software</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Granted, most of the information about the original movie is stolen from IMDB. (What did you expect? They’re pirates.) But the rest of the metadata — video, audio, subtitles — is unique to the release itself (more on this in a minute).</p>\n\n<p>Some thoughts about the IMDB link. I have seen NFOs without a lot of this metadata, but I have never seen an NFO without an IMDB link. First, it serves as a unique indentifier in the case where the movie title is not unique (not a problem here, but think about “Hamlet” or “Pride and Prejudice” which have been remade a dozen times). Second, it effectively offloads the “research-y” part of the decision-making process. Commercial distributors can’t afford to link to IMDB because it’s a competitor (it’s owned by Amazon and offers links to buy things on Amazon). Which is a shame, because it’s <em>packed</em> with information — everything from cast biographies to famous quotes to movie trailers. I often get lost in IMDB in the same way I get lost on Wikipedia, except without ending up reading about famous fictional dogs of the 1930s.</p>\n\n<p>Some thoughts about video. Video is outrageously complex and technical, even when you’re doing it correctly and you have no commercial interest in confusing your customers. On my desk is a plain old DVD that I rented from the local video store over the weekend; it proudly proclaims to be “MASTERED IN HIGH DEFINITION!” Whatever that means, it does <em>not</em> mean that it’s anything but a plain old DVD. The marketing of “high definition” content that actually <em>is</em> high definition (at least, higher than plain old DVDs) is even worse. Will you get high definition video out of your Blu-ray disc? That depends on your player, your TV, the cables in between, and the phase of the moon. Is your cable TV high definition? That depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. And so on.</p>\n\n<p>It is against this backdrop that I appreciate the specificity of the video and audio codec information in this NFO. It is doubly relevant when you consider that pirates can and do redistribute stolen content in a wide variety of formats. You can only legitimately buy “Pirates of the Caribbean” in a preselected number of vague categories, generally limited by disc format (Blu-ray, HD-DVD, or DVD — but don’t forget “full screen” vs. “wide screen” vs. “Ultimate Edition” with enhanced audio). But pirates can choose to redistribute content in an infinite number of formats, each with its own features and strengths. Plain old DVDs can be re-encoded into a file that fits on a single CD (700 MB), two CDs, one DVD-R (4.4 GB), or untouched. High-definition discs like Blu-ray and HD-DVD can be re-encoded to fit on one DVD-R (4.4 GB), two DVD-Rs, untouched, or somewhere in between. Or they can be encoded to play on specific devices like PSPs, video iPods, or standalone DivX players. And that’s not even accounting for audio formats. (Some high definition discs only contain a new audio format that open-source video players don’t understand, so pirates combine high definition video with the matching audio track from a plain old DVD. Ingenious!)</p>\n\n<p>This NFO tells us that this particular release comes from a retail Blu-ray disc, has a very high video quality at the same dimensions as the original, and features English audio in the (old, compatible) 5.1 DTS format. You will only be able to play it on an extremely fast computer and a high resolution monitor (maybe one of those new MacBook Pros with a 1920×1200 screen), but if your hardware can manage it, this will basically be the ultimate movie experience on your desktop.</p>\n\n<p><b>Lesson 1: don’t bullshit me.</b> 1080p is 1080p; 720p is 720p. You’d be surprised how many “average” customers know the difference. Ironically, it was the last generation of your marketing bullshit that forced us to learn.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>So that’s what the pirates offer, in a nutshell. Highly technical, information-rich, and, of course, completely illegal.</p>\n\n<p>Here’s what <a href=\"http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8274798&lp=4&type=product&cp=1&id=1627140\">Best Buy’s product page</a> offers people wanting to buy the same movie:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Title</li>\n<li>Disc format (Blu-ray)</li>\n<li>Genre (breadcrumbs)</li>\n<li>Plot summary</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>That’s it. No other information about the movie — not even a running time! No information about audio — not even whether it’s in English! No information about subtitles. No links to additional information, even on their own site.</p>\n\n<p><b>Lesson 2: There is no shelf space on the Internet.</b> I need to know more than just the title before I plonk down $35 for a movie, and you have infinite space to display it. If you don’t have the information I want, find someone who does and link to them. (And if you do have it, why the hell are you hiding it from me?)</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Here’s <a href=\"http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5871516\">what Walmart.com offers</a>:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Title</li>\n<li><em>Two incompatible listings of disc format</em></li>\n</ul>\n \n<p>I’m not even going to bother listing the rest. (It’s funny though. “Product in Inches (L x W x H): 5.5 x 0.5 x 7.44.” Wow, thanks Walmart!)</p>\n\n<p>Let’s go back to the part about the disc format. Two incompatible listings? WTF is he talking about? See for yourself: in the movie title it mentions “Blu-ray,” but in the details below it says “Format: DVD.” In the plot summary it mentions “Blu-ray,” but in the ultra-small print below it says (again) “Format: DVD.” Apparently no one had permissions to add another row in that “format” database table, so they’re making up for it every which way they can. Result: utter confusion.</p>\n\n<p>Before you say I’m nitpicking, keep in mind that Walmart.com lists the disc format as “DVD” <em>twice</em> in their search results (along with the movie title, which still says “Blu-ray”). So they recognize, at some level, that the disc format is important; they just don’t get it right.</p>\n\n<p><b>Lesson 3: In this world of intentionally incompatible, mutually exclusive formats, make it clear what you’re selling.</b> By the time I figure out you sold me the wrong thing, I probably can’t return it. I will only be burned by this once, and I will never forget who burned me.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Barnes and Noble <a href=\"http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?EAN=786936735550\">fares somewhat better</a>:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Title</li>\n<li>Disc format</li>\n<li>Genres</li>\n<li>Plot summary & reviews</li>\n<li>Major actors</li>\n<li>Theatrical release date (year)</li>\n<li>Running time</li>\n<li>User-submitted comments and ratings</li>\n<li>List of extra on-disc features</li>\n<li>Director, cast, and same-site links for more information</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>They mention the disc format up-front and give you a link to “learn more about formats.” They even let you search by format, which is simultaneously a nice touch and a sad necessity. The plot summaries are high quality, and their origins are clearly labeled (”Barnes & Noble,” “All Movie Guide,” “Customer Reviews”). The directors and cast listings are a nice touch, and they’re links to (same-site) searches for more information. In fact, Barnes and Noble replicates the core of what IMDB gives you — cast biographies, related links — while keeping you on-site. All in all, a job well done.</p>\n\n<p>But notice what’s still missing: still no mention of audio, still no mention of subtitles. Am I the only one who likes to watch movies with subtitles? How many millions of people in the United States alone only speak English as a second language? I guess those people don’t shop at Barnes & Noble.</p>\n\n<p><b>Lesson 4: “secondary” features like audio and subtitles can be a dealbreaker.</b> Again, just be clear about what you’re offering. Not everyone speaks English. Not everyone who can speak English can hear perfectly. Not everyone who can hear perfectly can watch movies at full volume without waking up their kids upstairs. (When did you think we could find two hours to watch a movie, anyway?)</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Finally, here’s <a href=\"http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.asp?item_id=1305507\">DVD Empire’s page for the same movie</a>. They’ve got it all: title, disc format, running time, complete and accurate audio and subtitle information, on-disc extras, reviews, ratings, actors and directors and producers and writers and — God bless ‘em — links wrapped around every last one of them. They even list the video aspect ratio and the UPC code. I don’t think there’s a single bit of readily available information that they don’t list or link to. They’ve got it all.</p>\n\n<p>And after all that, the pirate release is still better. Really. I don’t mean “it’s better because it doesn’t have DRM,” or “it’s better because it’s free (until you get caught).” It’s better because it has unique features that <em>you simply can not find</em> from any legitimate distributor. Look at those subtitles: 11 of them! English, Spanish, French, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Portuguese. Holy crap, where did all those come from? The original disc only has 3!</p>\n\n<p>Well, they come from people, real people who take the time to translate subtitle files into other languages and share them on communities like <a href=\"http://www.opensubtitles.org/\">OpenSubtitles.org</a>. User-generated subtitles are a massive worldwide phenomenon that most English speakers don’t even know about. Ever since DVDs were cracked wide open, open-source video players have offered the capability to play retail DVDs but display subtitles from a separate file, which you could download without feeling too guilty about stealing anything. Translation quality varies widely, of course, but something is better than nothing. In this release, the pirates have gone to the trouble of locating all those subtitle files for you, and they ultimately provide a “total package” that even the best legitimate distributor can’t match.</p>\n\n<p><b>Lesson 5: in the edge cases, you can’t compete with pirates because you don’t control what you’re selling.</b> (Lesson 5½: there are more edge cases than you think.) Pirates aren’t just distributors; they can also be content creators. They can rip, mix, burn, and mashup content at will, and they have a twisted sense of pride in offering “the best” — whether that’s release speed, video quality, file format, or subtitles in 11 different languages. (What, you thought this was the only pirate release of this movie? There are dozens more, and they’re all optimized for different definitions of “best.”)</p>\n\n<p>Every legitimate retailer could learn lessons 1 through 4. Some retailers have learned them already. But solving this last problem would require a complete overhaul of the content distribution network. More than that, it would require a rethinking of the fundamental roles of creator and distributor, to give retailers the sort of control that pirates take without asking. I don’t think it’s realistic that the copyright kings of the world would ever allow such an overhaul (after all, they designed the current system from top to bottom), but this is what we’re losing by not even trying.</p>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://poppalina.typepad.com/my_weblog/\">This is a very elegantly written posting.</a></p>\n<p>Most people are not aware of the depths of the argument that between the fine craft establishment and the dominate fine art elite. I used to think about that debate more; but I’m pleased to note something about it.</p>\n<p>Fine art is at it’s core about scarcity; fine craft is much less so; and what has come to be called crafting hardly at all. The fine craft movement, which weaves it’s way back through all of history and all nations, in it’s modern manifestation, I’m surprised to note, a lot like open source.</p>\n<p>I hate to play that card. The term open source has almost fallen dead for me. So many people play that card in an attempt to grab a bit of legitimacy for what every scheme they are executing that involves sucking talent out of the vast pool of people on the other side of the internet; and don’t get me started on the neologism ‘democratizing.’</p>\n<p>What is going on in the modern crafting movement, as manifested in the web, is the thing I think is coolest about the Internet. First off it has a pool of people of common interest finding each other, like a giant pot luck dinner or a stone soup. They are creating energy and knowledge that wasn’t there before; in an commons. Secondly the energy of this movement comes from the periphery; the respect of the participants faces toward the periphery.</p>\n<p>When this works you get the opposite of scarcity based activities. In fine arts the entire community is polarized by the pervasive question of who’s at the top, who can command the premium prices, who’s hot, who’s not. In a periphery facing community the tension, the anxiety if you wish, is where on the vast periphery the next insight will emerge, the next cool trick of the trade, the next breath taking bit of design.\n</p>"
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"title" : "The Road Less Traveled",
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"content" : "<p>I’ve read that given two stores people will tend to visit the one that is toward the city center in preference to the one that’s in the other direction. It’s as if you had to climb uphill to move away from the city center. Customers tend to flow, like water toward the commercial centers.</p>\n<p>These effects get filled under the term Hoteling in some of the economics’s literature. In it’s most naive form Hoteling is kind of stupid; it meerly points out that buyers include the total cost of a transaction when making a purchase. The vegetables maybe spectacular at Russo’s or dirt cheap at Haymarket; both a half hour round trip from my house; but the Foodmaster at the bottom of my street is a damn sight more convenient. Which goes to explain why there are a few dozen Foodmaster’s around town; like a hotel chain Mr. Foodmaster knows that part of what he’s selling is being close at hand.</p>\n<p>My reading on hyperbolic discounting suggests that hoteling effects are much stronger than mere arithmetic would suggest. I suspect that people have extremely skewed models about this stuff. The hills are much steeper than it’s possible to imagine. That most people shop closer to home and stick to the main roads far more than would be in their best interest.</p>\n<p>I’ve always been a road less traveled kind of guy. As a child, before first grade, I can recall lying in bed tracing out the roads of my town; wondering what was down particular turns my parents had never taken. As an adult I have a self amused tendency to take turns out of raw curiosity and a strong preference for taking the roads the super highways replaced. I know that the interesting authentic vendors tend to be hidden, around the corner, up the stairs, where their unique qualities sustain them; rather than their proximity to traffic.<br>\nHoteling effects, of course, take place in your mind too. When something new needs an explanation you fall naturally into the existing explanations. When you must decide what to do your thoughts flow into existing channels. It would be, it is, exhausting not to.</p>\n<p>In this country, where we have traditionally had tremendous amounts of empty real estate, we have undergone waves of upheaval that have transformed the shape of the traffic flows. We have successively overlaid networks of rivers, turnpikes, canals, railroads, and superhighways. For better or worse, each time these have created new commercial centers while displacing older ones.</p>\n<p>In each round some people got really rich. Not by buying the land cheap and selling it high, but by shaping the traffic flows until they came to the land they owned. Some railroad barons are and were more conscious of this process than others. For example the folks building Facebook are clearly working hard to see that social traffic flows over their turnpikes.</p>\n<p>As a guy who like to take the road less traveled I’m pleased to see that Google Maps has added little handles to their suggested routes that enable me to dynamically drag them. Now I can insist that, yes I do want to drive thru downtown on this trip; and yes I do want to make detour that goes along the beach road, and yes I do want to cross the river on that exceptionally narrow bridge. But I wonder, why did they decide that such a feature would actually be interesting to most people? Most people aren’t like me. I suspect I’m way out on the long tail of map users; but then I suspect the folks working on Google maps are too.\n</p>"
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"content" : "<div><p>by <strong>Slothrop</strong></p>\n\n<p>As expected, the batch of boneheaded bills on immigration was trounced this \nweek. Instead of reform to provide millions of undocumented workers a place to \ntruly call a home (rather like the rest of us) businesses will push for \naccommodations on hiring immigrants, and Tom Tancredo will get his fence and a \npassel full of stinking badges to "enforce" what passes as \nimmigration.</p>\n\n<p>But the debate will continue as "illegals" remain and arrive \nfor permanent membership in America's lumpen proletariat. </p>\n\n<p>Disabusing the \nrhetoric of the "debate" isn't easy. According to the virtual rightwing book of \ncommonplaces the "illegal" immigration "crisis" will destroy America. If you're \na knucklehead you have to know and repeat, to whomever is unfortunate to listen, \nthat illegals--and god only knows the millions of potentially "amnestied" \nimmigrants--will destroy America's social services, healthcare and income \nsubsidy programs, economy and culture. The Mexican is undermining the American \nDream.</p>\n\n<p>This is hardly limited to circulation among rightwing \nknuckleheads. Looking for votes, few politicians would risk contravention of a \nmaster trope. And to be sure, the god narrative featuring Mexican immigrants \ngnawing at American prosperity is good for capital. </p>\n\n<p>Breaching this wall \nof false consciousness isn't easy, but it helps to be armed with a few quick \nfacts to disarm the depthless stupidity of the reigning discourse on illegal \nimmigration:</p>\n\n<p>Myth #1: The Mexican under my bed will take away more than \ngive to America's economy.</p>\n\n<p>Nope. Study after study shows that illegals \ncontribute to economic productivity and profits. And the best support for this \ncomes from bourgeois economists who seldom pass up an opportunity to praise the \nefficient maintenance of a reserve army of service workers. Support of this is \nprovided by the increase in productivity of efficiently employed workers. The \nso-called immigration surplus, captured by employers as added productivity is \nsmall, but positive (about .4 of GDP in 2004). George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: \nImmigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University \nPress, 1999); <a title=\"http://irpshome.ucsd.edu/faculty/gohanson/ImmigrationCSR26.pdf\" href=\"http://irpshome.ucsd.edu/faculty/gohanson/ImmigrationCSR26.pdf\">see also, \nHanson.</a> <br>Even when considering skill differentials between immigrant and \nnative labor, immigration both legal and illegal is a <a title=\"http://www.phil.frb.org/econ/conf/immigration/card.pdf\" href=\"http://www.phil.frb.org/econ/conf/immigration/card.pdf\">plus</a> for the \neconomy.</p>\n\n<p>To the extent research like <a title=\"http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.html\" href=\"http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.html\">The Center for Immigration \nStudies</a> honestly interprets a "drain" on the economy by illegal and possibly \n"amnestied" immigrants, the upshot is that any successful integration of persons \nrequires an improvement of prevailing policies of education, healthcare, and \ntaxation. It is not the fault of illegal workers, or any workers for that \nmatter, that the principle social pathology of poverty remains inadequately \naddressed in theory and in practice. To the extent persons are condemned to \npenury and public subsidy is the result of structural imperatives of capitalist \naccumulation solved by greater equity in the distribution of \nresources.</p>\n\n<p>Myth #2: The Mexican under my bed is destroying wages because \nhe'll work for almost nothing.</p>\n\n<p>Nope. First, illegal competition for jobs \nno doubt reduces the wage-rate. But the amount is negligible at best, and indeed \nimpossible to accurately assess. Even the rightwing maven of immigrant labor \neconomics, George Borjas, must lump all immigrant labor together to limn a \nnational picture of wage-effects. And his more <a title=\"http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief8/policy_brief8.pdf\" href=\"http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief8/policy_brief8.pdf\">recent \nprojection</a> is around a 3.5% decline in wages among low-skilled native \nworkers. While immigration might have a downward pressure on menial wages, the \nwage gap between dropouts and highschool graduates has remained constant for \nnearly 30 years.</p>\n\n<p>Secondly, the downward pressure on wages is not a choice \nmade by individual workers. All workers seek to rationally maximize welfare by \nseeking higher wages. The problem is the declining solidarity of all workers to \nconfront capital, and the failure of labor to extract a larger share of the \nnational product. The wage-labor contract is the locus of class-war, regardless \nof ambiguous and arbitrarily assigned "documentation" of the status of \nindividual workers. This would not change even if no Mexicans remained to \ndestroy America.</p>\n\n<p>Myth #3: The Mexican under my bed is a parasite on the \nhealthcare "system."</p>\n\n<p>Nope. A recent Rand study using excellent survey \ndata from Los Angeles found that foreign-born and especially illegal persons \nspend far less, and utilize far fewer public subsidies, on healthcare. \nImmigrants And The Cost Of Medical Care. By: Goldman, Dana P.; Smith, James P.; \nSood, Neeraj. Health Affairs, Nov/Dec2006, Vol. 25 Issue 6, p1700-1711. <a title=\"http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=406401&renderforprint=1&CFID=18405237&CFTOKEN=38035204\" href=\"http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=406401&renderforprint=1&CFID=18405237&CFTOKEN=38035204\">Elsewhere</a>, \n<a title=\"http://www.floridachain.org/mig_Immigrant Health Expenditures (2nd Draft).pdf\" href=\"http://www.floridachain.org/mig_Immigrant%20Health%20Expenditures%20(2nd%20Draft).pdf\">researchers</a> \naccumulate more and more evidence suggesting quite low-rates of healthcare \nconsumption among illegal/legal immigrants. There is no shortage of studies \nconcluding the same. And as for the revolting slander repeated on knucklehead \nradio that Mexican women illegally enter the US to conceive "anchor babies" in \norder to win cash subsidies, nothing could be <a title=\"http://www.chcf.org/documents/insurance/HAjulaug2000BerkEtAl.pdf\" href=\"http://www.chcf.org/documents/insurance/HAjulaug2000BerkEtAl.pdf\">less \ntrue</a>.</p>\n\n<p>In any case, the "system" is in undeniable crisis owing to the \nrationing of care by tenuously market-oriented competition, and the confiscation \nof wealth by the capitalist class assured by the sanction of law. Pharma, HMOs, \ninsurance companies are the beneficiaries of this massively fraudulent transfer \nof wealth, not "illegal immigration." </p>\n\n<p>Myth #4: Isn't the Mexican under \nmy bed a drug-snorting father-rapist?</p>\n\n<p>Nope. Undocumented workers are not \nmore likely to be incarcerated or criminals. Many knuckleheads will offer <a title=\"http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_illegalsandcrime\" href=\"http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_illegalsandcrime\">FAIR(!)</a> \nresearch to argue otherwise. Disingenuously, FAIR correlates the adult \npopulations in and out of prison to reveal higher criminality among illegals. If \nFAIR had fairly compared low-income non-incarcerated with incarcerated \nundocumented males who are of course poor, the claim of the report could not be \nsupported. A more accurate assessment of crime and immigration comes from the <a title=\"http://www.ailf.org/ipc/special_report/sr_022107.pdf\" href=\"http://www.ailf.org/ipc/special_report/sr_022107.pdf\">American Immigration \nLaw Foundation</a> which shows that foreign-born high-school dropouts are \nincarcerated at far lower rates than the corresponding native \npopulation.</p>\n\n<p>It is hardly surprising that low-income workers--all of whom \nare forced to accept dismally low-paying jobs without benefits--sometimes commit \ncrimes.</p>\n\n<p>Other "myths" including "problems" of cultural assimilation, \nlanguage acquisition, low-IQ, "reconquista" etc. are pursuits of implicit racism \ndeserving no response. </p>\n\n<p>As for the Mexican under your bed, strike up a \nconversation in poor Spanish, repeating the phrase: Ya se puede!</p></div>"
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"content" : "<p>For the next few days, I am at the Aspen-Atlantic “Ideas Festival,” whose proceedings are chronicled in detail <a href=\"http://aspenideas.theatlantic.com/\">here</a>. Just now at a lunch time session, James Bennet, the Atlantic’s editor, was interviewing Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. In a (very long!!) speechlet/question to Meridor, James Woolsey, former CIA director, alluded to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase, “<a href=\"http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/formans/DefiningDeviancy.htm\">defining deviancy down.</a>”</p>\n<p>Eureka.<a></a></p>\n<p>Woolsey was applying the phrase to the Palestinian/Israeli standoff. (His point: the rest of the world took it for granted that Israel would respect the rights of its Arab minority, and also took it for granted that Palestinians would attack the Israeli-settler minority on the West Bank.) But as soon as I heard the phrase I thought: this is what’s going on with President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence.</p>\n<p>Of course this is outrageous. Of course it is at odds with everything Bush and his team used to say about punishing leakers in specific, and about “accountability” and “consequences” in general. (One thing I learned when researching Bush’s speaking style for <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200407/fallows\">this article</a> in 2004 about his surprising success as a debater, was how strongly the themes of “actions have consequences” and “people must be held accountable” characterized his rise to political prominence in Texas.) Of course it makes a mockery of the concept of all people standing equal before the law. Of course the result would have been 180 degree different if, say, Joseph Wilson had been convicted of leaking information about something Libby himself was doing on a classified mission. Of course in that situation the Administration would have complained that two-and-a-half years in the slammer was barely a slap on the wrist for someone who had revealed the nation’s secret.</p>\n<p>The problem is: “of course.” We know that this is how the Administration behaves. We know it from the President’s declaration that Alberto Gonzales had performed magnificently in Congressional testimony the rest of the world saw as catastrophic. We know it from the infamous “three stooges” moment when the Presidential Medal of Freedom was conferred on Paul Bremer, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks. We know it from the failure to hold anyone above the foot-soldier level responsible for disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know it in a thousand other ways.</p>\n<p>And thanks to “of course,” people can be upset by this decision but not really shocked. (The main surprise, of course, is that Bush didn’t wait until his last days in office and then pardon Libby; on the other hand, Libby would have spent some time behind bars by then.) That is why I agree with only one part of David Brook’s <a href=\"http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/opinion/03brooks.html\">column today</a> about Libby: his assertion that outrage over the issue will soon simmer down. The outrageousness will remain.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Give Scooter Libby a New Job",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RopNXy78bEI/AAAAAAAAAJc/hYRy_xcmcPE/s1600-h/libby_happy.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RopNXy78bEI/AAAAAAAAAJc/hYRy_xcmcPE/s320/libby_happy.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>Conservatives have not been very happy with President Bush lately because of his support for immigration reform and his apparent disregard for the fate of Scooter Libby. Although his <a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/02/libby.sentence/\">commutation</a> of <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/washington/03libby.html?ex=1341115200&en=a0fa5f740498d6ba&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">Libby</a>'s sentence should reassure the <a href=\"http://themoderatevoice.com/society/law-legal-matters/13850/bush-libby-commute-solidfies-bushs-status-as-polarizer-in-chief/\">President</a>'s base, many <a href=\"http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010289\">conservatives</a> <a href=\"http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/07/02/libby-commutation-washington-responds/\">believe</a> that the <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/02/AR2007070202060.html\">President</a> did not go far enough. I think the President needs to do more to win back the base and I have an idea that will do just that.<br><br>Many were shocked by the harsh sentence that Judge Reggie Walton gave <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/scooter-libbys-halloween.html\">Libby</a>. To give him a sentence that was within the sentencing <a href=\"http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2007/07/one-off-justice-republican-style.html\">guidelines</a> was to treat him like a crack dealer or some other <a href=\"http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/07/02/fitzgeralds-statement/\">common</a> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/opinion/03tues1.web.html?_r=1&oref=slogin\">criminal</a>. It sent a terrible message to those who criticize the administration that no one can do anything to stop them without risking jail time. In his <a href=\"http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070702-3.html\">statement</a> commuting the sentence President Bush called the <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/washington/02cnd-libby.html?ex=1341115200&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=3b552b3d4a3ea394&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink\">sentence</a> \"excessive.\" But oddly the <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/washington/03bush.html?ex=1341115200&amp;amp;amp;amp;en=3bcdee56f578bb53&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss\">President</a> did not pardon <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-kind-of-tree-is-scooter-libby.html\">Libby</a> and he did not <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/02/AR2007070201611.html\">absolve</a> him of having to pay a hefty $250,000 fine.<br><br>Ed Morrissey, who was not very happy with President's immigration bill and <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/010335.php\">wanted</a> Congress \"to find a solution that respects the rule of law,\" <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/010421.php\">compared</a> the President to Solomon. \"In opting for commutation, Bush has attempted a Solomonic decision to split the baby,\" Morrissey wrote. \"Unfortunately, like Solomon, Bush will probably find neither side satisfied.\" Although I agree with Morrissey that Bush is as wise as Solomon, I'm not sure he is interpreting the biblical story correctly. As I recall one of two women who claimed the baby was perfectly happy to settle for half a baby and it was only the real mother that objected. To tell you the truth I never understood why the other woman thought having half a baby was a pretty good deal, but I guess times were different back then. Morrissey thinks that half a baby is all the President could give Libby for now.<br><br>Ace of Spades, who in post after post rallied his readers to jam the phone lines of their congressmen to protest the \"<a href=\"http://ace.mu.nu/archives/229479.php\">amnesty bill</a>\" for illegal immigrants, was glad that the President ended what he called a \"<a href=\"http://ace.mu.nu/archives/232229.php\">silly fantasia</a>.\" However, he thinks that the $250,000 fine should have been lowered to something more reasonable. Undeclared presidential candidate <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/fred-thompson-kicks-gandhis-ass.html\">Fred Thompson</a><a href=\"http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/02/253699.aspx\"> said</a> he was \"happy\" for Libby though he had \"urged for a pardon.\" Thompson, who was on Libby's defense fund, had also split with the President on immigration, <a href=\"http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/30/ap3874432.html\">saying</a> that illegal immigrants from Cuba are potential terrorists. Glenn Reynolds, who <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11868622/\">thought</a> the immigration bill sent a message to legal immigrants that \"laws are for suckers\" <a href=\"http://instapundit.com/archives2/006806.php\">predicted</a> that Bush would rise in the polls as some conservatives rallied to his side for commuting Libby's sentence. Michelle Malkin who has excoriated the President over what she called \"shamnesty\" for illegal immigrants has been largely silent on the Libby case.<br><br>If Bush wants to win back the Republican base, there is something he could do that would win them over on both the immigration issue and on <a href=\"http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/07/george-bush-obs.html\">justice</a> for Scooter Libby. He could appoint Libby as the new Immigration Czar and give him sweeping new powers to ruthlessly enforce the <a href=\"http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003585.php\">rule of law</a>. Working with Federal and local law enforcement, Libby's new agency could round up illegal immigrants that break our laws just by being here. At the same time his recent experience with the legal system would give him the compassion and discretion necessary to deal leniently with the small businessmen and homeowners who just needed workers for their restaurants and factories and day laborers to tend their gardens and lawns. And the annual salary for this new job should be $250,000, which would take care of Libby's fine. With this bold move, the President would be <a href=\"http://tomwatson.typepad.com/tom_watson/2007/07/no-mercy.html\">killing</a> two halves of the baby with one stone, something even Solomon couldn't manage. It would send a powerful message that the President does not condone law-breaking unless it is absolutely necessary for national security. That's a clear message that I think conservatives could rally around.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br> <a href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"blinkbits\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\" alt=\"blinkbits\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&Title=\" title=\"BlinkList\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\" alt=\"BlinkList\"></a> <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"del.icio.us\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\" alt=\"del.icio.us\"></a> <a href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&new_comment=\" title=\"Fark\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\" alt=\"Fark\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&t=\" title=\"Furl\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\" alt=\"Furl\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"LinkaGoGo\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\" alt=\"LinkaGoGo\"></a> <a href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"Ma.gnolia\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\" alt=\"Ma.gnolia\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&h=\" title=\"NewsVine\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\" alt=\"NewsVine\"></a> <a href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"Reddit\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\" alt=\"Reddit\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"Shadows\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\" alt=\"Shadows\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"Simpy\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\" alt=\"Simpy\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"Spurl\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\" alt=\"Spurl\"></a> <a href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&title=\" title=\"TailRank\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\" alt=\"TailRank\"></a> <a href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html&=\" title=\"YahooMyWeb\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\" alt=\"YahooMyWeb\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/07/give-scooter-libby-new-job.html\"><img src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" title=\"RawSugar\" border=\"0\" height=\"20\" width=\"20\"></a><br><br>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Cheney\" rel=\"tag\">Cheney</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Scooter+Libby\" rel=\"tag\">Scooter Libby</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Bush\" rel=\"tag\">Bush</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Immigration\" rel=\"tag\">Immigration</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/701911888/\" title=\"waiting for the iphone\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1339/701911888_7e258e9bc9_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" alt=\"waiting for the iphone\"></a></p>\n\n<p>sigh... camping out for days waiting for a phone... observers are worried</p>"
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"title" : "ghana must go in san francisco",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/701931174/\" title=\"ghana must go in san francisco\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1213/701931174_b59c88b2dd_m.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"240\" alt=\"ghana must go in san francisco\"></a></p>\n\n<p>The mementos of exiled souls<br>\nSee <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/bags-and-stamps.html\">Bags and Stamps</a> and <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/06/plagiarism-in-plaid.html\">A plagiarism in plaid</a></p>"
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"title" : "lotus ibm gear",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/677016587/\" title=\"lotus ibm gear\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1166/677016587_fdcd59db94_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" alt=\"lotus ibm gear\"></a></p>\n\n<p>The toli donation to the <a href=\"http://www.lotusmuseum.com/pages/home_page\">Lotus Museum</a><br>\nA sampling of my collection of loot...<br>\n<br>\n- 1 Freelance Graphics '96 (Avery) pen holder (1996)<br>\n- 1 Lotus Notes globe (1995 vintage?)<br>\n- 1 Lotus Notes cup - the groupware standard (1997) with Beanie Baby diving into it. The Beanie Baby was a giveaway at LotusSphere 2001, most likely for Lotus K-station or Lotus Discovery Server (Raven).<br>\n- Lotus SmartSuite Millenium Edition water bottle (1999)<br>\n- Lotus eSuite blue coffee mug (1999)<br>\n- 2 Lotus eSuite toolkits (open and closed) featuring mini screwdrivers, knives, pliers and pullers, (1998-1999)<br>\n- 1 Lotus ScreenCam 97 mouse pad, 1997<br>\n- 1 Lotus Software memo pad, 2002<br>\n- 1 IBM Software Group Strategic Priorities mousepad, 2002<br>\n- 1 Lotus tropical hat (1998)<br>\n- 1 GPG 1997 Kickoff T-shirt (Graphical Products Group aka Freelance Graphics) featuring a very happy Clip Art Pete, the celebrated mascot from Freelance<br>\n<br>\nAncilliaries: Norwegian flag from consulting engagement with StatOil, 1999, courtesy of the M. O'Connell collection. Greek facemask courtesy of the E. Karra collection. <br>\n<br>\nLotus Development Corporation ceased to exist circa 2002 and it became a brand, Lotus Software. It is left as an exercise to the reader to transcribe the text of the IBM Software Group Priorities and indeed assess their implementation success.<br>\n<br>\nThe mementos of exiled souls</p>"
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"title" : "Abacha watch YEAA '98",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/540105032/\" title=\"Abacha watch YEAA '98\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1127/540105032_8462c2b9ac_m.jpg\" width=\"185\" height=\"240\" alt=\"Abacha watch YEAA '98\" style=\"border:1px solid #ddd\"></a></p>\n\n<p>A historical artefact of infamy in Nigeria: a campaign watch for the YEAA '98 campaign, that is, the <b>Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha</b> shell organization that supposedly was spontaneously formed to campaign for that suffocating, murderous and dictatorial rogue, General Sani Abacha, who feasted on the corpse of the Nigerian body politic in the eighties and nineties. <br>\n<br>\nNotice the arrow and the wheel mechanism, perhaps it is fitting, for Nigeria under Abacha was on a road to nowhere.<br>\n<br>\nFor those interested in tracking the financial shenanigans, the watch was manufactured by a certain CMI Corporation of Monrovia, California. Other campaign paraphernalia were flown in from Singapore to support the fledgling campaign designed to keep the general in power and have him hand over to himself. <br>\n<br>\nThis is one of my prized possessions, I keep it by my bedside to remind myself about hubris and the strange bedfellows that populate this world of ours.</p>"
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"title" : "Dew drops by Gabriele Schwibach",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/koranteng/\">amaah</a> posted a photo:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/538188461/\" title=\"Dew drops by Gabriele Schwibach\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1098/538188461_24e6bb3de0_m.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"152\" alt=\"Dew drops by Gabriele Schwibach\" style=\"border:1px solid #ddd\"></a></p>\n\n<p>a delightful etching - her <a href=\"http://www.loraen.com/schwibach/littlepeople01.htm\">Little People</a> series is also iconic, she's a fabulous fabulist.<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.schwibach.com/9227.html\">Gabriele Schwibach</a> kindly sent the folktale behind this painting:<br>\n<br>\n<b>The Dew Drop Bringer</b><br>\n <br>\nThe families of the dewdrop bringers belong to the Rain tribe. Everyone in the Rain tribe has an important job to make sure the big circle of rain can happen. There are the fog families; the mist families, the snow families, the storm families, the hail families and the dew drop families.<br>\n<br>\nSome of the dew drop families lives in the clouds. They gather moisture and form it to little drops. So the cloud gets heavier and heavier till the cloud rains and the drops fall to earth.<br>\n<br>\nSome of the dew drop families live on the ground. In the early morning they gather the moisture from the air and form little dewdrops, which they place, everywhere and the plants enjoy the sparkling jewelry of water drops that washes them and gives them water to drink. The little ants and other insects love to drink out of the sparkling dewdrop.<br>\n<br>\nThe little dewdrop people work fast and when the sun is rising and it gets warmer and the dewdrops are dissolving they take a break and rest in the shades of the plants.</p>"
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"title" : "I Am Paris Hilton",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RmsRIpd8ZwI/AAAAAAAAAGk/nyZ2pQGEBc4/s1600-h/paris_hilton.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RmsRIpd8ZwI/AAAAAAAAAGk/nyZ2pQGEBc4/s320/paris_hilton.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>At the end of the film <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054331/\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Spartacus</span></a> a Roman general stands before a great multitude of slaves captured after their failed rebellion and demands that their leader, Spartacus, identify himself to face execution. Spartacus steps forward and says, \"I am Spartacus!\" but then one by one the other slaves come forward as well and cry out, \"I am Spartacus!\" \"No, I am Spartacus!\" until everyone in the crowd is echoing his name.<br><br>In Los Angeles a judge ordered <a href=\"http://themoderatevoice.com/general/13369/jailed-paris-hilton-captures-world-press-and-blog-attention/\">Paris Hilton</a> to come before him and just like those Roman slaves in <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Spartacus</span>, I, along with millions of <a href=\"http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0608072paris1.html?link=rssfeed\">Americans</a>, cry out, \"I am Paris Hilton!\"<br><br>What has always made America different from other countries is that every citizen has an equal opportunity to become rich or, at least, to inherit great wealth. That is the American dream. That is why most Americans oppose high taxes for the wealthy and death taxes because they know that someday they might be well off themselves.<br><br>But the tragic saga of <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/6735631.stm\">Paris Hilton</a> has shattered that dream. How can we possibly have faith in the American system of <a href=\"http://ginacobb.typepad.com/gina_cobb/2007/06/crime_and_lack_.html\">justice</a> when we see that despite having access to the best lawyers money can buy, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/us/08cnd-paris.html\">Paris Hilton</a> can be treated so cruelly? What hope do we have for the future when we see that even if we become a <a href=\"http://pandagon.net/2007/06/09/if-paris-hilton-makes-you-mad/\">wealthy</a> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09hilton.html\">celebrity</a>, we might still be subject to the harsh vagaries of the law.<br><br>First they came for Paris Hilton and I did not speak up because I was not Paris Hilton.<br><br>Well, I am speaking up now because I am Paris Hilton!<br><br>Who among us cannot imagine ourselves in <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/08/AR2007060800447.html\">Paris Hilton</a>'s Manolo Blahnik pumps? It does not stretch the imagination to see ourselves driving our Bentley to buy a cheeseburger late at night and getting pulled over for the second time in less than a year and charged with driving without a license after it was suspended for driving while intoxicated. There but for the grace of God, go I.<br><br>The judge in <a href=\"http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,279212,00.html\">Paris Hilton</a>'s case, Michael Sauer, has declared class warfare. If our courts start treating rich and poor equally, what will be left to strive for? People will start believing that justice should just be given away for free. It will become yet another <a href=\"http://www.thoughttheater.com/2007/06/paris_hilton_the_bigattitudes.php\">entitlement</a>. When the haves become indistinguishable from the have-nots, we are all have-nots. On a level playing field no one can rise to the top because there is no top to rise to, just one long valley.<br><br>I am especially shocked at how some of my fellow <a href=\"http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2007/06/09/i-just-cant-get-enough-of-paris-hilton/\">conservatives</a> have suddenly joined the ranks of <a href=\"http://bitsblog.florack.us/?p=6072\">class warriors</a>. \"Pardon me for injecting a little conservative thought into all of this, but I have very little sympathy for Ms. Hilton,\" said <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/010188.php\">Ed Morrissey</a> of Captain's Quarters, sounding more like a Bolshevik than a real conservative. \"She has had all of the advantages possible in society, and has shown herself contemptuous to any sense of responsibility.\" <a href=\"http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/06/a_uniter_not_a_.html\">Andrew Sullivan</a> seems positively gleeful at her plight. \"Whoever doesn't feel an ounce of pleasure at the sight of this mega-rich non-entity finally being treated with a modicum of justice has surely lost the capacity to feel anything,\" he says. <a href=\"http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/06/08/victim-of-society/\">Jules Crittenden</a> gets it right when he says this is all about \"class warfare\" but then shockingly invokes the hoariest liberal clap-trap, writing, \"Like the lefties like to say about murderers, rapists, etc., society made her what she is.\" There is something very wrong with the heart of conservatism today when the words of our greatest conservative thinkers are indistinguishable from those of <a href=\"http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=8272\">Al Sharpton</a> or a Marxist university professor. Even <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzcwZjAzOGVjODg5MjUyZGNjYjRkMDhkYjhiMmMzY2M=\">John Podhoretz</a> seems more confused than usual.<br><br>As one of Podhoretz's readers tries in vain to <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2NiMmEyMzA0NTRkODIyYWU4MTNkMzllODVlOTM1M2I=\">point out</a>, illegal aliens are treated better than Paris Hilton and they shouldn't have any rights at all. Her crack team of expensive lawyers has been reduced to the desperate legal ploy of filing a <a href=\"http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/06/republicans-use-writs-of-habeas-corpus.html\">writ</a> of <a href=\"http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/6/8/14423/01155\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">habeas corpus</span>,</a> as if Paris Hilton were some kind of terrorist. Our system of justice is certainly broken when an American citizen has nothing left to turn to but this outdated legal maneuver, which I thought had been suspended. <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Habeas corpus</span> literally means \"have the body\" and I don't need to point out the sad irony of such a phrase being invoked in Hilton's case. Meanwhile, one Paris Hilton <a href=\"http://www.parishiltonsite.net/paris-hiltons-civil-rights-may-have-been-violated/\">fansite</a> believes her civil rights have been violated and says that the judge may be in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act for retaliating against her because she is \"mentally upset.\"<br><br>To paraphrase <a href=\"http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/quotations/poetry/oscar_wilde.html\">Oscar Wilde</a> on the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to read of the incarceration of little Paris Hilton without <a href=\"http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/2007/06/paris-hilton-bawls-her-way-out-of-jail.html\">weeping</a>. \"Mom, Mom. It's not right,\" she cried when a judge ordered her back to jail to spend 45 harrowing days with people who can only afford public defenders. \"And after all the money we spent,\" <a href=\"http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2007/06/im-party-star-im-popular-ive-got-my-own.html\">said</a> Hilton's outraged mother at her sentencing. If this is the kind of society we live in, then we might as well all be making the minimum wage.<br><br>If this travesty of justice is allowed to stand, then someday it could be you or me. If Paris Hilton is just one of us, then someday we might all be Paris Hilton. That is why I step forward today and proudly proclaim, \"I <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">am</span> Paris Hilton!\"<br><br><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Photo of Paris Hilton by <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Ut\">Nick Ut</a>, who took this <a href=\"http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/06/maybe_al_has_a_.html\">picture</a> <a href=\"http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/06/from_hanoi_to_p.html\">35 years ago</a> to the day after he snapped <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TrangBang.jpg\">this</a> Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a napalmed Vietnamese girl. If that isn't an example of the American Dream, I don't know what is.</span><br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a title=\"Fark\" href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&new_comment=\"><img alt=\"Fark\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\"></a> <a title=\"Furl\" href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&t=\"><img alt=\"Furl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\"></a> <a title=\"LinkaGoGo\" href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"LinkaGoGo\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\"></a> <a title=\"Ma.gnolia\" href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Ma.gnolia\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\"></a> <a title=\"NewsVine\" href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&h=\"><img alt=\"NewsVine\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\"></a> <a title=\"Reddit\" href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Reddit\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\"></a> <a title=\"Shadows\" href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Shadows\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\"></a> <a title=\"Simpy\" href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Simpy\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-am-paris-hilton.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" height=\"20\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" width=\"20\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Paris+Hilton\" rel=\"tag\">Paris Hilton</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Celebrities\" rel=\"tag\">Celebrities</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Ed+Morrissey\" rel=\"tag\">Ed Morrissey</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Andrew+Sullivan\" rel=\"tag\">Andrew Sullivan</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jules+Crittenden\" rel=\"tag\">Jules Crittenden</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Conservatives\" rel=\"tag\">Conservatives</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Law\" rel=\"tag\">Law</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"title" : "Jonah Goldberg's Shining",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaTVS78a1I/AAAAAAAAAHk/UrxzT3vIJf0/s1600-h/lolcat_jonah_goldberg.bmp\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaTVS78a1I/AAAAAAAAAHk/UrxzT3vIJf0/s320/lolcat_jonah_goldberg.bmp\" border=\"0\"></a>All work and no play makes Jonah a dull boy. But two years after the scheduled publication of Jonah Goldberg's magnum opus <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLiberal-Fascism-Totalitarian-Temptation-Hegel%2Fdp%2F0385511841%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1183232339%26sr%3D1-1&tag=jonswift-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\">Liberal Fascism</a><img style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:medium none;BORDER-TOP:medium none;MARGIN:0px;BORDER-LEFT:medium none;BORDER-BOTTOM:medium none\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=jonswift-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=ur2&o=1\" width=\"1\" border=\"0\"></span>, there is no evidence that he has actually written anything other than the subtitle -- again and again and again, like Jack Nicholson in <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Shining</span>. And now he is even rewriting that. The <a href=\"http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/03/shed_a_single_tear/\">original</a> <a href=\"http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2007/03/you_dont_have_a.html\">subtitle</a>, \"The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton,\" had to be changed, probably because the publisher worried that Hillary Clinton would no longer be President by the time the book came out.<br><br>But the new subtitle, \"The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods,\" has come under some criticism from jealous wags. \"I’ve met John Mackey a number of times and I know for a fact that he’s not a 'fascist,' nor does he distribute 'fascist food,'\" <a href=\"http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/042196.php\">wrote</a> Tom Palmer about the founder of Whole Foods. \"Fascism is a more complicated subject than he makes it sound,\" Goldberg responded wearily, clearly worn out by all the energy he has expended rewriting the subtitle. \"'I know John Mackey, John Mackey is a friend of mine, and he's no fascist,' is a pretty vapid argument.\"<br><br>But in defending the subtle <a href=\"http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_06_24_archive.html#3856392735009470748\">new</a> subtitle, <a href=\"http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2007_06_24_archive.html#713942097877447718\">Goldberg</a> has dropped a few tantalizing <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjBmYmNmN2Q0NjkyYTNmOWQzNjU4YWJiOGRiZmM4NTk=\">hints</a> as to what the book is going to be about once he starts writing it. Apparently, Goldberg unearths for the first time shocking similarities between <a href=\"http://larison.org/2007/06/29/nur-der-freiheit-gehoert-unser-leben-the-secret-libertarianism-of-the-nazis-or-is-it-the-secret-nazism-of-the-libertarianism/\">Nazis</a> and liberals. For example, Nazis wanted to clean up the environment. So do liberals! Nazis wanted to cure cancer. So do liberals! Nazis liked <a href=\"http://www.outsidethetent.com/wp/archives/heil-foods/\">organic food</a> and many were vegetarians. So are many liberals! A lot of Nazis were gay and a lot of liberals are, too! Nazis made Volkswagons and liberals love to drive them! Hitler loved dogs and so do many liberals! (which is why many conservatives like <a href=\"http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/06/the-defeat-of-t.html\">Kathryn Jean Lopez</a> were very relieved to discover that <a href=\"http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/06/romneys_shaggy_dog_story.html\">Mitt Romney hates dogs</a>). Goldberg's book will explore the remarkably nuanced similarities between liberals and Nazis and not be the simplistic exercise in liberal <a href=\"http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/29/authoritarianism/index.html\">bashing</a> his <a href=\"http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2007/06/29/6712\">critics</a> claim it will be without even reading the book, which isn't even written yet.<br><br>Like many conservatives I can't wait for Goldberg to publish his book, which he <a href=\"http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGY3ODg1ZGEyYjQ0OTYxYzc0Yzc0ZDNhN2Q1MzhjMDE=\">promises</a> will be \"a very <a href=\"http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/free_book_help.html\">serious</a>, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.\" But the <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2162318/\">publication date</a> keeps getting pushed farther and farther into the <a href=\"http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2007_03_11_archive.html#2320739960678652822\">future</a>. The first sign of trouble was when Goldberg <a href=\"http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2005/10/conservative_sc.html\">asked</a> for help from readers of The Corner. \"I'm working on a chapter of the book which requires me to read a lot about and by Herbert Spencer,\" Goldberg said. \"There's simply no way I can read all of it, nor do I really need to. But if there are any real experts on Spencer out there -- regardless of ideological affiliation -- I'd love to ask you a few questions in case I'm missing something.\" The idea that he would try to read any Spencer at all before writing about him already struck me as biting off more than he could chew. But the addition of <a href=\"http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_06_24.html#007058\">Hegel</a> to the new subtitle raises more troubling questions. <a href=\"http://www.martinirevolution.com/wp-trackback.php?p=373\">Hegel</a> is even more tedious and difficult to understand than Spencer and I'm afraid that finding someone who can explain Hegel to Goldberg is going to take up yet more precious time. After all, Hegel himself reportedly said, \"Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me.\"<br><br>I don't know how Goldberg can possibly meet his deadline in time for the book to come out on the latest publication date -- December 26 of this year -- so I have an idea that will save Goldberg a lot of time writing and also spare the reader from having to plow through too much prose once it's finished. Most of Goldberg's ideas could be expressed much more economically, not to mention entertainingly, by using <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat\">LOLcats</a>, an Internet meme where <a href=\"http://icanhascheezburger.com/\">pictures</a> of <a href=\"http://slate.com/id/2166338/\">cats</a> and other cute animals (or \"varmints,\" as Mitt Romney likes to call them) are captioned with <a href=\"http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/04/cats-can-has-gr.html\">grammatically</a> challenged prose. Cats are thematically appropriate because they are often used to depict Nazis in such books as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman\">Art Spiegelman</a>'s <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMaus-Survivors-Tale-Father-History%2Fdp%2F0394541553%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1183232418%26sr%3D1-3&tag=jonswift-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\">Maus</a><img style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:medium none;BORDER-TOP:medium none;MARGIN:0px;BORDER-LEFT:medium none;BORDER-BOTTOM:medium none\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=jonswift-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=ur2&o=1\" width=\"1\" border=\"0\"></span> and <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMaus-II-Survivors-Troubles-Began%2Fdp%2F0679729771%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1183232418%26sr%3D1-4&tag=jonswift-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\">Maus II</a><img style=\"BORDER-RIGHT:medium none;BORDER-TOP:medium none;MARGIN:0px;BORDER-LEFT:medium none;BORDER-BOTTOM:medium none\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=jonswift-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=ur2&o=1\" width=\"1\" border=\"0\"></span>. And conveniently, many <a href=\"http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/cgi-bin/seigmiaow.pl\">cats look like Adolf Hitler</a> so these \"kitlers,\" as they are called, can be used as pictorial shorthand to depict liberals.<br><br>Using LOLcats to express his ideas instead of boring old-fashioned prose would also help Goldberg appeal to a new generation of young people who seem to be getting more and more liberal according to recent <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27poll.html?ex=1340596800&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=36085ff7d204267f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">polls</a>. In fact, I think Goldberg could solicit the help of many young Photoshop whizzes on the Internet to write the book for him. Below, I have already provided a few suggestions to start the ball rolling. Feel free to email me or drop links in the comments to your own examples and I will post the links here.<br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Introduction: A Very Serious Book</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaUXy78a3I/AAAAAAAAAH0/3yhizemo_z4/s1600-h/lolcats_seriouscat.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaUXy78a3I/AAAAAAAAAH0/3yhizemo_z4/s200/lolcats_seriouscat.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 1: Hegel</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaU2C78a4I/AAAAAAAAAH8/MLofVAnuAso/s1600-h/lolcats_black-white-and-grey-kittens.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaU2C78a4I/AAAAAAAAAH8/MLofVAnuAso/s200/lolcats_black-white-and-grey-kittens.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 5: Why Do Liberals Hate Adam Smith?<br><br></span><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaVPC78a5I/AAAAAAAAAIE/5jh7yK1cFLQ/s1600-h/lolcats_invisible_hand.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaVPC78a5I/AAAAAAAAAIE/5jh7yK1cFLQ/s200/lolcats_invisible_hand.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 13: Nazis and Liberals: Separated at Birth?</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaWSy78a7I/AAAAAAAAAIU/hCebcFys6ew/s1600-h/lolcats_nazi.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaWSy78a7I/AAAAAAAAAIU/hCebcFys6ew/s200/lolcats_nazi.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 24: Rachel Carson, Nazi</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaVry78a6I/AAAAAAAAAIM/lBmFJS1m3ug/s1600-h/lolcats_treehugger.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaVry78a6I/AAAAAAAAAIM/lBmFJS1m3ug/s200/lolcats_treehugger.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 27: Gay Marriage and the Decline of Western Civilization</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoakBy78a-I/AAAAAAAAAIs/bMufuzxpJRI/s1600-h/lolcats_gay.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoakBy78a-I/AAAAAAAAAIs/bMufuzxpJRI/s200/lolcats_gay.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 32: Fighting Islamofascism<br><br></span><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoalZi78a_I/AAAAAAAAAI0/0_8CtLp4CJA/s1600-h/lolcats_islamofascism.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoalZi78a_I/AAAAAAAAAI0/0_8CtLp4CJA/s200/lolcats_islamofascism.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 33: They're Taking Our Guns Away!<br><br></span><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoarNy78bAI/AAAAAAAAAI8/KYUrFDs_mQ8/s1600-h/lolcats_gun.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoarNy78bAI/AAAAAAAAAI8/KYUrFDs_mQ8/s200/lolcats_gun.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 35: Food Fascism</span><br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaXTi78a8I/AAAAAAAAAIc/WvjfUOma5rM/s1600-h/lolcat_wholefoods.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoaXTi78a8I/AAAAAAAAAIc/WvjfUOma5rM/s200/lolcat_wholefoods.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">Chapter 46: How We Can Fight the Whole Foods Menace<br></span><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoagVS78a9I/AAAAAAAAAIk/GcmyJ8E1i8Y/s1600-h/lolcats_cheezeburger.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoagVS78a9I/AAAAAAAAAIk/GcmyJ8E1i8Y/s320/lolcats_cheezeburger.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><strong><em>Update:</em> Im in ur blogosphere writin ur book:</strong><br><br>Pinko Punko from <a href=\"http://blog.3bulls.net/\">Three Bulls</a> is the first to meet the challenge with the <a href=\"http://blog.3bulls.net/?p=1666\">dust jacket</a> and some more chapters:<br><br><strong>Prologue: Liberal fascism is tempting!</strong><br><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rogjxy78bCI/AAAAAAAAAJM/WBHZoUytiwc/s1600-h/prologue.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rogjxy78bCI/AAAAAAAAAJM/WBHZoUytiwc/s200/prologue.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><strong></strong><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><strong>Chapter 36: Food Fascism II</strong><br><strong></strong><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RogjTC78bBI/AAAAAAAAAJE/mD74fkOizxc/s1600-h/chapter36.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RogjTC78bBI/AAAAAAAAAJE/mD74fkOizxc/s200/chapter36.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><strong></strong><br><br><br><strong></strong><br><br><strong>Blurb: im in ur pornography knowin it when I seez it. o book is fine kthxbye</strong><br><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RogkOi78bDI/AAAAAAAAAJU/Gg9VTyVdDMs/s1600-h/blurb.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RogkOi78bDI/AAAAAAAAAJU/Gg9VTyVdDMs/s200/blurb.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>My Signature weapon presents <a style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\" href=\"http://mysignatureweapon.blogspot.com/2007/07/chapter-4-liberty-and-marketplace-of.html\">Chapter 4: Liberty and the Marketplace of Ideas</a><br><br>Reader Ginsu Chef sends along <strong>Chapter 42: Protecting Democracy from Democrats</strong>:<br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Roqiby78bFI/AAAAAAAAAJk/DjJsJeT36vI/s1600-h/diebold_pwns.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Roqiby78bFI/AAAAAAAAAJk/DjJsJeT36vI/s200/diebold_pwns.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><b></b><br><b><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>Share This Post</b><br><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/jonah-goldbergs-shining.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" 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"title" : "Brown v Board of Education's Original Intent",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoUcxi78a0I/AAAAAAAAAHc/WvzZ6rjEVfg/s1600-h/john_roberts.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/RoUcxi78a0I/AAAAAAAAAHc/WvzZ6rjEVfg/s320/john_roberts.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>In his confirmation <a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/13/roberts.hearings/index.html\">hearings</a> Chief Justice John Roberts affirmed his support of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Board of Education</span></a>, a decision that has often been misinterpreted by judicial activists. Finally, more than 50 years after the <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span> decision, Justice Roberts has <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/28/AR2007062800896.html\">revealed</a> in his <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29scotus.html?ex=1340769600&en=b61ba374f900bc92&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">opinion</a> for the 5-4 <a href=\"http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2007/06/school_race_dec.html\">majority</a> in <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Parents Involved</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Seattle School Dist. No. 1</span> what <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown </span>really meant. \"Before <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span>, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,\" he wrote of the cruel injustice of white children being told they could not attend the black schools of their choice. In the wake of <span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/2007/06/supremes-break-social-contract.html\">Brown</a> </span>liberals only compounded this injustice by forcing black children to go to school with white children even if they didn't want to. In the name of equality hardly anyone got to attend the schools of their choice. Although the <a href=\"http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2007/06/desegregation-opinions-blog-and-media.html\">decision</a> in <a href=\"http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/06/parents-involved-swan-song-or-bakke-for.html\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Parents Involved</span></a> generated 185 pages of opinions, Roberts has conveniently boiled down the true meaning of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown </span>in a sentence that could fit on a <a href=\"http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/jun/28/triumph_of_the_bumper_sticker\">bumper sticker</a>: \"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of <a href=\"http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/segregation-today-segregation-tomorrow-segregation-forever/\">race</a> is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.''<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">The Board of Education</span> overturned <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Plessy</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Ferguson</span> which upheld the segregation of railroad cards based on the doctrine of \"separate but equal.\" But <span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/06/undoing-america.html\">Brown</a> </span>had the inadvertent effect of replacing this doctrine with an even more unfair policy: \"together but unequal.\" Black children were forced to attend white schools where they couldn't possible compete and white children where forced to attend black schools where they weren't challenged enough. Parents were horrified that their children had become pawns in social experiments that tried to force equality and integration. Many parents <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/21_boston.html\">responded</a> understandably to forced busing of their children by throwing rocks at buses carrying other people's children.<br><br>The <a href=\"http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/06/28/shifting-the-groundwork-at-scotus/\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span></a> decision, perhaps more than any other event in our history, gave rise to the modern <a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/28/toobin.ots/\">conservative</a> movement. In writing about <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span> in his book <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Conscience of a Conservative</span>, Barry Goldwater said, \"In effect the Court said that what matters is not the ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution, but the Court's ideas. It was only by engrafting its own ideas on the law of the land that the Court was able to reach the decision it did….I am therefore not impressed that the Supreme Court's decision on school integration is the law of the land\" William Buckley's <span style=\"font-style:italic\">National Review</span> also denounced the decision at the time. And future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a <a href=\"http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/001677.html\">memo</a> in 1952 urging the Court to do the right thing. \"I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Plessy </span>v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Ferguson</span> was right and should be reaffirmed,\" wrote Rehnquist, who would stay true to his ideals and make a lot of unpopular and unhumanitarian decisions. If it weren't for Brown, there might be no modern <a href=\"http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu/archives/231755.php\">conservative</a> movement.<br><br>But like all conservatives Justice Roberts is a great respecter of the principle of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">stare decisis</span> and did not want to <a href=\"http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/06/the-school-assi.html\">overturn</a> an important <a href=\"http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2007/06/oh-god.html\">precedent</a> like <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown </span>after more than 50 years (although the Warren Court apparently felt no such compunction in overturning <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Plessy</span>). So instead, he went back to the original intent of the decision, which was that the government should be completely <a href=\"http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/06/28/supreme-court-severely-limits-affirmative-action/\">colorblind</a>. If many schools have become <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29fri1.html?ex=1340769600&en=86f06a756d90d397&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">resegregated</a> in the half century since <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span>, then the government is totally <a href=\"http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/?p=455\">blind</a> to this outcome. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, quoting Anatole France, \"The majestic equality of the law, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.\" Under the Roberts court the government gives black students and white students the same freedom to go to dilapidated segregated schools if they want to.<br><br>If parents don't want their children attending segregated <a href=\"http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/06/the-school-assi.html\">schools</a>, then the have the <a href=\"http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=25827\">freedom</a> of choice to <a href=\"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/06/scotus_strikes_down_race_discrimination_as_cure_for_race_discrimination/\">move</a> to another district, earn enough money to send their kids to <a href=\"http://www.stereohyped.com/politics/good-news-for-white-parents-in-seattle-and-louisville-you-can-take-your-kids-out-of-private-school-now-20070628/\">private</a> schools or quit their jobs and homeschool their kids. Other parents, on the other hand, may prefer that their children attend segregated schools. \"People -- black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, poor, Christian, secular, etc. -- naturally want to be around people like themselves. Why is that such a bad thing?\" conservative Rod Dreher recently <a href=\"http://dallasmorningviews.beloblog.com/archives/2007/06/re_td_looking_f_5.html\">wrote</a>. He points to a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c4ac4a74-570f-11db-9110-0000779e2340.html\">study</a> by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam that shows that \"the more <a href=\"http://theglitteringeye.com/?p=2992\">diverse</a> a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone.\" The recent <a href=\"http://neoneocon.com/2007/06/28/what-price-diversity/\">conservative</a> uprising over <a href=\"http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2007/06/race-wars.html\">immigration</a> legislation was a warning to politicians that conservatives do not want to be forced to listen to salsa music and be subjected to the pungent odors of Mexican cooking in their own neighborhoods, because that will only make them trust their Spanish-speaking neighbors less, especially since they can't <a href=\"http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/6361.html\">understand</a> a word they are saying.<br><br>\"It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,\" Judge Stephen Breyer said in an angry dissent from the bench. But all Justice Roberts has done is return to the original intent of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Brown</span>, changing things back to the status quo. In coming years I think we will see the Court returning to the original intent of a number of decisions. Hopefully, we will return to the original intent of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Roe</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Wade</span>, which affirmed that the government does have the right to restrict abortion, the original intent of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Griswold</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Connecticut</span>, which granted only married couples the right to privacy and the original intent of <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Marbury</span> v. <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Madison</span>, which affirmed that the Supreme Court only has the power to interpret the original intent of the Founding Fathers not make up its own interpretations.<br><br>I hope that the Roberts Court will also return the original intent of legislation that has been distorted over the years. It made some strides in this direction in another decision the Court issued yesterday, which <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/business/28cnd-bizcourt.html?ex=1340769600&en=190350e79de0ed9a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg\">stripped</a> <a href=\"http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-judicial-restraint.html\">away</a> 96 <a href=\"http://guntotingliberal.com/?p=1571\">years</a> of misinterpretations of <a href=\"http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-just-started-laughing.html\">anti-trust</a> <a href=\"http://d-day.blogspot.com/2007/06/make-me-barf.html\">laws</a> and returned back to the original intent of the law. If Justice Roberts Court succeeds in his efforts to wrest control of the judiciary away from the radical judicial activists, this country will be returned back to the original vision of the Founding Fathers and the last 200 years or so will just seem like a bad dream.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a title=\"Fark\" href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&new_comment=\"><img alt=\"Fark\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\"></a> <a title=\"Furl\" href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&t=\"><img alt=\"Furl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\"></a> <a title=\"LinkaGoGo\" href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"LinkaGoGo\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\"></a> <a title=\"Ma.gnolia\" href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Ma.gnolia\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\"></a> <a title=\"NewsVine\" href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&h=\"><img alt=\"NewsVine\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\"></a> <a title=\"Reddit\" href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Reddit\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\"></a> <a title=\"Shadows\" href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Shadows\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\"></a> <a title=\"Simpy\" href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Simpy\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/brown-v-board-of-educations-original.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" border=\"0\" height=\"20\" width=\"20\"></a><br><br>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Brown+v+Board+of+Education\" rel=\"tag\">Brown v. Board of Education</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Supreme+Court\" rel=\"tag\">Supreme Court</a>,<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/John+Roberts\" rel=\"tag\">John Roberts</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Original+Intent\" rel=\"tag\">Original Intent</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Parents+Involved\" rel=\"tag\">Parents Involved</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "Content Management is one the most important categories of software. Two years ago, Microsoft Office was the inevitable choice, with various hosting applications like Sharepoint for the enterprise. But there's been a huge amount of change in the last two years - from OpenOffice to Google Spreadsheets to Youtube.\n \n<p>It's now (just) possible to see what Content Management will be like in future - and it's already clear that no one is near yet.\n \n<h4>About Content Management</h4>\nThe first question is, what is content?\n<ul>\n<li>text (e.g. HTML, doc or xls) </li>\n<li>raster images (e.g. JPG, PNG)</li> \n<li>vector images (e.g. SVG)</li>\n<li>audio (e.g. mp3) </li>\n<li>video (e.g. mpeg) </li>\n<li>structured data (e.g. various XML)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The last category is really a miscellaneous bucket, which I don't expect to contain much except for niche applications. Raw XML is great for data crunching and back-end configurations, but I don't see it being used much for content - we have more specific languages (like HTML and SVG) for that.\n \n<p>The second question is, what is management?\n<ul>\n<li>CRUD (create, read, update, delete) </li>\n<li>publishing </li>\n<li>collaboration (CRUD permissions, discussion tools) </li>\n<li>versioning & audit trail </li>\n<li>syndication (subscribing to feed) </li>\n<li>search </li>\n<li>storage (includes records management)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<h4>Web Office Suites</h4>\nIf you look through this list, Microsoft Office only really handles the first option. Sharepoint handles most of the rest, but that's only used in the enterprise - what about other people?\n \n<p>That's why you can't rule out web office suites like Google Apps - they may be very basic at CRUD, but they can be excellent at management functions 2 through 7 - and how many people really want complicated document formatting options anyway?\n \n<p>The most interesting content management technology is, of course, the Wiki. Wikis naturally cater for all seven management functions above. The only problem is, traditionally Wikis have been restricted to plain text and totally open permissions, but there's no reason why that couldn't change.\n \n<p>For example, JotSpot was (until being acquired by Google) selling a Wiki for corporate use that included HTML calendars and spreadsheets as editable pages. And I don't see why you couldn't edit other media collaboratively using a Wiki - especially vector graphics.\n \n<h4>Ideas for a Web Office</h4>\nGoogle has been suprisingly quiet about the future of JotSpot since acquiring it. If I'm right, their strategy will be to convert Google Apps into a Wiki suite that covers all types of content (1-6 above), and all types of management (1-7 above).\n \n<p>For example, Youtube could become a Wiki, including video editing capability (with permissions settings). Picasa will become a Wiki-based competitor to Photoshop. They could be packaged up with general Wiki website editing functionality, and sold to corporates (or made available to consumers, supported by ads).\n \n<p>To compete, Microsoft will have to cannibalize their existing Office suite, including Sharepoint. I'm still not sure they're ready for this yet. \n \n<h4>In summary</h4>\nThe future of content management is Wikis, allowing management of all types of content: web pages, photos, vector diagrams and videos. It'll be based in the browser, using standard web technology like HTML, CSS, javascript and SVG. There'll be a lot more emphasis on collaboration, syndication, and search. And now the future is clear, there will be a race to achieve it - and Google has the head start.</p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "A File Format Timeline",
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"content" : "<img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/timeline.png\" align=\"left\"><br><br><br><br><br>26 June Update<br><br>I suppose the downside of a blog post containing only a picture is that there is nothing for anyone to quote. So here are a few themes that struck me while putting this chart together:<br><ol><br><li>Microsoft once made file format information on the binary formats readily available, in fact encouraged programmers to use the binary formats. But then around 1999 they reversed course, and eliminated such documentation. At the time, working at Lotus, I had no idea what motivated this change. It was only years later, when Microsoft internal memos were released in cases like <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Comes v. Microsoft</span>, that the full picture emerged. The file format was viewed by Microsoft as a strategic tool, used to support the overall Microsoft platform, not the user. The format was designed to preserve their vendor lock-in. The availability of the file format documentation to competitors was limited, as a matter of corporate policy.<br><br>So this reminds us that just because something is documented and available today does not prevent Microsoft from changing their mind at a later point and removing the documentation, failing to update it with new releases, or making it available only under a more restrictive license. Since Ecma owns the OOXML specification, as well as the future maintenance of it, any belief in the long-term openness of this format depends on your trust of Microsoft's future behavior in this area.<br></li><br><br><li>Like any durable goods monopoly (and few things are as durable as software) Microsoft's largest competitor is their own install base. Microsoft has made many attempts at moving beyond the binary formats in the past, with Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. But in each case it failed. These were all false starts and abandoned attempts. So we should look for signs that OOXML is actually Microsoft's real direction and not another false start or dead end.<br><br>My guess is that OOXML is merely a transitional format, much like Windows ME was in the OS space, a temporary hybrid used to ease the transition from 16-bit to the 32-bit platform that would eventually come (Windows 2000). Microsoft doesn't want to support all of the quirks of their legacy formats forever. That just leads to bloated, fragile code, more expensive development and support costs. They would rather have clean, structured markup, like ODF. But the question is, how do you get there? The answer is straightforward: First, eliminate the competition. Second, move users in small steps, promising the comfort of continuity and safety. Third, once you have eliminated competition and have the users on the OOXML format that no one but Microsoft fully understands, then you may have your will of them. For example, introduce a new format that drops support for legacy formats and force everyone to upgrade. They are pretty much doing this already on the Mac by <a href=\"http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/25.html\">dropping support for VBA</a> in the next version of the Mac Office.<br><br>Even a cursory look at OOXML shows that it was not designed for long term use, even by Microsoft. So the question I have is, what is the real format that they are going to?</li><br><br><li>Microsoft, after pretty much ignoring document standards for over a decade, suddenly got religion in late 2005 and rushed whatever they had on hand into Ecma. Remember, just months earlier they had recommended the Office 2003 Reference Schemas to Massachusetts for official use. I'm certainly glad Massachusetts did not fall for that by putting their resources on another dead format in the Microsoft format graveyard. OOXML was not designed to be a standard. It is just a proprietary specification that Microsoft has dumped, at the last minute, into ISO's lap, in an attempt to translate their market domination into a standards imprimatur in order to further cement their market domination. It is a win-win situation for them. Either they have a effective monopoly in office applications and an ISO standard, or they have an effective monopoly in office applications. Nice situation for them either way. Reminds me a lot of Henry VIII and Clement VII. Henry set himself up to win regardless of what the Pope's response was.</li></ol>"
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"content" : "<p>One of the questions I have been asked many times since leaving South Africa is “are they going to be ready for the World Cup”. My standard refrain is they shouldn’t be hosting the world cup in the first place which like BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) will benefit a small minority with an even smaller minority making huge sums of money from the competition. Is the the World Cup in anyway influencing anti-poor policies in urban centres such as Durban and Cape Town? I imagine yes, that it is playing a part as the SA government is no doubt concerned to remove any evidence of poverty from the centre of it’s cities. However the real issue behind the attacks against the poor in the Eastern & Western Cape and KwaZulu Natal is LAND and MONEY - property development and gentrification.</p>\n<p>What I want to try and highlight here is the similarities between what is happening in South Africa with what has happened and continues to happen to the survivors of Katrina in New Orleans. The systematic harassment and removal of the homeless from urban centres along with the harassment and attempts to evict shack dwellers also from urban centres in a replication of apartheid era policies based on race and class.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=220\">In New Orleans, Katrina </a>and the flooding from the broken levees destroyed some 142,000 apartments of working class families plus thousands of public housing homes. In the aftermath of Katrina thousands of residents were dispersed throughout the US in what many thought would be a temporary move until they could return to their homes in New Orleans. Note there was a housing crisis in New Orleans before Katrina and the city was one of the most deprived and underdeveloped in the country. Katrina was, for the developers, a <a href=\"http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=220&limit=1000&limit2=2000&page=2\">Godsend…..</a></p>\n<blockquote><p>After the disaster, public officials famously made race-tinged comments about the flood as an act of God cleaning up New Orleans public housing, and the city being better off without welfare queens, pimps and “soap opera watchers.” HUD’s Jackson signalled his own low opinion of public housing when he told the press that “only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked.”</p>\n<p>“What you see in New Orleans is happening in every other community around the country. What is different about New Orleans is Katrina gave the government a chance to fast forward what other communities are going through in terms of the conversion of traditional public housing, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of families,” said Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University and one of the main advocates on the residents’ lawsuit.</p></blockquote>\n<p>An interesting sidebar: The oil is produced by the State of Louisiana is 3 miles offshore therefore the state receives no monies. Like the Niger Delta, all off shore oil monies go direct to the Federal government. “if Louisiana seceded from the US” they would be able to build their own levees, homes etc. Even receiving a percentage like every other oil state could enable it to be self-sustaining. (Source: “When the Levees Broke”)</p>\n<p>But it’s not just the US that is engaging in the displacement of thousands and theft of housing and land from the poor and marginalised people in the country, the majority of whom are Black people. In South Africa the displacement is taking place in cities and rural areas across the country. In the past year there has been a systematic removal of some of the most vulnerable sectors of the community such as the homeless including street children from Cape Town city centre. The children have been picked up by the police and dumped in outlying communities such as in Muizenberg where there are no support systems in place leaving them even more vulnerable to physical attacks and sexual assault. Residents of <a href=\"http://abahlali.org/node/1456\">Conifer Court</a> and <a href=\"http://abahlali.org/search/node/grassy+park\">Grassy Park</a> (Cape Town) are right now facing eviction following continued harassment of those communities as part South Africa’s anti-poor policy - many of them have been living in Conifers for over 15 years. It is their home, their community. The ultimate aim of the government is to bulldoze all shacks and remove the families to locations as far away as possible such as to the ridiculously named “Happy Valley” where they are given “starter shacks” to set up homes in that wasteland miles from nowhere.</p>\n<p>I have reported previously, the <a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org/?s=Abahlali+\">Abahlali baseMjondolo </a> - [the Durban Shack dweller’s Movement] are constantly battling eviction notices and harassment by local racist police. The aim of the Durban government is to remove the Shack dwellers to out of town locations into cheap and poorly built boxes with no community facilities and far from any opportunities of work.</p>\n<p>The evictions in Cape Town and more recently in KwaZulu-Natal are both underpinned by two pieces of draconian legislation that criminalises poverty and dehumanises the poor. In Cape Town, the City Streets, Public Places and Public Nuisance Act was adopted in May last year. The section that impacts on the homeless including the street children is “<a href=\"http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/40305\">prohibitive behaviour”</a>.</p>\n<blockquote><p> This includes intentionally touching another person or their property without consent, continuing to beg after someone has said no, starting or keeping a fire, erecting any form of shelter or sleepingor camping overnight and bathing or washing in public. The lumping together of human beings and toxic waste within one piece of legislation has sparked outrage in some quarters, with others taking offence at the references made to the poor and disadvantaged as ‘nuisances’.</p></blockquote>\n<p>In addition to prohibiting the homeless from being on the streets, the by-law also prevents them from earning a living from street vending including selling the homeless magazine. Patric Solomons, Director of Molo Songololo (children’s rights) likens the application of the law to be <em>“<a href=\"http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/40305\">equal to apartheid when certain laws applied to certain people.”</a></em></p>\n<blockquote><p> ‘the public has very little care for children living on the streets, they are seen as nuisances’. Molo Songololo has also received reports of children being removed from the city centre and dumped in areas such as Belville, Eerste River and Khayelitsha as well as being physically assaulted, having their possessions confiscated and officials soliciting bribes form them……………..’By doing this we are criminalising the children and and introducing them to a life of crime, for very petty things. I have seen cases of children, with no history of criminal activity, being locked up for something as petty as loitering. In some of these instances the children get sent to a juvenile facility, where instead of being rehabilitated, they are introduced to gang life.’ Of course, such a system then creates real criminals out of children who could have been reintegrated into society at a much lower cost..</p></blockquote>\n<p>The “KwaZulu-Natal Elimination & Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Bill” is possibly the worst piece of legislation since the end of apartheid and one that has striking parallels with that era. <a href=\"http://abahlali.org/node/1629\">Abahlali have described</a> the legislation as <em>“an attempt to legalise attacks against the poor” </em>- the shack dwellers and the street vendors of KZN.</p>\n<blockquote><p> We have heard Ranjith Purshotum from the Legal Resources Centre say that “Instead of saying that people will be evicted from slums after permanent accommodation is secured, we have a situation where people are being removed from a slum, and sent to another slum. Only this time it is a government-approved slum and is called a transit area. This is the twisted logic of the drafters of the legislation”. We have heard Marie Huchzermeyer from Wits University say that this Bill uses the language of apartheid, is anti-poor and is in direct contradiction with the national housing policy Breaking New Ground. Lawyers have told us that this Bill is unconstitutional.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Since 2002, The Durban government has been trying to evict and relocate the people of Abahlali. They have been lied to, tricked by developers as well as the local government, harassed by racist police, their leaders arrested on false charges of murders, protesters including women beaten by the police. All of this so the shackdwellers land can be used by developers to build houses for middle income people whilst they are sent to the wilderness of outer Durban. Like Operation Murambatsvina in Harare, the Bill uses offensive language such as the word “slum” to describe the communities and “eliminate” to remove them. It gets worse. The plan is to place people in “transit areas” in between their eviction from their present homes and relocation to new homes. How long this will take is not clear. But forcibly removing people and placing them in transit camps before dumping them in wastelands of poorly built houses with no facilities sounds very much like the racist Group Areas Acts of the Apartheid era. The Mail & Guardian even compared the Bill to Nazi Germany. In addition the punishment for trying to prevent an eviction is R20,000 or face 5 years in prison. The city, regional and national governments have a choice. They can either invite representatives from the various shack dweller settlements, the street vendors, homeless and street children to sit down and develop a proper decent plan where people are treated as human beings with respect or continue to be confrontational, anti-poor and inhumane. They have chosen the latter and it will not work - South Africa especially should know that it will not work. It didn’t work for the Apartheid regime and it will not work now. One final point. The policies discussed above are closely connected to the anti-immigration policies of the US and Western Europe and all those other countries in the world that are building walls to keep people out and imprison people inside.</p>\n<p>The USSF starts this Wednesday and one positive outcome would be for those social movements here in the US to begin to build serious links with social movements in Africa and elsewhere around issues such as land rights and immigration. Another positive note is that the forum will be followed by the 3rd “<a href=\"http://www.towardanafricawithoutborders.org/rally.html\">Towards an Africa Without Borders” </a>conference (5th July at the Durban University of Technology)- one of the primary aims is to “internationalise” the struggle in Africa by “bringing together conscious voices of all those struggling to bring change to their societies so that they can recognize each others’ struggles. We also hope to provide a forum by which a unified voice can generate a platform that is, in praxis, cognizant of struggle, not only in Africa, but in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia.” [One of the speakers will be Andile Mngxitama so I hope he will be able publish his own keynote speech of the conference here]</p>\n<p>Links: <a href=\"http://abahlali.org/node/903\">KZN Slum Elimination Bill: A Step Back</a></p>\n<p>Cross posted from <a href=\"http://www.blacklooks.org\">Black Looks</a></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.africanloft.com/?p=258&akst_action=share-this\" title=\"E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc.\" rel=\"nofollow\">Share This</a>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Bad Lands",
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"content" : "<p>Businesses that provide a platform for third party developers are directly analogous to real estate development with the platform vendor in the role of landlord. The ultimate landlords are, of course, nation states. How all that is governed is the primary turf under dispute in politics. For example in colonial Boston the state delegated to Harvard University the rights to build a bridge over the river. Running the bridge was quite profitable, and later when the state wanted to build a second bridge Harvard sued them for breach of contract. Later the state licenced a lot of toll roads and canals, which mostly turned out not to be profitable. When the private operators folded the state got left holding the bag. Historically you needed to get a license from the king to run pretty much any business. Some of these where “licenses to print money,” others less so.</p>\n<p>Vendors Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. etc., like states, manage their platforms to create economic growth on the platform for all the various reasons. For example Tivo averages $8.78 per subscriber per year and one way for them to increase revenue is to raise taxes or get more customers to move onto their platform. But an example like that can be extremely misleading. The bloom of economic activity around a platform offers many options, and the king can manage those licenses in numerous ways. The traditional technique is to <a href=\"http://10qdetective.blogspot.com/2006/04/all-in-family-at-martha-stewart-living.html\">employ the relatives</a>. But more profitable is to spin off private businesses to friends and family.</p>\n<p>The European kings handing out license for regions of the new world was mixed bag for the license holders; but the US government handing out license for the cross continental railroads was a pretty good deal. The railroad barons managed to retain the rights to much of the land around the rail lines. That’s an interesting contrast to the Louisiana purchase where the Federal government believed it would recoup the cost of the purchase by selling the land, but since we already had a long tradition of taking rather than paying for land it never did.</p>\n<p>The railroad barons (like modern platform vendors) would advertise to attract settlers (developers) to their real estate (platforms). Here’s a story:</p>\n<blockquote><p>IN THE BEGINNING, there were 10 families of Germans from Russia, who arrived in Fresno, CA on June 19, 1887.</p></blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>On May 8, along with 219 other immigrants, they had left the villages of Straub and Stahl am Tarlyk, on the Wiesenseite of the Volga River, journeying westward traveling by wagon, train, and boat through Poland, East Prussia, and Brandenburg to Bremen, Germany, the port of embarkation. When they docked in New York, they intended to go to Lincoln, Nebraska.</p></blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>52 days later, on June 19th, 31 of these pioneers arrived at the old Southern Pacific Railroad Depot in Fresno, California. They brought their families to this great San Joaquin Valley to seek a better life for themselves and scouting for other families in their home villages in Russia.</p></blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>According to Alex C. Nilmeier, of Fresno, his grandfather Philip Nilmeier had become acquainted with a Jewish salesman on board ship. He was a man of the world who believed the San Joaquin Valley had great potential as an agricultural area. Philip Nilmeier was able to convince ten families to change their destination from Lincoln, NE to Fresno. In 1919, he said that certain articles in a little booklet, setting forth the attractions of Fresno County, for working people, also induced him to break away from the homeland.</p></blockquote>\n<p>That worked out! But golly, think about the risk these folks were taking. All on the basis of a little booklet. The visitor center of a national park I once visited had a picture taken about that time showing a barren landscape spotted with occasional hovels, in the foreground a family stood in front of theirs. The caption informed us that these were sod houses, since there was no other building material and that everybody died that winter. I doubt their little booklet used the modern name for that park The Badlands. A tremendous load of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias\">Survivor Bias</a> is built into the stores that get told about all these platforms.\n</p>"
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"content" : "There's an idea I've been mulling over for a few years now and, having discussed it informally with many people, I believe that it is worth describing in detail to solicit further evaluation. It describes a system for prioritizing tasks and allocating resources to accomplish them in a utilitarian manner.<br><br>The system is designed around a collection of tasks. This collection is viewable by all participants and any participant may submit new tasks for addition to it. Depending on the use context, it may be prudent to have gatekeepers filtering incoming submissions. Each task in the collection has a bounty associated with it. This bounty should be linked to a reward system so that participants have an extrinsic incentive to successfully complete tasks. The value of a bounty is dynamic but should usually increase monotonically. The bounty of all tasks may increase uniformly with age but this natural growth of the bounty may be expedited by participants pledging their resources towards the bounty of tasks they particularly wish to see completed. <br><br>At some point, a task will be claimed by a participant who feels the bounty is worth the effort required to accomplish the task. When a claim attempt is made, all sponsors of the task will be contacted and asked to place their previously pledged resources in escrow until the task has been accomplished. Once the necessary quantity if resources have been placed in escrow, the task is assigned to the claimant, who is then responsible for providing regular progress updates on it. If these updates cease for a predetermined length of time then the sponsors may withdraw their resources from escrow and the task will be returned to the unclaimed state.<br><br>Once the claimant has completed the task, each sponsors must approve it before their resources are released to the claimant. If there is a dispute about the level of completion, all involved parties may engage in discussion and further work may ensue. Otherwise, the claimant may choose to relinquish the unclaimed portion of the bounty. To discourage sponsors from turning into deadbeats, their resources are held in escrow until the claimant decides to relinquish them. Likewise, claimants are discouraged from tying up resources in endlessly disputed conflicts by having all their currently assigned tasks viewable before sponsors agree to place pledged resources into escrow.<br><br>I believe that this system will tend to deliver task completion at the lowest price on the market while letting participants effectively pool resources to accomplish shared goals. One thing that I haven't figured out yet is a way of incorporating tasks which have an expiration date because my proposed conflict resolution method doesn't handle that well."
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"content" : "I got into a discussion with my room-mate over whether the Episcopalians are justified in adopting their reforms (NOT regarding the freedoms of homosexuals to homo, which we accepted as none of our business), and like all good discussions we disagreed. Like all better arguments, we got biblical, we got historical, we got theological, we got metamoral, I then understood his understanding of the bible to realize my catholic/agnostic leanings let me overlook an excellent biblical interpretation and then we watched WWE Monday Night Raw. So one one hand I am an asshole (as evidenced by that last parenthesis, if you squint at it a certain way), but on the other hand that seems to be what most great famous people are so I'm getting better about it. Besides, he brought it up, I'm just bad at being politic.<br><br>Today I went to a Political Science class with <span style=\"white-space:nowrap\"><a href=\"http://jimparadise.livejournal.com/profile\"><img src=\"http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif\" alt=\"[info]\" width=\"17\" height=\"17\" style=\"vertical-align:bottom;border:0\"></a><a href=\"http://jimparadise.livejournal.com/\"><b>jimparadise</b></a></span> on a whim, which was fun.<br>-He urged the class to, some day, to the man, drop off at our parliament member's office to raise concerns or even say \"Hi, nice to get form a relationship, the one where you <i>represent me</i>.\" I laughed like everyone else, but I grew ashamed and whispers of \"We the people...\" crept ghostily down my neck.<br>-He also made a throwaway comment about how people at the top of any ministry are probably doctorates or post-grads who have dedicated their lives to the operation of defence, health, whatever. He's probably wrong, there's probably grease if not hard work involved, but once again frustration burned. I don't want a stupid bachelor's just to churn the stupid wheel, and yet now I'm behind the game. The rest of this paragraph has been mulled over many times.<br><br><span style=\"white-space:nowrap\"><a href=\"http://quikchange.livejournal.com/profile\"><img src=\"http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif\" alt=\"[info]\" width=\"17\" height=\"17\" style=\"vertical-align:bottom;border:0\"></a><a href=\"http://quikchange.livejournal.com/\"><b>quikchange</b></a></span> linked me to Danah on <a href=\"http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html\">the good ol' Myspace vs. Facebook class <i>\"\"dicho\"tomy\"</i></a>, which wasn't particularly OMG; but.<br>She bugs me, in a way. On one hand she's trying for a doctorate in !blogging!, which is the coolest thing since ever. She also openly does all sorts of loosely-termed <span style=\"white-space:nowrap\"><a href=\"http://kousu.livejournal.com/profile\"><img src=\"http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif\" alt=\"[info]\" width=\"17\" height=\"17\" style=\"vertical-align:bottom;border:0\"></a><a href=\"http://kousu.livejournal.com/\"><b>kousu</b></a></span>isms (to give it that personal touch), which is just too awesome in a \"bring down the oldboy tweed suit cabal\" way. Most importantly she has this citizen-journalism-web-presence feel, which is way better than cumming into a by-the-cart Livejournal, and she's screaming cos' she had something to say. So she deserves it.<br>And I want it. I want it sooo bad. But is that what one has to do, be outspoken, be garish in some way, decide that these kinds of trivialities are important, be <a href=\"http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/\">arthaus</a> (and don't get me started on what a pompous writer <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/\">Toli</a> can seem to me sometimes.)<br>I fully want every single person spitting their life on the Internet, I believe that we are derilect in our now-reachable duty of shipping the Hegelian Absolute/Spirit into its ultimate frenzy. In the beginning was the word, and the word was UTF-8. But still; if one wants to be that kind of thoughtful academic, is there no way except to push such things into people's faces, network, schmooze, wine, dine, shine, reflect on Ani DiFranco's identity and impact upon this world? Can people not just launch upon the theoretic in peace, advancing and furthering the craft in dignified silence while the real world leaves them alone? Must we be prodigious, single-minded or genial?<br><br>I have a feeling the answer is yes, one has to push if one wants into the subway doors of influence. One must preach if one is to rise above the congregation.<br><br>Stay in school, kids. Do your homework, do it single-mindedly and with volume."
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"title" : "Web3S",
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"content" : "<div><div style=\"width:6.5625em;height:5.9375em;float:right\">\n\n\n\n\n</div>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/06/rest_app_microsofts_webw3s_and.html?CMP=OTC-TY3388567169&ATT=REST+Atom+APP+WebW3S+and+An+Open+Invitation+To+Prove+MSFT+Wrong\"><cite>M. David Peterson</cite></a>: <em><a href=\"http://dev.live.com/livedata/web3s.htm\">WebW3S</a> is Microsoft’s answer to a RESTful web publishing protocol. In many ways it attempts to tackle the same problems solved by the Atom Publishing Protocol.</em></p>\n<p>I took a look at “Web Structured, Schema’d & Searchable”, and found Structure, but was unable to find the Web, Schema, or Search.</p>\n<p>But let me first back up.</p>\n<p>The web on which the Atom Publishing Protocol concerns itself consists of resources which may be binary (things like GIFs and JPEGs), markup (things like HTML and XHTML), and arbitrary XML; and furthermore may contain outbound links to resources which can reside either on the same host or on different hosts.</p>\n<p>The data that Web3S concerns itself with consists of element information items (EIIs) which, in Web3S at least, must always form acyclic single rooted trees. EIIs have a name, an ID, a parent, and zero to many children. EIIs are explained in terms of the XML Infoset, though apparently serializing the Web3S Infoset into/out of JSON is an open issue (<a href=\"http://dev.live.com/livedata/web3s.htm#_Toc165289025\">3SAFQ</a>), as for that matter so is XPATH (<a href=\"http://dev.live.com/livedata/web3s.htm#_Toc165289023\">3SAFO</a>) and SEARCH (<a href=\"http://dev.live.com/livedata/web3s.htm#_Toc165289024\">3SAFP</a>).</p>\n<p>While I see little in this document that relates either to Atom or APP, my read is that if Web3S were recast using <a href=\"http://www.foaf-project.org/\">FOAF</a> and <a href=\"http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xml/bb510102.aspx\">SSE</a>, it would be a home run. </p>\n<p>Or LDAP, <a href=\"http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/06/17/Web3S#p-3\">as Tim points out</a>.</p>\n<p>More details below.</p>\n<h3>Mapping to the Web</h3>\n<p>The mapping of a self-contained acyclic self rooted tree onto a portion of URI space is via a “Non-Web3S Prefix Path” which is defined thus: </p>\n<blockquote><p>The part of a HTTP URL path that points to a Web3S root EII. For example, if the root EII <code>com.example.lists</code> is addressable as <code>http://example.com/web3sparser/joesstuff/com.example.lists</code> and <code>com.example.lists</code> is a Web3S resource then <code>web3sparser/joestuff</code> is the non-Web3S prefix path.</p></blockquote>\n<p>A more complete example can be found in Example 3:</p>\n<pre>DELETE /someuser@example.com/LiveContacts/com.example.addressbook/com.example.contact(123ABC)/com.example.phones/com.example.phone(9993) HTTP/1.1\nHost: cumulus.services.live.com</pre>\n<p>So from this, we can conclude that on a host named <code>cumulus.services.live.com</code>, rooted at <code>/someuser@example.com/LiveContacts</code> is a Web3S acyclic single rooted tree.</p>\n<h3>Schema</h3>\n<p>Section 3 disclaims any relation of the term “schema” as described by this document has any relationship with any existing schema language in this manner: </p>\n<blockquote><p>the actual representation of the schema (if any) is not constrained by this spec. (Read: No, this has nothing to do with XML Schema.)</p></blockquote>\n<p>That being said, the infoset is sharply constrained:</p>\n<blockquote><p>All elements in the Web3S infoset are named using reverse domain names. So the ‘proper’ name of the root element is <code>com.live.livecontacts.addressbook</code>. To make it easy to serialize into XML we split the name such that the last segment becomes the XML localname and the rest of the DNS name, prefixed with the protocol identifier <code>Web3SBase</code> becomes the namespace.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Again, an example to illustrate:</p>\n<pre><Contact xmlns=”Web3SBase:com.example”\n\t xmlns:Web3s = “Web3S:”>\n <Web3s:ID>43432</Web3s:ID>\n <Profiles>\n <Personal>\n\t <FirstName>Manish</FirstName>\n </Personal>\n </Profiles>\n</Contact></pre>\n<h3>Update/merge</h3>\n<p>While search and JSON are planned future enhancements, boxcarring has made it into the spec in the form of a proposed new HTTP verb: <code>UPDATE</code>.</p>\n<p>The UPDATE method allows the caller to bundle “three kinds of changes to a resource – create a value that is not there, update a value that is there and delete a value that is there — into a single request.” As near as I can tell, all such requests must be scoped to a single Web3s tree.</p>\n<p>This document also describes infoset merging; I can’t help but wonder if <a href=\"http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xml/bb510102.aspx\">SSE</a> fits here. As it stands, Web3S appears to be a single user database; once you accept updates from multiple places the situation becomes a bit more complicated.</p>\n<h3>Summary</h3>\n<p>There are two new media types (<code>Application/Web3S+xml</code> and <code>Application/Web3SDelta+xml</code>), two new URI Protocols (<code>Web3S</code> and <code>Web3SBase</code>), and one new HTTP method (<code>UPDATE</code>) defined in this document.</p>\n<p>I can find no discussion of binary data, in fact everything seems defined in terms of the XML infoset. Given that all data needs to be in a namespace, and that all such namespaces need to use a new URI protocol, one can conclude that no existing XML documents can be directly handled by Web3S.</p>\n<p>Web3S data is further constrained to be a self enclosed tree. There is no general concept of a hyperlink in Web3S, neither to external data, nor within a tree. To traverse this data, one needs to be aware of the specific schema employed by the application. Adopting either <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/\">XLink</a>, or some conventions (e.g., <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/\">xml:base</a> + href attributes), would make this data crawlable.</p>\n<p>The data structures that motivated these requirements seem to have much more to do with FOAF (or perhaps <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML\">OPML</a>) than Atom or RSS. Both FOAF and OPML are inherently “linky”, distributed, and web like.</p></div>"
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/ad4/\"><img border=\"0\" alt=\"Watereddown\" title=\"Watereddown\" src=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/06/15/watereddown.jpg\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>\nI've been excited about the web capabilities of the upcoming <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/\">iPhone</a> for some time. As a reluctant laptop user ("oh, my aching shoulders"), there is real appeal to me in a better portable web browser. I have tried most of the PDA and cellphone browsers to date, and none offer more then a poor cousin to the web that we experience on the desktop.</p>\n\n<p>Instead, the iPhone offers a desktop-class browser. There is no transcoding, nor any subset of HTML such as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language\">WML</a>. Full web pages are rendered in the small display, and when you "double-tap" with your finger the section you touch is expanded to a more readable size. The <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/ad4/\">video</a> available at the Apple website shows this capability in use.</p>\n\n<p>Because of the iPhone's upcoming July 29th release, I decided to participate in this week's <a href=\"http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/\">Apple WWDC</a> conference for Macintosh developers. There a number of announcements about the iPhone were released, and a number of technical sessions on the iPhone and iPhone-related technologies were held. Together the iPhone demonstrations at the public keynote and other demonstrations throughout the WWDC offered some real promise for when the phone is released on June 29th.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://lifewithalacrity.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/06/15/iphonesteve.jpg\"><img width=\"200\" height=\"132\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/images/2007/06/15/iphonesteve.jpg\" title=\"Iphonesteve\" alt=\"Iphonesteve\" style=\"margin:0px 5px 5px 0px;float:left\"></a>\nThe biggest announcement at the public <a href=\"http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/d7625zs/event/\">keynote</a> was that there will not be an SDK for building native iPhone apps; instead, the only way for third parties to get involved is to create web applications optimized for the iPhone. This came as a big disappointment to the majority of developers participating at WWDC. However, as someone who has been involved lately in creating AJAX/Web 2.0 apps, I was less unhappy.</p>\n\n<p>The other significant announcement at the keynote was that a <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/safari/download/\">Safari 3.0 beta</a> for both Mac and Windows was being released and that a third Safari platform would be released on July 29th—inside the iPhone. This means that web 2.0 applications created to work with Safari on the Mac will likely also work on the iPhone.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.synchroedit.com\"><img border=\"0\" alt=\"SynchroEdit\" title=\"SynchroEdit\" src=\"http://www.synchroedit.com/img/selogo-nobox-green.png\" style=\"margin:0px 0px 5px 5px;float:right\"></a>Since <a href=\"http://www.synchroedit.com\">SynchroEdit</a>, an open-source simultaneous web editor (in the style of <a href=\"http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/\">SubEthaEdit</a>) for Firefox that I produced last year, is one of the most sophisticated AJAX/Web 2.0 applications, I dug deeper at various WWDC sessions to see if it might be possible to make SynchroEdit work on the iPhone.</p>\n\n<p>One of the biggest things that SynchroEdit needs in order to function is <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Events/events.html#Events-eventgroupings-mutationevents\">DOM Mutation Events</a>. At a party for <a href=\"http://www.webkit.org\">WebKit</a> (the open source code underpinnings of Safari's web renderer) and in questions after a session at WWDC it was confirmed that these are available to Safari 3.0 and presumably the iPhone.</p>\n\n<p>The other key ability that SynchroEdit requires is WYSIWYG editing. This was terribly broken in Safari 2.0, but I saw many demonstrations of it working in Safari 3.0, so I don't anticipate any problems with this.</p>\n\n<p>SynchroEdit also requires AJAX and in particular the <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/\">XMLHttpRequest</a> function, and the keynote clearly said that this was available.</p>\n\n<p>The final thing that SynchroEdit needs is the ability to keep the browser at <em>readystate==3</em>, i.e. not "finish" sending the page, so that we can continue to interactively pass updates to users as they arrive, without creating a new connection for every message. It is not clear if this will be supported on the iPhone, but there are ways to work around it.</p>\n\n<p>So, in principle, it appears that we should be able to make SynchoEdit work on the iPhone. I am not sure that many iPhone users need SynchroEdit, but as an example of a very sophisticated web technology that should work on that platform, it shows the potential for what might be possible.</p>\n\n<p>Because of this technological capability I've decided to begin investigating what type of social software apps could be highly useful on the iPhone and that aren't being served by the existing web 2.0 community. I am also going to continue investigating the technical issues of developing web apps for the iPhone</p>\n\n<p>If you are interested as well, I invite you to participate in the new <a href=\"http://www.iPhoneWebDev.com/\">iPhoneWebDev</a> community. It should be a great resource for everyone interested in getting in on the ground floor with this new web technology. I have also begun tagging relevant web pages in <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/ChristopherA\">del.icio.us</a> with the tag <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/tag/iphonewebdev\">iphonewebdev</a>—I hope that others will begin to use this tag as well.</p>\n\n<p>I have quite a bit more I'd like to write about specific iPhone technology, but unfortunately I have to wait until the <a href=\"http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/attendee/\">WWDC confidentiality</a> expires on June 29th with the release of the iPhone, so keep an eye out here for more details.</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?a=Z0ymIfiDSwI:WdPT2dRIurI:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?a=Z0ymIfiDSwI:WdPT2dRIurI:dnMXMwOfBR0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?d=dnMXMwOfBR0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?a=Z0ymIfiDSwI:WdPT2dRIurI:aKCwKftKxY0\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?i=Z0ymIfiDSwI:WdPT2dRIurI:aKCwKftKxY0\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?a=Z0ymIfiDSwI:WdPT2dRIurI:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/LifeWithAlacrity?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Ghana’s got oil! (Oh no!)",
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"content" : "<p>My friend <a href=\"http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hmehari/\">Henok Mehari</a> sent me a link to this story from the BBC about the <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6764549.stm\">discovery of substantial oil reserves off the Ghanaian coast</a>. He wanted to know whether I thought this was a good thing or a bad thing for Ghana.</p>\n<p>It’s an excellent question. I’m not sure anyone has the answer.</p>\n<p>There’s a theory in development economics called “<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse\">the resource curse</a>“. It’s an observation that countries with substantial natural resources often develop more slowly than countries with scarce resources. There’s several reasons why oil revenues might be a bad thing:</p>\n<p><b>The “Dutch Disease”</b> - revenue from natural resources increases wages and the valuation of a country’s currency, which makes it harder for industries to be competitive on international markets.</p>\n<p><b>Unpredictable revenue</b> - All commodities are subject to international price fluctuations. Unless you’ve got a monopoly on a commodity - as the South Africans did with diamonds for a few decades - the price may shift radically, making your economy subject to sharp peaks and valleys.</p>\n<p><b>Failure to develop human resources</b> - Countries that are rich in oil sometimes fail to spend enough money on education and training, assuming that the country will make money from resources rather than from the industrial or service sectors.</p>\n<p><b>Corruption</b> - There’s a lot of money in the oil industry, and much of that money makes it into the pockets of corrupt government officials. This is the fault both of the government officials and of the companies that elect to pay bribes.</p>\n<p><b>Conflict</b> - Countries with mineral reserves tend to have a great deal of conflict. Sometimes that conflict is ethnic and regional; other times it’s international, as with the conflict over minerals and timber in the eastern DRC. </p>\n<p>There’s was <a href=\"http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=329\">a brilliant story broadcast by This American Life </a>a few weeks ago about <a href=\"http://www.edwardugel.com/\">Ed Ugel</a>, who bought lottery jackpots from winners, the vast majority of whom discover that winning the lottery leads to massive financial problems. Basically, when someone tells you you’re a millionaire, you start acting like a millionaire, even if lottery prizes are paid in small payments over twenty years.</p>\n<p>It’s easy to imagine how this could happen to an economy.</p>\n<p>Oil-rich African states haven’t exactly had an easy time of it. Nigeria has proven reserves of <a href=\"http://archives.tcm.ie/breakingnews/2002/08/01/story62335.asp\">30 billion barrels</a> - vastly more than the 600 million discovered in Ghana - but the wealth from pumping 1.1 million a day hasn’t done nearly enough to alleviate poverty in the nation, especially in the regions where the oil is produced. Oil has funded a kleptocracy in Equatorial Guinea that has suceeded in enriching the ruling family while creating one of the most economically unequal societies in the world.</p>\n<p>Looking at the problems of oil in Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank attempted to fund creation of a pipeline from newly discovered oilfields in Chad to Cameroon with strong constraints designed to ensure that oil funds would go towards education and economic development. When the power of Chadian president Idris Déby was threatened, <a href=\"http://www.cfr.org/publication/10532/#5\">he changed the petroleum law to eliminate a “future generations” fund</a> and increase spending from oil monies on the military.</p>\n<p>So will the same thing happen in Ghana? There’s reasons to think the Ghanaian government will be able to avoid some of the traps other nations have fallen into. <a href=\"http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/IDA/0,,contentMDK:21204309~pagePK:51236175~piPK:437394~theSitePK:73154,00.html?cid=gidaghana\">Ghana is in excellent economic shape</a> in comparison to its neighbors. It’s one of the very few nations in West Africa on pace to meet its millenium development goals and to halve poverty by 2015 - the percentage of Ghanaians living in poverty has dropped from 52% in 1992 to 35% by 2003. Economic growth has averaged 4.5% a year since 1983, and has been at or above 6% the last three years. This growth has had some connection to natural resources and commidities, including gold and cocoa, but has also included growth in tourism and service outsourcing. A stable, investment-friendly government has encouraged many diaspora Ghanaians to return home and start businesses. Friends from around the continent report a sense of excitement in visiting Accra and Kumasi, and a sense that the country is going through an economic revolution. At least one Nigerian friend is looking into acquiring Ghanaian citizenship…</p>\n<p>Most economists believe that good governance has helped Ghana grow so rapidly the past few years. That good governance could help Ghana steer clear of some of the perils of the resource curse. Ghana has a long tradition of multiethnic society, with members of more than 40 tribes living together peacefully - if the benefits of oil wealth are distributed equitably, there’s a much better chance that the country will benefit, not suffer from this new development.</p>\n<p>The best news about Ghana’s oil may be that there’s not a huge amount of it, and that it’s going to take a long time to get to it - Tullow Oil, which holds drilling rights to the field, tells the Ghanaian government that it could be seven years before the oil is flowing. And while the fields discovered are “one of the biggest oil discoveries in Africa in recent times”, it’s not going to turn Ghana into a producer on the scale of Nigeria. My personal hope is that Kufuor and his successor will be so successful in transforming Ghanaian economy independent of oil money that the natural inclination when oilfields come online will to be to maintain the same steady course.</p>\n<hr>\n<p>Henok offers <a href=\"http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hmehari/2007/06/19/what-is-that-mean-having-oil/\">his thoughts on the issue</a> as well.</p>"
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"title" : "A new wind blowing in Africa",
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"content" : "<p>If <a href=\"http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1514\">oil has the potential to destabilize or grow a nation’s economy</a>, very few economists are concerned with the negative economic impact of wind power. While wind is a resource that hasn’t attracted mass investment yet in Africa, it’s often a great resource for isolated communities that have no other steady source of electrical power.</p>\n<p>One of those areas is the Mastala Village in the Kasungu district of Malawi, where <a href=\"http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/\">William Kamkwamba</a> grew up. It’s a rural agricultural area about three hour’s travel from the capital, Lilongwe. Like many rural parts of Africa, there’s no grid electrical power. But there is wind.</p>\n<p>William had to drop out of secondary school in 2002 because his family lacked funds to pay his school fees. Determined to continue his education, he started reading books from the primary school library, which had been contributed by USAID in a teacher training scheme. He discovered a pair of books on energy, one of which included the design for a windmill, and he began work on a five meter tall windmill near his family’s home, built from scrap timber, an old bicycle frame, and blades made from PVC pipe heated and pounded into flat blades. The windmill powers a bicycle dynamo, designed to power a bicycle’s headlamp. William ran the bicycle dynammo through a transformer, which provided enough power to charge a 12 volt battery. That battery in turn powers four lights, two radios and a mobile phone charger in William’s home.</p>\n<p>Dr. Hartford Mchazime, the director of the Malawian training academy where William had found the books came to visit the village and was told about William’s windmill. He was so impressed by the young man’s ingenuity that he arranged for William to begin attending secondary school at government expense, and asked a reporter from the Malawi Daily Mail to report on the wind project. The Daily Mail story caught the attention of Malawian software developer and blogger <a href=\"http://soyapi.blogspot.com/\">Soyapi Mumba</a>, whose post got picked up by <a href=\"http://www.vdomck.org/2006/11/23/malawian-windmill/\">Hactivate</a>, Afrigadget and other blogs. Emeka Okafor from Timbuktu Chronicles - curator of the TED Global conference in Arusha - was so impressed that he arranged for William to come to the Arusha as a conference fellow.</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/wp-content/2007/06/me_standing_at_the_top_of_the_win_2.jpg\" width=\"400/\"><br>\n<i>William stands atop his windmill, which now is 12 meters high</i>.</p>\n<p>William’s work stole the show at TED, where he gave a three minute talk about his work and answered questions on stage from Chris Anderson. More than a few of the TED attendees were moved by his story and agreed to subsidize William’s education, both in and out of the classroom. Tom Rielly from the TED team is visiting Malawi with William this week to talk about the best ways to help William, consulting with Dr. Mchazime, William’s family and Soyapi and others of the African bloggers who’ve had the experience of moving from homes in rural areas to secondary schools in bigger cities. While the TED community is able to raise the money that would be necessary to send William to secondary school anywhere on the continent, Tom is looking for all sorts of opportunities for William to learn more, both formally and informally, both in classrooms and in machine shops.</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/wp-content/2007/06/img_6485.JPG\" width=\"450/\"><br>\n<i>William shows off his transformer and battery system in his house. Photo by Tom Rielly.</i></p>\n<p>One important resource for William will be the brilliant geeks at<a href=\"http://www.baobabhealth.org/\"> Baobab Health</a>. Soyapi and others have been building open source touchscreen health systems with Baobab, using retrofitted thin client systems. <a href=\"http://www.baobabhealth.org/2006/12/23/erecting-a-tower/\">A recent volunteer project at Baobab</a> helped build an 18m windmill - William visited the NGO yesterday and <a href=\"http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/2007/06/visiting_baobab.html\">received a voltmeter and a 48 volt motor</a> which is likely to be used in his next windmill system. Since William used his first computer only a few weeks ago, it might be a while before he’s regularly updating <a href=\"http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba\">his own blog</a>, but I suspect that if Soyapi has his way, William will be building power control systems in Ruby on Rails within about six months…</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/wp-content/2007/06/img_6568.JPG\" width=\"450/\"><br>\n<i>William’s push-button wall switch. Photo by Tom Rielly</i></p>\n<p>Tom has been sending notes and pictures from the road to some of the TED community. It’s been very humbling to see what this young man has accomplished with hard work, patient reading and almost no money. The photo above shows a wall-switch for the lights in his family’s house that William engineered from PVC pipe, springs, wire and rubber from flip-flops. I take a certain amount of pride in my ability to build complex things from simple parts… but I’ve got a Home Depot down the road, disposeable income and a pickup truck. Ask me to wire my house using plastic conduit, bare copper wire and a used pair of shoes and I’d laugh at you. William would get to work and get the job done.</p>\n<p>I’m not the only one who found William to be an inspiration. Nii Simmons, a Ghanaian-American entrepreneur, points to William’s ingenuity, and his statement, <a href=\"http://improudtobeanafrican.blogspot.com/2007/06/quintessential-quote-i-saw-i-make.html\">“I saw, I make,”</a> as an inspiration for his own work. Hash has <a href=\"http://whiteafrican.com/?p=656\">a great version of William’s story on his blog as well</a>, and J<a href=\"http://www.afromusing.com/blog/2007/06/19/simon-mwacharo-renewable-energy-entrepreneur-video\">uliana has a great video interview with Simon Mwacharo</a>, the founder of <a href=\"http://craftskills.biz/\">Craftskills</a>, a group in Kibera, Nairobi, which is building renewable energy projects in African cities. It’s likely that Mwacharo will be a great resource for William in the future… and that William is an inspiration for Mwacharo and anyone who cares about African innovation and ingenuity.</p>\n<p>William’s not the only new African blogger to appear on the web this week. Ike Anya and Chikwe Ihekweazu have both leapt onto the scene with their new blog, <a href=\"http://nigeriahealthwatch.blogspot.com/\">Nigeria Health Watch</a>, which looks at public health issues and innovations in Africa’s most populous nation. Welcome, guys. It’s a great time to be a reader of African blogs - if you’re not getting your daily dose, take a spin by <a href=\"http://blogafrica.com\">BlogAfrica</a>, <a href=\"http://afrigator.com\">Afrigator</a> or <a href=\"http://globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/sub-saharan-africa\">Global Voices</a> and make sure you’re getting your recommended daily allowance of African innovation. </p>"
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"title" : "Edit This!",
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"content" : "<h2>Editing ETags</h2>\n<p>\nIn a <a href=\"http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-whitehead-http-etag-00.txt\">draft from beginning this year</a>, <a href=\"http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~ejw/\">Jim Whitehead</a> summarized the rather brittle state of editing HTTP resources. The idea of how to use HTTP for <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/04/Editing/\">editing web resources</a> was specified in 1999 already. ETags are being used in order to detect lost updates. So a resource entity is described by the tuple (url, etag).\n</p><p>\nETags are a fine thing when it comes to <a href=\"http://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#caching\">HTTP caching</a>. A cache wants to detect in a cheap, efficient way if a resource entity has changed. So it sends the entity tag it knows (etag1) along with a conditional request. If the etag1 still describes the resource entity that would be send to the client, the server will not retransmit it but inform the client that it can continue using its copy.\n</p><p>\nAs Jim explains, there are some problems in exactly figuring out when and how an ETag changes and what the client can deduce about it. While there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel and experts opinions converge on a definition, it seems rather messy and complicated.\n</p>\n<h2>A Step Back</h2>\n<p>\nIf we take a step back (or several) from the current discussion, it seems that WebDAV (and parts of HTTP) has painted itself into a corner by using ETags in editing resources. It is just another sympton of a \"seemed like a good idea at the time\" thing. Other symptoms are\n<ul>\n<li>Microsoft's translate header which they introduced for editing ASP resources.</li>\n<li>The confusion about the DAV:source property and its top place in things left unimplemented.</li>\n<li>The difficulty of offering unauthorized access to resources and when to enforce client authentication.</li>\n<li>The unsolved problem of offering editing capabilities for resources in the presence of content negotiation.</li>\n</ul>\nSo, when using <code>PUT</code> (some things apply to <code>DELETE</code> as well), things are not as nice and easy and orthogonal as one would like them to be. \n</p>\n<h2>A Way Out</h2>\n<p>\nWhen <a href=\"http://www.johnpanzer.com/\">John Panzer</a> send a link to <a href=\"http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/protocol.html#Optimistic-concurrency\">google's GData protocol</a> on the atom mailiing list, I read how google is addressing the lost update problem by generating <em>edit url</em> for the <em>current version</em> of a resource. I don't know if the idea is new, maybe not, but then the credit to the google guys for picking it.\n</p><p>\nBasically the google edit url encodes the tuple (resource url, state) in an opaque way. This is smart. But I see no reason why this canot be applied to general web resources as then:\n<ul>\n<li>editing clients need only to memorize a url and no additional token(s).</li>\n<li>lost updates are detected by the server when modifiying an edit url no longer valid.</li>\n<li>it is possible to handle DELETEs on resources which have been replaced.</li>\n<li>content transformations on GET are orthogonal to edit urls.</li>\n<li>there is no need for a translate header or a DAV:source property any longer.</li>\n<li>edit urls can be placed in a separate namespace where authorization is mandatory.</li>\n</ul>\nSo, it seems its about time for resurrection of the HTTP Link header of RFC 2068:\n<pre>\nGET /index HTTP/1.1\nHost: www.example.com\n\nHTTP/1.1 200 Ok\nLink: <http://www.example.com/edits/index-001>;rel=edit\nContent-Type: text/html\n\n<html>\n...\n</html>\n\nGET /edits/index-001 HTTP/1.1\nHost: www.example.com\n\nHTTP/1.1 200 Ok\nContent-Type: application/myformat+xml\n\n<mymarkup>\n...\n</mymarkup>\n</pre>\nThis example shows a editable resource, showing the edit location in its Link header. Notice that the content type of the resource and its editable representation differs.\n\n</p>"
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"title" : "US Naval operations in the Gulf of Guinea",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rm82qpWlW4I/AAAAAAAAAMY/hKpuudGy9xk/s1600-h/GofG-GhanaNavy.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/Rm82qpWlW4I/AAAAAAAAAMY/hKpuudGy9xk/s320/GofG-GhanaNavy.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><div><div style=\"text-align:center\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.defenselink.mil/home/homepage_photos/index_2005-10.html\">10/26/2005 Training Exercise</a><br>The Ghanaian Naval Ship Anzone, front, and the GNS Achimotaz follow astern of the USS Gunston Hall while participating in training as part of West African Training Cruise ‘06 in the Gulf of Guinea, Oct. 20, 2005 . . . .participating West African nations of Ghana, Senegal, Guinea and Morocco . . . U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Steve Faulisi</span></span><br><br></div><br>Peter Pham writes in World Defense Review about <a href=\"http://worlddefensereview.com/pham060707.shtml\">securing the new strategic gulf</a>. His assessment leaves no doubt as to the nature of US interests. Increasingly the oil from the Gulf of Guinea is found in deep water off shore locations. To protect oil interests, the US wants a naval presence. </div><br><div></div><div>Pham writes:</div><br><div></div><div><blockquote>. . . this past March, Nigeria edged past Saudi Arabia to become our third largest supplier, delivering 41,717,000 barrels of oil to the desert kingdom's 38,557,000.<br>When one adds Angola's 22,542,000 barrels to the former figure, the two African states alone now supply more of America's energy needs than Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates combined.<br>This is all the more remarkable when one considers that, as I reported in <a href=\"http://worlddefensereview.com/pham051707.shtml\">this column three weeks ago</a>, the militant activities of the relatively small Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) over the course of the last eighteen months has \"had the cumulative affect of cutting Nigeria's total oil production by almost one-third.\"<br>Yet for all its global importance as well as strategic significance for U.S. national interests, the Gulf of Guinea has seen comparatively few resources poured into maritime security, a deficit which only worsens when one considers the scale of the area in question and the magnitude of the challenges faced. Depending on how one chooses to define the gulf region, it encompasses roughly a dozen countries with nearly 3,500 miles of coastline running in an arc from West Africa to Angola.</blockquote></div><br><div></div>Pham is concerned about international groups like al-Qaeda, replaying the usual themes of terrorism and oil. There are other security issues in the Gulf. Piracy is one, in the form of armed robbery against ships, mostly off the coast of Nigeria. Criminal enterprises are another, mostly tapping oil pipelines and stealing oil, and an escalating drug trade. Poaching is the third, mostly illegal and unlicensed fishing from commercial trawlers, damaging both the fishing business and the eco-system.<br><br><br>The US Navy is planning a more or less <a href=\"http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2800614&C=america\">permanent presence in the Gulf of Guinea</a>:<br><br><br><br><blockquote>“We’re getting a large-volume ship,” Ulrich explained to reporters, “and loading it with expertise — training teams — and we’re going to go down to the Gulf of Guinea and work the 11 Gulf of Guinea nations and build maritime capability and capacity. The ship is a platform that holds the training teams and the students, visiting the countries, bringing the students together and improving on their knowledge skills and ability so that they can provide for their own maritime safety and security.”<br>Plans are not yet finalized, but the ship is likely to be the landing ship dock Fort McHenry, based at Little Creek, Va., as part of the Atlantic Fleet. Amphibious ships like the Fort McHenry are designed to carry more than 400 Marines, as well as cargo, vehicles, landing craft and aircraft.<br>. . .<br>Current plans envision the Fort McHenry working a circuit, traveling between Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon and Angola. Training and support teams would be dropped off and picked up at each stop, spreading the deployment’s expertise around the area.<br>Prominently left out of current plans for the deployment is Nigeria, the region’s top oil-producer but the scene over recent years of ongoing strife and corruption.<br><br><br>Ambassador Peter Chaveas, director of the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), noted the importance of Nigeria as part of a successful GFS effort.<br>“If you’re going to address the issues of maritime safety and security in the Gulf of Guinea you simply can’t do it without Nigeria,” he told reporters. “That’s absolutely critical to it.”<br></blockquote>"
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"title" : "China in Africa",
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnWMAZWlW6I/AAAAAAAAAMo/UwNnue_4cCo/s1600-h/WenJiabaoKufuor.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnWMAZWlW6I/AAAAAAAAAMo/UwNnue_4cCo/s320/WenJiabaoKufuor.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><a href=\"http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6137716\">Visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor</a> pose for photo with local children during a road completion ceremony near Accra, capital of Ghana, June 19, 2006. Wen and Kufuor co-inaugurated Monday the road between Ofankor and Nsawan, a portion of the trunk road linking Ghana's capital Accra and the west African country's second biggest city Kumasi.</span></span></div><br><br>Harold French has an article in the International Herald Tribune about the <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6137716\">Chinese footprint growing across Africa</a>. China's fundamental interest is oil, China really needs to expand supply to meet skyrocketing demand.<br><br>French compares an Ethiopian Airlines flight filled with Chinese, to those flights he has taken to Africa from the United States:<br><br><blockquote>Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research. <p>There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.</p> <p>To be sure, China will not forever be the fresh-faced and idealized suitor that many in Africa take it to be today. This is clearly a special, honeymoon-like moment. But the very appeal of China owes a great deal to disillusionment in Africa with the West, whose preachiness and shifting prescriptions, whose unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa's failures, free of critical self-examination, have left many Africans exasperated.</p> <p>This exasperation has been the all but unacknowledged backdrop to a string of recent events, from the Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank to the recent Group of 8 summit meeting, the common threads being Western posturing about helping Africa, a failure to deliver on promises and the dearth of African voices heard, or even admitted into the debate.</p></blockquote><p></p>It is particularly this last that truly infuriates Africans: <span style=\"font-weight:bold\">the dearth of African voices heard, or even admitted into the debate</span>, as well as the West's unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa's failures.<br><br>In a <a href=\"http://crossedcrocodiles.blogspot.com/2007/05/fighting-corruption-with-wolfowitz.html\">previous post</a> I quoted Kenyan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo on the World Bank:<br><br><blockquote>Not too long ago, in many African countries, the second most powerful person after the president was not the army commander or the vice president, but the World Bank country representative.<br><div>The policy prescriptions of the Bank . . . and loan conditions could neither be reviewed nor questioned by elected parliaments and cabinets.</div></blockquote><div><br><br>And following World Bank and IMF prescriptions has left many African countries with <a href=\"http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/06/02/the-view-from-the-third-world/\">these results</a>:<br><br><div></div><blockquote><div>So, at the end of the day, by following the advice of western experts you've destroyed your rural economy, gone from a country which could feed itself to a net importer of food, created huge slums around your cities, increased the instability of your country - and haven't modernized. </div><div>. . .</div>When citizens of third world countries talk about how the West in general, and America in specific, is keeping them down, this is much of what they're talking about.</blockquote><br>French notes the same thing in his article, including the following statements:<br><br><blockquote>Thérèse Mekombé, a member of a Chadian commission created to supervise the use of that country's oil revenues, was categorical in an interview, saying, \"The World Bank is not a partner in development, and can never be a partner in our development.\" <p>Another recent exception was an op-ed column by the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, which was published in this newspaper, urging G-8 nations to invest in Africa \"like India and China.\"</p></blockquote><p></p>And as French ads:<br><br><blockquote>Compare this with China, whose diplomacy has been on a tear across the continent recently, writing off debt, exempting African exports from trade duties, lending increasingly huge amounts of money, and, generally speaking, making things happen quickly and in a big way.<br><br>Surely China is pursuing its own interests. Just as surely, much of what it is attempting will not pan out, or will have deleterious effects, particularly since no distinction is made between governments that are relatively clean and representative and those that are odious.<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">(Between the West and China)</span> . . . it is not hard to see who is gaining ground.</blockquote><br><br>Despite Bush, the United States still has a moderately good reputation in Africa, and still holds a position of some respect. Most African governments continue to deal with the US. This is primarily the result of work by Presidents Carter and Clinton. Carter's emphasis on human rights made a huge impact around the world. It is a great shame the US turned away from this immediately following Carter under Reagan. And Clinton has enjoyed a fabulous relationship with Africa where he is viewed as a brother.<br><br>Southern thinking and traditions are not often held in esteem by the US intelligentsia, aside from the GOP southern strategy to take advantage of white racism. But I often think that leaders with open minds, who come out of the south, have a greatly enhanced ability to achieve some success in resolving intransigent issues. Southerners know how to talk and keep talking. They have had to keep talking to work out the issues of civil rights. And when you have two sides that are completely opposed, the only possible peaceful solution lies in talking and talking and keeping talking, even when there looks like no possibility of compromise.<br><br>The present US approach to Africa, military assistance, the Africa Command, with diplomacy and aid subsumed under the Pentagon's aegis, is exactly the wrong way to go. It continues the western mistakes and arrogance that French describes. The Africom message is control and containment.<br><br>Those people who \"look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play\" are likely to do better both for African countries and for themselves. Although the same caveat applies here as everywhere in the world. It is critical for everyone to think long term about human rights and about the environment.<br><br></div>"
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"title" : "Black gold? Ghana should beware the oil curse",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RniJxpWlW7I/AAAAAAAAAMw/bpxP13L52c4/s1600-h/BlackGold.jpg\"><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RniJxpWlW7I/AAAAAAAAAMw/bpxP13L52c4/s320/BlackGold.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br>There have been a number of reports of the discovery of a significant oil field off the coast of Ghana. Everyone I know is jubilating about it. Let us pray that Ghana does not fall victim to the oil curse. Poverty has increased in those countries that have oil, and agriculture that lets a country feed itself, has died.<br><span><p></p></span>Rawlings made some particularly brilliant moves when he governed Ghana, setting up the government in a way that tied a contemporary, and generally democratic government to traditional local and regional ways of governing. Ghana has the tools to make government work. Ghana also has problems with corruption that have gotten worse under Kufuor, who owes his position to some very corrupt people. Kufuor will be gone about the same time as Bush. He has used the Presidency as a paid travel vacation around the world. He is rarely and briefly in Ghana. Let us hope Ghanaians chose the next President wisely. Oil encourages corruption, and there are many dangers.<br><br>If Ghana is able to invest a significant portion of oil earnings in education, Ghana could become a regional strength and beacon. Ghana needs to restore compulsory free elementary education, as was the case after independence and before the coups. Ghana needs universal and compulsory secondary education, and it needs advanced learning, colleges and universities. The need and demand is there, but the supply has been neglected. Universities create economic success. For those parts of the United States that have invested heavily in universities, it has paid of in economic booms and sustained economic success. Businesses want to set up shop where they can find a trained and talented pool of workers. Education brings business, education develops business, and business brings money.<br><br>Ghana also needs to think long term. What happens when the oil runs out. Ghana needs to develop economic and energy resources independent of oil. And Ghana needs to protect her environment. No country yet has done very well in planning for the end of oil. I recently watched a tv program, <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/equator/default.stm\">Equator</a>, in which Simon Reeves travels around the equator. In his travels through Gabon he said that with oil supplies depleted, and local agriculture barely in existence, President Bongo had declared a number of large forest areas as protected reserves, and is encouraging tourism as a source of income to replace oil. The program showed people in a rural village dancing for tourists, as that was their only means of making a living. They had little agriculture, and were forbidden to hunt in the reserves where they used to hunt. It made for a very peculiar situation. To my eye, there was little joy in the dance, and I really wondered what the tourists felt, and what they were thinking. I would not enjoy seeing this sort of thing again.<br><br>Some of the oil strike stories from:<br><a href=\"http://www.thestatesmanonline.com/pages/news_detail.php?newsid=3836&section=1\">The Statesman</a><br><a href=\"http://www.graphicghana.info/article.asp?artid=17260\">The Daily Graphic</a><br><a href=\"http://www.graphicghana.info/article.asp?artid=17260\">The Accra Daily Mail</a><br><a href=\"http://www.myjoyonline.com/news/200706/5808.asp\">Joy Online</a><br><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6764549.stm\">BBC News<br></a><br>Also from <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6766527.stm\">BBC News</a>:<br><p><span style=\"font-size:85%\">Mr Kufuor said the discovery would give a major boost to Ghana's economy. </span></p><p><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><table style=\"WIDTH:208px;HEIGHT:140px\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\"><tbody><tr><td width=\"5\"><img height=\"1\" alt=\"\" hspace=\"0\" src=\"http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif\" width=\"5\" border=\"0\"></td><td><div><div><img height=\"13\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/start_quote_rb.gif\" width=\"24\" border=\"0\"> <b>We're going to really zoom, accelerate... and you'll see that Ghana truly is the African tiger</b> <img height=\"13\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/end_quote_rb.gif\" width=\"23\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\"><br></div></div><div><div>Ghana's President John Kufuor<br><br><br></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></span></p><p><span style=\"font-size:85%\">\"Oil is money, and we need money to do the schools, the roads, the hospitals. If you find oil, you manage it well, can you complain about that?\" he told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme. </span></p><br><br><br><br><br>I am praying fervently that he is right."
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"title" : "Oil - Strength in numbers",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnnnSJWlW8I/AAAAAAAAAM4/d55FTNqJ2kk/s1600-h/BlackGoldOrwel.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnnnSJWlW8I/AAAAAAAAAM4/d55FTNqJ2kk/s320/BlackGoldOrwel.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><br><a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=125882\">Njei Moses Timah</a> </span><span style=\"font-size:100%\">writes:</span><br><span style=\"font-size:100%\"><br></span><span></span><blockquote>Most African countries' petroleum revenue has simply disappeared.</blockquote><br>He continues:<br><br><span><blockquote>It is my opinion that Kufuor's elation about this oil find is a little bit naive. As a seasoned politician and African Union (AU) chairman, he is better placed to know that oil and other minerals have contributed more to African backwardness than the want of resources.<br><br>These resources have fanned civil wars in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Chad. Coups and mercenary incursions have occurred in almost all resource-rich African countries. The corruption and graft that follows the discovery of these resources has destroyed the social fabric of many of these so-called oil or mineral producing African countries. Bad governance, weak and inefficient institutions, poor accountability, crime and parasitic state employees (now a hallmark of these countries) have all contributed to chase Africa's best brains out of the continent. There is no doubt that this brain drain is negatively affecting the competence and the commitment of those left behind to negotiate trade terms with foreign partners and administer these countries.</blockquote><br><br>Timah proposes that the African Union band together to negotiate oil contracts and to stand firm against the predatory exploitation and interference that is sure to come.<br><br></span><span></span><blockquote><span> The AU should be seriously thinking about how they can negotiate the management of African resources with external powers. The current way of doing things will never move Africa out of backwardness. Leaders of most African countries are usually manipulated, cajoled, bullied or simply bribed to sign unfavorable contracts with foreign partners. Those that have resisted these pressures in the past have simply been \"physically removed\" or their governments subverted in one form or another.<br><br></span><span> Oil is the most important commodity in the world today and those that need that commodity most are very powerful nations. China and the United States are not going to fold their arms and allow Ghana to quietly enjoy the proceeds of the over $40 billion worth of oil (less exploration and production costs) that has been discovered. It has never been so in other oil producing African countries. The AU should understand this and accept the reality that many African countries can neither protect their resources from external economic predators nor negotiate fair trading terms with them.</span></blockquote><span><br>The <a href=\"http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=125882&comment=0#com\">comments</a> on his article are interesting as well<br></span>"
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"content" : "<div style=\"TEXT-ALIGN:center\"><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnslppWlW9I/AAAAAAAAANA/X9f4gCi2ctA/s1600-h/ObserversWorried.jpg\"><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_pfl5QUTO-gI/RnslppWlW9I/AAAAAAAAANA/X9f4gCi2ctA/s320/ObserversWorried.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/512231690/\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\"><span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">OBSERVERS ARE WORRIED</span></span></a><br></div><br>This sentiment seems particularly apt since the announcement of an oil discovery in Ghana. With appreciation to <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/\">Amaah's photos</a>. He is also the author of <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/\">Koranteng's Toli</a>."
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"content" : "Last week, some friends of mine from Ingres, the early relational database management system, attended a retrospective on relational database systems held at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley with other database pioneers from Oracle, Informix, IBM and Sybase. I was an early employee at Ingres which was the second best selling relational database [...]<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?a=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?a=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?i=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?a=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?a=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:7Q72WNTAKBA\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?d=7Q72WNTAKBA\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?a=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/zdnet/Newton?i=0SmbSpSSZpc:ovpQEblvU9Q:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/Newton/~4/0SmbSpSSZpc\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Ethernet, the latest religion",
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"content" : "<p>If you've been on the technical side of this industry even a short time, you've no doubt run across debates that are so monumental and so emotion-driven that they are labeled religious debates. Perhaps the debates are not really so monumental, but each side of the issue often represents a fundamentally different philosophy. Some favorites of mine? \n<ul>\n<li>Mac vs. Windows</li>\n<li>PC w/ Unix vs. Unix Workstation</li>\n<li>BSD vs. SVR4</li>\n<li>Emacs vs. vi (or any other editor, really)</li>\n<li>EISA vs. VLB</li>\n<li>USB vs. Firewire</li>\n<li>VHS vs. Betamax?</li>\n</ul>\nFrom the realm of networking, who could forget the long running debate between <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=660203\">ATM and IP</a>? There were many arguments used against IP that were just plain false, like the security concerns around IP and it being easier to hack (which I found silly because all ATM/FR network were running IP atop ATM/FR).</p>\n<p>That's why it makes me chuckle a bit to see the same type of argument used in to promote Ethernet as a substitute for IP-VPN in this <a href=\"http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=B5DB0ACA%2DC23E%2D4C4C%2D86A7%2DAE30F3A6F666\">article about advertising.com switching out their IP-VPN</a>. </p>\n<blockquote><p>Bavisi said that because VPLS is a L2 service there is no need for the firewalls the London office of Advertising.com previously had to manage at the remote sites. ?Both IPsec [a.k.a. DIY] VPNs and IP VPNs delivered by carriers over MPLS networks are at Layer 3, and thus face security issues,? he said.</p></blockquote>\nThe first sentence is fine. It's true, Ethernet (or an MPLS-based IP-VPN solution) eliminates the need for firewalls at each site. You can safely run in a closed network environment with no IPsec tunnels or other hassle. The <i>downside </i>to that, however, is that each site now has to use the main corporate center for all Internet traffic, which puts more strain on the WAN...<b>which is great</b> for the backbone provider. Ultimately it means more business for them.\n<p>The second sentence I quoted is the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt\">FUD</a> factor coming into play. There could not possibly a difference in the security risk between an Ethernet VPN running IP and a closed IP-VPN network running IP. The security risks inherent with an IP network, especially one connected to the Internet <i>somewhere</i>, are not necessarily lessened by moving to an Ethernet network, and the process of centralizing Internet Access and firewalls into one or more main hubs is a common design element in layer 2 and layer 3 VPN's alike.</p>\n<p>In a way, the recent development effort into Ethernet remind me of one of the Fundamental Truths of Networking, as cited in <a href=\"http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1925.txt?number=1925\">RFC 1925</a>.</p>\n<blockquote><p>(11) Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.</p>\n</blockquote>\nEthernet as a WAN protocol (and the use of VLAN's for logical seperation, QoS, and site identifiers) reminds me an awful lot of ATM and Frame Relay, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS\">MPLS</a> reminds me an awful lot of ATM too. ATM had QoS and Traffic Engineering and IP didn't, so along came MPLS to give some traffic engineering function and they put CoS into IP. Now that we're trying to use Ethernet in the WAN, we've got to add all that stuff to it as well, so we'll run it over MPLS and make <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1p\">802.1p</a> to give it QoS. We're re-inventing the wheel!\n<p>Those of you involved in the creation of these new Ethernet standards should remember your your RFC's. That way you'd know that the twelfth fundamental rule of networking is </p>\n<blockquote><p>In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Ethernet\" rel=\"tag\">Ethernet</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/VPLS\" rel=\"tag\">VPLS</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/IP-VPN\" rel=\"tag\">IP-VPN</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/MPLS\" rel=\"tag\">MPLS</a></p>"
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"title" : "Mutiny on the tro-tro",
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"content" : "Going from point A to point B in Ghana is never as easy as you think. First there's the fact that nothing leaves on schedule. Then there's the problem of not always having a paved road. Even if you are lucky enough to have the first two, there's the likelihood that the vehicle you are traveling in looks, sounds and feels like it is going to fall apart at any second.<br><br>Yesterday my sister and I experienced what happens when you combine all three of those elements. Mutiny. Well, nearly mutiny.<br><br>After spending a couple of days on a remote beach in a tiny village (along with just about everyone we met in Cape Coast--Kofi and Benjamin (two ghanaians), and a group of Canadians who had been volunteering), we decide to head up to Kumasi.<br><br>Our adventure begins when we all pack into a tro-tro and head out on a very bumpy unpaved road, in a tro-tro that is literally on it's last legs. Maybe about a mile out, there's a very loud clanging noise, followed by a thud. Sure enough, looking through the back window there is a piece of the tro-tro lying in the middle of the road. So we pull over and it turns out it was one of the parts that holds the vehicle up off the tire (bad description, but my car mechanic knowledge is a bit lacking). And not only did it just fall off, it broke in two. The driver insisted it could be fixed. One woman decided it wasn't worth the wait and set off walking, complete with baby strapped to her back and a load of something balanced on her head. The rest of us decided to wait it out. Surprisingly, not too much later, the tro-tro is fixed. Somehow the driver recreated the broken piece out of a piece of wood. Not sure how long that will last, but it did get us to our first destination, Agona. From there, we take an uneventful tro-tro to Takoradi. At this point we part ways. The Canadians head to Accra, Kofi and Benjamin back to Cape Coast, and Steph and I to Kumasi.<br><br>We find the tro-tro to Kumasi, which is empty, a bad sign. We're assured we will only be waiting 30 minutes, but 30 minutes African time is more like 2 hours. As it turned out, 2 hours was even a bit hopeful. The way tro-tros work is that there is a driver and then several other people who help with luggage and recruiting passengers. The recruiters stand out in the middle of the tro-tro lot, and yell out destinations, then direct the traveler to the appropriate tro-tro. In this case, our Kumasi recruiter was not very good. About 3 hours later our tro-tro is only half full and some of the passengers (including us) are pretty annoyed. A couple of them get out and begin arguing rather vehemently with the recruiter. Couldn't make out everything they were saying, but they were trying to convince him that we should just go, we've been here so long. And they were also arguing about how many people needed to be on one of the seats before it was considered \"full.\" The passengers said three, the recruiter said four. An hour later, our tro tro is full (but only because one of the passengers accidently got on the wrong tro-tro and we dropped him off a few blocks later), and the still unhappy passengers continued to yell at both the recruiter and the driver (Ali) even as we are pulling out of the lot.<br><br>Ali is pretty much oblivious to everything--the yelling passengers, the pedestrians, the other cars...The only thing he really paid attention to was his music - 90's love songs like Bryan Adams' \"Everything I do,\" Whitney Houston's \"I Will Always Love You,\" etc, that he proceeded to blare the entire trip and sing at the top of his lungs (which was highly entertaining). He also paid attention to the pot holes, which he avoided hitting at all costs, even at the cost of a potential head on collision. It must have been some pot hole for him to swerve out of our lane and into the other lane right as a car was about to go by. Fortunately he swerved back to our lane in the time, but I can only imagine what the driver of the other car must have been thinking. Probably something similar to what the rest of our passengers were thinking--that move elicited a few gasps and more angry yelling, all of which were duly ignored.<br><br>We finally arrive to Kumasi in one piece and Ali pulls up to the \"station\" and orders us all out. Well it's 11p.m. at night, and what might be a small station during the day is pretty deserted now. Again, the passengers are not having it. They begin to yell at Ali that this isn't the right station and every single person refuses to get out of the tro-tro. Steph and I figure they probably know where they're going better than we do, so we stay too. After a few back and forths, Ali drives to the next station, which sure enough is obviously more central and also has several waiting taxis, one of which takes us to our hotel--at the Obruni price, of course."
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"title" : "On Why and When Fiction Writers First Publish",
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"content" : "<div><p>“If you don't make masterpiece by time you twenty five you nothing,” went the advice of a drunk literature professor. I was a sophomore. The nineteenth century authors I admired had all first published before the age the professor put forward. Twenty five became the longitudinal line where my flat world ended. Twenty-five was crossed without masterpiece or incident. I found solace in the biographies of contemporary writers, most of whom first published at an older age. </p>\n\n<p>Why the age difference from one century to the next?</p>\n\n<p>To begin I posit that the apprenticeship period of a writer, before a publishable novel is completed, lasts approximately eight years and involves three components: 1) lots of writing, much of it crap, an unfinished or rejected opus or three, a novel that was talked about more then it was ever written, some short stories; 2) A fair amount of reading, not from any cannon in particular, enough to get a sense of what is out there; 3) Life experience—bullfighting and shooting heroin, sure—but more having lived and become aware of one's existence in a way that can be processed many many times over to be used in stories. The healthy realization that instead of writing the greatest book ever one should focus on a good story one can tell well can be filed under the third component. Factor in necessary talent and the budding writer is on his or her way to a literary debut.</p>\n\n<p>(The debut may never take place and occasionally occurs after less time).</p>\n\n<p>Tolstoy completed his apprenticeship young in part because he was mind numbingly rich—he lived on a Rhode Island sized farm that was worked by slaves—and had lots of free time. By free time I mean the time to work as an around the clock unpaid writer, which in Tolstoy's case meant he was able to pump out short stories thick enough to qualify as assault weapons by 23. Dostoevsky's provenance was more middle class, his father was a doctor to the indigent, but a middle class that came with amenities far greater then full cable and a second car. The Western world was less equitable with a lot of poor people available to do chores and errands that would be done by the budding author today. Dostoevsky too, pre-gulag, had his free time, first publishing to great fanfare at 23. </p>\n\n<p>For those with access to it, education was better in the nineteenth century. The richest writers had private tutors. The writers who went to school, Balzac, Dickens intermittently, received better more thorough educations then are readily available today. Memorization of poems was central to understanding literature, languages were rigorously taught, correspondence and the discipline to write constantly were imperatives. Without looking far beyond the routines that were handed to them as adolescents, they fulfilled large parts of their apprenticeship.</p>\n\n<p>The broadly romanticized lost generation of the 1920s first published at a slightly later age. The middle class was larger, education was more universal. They came from a range of households and schoolings—Dos Passos, loaded, boarding school and college; Hemingway, not so loaded, public school and no college. But the available education was still better then today's. Reading was more a core part of curriculums, correspondence remained essential, Greek and Latin were taught. And it is not that I believe a classical education is best, simply that writing is an exercise in shaping language and early knowledge of its anatomies feeds when a person starts thinking as a writer. The challenge was finding the time to write, which is part of why they all went to Paris—still reeling from the WWI, economically brittle Paris was cheap. The ability to live well for not much gave them the incentive and time to finish their first works. Getting to Paris meant time working and traveling and that interval tacked on about two years to their debuts. </p>\n\n<p>Why and when people published in the 19th century was mostly a matter of pedigree. Why and when people first published in the 20th century was a matter of cheap rent. From Paris, to the West and East Village, to Berlin, writers roamed much of the Western world looking for cities in economic decline where they could work unperturbed. </p>\n\n<p>Today education is essentially universal, but of mixed quality. In the United States the solution is a masters degree in writing where the differing levels of education can be calibrated, the safety of a campus buffering young writers from economic ebbs and flows. A student at NYU or Columbia can live in currently unaffordable New York thanks to subsidized low rent and money from a job teaching undergraduates once or twice a week. Because the youngest a person would likely enter grad school is 22, masters programs have pushed the age of debuts up as people fulfill the requirements of their apprenticeship at a later age.</p>\n\n<p>I am ignoring will. Irregardless of provenance, schooling and available time, where the writer has had the will and talent he or she has published. Kafka had a full time job at an insurance company. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, the son of a truck driver, traveled the world, holding jobs no more exalted then security guard. Both men wrote at night and published late in life, their reputations propelled far into the future by the forces of their wills. Black writers of the mid-century, Baldwin and Wright, wrote their first works in the vacuum of a society closed off from their voices. They established places for themselves with their wills. Masters programs have had the positive effect of honoring and financing the bright talents who earlier pushed forward alone. But the rest must pay, a lot, and the programs have had the inverse effect of excluding those of mixed or still growing talent and little funds, and not just from an education, but from direct avenues to agents and publishing houses.</p>\n\n<p>A corrective mechanism exists. During economic downturns the plights of the excluded are chronicled and sensationalized in pulp. Pulp's goal of titillating is easier to achieve then literature's goal of moving the reader. The apprenticeship is shorter and can respond to social changes more swiftly. New York currently has 800,000 millionaires and the poorest urban county in the nation, the Bronx, splitting the city between a community who can afford graduate schools and comes from a decent education and another which comes from stunted public schools, 20 percent and up unemployment and high crime. In the Gilded Age, when the Lost Generation fled to Europe, pulp was a local reaction by those who could not afford a ticket out of the country. The best pulp works are considered literature. The rest are no better then the genre exercises they aspire to be. </p>\n\n<p>On fold out tables on 125th Street in Harlem, near the court houses on Chambers Street, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and on Third Avenue in the Bronx, a new pulp is sold under the moniker of urban literature. A handful of titles have sold in the hundreds of thousands; Borders and Barnes and Noble, depending on the store location, dedicate sections to the genre. I have attempted reading some urban literature and found them on the whole unmoving and conventionally titillating; but I am open to attempting more titles. I contacted the office of Triple Crown Publications, which specializes in the genre, wanting to know what the average age of their authors was. The answer was between 20 and 30, the youngest, Mallori McNeal, was 16 when she first published. If literature is what Ms. McNeal wants to write, a couple drafts and some experience from now, she'll be 24.</p></div>"
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"title" : "A conversation with Tessa Lau about Project Koala",
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"content" : "<div><p> For this week’s <a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1837.html\">ITConversations show</a> I talked with <a href=\"http://tlau.org/\">Tessa Lau</a> about <a href=\"http://www.research.ibm.com/koala/\">Project Koala</a>, a “a system for recording, automating, and sharing business processes performed in a web browser.” I’ve been interested in that idea for a long time, and mentioned it most recently in <a href=\"http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/15/shared-navigation-of-online-bureaucracies/\">this item</a> on pooling citizens’ collective knowledge about the services of government websites, and about how to make effective use of those services. In a comment on that item, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a> mentioned Project Koala and suggested that I speak with Tessa about it, so I did.</p>\n<p>Of course we’ve had macro recorders since the dawn of computing, and Koala is yet another of those. What’s different? Crucially, the ability not only to capture and replay, but also to share, performances of tasks. The descriptions of those tasks are shared on a Wiki, and they’re written in an English-like syntax that’s very close to what you’d write if you were narrating instructions, e.g.: “Enter 94301 into the Search By Zipcode textbox, then click the Continue button.” These instructions can be edited, tagged, searched, and indexed by the URLs embedded in them. In theory that will enable us to pool our experiential knowledge of web applications. In practice, we’ll see. Koala has yet to emerge from IBM’s research lab. But you’ve got to love the idea.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "How do I know this person? Through the Web!",
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"content" : "<div><p>\nLike other social applications, Facebook wants to know how you’re connected to people. So it asks: “How do you know this person?” and presents these choices:\n</p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\">\n<img src=\"http://jonudell.net/img/facebook01.png\">\n</p>\n<p>\nThe choice I usually want — “Through the Web” — isn’t available. One friend coerced “Met randomly” by adding “The web as a conversation engine” — but that’s an unsatisfactory workaround. There was nothing random about how we met. Given our shared interests and our online expression of them, it was inevitable that we would come into contact.\n</p>\n<p>\n“Through the Web” should be a first-class answer for “How do you know this person?”</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "No Admittance to Marsh Theater",
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"content" : "So, I'd hoped to write a little promo for a play running at the Marsh Theater this week.<a href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/hoyle.html\"> 'Tings dey Happen'</a> is a one man show conceived by Dan Hoyle about the various intrigues surrounding oil drilling in Nigeria.<br><br>My husband and I are new to the area and had a little bit of trouble finding the discreet <a href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/index.html\">Marsh Theater</a> off Valencia St in the San francisco Mission District.<br><br>As it turned out, we were ten minutes late to the performance Saturday.<br><br>The woman at the box office/table set up just outside the entrance to the small theater first told us that we would have to reschedule and come to a later performance. When we looked at her in disbelief-- mind you we had pre-purchased our tickets online and were holding the receipt-- she offered that we could stand at the back, but she wouldn't be able to seat us. It is now 12 minutes after 5 pm.<br><br>Apparently, the Marsh theater is a free-seating establishment and they do not hold seats for late-comers.<br><br>Or do they? It was one of those akward moments that you may have experience at a point in your life. I for one was bounced from an upscale restaurant in Palo Alto some years back. I was with two other individuals, all of us visiting Stanford for a weekend recruitment of admitted minority graduate students. We asked for a table and were promptly escorted through the restaurant, the dishroom, and deposited in a back alley. Suffice to say, I did not opt to attend graduate school at Stanford. Was it because one of us was chicano and two of us mixed- American and Ghanaian. Were we too swarthy for their fine establishment? These are the kinds of experiences that can make you become paranoid.<br><br>So, we moved to stand at the back of the theater. It was dark and the woman at the boxoffice/ usher on duty was doing nothing to light our path or make it easier to see where to stand at any rate. Stand?? We had paid for seats, but I digress.<br><br>I'm short, so immediately saw that given the way seats had been set on risers, I would not be able to see, so moved towards the aisle. The woman at the door bounded in front of us, possibly shoving my husband and announced rudely, 'No, No! I can't have you tripping over people to find seats!'<br><br>Calm down lady! We've barely even walked into the theater! We are willing to try your absurd proposition of standing in the back for 90 minutes! When you walked in front of us we assumed you were about to lead us to an area of the theater where we might be.<br><br>But no, she escorted us to the door as I simultaneously said, \"I'm leaving!\"<br><br>So, we only saw about 2 minutes of 'Tings dey Happen'. All I caught was a skinny white kid on a dim stage speaking in a convincing Nigerian accent. We left at the point that he unfurled a map of Africa and the (apparently white) audience began to warm to his subject.<br><br>Finding ourselves in the bright sunshine (who schedules a theater event for 5 pm?) on the street, we went to the cafe next door as suggested by our most unhelpful host. I managed to spy a young cashier at the counter and asked if she was the one we were to speak to about rescheduling.<br><br>Then, I said loudly for all in the cafe to hear, \"I'm extremely offended. I'm a professor of African History and my husband is a writer hoping to review the play. We have been refused seats and asked to reschedule. I'm extremely offended.\"<br><br>My husband walked out of the cafe. I soon followed. We are writing a formal complaint.<br><br>San Francisco is not ready for us. A play on Nigeria? I mean, really the ironies are too many.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7377987806222322428-2081342470861005367?l=africaliving.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "A Series of Unfortunate Events",
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"content" : "<blockquote><p>And now here I go, clearing my throat as above before deciding to do something I would have never believed I would do, and choosing to write about Paris Hilton.</p></blockquote>\n\t<p>So, in classic <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29699\">Penthouse Forum</a> fashion, begins <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2168128/nav/tap3/\">Dear Hitchens’</a> latest booze-fueled misadventure. <em>Paris Hilton?!?</em> Readers exclaim in alarm. <em>Why, has Our Own Modern Orwell sunk to trafficking in pop gossip?!?</em> There, there, Excitable Readers. There is nothing to fear! For, as inevitably as night follows day or Jager Bombs follow breakfast, this pedestrian Paris Hilton business segues into matters of real world-historical political importance: how people are being totally mean to Scooter Libby!</p>\n\t<blockquote><p>Perhaps to compensate for its ridiculous decision to put her on Page One on Friday, the New York Times report shifted from the sobbing, helpless child to the more portentous question of another “high-profile defendant.” It cited an even more acid piece of creepy populism, in the form of an order from Judge “Reggie” Walton, who poured his witless sarcasm on those who had filed a brief in support of Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Would such “luminaries,” sneered Walton, be equally available for other litigants? It’s not his job to arbitrate such a question, and he seems not to understand the law, but if his words mean anything, and from a federal judge at that, they appear to mean that to be a public figure is to risk double jeopardy in the courts. No doubt Judge Walton will relish the coming days in which he can order Libby to report to prison. One hopes that his moral superiority, and his keen attention to public opinion, remain as untroubled and secure as those of Sarah Silverman. It seems that this is now the standard. How splendidly we progress.</p></blockquote>\n\t<p><img src=\"http://www.thepoorman.net/wp-content/lemonysnicket1.jpg\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"10px\">And with this last pint of witless sarcasm, Judge Walton joins <a href=\"http://www.catholicleague.org/research/hating_mother_teresa.htm\">Mother Theresa</a> and <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2166661/\">Jimmy Carter</a> as one of History’s Greatest Monsters, and Hitchens joins <a href=\"http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/06/thoughts_on_sentencing_1.html\">Joke Line</a>, <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/08/AR2007060802398.html\">Broderella</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/06/07/scooter_libby/index_np.html\">scads of professional wankers</a> in lamenting in the terrible, terrible injustice that Scooter has suffered. And, if you think about it, it really is an astounding run of bad luck and untimely encounters which has landed poor Scooter in this predicament. Recall:</p>\n\t<p>Despite the fact that <a href=\"http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/30/plame_covert/index.html\">Valerie Plame was not covert</a>; and that <a href=\"http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_09_28.html#004485\">everybody knew she worked for the CIA</a>; and that <a href=\"http://wizbangblog.com/2005/10/27/plamegate-plame-name-no-secret.php\">people knew her name and so she couldn’t really be a spy</a>; George W. Bush’s CIA - for some truly twisted and inexplicable reason - insisted that a special prosecutor be named;</p>\n\t<p>Then, when George W. Bush’s hand-picked Attorney General John Ashcroft’s deputy, <a href=\"http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/08/15/let-the-eagle-soar-somewhere-else/\">James B. Comey, selected</a> lifelong Republican Patrick Fitzgerald - despite the fact that Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson (a former ambassador appointed by Bush’s father), was <a href=\"http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004/07/how-could-you-lie-to-me-so-joe-wilson.html\">a bad person</a>; and that Plame secretly sent him on <a href=\"http://news.monstersandcritics.com/usa/features/article_1311833.php/Plame_asked_to_explain_trip_role?compage=10&comcount=12&comlimit=10\">a junket to fabulous Niger</a>; and that <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/31/AR2006083101460.html\">Joseph Wilson himself blew Plame’s cover</a>; and that <a href=\"http://www.newshounds.us/2005/07/13/john_gibson_rove_should_get_a_medal.php\">whoever outed Plame deserves a medal</a> - Fitzgerald pointlessly decided to <a href=\"http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200507180801.asp\">investigate this non-crime</a>;</p>\n\t<p>Then, completely oblivious to the undeniable facts that <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-29-plame-testimony_N.htm\">Plame was big liar</a>; and that she <a href=\"http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012840.php\">got her picture taken for a magazine</a>; and that <a href=\"http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/07/the_plame_rove.php\">investigating it was a waste of time</a>; and that the whole thing is just a way to <a href=\"http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/08/the_real_plame_.html\">distract attention from all the WMDs we find in Iraq</a> - despite all these things, a Grand Jury is called, and Scooter Libby and other complete innocents are forced to testify under oath;</p>\n\t<p>And, to top it all off, Libby - despite the fact that <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7396169\">he is notoriously absent-minded</a> so it’s all a big misunderstanding; and that perjury, lying to Grand Jury, and obstruction of justice are “<a href=\"http://www.slate.com/id/2128301/\">crap charges</a>“; and that <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101202002.html\">it is very inconvenient for important and funny people</a>; and that <a href=\"http://mediamatters.org/items/200701310003?f=i_related\">Joseph Wilson is a huge, enormous, totally crazy liar</a> who seems to have mysteriously been right about everything; and that everybody who’s anybody agrees that <a href=\"http://www.scooterlibby.com/\">Scooter Libby is the Bestest. Guy. EVAR!</a> - despite all these plain and incontrovertible <strong>FACTS</strong>, a jury went completely insane and found Libby <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17479718/\">guilty on four out of five charges</a>, and then, rather than dismiss the silly charges out of hand as he obviously should have, the <a href=\"http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/walton-bio.html\">George W. Bush-nominated judge</a> sentenced him to <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19039377/\">30 months in prison</a>. Talk about bad luck!</p>\n\t<p>And the saddest part of this whole sad story is that, outside of the really important people who are the natural arbiters of what is and isn’t fair and/or <a href=\"http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/05/04/the-wanker-kings-of-comedy/\">funny</a>, nobody understands how unfair this situation is. From the outside, Scooter Libby looks like some Gaping Fucking Asshole who is now receiving approximately 0.001% of his just desserts. And this, my friends: this is the real scandal.\n</p>"
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"title" : "On ODBMS versus O/R mapping",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/orm-obms-debate\">Debate: ODBMS sometimes a better alternative to O/R Mapping?</a></p>\n\n<p>Objects see databases as memento and object-graph storage. Databases see objects as data exposed in table rows. RDF databases see objects data exposed in schema-constrained graphs. The private of one is the public of the other. The benefits of each conflict with the design goals of the other.</p>\n\n<p>Perhaps REST is the middle ground that everyone can agree on. Objects interface easily using REST. They simply structure their mementos as standard document types. Now their state can easily be stored and retrieved. Databases interface easily using REST. They just map data to data. So the data in an object and the data in a database don't necessarily have precisely-matched schemas. They just map to the same set of document types and these document types define the O-R mapping. The document type pool can evolve over time based on Web and REST principles, meaning that tugs from one side of the interface don't necessarily pull the other side in exactly the same direction.</p>\n\n<p>If O-R mapping is the Vietnam of computer science, perhaps we should stop mapping between our object and our relational components. Perhaps we should start interfacing between them, instead.</p>\n\n<p>Benjamin</p>"
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"title" : "The software market for lemons, and how open source software fits.",
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"content" : "<p>There's a common meme floating around the so-called \"blogosphere\" that relates economist George Akerlof's Nobel-winning \"market for lemons\" ideas to the software industry:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>David N. Welton</strong>'s <a href=\"http://www.dedasys.com/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html\">Web Hosting - A Market For Lemons</a> makes the case for the lemon market phenomenon applying to the web services hosting market. It hearkens back to 2005, but it has resurfaced in references from other sources because of the current \"market for lemons\" meme propagation.</li>\n<li><strong>Bruce Shneier</strong>'s <a href=\"http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/a_security_mark.html\">A Security Market for Lemons</a> relates the lemon market phenomenon to the often abysmal quality of computer security products. Shneier may be largely to blame for the current popularity of the meme.</li>\n<li><strong>Reg Braithwaite</strong>'s <a href=\"http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/05/not-so-big-software-application.html\">The Not So Big Software Design</a>, where he tackles both the software engineer employment market and the cutom software development market. If you've ever wondered why so many huge corporations use cruddy customized ERP \"solutions\" that literally cost millions of dollars, this might give you a hint. Of more immediate concern to most of us, this also pretty well illustrates how it might be that we ended up with employers hiring all the wrong people and refusing to pay the right people what they're worth <em>without</em> just calling hiring managers idiots -- though he mostly lays that subject at the feet of \"steveblgh\" <a href=\"http://programming.reddit.com/info/1reqw/comments/c1rl6e\">at reddit</a> and focuses on the custom software subject.</li>\n<li><strong>Richard Tibbetts</strong> ties some of this together quite well in <a href=\"http://innocuous.org/articles/2007/06/06/the-lemons-meme-in-software\">The Lemons Meme in Software</a>, and brings up resale value -- which actually further devalues custom ERP packages and the like.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>The short version of the theory of lemon markets goes something like this:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Customers can't tell just by looking at a car whether it's any good.</li>\n<li>Sellers know more about the quality of what they're selling than the customers.</li>\n<li>Sellers with crap products are likely to lie about the quality of the products when they can get away with it.</li>\n<li>Customers tend to become wary of high-priced products, because if the car turns out to be a lemon they've lost more money than with a lower-priced product.</li>\n<li>Nobody pays more for a car than within spitting distance of the average quality of car in that product's class.</li>\n<li>Higher quality cars that aren't worth selling at the depreciated \"average quality\" price are thus priced out of the market.</li>\n<li>Without those higher quality cars dragging up the curve, the average quality of cars on the market drops -- as does the average price.</li>\n<li>Wash. Rinse. Repeat.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Thanks to trends in the proprietary software industry over the last twenty years or so, the tendency is for the customer to have less and less information about the software he or she considers buying. Software of all stripes is affected by the lemon market phenomenon, but unlike in other (only slightly) healthier lemon markets, there's a lower bound on price because of the effective commercial monopoly on low-end general purpose computing software. This means that the lemon market phenomenon can cause quality to drop precipitously while ensuring that prices do not follow suit.</p>\n<p>The lemon market phenomenon, in this case, essentially drags customers out of the high-end software range and into the mediocre-end software range, because they're unwilling to pay the price for high-end software but unwilling to drop below the mediocre quality of the software they find themselves using as a result. Things are changing, however.</p>\n<p>Open source software development, because of its apparently unique relationship to an information market, throws a spanner in the works of the lemon market. Think about it: the center of gravity for the software industry is information management. There's a reason they call this stuff \"Information Technology\", after all. Software itself is just information -- but in attempts to shore up the defenses of positions of market dominance, the proprietary software vendors have embarked on a crusade against the sharing of information related to their own software offerings. They wish to maintain asymmetrical information access so that they are in a position of power with regard to the customers. Open source software, by contrast, predicates the success of its business model (for lack of a better term) on the free, unfettered sharing of information.</p>\n<p>Because the lemon market phenomenon is entirely dependent upon asymmetry, the rise of open source software in the public consciousness is beginning to shake up the software industry. The lemon market effect that keeps MS Windows customers (I mean businesses as much as, if not more than, end users) from going back to Unix and mainframe systems is being undermined by the simple facts that:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>No lemon market can survive roughly symmetrical information access.</li>\n<li>Open source software, such as free unices, is available at a price that Microsoft just can't match under its current business model.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>I've talked before this about the fact that the combination of the \"wild west\" aspects of the Internet and the freedoms available through open source software leads to a purer free market economy in practice than just about anything else we've seen. The monkeywrench in the lemon market phenomenon that has ruled much of the software industry for so long is a significant part of the reason for that.</p>\n<p>Computer security, web hosting, and custom software development are really just special cases of the overall lemon market tendencies of a closed source software industry predicated upon notions like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity\"><strong>security through obscurity</strong></a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing\"><strong>astroturfing</strong></a>, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property\"><strong>intellectual protectionism</strong></a>. Principles of <a href=\"http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877-6064734.html\"><strong>security through visibility</strong></a>, <a href=\"http://reddit.com\"><strong>social networking</strong></a>, and <a href=\"http://ccd.apotheon.org\"><strong>a protected public domain</strong></a> serve as foils for the lemon market effect in the software industry, however. We're on the right track. Just don't let us get derailed.\n</p>\n \n Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Geek\" rel=\"tag\">Geek</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Liberty\" rel=\"tag\">Liberty</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/asymmetry\" rel=\"tag\">asymmetry</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/bruce+schneier\" rel=\"tag\">bruce schneier</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/david+welton\" rel=\"tag\">david welton</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/free+software\" rel=\"tag\">free software</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/lemon+market\" rel=\"tag\">lemon market</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/memes\" rel=\"tag\">memes</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/open+source\" rel=\"tag\">open source</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/reg+braithwaite\" rel=\"tag\">reg braithwaite</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/richard+tibbetts\" rel=\"tag\">richard tibbetts</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/security\" rel=\"tag\">security</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/software\" rel=\"tag\">software</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/symmetry\" rel=\"tag\">symmetry</a>"
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"title" : "Locked in America",
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"content" : "When my passport was stolen at the end of March, I applied for a new one – sending the necessary forms to the passport office along with the mandatory $97 filing fee. I was planning to travel to Canada in mid June but that didn’t worry me because the passport office’s web page assured me that a new one would arrive in 6 weeks, 8 weeks maximum. <br><br>Nine weeks later and still without a passport, I phoned the local passport office. I should say, I tried to phone. No one answered. So I tried the national passport line in Washington and got a recording saying that due to \"unprecedented\" volume they could serve me only if I was leaving the country within two weeks. I qualified, but that hardly seemed to matter. I was patched through to a 24-hour automated line that informed me I couldn’t be connected because of the high volume of calls and advised me to call back at night, then hung up. I phoned back that night but no one answered. <br><br>In the meantime, I learned from a friend about a private company that sped up the process by hand-delivering passport applications to appropriate government offices, but that would cost another hundred bucks and mean starting the process all over again. Trying to control my rising anxiety, I phoned my representative in Congress and finally got through to a sympathetic human being who said they were getting a lot of calls about passports. She’d do what she could. <br><br>Apparently it’s been like this ever since a new law went into effect last January requiring passports for Americans returning by air from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. The State Department reportedly hired \"dozens\" of new workers to process the anticipated flood of applications, which is laughable. They didn’t need dozens; they needed thousands. <br><br>Late last week, faced with rising tempers, the government announced a temporary suspension of the new passport requirement. To go to Canada next week, all I need is proof I’ve applied for a passport. But when I went online to get the proof, there was a notice saying it’s taking a week for passport applications to be tracked online. <br><br>I don’t know whether I’ll get to Canada, but I doubt any of this has made it harder for terrorists to enter America. All we’ve done is make it harder for Americans to leave.<br><br>PS: I belly-ached about my passport woes on public radio's \"Marketplace\" this past Wednesday. On Thursday, I got a call from the Office of Public Affairs of the State Department, telling me they'd get to work on my passport. Today (Friday), my passport arrived in the mail. Lesson: If you've got a problem that needs fixing, all you need do is complain about it on public radio."
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"title" : "gaze at the moon till I lose my senses",
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"content" : "<p>Digital identity systems have a natural progression. They are introduced first in applications where the individuals being identified are weak and powerless. That pays for the first copy costs, creates an installed base of craft knowledge, debugs the technology, clears questions about how to use the system in practice, sets standards. It is then resold to communities where the identified individuals are, at least going in, less powerless; but yeah it’s a cheap proven system. So if you want to see the future you need to look at how industry solving identity problems for the powerless, e.g. cattle, prisoners, children, shipping containers.</p>\n<p>Here’s an example that’s actually a bit different. The start up costs of this system were paid to identify one largely powerless population, i.e. prisoners, but it’s moving not toward a more powerful one; but toward a less powerful one, i.e. cattle. <a href=\"http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/livestock-virtually-fenced-13477.html\">Virtual Fencing</a> for cattle. It’s an obvious idea of course. Each animal wears a collar and with the help of GPS tracking they are taught to remain within the bounds of the virtual fence, and then you can move the fence around to manage your pastures. (Great, we are back to the <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2007/05/i-spy-class-war/\">turf maintenance</a> and <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2002/07/ground-cover-strategy\">ground-cover</a> problem again.)</p>\n<p>I am reminded of the cowboy’s lament</p>\n<blockquote><p>I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences<br>\nAnd gaze at the moon till I lose my senses<br>\nAnd I can’t look at hovels and I can’t stand fences<br>\nDon’t fence me in.</p></blockquote>"
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"title" : "RESTify DayTrader",
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"content" : "<div><p>Let's RESTify <a href=\"http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC20/daytrader.html\">DayTrader</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>\nDayTrader is benchmark application built around the paradigm of an online\nstock trading system. Originally developed by IBM as the Trade Performance\nBenchmark Sample, DayTrader was donated to the Apache Geronimo community in\n2005. The application allows users to login, view their portfolio, lookup stock\nquotes, and buy or sell stock shares.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Why build a RESTful web service for DayTrader?\nBecause I frequently hear that REST can't be applied to complex situations. I also\nwant to use the example as motivation for talking about some of the idioms that\nare available to handle more extensive requirements.</p> <p><b>...</b></p></div>"
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"title" : "links for 2007-06-14",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2007/06/links_for_20070614.html\">links for 2007-06-14</a></p><blockquote>Koranteng's Toli: The Low End Theory of Networks koranteng does networking dada (tags: **** network networks internet) Search Insider » Blog Archive » Second Life Optimization \"how do you mug people here?\" (tags: secondlife humor) Feld Thoughts - Permalink Changes in Movable Type i'm so not looking ...</blockquote><p>Read the <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2007/06/links_for_20070614.html\">full post</a> from <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/\">Bill de hÓra</a></p>\n\t\t\t<p>via <a href=\"http://www.blogdigger.com/search/Koranteng\">Blogdigger blog search for <b>Koranteng</b></a>.</p>"
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"title" : "Lending a Hand",
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"content" : "<p>At some point in the last 24 hours a blog on some random web page slipped thru my peripheral vision. I only recall the tag line it was using.</p>\n<blockquote><p>“When supply and demand need a hand”</p></blockquote>\n<p>What a great tag line for an intermediary, a market maker, the hub in a two sided network, a dating service. I’m guessing here I but I bet it was an Ad for a head hunter, directed at the hiring side. But it’s a nice tag line for any number of scenarios where you want to reduce the transactional friction, for example it’s not a bad way to talk about what is often the motivation for specifying standards.\n</p>"
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"title" : "This and that: Tuesday evening in Tobago edition",
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"content" : "<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiap/533483037/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1022/533483037_4e1256e8f7_m.jpg\" alt=\"Bag\" height=\"240\" width=\"180\"></a></p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/06/plagiarism-in-plaid.html\"><small>A plagiarism in plaid</small></a></p>\n<p>- Farewell, <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10947966\">Ousmane Sembene</a>!</p>\n<p>- Hello, <a href=\"http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-i-learned-in-writing-grandpa.html\">Grandpa Sydney</a>!</p>\n<p>- <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/06/plagiarism-in-plaid.html\">if you’re going to steal information from bloggers (and commenters)</a>, the least you can do is give a credit in return. And come up with less lame defenses than <a href=\"http://home.koranteng.com/writings/liz-hunt-plagiarism-exchange.html\">this</a>.</p>\n<p align=\"center\"><small>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/daily%20telegraph\" rel=\"tag\">daily telegraph</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/geoffrey%20philp\" rel=\"tag\">geoffrey philp</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/ousmane%20sembene\" rel=\"tag\">ousmane sembene</a></small></p>\n<p align=\"center\">\n\n\n\n\n</p>\n\n<p><map name=\"google_ad_map_wHIYVbjN7pJlHti03PfMRAomLSI_\"><area shape=\"rect\" href=\"http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/wHIYVbjN7pJlHti03PfMRAomLSI_?pos=0\" coords=\"1,2,367,28\"><area shape=\"rect\" href=\"http://services.google.com/feedback/abg\" coords=\"384,10,453,23\"></map><img usemap=\"http://www.caribbeanfreeradio.com/blog#google_ad_map_wHIYVbjN7pJlHti03PfMRAomLSI_\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_img&client=ca-caribbeanfreeradio@gmail.com&output=png&cuid=wHIYVbjN7pJlHti03PfMRAomLSI_&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.caribbeanfreeradio.com%2Fblog%2F2007%2F06%2F12%2Fthis-and-that-tuesday-evening-in-tobago-edition%2F\"></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=Od2Miyx5\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=Od2Miyx5\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=LqwbExek\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=LqwbExek\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=SCyO3icp\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=SCyO3icp\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=sHNziVP3\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=sHNziVP3\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=kpuYRCoG\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=kpuYRCoG\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?a=8bQjK8XE\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog?i=8bQjK8XE\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CaribbeanFreeRadioBlog/~4/124366086\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in",
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"content" : "<div><p>On May 24, <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/\">Facebook</a> launched the newest version of the <a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/\">Facebook Platform</a>, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience.</p>\n\n<p>In this post, I provide an <strong>overview and analysis</strong> of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched.</p>\n\n<p><strong>To start</strong>, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.</p>\n\n<p>Here's why:</p>\n\n<p>Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.</p>\n\n<p>Definitionally, a \"platform\" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.</p>\n\n<p>In contrast, an \"application\" is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.</p>\n\n<p>The classic example of an application being vanquished by a platform was the Wang word processor versus Microsoft DOS-based personal computers.</p>\n\n<p>Wang word processors -- the application, in this case -- were highly evolved, fantastically successful dedicated word processing systems that owned their market, until the general-purpose PC came along. While the PC at first was inferior at word processing, within a few years of its launch the fact that outside developers had built thousands of applications for it -- like spreadsheets -- that closed Wang word processors could not match, coupled with steadily improving PC-based word processing software like Wordstar, had all but killed the Wang word processor. Wang -- one of the most succcessful technology companies of the 1970's -- went bankrupt not long after.</p>\n\n<p><strong>This is a story whose moral has historically not been embraced by the web industry to nearly the extent one would have thought.</strong></p>\n\n<p>The web, after all, vanquished proprietary online services like America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve -- the so-called \"walled gardens\" -- in large part because the web is a platform and the walled gardens were not. No single closed service, no matter how good, and no matter how big, could compete with the diversity of thousands and then millions of web sites that were customized to every conceivable user interest and need.</p>\n\n<p>Yet most major web busineses have not themselves sought to become platforms.</p>\n\n<p>Sure, some have released APIs -- some have even released very sophisticated APIs -- but such APIs have mostly been for interacting with a web system from the outside. Those APIs have been a far cry from the programmability and customizability enabled by a true platform in the sense that the software industry has come to understand it.</p>\n\n<p>Instead, most major web businesses have sailed along without the added lift from platform-style programmability that they could have had at any point.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Until now.</strong></p>\n\n<p>In a nutshell, the Facebook API enables outside web developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment.</p>\n\n<p>After signing up for a developer account on Facebook, the developer writes a web application (in the simplest case, a piece of web content; in the most advanced case, a full fledge web application with deep functionality) and hosts it on her own servers. The developer then registers her application with Facebook, and then users can add that application to their Facebook user experience in several different ways, including within their Facebook profile pages.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Viewed simply</strong>, this is a variant on the \"embedding\" phenomenon that swept MySpace over the last two years, and which Facebook prohibited.</p>\n\n<p>However, what Facebook is now doing is a <strong>lot more sophisticated</strong> than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.</p>\n\n<p>And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a <i>highly</i> viral <strong>distribution engine</strong> for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.</p>\n\n<p>Finally, Facebook is promising <strong>economic freedom</strong> -- third-party applications can run ads and sell goods and services to their hearts' content.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Metaphorically</strong>, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, plus the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.</p>\n\n<p>The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.</p>\n\n<p>You may also notice the irony of Facebook leapfrogging MySpace on embedding at the same time that MySpace seems to be getting <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/technology/20myspace.html?ex=1181793600&en=dc9902653c8fa988&ei=5070\">substantially more restrictive</a>, in some cases even shutting down third-party widgets.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Let's look at some of the key aspects of the Facebook Platform in more detail.</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>First</strong>, perhaps the most architecturally interesting aspect of the Facebook platform is the fact that <strong>everything routes through Facebook's servers</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>This is known as a \"proxy\" model -- you interact with a third-party Facebook application by interacting with Facebook's servers which turn interact with the application's servers.</p>\n\n<p>There are very sharp pros and cons to this approach, contrasted with the MySpace model where third-party content is pulled directly from third-party servers.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Pros:</strong></p>\n\n<p>Facebook retains much tighter control of the overall user experience. Applications must conform to Facebook guidelines for appearance and content or they are disallowed.</p>\n\n<p>Facebook can provide third-party pages with integral access to Facebook user and activity information -- the application can easily be aware of who your Facebook friends are, for example. This allows the applications to be considerably more powerful in the context of a social network than a simple piece of embedded content.</p>\n\n<p>Facebook can cache static content such as images and videos and thereby serve them up faster, improving the overall user experience.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Cons:</strong></p>\n\n<p>Facebook retains much tighter control of the overall user experience. Applications must conform to Facebook guidelines for appearance and content or they are disallowed. Yes, this is also listed above under \"Pros\".</p>\n\n<p>Performance will generall be slower than a non-proxy model. There are additional network hops for each access of a third-party application, which causes additional latency. Plus, Facebook's servers do a lot of processing of the third-party content that they are passing back and forth: they essentially rewrite every page on the fly to implement the added features (e.g. FBML) and restrictions (e.g. no Javascript; div's are rewritten) that they provide. This processing inevitably takes time.</p>\n\n<p><strong>On balance</strong>, of course, this is a fine set of tradeoffs that accommodate Facebook's dual goals of opening up their environment but in carefully controlled ways, and may well serve as a powerful precedent for how other web businesses will open themselves in the future.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Second</strong>, Facebook has <em>really</em> thought through the API suite it provides to developers.</p>\n\n<p>You get a <a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php\">REST web services API</a> that lets your application programmatically interact with Facebook's systems and data in very interesting ways. Developers who understand web services can pick it up in about five minutes.</p>\n\n<p>You get a <a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fql\">database query language</a> called FQL -- a variant of SQL -- that lets you interact with Facebook's databases directly. Developers who are experienced with relational databases and SQL will be right at home.</p>\n\n<p>And, you get a <a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fbml\">text markup language</a> called FBML -- a variant of HTML. FBML strips out some features of HTML, such as Javascript, and adds a new set of features that enable a third-party application page to access Facebook features, data, and look and feel elements in a variety of interesting ways. Anyone who knows HTML can take advantage of it immediately.</p>\n\n<p>This is a very sophisticated yet easy to adopt suite of APIs for a brand new platform, and demonstrates real seriousness of purpose.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Third</strong>, there are three very powerful potential aspects of being a platform in the web era that Facebook does not embrace.</p>\n\n<p>The first is that Facebook itself is not reprogrammable -- Facebook's own code and functionality remains closed and proprietary. You can layer new code and functionality <em>on top</em> of what Facebook's own programmers have built, but you cannot change the Facebook system <em>itself</em> at any level.</p>\n\n<p>The second is that all third-party code that uses the Facebook APIs has to run on third-party servers -- servers that you, as the developer provide. On the one hand, this is obviously fair and reasonable, given the value that Facebook developers are getting. On the other hand, this is a much higher hurdle for development than if code could be uploaded and run directly within the Facebook environment -- on the Facebook servers.</p>\n\n<p>The third is that you cannot create your own world -- your own social network -- using the Facebook platform. You cannot build another Facebook with it.</p>\n\n<p>I won't dwell on these three factors too much right now. Those of you familiar with Ning may, however, expect me to revisit them in the future, and I will :-).</p>\n\n<p>These factors are, however, very reflective of the fact that while the Facebook Platform gives developers a lot of capabilities that they never had before, and access to a huge base of enthusiastic users, as a Facebook developer you're very much living in Facebook's world -- you're not creating your own world. And you have to be serious enough about living in that world that you are willing to hit the fairly high barrier of being willing to run your own servers and infrastructure for any applications you build.</p>\n\n<p>Which takes us to...</p>\n\n<p><strong>Fourth</strong>, and perhaps most significantly, when your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.</p>\n\n<p>Let me explain.</p>\n\n<p>I already described Facebook's viral distribution mechanism by which users became instantly aware of which applications their friends are using, can with one click start using those applications, and automatically spread them to <i>their</i> friends.</p>\n\n<p>This is happening in an environment with 24 million active users -- active users defined as users active on the site in the last 30 days. 50% of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007.</p>\n\n<p>An application that takes off on Facebook is very quickly adopted by hundreds of thousands, and then millions -- in days! -- and then ultimately tens of millions of users.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Unless you're already operating your own systems at Facebook levels of scale, your servers will promptly explode from all the traffic and you will shortly be sending out an email <a href=\"http://pmarca.typepad.com/files/ali_partovi_ilike_letter.jpg\">like this</a>.</strong></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.ilike.com\">ILike</a> was the first third-party application to get serious lift-off on Facebook. Quoting from <a href=\"http://blog.ilike.com/\">ILike's blog</a> shortly after their launch:</p>\n\n<blockquote>In our first 20 hours of opening doors we had 50,000 users sign up, and it is only accelerating. (10,000 users joined in the first 12 hrs. 10,000 more users in the next 3 hrs. 30,000 more users in the next 5 hrs!!)\n\n<p>We started the system not knowing what to expect, with only 2 servers, but ready with backup. Facebook's rabid userbase chewed up our 2 servers almost instantly. We doubled our capacity to catch up. And then we doubled it again. And again. And again. Oh crap - we ran out of servers!! Although iLike.com has a very healthy level of Web traffic, and even though about half of all the servers in our datacenter were sitting unused, idle, as backup capacity, we are now completely maxed out.</p>\n\n<p>We just emailed everybody we know across over a dozen Bay Area startups, corporations, and venture firms in a desperate plea to find spare servers so we can triple our capacity for the continued onslaught. Tomorrow we are picking up over 100 servers from different companies to have them installed just to handle the weekend's traffic. (For those who responded to our late night pleas, thank you!)</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Yesterday, about two weeks later, ILike <a href=\"http://blog.ilike.com/ilike_team_blog/2007/06/holy_cow_6mm_us.html\">announced</a> that they have passed 3 <em>million</em> users on Facebook and are still growing -- at a rate of 300,000 users per day.</p>\n\n<p>They didn't say how many servers they're running, but if you do the math, it has to be in the hundreds and heading into the thousands.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Translation</strong>: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it -- networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. -- and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.</p>\n\n<p>This is a <strong>\"success kills\"</strong> scenario -- the good news is you're successful, the bad news is you're flat on your back from what amounts to a self-inflicted denial of service attack, unless you have the money and time and knowledge to tackle the resulting scale challenges.</p>\n\n<p>Will every Facebook application go through this?</p>\n\n<p>No, of course not. The ones that nobody uses will not have this problem.</p>\n\n<p>But the successful ones all will.</p>\n\n<p>The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- <strong>the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements</strong>. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Fifth</strong>, there's the fascinating issue of the Facebook application directory -- the page from which users can pick which applications they want to use.</p>\n\n<p>When you develop a new Facebook application, you submit it to the directory and someone at Facebook Inc. approves it -- or not.</p>\n\n<p>If your application is not approved for any reason -- or if it's just <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2205007948&topic=5673\">taking too long</a> -- you apparently have the option of letting your application go out \"underground\".</p>\n\n<p>This means that you need to start your application's proliferation some other way than listing it in the directory -- by promoting it somewhere else on the web, or getting your friends to use it.</p>\n\n<p>But then it can apparently proliferate virally across Facebook just like an approved application.</p>\n\n<p>There is already <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2205007948&topic=5029\">long list</a> of underground apps that you can use -- and proliferate.</p>\n\n<p>It will be fascinating to see how Facebook deals with this -- will they embrace underground apps, or move to shut them down?</p>\n\n<p>The answer will go a long way towards understanding the true level of freedom that developers have on the Facebook Platform.</p>\n\n<p><strong>In closing:</strong></p>\n\n<p>Congratulations to the Facebook team -- big time! -- for an amazing leap forward in what the Internet can do for real users and for opening up whole new vistas of opportunities for third-party developers.</p>\n\n<p>This is an amazing achievement -- one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Clarifications and expansions:</strong></p>\n\n<p>In conversations with the folks at Facebook, there are a few clarifications and expansions I'd like to note:</p>\n\n<p>First, my statement that \"applications must conform to Facebook guidelines for appearance and content or they are disallowed\" is partially but not entirely true. Boxes that contain content from an application on a user's Facebook profile page must be rendered via FBML and have tight controls over what can be included, particularly the no-Javascript limitation. On the other hand, so-called \"canvas\" pages -- the pages dedicated completely to a specific application, and accessible via the left-hand-side app navigation area, can be rendered either via FBML (which is restrictive), an iframe that can include arbitrary content, or a combination of the two. From an iframe you do pretty much whatever you want, but you don't get the FBML features.</p>\n\n<p>Note that you are incented to use FBML because that's the easiest way to achieve integration between your application and Facebook -- e.g. to let your app have access to information about the user and her friends. FBML is clearly a good thing; it's just that when you're using it, you can't do certain other things that you're used to. And, as noted, you are required to use it for content that shows up on users' profile pages.</p>\n\n<p>Second, my point that \"success kills\" -- that a successful, widely used application will require a large number of servers to run, at best, and will fall over and die, at worst -- is true, but the Facebook folks point out that as an app developer you have a lot of control over how fast your application grows. You don't have to light up all the viral spread features all at once, for example.</p>\n\n<p>I would counter-argue that deliberately tamping down the growth rate doesn't do you any favors either -- then you don't get widely used, which for most apps is the whole reason to exist.</p>\n\n<p>My larger point is that if your app succeeds on Facebook, expect to have to do a lot of heavy lifting on your back end and to spend a lot of money on hardware and bandwidth -- just like if you built a web app that succeeded outside Facebook, of course.</p>\n\n<p>Some commenters have proposed that <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011\">Amazon's EC2 service</a> would be a way to easily scale a Facebook app (or a non-Facebook web app). I think EC2 is a great service and have no desire to say anything negative about it. So I will just say two things: it isn't as easy as that, and EC2 is not free either. Bonus points to commenters who want to go into more detail on these topics than I have here!</p>\n\n<p><strong>Appendix -- some interesting links:</strong></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/24/facebook-launches-facebook-platform-they-are-the-anti-myspace/\">Techcrunch's Facebook Platform launch coverage</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/24/were-covering-facebook-platform-stay-tuned/\">VentureBeat's launch coverage</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=3689274c-91e5-4ab9-bea8-630719932304\">Dare Obasanjo's launch coverage</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.paulallen.net/2007/05/25/prediction-facebook-will-be-the-largest-social-network-in-the-world/\">Paul Allen's (no, the other one) launch coverage</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/24/technology/facebook.fortune/\">David Kirkpatrick's first Fortune article</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/01/technology/facebookplatform.fortune/index.htm\">David Kirkpatrick's second Fortune article</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/05/facebooks_250m_.html\">Josh Kopelman on MySpace vs Facebook</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/31/the-new-portals-its-the-bread-not-the-peanut-butter/\">David Sacks on Facebook vs portals</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/29/qa-with-ilikes-ali-partovi-on-facebook/\">VentureBeat interview with ILike CEO Ali Partovi shortly after ILike's launch on Facebook</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://pmarca.typepad.com/files/needham_facebook_yahoo_report.pdf\">Needham report on Facebook from April 2007</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.insidefacebook.com/\">Inside Facebook -- a blog on all things Facebook</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/04/this-weeks-top-25-hottest-facebook-apps/\">Inside Facebook's review of 25 Facebook applications</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://mashable.com/2007/05/24/facebook-platform-30-apps/\">Mashable's review of 30 Facebook applications</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9723040-2.html\">Webware's review of 5 Facebook applications</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://mashable.com/2007/05/02/10-awesome-things-built-on-the-facebook-api/\">Mashable's 10 awesome things built on the original Facebook API</a></li>\n</ul>\n</div>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=E13Ze9Y9\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=E13Ze9Y9\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=1FdKJib6\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=1FdKJib6\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=x2El0GKa\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=x2El0GKa\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=lUTTFauP\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=lUTTFauP\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=qDVOpJej\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=qDVOpJej\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=eMwcFo7a\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=eMwcFo7a\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pmarca/~4/125286267\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Paper of the week: history's view of the dot com boom",
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"content" : "<div><p>History's view of the dot com boom of the late 90's may be substantially different than ours.</p>\n\n<p>According to <a href=\"http://pmarca.typepad.com/files/true_dot_com_boom.pdf\">David Kirsch and Brent Goldfarb's 2006 paper</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>The Icarian arcs of a handful of high-flying internet companies occupied the bulk of public attention both on the way up and on the way down. In the public eye, these stories came to represent the totality of internet entrepreneurship in the 1990s, even as thousands of successful, if less spectacular, internet companies followed a more traditional growth trajectory, survived and even thrived...\n\n<p>Exploiting a unique database of Dot Com Era business planning documents, we have estimated the scale of entrepreneurial activity during the period. Approximately 50,000 startups were founded in the United States between 1998 and 2002 to exploit the commercialization of the Internet. The survival rate of Dot Com ventures founded during the height of the bubble in late 1998, 1999, and 2000 was a surprisingly high 48%, in line with if not higher than that observed in prior instances of industry emergence...</p>\n\n<p>Technology entrepreneurship in the Dot Com Era was more successful than people imagine today, and there was more of it than originally reported...</p>\n\n<p>Many Dot Com entrepreneurs can share the sentiment expressed in Mark Twain’s famous quip, “the report of my death was an exaggeration.\"</p></blockquote></div>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=vkwI2G7z\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=vkwI2G7z\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=RA4SaGIK\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=RA4SaGIK\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=TdEKEshD\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=TdEKEshD\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=0u5ARdiR\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=0u5ARdiR\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=r5Is6T2Z\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=r5Is6T2Z\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?a=3tCiK2kQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pmarca?i=3tCiK2kQ\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pmarca/~4/125286265\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Microsoft is not sabotaging APP (probably)",
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"content" : "<div><p>(<u>Update 5/13/2007:</u> It’s come to my attention that various blog posts are saying that Windows Live Writer supports APP. Neither Beta 1 nor Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer supports generic APP, only Blogger’s GData implementation. Sorry for any confusion!)</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/09/WhyGDataAPPFailsAsAGeneralPurposeEditingProtocolForTheWeb.aspx\">Dare says</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p><font color=\"#444444\">…certain limitations in the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom Publishing Protocol</a> become quite obvious when you get outside of blog editing scenarios for which the protocol was originally designed.</font></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/06/10/So-Lame\">Tim responds</a> (with a vengeance):</p>\n<blockquote><p>The thing is, I’ve seen this movie before: The movie where there’s an emerging standard that’s got some buzz and looks promising and maybe it’ll raise the tide and float all our boats a little higher, and then Microsoft says they won’t play.</p>\n<p>Since there are huge numbers of computers out there with Microsoft client software, APP-enabling those clients would definitely lift the tide. But then, of course, the people using those computers would be able to post to any old online property they want to. As opposed to just <a href=\"http://spaces.live.com/\">Spaces</a>. By the way, Dare has spent quite a bit of time on the Spaces team.</p>\n<p><strong>Do I believe that Microsoft would deliberately steer their client implementations away from APP and toward something else that Windows Live Spaces would have the first and perhaps only implementation of? Well, um… <em>yes</em>.</strong> <em>[jcheng: emphasis mine]</em></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#333333\">I don’t have a lot to say on the merits of APP for whatever scenarios Dare is talking about. I’ve always found it really hard to think about how well general protocols map to abstract problem sets. You don’t really feel the pain until the rubber meets the road. <a href=\"http://jcheng.wordpress.com/#footnote1365\">*</a></font></p>\n<p>But what I do want to address is the idea that Microsoft might be sabotaging APP for nontechnical reasons. I can’t blame Tim for being paranoid and cynical about Microsoft–no doubt he’s been butting heads with Microsofties in standards meetings since the Bad Old Days–but please, consider the following:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Microsoft has already shipped a general purpose APP client (Word 2007) and GData implementation (Windows Live Writer). <em>[Update 5/13/2007: Writer currently <u>only</u> supports GData, <u>not</u> generic APP.]</em> These are the two main blogging tools that Microsoft has to offer, and while I can’t speak for the Word team, the Writer team is serious about supporting Atom going forward. </li>\n<li>These two clients also already post to most blogs, not just Spaces. In particular, Writer works <em>hard</em> to integrate seamlessly with even clearly buggy blog services. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as we do at this. </li>\n<li>Dare was not at the interop event–it was for people with APP implementations, and he doesn’t have one–but at least I was. And if I recall correctly, Writer was the only blogging client there (someone from Flock RSVPed but didn’t show). In fact, of the names I regularly see on the atom-protocol list, the only one I recognize as the developer of a blog client is <a href=\"http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/\">Daniel Jalkut</a> (MarsEdit). </li>\n<li>Spaces may not support APP, but it does support MetaWeblog which Microsoft has a lot <em>less</em> influence over than APP (since MW is controlled by Dave Winer, not by an official standards body). Consider that many of its main competitors, including MySpace, Vox, and almost all overseas social networking sites, have poor or nonexistent support for <em>any</em> APIs. </li>\n</ol>\n<p><font color=\"#333333\">And also, as far as I can tell, there is nobody at Microsoft who would be <em>less</em> likely to tolerate this kind of anti-competitive behavior as Dare Obasanjo. I have not met Dare in person but I see him all over the internal mailing lists, and he is always arguing for doing the Right Thing–loudly, abrasively, persuasively arguing. Whether he is right or wrong in his arguments, I personally have little doubt that he is at least <em>sincere</em>.</font></p>\n<p><font color=\"#333333\">Oh, and I added the “probably” to the end of the title, because in the end, what the hell do I know… I’m just a dev. But if there is some kind of strategic agenda around APP, they are doing a notably poor job of communicating it to the folks on the ground.</font></p>\n<p><font size=\"0\"><a name=\"footnote1365\"></a>* I spent a fair amount of time trying to put <a href=\"http://www.onfolio.com/\">Onfolio’s</a> storage online while piggybacking on top of existing, fairly widely deployed servers–first FTP with HTTP access (i.e. webhosts), then WebDAV. And while each seemed like it should work fine and dandy, when I actually tried them, it all fell apart when I realized I simply could not make it work without lease-based pessimistic locking–and I couldn’t do that without some kind of master clock to rule all the clients. And the main reason I needed lease-based pessimistic locking is that I was doing link-based hierarchy. I’m not smart/experienced enough to think of these kinds of issues unless the problem is concrete.</font></p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Twitter’s value to society…",
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"content" : "<p>… and that of other micro-publishing solutions.</p>\n<p>Jon Udell <a href=\"http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/15/shared-navigation-of-online-bureaucracies/\">sees</a> what many others see as well, but he goes one step further to understand some of the consequences.</p>\n<p><em>“For a variety of reasons, people are beginning to document and share what they know. If you write it down, you’ll be able to remember it yourself in case you have to replay the steps. And writing it down in a shared information system in the cloud is becoming a more reliable way to assure your own future access to this documentation than writing it down locally.”</em></p>\n<p>This is also one of the reasons I started blogging and sharing my photos online years ago. However, the fact that many people are now doing this, due to the ease of use of services like Twitter, Blogger and Flickr, has (had) a more fundamental impact. We are now documenting (links to) knowledge and experiences that would otherwise not have documented (in a way they could have been found by anyone, anywhere).</p>\n<p>Udell takes governmental bureaucracy as a example where a combination of social bookmarking and micro-blogging could help people find their way through procedures and forms, but this concept works in many other areas as well of course.</p>\n<p><em>“I think one answer will emerge from the intersection of social bookmarking and clickstream logging. Suppose that instead of bookmarking and tagging a single URL, you could bookmark and tag a sequence of page-visiting and form-filling events. The sequence corresponds to some complex multi-step task. The performance of the task crosses several (or many) online jurisdictions. The outcome might be successful or not: “Yes, I got the license,” or “No I didn’t.” But in either case, it would be qualified by an anecdotal report: “Yes, I got the license, but I found out that if you’re in my category you need an import license and you have to meet the following insurance requirement.”</em></p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?a=ITd0Rsds\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?i=ITd0Rsds\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?a=OtqPiYmj\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?i=OtqPiYmj\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?a=oP02e27N\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?i=oP02e27N\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?a=05DgnKig\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/yme/thoughts?i=05DgnKig\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Goma: A Dangerous and Much Misunderstood Mess",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_hcNKiPM2OBo/RnAPmSF-riI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/4h6Qvreh8yU/s1600-h/goma.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 10px 10px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_hcNKiPM2OBo/RnAPmSF-riI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/4h6Qvreh8yU/s400/goma.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><em>As the 1994 genocide unfolded in Rwanda, few reporters actually traveled in the country. When the major influx of Rwandan refugees into Zaire (Congo) occurred, many more reporters were sent in to cover that. This discrepancy in the amount of coverage and the attention paid by news media led many audiences outside of Africa to actually perceive of the refugees, mainly Hutu and largely controlled by the extremists responsible for the genocide, as <strong>the</strong> main victims of what had happened in Rwanda. This embittered most of us who reported mainly on the actual genocide. As the problems created in the refugee camps became more critical, I focused more attention on them and in October and November 1994 I went to Goma (where colleagues had covered the refugee story while I was in Rwanda). Among my stories was this one about some refugees I met along the road north of the city. </em><br><div></div><br><div>Weariness is etched into the eyes of 56-year-old Savelin Mukanyangezi as she and members of her family of 10 briefly interrupt their slow trek toward the Katale refugee camp north of Goma. She has been walking for hours, a few meagre possessions packed in a bundle balanced on her head. She says it is painful to be on the move once again. </div><br><div></div><div>Ms. Mukanyangezi, a member of the Hutu ethnic group, was first uprooted from her home in Rwanda early this year. That was when soldiers of the mainly Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front launched their all-out assault to take control of the country following the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi by extremist forces loyal to the then Hutu-led government. </div><br><div></div><div>Initially she stayed in Rwanda. But in July, when opposition to the RPF advance finally collapsed, she moved again -- this time across the border into Zaire (Congo). She and her family stayed away from the main refugee concentrations around Goma and settled in a village further north. </div><br><div></div><div>Now, though, armed Zairean troops have ordered them into the camps. Ms. Mukanyangezi and others in her group charge those soldiers gave them little time to move and looted most of their belongings, including items like plastic sheeting given to the Rwandans by relief agencies. She makes clear she does not relish going into the overcrowded camps. But she says she was afraid and had no choice. </div><br><div></div><div>The reason for her fear is plain along the road north of Goma. At one checkpoint, bellowing moans of pain can be heard from behind a parked truck. Between the big wheels a man can be seen curled on the ground, squirming. Zairean security forces are kicking him repeatedly. A smiling soldier explains the man, a Rwandan refugee, failed to stop at the roadblock. </div><br><div></div><div>Relief officials working in Goma say the Zaireans are fed up with the refugees, especially by acts of banditry the local authorities blame on the Rwandans. During the past week, in addition to evicting refugees like Ms. Mukanyangezi from their makeshift homes, Zairean security forces have been accused of shooting indiscriminately into crowds of refugees, killing and wounding more than 100 in one incident. They have detained other refugees on criminal charges stemming from the violence. They have even forcibly deported some Rwandan prisoners back to Rwanda, turning them over to forces of the new government in Kigali despite UN protests. </div><br><div></div><div>Still, the growing hostility of Zairean authorities hasn't pushed Ms. Mukanyangezi or a man walking with her, 33-year-old Dominique Uwimana, to think about returning to Rwanda. They say the regugees fear the Zaireans but insist most still fear the RPF as well (even though the new rulers in Kigali says refugees with no role in the genocide have nothing to fear and should return home). Mr. Uwimana says that for him to feel comfortable about going home, the new government in Kigali will first have to negotiate with the old, Hutu-led government -- and let former officials and soldiers return to their homes too. </div><br><div></div><div><em>While many refugees like the two in the previous piece were likely innocent of any wrongdoing during the genocide, there were clearly killers among them. They were terrorizing the camps in Goma and elsewhere, threatening and even killing refugees who wanted to return home. They were also hijacking aid shipments and controlling the distribution of relief supplies. Aid agencies were in a quandary but finally went public with the problems they faced, threatening a possible pullout of humanitarian workers from the camps.</em> </div><br><div></div><div>Relief agencies working with Rwandan refugees are calling for swift international action to end what they say are \"unacceptably dangerous\" conditions for refugees and aid workers at camps in Goma, Zaire. </div><br><div></div><div>In a joint statement, the aid agencies warn they may be forced to withdraw from refugee camps unless there are immediate and tangible changes. They say current humanitarian operations are untenable because of what they characterize as deteriorating security conditions. </div><br><div></div><div>The relief groups -- including Care, Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam -- are demanding, among other things, that all weapons be removed from the camps along with those individuals who are inciting violence and interfering with the delivery of aid supplies. </div><br><div></div><div>They also say the protection of refugees must be guaranteed and refugees must be free to stay or return to their homes without intimidation or fear for their lives. </div><br><div></div><div>Most of the trouble in the Zairean camps has been blamed on armed militia loyal to Rwanda's ousted Hutu-led government. These are the same groups accused of carrying out the massacres that left more than half a million mainly Tutsi Rwandans dead. </div>"
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"title" : "A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit.",
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"content" : "This is a potted history of consensus, transactions and 2PC. Reading the literature on consensus is difficult because the language changes (consensus was originally called agreement), the results come in an order that isn't logical, and the whole framework for describing distributed algorithms evolved in parallel with the work. Also, there are few books other than Lynch's Distributed Algorithms that cover the subject.<br><br>Papers are discussed in the order that makes most sense, not in the order they were published.<br><br>The first instance of the consensus problem that I am aware of is in Lamport's <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf\">\"Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System\" (1978)</a>, though it is not explicitly declared as a consensus or agreement problem. In this paper Lamport discusses how messages take a finite time to travel between processors and draws an analogy with Einstein's special relativity. Discussing Einstein's theory with respect to distributed systems is popular recently in the blogsphere, but in 1978 Lamport give a complete analysis with space-time diagrams and all. The issue is that in a distributed system you cannot tell if event A happened before event B, unless A caused B in some way. Each observer can see events happen in a different order, except for events that cause each other, ie there is only a partial ordering of events in a distributed system. Lamport defines the \"happens before\" relationship and operator, and goes on to give an algorithm that provides a total ordering of events in a distributed system, so that each process sees events in the same order as every other process.<br><br>Lamport also introduces the concept of a distributed state machine: start a set of deterministic state machines in the same state and then make sure they process the same messages in the same order. Each machine is now a replica of the others. The key problem is making each replica agree what is the next message to process: a consensus problem. This is what the algorithm for creating a total ordering of events does, it provides an agreed ordering for the delivery of messages. However, the system is not fault tolerant; if one process fails that others have to wait for it to recover.<br><br>Around the same time as this paper, Gray described 2PC in <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/%7EGray/papers/DBOS.pdf\">\"Notes on Database Operating Systems\" (1979)</a>. Unfortunately 2PC would block if the TM (Transaction Manager) fails at the wrong time. Skeen showed in <a href=\"http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/Ske81.pdf\">\"NonBlocking Commit Protocols\" (1981)</a>that for a distributed transactions you needed a 3 phrase commit algorithm to avoid the blocking problems associated with 2PC. The problem was coming up with a nice 3PC algorithm, this would only take nearly 25 years!<br><br>Fischer, Lynch and Paterson showed that distributed consensus was impossible in an asynchronous system with just one faulty process in <a href=\"http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf\">\"Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process\" (1985)</a>, this famous result is known as the \"FLP\" result. By this time \"consensus\" was the name given to the problem of getting a bunch of processors to agree a value. In an asynchronous system (where processors run at arbitrary speeds and messages can take an arbitrarily long time to travel between processors) with a perfect network (all messages are delivered, messages arrive in order and can not be duplicated) distributed consensus is impossible with just one faulty process (even just a fail-stop). The kernel of the problem is that you cannot tell the difference between a process that has stopped and one that is running very slowly, making dealing with faults in an asynchronous system almost impossible. The paper was also important because it demonstrated how to show something was impossible: show that all algorithms that solve the problem must have some property, then show that this property is impossible, ie proof by contradiction. (This approach was only re-learned as Turing used it in the halting problem)<br><br>By this stage people realized that a distributed algorithm has two properties: safety and liveness. Safety means nothing bad happens, while liveness means that something good eventually happens. 2PC is an asynchronous consensus algorithm, all processes must agree on either commit or abort for a transaction. 2PC is safe: no bad data is ever written to the databases, but its liveness properties aren't great: if the TM fails at the wrong point the system will block.<br><br>Also by this stage people thought of distributed systems as being synchronous (processes run at known rates, and messages are delivered in known bounds of time) or asynchronous (processes run at unknown and arbitrary rates, and messages can take unbounded time to be delivered). The asynchronous case is more general than the synchronous case: an algorithm that works for an asynchronous system will also work for a synchronous system, but not vice versa. You can treat a synchronous system as a special case of an asynchronous system that just happens to have bounds on the time it takes to deliver a message.<br><br>Before FLP, there was the <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf\">\"The Byzantine Generals Problem\" (1982)</a> paper. In this form of the consensus problem the processes can lie, and they can actively try to deceive other processes. This problem looks harder than the FLP result, but it does have a solution for the synchronous case (though when the Byzantine Generals paper was written the distinction between asynchronous and synchronous systems was not explicit). The solution is expensive in the number of messages exchanged, and the number of rounds of messages required. The problem originally came from the aerospace industry: what would happen if sensors gave false information on an plane (clearly the system could be treated as synchronous).<br><br>In 1986 there was a get together of the distributed systems people who were interested in consensus and the transaction people. At the time the best consensus algorithm was the Byzantine Generals, but this was too expensive to use for transactions. Jim Gray wrote up a note on the meeting: <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/%7EGray/papers/TandemTR88.6_ComparisonOfByzantineAgreementAndTwoPhaseCommit.pdf\">\"A Comparison of the Byzantine Agreement Problem and the Transaction Commit Problem.\" (1987) </a>.<br><br>The paper contains this in the introduction :-)<br><br><span style=\"font-style:italic\">\"Prior to the conference, it was widely believed that the transaction commit problem faced by distributed systems is a degenerate form of the Byzantine Generals Problem studied by academe. Perhaps the most useful consequence of the conference was to show that these two problems have little in common.\"</span><br><br>Eventually distributed transactions would be seen as a version of consensus, called uniform consensus (see <a href=\"http://infoscience.epfl.ch/getfile.py?recid=88273&mode=best\">\"Uniform consensus is harder than consensus\" (2000)</a>). With uniform consensus all processes must agree on a value, even the faulty ones - a transaction should only commit if all RMs are prepared to commit. Most forms of consensus are only concerned with having the non-faulty processes agree. Uniform consensus is more difficult than general consensus.<br><br>Eventually Lamport came up with the Paxos consensus algorithm, described in <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf\">\"The Part-Time Parliament\" (submitted in 1990, published 1998)</a>. Unfortunately the analogy with Greek democracy failed badly with people finding the paper very difficult to understand, and the paper was ignored until its case was taken up by Butler Lampson in <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/lampson/58-Consensus/Acrobat.pdf\">\"How to Build a Highly Availability System using Consensus\" (1996)</a>. This paper provides a good introduction to building fault tolerant systems and Paxos. Later Lamport would publish <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf\">\"Paxos Made Simple (2001)</a>.<br><br>The kernel of Paxos is that given a fixed number of processes, any majority of them must have at least one process in common. For example given three processes A, B and C the possible majorities are: AB, AC, or BC. If a decision is made when one majority is present eg AB, then at any time in the future when another majority is available at least one of the processes can remember what the previous majority decided. If the majority is AB then both processes will remember, if AC is present then A will remember and if BC is present then B will remember.<br><br>Paxos can tolerate lost messages, delayed messages, repeated messages, and messages delivered out of order. It will reach consensus if there is a single leader for long enough that the leader can talk to a majority of processes twice. Any process, including leaders, can fail and restart; in fact all processes can fail at the same time, the algorithm is still safe. There can be more than one leader at a time.<br><br>Paxos is an asynchronous algorithm; there are no explicit timeouts. However, it only reaches consensus when the system is behaving in a synchronous way, ie messages are delivered in a bounded period of time; otherwise it is safe. There is a pathological case where Paxos will not reach consensus, in accordance to FLP, but this scenario is relatively easy to avoid in practice.<br><br>Clearly dividing systems into synchronous and asynchronous is too broad a distinction, and Dwork, Lynch and Stockmeyer defined partially synchronous systems in <a href=\"http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm88.pdf\">\"Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony\" (1988) </a>. There are two versions of partial synchronous system: in one processes run at speeds within a known range and messages are delivered in bounded time but the actual values are not known a priori; in the other version the range of speeds of the processes and the upper bound for message deliver are known a priori, but they will only start holding at some unknown time in the future. The partial synchronous model is a better model for the real world than either the synchronous or asynchronous model; networks function in a predicatable way most of the time, but occasionally go crazy.<br><br>Lamport and Gray went on to apply Paxos to the distributed transaction commit problem in <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=701\">\"Consensus on Transaction Commit\" (2005)</a>. They used Paxos to effectively replicate the TM of 2PC, and used an instance of Paxos for each RM involved in the transaction to agree whether that RM could commit the transaction. On the face of it, using an instance of Paxos per RM looks expensive, but it turns out that it is not. Paxos Commit will complete in two phases for the fault free case, ie it has the same message delay as 2PC, though more messages are exchanged. A third phase is only required if there is a fault, in accordance to the Skeen result. Given 2n+1 TM replicas Paxos Commit will complete with up to n faulty replicas. Paxos Commit does not use Paxos to solve the transaction commit problem directly, ie it is not used to solve uniform consensus, rather it is used to make the system fault tolerant.<br><br><br>Any argument that distributed transactions should not be used because 2PC is blocking is a void, because Paxos Commit addresses the blocking issue.<br><br>Recently there has been some discussion of the CAP conjecture: Consistency, Availability and Partition. The conjecture asserts that you cannot have all three in a distributed system: a system that is consistent, that can have faulty processes and that can handle a network partition.<br><br>We can examine CAP by equating consistency with consensus. For an asynchronous system we cannot reach consensus with one faulty process, FLP, so we cannot have consistency and availability for an asynchronous system!<br><br>Now take a Paxos system with three nodes: A, B and C. We can reach consensus if two nodes are working, ie we can have consistency and availability. Now if C becomes partitioned and C is queried, it cannot respond because it cannot communicate with the other nodes; it doesn't know whether it has been partitioned, or if the other two nodes are down, or if the network is being very slow. The other two nodes can carry on, because they can talk to each other and they form a majority. So for the CAP conjecture, Paxos does not handle a partition because C cannot respond to queries. However, we could engineer our way around this. If we are inside a data center we can use two independent networks (Paxos doesn't mind if messages are repeated). If we are on the internet, then we could have our client query all nodes A, B and C, and if C is partitioned the client can query A or B unless it is partitioned in a similar way to C.<br><br>For a synchronous network, if C is partitioned it can learn that it is partitioned if it does not receive messages in a fixed period of time, and thus can declare itself down to the client.<br><br>Paxos, Paxos Commit and HTTP/REST have been combined to build a highly available co-allocation system for Grid computing, details of which can be found here <a href=\"http://www.cct.lsu.edu/%7Emaclaren/HARC/\">HARC</a>, there are also more references in this paper: <a href=\"http://www.allhands.org.uk/2006/proceedings/papers/624.pdf\">\"Co-Allocation, Fault Tolerance and Grid Computing\" (2006)</a>."
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"content" : "<blockquote>\"... plagiarism is against journalistic ethics; it brings discredit on both the individual and the organisation and damages their credibility and reputation. Trust and authenticity are qualities difficult to acquire and easy to lose but much prized by media organisations in the global proliferation of internet information sources. Accusations should be taken seriously by both journalists and editors.\"</blockquote>\n\n<p>Informed <a href=\"http://www.frizzylogic.org/fl/2007/06/12/how-doth-the-little-crocodile/\">opinion</a> on the recent alleged plagiarism by <em>Daily Telegraph</em> journalist Liz Hunt of one of Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah's blog posts, by someone who - with feet in the blogger, journo and editor camps (yes, I'm aware that makes her sound like a tripod) - is more than qualified to comment. </p>\n\n<p>When I first heard about this I shrugged my shoulders. It happens. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but I've encountered three instances of my own copyright-protected work reappearing elsewhere over the past decade or so: two direct steals and a third piece with a very familiar structure and select phrases. All by well-known organisations.</p>\n\n<p>However, Rachel's post made me think again. Truth is a slippery concept, as anyone who has studied history knows. The reality is that it's a series of (sometimes disputable) \"facts\" reported from a multiplicity of different perspectives, which somehow come together to form the big-picture whole. It's not perfect, but it's the best approach we've got.</p>\n\n<p>\"Truth\" requires research, sifting, evaluating, editing and re-telling. The skill with which these techniques are exercised is the basis on which reputations are built. I'm more of a <em>BBC News</em>, <em>Guardian</em> and <em>Times</em> man myself, but I recognise the Telegraph's similar reputation of \"quality\", even though I might not quite share its view of the world.</p>\n\n<p>This is why a <em>Telegraph</em> editor needs to provide some kind of response to this issue. To a certain extent, the details of the response itself are unimportant. It can say that it upholds the complaint, that it rigorously denies it, or that it agrees to differ and to print an attribution so readers can make their own minds up. Ongoing silence would be misguided.</p>\n\n<p>We need our bastions of truth: reliable, open and fair sources of fact and opinion. However, that's not enough these days. As the old hierarchies disintegrate, we now expect a two-way dialogue with our symbols of authority (however benign). We have increasingly short patience with, and mutinous disrespect towards, those that treat us with indifference.</p>"
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"title" : "Cory's column on the origins of the copyright wars",
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"content" : "<strong>Cory Doctorow</strong>:\nEver wonder how the copyright wars started? I think it has a lot to do with the national frenzy over the \"information revolution\" in the 80s and 90s and the certainty that the future would be all about selling bits. I argue this case in my new Information Week column, and show how trading the US manufacturing sector to preserve the entertainment industry was especially dumb in the \"information age,\" because from here on it, it's just going to get easier and easier to copy information.\n\n<blockquote>\nNot too long ago, back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. For America, that was nothing new. Through most of its history, the U.S. government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth.\n<p>\nNot anymore. The relationship between the entertainment industry and the U.S. government today is pretty cozy. Entertainment is using America's clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses, apparently oblivious to the irony of post-Soviet Russia forgoing its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal. The U.S. attorney general is proposing to expand the array of legal tools at the RIAA's disposal, giving the organization the ability to attack people who simply attempt infringement.\n<p>\nHow did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the \"Information Economy.\"\n\n\n</p></p></blockquote>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=QW2BTSKAQACEKQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=199903173&queryText=doctorow\">Link</a>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=3FtYMv\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?i=3FtYMv\" border=\"0\"></a></p>"
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"title" : "How doth the little crocodile",
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"content" : "<p>Interesting to turn from musings on how journalists might best pluck goodies from the strands of the wondrous world-wide webbing to see that some are finding it a highly nourishing activity already.</p>\n<blockquote><p><a title=\"A poem by Lewis Carol\" href=\"http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/carroll/parody/crocodile.html\">How</a> cheerfully he seems to grin,<br>\nHow neatly spreads his claws,<br>\nAnd welcomes little fishes in,<br>\nWith gently smiling jaws!</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Liz Hunt is a journalist who currently inhabits the waters of the <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/\">Daily Telegraph</a> newspaper and her information acquisition techniques appears to include, to one blogger at least, <a title=\"NYU Journalism dept\" href=\"http://journalism.nyu.edu/ethics/\">plagiarism</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Attempting to pass off someone else’s words or ideas as your own without proper attribution or acknowledgment. In both journalism and academia, this is akin to theft. Examples: Copying in whole or in part a published article or another student’s paper, borrowing language or concepts, lifting quotes or failing to use quotation marks where appropriate.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><a title=\"Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Journalism\">Journalistic plagiarism</a> ranges from including one or two sentences copied from another newspaper without attribution, to more serious cases, such as copying an entire paragraph or story… The ease of copying electronic text from the Internet has lured a number of reporters into acts of plagiarism; column writers have been caught ‘cutting and pasting’ articles and text from a number of websites…</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p><a title=\"A blog friend of mine\" href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a> wrote one of his characteristically wide-ranging, erudite and entertaining blog posts entitled <a title=\"His original post (containing, you will note, links back to others)\" href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/04/bags-and-stamps.html\">Bags and Stamps</a>. It weaves together a number of strands around the subject of those outsized, woven plastic, plaid-printed flimsily-zipped containers known in west Africa as “Ghana must go” bags. He calls them “an object lesson in the fluidity of ideas” in an essay which touches on, among many other things, the subject of plagiarism. That was on 13 April this year.</p>\n<p>Some time later, on 2 June to be precise, Liz Hunt wrote a piece in the opinion section of the Daily Telegraph entitled <a title=\"Liz Hunt's piece. No attributions.\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/06/02/do0202.xml\">Immigrants have bags of ambition</a>. It is a short piece, however it seems that Koranteng’s ideas had been fluid enough to percolate into her small container. Let’s note at this stage that Koranteng’s blog states, at the bottom of each page, that the contents are <a title=\"Media Solicitors UK\" href=\"http://www.media-solicitors.co.uk/copyright1.htm\">copyright</a>, a move which <a title=\"According to Media Solicitors UK\" href=\"http://www.media-solicitors.co.uk/internet-copyright.htm\">protects it under UK law</a>. Also that the Telegraph group itself is no stranger to <a title=\"The Telegraph RSS feed page\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/rss/exclusions/rssinfo.xml\">the importance of attribution</a> as regards the re-use of their own content on the internet:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Please provide attribution to telegraph.co.uk in relation to the RSS feeds either in text form: “telegraph.co.uk” or by using the telegraph.co.uk graphic (included in the feeds).</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The day after Liz Hunt’s article appeared Koranteng wrote a letter to the newspaper’s editors: <a title=\"Koranteng's letter to the editors and subsequent dialogue\" href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/2007/06/plagiarism-in-plaid.html\">A Plagiarism in Plaid</a> in which he links to <a title=\"It's the spelling mistake that's the smoking gun\" href=\"http://home.koranteng.com/writings/a-plagriarism-in-plaid.html\">a detailed textual analysis of his essay next to her article</a>. There has been <a title=\"This is a link to it\" href=\"http://home.koranteng.com/writings/liz-hunt-plagiarism-exchange.html\">an e-mail response from Liz Hunt</a> in which she says:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I am happy to organise a link to your blog IF you will extend the same courtesy to my (unedited) defence against your accusation which I refute.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This he has done but there’s no sign of any link on the article back to his blog, and a week after the original mail there’s still no response from the editors. Incidents like this are important for a number of reasons. Firstly the obvious… plagiarism is against journalistic ethics; it brings discredit on both the individual and the organisation and damages their credibility and reputation. Trust and authenticity are qualities difficult to acquire and easy to lose but much prized by media organisations in the global proliferation of internet information sources. Accusations should be taken seriously by both journalists and editors.</p>\n<p>Secondly it has implications for the future of information gathering and exchange on the internet. Mainstream media news organisations are increasingly alert to unacknowledged re-use of their material. They watch each others’ output for evidence of unacknowledged borrowings. News agencies similarly monitor media outlets to ensure their material appears with appropriate attribution. It is hardly surprising that individual writers do the same. The rules, such as they are, should apply to all.</p>\n<p>Thirdly one of the great beauties of text on the internet is the ability to make hyperlinks. It enriches the experience of communication for both producers and consumers. It is the technology which is shaping the transmission and reception of information, away from a top-down model to a more collaborative and conversational paradigm.<br>\nSearching for “telegraph” and “plagiarism” on google brings up more than a quarter of a million hits including <a title=\"On a Telegraph blog\" href=\"http://www.copyblogger.com/journalistic-superiority-at-work/\">this previous example of stealing an entire blog post wholesale</a>. However there are already two references to Koranteng’s post in the first ten results. Plagiarism or <a title=\"American Press Institute\" href=\"http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/pages/resources/2006/09/when_does_sloppy_attribution_b/\">sloppy attribution</a>, whatever one cares to call the importation of material, including an unusual spelling mistake, requires some kind of response.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/2335.cfm\">Steve Buttry</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/\">American Press Institute</a>, whose article I linked to above, says the following:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I’m willing to call small-scale plagiarism something less damning and punish it with something less than the public flogging that has become standard.</p>\n<p>But given those stakes and all that attention to the issue, I find it hard to believe a journalist would copy and paste from another source without first putting quotation marks and attribution into the story (as I did when I cut and pasted the plagiarism definitions above).</p>\n<p>If someone pleads sloppy attribution, I would thoroughly research that reporter’s past stories and thoroughly vet future stories. I’m skeptical and I’m not cutting much slack.</p>\n<p>Our credibility is precious and a sloppy journalist is hardly better than a crooked journalist.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I’m sure Koranteng doesn’t want a public flogging. Or damages. He just wants an explanation and an attribution from the editors. Is that so very, very difficult?\n</p>\n<div><a href=\"http://www.frizzylogic.org/fl/2007/06/12/how-doth-the-little-crocodile/#comments\"><img src=\"http://www.frizzylogic.org/fl/wp-content/plugins/tantan/get-comments.php?p=222\" width=\"100\" height=\"15\" style=\"border:0\"></a></div>"
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"title" : "Google Gets Its Third Verb",
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"content" : "<p>I'm happy for my friends at <a href=\"http://www.feedburner.com\">FeedBurner</a>, who've finally announced their acquisition by the Big G. I do have to confess that this marks the point where I'm officially uncomfortable with the centralized gravitational attraction for brains going on at Google, but today's not the day for belaboring that.</p>\n\n<p>More importantly, Google has done something with this acquisition that hasn't happened since its very <em>first</em> <a href=\"http://www.blogger.com/\">acquisition</a>: <strong>They got a new verb</strong>.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://www.feedburner.com/fb/i/public/sticker.gif\" width=\"170\" height=\"170\">\nThe generic term for enhancing a feed through the use of a service is to \"burn\" it, thanks to the efforts of FeedBurner. They've always been straightforward about the term they use to describe the process, and its paid off by becoming the name of the concept. I even think it may have helped keep any other services from being able to entrench themselves in the space.</p>\n\n<p>Google, for its part, has always been a little more circumspect about its status as a verb. There was even an a <a href=\"http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/do-you-google.html\">gentle admonishment</a> from Google's legal team a while ago, asking people to please help the poor Googlers avoid the fate of other brands and products that \"that fell victim to those products' very success and, as they became more and more popular, slipped from trademarked status into common usage.\" Oh no! Not common usage! For what it's worth, I know there was some consternation on the part of a number of Googlers about the silliness of the post, especially since Google itself repeatedly refers to its employees as, yes, Googlers.</p>\n\n<p>But that's neither here nor there. Today, the milestone is that Google acquired a signature so distinctive it takes its place in elite company as part of the language. Congrats to Dick, Eric, Steve, Matt, Brent, and everyone else on the team.</p>\n\n<p>p.s. Can someone else do whatever it is Dick does now, and just let him write for the Official Google Blog full-time? Thanks.</p>\n \n \n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/AnilDash?a=36Fqe4\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/AnilDash?i=36Fqe4\" border=\"0\"></a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/AnilDash?a=EV0t24cQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/AnilDash?i=EV0t24cQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/AnilDash?a=avN8MAsH\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/AnilDash?i=avN8MAsH\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AnilDash/~4/121477667\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "J.J. RAWLINGS, ODARTEY-WILLINGTON AND THE ABRACADABRA",
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"content" : "<p>Mr. Felix Odartey-Willington has collapsed into a relatively quieter existence in Toronto, Canada, where he is undertaking a joint PhD programme in media relations and communication studies. He had served his country briefly as a barrister and solicitor at law before going abroad. He had been a student leader at University of Ghana, but we remember him particularly for his last appearance on GTV, in which he was said to have described Mr. Rawlings as a ‘con man’. That pronouncement triggered an almost never-ending interrogation by the BNI. After that, we haven’t heard much of him, except that he is doing a bit of learning. </p>\n<p>For most us, Rawlings’ June 4 uprising is only a bloody chapter in the political history of Ghana; we regret it, but we are spared the thought of reliving the flow of human blood on that day, until every June when the event is celebrated. But, for somebody like Felix, whose father, General Odartey-Willington, was killed in the revolution, it is a daily experience, and it is etched on his mind. While Rawlings doesn’t remember his own age in 1979, Felix and children of other victims who were shot will have no difficulty in bringing back bitter memories, when as toddlers their parents were taken away forever. Felix may also find it amusing to read Hon Nuamah Donkor’s proclamation at the recent commemoration of the June 4 uprising that, General Odartey-Willington died because he did not listen to the prophecies of a Winneba based oracle. </p>\n<p>According to ex-minister of state Nuamah Donkor, Rawlings was ordained by God to rule Ghana: ‘‘This young officer who is a half-caste has been destined by God to raise the status of the nation,’’ the oracle has said. Mr. Paddy Acheampong, a military officer at the time was to deliver this message to army commander Odartey, and advise him to perform special rituals, to avert an impending doom. Odartey’s impiety in the gods turned the wrath of the spirits against him and he was killed. The gods were proved right when the young half-caste was broken free from jail to lead the June 4 bloody killing spree, eventually becoming president of the West African country, his hands soaked in blood. </p>\n<p>Oracles do speak, and when they speak, things happen. As we taxi earth bound, we are only too aware of today; tomorrow is most often in the womb of time. Oracles see into the seeds of time and predict the future of seeds that will grow and those that will wither. When the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth predicted that Macbeth will be King, he did become King, but at a price. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the seer, Teresias, was a blind man, but when he prophesied that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, it did happen. He bore children with his mother and had to gorge out his eyes when the reality dawned on him. And when Ola Rotimi adopted the Oedipus story in The Gods are not to blame, the power of the gods was overpowering. Odawale was a butterfly who thought himself a bird. He tried to prove himself a bird, and he was made a butterfly. The Gods are not to blame for this; he was told to stay at one place. Such is the power of the gods. </p>\n<p>These are creations of people’s imagination; they never happened. But, we know Rawlings and we experienced June 4 together; do we smell the power of a god or the involvement of a larger design in Rawlings’ ascent to power? Are we talking of gods such as Rawlings’ favourite-Antoa Nyamaa, Techiman Botwerewa and Nsoatre Botene, or we are thinking of the Supreme Being-the Christian God or Allah, as he is known in Islam? The Winneba oracle had sweepingly mentioned God. </p>\n<p>Which of these gods does Rawlings believe in? When the PNDC became a national democratic congress (NDC), he was heard to have proclaimed that he didn’t believe in democracy. He has on occasion without number professed his disbelief in God, making the Bible appear like the transcript of a baby’s lullaby. However, he believes in the supernatural. When he called for human blood to flow like a river in the heat of the uprising, he declared that Ghanaians should not put their faith in God; but in ‘‘a fetish native shrine.’’ His handwritten speech meant for his abortive May 15 mutiny, explicitly extolled the powers of voodoo: ‘‘If you should dare touch a penny you will be shot without trial. If you should escape our notice you better be prepared to die on the shrine.’’ </p>\n<p>He had assured the people: ‘‘He who has nothing to fear has nothing to lose.’’ But a lot of people lost everything, including precious lives: ‘‘I am telling you today that not one single criminal, thief shall escape the wrath of the gods of the underdogs of this country, be it a soldier, officer, civilian, be it a corrupt power hungry politician, businessman or a thieving Labanese.’’ Then as if Yahweh did not mean I am, he extinguished any semblance of a God from his thoughts in a piece of admonishment to Ghanaians: ‘‘We sit here thinking God’s time is the best. We hope and pray that God will punish evil doers. Take it from me today, God will not raise a finger if you don’t initiate the move.’’ </p>\n<p>With this background, it was going to be easier for anybody to bet that the Pope is not a Catholic than to see Rawlings respect the very lives he claimed to have come to redeem. ‘‘ We had no choice but to sacrifice two initially… Within a week, the cry for more blood was still going on. We had no choice but to offer another six’’, he told a conference in The Hague recently. He was charitable to have wished for ‘rivers of human blood’; the blood that was shed was more than a river; the word tsunami was not popular at the time. </p>\n<p>I don’t know much about the June 4 uprising, except that Rawlings was my age today when he led it. At 5, I must have heard gun shots and made to observe the curfew. The story of Ante Domson, a Sunyani based businesswoman, was chilling when it was later narrated to me, and it still sends shivers down my spine, for her grandchild was my classmate at the Ridge Experimental School. Drug-fueled soldiers stripped her naked, poured paint perfumed with chili pepper into her private parts and loaded a big pan with milk and sardines on her head. They marched her into a principal street and ordered her to run, while carrying the heavy load. Then as if the Trinity did not comprise three entities, an armored car would roar its baritone engine and zoom past her, as if to hit her. Then they would apply the brakes in Accra Aca Atwetwe fashion, whereupon Ante Domson will stumble and fall frightfully. They will lift her up, fondle with her enormous bum flirtatiously and load the scattered items onto her head again, as if Golgotha was not enough punishment for Jesus. People watched, cried and cursed. (Believe me, I cried when I finished writing this paragraph; I never knew I was that emotional.) Her crime was for making too much profit from genuine sales. Kalabule, I remember this term well. </p>\n<p>When the gods decide to make a King, the reason for the choice is also a thing for the gods alone, but often it is predicated on the egotism of an egonomaniac. And often, Kings made this way fall at the feet of the very gods who crowned them. Oedipus fell, Macbeth fell, Odewale fell, so do people who patronize ‘juju money’. When fortune begins creaking at the seams, the walls will cave in. So if the gods, instead of God made JJ Rawlings King, why did he not fall? And perhaps, it is only Professor Martin Owusu, whose King in The story Ananse Told ruled for just one day and was demoted to his original poor hunter state; Kings ordained by the gods could rule for many years. JJ ruled for nearly twenty years and voluntarily (or rather mistakenly) handed over to John Kufour, instead of John Mills. Was there the hand of the supernatural in the process? Did the handing over mark the expiration of the season the gods had appointed or democratic commonsense would have prevented a Mugabe in Ghana willy-nilly? </p>\n<p>That superstition works in our politics is known in far away Guinea, where Kankan Nyame was imported to be part of our first republic. Kankan is a town in Guinea, and their powerful shrine was so admired by Ghanaians that we were quick to borrow it the ‘surname’ of Onyankorompon. Perhaps, this was the precedent JJ was following. </p>\n<p>When we talk of the supernatural, we mean to say that we are natural and God or the gods are super, so together we make the supernatural. How natural has JJ Rawlings been over the years? He had credited yoko-gari as a young man and made some bad grades at Achimota School. He wasn’t better looking than me when he mounted platforms and delivered moving speeches amidst wild gyrations. He was hailed Junior Jesus by those who felt that a messianic redemption had finally arrived. Today, his boom persona is gradually eating away his much needed statesmanship credentials. </p>\n<p>But you can’t say that his belief in the gods, instead of The God, has not helped his course. He still has a good following, and it is virtually impossible to divorce his person from the personality of the NDC. To do so will be denying that speaking in tongues was not the result of the Pentecost. He may have had the support of the gods but could that ever justify the ‘‘rivers of blood’’ that was squeezed from precious lives some 28 years ago? If the gods willed that the army generals, including Odartey-Willington should be ‘‘sacrificed’’ to herald his kingship, then like Oedipus, JJ ‘‘had no choice.’’ But we know there were lots of choices available to him at the time. His life had been spared in jail after the failed May 15 insurrection. Was that not a choice he could have offered the Generals? He was emphatic: ‘‘This time evil shall be made to pay back evil…’’ What evils had the Generals and the judges committed, except being hardworking Ghanaians? </p>\n<p>JJ Rawlings had also warned that if anybody stood in the way of the killing of the ‘inhuman nation wreckers,’’ blood will flow like a river. It would be ungodly for any god to have sanctioned a ceaseless flow of blood to save any situation, unless the person supervising the flow was a god himself. That, apparently, is the Rawlings Oedipus. </p>"
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"content" : "<h3>On Failure</h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/06/10/app_not_general_purpose.html\">Stefan Tilkov</a> paraphrased <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2007/06/app_on_the_web_has_failed_miserably_utterly_and_completely.html\">my responses</a> to <a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/09/WhyGDataAPPFailsAsAGeneralPurposeEditingProtocolForTheWeb.aspx\">Dare's post on the Atom Protocol</a> as:</p>\n\n<p><blockquote>"Bill de hÓra acknowledges that the third is indeed missing from APP, considers\nthe second problem a general issue with PUT, and disagrees about the first one;\nbut he adds two more problems: update resumption and batch/multi-part uploads."</blockquote></p>\n\n<p>To recap, the issues Dare raised are:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li> Mismatch with data models that aren't microcontent</li>\n<li> Lack of support for granular updates to fields of an item</li>\n<li> Poor support for hierarchy</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Stefan is a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point_(book)\">connector<a></a> across <a href=\"http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/GData-too-limited-for-MS\">a number of communities</a>, so I'd like to qualify his reduction as follows:</a></p>\n\n<ol>\n<li> Atom as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point_(book)\">Joe points out</a>, is more than an envelope, it's content. I pointed out, valuable formats - ones with media types, and not just the usual blogging suspects - are properly supported in APP. <a href=\"http://www.lolcats.com/\">Lolcats</a> won't be a problem.</li>\n<li> Use PATCH. More on this below.</li>\n<li> I do not think Atom is a good format for hierarchical data, but it's not clear to me that's a problem (certainly it's not a protocol level problem). You probably want to start with a placeless model as APP/Atom does and declare hierarchies and maps out of band. There are all kinds of options for this that will work within the APP constraints. </li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Perhaps the title of my post was misleading (that's what you get for being clever). The point wasn't to criticize some\ndetailed observations, or suggest APP has serious problems, but rather to criticize \nthe dual conclusions that 1) the APP has failed for some definition of \"general\npurpose\" publishing, and 2) it's necessary to roll your own\npublishing protocol for the reasons given. Feedback on the protocol is a good thing, but I couldn't get to those conclusions following the arguments given. It didn't take long \nfor some people to provide workable options, and I presented some other issues \nto chew on (batch updates and resuming uploads). </p>\n\n<h3>On PATCH</h3>\n\n<p>I mentioned using PATCH as an option for dealing with partial updates. <a href=\"http://mernst.org/blog/rss.xml#partial-appdates\">Matthias Ernst</a> questioned the need for a different method: </p>\n\n<p><blockquote>\"I don't see that need. PUT with the If-Match: header is just enough to do the work on the client side using optimistic concurrency control.\"</blockquote></p>\n\n<p>Stefan also questioned the need for PATCH:\n\n<p><blockquote>\"I’m not at all sure I like the PATCH approach, too — I’m not really keen on having to tunnel even more verbs through POST because they’re not widely supported\"</blockquote></p>\n\n<em>update: Stefan explained to me that his concern is adding another method rather than tunneling; a valid concern.</em>\n\n I probably wasn't clear enough on where I was going with this. First of all, PATCH is defined <a href=\"http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html\">in RFC2608 19.6.1.1 (sort of)</a> and <a href=\"http://osdir.com/ml/org.w3c.tag/2004-04/msg00031.html\">arguably part of HTTP</a>, it's not a POST tunnel (thanks to <a href=\"http://www.julian-reschke.de/\">Julian</a> for the reference). Second, what Matthias says is true for \nthe case of multiple editors (and APP has mention of how to deal with lost updates using If-Match \nand friends), but this is a different problem to sending deltas - ie, you don't need partial updates \nto have lost updates.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The design value in using a new method to deal with delta updates is twofold. </p>\n\n<p>First no matter what the format is, or the optimal algorithm/policy for merging data on the format, the \nPATCH method is explicit in its intent - the server is getting a change delta from the client as a function \nof the representation sent down to the client. With PUT you have to infer outside the method whether \nthe server is receiving a delta or a full update. You can deal with this format by format using \nPUT, and APP has specifications in place for avoid the problem altogether (the atom-syntax working \ngroup felt that sending partials was overloading PUT). <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/and%20will%20up%20the%20overall%20design%20and%20engineering%20dollars%20spent.%20Companies,%20even%20big%20ones,%20are%20resource%20bound%20so%20each%20such%20dollar%20spent%20on%20publishing%20infrastructure%20is%20a%20dollar%20not%20spent%20on%20a%20cool%20feature%20a%20user%20might%20care%20about.\">Joe points to the following in section 9.3</a>:</p>\n\n<p><blockquote>\"To avoid unintentional loss of data when editing Member Entries or Media Link Entries, Atom Protocol \nclients SHOULD preserve all metadata that has not been intentionally modified, including unknown \nforeign markup as defined in Section 6 of [RFC4287].\"</blockquote></p>\n\n<p>But \"general purpose\" diff/patch is another matter, especially if people want to work at a higher level \nthan bytes. I see no reason to disallow it in the future; the best way to do that is not redefine or muddy PUT \nnow (or later on), but allow the protocol room to use PATCH.</p>\n\n<p>Second the broader guideline I had in mind was this - whenever you \nhave you two operations that resemble each other superficially but are semantically different and \nhave different expected outcomes, you should consider separate and explicit definitions to avoid interop issues. \nIt's not just about finding efficient techniques for important approaches to readers and writers like optimistic concurrency - it's about providing a uniform means of expression in the protocol design.</p>\n\n<h3>On Strategy Tax</h3>\n\n<p>Broadening things beyond direct issues with Atom Protocol for a minute, it should be clear that defining your own publishing and data access protocol, means building\nyour own tools and platform infrastructure from top to bottom. The amount of\nwork to do this, again for some definition of \"general purpose\" shouldn't be\nunderestimated. It's much more likely in a high pressure commercial environment\nto produce a protocol that is highly limited and works for one platform - yours. That\nis you end up with less capability and yet another silo. This is analogous at\nthe protocol level to Facebook's choosing to create markup format for users - one\nthat says more about Facebook's current capabilities than the actual users -\ninstead of rolling with something like FOAF. Arguably controlling of data portability is largely the point, but the overall costs of doing so shouldn't underestimated. Going custom will up the overall design and engineering dollars spent 'below the waterline'. Companies, even big ones, are resource bound so each engineering dollar spent on publishing infrastructure is a dollar not spent on a cool feature a user might care about. You want to be sure it's the right thing to do. For those integrating against such a provider you probably want to keep custom formats/protocols at the edge and convert them to open models for that internal use.</p>\n\n<p>This reluctance to roll out on an\nopen protocol is a good example of a <a href=\"http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/04/30/strategyTax\">strategy tax</a>, where creating barriers to data allows companies building social network platforms to\nmaximize a return on that data and all importantly, monetize the graph of social\nrelations. This balance around open data and platform franchises is a difficult problem for social network providers, who are especially subject to moddish swings in interest or perceived coolness. They don't yet seem to have the stable revenue streams that Google has from adsense or that Ebay and Amazon have from providing marketplaces. It's surely tempting then to reduce the fluidity of user data while figuring out how to become an <a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=800-pound+gorilla\">800lb gorilla</a>. However web history suggests betting on a user silo will be a short lived tactical advantage, not a strategic play a la desktop operating systems. Perhaps there are other models to lockin - people have been pointing out for years that Google has precious little lockin on the search page and it's trivial to use a different search engine - yet somehow they manage to get by.</p>"
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"title" : "REST, the Lost Update Problem, and the Sneakernet Test",
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"content" : "<p>Dare Obasanjo is <a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/09/WhyGDataAPPFailsAsAGeneralPurposeEditingProtocolForTheWeb.aspx\">giving a bit of pushback</a> on the <a href=\"http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol/\">Atom Publishing Protocol</a>, but the part that caught my attention was the section on the <em>Lost Update Problem</em>. This doesn’t have to do with REST per se as much as with the choice not to use resource locking, but since REST people tend to like their protocols lightweight, the odds are that you won’t see exclusive locks on RESTful resources all that often (it also applies to some kinds of POST updates as well as PUT).</p>\n<div>\n<h3>How to lose a REST update</h3>\n<ul>\n<li>I check out a resource about “John Smith” (as a web form or an XML document, for example), and correct the first name field to “Jon”.</li>\n<li>You check out the same resource, and correct the last name field to “Smyth”.</li>\n<li>I check in my changes.</li>\n<li>You check in your changes.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>You have corrected the last name to “Smyth”, but have inadvertently overwritten my correction of the first name with the old value “John”, because you never saw my update.</p>\n</div>\n<div>\n<h3>Detection, not avoidance</h3>\n<p>Without exclusive locks, there’s no way to <em>avoid</em> this problem, but it is possible to <em>detect</em> it. What happens after detection depends on the application — if it’s interactive, for example, you might redisplay the form with both versions side by side. I don’t mean to diminish the difficulty of dealing with check-in conflicts and merges — it’s a brutally hard problem — but it’s one that you’ll have whenever you chose not to use exclusive resource locks (and even with resource locks, the problem still comes if someone’s lock expires or is overridden). Managing multi-user resource locks properly can require a lot of extra infrastructure, and they have all kinds of other problems (ask an enterprise developer about the stale lock problem), so there are often good reasons to avoid them.</p>\n</div>\n<div>\n<h3>State goes in the resource, not the HTTP header</h3>\n<p>Dare points to <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/04/Editing/\">an old W3C doc</a> that talks about doing lost-update detection using all kinds of HTTP-header magic, requiring built-in support in the client (such as a web browser). That doesn’t make sense to me. A better alternative is to include version information directly in the resource itself. For example, if I check out the record as XML, why not just send me something like this?</p>\n<pre>\n<record version="18">\n <given-name>John</given-name>\n <family-name>Smith</family-name>\n</record>\n</pre>\n<p>If I check it out as an HTML form, my browser should get something like this:</p>\n<pre>\n<form method="post" action="/actions/update">\n <div>\n <input type="hidden" name="version" value="18" />\n Given name: <input name="given-name" value="John" />\n Family name: <input name="family-name" value="Smith" />\n <button>Save changes</button>\n </div>\n</form>\n</pre>\n<p>When you check out the resource, you’ll also get version 18. However, when I check in my changes (using PUT or POST), the server will bump the resource version to 19. When you try to check in your copy (still at version 18), the server will detect the conflict and reject the check-in. Again, what happens after that depends on your application.</p>\n</div>\n<div>\n<h3>The Sneakernet Test</h3>\n<p>I think that this is far better than the old W3C solution, because it (1) it’s already compatible with existing browsers, and (2) it passes what I call the <strong>Sneakernet Test</strong> — I can take a copy of the XML (or JSON, or CSV, or whatever) version of the resource to a machine that’s <em>not</em> connected to the net, edit it (say, on the plane), then check it back in from a different computer — I can copy it onto a USB stick, take it to the beach, edit it on my laptop, then take it back to work and check it back in — all the state is in the resource, not hidden away in cryptic HTTP headers.</p>\n<p>By the way, if you don’t trust programmers to be honest when designing their clients, you can use a non-serial, pseudo-random version so that they can’t just guess the next version and avoid the merge problem, but serial version numbers should be fine most of the time.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Lessons of the Web",
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"content" : "<p>Many people have tried to come up with a definitive list of\n<a href=\"http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=337\">lessons from the Web</a>.\nIn this article I present my own list, which is firmly slanted\ntowards the role of the software architect in managing competing demands\nover a large architecture.\n</p>\n<p>One of the problems software architects face is how to scale their\narchitectures up. I don't mean scaling a server array to handle a large number\nof simultaneous users. I don't mean scaling a network up to handle terabytes\nof data in constant motion. I mean creating a network of communicating machines\nthat serve the purposes of their users needs at a reasonable price. The World-Wide\nWeb is easy to overlook when scouting around for examples of big architectures\nthat are effective in this way. At first, it hardly seems like a distributed\nsoftware architecture. It transports pages for human consumption, rather than\nbeing a serious machine communication system. However, it is the most successful\ndistributed object system today. I believe it is useful to examine its success\nand the reasons for that success. Here are my lessons:\n</p>\n<h3>You can't upgrade the whole Web</h3>\n<p>When your architecture reaches a large scale, you will no longer be able to\nupgrade the whole architecture at once. The number of machines you can upgrade\nwill be dwarfed by the overall population of the architecture. As an architect\nof a large system it is imperative you have the tools to deal with this problem.\nThese tools are evident in the Web as separate lessons.\n</p>\n<h3>Protocols must evolve</h3>\n<p>The demands on a large architecture are constantly evolving. With that\nevolution comes a constant cycling of parts, but as we have already said:\nYou can't upgrade the whole Web. New parts must work with old parts, and\nold parts must work with new. The old Object-oriented abstractions of dealing\nwith protocol evolution don't stack up at this scale. It isn't sufficient\nto just keep adding new methods to your base-classes whenever you want to\nadd an address line to your purchase order. A different approach to evolution\nis required.\n</p>\n<h3>Protocols must be decoupled to evolve</h3>\n<p>A key feature of the Web is that it decouples protocol into three\nseparately-evolving facets. The first facet is identification through the\nUniform Resource Identifier/Locator. The second facet is what we might traditionally\nview as protocol: HTTP. The definition of HTTP is focused on transfer of data from\none place to another through standard interactions. The third facet is the actual\ndata content that is transferred, such at HTML.\n</p>\n<p>Decoupling these facets ensures that it is possible to add new kinds of\ninteractions to the messaging system while leveraging existing identification\nand content types. Likewise, new content types can be deployed or content types\nbe upgraded without compromising the integrity of software built to engage in\nexisting HTTP interactions.\n</p>\n<p>In a traditional Object-Oriented definition of the protocol these facets are\nnot decoupled. This means that the base-class for the protocol has to keep expanding\nwhen new content types are added or entire new base-classes must be added.\nThe configuration management of this kind of\nprotocol as new components are added to the architecture over time is a potential\nnightmare. In contrast, the Web's approach would mean that the base-class that defines the\nprotocol would include an \"Any\" slot for data. The actual set of data types can\nbe defined separately.\n</p>\n<h3>Object identification must be free to evolve</h3>\n<p>Object identification evolves on the Web primarily through redirection, allowing\nservices to restructure their object space as needed. It is an important principle\nthat this be allowed to occur occasionally, though obviously it is best to keep\nit to a minimum.\n</p>\n<h3>New object interactions must be able to be added over time</h3>\n<p>The HTTP protocol allows for new methods to be added, as well as new headers to\ncommunicate specific interaction semantics. This can be used to add new ways to\ntransfer data over time. For example, it allows for subscription mechanisms or other\nspecial kinds of interactions to be added.\n</p>\n<p>New architecture components can't assume new interactions are supported by all\ncomponents.\n</p>\n<h3>Prefer low-semantic-precision document types over newly-invented document types</h3>\n<p>I think this is one of the most interesting lessons of the Web. The reason for\nthe success of the Web is that a host of applications can be added to the network\nand add value to the network using a single basic content type. HTML is used for\nevery purpose under the sun. If each industry or service on the Web defined its own\ncontent types for communicating with its clients we would have a much more fragmented\nand less valuable World-Wide-Web.\n</p>\n<p>Consider this: If you needed a separate browser application or special browser\ncode to access your banking details and your shopping, or your movie tickets and\nyour city's traffic reports... would you really install all of those applications?\nWould google really bother to index all of that content?\n</p>\n<p>Contrary to perceived wisdom, the Web has thrived exactly because of its low\nsemantic value and content. Adding special content types would actually work against\nits success. Would you rather define a machine-to-machine interface with special\ncontent types out to a supplier, or just hyperlink to their portal page? With a\nweb browser in hand, a user can often integrate data much more effectively than\nyou can behind the scenes with more structured documents.\n</p>\n<p>On the other hand, machines are not as good as humans at interpreting the kinds\nof free-form data that appear on the Web. Where humans and machines share a common\nsubset of information they need the answer appears to be in\n<a href=\"http://microformats.org/\">microformats</a>: Use a low-semantic file format,\nbut dress up the high-semantic-value parts so that machines can read it too.\nIn pure machine-to-machine environments XML formats are the obvious way to go.\n</p>\n<p>In either the microformat or XML approaches it is important to attack a very\nspecific and well-understood problem in order to future-proof your special document\ntype.\n</p>\n<h3>Ignore parts of content that are not understood</h3>\n<p>The must-ignore semantics of Web content types allows them to evolve. As new\ncomponents include special or new information in their documents, old components\nmust know to filter that information out. Likewise, new components must be clear\nthat new information will not always be understood.\n</p>\n<p>If it is essential that a particular piece of new information is included and\nunderstood in a particular document type, it is time to define a new document\ntype that includes that information. If you find yourself inventing document\ntype after document type to support the evolution of your data model, chances are\nyou are not attacking the right problem in the right way.\n</p>\n<h3>Be cautious about the use of namespaces in documents</h3>\n<p>I take\n<a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/blog/2006/04/07/extensibility\">Mark Nottingham's observation</a>\nabout Microsoft, Mozilla, and HTML very seriously:\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>What I found interesting about HTML extensibility was that namespaces weren’t necessary; Netscape added blink, MSFT added marquee, and so forth.</p>\n<p>I’d put forth that having namespaces in HTML from the start would have had the effect of legitimising and institutionalising the differences between different browsers, instead of (eventually) converging on the same solution, as we (mostly) see today, at least at the element/attribute level.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Be careful about how you use namespaces in documents. Consider only using them\nin the context of a true sub-document with a separately-controlled definition.\nFor example, an atom document that includes some html content should identify\nthe html as such.\nHowever, an extension to the atom document schema should not\nuse a separate namespace.\nEven better: Make this sub-document a real external link and let the\narchitecture's main evolution mechanisms work to keep things decoupled.\nContent-type definition is deeply community-driven.\nWhat we think of as an extension may one day be part of the main specification.\nPerhaps the worst thing we can do is to try and force in things that shouldn't\nbe part of the main specification. Removing a feature is always hard.\n</p>\n<h3>New content types must be able to be added over time</h3>\n<p>HTTP includes the concept of an \"Accept\" header, that allows a client to\nindicate which kinds of document it supports. This is sometimes seen as a way\nto return different information to different kinds of clients, but should\nmore correctly be seen as an evolution mechanism. It is a way of supporting\nclients that only understand a superseded document type and those that\nunderstand a current document type concurrently. This is an important feature\nof any architecture which still has an evolving content-type pool.\n</p>\n<h3>Keep It Simple</h3>\n<p>This is the common-sense end of my list. Keep it simple. What you are trying\nto do is produce the simplest evolving uniform messaging system you possibly\ncan. Each architecture and sub-architecture can probably support half a dozen\ncontent types and fewer interactions through its information transport protocol.\nYou aren't setting out to create thousands of classes interacting in crinkly,\nneat, orderly patterns. You are trying to keep the fundamental communication\npatterns in the architecture working.\n</p>\n<h3>Conclusion</h3>\n<p>The Web is already an always-on architecture. I suspect that always-on\narchitectures will increasingly become the norm for architects out there. There\nwill simply come a point where your system is connected to six or seven other\nsystems out there that you have to keep working with. The architecture is no\nlonger completely in your hands. It is the property of the departments of your\norganisation, partner organisations, and even competitors. You need to understand\nthe role you play in this universal architecture.\n</p>\n<p>The Web is already encroaching. Give it ten more years.\n\"Distributed Software Architecture\" and \"Web Architecture\" will soon be synonyms.\nJust keep your head through the changes and keep breathing. You'll get through.\nJust keep asking yourself: \"What would HTML do?\", \"What would HTTP do?\".\n</p>\n<p>Benjamin</p>"
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"title" : "After 8 months in Ghana - Krissy Darch",
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"content" : "New moon like the smile of the<br>Cheshire cat and deep yellow<br>on a slight angle as we're<br>just barely north of the equator<br>in the centre bobbing<br>remembering baths in the north<br>parts of my body under the water<br>and parts out<br>thinking about the line<br>where the water ends and air<br>begins, moving gently<br>a delicate line<br>a loose strand of beads imprecise<br>easily lifted and shifted<br>and uncommittedly resting<br>on the cusp of a girl's hip<br>like the equator<br>tracing the swell of the earth<br>my body, a buoy<br>the water line has dropped<br>from a hard unmoving top<br>to an unfixed, flexible<br>middle (equator means turning)<br>accentuated with beads<br>to remind me of ease<br>and equipoise<br>and that half of me is now<br>above the surface<br>that I am no longer afraid of my own face<br>and I am no longer afraid of the sun"
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"title" : "Author Profile - Krissy Darch",
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"content" : "<strong>Biography:</strong><br><br><blockquote><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_pgdSd0vYhjI/RlIS1qp1P1I/AAAAAAAAAFc/v9kzVgPxsk4/s1600-h/krissykhadija.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_pgdSd0vYhjI/RlIS1qp1P1I/AAAAAAAAAFc/v9kzVgPxsk4/s200/krissykhadija.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>A recent graduate of University of Ottawa's Visual Art program, Krissy Darch <em>[the obruni in the picture - ed.]</em> is a visual artist and writer who has produced and exhibited work with a humanitarian focus on Canadian social issues. Last year she lived in Ghana for 8 months teaching art and literacy at a community library, which sparked continuing volunteer work with women in developing countries. She is currently living and working in Toronto, and plans to return to Ghana soon.</blockquote><br><br><strong>Five Questions with Krissy Darch:</strong><br><br><blockquote>1. How long have you been writing poetry? <br><br><em>When I was a kid I wrote silly rhyming poetry that read as song lyrics, but I've mostly been writing since I was about 15.</em><br><br>2. Who are your favorite poets? Which poets have most inspired you and informed your work?<br><br><em>The first poet I ever really read was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire\">Charles Baudelaire</a>. In high school it was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot\">T.S Eliot</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ee_cummings\">E.E. Cummings</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich\">Adrienne Rich</a>, that whole modern bunch. Then later, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda\">Pablo Neruda</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Blackman\">Nicole Blackman</a> - a New York based spoken word poet. But I'm more influenced by song lyrics than anything else. Sometimes I hear amazing poetry in the most obscure, 80's pop music.</em><br><br>3. What do you hope to accomplish with your poetry?<br><br><em>To make sense of things, to make my own heart race, to communicate thoughts and feelings that go beyond the tables-and-chairs world of the everyday.</em><br><br>4. What do you think can be done to better promote African literature in Canada?<br><br><em>Canadian audiences are totally ready for African literature, as well as African art and dance. There's a spontaneity, jubilance, courage, and sensuality that comes out of Ghanaian cultural expression that is so refreshing in a culture that tends towards the analytical and the abstract. There's a cynicism here which Ghanaian culture sort of flies in the face of, and that's its strength.<br><br>There's so much talent in Accra alone, and with a bit of support from over here, and some on-the-ground work in Ghana, I know it wouldn't take long to round up an anthology of totally original poetry written by young Ghanaians. I think there's a lot to be gained from the collaboration between the two cultures.</em><br><br>5. You have taught art and literacy in Ghana, with a special focus on women. Through that work, how do you now see the position of women in Ghana in regards to literature - both in reading others work, and writing and sharing their own?<br><br><em>Like I said before, I think North America is really ready for literature that comes out of Ghana. In crude marketing terms, Africa is the flavour of the month right now, with movies like</em> Blood Diamond <em>coming out, and</em> The Constant Gardener<em>, as well as celebrity involvement, particularly that of Angelina Jolie. The interest is there - the work just needs to be put out there. <br><br>Before I left for Ghana I read</em> Hustling is not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl<em>, and </em>Exchange is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl<em>, by John Chernoff, and I was fascinated. I always tell people that it's a different world over there, and these books capture that like no Westerner ever could. Until then, the only representations of Africa I had been exposed to were written/produced/controlled in some way by Westerners. These books were narrated by a young Ghanaian woman and we follow her trajectory from, I think, Bolgatanga all the way to Accra where she makes a living through prostitution. I was captured by the energy behind her voice. The book just crackled with it. But it took some North American dude to recognize that value and put it out there. <br><br>I met a lot of kids in Ghana who felt like reading and writing was a waste of time. It's time for Ghanaians to get serious about literacy, to recognize the value, not to mention the marketability, of their own stories and their own voices.</em><br><br></blockquote> <br><strong>Contact Krissy:</strong> <br><br><blockquote><em>krissy.darch(at)gmail.com</em></blockquote>"
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"title" : "APP on the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely",
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"content" : "<p>In his post <a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/09/WhyGDataAPPFailsAsAGeneralPurposeEditingProtocolForTheWeb.aspx\">\"Why GData/APP Fails as a General Purpose Editing Protocol for the Web\"</a> Dare Obasanjo says </p>\n\n<p>\"I thought it would be useful to describe the limitations we saw in the Atom Publishing Protocol which made it unsuitable as the data access protocol for a large class of online services. \"</p>\n\n<p>and provides 3 issues with Atom Protocol's. data model.</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Mismatch with data models that aren't microcontent</li>\n<li>Lack of support for granular updates to fields of an item</li>\n<li>Poor support for hierarchy</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>The post is a good read, and informative, but the title and the above quotation has something of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_is_Falling\">Chicken Little</a> about it. Let's go though Dare's 3 problems, provide some options for dealing with them, and then state 2 further problems with APP that are indeed worth thinking about. </p>\n\n<ol>\n\n<p><li><b>Mismatch with data models that aren't microcontent</b></li></p>\n\n<p> \"I guess we could keep the existing XML format used by the Facebook REST API and treat the user documents as media resources. But in that case, we aren't really using the Atom Publishing Protocol, instead we've reinvented WebDAV. Poorly.\"</p>\n\n<p>Actually do treat it as a media entry; it'll work fine.</p>\n\n<p>Here's some speculation about formats. First, an awful lot of needless custom markup formats are going to be replaced by Atom entries; a good example is anything that looks like an event. Yes, some fields become pointless (atom:summary being an example I keep running into), but I'd say the problem of carrying around some junk DNA fields is outweighed by not starting over, plus you are easily integrated with the planet's syndication technology, for some definition of \"free\". Second, anything that looks like a bag of descriptive metadata (and.Facebook markup about users is <em>exactly</em> that) should be starting at RDF and working back to custom only based on real needs. The problem here is that the markup is describing more than the User, what it's describing reflects what Facebook's feature set can do. Facebook then risk going to revving the data as part of the platform*. Whereas something like <a href=\"http://www.foaf-project.org/\">FOAF</a> would ameliorate much of that and allow people to concentrate on work that's actually valuable.</p>\n\n<p>The acid test here is whether Facebook's custom format is worthy of a media type. If it is, it probably has a reason to exist.</p>\n\n<p> [Incidentally, APP + non-Atom content strikes me as nothing like WebDAV; I'd like to hear more about that.] </p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p><li><b>Lack of support for granular updates to fields of an item</b></li></p>\n\n<p>\"Thus each client is responsible for ensuring that it doesn't lose any XML that was in the original atom:entry element it downloaded. The second problem is more serious and should be of concern to anyone who's read Editing the Web: Detecting the Lost Update Problem Using Unreserved Checkout. The problem is that there is data loss if the entry has changed between the time the client downloaded it and when it tries to PUT its changes.\"</p>\n\n<p>The solution at the protocol level is PATCH. In other words, this is not just a data problem. Using PUT to send deltas mucks about with PUT semantics in too subtle a way. The correct choice in that case is to choose a new method, not overload an existing one that has \"nearby\" semantics. Assuming it's really needed, it might take a few years to see proper support for PATCH - no doubt we'll see some ropey ideas rolled out in the meantime such as diff annotations in formats or method override headers. </p>\n\n<p>At the data level, Atom presents challenges; there's a minimum set of elements you need to be valid, but the truth is general purpose deltafication support across formats is a hard problem - just deltifying XML infosets alone is a hard problem. If you want to do this above the byte level, with data elements rather than offsets, again I'd say to look at RDF. Every RDF statement and collection of statements is a graph, and all its operations are closed under graphs. RDF is thus ideal for granular updates, including sending incomplete data sets in the first place. </p>\n\n<p>That said, once the client is sending a PATCH request, the intent is explicit irregardless of the format in play; that includes servers being able to say they do/don't support that instead of trashing content. </p>\n\n<p>In fact this came up this year in the atom-syntax working group as a design issue. I feel the atom working group made the right choice not trying to standardize it yet. Frankly, part of me sees this concern as somewhat Enterprisey; the kind of requirement only a WS-* standards group could care about. But if it's a real problem, I suspect it can be dealt with without running off and defining <a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/blog/2004/06/30/protocol_v_format\">half-baked</a> <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2004/08/monster_oriented.html\">custom protocols</a>.<br>\n</p>\n\n<p><br>\n<li><b>Poor support for hierarchy</b></li></p>\n\n<p>\"The Atom data model is that it doesn't directly support nesting or hierarchies. You can have a collection of media resources or entry resources but the entry resources cannot themselves contain entry resources.\"</p>\n\n<p>I wouldn't say \"poor\" so much as non-existent. So I agree, and have banged my head against representing hierarchal data with Atom (or any RSS) in the past. </p>\n\n<p>It turns out the solution is provided by Microformats.- send a XOXO map file in the body of an Entry (or directly as a Media Entry). You can chose to inline all the data in the XOXO, provide basic metadata in description lists, or just links. There's not much point trying to force Atom Entries and Feeds to represent something they're not designed for. </p>\n\n<p><br>\n</p></ol>\n\n<p>All that said, I'm very happy to see real implementors provide some pushback on the Atom Protocol for their needs. However going on to claim GData/APP has failed is random enough conclusion, especially for the problems mentioned, which in one case ,is a deliberate design exclusion (for now). If these are the most serious problems encountered inside MSFT, it strikes me that APP's overall design is in good shape. Given the level of thought and discussion he indicates seems to have gone on inside MSFT, I'm surprised Dare didn't mention these two issues, which strike me as much more substantial:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><b>Update resumption:</b> some clients need the ability to be able to upload data in segments. Aside from a poor user experience and general bandwidth costs, this is important for certain billing models; otherwise consumers have to pay on every failed attempt to upload a fote. APP doesn't state support for this at all; it might be doable using HTTP more generally, but to get decent client support you'd want it documented in an RFC at least. </li>\n\n<p><li><b>Batch and multi-part uploads:</b> This feature was considered and let go by the atom-syntax working group. The reason was that processing around batching (aka \"boxcarring\") can get surprisingly complicated. That is, it's deceptively simple to just say \"send a bunch of entries\". Still, it would be good to look at this at some point in th future.</li><br>\n</p></ol>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>* I'd like to think inventing a custom format to describe a user that is lockstepped to a platform was part of a platform play, or even technical resistance because of using databases for storing arbitrary graphs - anything really. More likely it was lack of knowledge/research and/or fud about RDF. <a href=\"http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss\">Oh well, at least we know what's down that raod.</a></p>\n\n<p>The title is taken from Mark Pilgrim's article <a href=\"http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/21/dive.html\">\"XML on the web has failed\"</a></p>"
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"title" : "…ahhhhhhhh",
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"content" : "<p>…and we’re back.</p>\n<p>On my sixth visit, I finally began to genuinely love Hawai’i. You might have a hard time believing that. What’s not to love, you ask. You’ve seen the postcards, the dashboard hula girls, the craigy blond surfers gliding down huge waves. Waikiki, Maui Wowee, wiki wiki, etc. Twee.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/weichbrodt/536872297/\"><img align=\"middle\" title=\"Sponger's Regret\" alt=\"Sponger's Regret\" src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1171/536872297_24c0e647c1.jpg\"></a></p>\n<p>I was never that into island paradises. Especially Polynesian, and most singularly isolated. The Sandwich Islands (even the name) always seemed odd, overwrought, easily ignored, inconsequential. Biggest claim to fame was to be bombed, and to ride a board of wood down a wave. Kudos; check back when you’ve advanced the human race, son. When I first started visiting, I found the culture oddly introverted and unambitious (Is it an predictable yet unavoidable outworking of my Midwestern-American culture that I dismiss the people of Hawai’i as exotic, lazy savages?). The ocean’s relentless insistence at remaining visible no matter where I was greatly disturbed me. Switching from the Midwest, where the adequacy of a home is judged by how well it seals up and keeps the outside out, the construction of single-walled homes with jalousies beggar belief. (”How can it be all open like that…wait, why not? What happens when it gets col…oh, right, it doesn’t. Well, what about strong winds…right, none there either. What about the air cond…right, don’t need it. But in the winter when it gets…to 75 F, as opposed to summer’s 79 F. So let’s review, without tornadoes, hurricanes, severe storms, flooding, strong wind, winters, and summers…I suppose there is no need to seal your house up. And when the earthquakes come, there’s less to collapse onto you. Brilliant!”).</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/weichbrodt/536749850/\"><img align=\"middle\" alt=\"Mather Dragon & Japanese Man\" title=\"Mather Dragon & Japanese Man\" src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1320/536749850_8f01424264.jpg\"></a></p>\n<p>As a Midwestern kid, I’m into weather. More so than most. It’s not just a polite topic of conversation, it’s a lifelong education and always a variable when attempting to plan anything (like, when to wake up the next morning. Or whether to open the front door right now.). Case in point, last night I sent my brothers and sisters some awesome <a href=\"http://www.ultimatechase.com/chase_accounts/oklahoma_LP_050407.htm\">pictures of a classic low-pressure supercell as it moved across the Oklahoma panhandle</a> in this May. I love supercells.</p>\n<p>Slowly, I started to internalize bits of Hawai’i. The weather <a href=\"http://www.wunderground.com/US/HI/Honolulu.html\">never deviates from perfect</a>, but it changes all the time. The most spam per capita consumed, but any culinary culture that fearlessly combines Korean, American, and passion fruit on the way to making an apple pie wins my satiated respect.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/weichbrodt/536749326/\"><img align=\"middle\" alt=\"The Infanta (Here She Comes!)\" title=\"The Infanta (Here She Comes!)\" src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1321/536749326_181329cd0a.jpg\"></a></p>\n<p>You think the islands are all beach, but some of the most spectacular mountain and cliff hikes I’ve ever seen, let alone done, are begun (and sometimes ended) from there. More family-oriented than any suburb, but not a place which allows you to withdraw from society.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1152/536871815_9805419934.jpg\"><img align=\"middle\" alt=\"Beach Boys\" title=\"Beach Boys\" src=\"http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1152/536871815_9805419934.jpg\"></a></p>\n<p>Also, falling in love with the place allows me to keep falling in love with my wife. And <a href=\"http://www.elissa.weichbrodt.org/?cat=5\">her food</a>. Which to her is basically the same thing.</p>"
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"title" : "Delta Specification",
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"content" : "<b>Introduction</b><br><br>Delta is an XML-based language for describing changes to XML documents. A delta document (doc) contains a reference to a target XML doc, and a sequence of elements that describe “add” and “remove” operations to be applied to the target doc.<br><br>Delta makes it possible to describe changes without modifying the underlying doc. This allows a group of people to exchange changes efficiently, without exchanging the doc itself. Additionally, delta makes it possible to compare sets of independent changes, and merge delta operations as a way of combining multiple peoples’ work.<br><br>Increasingly, people are using XML as a means of formatting data to be exchanged between programs. Historically though, changes have been transmitted as updated versions of XML docs, and this places the burden on the receiving program to figure out what the changes are, by comparing versions. This approach results in lost information (i.e. the intermediate change steps), and it is inefficient when the docs become large.<br><br>Delta keeps change information out of the original doc, and organizes the changes in a sequence that corresponds to the order in which they are made. As such, a delta doc represents the recipe for how a set of changes is to be made, and thus, is distinct from the doc itself.<br><br>Figure 1 illustrates the relationships among the delta docs, the docs undergoing changes, and the software components required to process these docs. The delta doc has a dependency upon a separate XML doc that is being changed. Furthermore, the delta processor operates upon the delta doc in order to apply changes to the start doc, and produce an output (end) doc.<br><p align=\"center\"><br><a href=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1415/2606/1600/delta5.0.jpg\"><img style=\"display:block;margin:0px auto 10px;text-align:center\" src=\"http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1415/2606/400/delta5.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>Figure 1: Delta Components<br></p><br>This specification describes the rules for creating valid delta docs, as well as the rules that delta processors must follow in applying change operations to a target doc.<br><br><b>Language Elements</b><br><br><b><Delta> Element</b><br><br>The element is the root of a delta doc. It contains the information needed for a delta processor to make a set of changes to a referenced “target” XML doc. In most cases, the target doc represents the “start” state, before a set of operations has been applied, but it is also possible to reference a document in its “end” state, after a set of change operations has been applied. In the latter case, a delta processor would process the operations in reverse order in order to re-derive the “start” state of the doc.<br><br>Delta docs can optionally provide a date value by way of an <updated> element; using RFC 3339 format, to indicate when the delta doc was modified. This information is useful in determining the chronological order of multiple delta docs that reference the same target doc. <br><br>A delta doc must have a <start> or <end> element that specifies the URI to the target doc. This is followed by an <operations> element, which specifies the set of individual operations.<br><br>Following is a simple example of a delta doc that modifies an Atom feed, such that a new <entry> element is added after the first existing entry, and the <updated> element is removed from the <feed> element and replaced with a new one. Following the delta doc is the original feed doc.<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><br><delta xmlns="http://www.delta.org/2006/Delta" version="0.1"<br>xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><br> <updated>2006-03-31T11:42:55-05:00</updated><br> <start>http://www.somewhere.com/atom1.xml</start><br> <operations><br> <add id="1"><br> <date>2006-03-31T11:42:51-05:00</date><br> <path directive="after">//atom:feed/atom:entry[1]</path><br> <value><br> <atom:entry><br> <atom:id>tag:intertwingly.net,2004:2180</atom:id><br> <atom:link rel="alternate" /><br> <atom:title>Bridge Crossing Puzzle</atom:title><br> <atom:summary>My daughter was given a puzzle.</atom:summary><br> <atom:content type="xhtml"><br> <xhtml:div><br> <xhtml:p>My daughter was given a puzzle.</xhtml:p><br> </xhtml:div><br> </atom:content><br> <atom:updated>2006-03-31T11:42:54-05:00</atom:updated><br> </atom:entry><br> </value><br> </add><br> <remove id="2"><br> <date>2006-03-31T11:42:53-05:00</date><br> <path>//atom:feed/atom:updated</path><br> </remove><br> <add id="3"><br> <date>2006-03-31T11:42:54-05:00</date><br> <path directive="after">//atom:feed/*[3]</path><br> <value><br> <atom:updated>2006-03-31T11:42:54-05:00</atom:updated><br> </value><br> </add><br> </operations><br></delta><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><pre><br> <br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><br><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xml:lang='en-US'><br> <title>Example Feed</title><br> <subtitle>Insert witty or insightful remark here</subtitle><br> <link href='http://example.org/' /><br> <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated><br> <author><br> <name>John Doe</name><br> </author><br> <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6</id><br> <entry><br> <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title><br> <link href='http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03' /><br> <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id><br> <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated><br> <summary>Some text.</summary><br> </entry><br></feed><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><br><br><b><Operations> Element</b><br><br>The <operations> element contains an ordered list of “add” and “remove” operations. Each operation is represented by an <add> or <remove> element. Each of these elements must have an “id” attribute whose value is unique among its set of siblings. The id is used to determine the relative order in which the operations are to be applied. Optionally, one can include a child <date> element on each operation to specify an absolute point in time for the operation. This can be useful when a delta processor compares two or more separate delta documents, where the id alone does not provide enough information to determine the relative order in which the operations from separate delta docs occur.<br><br>“Add” and “remove” operations also contain a <path> element with an XPath value to determine where an operation should to be performed. Delta processors should evaluate the XPath, and use the resulting “found” element(s) and/or attribute(s) as the context in which to perform the operation.<br><br>It is very important to note that before applying an operation, a delta processor must apply all of the operations preceding the operation in the delta doc. This requirement assures that the state of the doc is valid for the XPath in the operation. In the case where a delta doc references an “end” doc instead, then the operations, starting from the end, back to the specific operation, must be applied in reverse order to undo the doc to the valid state for the specific operation.<br><br><br><b><Add> Element</b><br><br>The XPath on an “add” operation must reference one or more “target” elements or attributes in the target doc. For “add” operations, the <path> element may also have a “directive” attribute that indicates where, relative to the target element/attribute, the value should be added. The values for the “directive” attribute are: “before”, “after”, and “child”, with “child” being the assumed value in the absence of a directive attribute.<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><add id='1'><br> <path directive="child">//xcal:iCalendar/xcal:vcalendar/xcal:vevent</path><br> <value><br> <ibmcal:summary>new summary</ibmcal:summary><br> </value><br></add><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><p align=\"center\">Example 1: Add a <summary> element as a child of an <xcal:vevent> element.</p><br><br>A path can also reference multiple elements, in which case the “add” operation is applied to each referenced element.<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><path>//xcal:iCalendar/xcal:vcalendar/xcal:vevent/xcal:attendee[1 | 3 | 5]</path><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><p align=\"center\">Example 2: An XPath that resolves to multiple elements.</p><br><br>An “add” operation can also have a <value> that is comprised of a sequence of child elements. In this case the sequence is added in the same manner as adding a single element. This approach makes it possible to combine a set of “add” operations where multiple children are being added to a single parent element.<br><br>Adding attributes poses a slightly different challenge. The XPath for an attribute-based “add” operation should reference the element(s) to which the attribute(s) should be added. Since an attribute is represented by a name and a value, delta uses an <attribute> element to encapsulate this information as a child element of the <value> element. A delta processor needs to unpack the attribute information from the <value> and create/add a new attribute to the XPath-referenced elements:<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><add id="2"><br> <path>//xcal:iCalendar/xcal:vcalendar/xcal:vevent</path><br> <value><br> <attribute name="ibmcal:draft" value="true" /><br> </value><br></add><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><p align=\"center\">Example 3: Add an @draft attribute to the <xcal:vevent> element.</p><br><br>To add an attribute, one can also specify an XPath to an existing attribute on an element, and then use the “directive” attribute on the <path> to indicate whether the attribute should be added “before” or “after” the referenced attribute.<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><add id="3"><br> <path directive="after">//xcal:iCalendar/xcal:vcalendar/@version</path><br> <value><br> <attribute name="xcal:prodid" value="-//handcal//NONSGML 1.0//EN" /><br> </value><br></add><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><p align=\"center\">Example 4: Add a @prodid attribute after the @version attribute on the <xcal:vcalendar> element.</p><br><br><br><b><Remove> Element</b><br><br>“Remove” operations are easier to specify than “add” operations because the XPath simply references the element(s) and/or attribute(s) to remove. No “directive” is needed on the <path> element. As with “add” operations, one or more values can be removed in a single "remove" operation. Optionally, the removed values can be placed in the <value> element. However, in cases where a delta doc references an “end” state doc, the value on the “remove” operation is required to be saved, in order for a delta processor to be able to undo the “remove” operation and put the removed value back into the target doc.<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><remove id="2"><br> <path>//xcal:iCalendar/xcal:vcalendar/xcal:vevent/xcal:attendee[<br> [@role=\"REQ-PARTICIPANT\"] = \"tuser1@dominoportal.com\" | [@role=\"REQ-PARTICIPANT\"] =<br> "tuser2@dominoportal.com" ]</path><br></remove><br></span><br></pre><br> <br><p align=\"center\">Example 5: Remove two <xcal:attendee> elements where there’s a match on both the @role attribute, and the text value of the element.</p><br><br>In the case of removing an attribute, the entire attribute is removed, not just the value.<br><br><br><b>Delta Schema</b><br><br>This section contains the xsd representation of the delta schema:<br><pre><br><span style=\"color:black;LINE-HEIGHT:12pt;font-size:10pt\"><br><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><br><xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"<br>xmlns:ecore=\"http://www.eclipse.org/emf/2002/Ecore\"<br>xmlns:delta=\"http://www.delta.org/2006/Delta\" attributeFormDefault=\"unqualified\"<br>ecore:package=\"com.ibm.delta\" elementFormDefault=\"qualified\"<br>targetNamespace="http://www.delta.org/2006/Delta"><br> <xs:annotation><br> <xs:documentation>This version of the Delta schema is based on version 0.1 of the<br> format specifications, found here<br> http://www.deltaweb.org/developers/delta-format-spec.html.</xs:documentation><br> </xs:annotation><br> <xs:import namespace="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace"<br> schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/2001/03/xml.xsd" /><br> <xs:annotation><br> <xs:documentation>A Delta document may have one root element:<br> delta</xs:documentation><br> </xs:annotation><br> <xs:element name="delta" type="delta:deltaType" /><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="Delta" name="deltaType"><br> <xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="2"><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="0" name="updated" type="delta:dateTimeType" /><br> <xs:group maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1" ref="delta:baseGroup" /><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1" name="operations"<br> type="delta:operationsType"><br> <xs:unique name="operationId"><br> <xs:selector xpath="delta:operationType" /><br> <xs:field xpath="@id" /><br> </xs:unique><br> </xs:element><br> <xs:any maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0" namespace="##other"<br> processContents="lax" /><br> </xs:choice><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:group name="baseGroup"><br> <xs:choice><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="0" name="start" type="delta:uriType" /><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="0" name="end" type="delta:uriType" /><br> </xs:choice><br> </xs:group><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="URI" name="uriType"><br> <xs:simpleContent><br> <xs:extension base="xs:anyURI"><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:extension><br> </xs:simpleContent><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="Operations" name="operationsType"><br> <xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="1"><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0" name="add"<br> type="delta:operationType" /><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0" name="remove"<br> type="delta:operationType" /><br> </xs:choice><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="Operation" name="operationType"><br> <xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="3"><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1" name="date" type="delta:dateTimeType" /><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1" name="path" type="delta:xPathType" /><br> <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1" name="value" type="delta:contentType" /><br> <xs:any namespace="##other" processContents="lax" /><br> </xs:choice><br> <xs:attribute name="id" type="xs:positiveInteger" /><br> <xs:attribute name="family" type="xs:string" /><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="DateTime" name="dateTimeType"><br> <xs:simpleContent><br> <xs:extension base="delta:iso8601dateTime"><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:extension><br> </xs:simpleContent><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:simpleType name="iso8601dateTime"><br> <xs:union memberTypes="xs:dateTime xs:date xs:gYearMonth xs:gYear" /><br> </xs:simpleType><br> <xs:complexType name="xPathType"><br> <xs:annotation><br> <xs:documentation>A subset of XPath expressions for use in<br> selectors</xs:documentation><br> <xs:documentation>A utility type, not for public use</xs:documentation><br> </xs:annotation><br> <xs:simpleContent><br> <xs:extension base="delta:xPathTypeSimple"><br> <xs:attribute name="directive"><br> <xs:simpleType><br> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"><br> <xs:enumeration value="before" /><br> <xs:enumeration value="after" /><br> <xs:enumeration value="child" /><br> </xs:restriction><br> </xs:simpleType><br> </xs:attribute><br> </xs:extension><br> </xs:simpleContent><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:simpleType name="xPathTypeSimple"><br> <xs:annotation><br> <xs:documentation>A subset of XPath expressions for use in<br> selectors</xs:documentation><br> <xs:documentation>A utility type, not for public use</xs:documentation><br> </xs:annotation><br> <xs:restriction base="xs:token"><br> <xs:annotation><br> <xs:documentation>The following pattern is intended to allow XPath expressions<br> per the following EBNF: Selector ::= Path ( '|' Path )* Path ::= ('.//')? Step (<br> '/' Step )* Step ::= '.' | NameTest NameTest ::= QName | '*' | NCName ':' '*'<br> child:: is also allowed</xs:documentation><br> </xs:annotation><br> <xs:pattern<br> value="(\\.//)?(((child::)?((\\i\\c*:)?(\\i\\c*|\\*)))|\\.)(/(((child::)?((\\i\\c*:)?(\\i\\c*|\\*)))|\\.))*(\\|(\\.//)?(((child::)?((\\i\\c*:)?(\\i\\c*|\\*)))|\\.)(/(((child::)?((\\i\\c*:)?(\\i\\c*|\\*)))|\\.))*)*" /><br> </xs:restriction><br> </xs:simpleType><br> <xs:complexType ecore:name="Content" mixed="true" name="contentType"><br> <xs:sequence><br> <xs:any maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0" namespace="##other"<br> processContents="lax" /><br> </xs:sequence><br> <xs:attribute name="src" type="xs:anyURI" use="optional" /><br> <xs:attributeGroup ref="delta:commonAttributes" /><br> </xs:complexType><br> <xs:attributeGroup name="commonAttributes"><br> <xs:attribute ref="xml:base" /><br> <xs:attribute ref="xml:lang" /><br> <xs:anyAttribute namespace="##other" processContents="lax" /><br> </xs:attributeGroup><br></xs:schema><br></span><br></pre>"
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"title" : "Why GData/APP Fails as a General Purpose Editing Protocol for the Web",
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"content" : "<p>\r\nRecently I wrote a blog post entitled <a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/05/25/GoogleGDataAUniformWebAPIForAllGoogleServices.aspx\">Google\r\nGData: A Uniform Web API for All Google Services</a> where I pointed out that Google\r\nhas standardized on GData (i.e. Google's implementation of the <a href=\"http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287\">Atom\r\n1.0 syndication format</a> and the <a href=\"http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-14.txt\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> with some extensions) as the data access protocol for Google's\r\nservices going forward. In a comment to that post <a href=\"http://greg.abstrakt.ch/\">Gregor\r\nRothfuss</a> wondered whether I couldn't influence people at Microsoft to also standardize\r\non GData. The fact is that I've actually tried to do this with different teams on\r\nmultiple occasions and each time the I've tried, certain limitations in the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> become quite obvious when you get outside of blog editing\r\nscenarios for which the protocol was originally designed. For this reason, we will\r\nlikely standardize on a different RESTful protocol which I'll discuss in a later post.\r\nHowever I thought it would be useful to describe the limitations we saw in the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> which made it unsuitable as the data access protocol for a\r\nlarge class of online services. <br></p>\r\n <h3>Overview of the Atom's Data Model\r\n</h3>\r\n <p>\r\nThe Atom data model consists of collections, entry resources and media resources.\r\nEntry resources and media resources are member resources of a collection. There is\r\na handy drawings in <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html#dataiscode\">section\r\n4.2 of the latest APP draft specification</a> that shows the hierarchy in this data\r\nmodel which is reproduced below. \r\n</p>\r\n <pre>\r\n <br>\r\nMember Resources<br>\r\n|<br>\r\n-----------------<br>\r\n| |<br>\r\nEntry Resources Media Resources<br>\r\n|<br>\r\nMedia Link Entry \r\n<br></pre>\r\n <p>\r\nA media resource can have representations in any media type. An entry resource corresponds\r\nto an <a href=\"http://atompub.org/2005/07/11/draft-ietf-atompub-format-10.html#rfc.section.4.1.2\"><code>atom:entry</code></a> element\r\nwhich means it <b><u>must</u></b> have an id, a title, an updated date, one or more\r\nauthors and textual content. Below is a minimal <code>atom:entry</code> element taken\r\nfrom the <a href=\"http://atompub.org/2005/07/11/draft-ietf-atompub-format-10.html\">Atom\r\n1.0 specification</a></p>\r\n <pre>\r\n <code> <entry> <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>\r\n<link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03"/> <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>\r\n<updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated> <summary>Some text.</summary>\r\n</entry> </code>\r\n </pre>\r\n <p>\r\nThe process of creating and editing resources is covered in <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html#collection_resource\">section\r\n9 of the current APP draft specification</a>. To add members to a Collection, clients\r\nsend POST requests to the URI of the Collection. To delete a Member Resource, clients\r\nsend a DELETE request to its Member URI. While to edit a Member Resource, clients\r\nsend PUT requests to its Member URI. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nSince using PUT to edit a resource is obviously problematic, the specification notes\r\ntwo concerns that developers have to pay attention to when updating resources. \r\n</p>\r\n <blockquote> To avoid unintentional loss of data when editing Member Entries or Media\r\nLink Entries, Atom Protocol clients SHOULD preserve all metadata that has not been\r\nintentionally modified, including unknown foreign markup. \r\n<br>\r\n...<br>\r\nImplementers are advised to pay attention to cache controls, and to make use of the\r\nmechanisms available in HTTP when editing Resources, in particular entity-tags as\r\noutlined in <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html#NOTE-detect-lost-update\">[NOTE-detect-lost-update]</a>.\r\nClients are not assured to receive the most recent representations of Collection Members\r\nusing GET if the server is authorizing intermediaries to cache them. </blockquote>\r\n <p>\r\nThe [NOTE-detect-lost-update] points to <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/04/Editing/\">Editing\r\nthe Web: Detecting the Lost Update Problem Using Unreserved Checkout</a> which not\r\nonly talks about ETags but also talks about conflict resolution strategies when faced\r\nwith multiple edits to a Web document. This information is quite relevant to anyone\r\nconsidering implementing the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> or a similar data manipulation protocol. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nWith this foundation, we can now talk about the various problems one faces when trying\r\nto use the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> with certain types of Web data stores. \r\n</p>\r\n <h3>Limitations Caused by the Constraints within the Atom Data Model\r\n</h3>\r\n <p>\r\nThe following is a list of problems one faces when trying to utilize the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> in areas outside of content publishing for which it was originally\r\ndesigned. \r\n</p>\r\n <ol>\r\n <li>\r\n <p>\r\n <b>Mismatch with data models that aren't microcontent:</b> The Atom data model fits\r\nvery well for representing authored content or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcontent\">microcontent</a> on\r\nthe Web such as blog posts, lists of links, podcasts, online photo albums and calendar\r\nevents. In each of these cases the requirement that each Atom entry has an an id,\r\na title, an updated date, one or more authors and textual content can be met and actually\r\nmakes a lot of sense. On the other hand, there are other kinds online data that don't\r\nreally fit this model.\r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nBelow is an example of the results one could get from invoking the <a href=\"http://developer.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&method=users.getInfo\">users.getInfo\r\nmethod</a> in the Facebook REST API. \r\n</p>\r\n <pre>\r\n <code> <user> <uid>8055</uid> <about_me>This field perpetuates\r\nthe glorification of the ego. Also, it has a character limit.</about_me> <activities>Here:\r\nfacebook, etc. There: Glee Club, a capella, teaching.</activities> <birthday>November\r\n3</birthday> <books>The Brothers K, GEB, Ken Wilber, Zen and the Art,\r\nFitzgerald, The Emporer's New Mind, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar</books> <font color=\"#ff0000\"><current_location><br>\r\n<city>Palo Alto</city><br>\r\n<state>CA</state><br>\r\n<country>United States</country><br>\r\n<zip>94303</zip><br>\r\n</current_location></font><br>\r\n<first_name>Dave</first_name> \r\n<br>\r\n<interests>coffee, computers, the funny, architecture, code breaking,snowboarding,\r\nphilosophy, soccer, talking to strangers</interests><br>\r\n<last_name>Fetterman</last_name> \r\n<br>\r\n<movies>Tommy Boy, Billy Madison, Fight Club, Dirty Work, Meet the Parents,\r\nMy Blue Heaven, Office Space </movies><br>\r\n<music>New Found Glory, Daft Punk, Weezer, The Crystal Method, Rage, the KLF,\r\nGreen Day, Live, Coldplay, Panic at the Disco, Family Force 5</music><br>\r\n<name>Dave Fetterman</name> \r\n<br>\r\n<profile_update_time>1170414620</profile_update_time><br>\r\n<relationship_status>In a Relationship</relationship_status><br>\r\n<religion/><br>\r\n<sex>male</sex><br>\r\n<significant_other_id xsi:nil="true"/><br>\r\n<status><br><font color=\"#ff0000\"><message>Pirates of the Carribean was an awful movie!!!</message></font> </status>\r\n</user> </code>\r\n </pre>\r\n <p>\r\nHow exactly would one map this to an Atom entry? Most of the elements that constitute\r\nan Atom entry don't make much sense when representing a <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> user.\r\nSecondly, one would have to create a large number of proprietary extension elements\r\nto anotate the <code>atom:entry</code> element to hold all the <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> specific\r\nfields for the user. It's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. If you\r\nforce it hard enough, you can make it fit but it will look damned ugly. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nEven after doing that, it is extremely unlikely that an unmodified Atom feed reader\r\nor editing client such as would be able to do anything useful with this Frankenstein <code>atom:entry</code> element.\r\nIf you are going to roll your own libraries and clients to deal with this Frankenstein\r\nelement, then it it begs the question of what benefit you are getting from <strike>mis</strike> using\r\na standardized protocol in this manner? \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nI guess we could keep the existing XML format used by the <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> REST\r\nAPI and treat the user documents as media resources. But in that case, we aren't really\r\nusing the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a>, instead we've reinvented <a href=\"http://www.webdav.org/specs/rfc2518.html\">WebDAV</a>.\r\nPoorly. \r\n</p>\r\n </li>\r\n <li>\r\n <p>\r\n <b>Lack of support for granular updates to fields of an item:</b> As mentioned in\r\nthe previous section editing an entry requires replacing the old entry with a new\r\none. The expected client interaction with the server is described in <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html#rfc.section.5.4\">section\r\n5.4 of the current APP draft</a> and is excerpted below.\r\n</p>\r\n <blockquote>\r\n <i>\r\n </i>\r\n <h4>\r\n <i>Retrieving a Resource</i>\r\n </h4>\r\n <pre>\r\n <i>Client Server<br>\r\n| |<br>\r\n| 1.) GET to Member URI |<br>\r\n|------------------------------------------>|<br>\r\n| |<br>\r\n| 2.) 200 Ok |<br>\r\n| Member Representation |<br>\r\n|<------------------------------------------|<br>\r\n| |<br></i>\r\n </pre>\r\n <ol>\r\n <li>\r\n <i>The client sends a GET request to the URI of a Member Resource to retrieve its\r\nrepresentation.</i>\r\n </li>\r\n <li>\r\n <i>The server responds with the representation of the Member Resource.</i>\r\n </li>\r\n </ol>\r\n <i>\r\n </i>\r\n <h4>\r\n <i>Editing a Resource</i>\r\n </h4>\r\n <pre>\r\n <i>Client Server<br>\r\n| |<br>\r\n| 1.) PUT to Member URI |<br>\r\n| Member Representation |<br>\r\n|------------------------------------------>|<br>\r\n| |<br>\r\n| 2.) 200 OK |<br>\r\n|<------------------------------------------|<br></i>\r\n </pre>\r\n <ol>\r\n </ol>\r\n <i>\r\n </i>\r\n <li>\r\n <i>The client sends a PUT request to store a representation of a Member Resource.</i>\r\n </li>\r\n <i>\r\n </i>\r\n <li>\r\n <i>If the request is successful, the server responds with a status code of 200.</i>\r\n </li>\r\n </blockquote>\r\n </li>\r\n </ol>\r\n <p>\r\nCan anyone spot what's wrong with this interaction? The first problem is a minor one\r\nthat may prove problematic in certain cases. The problem is pointed out in the note\r\nin the <a href=\"http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/developers_guide_protocol.html#UpdatingPosts\">documentation\r\non Updating posts on Google Blogger via GData</a> which states\r\n</p>\r\n <blockquote>\r\n <strong>IMPORTANT!</strong> To ensure forward compatibility, be sure that\r\nwhen you <code>POST</code> an updated entry you preserve <b>all</b> the XML that was\r\npresent when you retrieved the entry from Blogger. Otherwise, when we implement new\r\nstuff and include <code><new-awesome-feature></code> elements in the feed, your\r\nclient won't return them and your users will miss out! The <a href=\"http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/clientlibs.html\">Google\r\ndata API client libraries</a> all handle this correctly, so if you're using one of\r\nthe libraries you're all set.</blockquote>\r\n <p>\r\nThus each client is responsible for ensuring that it doesn't lose any XML that was\r\nin the original <code>atom:entry</code> element it downloaded. The second problem\r\nis more serious and should be of concern to anyone who's read <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/04/Editing/\">Editing\r\nthe Web: Detecting the Lost Update Problem Using Unreserved Checkout</a>. The problem\r\nis that there is <b>data loss</b> if the entry has changed between the time the client\r\ndownloaded it and when it tries to PUT its changes. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nEven if the client does a HEAD request and compares ETags just before PUTing its changes,\r\nthere's always the possibility of a race condition where an update occurs after the\r\nHEAD request. After a certain point, it is probably reasonable to just go with \"most\r\nrecent update wins\" which is the simplest conflict resolution algorithm in existence.\r\nUnfortunately, this approach fails because the <a href=\"http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-15.html\">Atom\r\nPublishing Protocol</a> makes client applications responsible for all the content\r\nwithin the <code>atom:entry</code> even if they are only interested in one field. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nLet's go back to the <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> example above.\r\nHaving an API now makes it quite likely that users will have multiple applications\r\nediting their data at once and sometimes these aplications will change their data\r\nwithout direct user intervention. For example, imagine Dave Fetterman has just moved\r\nto New York city and is updating his data across various services. So he updates his\r\nstatus message in his favorite IM client to \"I've moved\" then goes to <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> to\r\nupdate his current location. However, he's installed a plugin that synchronizes his\r\nIM status message with his <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> status message.\r\nSo the IM plugin downloads the <code>atom:entry</code> that represents Dave Fetterman,\r\nDave then updates his address on <a href=\"http://www.facebook.com\">Facebook</a> and\r\nright afterwards the IM plugin uploads his profile information with the <b>old</b> location\r\nand his <b>new</b> status message. The IM plugin is now responsible for data loss\r\nin a field it doesn't even operate on directly. \r\n</p>\r\n <li>\r\n <p>\r\n <b>Poor support for hierarchy:</b> The Atom data model is that it doesn't directly\r\nsupport nesting or hierarchies. You can have a collection of media resources or entry\r\nresources but the entry resources cannot themselves contain entry resources. This\r\nmeans if you want to represent an item that has children they must be referenced via\r\na link instead of included inline. This makes sense when you consider the blog syndication\r\nand blog editing background of Atom since it isn't a good idea to include all comments\r\nto a post directly children of an item in the feed or when editing the post. On the\r\nother hand, when you have a direct parent<->child hierarchical relationship,\r\nwhere the child is an addressable resource in its own right, it is cumbersome for\r\nclients to always have to make two or more calls to get all the data they need. \r\n</p>\r\n </li>\r\n <p>\r\n <b>UPDATE:</b> Bill de hÓra responds to these issues in his post <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2007/06/app_on_the_web_has_failed_miserably_utterly_and_completely.html\">APP\r\non the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely</a> and points out to two\r\nmore problems that developers may encounter while implementing GData/APP. \r\n</p>\r\n <div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=pv4Vf80L\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=pv4Vf80L\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=19QX36o2\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=19QX36o2\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=MzMxLM5p\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=MzMxLM5p\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=Zmp0CoSx\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=Zmp0CoSx\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=XORRKKJn\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=XORRKKJn\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Language lessons",
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"content" : "<div><p> For a while now I’ve been uncomfortable with the words <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/04/28.html#a1224\">user</a> and <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/03/23.html\">content</a>, and with the phrase <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/06/19.html\">user-generated content</a>. But although <em>produced</em> or <em>created</em> are almost certainly better generic terms than <em>generated</em>, I’ll admit that I’ve failed to come up with a generic alternative to <em>user</em> or <em>content</em> (a <a href=\"http://doc.weblogs.com/2007/03/24#howToSaveNewspapers\">bullshit word</a> as Doc Searls rightly notes).</p>\n<p>The commentary attached to Jimmy Guterman’s recent plea — <a href=\"http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/dont_call_me_a.html\">Don’t call me a user!</a> — has convinced me that there may not be superior generic alternatives. But several of the comments there reach the same conclusion that I have. Use the generic terms when necessary. But wherever possible, be more specific. The word <em>user</em> connotes a role, but so does <em>member</em> or <em>contributor</em> or <em>participant</em> and, even more specifically, <em>writer</em> or <em>photographer</em> or <em>indexer</em> or <em>webjay</em>.</p>\n<p>The latter is a complete neologism, of course, but note the effect that it had at webjay.org. The reflex would have been to say things like “OddioKatya is my favorite Webjay user.” But because the term <em>webjay</em> was so active and so evocative — a DJ for the web — it became natural to simply say “OddioKatya is my favorite webjay.”</p>\n<p>Likewise content. Because a more distinctive and evocative term was available — <em>playlist</em> — you’d never think of saying “I love OddioKatya’s content.” Instead you’d say “I love OddioKatya’s playlists.”</p>\n<p>While we’re at it, webjays are not generators of playlists, they are curators of them. This isn’t just pedantry. Language governs thought, and when we enrich our language we enrich our individual and shared mental lives. With evocative and precise vocabulary, we can imagine more and accomplish better.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Investor's Business Daily, Zepheira, and what some insist on calling \"Web 3.0\"",
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"content" : "<p>\nO yes, I've been quiet. What a year. My consulting work at Sun is\npretty much a full-time job. As if that's not enough, I <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006-12-15/From_Fourt\">moved from\nFourthought to\nKadomo</a>. I'd\nscarcely been there for a month when most of us decided we needed to\nrestructure and start afresh, and thus was born\n<a href=\"http://zepheira.com/\">Zepheira</a>. Joining one company at early stage,\nand then launching another two months later is no way to have a life\nleft over. I've had no time whatsoever for Weblogging, and what little\ntime I have had for such things I've given over to my OSS projects such\nas 4Suite, Amara and Bright Content.</p>\n\n<p>Then a curious thing happened today. We learned that our company (which\nhas been getting <a href=\"http://zepheira.com/news/\">oodles of good press\nlately</a> was featured in an <a href=\"http://www.investors.com\">Investor's\nBusiness Daily</a> story, but that the article\nwould likely disappear from the Web forever by the end of the day. \n(we've all heard that <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI\">\"Cool URIs don't\nchange\"</a>, so I'm dismayed that\nhere's a cool URI that might just completely vanish). I guess when\nthose cats say \"Daily\" they are <strong>not</strong> playing. Something about the\nephemeral nature of the news inspired me to throw in my tuppence.</p>\n\n<p>Anyways <a href=\"http://purl.org/NET/ZEPHEIRA/IBDWeb3.0_20070604\">\"After All This Interactivity, Look Out For Web 3.0\nLeap\"</a> (linked via\n<a href=\"http://purl.org\">PURL</a>, just in case) discusses Semantic Web at\nsuitable high level, and since it includes an interview with Eric\nMiller, includes a good dose of practicality. Quoting the article:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Software giants Oracle and Adobe Systems already support or plan to\n back the RDF and OWL standards to represent data in some of their\n products.</p>\n \n <p>These Web standards should help companies spot new relationships among\n huge sets of data and use the findings for better conclusions about\n their business, says Eric Miller, president of Web startup Zepheira.</p>\n \n <p>\"We want the ability to free data from applications and use the data\n in other applications for which it was not originally intended,\" said\n Miller.</p>\n \n <p>Current Web 2.0 firms could apply the future benefits of metadata in\n Web 3.0.</p>\n \n <p>For instance, MySpace might let personal pages share information with\n the pages of relevant friends or colleagues in the social network.</p>\n \n <p>Take someone whose MySpace page describes a fondness for vintage jazz.\n By entering that information once, that person could automatically be\n linked to others who share the same interest.</p>\n \n <p>Furthermore, that information could be applied to future Web searches\n for new music releases. In effect, using metadata could become a way\n to make MySpace \"truly mine,\" said Miller.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And no, this is not magic. It's no more than taking the open data\nprecepts people already associate with Web 2.0, and making them a bit\neasier to aggregate. And yes, this makes them easier for sharp types to\nrun game: the Web has ben easy to game from day one, and we've managed\njust fine. Even phishies in Russia, despite dire warnings of Total\nInternet Meltdown, have never posed more <strong>actual</strong> threat than any\nother scam mechanism such as those that come through that other perilous\ninstrument: your phone. As Eric goes on to say:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"This means there is a much more flexible, personalized integration\n point to really connect people,\" he said. \"The notion here is to enter\n data just once, but to use it often.\"</p>\n \n <p>In recent years, Miller led the Semantic Web program at the World Wide\n Web Consortium.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yeah, that simple. \n<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself\">DRY</a> for Web\ndata. Now does <strong>that</strong> sound like strong AI redux to you? Apparently\nsome people are incapable of hearing anything else, as the very end of\nthis article shows. Then again, the W3C themselves can take some of the\nblame for creating that straw man.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Web 3.0 involves building a Web of interconnected data, Miller says.\n This approach will let companies quickly change computer processes as\n their business needs evolve.</p>\n \n <p>\"What we've got here is a set of useful technologies that when\n combined become very powerful,\" he said. \"This makes it easier to free\n the data from the application that created it and make it more useful\n and easier to combine with other little bits of information.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yeah. Separating data from applications has kinda been an <a href=\"http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-think38.html\">obsession of\nmine</a> <a href=\"http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7238\">for\na while now</a>, and it really\nain't that hard, and it's about time someone brought such practical\nsolutions to the enterprise. It's a very important generalization of\nthe \"separate content from presentation\" mantra that just about every\nWeb developer has heard 1000 times, and reading Eric, you might get a\nsense of why I've poured som much of myself into this startup. I think\nthat not only are we <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006-03-22/No_one_eve\">architecting like\nGoogle</a>, but we're\nfollowing natural lessons Google brings to a new generation of\narchitecture. And I'm a bit surprised as well as gratified at how well\nthis message has been playing in a growing number of enterprises.</p>\n\n<p>Certainly that's the sort of thing I might mention to an investor type\nat a cocktail party, although you wouldn't hear me say \"Web 3.0\"\n(reminds me too uncomfortably of the RSS wars). And I'd certainly be\nwary of mentioning to said investor type exactly where I work.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Update: so seems I was too cryptic in the last para. I'm definitely proud\nof my company; I meant that neither I nor any of the other partners are courting\ninvestment</strong></p>"
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"title" : "What's Wrong with WADL?",
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"content" : "<p>\r\nLast week there was a bunch of discussion in a number of blogs about whether we need\r\nan <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_description_language\">interface\r\ndefinition language (IDL)</a> for <a href=\"http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html\">RESTful\r\nWeb services</a>. There were a lot of good posts on this topic but the posts from\r\nDon Box and Bobby Woolf which gave me the most food for thought. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nIn his post entitled <a href=\"http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/archive/2007/05/29/47544.aspx\">WADL,\r\nWSDL, XSD, and the Web</a> Don Box wrote \r\n</p>\r\n <blockquote>\r\n <p>\r\n <i>More interesting fodder on Stefan Tilkov's blog, this time on whether <a href=\"http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/05/28/does_rest_need_a_service_description_language.html\">RESTafarians\r\nneed WSDL-like functionality</a>, potentially in the form of WADL.</i>\r\n </p>\r\n <p>\r\n <i>Several points come to mind.</i>\r\n </p>\r\n <i>First, I'm doubtful that WADL will be substantially better than WSDL given the\r\nreliance on XSD to describe XML payloads. Yes, some of the cruft WSDL introduces goes\r\naway, but that cruft wasn't where the interop probems were lurking. </i>\r\n <br>\r\n </blockquote>\r\n <p>\r\nI have to concur with Don's analysis about XSD being the main cause of interoperability\r\nproblems in SOAP/WS-* Web services. In a past life, I was the Program Manager responsible\r\nfor Microsoft's implementations of the <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#dev\">W3C's\r\nXML Schema Definition Language</a> (aka XSD). The main problem with the technology\r\nis that XML developers wanted two fairly different things from a schema language\r\n</p>\r\n <ol>\r\n <li>\r\nA grammar for describing and enforcing the contract between producers and consumers\r\nof XML documents so that one could, for example, confirm that an XML document received\r\nwas a valid purchase order or RSS feed. \r\n</li>\r\n <li>\r\nA way describe strongly typed data such as database tables or serialized objects as\r\nXML documents for use in distributed programming or distributed query operations.</li>\r\n </ol>\r\n <p>\r\nIn hindsight, this probably should have been two separate efforts. Instead the W3C\r\nXML Schema working group tried to satisfy both sets of consistuencies with a single\r\nXML schema language. The resulting technology ended up being ill suited at both\r\ntasks. The limitations placed on it by having to be a type system made it unable\r\nto describe common constructs in XML formats such as being able to have elements show\r\nup in any order (e.g. in an RSS feed <code>title</code>, <code>description</code>, <code>pubDate</code>,\r\netc. can appear in any order as children of <code>item</code>) or being able to specify\r\nco-occurrence constraints (e.g. in an Atom feed a text construct may have XML content\r\nor textual content depending on the value of its <code>type</code> attribute). \r\n<br></p>\r\n <p>\r\nAs a mechanism for describing serialized objects for use in distributed computing\r\nscenarios (aka Web services) it caused several interoperability problems due to the <a href=\"http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo/archive/2004/02/20/77264.aspx\">impedance\r\nmismatch between W3C XML Schema and object oriented programming constructs</a>. The\r\nW3C XML schema language had a number of type system constructs such as simple type\r\nfacet restriction, anonymous types, structural subtyping, namespace based wildcards,\r\nidentity constraints, and mixed content which simply do not exist in the typical programming\r\nlanguage. This lead to interoperability problems because each SOAP stack had its own\r\nidiosyncratic way of mapping the various XSD type system constructs to objects in\r\nthe target platform's programming language and vice versa. Also no two SOAP stacks\r\nsupported the same set of XSD features. Even within Microsoft, let alone across the\r\nindustry. There are several SOAP interoperability horror stories on the Web such as\r\nthe reports from Nelson Minar on Google's problems using SOAP in posts such as <a href=\"http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/whySoapSucks.html\">Why\r\nSOAP Sucks</a> and his ETech 2005 presentation <a href=\"http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=83ec4876-7578-418c-8335-a3b0a147037b\">Building\r\na New Web Service at Google</a>. For a while, the major vendors in the SOAP/WS-* space\r\ntried to tackle this problem by forming a <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/05/25-schema/wsi.pdf\">WS-I\r\nXML Schema Profile working group</a> but I don't think that went anywhere primarily\r\nbecause each vendor supported different subsets of XSD so no one could agree on what\r\nfeatures to keep and what to leave out.\r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nTo cut a long story short, any technology that takes a dependency on XSD is built\r\non a shaky technological foundation. According to <a href=\"https://wadl.dev.java.net/wadl20061109.pdf\">the\r\nWADL specification</a> there is no requirement that a particular XML schema language\r\nis used so it doesn't have to depend on XSD. However besides XSD, there actually isn't\r\nany mainstream technology for describing serialized objects as XML. So one has to\r\nbe invented. There is a good description of what this schema language should look\r\nlike in James Clark's post <a href=\"http://blog.jclark.com/2007/04/do-we-need-new-kind-of-schema-language.html\">Do\r\nwe need a new kind of schema language?</a> If anyone can fix this problem, it's James\r\nClark. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\nIgnoring the fact that 80% of the functionality of WADL currently doesn't exist because\r\nwe either need to use a broken technology (i.e. XSD) or wait for James Clark to finish\r\ninventing Type Expressions for Data Interchange (TEDI). What else is wrong with WADL? \r\n<br></p>\r\n <p>\r\nIn a post entitled <a href=\"http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/woolf?entry=wadl_declared_interfaces_for_rest&ca=dat-bl\">WADL:\r\nDeclared Interfaces for REST?</a> Bobby Woolf writes \r\n</p>\r\n <blockquote>\r\n <i> Now, in <a href=\"http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/pmuellr?entry=typing_rest\">typing\r\nrest</a>, my colleague <a href=\"http://muellerware.org/\">Patrick Mueller</a> contemplates\r\nthat he \"wants some typing [i.e. contracts] in the REST world\" and, among other things,\r\ndiscusses <a href=\"https://wadl.dev.java.net/\">WADL</a> (Web Application Description\r\nLanguage). Sadly, he's already gotten some backlash, which he's responded to in <a href=\"http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/pmuellr?entry=not_doing_rest\">not\r\ndoing REST</a>. So I (and Richard, and others?) think that the major advantage of\r\nWSDL over REST is the declared interface. Now some of the REST guys seem to be coming\r\naround to this way of thinking and are thinking about declared interfaces for REST.\r\nI then wonder if and how REST with declared interfaces would be significantly different\r\nfrom WSDL (w/SOAP).</i>\r\n </blockquote>\r\n <p>\r\nOne thing I've learned about the SOAP/WS-* developer world is that people often pay\r\nlip service to certain words even though they use them all the time. For example,\r\nthe technologies are often called <i>Web</i> services even though the key focus of\r\nall the major vendors and customers in this area is reinventing CORBA/DCOM with XML\r\nprotocols as opposed to building services on the Web. Another word that is often abused\r\nin the SOAP/WS-* world is <b>contract</b>. When I think of a contract, I think of\r\nsome lengthy document drafted by a lawyer that spells out in excruciating detail how\r\ntwo parties interact and what their responsibilities are. When a SOAP/WS-* developer\r\nuses the word contract and WSDL interchangeably, this seems incorrect because a WSDL\r\nis simply the XML version of <a href=\"http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/omg_idl.htm\">OMG\r\nIDL</a>. And an IDL is simply a list of API signatures. It doesn't describe expected\r\nmessage exchange patterns, required authentication methods, message traffic limits,\r\nquality of service guarantees, or even pre and post conditions for the various method\r\ncalls. You usually find this information in the <b>documentation</b> and/or in the\r\nactual business contract one signed with the Web service provider. A WADL document\r\nfor the REST Web service will not change this fact. \r\n<br></p>\r\n <p>\r\nWhen a SOAP/WS-* says that he wants a contract, he really means he wants an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_description_language\">interface\r\ndefinition language (IDL)</a> so he can point some tool at a URL and get some stubs\r\n& skeletons automatically generated. Since this post is already long enough and\r\nI have to get to work, it is left as an exercise for the reader as to whether a technological\r\napproach borrowed from distributed object technologies like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC\">DCE/RPC</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_Model\">DCOM</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORBA\">CORBA</a> meshes\r\nwith the resource oriented, document-centric and loosely coupled world of RESTful\r\nWeb services. \r\n</p>\r\n <p>\r\n <b>PS: </b>Before any of the SOAP/WS-* wonks points this out, I realize that what\r\nI've described as a contract can <i>in theory</i> be implemented for SOAP/WS-* based\r\nservices using a combination of <a href=\"http://www.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/05/19/wsdl2.html\">WSDL\r\n2.0</a> and <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Submission/WS-Policy/\">WS-Policy</a>. Good\r\nluck actually finding an implementation <i>in practice</i> that (i) works and (ii)\r\nis interoperable across multiple vendor SOAP stacks. \r\n</p>\r\n <div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=31UWwSwF\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=31UWwSwF\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=16nLjs5J\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=16nLjs5J\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=WZ6dL7XQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=WZ6dL7XQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=SVKuVEkG\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=SVKuVEkG\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=zTaq5HVb\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=zTaq5HVb\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"content" : "Approximately one year ago some readers may remember a post I wrote “Bag Woman” which included the following photo of all my bags during my move to a new apartment. The comment received various responses referring to the “names” of the bags from different parts of the world. \n\nOn April 13th this year Koranteng’s [...]"
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"title" : "Insight on Organizational Culture",
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"content" : "Mark Buchanan, who blogs behind the paywall at the New York Times' Times Select, had a really good <a href=\"http://buchanan.blogs.nytimes.com/?8tpw&emc=tpw\">posting</a> a couple days ago. In part, it says,<br><blockquote><em>People who engage in corrupt acts often do not see them as such. This much has emerged from studies of corporate scandals and fraud at places like Enron or WorldCom. In a study two years ago, for example, business professors Vikas Anand, Blake Ashforth and Mahendra Joshi concluded that most fraud within institutions takes place through the willing cooperation of many otherwise upstanding individuals with no psychological predisposition to be criminals.<br><br>Whether embezzling money, undermining product safety regulations, or even selling completely fake products, the perpetrators rationalize away their responsibility. They deny that they actually had any choice, saying that “everyone was doing it.” Or they deny that anyone really got hurt, so there really was no crime: “They’re a big company, they can afford to overpay us.”<br><br>*snip*<br><br>All of this isn’t so surprising, actually, when you realize that we like to feel good about ourselves and about those with whom we work, and that our brains have immense talent for producing reasons why we should. People engaged in corruption, the academic researchers suggest, create a kind of psychological atmosphere in which what they’re doing seems normal or even honorable . . .<br><br>*snip*<br><br>But the psychology of rationalization is only part of the story. The other element in all such cases seems to be a chain-like linking together of individual actions that can undermine social norms with surprising speed – or keep them safe, sometimes if just a single person remains strong.<br><br>*snip*<br><br>the fragility of social outcome, its potential sensitivity to the actions of just one person, brings home the profound importance of individual responsibility. Everyone’s actions count. The laws and institutional traditions we have were put in place precisely to help us avoid these social meltdowns, and to give people the incentive not to step over the line, especially when lots of others are doing so already.</em></blockquote><em><br></em>I've done so much snipping above because Buchanan is trying to relate these observations to Bushco scandals, but I think his remarks have much wider generality!<br><p style=\"text-align:right;font-size:10px\">Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Organizational%20Culture\" rel=\"tag\">Organizational Culture</a></p>"
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"content" : "<p>These days, it is fashionable to pluralize things that hitherto could only be understood in the singular sense. So, we can comfortably talk of journalisms, instead journalism, to distinguish between the kind of journalistic practice delivered by a Financial Times columnist and a budding reporter from an under-resourced ethnic minority bi-weekly in New York, USA. It is understandable that we would expect different levels of quality from them, as we would their earnings. Their use of language may also be dictated by their respective house styles and their standing in industry. </p>\n<p>Similarly, we have suddenly become used to Englishes, instead of the English Language. So, we have variations of the Queen’s language in Ghanaian English, Nigerian English, American English and French English: The brand spoken by people from francophone countries, where the definite article ‘The’ is often pronounced, or rather admirably mispronounced ‘Zhe’. The strong affinity that language has with culture often underlies the treatment of the English language in different locations. Register, collocation and pronunciation, differ from location to location, so does the premium we place on the rules of grammar. But English is ‘a definite language’ not ‘an indefinite one’: There are generally accepted standards that must be followed by the pupils of Tweapease LA Primary School, near Asuom in the Eastern region of Ghana, and the students of ST. Andrews University in Britain, where Prince William recently graduated. </p>\n<p>A newspaper columnist in the UK was mindful of the different Englishes when he wrote that the bad copy that had accompanied a piece of advertisement in The Daily Mail, a UK based newspaper, must have been written by a non-native English speaker, ‘probably an African.’ I wrote a rejoinder to the editor, but it was not published, because perhaps, my English was worse than the advertisement copy. So, I was not surprised when the Canadian High Commission in London asked a Ghanaian who holds a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Ghana and a Master of Philosophy degree in Linguistics from Norway, to undertake an IELTS (International English Language Testing System) examination, to prove his English ability. He is presently studying for a PhD at a prestigious London university, but the Commission still finds it necessary to ascertain that his English is good enough to survive as a skilled worker in Canada. </p>\n<p>This PhD student was treated better than me when I took my first job-one of those jobs- in England. My supervisor, a middle aged English widow, placed before me two pens: a blue and a red. She told me there were called pens, and they are tools for writing. She showed me where and when to use the red pen in the customer’s receipt books and when the blue was ideal. The lecture on the pens took about thirty minutes. An hour later, she came to test by knowledge of colours, by asking me to show her the red pen, by picking it up for her to see. She said I was a brilliant lad for getting it right. A week later, I wrote a report on an accident that had taken place at the work place while she was on holiday. She congratulated me on the report, but wondered if I hadn’t copied the language, like a template from another place. When she saw me reading fat law books from then, she grudgingly accepted that I was literate and nearly offered me herself as a present for being a ‘smashing bloke.’ Or may be she did offer herself after all, but I don’t think that is what we are discussing today. Of course, this forum is for adults. </p>\n<p>Last week, two adults on this forum engaged one another in what appeared to be a very interesting ‘linguistic cyber altercation.’ Dr Kwame Okampah-Ahoofe and Miss (I suspect Owura) Nana Ama Obenewaa gave some of us very good English lessons. It was interesting that Ghanaweb readers diverted their attention from the substance of the important issue that Dr Okoampah-Ahoofe had eloquently discussed in his article: Tilting at Windmills, to the rather fantastic use of language by the gentlemen, especially Okoampah. That Okoampah is an accomplished writer, and I would believe, speaker of English, is as incontrovertible as the Christian belief in the second coming of Jesus Christ. I could say that he is one of the best (judging by consistency of style, punctuation and understanding of vocabulary) we have had on the forum for so long. I will not attempt to discuss what is right or wrong about the use of language, because people in London do not trust my knowledge of colours; they will foam at the mouth when they see me writing like a classmate of Noam Chomsky, one of the top three intellectuals in the world; the rest being Umberto Eco and Prof Richard Dawkins of Oxford University. </p>\n<p>The thing with language is that, often when a man dares pick up his pen to comment or correct what others have written, he ends up making a few mistakes of his own. This has happened to me before. There are ‘linguistic Pharisees’ (those who see very far) who are always looking out for English users who suffer any kind of ‘grammatical diarrhea’. As soon as they smell anything foul, they will make you a Sadducee (Sad you see). And they are very unkind: They don’t tell you what to do to cure your diarrhea; they recommend lethal injection, to silence you forever. They revel in floccinaucinihilipilification: The act of contemptuously dismissing something as worthless. Did I mean to say they are ruthless? Then why don’t I use a simpler and more familiar word like ‘ruthless’, instead of this long ‘mega-syllabic’ flo whatever cation. It is, therefore, with great trepidation that I proceed to discuss the following areas of usage in our Ghanaian English. </p>\n<p>So you don’t form the impression that I am too known (self-conceited or a smart aleck), let me start with the mistakes I have made so far in this article. No modern newspaper will publish this. Take a look at my opening paragraph. My second sentence is made up 39 words. Newspapers these days want to preserve space for advertisements, so they want reporters and feature writers to write simple and short sentences. The word advertorial: effective use of space for advertisements and editorial makes sense in media circles. The advertisements, rather than the sale of the paper, are what maintain most media houses. I could cut my words to 27 by saying: We talk of journalisms, instead of journalism, to differentiate a Financial Times columnist from a budding reporter from a poor ethnic minority bi-weekly in New York. Who doesn’t know that New York is in the United States? And what is ‘journalistic practice’? The sentence is about journalism, why repeat it? That is redundancy. 27 words will still be too much for some newspapers. Most papers restrict their word limit to 20, and at worst 32. This is important for the nose (the lead or the opening paragraph). </p>\n<p>Now that I have taken the lead to talk about my own mistakes, let’s turn to other problem areas. Taken the lead, what is that? If two people intend going out and one of them decides to leave the other behind, because he is delaying, we would normally say: I am taking the lead. Well, this is not right. What we mean to say is: I am going ahead. However, if Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson are slugging it out in a 100 meter race, and Ben Johnson comes from behind to overtake Carl, he has taken the lead. This is the correction an English lecturer made when a student said to her girl friend (girlfriend, one word) in front of her office that he was taking the lead. The boy said he was completely ashamed that the lecturer had to correct him in the presence of his girlfriend. </p>\n<p>When do we say somebody is completely ashamed and when do we say he is ashamed? I can’t imagine the comparative and the superlative forms of shame. You can’t only be a little bit pregnant; you are either pregnant or you are not. If you are ashamed, it means you feel disgraced. If you are not ashamed, then you don’t feel any sense of abuse or guilt. I am not comfortable with the prefixes we normally use to indicate the extent of certain feelings. It is just like saying something was completely destroyed. The moment something is destroyed, it means we can’t repair it. If we can repair it, then perhaps it damaged. So the Twin Towers were completely destroyed by the terrorists does not convey a more desperate sense of the destruction than the twin towers were destroyed. Many things come in degrees and sizes. Between a tea spoon (teaspoon, one word) and a table spoon (tablespoon, one word), we have another spoon called dessertspoon. It is comfortable to talk of sizes here than to create a mental picture of an intermediary between complete destruction and ‘moderate’ destruction. </p>\n<p>Several years ago, say 17 or 18, when I was a secondary school boy, I read a letter that a girl had written to her step brother (stepbrother, one word) in my school. The girl had written to advise her brother to forgive her and accept her as a sister, so that the eyes of their enemies will die. This girl’s childish way of representing a thought in English exactly as it would appear in her mother tongue (transliteration) is not as unpardonable as the use of several above. The pronoun Several means not many; more than two, but certainly not as many as 17 or 18. I can’t confirm this, but it will come to your discomfiture to learn that you can only use several when you are talking of a number less than 12. Please don’t quote me on this; I am still checking. </p>\n<p>Of course, I didn’t mean to use discomfiture: shocked and embarrassed. If you didn’t know this, (but I trust that you have always known this), you will only be shocked, not embarrassed. The sentence is also passive: It will come to your discomfiture … Why not use the usually preferred active form: You will be shocked to …..Discomfiture would be the word to use for the boy when he learnt we had discovered that the problem in his family had been caused by his incestuous relationship with his stepsister. What about the use of the adjective childish to describe the girl’s English? Was she being childish or childlike? What is immature about innocently making an English construction sound as terrible as a pornographic film in the Garden of Gethsemane? Is she as innocent as the little girl who asked me to stop eating Chinese fried rice, because I will change into a Chinese? She was really serious about it. ‘Uncle stop, uncle stop’, she said. </p>\n<p>In view of the fact that good English is important in official communication, it is essential that we pay attention to the language we speak. This sentence is sick in many ways. If anybody prefers In view of the fact that to a simple word like Because, then he would welcome the over-wordiness in considerable difficulty, close proximity, final outcome, past history and root cause. As if baptism didn’t mean anything to John the Baptist, we still hear He fell down, revert back and invited guests. When was the last time you saw something that had fallen and was still standing? So why do we say The man fell down? He fell. I would advise all the girls that if a young man came to you saying I have fallen for you, to mean he is interested in you, please do not hesitate to push him down. He is a twit who does not deserve your affections. Marry a baboon instead. </p>\n<p>If I am at guest at a wedding, it means I was invited. If I was not invited but I managed to come all the same, I am still a guest. I am not less of a guest than those who were officially invited. When people, normally MC’s, say Mr. Chairman, invited guests, what exactly are they saying? Do they mean only the guests who were invited or they are referring to everybody apart from the organizers? I would rather goof invited guests than write Attached herewith for your attention and possible consideration. If something is attached, it means it is right here, so why waste our time by saying attached herewith? I would have to attend to something before I can consider it, so why say it is for my attention? I should know that. Once I would consider it, it means the possibility is already established. So what is the use of possible in the sentence? We have all seen or written official letters ending with: Counting on your usual cooperation. This sentence is like Zakeous: He is got the money but something is not right-his height. Instead of going for height-enhancing designer shoes, as ex-president Chiluba of Zambia did, (He was found guilty in a court ruling recently), he climbed a tree. The sentence has no subject. Don’t put a tree in front of the continuous form of the verb counting, just add the pronoun We and the auxiliary verb Are, and we are sure to get cooperation from the recipient. </p>\n<p>May be, you are not happy with me for writing these things, but you see, somebody has got to say it anyhow. Jean Annouil, the French political playwright who adopted the old Sophoclean play: Antigone, knew this when he said: ‘‘What a man can do, a man ought to do.’’ He didn’t say what a man can do very well; he ought to do it well. There are many grammatical errors I have made in this article. If any ‘grammatical Ombudsman’ has already fetched his red pen to paint my mistakes, I have already pleaded guilty. </p>\n<p>We all know English is a difficult language. If I say country (kowntri) instead of (kuntri) and you pretend not to understand what I am saying, because I didn’t pronounce it correctly, then you are just as too known as the teacher who called her student Comfort Antwi as: kumfet Ant wee. The students had noted the teacher’s characteristic way of mispronouncing names, so Comfort pretended she didn’t hear her. After the third try, the teacher came home and pronounced it the Ghanaian way: Komfcct, (c for or) whereupon the student responded: Yes Madam (Maddamm). Who has time to say: `Madem? </p>"
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"title" : "Abbey Lincoln on Abbey Lincoln",
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"content" : "<div align=\"justify\"><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/RlXysRB3o-I/AAAAAAAAAPk/rLNB_w7vjks/s1600-h/Abbey.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_206Vk7BcsTg/RlXysRB3o-I/AAAAAAAAAPk/rLNB_w7vjks/s320/Abbey.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><span style=\"font-size:85%\">A Review of <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Abbey-Sings-Lincoln/dp/B000PC1QNI/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180038629&sr=1-1\">Abbey Sings Abbey </a>(Verve) by Abbey Lincoln<br><br><strong>Abbey On Abbey</strong><br>by Mark Anthony Neal<br><br>“When I’m called home/I will bring a book/That tells of strange and funny turns/And of the heart it took/To keep on living in a world that never was my own/A world of haunted memories of other worlds unknown”—Abbey Lincoln, “When I’m Called Home”<br><br>Abbey Lincoln’s singing never gets any better—but that’s never been the reason we’ve listened to her. From the moment she belted out the opening bars from her debut <em><strong>Affair…Story of a Girl in Love</strong></em>, until she stepped into the studio last fall to record the music for her latest release from Verve, we’ve expected Abbey Lincoln to be the barometer for the failings and vulnerabilities of our own humanities. And yet now well into her 70s, there’s a singular beauty to those once disparaged and now weathered flat tones that mark her as one of the most unique vocalists ever to record. Nearly 35 years since Lincoln first recorded one of her own compositions—after bringing to life the compositions of musical geniuses like Max Roach, Oscar Brown, Jr., Duke Ellington, Kurt Weil and most fabulously Thelonious Monk—</span><a href=\"http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/product.aspx?pid=11684&ob=bf&src=vmg\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">Abbey Sings Abbey</span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\"> finds the vocalist bringing nuance and originality to songs that have long been associated with her.<br><br>Journalist June L’Rue wrote more than 40 years ago that Abbey Lincoln wanted to “sing the kind of songs, which to her, told the most beautiful story of all—that of the American black woman.” (Pittsburgh Courier, May 1961) It would be some time before Lincoln would write those songs, though it was on the album </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Straight-Ahead-Abbey-Lincoln/dp/B000042ODN/ref=sr_1_5/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180038016&sr=1-5\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">Straight Ahead </span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">(1961) that Lincoln began embrace songwriting seriously. Straight Ahead featured a lyrical rendition of Monk’s “Blue Monk”. As the story goes Monk stopped by the studio to give his blessings to the project and whispered in Lincoln’s ear, “don’t be so perfect”. Those were perceptive words for a woman who has never fit comfortably into the expectations often assigned to black women in American society.<br><br>Lincoln was never going to be the willing and able chanteuse—nor the docile and doting romantic and artistic partner, even as the era of Black Power increasingly demanded that black women take their rightful place in support of the men who presumed to be the public voice of black liberation struggles. For a figure like Lincoln that red “Marilyn Monroe” dress she was forced to wear on the cover of <em><strong>Ebony Magazine</strong></em> in June of 1957 was no more suited for her than the dashiki she wore as one of the revolution’s artistic caretakers. Well known is Lincoln’s grating against the wifely expectations that the legendary drummer Max Roach—her former husband and mentor—held out for her. No matter how instrumental Roach was in terms of bringing the former Anna Marie Wooldridge into political consciousness—and Lincoln readily acknowledges his role in this regard—Roach was limited in his capacity to provide Lincoln with the fertile artistic environment where she could speak more forcefully to her experiences as a women. So Lincoln turned inward and improvised her way through nearly two-decades of life, recording sporadically on independent labels as was the case with her now classic </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Naturally-Abbey-Lincoln/dp/B000GDI25Q/ref=sr_1_12/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180038016&sr=1-12\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">People in Me </span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">(1973) and </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Sun-Abbey-Lincoln/dp/B000005C7H/ref=sr_1_22/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180038016&sr=1-22\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">Talking to the Sun </span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">(1983).<br><br>Lincoln reemerged as a commercial artist in 1990 with </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/World-Falling-Down-Abbey-Lincoln/dp/B0000047AP/ref=sr_1_17/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180038016&sr=1-17\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">The World is Falling Down</span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">, her first for the Verve label. The bulk of the music she has recorded over the span of 8 recordings has been her own. In contrast some clichéd notion of writing from a black women’s perspective, Lincoln’s music over the past 15 years is about a more nuanced centering of black women’s intellect and creativity. For black women artists the stakes are much higher as Farah Jasmine Griffin suggests in her book </span><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/If-You-Cant-Free-Mystery/dp/0345449738/ref=sr_1_4/002-1985178-2152859?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180038408&sr=1-4\"><span style=\"font-size:85%\">If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday</span></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">: “Since the earliest days of our nation black women were thought to be incapable of possessing genius; their achievements were considered the very opposite of intellectual accomplishment…Black women, in particular, were body feeling, emotion and sexuality” (14).<br><br>Unlike her previous recordings <em><strong>Abbey Sings Abbey</strong></em> prominently features instruments—the pedal steel guitar, mandolin and National resonator guitar—normally associated with American roots music. Such instruments were critical in helping vocalist Cassandra Wilson gain a larger audience more than a decade ago when she joined the Blue Note label. The overall impact here on <em><strong>Abbey Sings Abbey</strong></em> is to suggest that Lincoln’s music is quintessential Americana, which of course can be extended to Monk’s “Blue Monk” which opens the new disc. As such a track like “The World is Falling Down” comes off as a universal anthem that finds resonance in rising fuel prices, rising healthcare costs and lowered expectation for elected officials and corporate media outlets.<br><br>Lincoln has always been at her best when she allows herself to be musically allured by the isolation that has companioned much of her adult life. On <strong><em>Abbey Sings Abbey</em></strong>, the haunting “Bird Alone” seems to speak to a longing for the very loneliness that the “bird alone” embodies. The same can be said for the metaphoric space that is “Down Here Below” as Lincoln sings “Through the weary night/I pray my soul will find me shining/In the morning/Down here below.” Listening to the joyous “The Merry Dancer”, one gets a glimpse of the girlhood that Lincoln has long left behind, but which the spirit of often makes an appearance as in the funky “Glenda” hats that nearly always adorn Lincoln’s head.<br><br>Farah Jasmine Griffin writes of Lincoln that “Perhaps Lincoln’s greatest creation has been herself”. Lincoln speaks to that reality on the poignant “Being Me” which closes <strong><em>Abbey Sings Abbey</em></strong>. As Lincoln sings, “It wasn’t always easy learning to be me/Sometimes my heart and head would disagree…Being me, I dared to be myself alone.”(190). But as the legions of Abbey Lincoln fans will attest, Lincoln has never really ever been alone—except in her role as one of the most unique artistic spirits of the last half-century. <strong><em>Abbey Sings Abbey</em></strong> is a fitting tribute to the woman’s genius.</span><br><br></div>"
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"title" : "A Content Repository API for Rich, Semantic Web Applications?",
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"content" : "<p></p>\n\n<p>I've been working with roll-your-own content repositories long enough to know that open standards are long overdue.</p>\n\n<p>The slides for my Semantic Technology Conference 2007 <a href=\"http://www.semantic-conference.com/2007/sessions/r3.html\">session</a> are up: <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/files/stc07/GRDDL-XML-CMS.odp\">"Tools for the Next Generation of CMS: XML, \nRDF, & GRDDL"</a> (Open Office) and <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/files/stc07/GRDDL-XML-CMS.ppt\">(Power point)</a></p>\n\n<p>This afternoon, I merged documentation of the 4Suite repository from <em>old</em> bits (and some new) into a <a href=\"http://notes.4suite.org/Repository\">Wiki</a> that I hope to contribute to (every now and then). <br>\nI think there is plenty of mature, supporting material upon which a canon of best practices for XML/RDF CMSes can be written, with normative dependencies on:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>GRDDL </li>\n<li>XProc</li>\n<li>Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One</li>\n<li>URI RFCs</li>\n<li>Rich Web Application Backplane</li>\n<li>XML / XML Base / XML Infoset</li>\n<li>RDDL</li>\n<li>XHTML 1.0</li>\n<li>SPARQL / Versa (RDF querying)</li>\n<li>XPath 2.0 (JSR 283 restriction) with 1.0 'fallback'</li>\n<li>HTTP 1.0/1.1, ACL-based HTTP Basic / Digest authentication, and a <a href=\"http://notes.4suite.org/Repository#head-86da1d0e3e8657a35d0aea2ffd398832e1033b00\">convention</a> for Web-based XSLT invokation</li>\n<li>Document/graph-level ACL granularity</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The things that are missing:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>RDF equivalent of DOM Level 3 (transactional, named graphs, connection management, triple <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/#defn_TriplePattern\">patterns</a>, ... ) with events.</li>\n<li>A mature RIF (there is always SWRL, Notation 3, and <a href=\"http://code.google.com/p/python-dlp\">DLP</a>) as a framework for SW expert systems (and \n<a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2005-08-22/a_sentient_semistructured_repository\">sentient</a> resource management)</li>\n<li>A RESTful service <a href=\"http://plasmasturm.org/log/460/\">description</a> to complement the current WSDL/SOAP <a href=\"http://cvs.4suite.org/viewcvs/4Suite/Ft/Server/Server/Http/Soap/Handler.py?view=markup\">one</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>For a RESTful service description, <a href=\"http://www.markbaker.ca/2003/05/RDF-Forms/\">RDF Forms</a> can be employed to describe transport semantics (to \n<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-scenarios/#xform_use_case\">help</a> with Agent autonomy), or a mapping to the Atom Publishing \n<a href=\"http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-14.txt\">Protocol</a> (and a thus a subset of GData) can be written.</p>\n\n<p>In my session, I emphasized how closely JSR 283 <a href=\"http://notes.4suite.org/Repository/JSR283Overlap\">overlaps</a> with the 4Suite Repository API.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://notes.4suite.org/Repository/JSR283Overlap?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=4suite-jsr-283-overlap.jpg\" border=\"0\"></p>\n\n<p>The delta between them mostly has to do with RDF, other additional XML processing specifications (XUpdate, XInclude, etc.), ACL-based HTTP authentication (basic, and sessions), HTTP/XSLT bindings, \nand other miscellaneous bells and whistles</p>"
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"title" : "The Architectural Style of a Simple Interlingua",
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"content" : "<p></p>\n\n<p>It just occurred to me that there is a strong correlation between the hardest nuance to get (or grok, as the saying goes) about REST and RDF.</p>\n\n<p>With RDF, there is the pervasive Clay Shirky misconception that the semantic web is about one large-ontology-to rule-them-all. I've made it a point \nto start every semantic web-related presentation with some background information about Knowledge Representation (yes, that snow-covered relic of the \nAI winter). <img src=\"http://www.lisperati.com/tellstuff/triangle.png\" alt=\"Knowledge Representation Triangle\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:left;padding:10px\"> My favorite initial read on the \nsubject is <a href=\"http://www.tellstuff.com/\">\"How To Tell Stuff To A Computer - The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation\"</a>. As a \nfollow-up, I'd suggest <a href=\"http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/ftp/psz/k-rep.html\">\"What is a Knowledge Representation?\"</a> .</p>\n\n<p>The thing that we miss (or forget) most often is that formal <em>knowledge representations</em> are first about a common syntax (and their \ninterpretation: semantics) and then about the vocabularies you build with the common syntax. A brief read on the history of knowledge representation \nemphasizes this subtle point. At each point in the progression, the knowledge representation becomes more expressive or sophisticated but the \nmasonry is the same.</p>\n\n<p>With RDF, first there is the RDF abstract syntax, and then there are the vocabularies (RDFS,OWL,FOAF,DC,SKOS,etc..). Similarly (but more \nrecursively), a variety of grammars can each be written to define a distinct class of XML documents all via the same language (RELAX NG, for \ninstance). An Application Programming Interface (API) defines a common dialect for a variety applications to communicate with. And, finally, the \nREST architectural style defines a uniform interface for <em>services</em>, to which a variety of messages (HTTP messages) conform.</p>\n\n<p>In each case, it is simplicity that is the secret catalyst. The RDF abstract syntax is nowhere as expressive as Horn Logic or Description Logic \n(this is the original motivation for DAML+OIL and OWL), but it is this limitation that makes it useful as a simple metadata framework. RELAX NG is \n(deceptively) much simpler than W3C XML Schema (syntactically), but its simple syntax makes it much more malleable for XML grammar contortions and \neasier to understand. The REST architectural style is dumbfounding in its simplicity (compared to WS-*) but it is this simple uniformity that scales \nso well to accommodate every nature of messaging between remote components. In addition, classes of such messages are \n<a href=\"http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/2007/05/29/rest-wadl-forest-trees/\">trivial</a> to describe.</p>\n\n<p>So then, the various best practices in the Semantic Web canon (content negotiated vocabulary addresses, http-range14, linked data, etc..) and those \nin the REST architectural style are really manifestations of the same principle in two different arenas: knowledge representation and network \nprotocols?</p>"
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"title" : "Hunting stories",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/wp-content/photos/tintin.JPG\" alt=\"Tintin in Africa\"><br>\n<small>From the cover illustration of <em>Tintin au Congo</em>, reproduced in many a Belgian home in Kinshasa today</small></p>\n<p>Yesterday, at an impromptu outdoor salon in Hampstead, I met my first Congolese barkless dog, more correctly known as a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basenji\" title=\"Wikipedia entry\">Basenji</a>. A close personal friend of the dog told me that it never barks, but has been known to yodel. Carvings of Basenji appear in Egyptian tombs, and they used to be popular hunting dogs in the Congo. I don’t imagine many are left there now, but here is an <a href=\"http://www.basenji.org/african/burn37.htm\" title=\"The Basenji Club of America African Stock Project\">account of a hunt</a> by an Englishwoman visiting ‘the interior’ in 1937:</p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<em>At the end of the dry season, the natives burn whole tracts of bush - strictly forbidden by the State - to round up game. The excitement - and, I may add, the danger - is great. Imagine the roar and crackle of mighty flame. Terrified game - antelope, bush pig, wild fowl, not to mention snakes - rushing out from the advancing inferno - unclad, gleaming figures of shouting, gesticulating natives! Old flintlock guns going off with ear-splitting bangs! Arrows flying, and everywhere, little red dogs, darting hither and thither, adding more excitement to the scene. They will follow up wounded game for miles, and pull it down, holding it until the hunter catches up. As they run mute, they wear little wooden gourds, tied round their loins, filled with pebbles, which rattle, so that their masters can follow them through the tall elephant grass.</em> </p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Six years earlier, Hergé published his second Tintin book, <em>Tintin au Congo</em>, in which the young reporter (who brought his own dog) has lots of fun on safari, blasting away at the wildlife and even, believe it or not, dynamiting a rhino. Hergé apparently based much of the book on travelogues by contemporary European explorers of Africa.</p>\n<p>In last week’s <a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528fa_fact_lane\" title=\"sadly the full article is not available online, but check out their new website\">New Yorker</a>, Anthony Lane described <em>Tintin au Congo</em> as ‘an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness’. Hergé was subsequently embarrassed enough (and perhaps freer of the influence of Wallez, his employer) to tone down the colonialist fervour for a new colour edition in 1946. For example, in the later version, Tintin teaches the locals the joys of <a href=\"http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/books/02congo.html\" title=\"2+2, anyone?\">extremely simple arithmetic</a> instead of the wonders of Belgian rule. But the renowned illustrator remained reluctant to discuss this particular adventure, and it seems that his publishers and most of his fans would prefer to forget about it altogether.</p>\n<p>There is no chance of doing that in Kinshasa, however, where street-traders still do a brisk trade in reproductions of the front cover and elaborate carvings of the Tintin’s jeep.\n</p>\n<div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=3RuZuPqL\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=3RuZuPqL\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=JssBh3AS\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=JssBh3AS\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=BDr6gcl1\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=BDr6gcl1\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div>"
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"title" : ""The More Information the Better"?",
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"content" : "Take a look at BARRY MEIER's May 23, 2007 NYT article "For Drug Makers, a Downside to Full Disclosure." It's about how GlaxoSmithKline made drug study data available online as a part of the settlement of a lawsuit from a few years back. The "story" of the article is that a scientist stumbled on the data, analyzed it, discovered that a drug posed a health threat, and published the results. This"
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"title" : "Turf Maintainance",
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"content" : "<p>The L-Curve model would have us pack the entire US population onto a football field, 44 people per square inch. In the center of the field the 2 inch high turf represents the median income. Society cares for the lawn: prisons to the left, schools to right. California <a href=\"http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL&o=1\">for example</a>.<br>\n<img alt=\"Prison Funding v.s. Higher Ed\" src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/mn_spending.jpg\"></p>\n<p>Less than <a href=\"http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/worldbrief/north_america_records.php?code=190\">1%</a> of the American population is in prison, while over the age of 18 <a href=\"http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2005.html\">6%</a> are enrolled in school\n</p>"
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"title" : "Enterprise vs. Consumer: IBM’s false distinction",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/04/why-ibms-steve-mills-should-be-like-king-canute/\">James Govenor of RedMonk observes that the tide is changing in the software industry</a>. Where many have viewed Web 2.0 as simply eye candy or a different class of applications for consumers, James cuts right to the heart and soberly declares that IBM is on the path to loosing a software battle much like they lost the PC hardware battle. I concur.</p>\n<p>At IBM, we systemically divide “consumer” and “enterprise”. Our entire culture, everything from sales (pricing of services, hardware, and software and incentive structure) to services to product group to research, focuses on what IBM claims they know best…the enterprise. And we’ve been very successful. But there is no way we are ready for an ecomony where micropayments are king. 2 cents a transaction? Sales won’t touch an engagment unless it is in the millions.</p>\n<p>But what about emerging economies? I don’t mean emerging countries. I’m talking about Web 2.0. Om Malik is quoted saying “On this Web 2.0 highway, there are three exits: Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.” Where is IBM? Well, have we completely positioned ourselves out of the consumer business? Are there enough experts or thought leaders in this space at IBM to make a splash?</p>\n<p>If Web 2.0 means anything to me it is that consumers are demanding convergence. IBM may get paid by enterprise customers, but who pays IBM’s customers? In a time where IBM’s customers’ customers are demanding a digital lifestyle to follow them wherever they go, IBM seems to be raising barriers of entry to new customers and potential community members. Increasing complexity for the sake of complexity to win over service agreements.</p>\n<p>Further, with the lure of next-gen frameworks such as <a href=\"http://www.djangoproject.com/\">Django</a> and <a href=\"http://www.rubyonrails.org/\">Rails</a>, smaller shops are more effective. This may be a blip on IBM’s radar right now, but what really matters is what what is the favored tools of college kids. I’ve heard many call this class of developers and their tools “toys”. </p>\n<p>True, nobody got fired for buying IBM, but in this emerging economy, will we be in position to be bought?</p>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/wd40.jpg\" alt=\"WD-40\"></p>\n<p><a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/\">Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah</a> kindly sent me a link to <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2007/05/friction/\">this article by Ben Hyde</a>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>I once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users. Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit. That wasn’t the case two decades ago.</p>\n<p>…</p>\n<p>Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones. So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms. Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.</p>\n<p>I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating. This is at the heart of what you’re doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free… In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two countervailing forces are at work. One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it. Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp and increase the friction. On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction. That more rather than less transactions would take place.</p></blockquote>\n<p>The idea of ‘process friction’ which is especially pertinent as applied to architectures of control. Simply, if you design a process to be difficult to carry out, fewer people will complete it, since - just as with frictional forces in a mechanical system - energy (whether real or metaphorical) is lost by the user at each stage. </p>\n<p>This is perhaps obvious, but is a good way to think about systems which are designed to prevent users carrying out certain tasks which might otherwise be easy - from copying music or video files, to sleeping on a park bench. Just as friction (brakes) can stop or slow down a car which would naturally roll down a hill under the force of gravity, so friction (DRM, or other architectures of control) attempts to stop or slow down the tendency for information to be copied, or for people to do what they do naturally. Sometimes the intention is actually to <em>stop</em> the proscribed behaviour (e.g. an <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/05/12/the-anti-sit-archives/\">anti-sit device</a>); other times the intention is to <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/12/22/some-more-architectures-of-control-for-traffic-management#pinchpoints\">force users to slow down</a> or <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/12/30/limiting-frequency-of-cigarette-use/\">think about what they’re doing</a>. </p>\n<p>From a designer’s point of view, there are far more examples where reducing friction in a process is more important than introducing it deliberately. In a sense, <em>is this what usability is?</em>. Affordances are more valuable than <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/10/22/disaffordances-and-engineering-obedience/\">disaffordances</a>, hence the comparative rarity of architectures of control in design, but also why they stand out so much as frustrating or irritating. </p>\n<p>The term <em><a href=\"http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/people_are_impatient.cfm\">cognitive friction</a></em> is more specific than general ‘process friction’, but still very much relevant - as explained on the <a href=\"http://www.cognitivefriction.net/\">Cognitive Friction blog</a>: </p>\n<blockquote><p>Cognitive Friction is a term first used by <a href=\"http://www.cooper.com/\">Alan Cooper</a> in his book <em>The Inmates are Running the Asylum</em>, where he defines it like this:</p>\n<p> “It is the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem permutes.”</p>\n<p>In other words, when our tools manifest complex behaviour that does not fit our expectations, the result can be very frustrating. </p></blockquote>\n<p>Going back to the Ben Hyde article, the use of the temperature descriptions is interesting - he equates cooling with <em>increasing</em> the friction, making it more difficult to get things done (similarly to the idea of <a href=\"http://www.chillingeffects.org/\">chilling effects</a>), whereas my instinctive reaction would be the opposite (heat is often energy lost due to friction, hence a ‘hot’ system, rather than a cold system, is one more likely to have excessive friction in it - I see many architectures of control as, essentially, wasting human effort and creating entropy). </p>\n<p>But I can see the other view equally well: after all, lubricating oils work better when warmed to reduce their viscosity, and ‘cold welds’ are an important subject of tribological research. Perhaps the best way to look at it is that, just as getting into a shower that’s too hot or too cold is uncomfortable, so a system which is not at the expected ‘temperature’ is also uncomfortable for the user.\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p>From <a href=\"http://www.indepundit.com/archive2/2007/04/courage.html#\" title=\"on courage\">Mr Smash</a>, something to remember these days:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Courage is not the absence of fear. To the contrary, courage involves recognizing danger, but acting on the realization that danger must be confronted — or it will find you when you are least prepared.</p></blockquote>\n<p>So many things in life scare us, so many people prey on our fears. Politicians give us fear as justification, cowards use fear to restrain us, we use fear to avoid living.</p>\n<p>The coward strikes at those he perceives as weak, hides under words and justifications, uses lies and tantrums, ignores the rights of others, and retreats under walls of hate and self-righteousness.</p>\n<p>Courage is simpler, harder, nobler.</p>"
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"title" : "Making Network Neutrality Sustainable: SMART Letter #100",
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"content" : "<span style=\"font-family:monospace\">After 14+ Months, a new SMART Letter! -- David I<br></span>-------<span style=\"font-family:monospace\"><br></span>!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()<br>------------------------------------------------------------<br> SMART Letter #100 - May 29, 2007<br> Some Rights Reserved by Creative Commons License<br> isen.com - \"Still Stupid After All These Years\"<br> isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com<br>********* isen.blog at http://isen.com/blog *********<br>------------------------------------------------------------<br>!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()<p></p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">CONTENTS</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Quote of Note: Paul Romer<br>A Word to the SMART<br>Creating Sustainable Network Neutrality<br>Will there be More SMART Letters?<br>Creative Commons License Notice<br>Administrivia<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">QUOTE OF NOTE: PAUL ROMER</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\"> \"Human history teaches us . . . that economic<br> growth springs from better recipes, not just<br> from more cooking . . . every generation has<br> underestimated the potential for finding new<br> recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to<br> grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered<br> . . . possibilities do not merely add up;<br> they multiply.\"</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Paul Romer, Stanford Professor of Economics, \"Economic Growth\"<br>in Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, David R. Henderson, ed.,<br>2007.<br>http://tinyurl.com/yanwb3 [.pdf]<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">A WORD TO THE SMART</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">SMART People,</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Ten years ago on Memorial Day weekend, I wrote \"The Rise of<br>The Stupid Network.\" It was a fortunate crystallization of why<br>this new Internet thingy was so much better than previous<br>networks. At the time, though, I missed an important fact,<br>that the Internet was disruptive technology. Clayton<br>Christensen's book, _The Innovator's Dilemma_ had not yet<br>appeared. I mistakenly compared the Internet to the Boeing 757<br>and the next Intel CPU. Boy was that a blind spot! <br>Fortunately, Don Norman had read an early Christensen draft;<br>he wrote immediately to point out my mistake. My subsequent<br>writings have profited from Christensen's new meta-recipe.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Telcos took longer to apprehend the discontinuity. When the<br>New York Times announced, \"Long Distance Telephone Calls Are<br>Coming Soon to the Internet\" on March 14, 1995, the monster<br>stirred. The Chairman of AT&T came down to Bell Labs -- for<br>the first and only time, to my knowledge! The Chairman, like<br>the sailing captain who \"got\" steam power so he put a steam<br>engine on his foredeck to raise the anchor, left reassured<br>that Bell Labs could do Internet telephony too. Yawn, back to<br>work.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In the early 2000s, the carriers finally grasped that the<br>discontinuous nature of the Internet threatens their own<br>continuance. Gradually they mounted a fight for survival. <br>It was couched in terms of competition. (Ironically, the<br>telephone companies never learned marketplace competition!) <br>Carriers saw the Internet not as a grand new invention, not as<br>a social benefit, not as a Petri dish of innovation, but as a<br>competitor that could destroy them. As long as the Internet<br>did telephony without special-purpose telephone networks and<br>video without special-purpose cable TV networks, they were<br>right. The Internet indeed has the potential to destroy the<br>business entities the carriers perceive themselves to be. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Today's struggle over Network Neutrality embodies what I've<br>been saying in my stump speech for the last five years:<br> Netheads want to change the telcos and cablecos<br> to preserve the Internet.<br> Carriers want to change the Internet<br> to preserve themselves.<br>If the carriers win, (a) the citizens of carrier-land will be<br>poorer and less free, and (b) countries where carriers do not<br>control policy will, per hypothesis, leap ahead. Neither (a)<br>nor (b) will be stable outcomes. If we win, we must figure<br>out how to get Internet services without today's legacy<br>carriers; a more sustainable outcome and a job I think we<br>already know how to do. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The battlefield is a chasm. Small steps will not get us to the<br>other side. My essay below is my attempt to explain why this<br>is so. Ten years after The Stupid Network, we've made Network<br>Neutrality a household word. I've tried to write down what<br>SMART People must understand next.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">David I<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">CREATING SUSTAINABLE NETWORK NEUTRALITY<br>by David S. Isenberg, May 29, 2007</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Executive Summary: Network Neutrality<br>as currently conceived requires changes<br>in carrier behavior that are contrary to<br>their corporate culture and business model,<br>so we can expect their active opposition<br>even after Network Neutrality becomes law. <br>If carrier resistance prevails, the<br>Internet stands to lose its key success<br>factor. The Network Neutrality movement<br>can learn from history; the demise of<br>Unbundled Network Elements (UNEs) and the<br>ensuing collapse of telephone and Internet<br>competition provides an parallel. <br>The solution is strategy that is more<br>ambitious and more patient, that addresses<br>industry structure rather than carrier<br>behavior.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Network Neutrality Movement vs. Carriers</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">I'm proud to be part of the Network Neutrality movement, which<br>raised the prohibition of, \"any service that privileges,<br>degrades or prioritizes any packet . . . based on its source,<br>ownership or destination,\" from an unknown issue in 2005 to a<br>cause célèbre in 2006. It achieved this victory despite a<br>press blackout so complete that Project Censored named Network<br>Neutrality its #1 most under-reported story of 2006! The<br>Network Neutrality movement is leading a struggle for the<br>Internet's essence; the Internet would not be the everyday<br>necessity it is today, or hold promise for tomorrow, if it<br>were not neutral.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">At the same time, I've grown concerned that Network Neutrality<br>rules and regulations based on constraining carrier behavior<br>are not sustainable as long as the carriers -- the telephone,<br>cable and mobile companies -- whose behavior these rules would<br>constrain, continue to operate according to their legacy<br>business model. And I've seen signs that some of the Network<br>Neutrality movement's leaders don't seem to take account of<br>how the carriers' vertically integrated business model and<br>special-purpose networks have shaped carrier culture. Just as<br>understanding the cultures of Iraq might have guided the U.S.<br>to a different course there, so might understanding the legacy<br>that motivates telephone, cable and cellular companies help us<br>make a neutral Internet sustainable.<br><br>The task is urgent, because as I write carriers are trialing a<br>new infrastructure called Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)<br>that will embed discrimination in their entire Internet access<br>infrastructure. When IMS is deployed, it will effectively<br>prevent the return to a neutral Internet. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">However, before I launch into this exploration of carrier<br>culture, carrier business models and how we can make the<br>Internet's neutrality stable and lasting, let me clearly<br>emphasize two things, lest my message be distorted by Network<br>Neutrality's opponents:<br>1. Network Neutrality as currently conceived is a good thing<br>and an important step forward.<br>2. The leaders of the Network Neutrality movement are heroes<br>who have devoted their careers to the creation of good<br>technology policy and who made miracles in 2006.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">How Carriers Understand the Internet Threat</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In the waning hours of 2006, during the FCC'S negotiations on<br>AT&T's merger with BellSouth, Network Neutrality advocates<br>fought hard and won several very important concessions. <br>However, in post-negotiation discussions, they adopted a<br>\"talking point\" to the effect that Network Neutrality would<br>not hurt the giant merged telephone company's business<br>interests. One of the movement's negotiators said, \"The<br>conditions placed on this merger will show irrefutably that<br>Network Neutrality and phone company profits are not mutually<br>exclusive." Another said, "The fact that AT&T reported nearly<br>$2 billion in profits, up 17% from a year ago, double-digit<br>growth in earnings per share, growth in residential lines<br>should put to rest any concerns that Network Neutrality<br>requirements will harm AT&T's growth now or in the future."<br>http://www.savetheinternet.com/=press15<br>http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/804</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">At best, the talking point is inaccurate, because we have not<br>yet seen systematic Internet Discrimination or its effects on<br>carrier profits, but I think it points to deeper<br>misunderstanding. Carriers don't spend $1.5 million a week as<br>they did in 2006 lobbying against Network Neutrality unless<br>they believe they will be harmed by it! I think the carriers'<br>belief is correct; Network Neutrality rules strong enough to<br>keep the Internet neutral will indeed weaken their business. <br>(I don't think that's a bad thing provided we can figure out<br>other ways to provide Internet access.) I've been saying for<br>a decade that the Internet is incompatible with telephone<br>companies in their current form http://isen.com/stupid.html. <br>Then I warned (with David Weinberger) that there's an<br>untenable paradox when carriers that are built on a legacy of<br>special-purpose networks sell plain, neutral Internet<br>connectivity http://netparadox.com . In 2002, many of my<br>colleagues and I wrote to the FCC urging that it should avoid<br>propping up incumbent carriers and let them fail fast so new,<br>more Internet compatible operating models might emerge<br>http://www.netparadox.com/fccletter.html. The conclusion of<br>this work for carriers is that the neutral, stupid, end-to-end<br>Internet is such disruptive technology that they must denature<br>it or face the risk that it could weaken them and ultimately<br>put them out of business.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">A decade ago the big telephone companies were complacent about<br>the Internet. Now they see Internet applications beginning to<br>have revenue impact on their core businesses. Skype, for<br>example, is an Internet telephony application that is capable<br>of better voice quality than telephony, with useful features<br>impossible for a conventional telephone company to deploy. It<br>isn't tied to the telephone company's network and it can run<br>on any Internet connection. In a similar manner, video<br>applications such as Vuze provide disruptive Internet<br>alternatives to conventional cable-based video services, and<br>wi-fi appliances using Voice over Internet Protocol promise to<br>disrupt the mobile telephony sector.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In the early 2000s carriers began to understand the threat. <br>Carrier executives started speaking publicly about it several<br>years before Ed Whitacre's famous complaint about how popular<br>Internet applications are using \"his pipes\" for free. In<br>2003, for example, AT&T CEO Dave Dorman complained, "Email is<br>a feature that nobody pays for,\" and called for the<br>restoration of \"network resident\" applications.<br>http://isen.com/archives/030818.html Coincidentally, 2003<br>marked the first of three carrier milestones that rolled back<br>their obligations to provide a neutral Internet. These were<br>the FCC triennial order of 2003 (which lightened key public<br>obligations on the installers of local access fiber), the<br>Supreme Court's Brand X decision in 2005 (which lightened many<br>public obligations of cable owners) and the subsequent FCC DSL<br>order (which lightened the public obligations of DSL<br>providers).</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Viewed against these milestones, Network Neutrality is a come-<br>from-behind tactical reaction that only arose after the legacy<br>of common carrier obligations had been hollowed out, after<br>critical distinctions between infrastructure and information,<br>carriage and content, and basic and enhanced services had been<br>defined into fragmentary meaninglessness, and after the<br>competition envisioned as better than government regulation by<br>the Telecom Act of 1996 had devolved to a grunch of giants.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Accordingly, we need more than legal policy if a neutral<br>Internet is to endure. We must address the non-neutrality of<br>the carriers' technological infrastructure, core business<br>model and, indeed, their self-concept. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The Carrier Business Model</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Carriers are slow to act, but once they do, they're<br>relentless. Their next step, the introduction of Internet<br>Discrimination, is likely to take a decade, maybe two. It is<br>an economic imperative to them. Discrimination is built into<br>the special-purpose networks that are the foundation of their<br>business model.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">For 130 years, if you wanted telephony on a telephone network,<br>you used the telephone company's telephony application. There<br>were no alternatives. Application discrimination was<br>automatic. Now, in contrast, on a neutral Internet connection<br>you can run Skype or Vonage or Gizmo or CallVantage or dozens<br>of other Internet telephony applications. But on Verizon's<br>conventional telephone network you can only run Verizon<br>telephony. These facts may seem obvious, but they're<br>important because tying the application to the underlying<br>network is the cornerstone of the carrier business model. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In other words, until the Internet arrived, carriers have<br>always sold the application and used application revenues to<br>operate the underlying special-purpose network. So, for<br>example, a cable company's core business is selling video<br>entertainment it chooses rather than connectivity, via its<br>cable, to anything, including other video entertainment! The<br>Internet breaks the special-purpose network based carrier<br>business model.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Carrier executives are now scared. In private, when I talk<br>about Network Neutrality with them, they talk about capital<br>expenditure, incomplete amortization, the loss of traditional<br>customers and the growing strength of application-based<br>competitors.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">It is extremely difficult for established companies to adopt a<br>new business model. It is not clear how companies build<br>successful new business models in the first place, but Eric<br>Beinhocker in The Origins of Wealth suggests that successful<br>models may come more from trial and error than from insight<br>and intent. Clayton Christiansen's Innovator's Dilemma<br>describes how businesses actively suppress innovation; at<br>budget time when there's a decision between improving an<br>established product or developing a young, risky, marginally<br>profitable one, it's a no-brainer. In addition, Robert<br>Jackall, in his study corporate culture published as Moral<br>Mazes, observes that under Management by Objective, bottom-up<br>innovation causes pain for one's boss, which, in turn, reduces<br>one's promotability with predictable effects on innovation. <br>In all cases, the larger the change, the more likely that<br>change will be suppressed. A new business model based on a<br>nondiscriminatory Internet would be difficult and risky at<br>best.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Carriers see themselves as providers of telephony, video<br>entertainment and mobile telephony. These applications have<br>shaped their corporate culture, their way of doing business<br>and their physical infrastructure. Carriers see Internet<br>access as a new, supplemental business. They see their road to<br>profitability paved by Internet Discrimination, because<br>Internet Discrimination casts the Internet in terms that are<br>congruent with their historical, established business model. <br>So the carriers are intent on rolling back the legal<br>prohibitions against Internet Discrimination.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In addition, they're developing and testing a new network<br>architecture that tracks packets across the network and<br>enables differential packet-by- packet treatment and charging.<br>It is called Internet Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS. IMS is to<br>be the technological realization of the carriers' plan to cast<br>the Internet in terms consistent with their legacy business<br>model. Indeed, IMS will only have value to them if Internet<br>Discrimination is legal.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The Lesson of Unbundled Network Elements</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Network Neutrality advocates should learn from history about<br>how the carriers work. Take, for example, their persistent<br>campaign to neutralize the idea of Unbundled Network Elements<br>(UNEs). UNEs were created under the Telecom Act of 1996 to<br>enable new competition. Specifically, the problem UNEs were<br>created to solve was that a new Competitive Local Exchange<br>Company (CLEC) or facilities-based Internet Service Provider<br>(ISP) that wanted its own network would need a massive chunk<br>of capital, then a period of network construction, before<br>seeing revenue dollar #1. So UNE rules were introduced<br>whereby incumbent telcos (ILECs) would make elements of their<br>network (elements such as local loop, switching, etc.)<br>available to new CLECs at prices that would allow these new<br>companies to offer services and earn revenues from them.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The theory was that new CLECs would build their own physical<br>network facilities gradually as business revenues grew. The<br>ILECs owed their success to their privileged role as a<br>monopoly with guaranteed profits because they provided a<br>public good, rather than to technological superiority or<br>competitive prowess. So the framers of the 1996 Act saw UNEs<br>as a reasonable way to re-distribute that public good to<br>introduce competition.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The ILECs saw UNEs differently. UNEs were against their<br>interests. UNEs enabled their competitors. Thus the ILECs<br>framed UNE's as an unfair taking of their private property. <br>And they behaved accordingly.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The ILEC influence on initial UNE rules was so heavy that even<br>AT&T, then a long-distance-only company, was not able to<br>launch a viable UNE- based local telephony business. The<br>conditions under which the ILECs were to offer UNEs (known in<br>the trade as \"necessary and impair\") were sufficiently<br>ambiguous as to be subject to endless litigation. An ILEC<br>could simply out- lawyer, out-appeal and out-wait new<br>entrants. Hundreds of small CLECs (here CLEC includes<br>facilities-based Internet Service Providers, or ISPs) sprang<br>up between 1996 and 2000 planning to use UNEs to offer network<br>services and grow. Virtually all of them went out of business<br>over the following few years as the entire UNE concept was<br>worn away by a constant trickle of seemingly minor technical<br>FCC and court decisions.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The ILECs survived even as they continued to complain that<br>they were selling \"their\" network elements, \"below cost.\" <br>They had other fiscal troubles due to (a) the rapid adoption<br>of dial-up Internet access, (b) the equally rapid abandonment<br>of dial-up Internet access as customers switched to cable and<br>then DSL too, (c) a parallel adoption and abandonment of fax<br>machines, and (d) the rapid shift to mobile phones. The ILECs<br>were left battered but standing. The CLECs were wiped out. <br>In the end, some two trillion dollars in market capitalization<br>was destroyed.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">UNEs were not the only cause of the CLECs' demise, to be<br>sure. Overspending, irrational exuberance, bad growth<br>projections, ILEC-friendly regulators, incompetent management<br>and even criminal behavior played a role. But the demise of<br>UNEs was a major and under-recognized strategic means of<br>influence.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">In 2003, the FCC essentially eliminated UNE rules for<br>broadband networks. The competition envisioned by the Telecom<br>Act of 1996 was dead.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">When Network Neutrality Dies</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">There is a clear parallel between UNEs and Network<br>Neutrality. Like Network Neutrality, UNEs were envisioned as<br>a fair, public-spirited means of ensuring competition. Both<br>ideas are actively opposed by the telcos because they are<br>contrary to their business interests. In other words, just as<br>the telcos saw UNEs as using \"their\" infrastructure to enable<br>their competitors, so do telcos and cablecos see Network<br>Neutrality as enabling application providers to offer \"their\"<br>applications. Like UNEs, Network Neutrality is, at inception,<br>already a weak compromise, and like UNEs, we can be sure that<br>the telcos will exploit every ambiguity, litigate every \"and,\"<br>\"but\" and comma, in every Network Neutrality rule and<br>regulation, and will not rest until Network Neutrality has<br>been rendered totally ineffective.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Then, just as the demise of UNEs spurred the collapse of the<br>entire CLEC sector, so would the collapse of Network<br>Neutrality gut the now- vibrant Internet applications sector. <br>If Network Neutrality collapses -- and history teaches us that<br>policy alone is not a strong enough bulwark against carriers<br>defending their legacy -- our carrier will stand between us<br>and our Internet searches, us and our private correspondence,<br>us and our medical information, us and our travel plans, us<br>and our financial transactions. When Network Neutrality goes,<br>eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Google will need to fight for their<br>lives, and a thousand lesser- known apps and services, will be<br>captured, neutered, destroyed or forced into some inaccessible<br>corner. The walls enclosing quasi-public services like<br>MySpace and FaceBook will grow higher. My blog and yours will<br>be shoved into a \"free speech zone\" in some barbed-wire corner<br>of the Internet.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The above scenario may not play out exactly like this, but the<br>vector of carrier opposition to Network Neutrality is<br>obvious. We can expect the carriers' push against Network<br>Neutrality -- even after rules and regulations go into effect!<br>-- will be relentless.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Making Network Neutrality Sustainable</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">If it is to succeed, the pro-Network Neutrality campaign must<br>be as persistent and forward- looking as the carriers'.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">I am skeptical about the long-term viability of simply<br>prohibiting Internet Discrimination. The occurrence of<br>discrimination might be hard to establish, and carriers might<br>see penalties as just a cost of doing business. More likely,<br>exigencies will arise -- terrorism, copyright violations, et<br>cetera -- that are manipulated to make broad-daylight Internet<br>Discrimination seem acceptable and moot even the strongest ex<br>ante rules and deterring penalties. So whether or not we<br>succeed in making Internet Discrimination illegal, we should<br>also take initiatives like the following:</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">1) We should put the concept of structural separation back on<br>the table! If 1.6 million save-the-Internet petitioners can<br>understand Network Neutrality enough to realize it applies to<br>them, they can understand the idea that NETWORK OPERATORS MUST<br>NOT HAVE A FINANCIAL INTEREST IN THE APPLICATIONS THAT THEY<br>CARRY. This is a bright line. It will be obvious if carriers<br>cross it or obfuscate it. But instituting it will be a long-<br>term, come-from-behind strategic effort. It should begin now.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">2) We should expand the coalition of Internet customers to<br>*all* users of the Internet. As Internet customers, Boeing<br>and GE and Monsanto, and the AFL-CIO and AARP and United<br>Health Care, share more interests with citizen Internet users<br>and Internet companies than they do with carriers. This too<br>must be a long-term persistent effort.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">3) We should clearly frame the current telco industry<br>structure as monopolistic. After the mergers of MCI, AT&T and<br>BellSouth, US telecom competition is all but dead. The only<br>thing worse than a monopoly is an unregulated monopoly. Even<br>worse is a monopoly that sees its business threatened by<br>freedom, innovation, competition and technological progress<br>afforded by an open, neutral Internet.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">4) The Network Neutrality movement should frame its advocacy<br>in Congress, at the FCC and in the States in terms of a<br>national telecommunications policy to unify what now might<br>seem to be independent projects, including advocacy of faster<br>access at lower prices, community and municipal Internet<br>access networks, progressive CALEA, 911 and universal service<br>policies that are not weighted against new competitors,<br>explicit and clear terms of service, regulations that permit<br>using any device on mobile telephone networks, and the<br>harmonization of U.S. spectrum policy with technological<br>advances.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Dilemma: The Internet Connectivity Providers Are the Anti-<br>Neuts</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">The largest providers of today's Internet infrastructure are<br>also the strongest opponents of Network Neutrality. If their<br>profit stream diminishes, which it must if the Internet is to<br>remain neutral, stupid and open, then we weaken the<br>infrastructure for that which we value. This is not a new<br>thought, see The Paradox of the Best Network<br>http://netparadox.com. What is new is that the opposition of<br>the telcos and cablecos has now crystallized in a full-on<br>assault on the Internet's neutrality. Their end game is a<br>corporatized Internet that stifles freedom, democracy and<br>innovation incidental to reifying the telco-cableco business<br>model. Ultimately, the vision of the Network Neutrality<br>movement must encompass more than the circumscription of<br>certain carrier behaviors; it must be structural.</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">We must resolve to persist until today's dinosaurs evolve into<br>birds. That is, we must face the fact that if the Internet is<br>to survive as a neutral network, sooner or later we will need<br>Internet access without carriers as we know them today. So we<br>need to decide whether we keep the neutral Internet or we keep<br>today's carriers, because we won't be able to have both.<br>-------<br>The author thanks Rob Berger, Mike Godwin, Peter Kaminski,<br>Katrin Verclas, David Weinberger, Rick Whitt and Tim Wu for<br>their comments on earlier drafts.<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">WILL THERE BE MORE SMART LETTERS?</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">I don't know! (Why'd you ask such an embarrassing question?<br>I feel guilty enough about letting 14 months (!!) go by<br>since SMART Letter #99!) I'd like to think there will be,<br>but I can't promise. </p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">However, if you miss The SMART Letter and don't read<br>blogs yet, pleeeease start! You can start here,<br>http://isen.com/blog but please don't stop there.<br>Blogs (and podcasts, and video blogs) -- plus RSS! --<br>provide a big hint about the next stage of old-media<br>disruption.<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">CREATIVE COMMONS NOTICE</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Redistribution or reuse of this document, or any part of it,<br>is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-<br>NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this<br>license, visit http://tinyurl.com/uc5g or send a letter to<br>Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California<br>94305, USA. Attribution must include the following three<br>lines:<br>Copyright 2007 by David S. Isenberg<br>Some Rights Reserved under Creative Commons License<br>isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com<br>-------</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">ADMINISTRIVIA</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">[To join The SMART List, to leave The SMART List or to change<br>your email address, go to http://tinyurl.com/6nh5r<br>If you are an existing SMART List member, your EMAIL ADDRESS<br>is at the top of this document, and your PASSWORD is set<br>initially to 123456]</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">[for past SMART Letters, see http://www.isen.com/archives ]</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">[Policy on reader contributions: Write to me. If you're<br>writing to me for inclusion in the SMART Letter, *please* say<br>so, but I'll exercise my judgment in ascertaining your intent.<br>I'll probably edit your writing for brevity and clarity. If<br>you ask for anonymity you'll get it, and I'll protect my<br>sources as vigorously as any reporter.]</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">*--------------------isen.com----------------------*<br>David S. Isenberg isen@isen.com<br>isen.com, LLC 888-isen-com<br>http://isen.com/ 203-661-4798<br>*--------------------isen.com----------------------*<br> -- The brains behind the Stupid Network --<br>*--------------------isen.com----------------------*</p><p style=\"font-family:monospace\">Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Cableco\" rel=\"tag\">Cableco</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Cellco\" rel=\"tag\">Cellco</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Content-Conduit\" rel=\"tag\">Content-Conduit</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/NetworkNeutrality\" rel=\"tag\">NetworkNeutrality</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Organizational%20Culture\" rel=\"tag\">Organizational Culture</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/ParadoxoftheBestNetwork\" rel=\"tag\">ParadoxoftheBestNetwork</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/SMARTLetter\" rel=\"tag\">SMARTLetter</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/StructuralSeparation\" rel=\"tag\">StructuralSeparation</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/Telco\" rel=\"tag\">Telco</a></p>"
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"title" : "Let your geeks roam free",
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"content" : "<p>\nI was thinking about Kubi and how bad we screwed up things there and why.\n</p><p>\nKubi was a VC funded startup where we were going to fix what was wrong with email. Lots of people know the pain and chaos of being swamped by emails on a regular basis. You inbox might look something like mine:\n</p><p>\n<img src=\"http://damienkatz.net/pics/inbox.png\" height=\"492\" width=\"697\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"200705262211\">\n</p><p>\nWe were going to fix the mess of the inbox by creating project specific collaboration. Integrated into Outlook or Notes, you could have an nice structured place to share documents and sales leads and plans to dominate the Earth. You create a space. Invite people to it. Share documents. Blah blah blah, peace, love and happiness. And it worked offline.\n</p><p>\nThere was a really cool thing about Kubi ( and by cool I mean completely unworkable): It used email to communicate between Kubi clients.\n</p><p>\nInstead of using a centralized server to coordinate updates, it used the existing messaging infrastructure so that Kubi clients could communicate in a decentralized manner. It was like peer to peer but even better than peer to peer because it actually had servers involved, your already existing email servers.\n</p><p>\nBuilding a email done right on top of email done wrong, it turns out, is really hard. I wasn't at Kubi from the beginning so I can't say what the Kubi vision was early on, but by the time I left it became a way to share 30 meg powerpoint presentations with versioning, access control and encrypted communications.\n</p><p>\nThere were tons of obstacles. For example most email system had limits on attachment sizes, so we had to break up big files into smaller messages. I designed and wrote the chunk-ifier, which broke up large messages into smaller chunk messages and reassembled them on the receiving other side. I remember I wrote some code that looked like this, which to me, in a wearied state of delirium, was the very height of hilarity:\n</p><p>\n<code> /*\n<br> A: How do you feel?\n<br> \n<br> B: Better...\n<br> \n<br> A: Better!?!\n<br>\n<br> B: Better... Get. A. Bucket.\n<br> */\n<br> BlowChunks(msg, ....); </code>\n</p><p>\nMaybe I'm delirious now, but the joke still cracks me up.\n</p><p>\nAnyway every time someone made a change to a document in a Kubi space, it had to the put little encrypted chunks of message data into email messages and send them to other Kubi clients so the clients could read the messages out of the user's inbox, reassemble and decrypt them and make the corresponding change in the local replica of the Kubi Space. And if for some reason a email message didn't get delivered, the system could even figure it out and resend the data and sync things up.\n</p><p>\nThis is how we built email done right. A brilliant solution to the collaboration problem, wouldn't you say?\n</p><p>\nIf you just agreed with me then please slap yourself. Because it's a horrible, horrible solution. Besides being extremely complex (EXTREMELY complex. I still shudder to think about it) our system was built on a false assumption: That email is in any way a reliable transport.\n</p><p>\nEmail just barely even works as email. With all the spam filters, virus scanners, white lists and \"roll your own\" mail rules, getting these opaque encrypted messages successfully delivered and processed was getter harder, it seemed, by the day.\n</p><p>\nThe biggest failure on our part was not getting our heads around how bad the email ecosystem was. We should have figured this out sooner and switched to a different transport and model.\n</p><p>\nPart of the problem at Kubi was so many of use were ex-Iris folks. Iris made Lotus Notes and Domino and Iris lived and breathed email. Email was a central part of Notes and we ate the hell out of out own dogfood. Nothing was filtered in our internal system. No spam filters, no virus scanners, no rules, no message or inbox limits.\n</p><p>\nWe didn't appreciate how onerous and over-protected (or in the case of many small Outlook/Exchange shops, seriously under-protected) the rest of the corporate world was. We didn't really have a clue what most of our prospective customers were dealing with.\n</p><p>\nBut we weren't entirely to blame, we were hobbled by lack of contact with the customer. The sales and marketing folks pretty much kept us away from direct contract with the customers. Instead they were the messengers and translators between customers and the geeks. Geeks couldn't talks directly to customers. No way.\n</p><p>\nI think I know why. These guys are hustling to get sales and they don't want us geeks screwing it up. I don't know what it takes to do sales, but those guys seemed to be pretty damn good at *something*. I just can't quite pinpoint what that was. I remember them being very entertaining to listen to in their presentations, but I don't remember much else.\n</p><p>\nAnyway, we geeks pretty much never got to talk to customers. I won't say never, I remember at least one meeting with a customer. But we had no email or online collaboration with the customers.\n</p><p>\nWe asked a few times to allow us to set up an online forum, where customers could post questions and give feedback and we could interact, maybe even build a little community and get some online advocacy.\n</p><p>\nNope, marketing didn't like that idea. They wanted to make sure the early customers were \"carefully managed\".\n</p><p>\nAnd that was hard on us. We came from the Notes community, where we could interact freely with customers. At Iris we had built a very strong community and it was very valuable to help us build a better product for a our customers.\n</p><p>\nI think one reason the Kubi sales guys didn't want to us to interact with customers is because engineers can scare customers. Engineers might come into a meeting with a customer to find out they have a firewall that blocks all unknown attachment types and say things like \"That's going to be a problem\". Yeah, for sales guys, that's definitely going to be a problem.\n</p><p>\nSalesguys like to carefully manage customers by telling them we can deal with whatever system configuration they have. Engineers might shatter the illusion of ultimate competence and flexibility the sales guys need to project at all times.\n</p><p>\nOr so I'm told.\n</p><p>\nMaybe that wasn't the reason at all. Maybe it's because we engineers are rude louts who will do typical nerd things like scold customers for not running the latest patches on the Solaris boxen, or joke how the customer's bald head makes him look like Captain Picard.\n</p><p>\nYeah, we geeks are annoying bunch. More than one rich moneybags has had his monocle pop-out in mortification at our antics. I can see why the sales guys are afraid.\n</p><p>\nBut really they shouldn't be. Customers are ready to tolerate it. Not only are tolerate, they actually expect it.\n</p><p>\n[Man, look how much I've written and I'm just now getting to me point.]\n</p><p>\nCustomers want geeks. They've seen geeks. They know geeks are annoying. They know geeks say weird things. They expect it.\n</p><p>\nThey want you to have geeks. Big damn geeks. You're a tech company and you don't have geeks working there? And you want me to trust you because your hair looks good?\n</p><p>\n<img src=\"http://damienkatz.net/pics/gs_copy.png\" height=\"505\" width=\"400\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"Gs Copy\">\n</p><p>\nFortunately, most people's perceptions of computer geeks are a bit more nuanced than the Geek Squad's stylized, fairly harmless version of a geek. But Geeks Squad's runaway success is a strong indication of what people actually expect when dealing with technology. Geeks!\n</p><p>\nIf you ain't got geeks, then you ain't got technology.\n</p><p>\nMost customers don't know technology very well, they don't know good tech from bad. But they know geeks when they seem them. They know they are inept, say weird things and maybe have bad hygiene. And customers are actually assured by this.\n</p><p>\nSo let your geeks roam free. You need them for geek-cred, they might actually learn something vital and they probably won't completely piss off your customers.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Sodom and Gomorrah slum in Kumasi demolished",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVU5bO06YI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/_CUSxkxlnmo/s1600-h/sodom6.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVU5bO06YI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/_CUSxkxlnmo/s400/sodom6.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><span>THE biggest single demolition exercise ever to hit the ‘Garden City’ of Kumasi took place yesterday when the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KM</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><span>A) razed down Sodom and Gomorrah, a sprawling slum near Adum, sending more than 3000 residents looking for places to lay their heads.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Armed soldiers and policemen supervised the demolition exercise which took two caterpillars about one hour to complete as several wooden and mud houses in which the residents, mostly of northern extraction lived, came crumbling down.</span> <span>The exercise was part of the second phase of the decongestion exercise, embarked upon by the city authorities about two months ago. </span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>There was virtually no resistance from</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><span> the residents, even though KMA officials said there was an initial potential for it.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>A number of the residents had gone out when the exercise took place and those who were around had to struggle to pull away their personal belongings.</span></span><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVUUrO06XI/AAAAAAAAAVI/SPsgmAZuilo/s1600-h/sodom+%283%29.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVUUrO06XI/AAAAAAAAAVI/SPsgmAZuilo/s400/sodom+%283%29.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><span>Some wailed uncontrollably and two nursing mothers holding strongly to their one-week and three-day old babies were seen running away to a safer place.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Officials said with Sodom and Gomorrah gone, the next target was Angola, another fast growing slum near Kaase in Kumasi.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Some people had associated the slum, the biggest in Kumasi, to vices including prostitution and gambling, but the leaders of the community denied these some months ago at a news conference.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>There was a market, day care centre and other ‘facilities’ in the area, which was also connected to electrical power from the national grid. </span><br><span>KMA officials said the decision to demolish the slum was due to reasons other than immorality.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Mr Charles Ampomah-Mensah, the Metropolitan Engineer at the KMA, told the Daily Graphic that the area was simply not zoned for human habitation and the general conditions there was nothing to write home about.</span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>He stated that the sewer system from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital ran to the area and it was an eyesore to see human beings living with all sorts of unhealthy materials at Sodom and Gomorrah.</span></span><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVTZrO06WI/AAAAAAAAAVA/BnC8KCbeYhM/s1600-h/sodom+%282%29.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVTZrO06WI/AAAAAAAAAVA/BnC8KCbeYhM/s400/sodom+%282%29.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Again, the metropolitan engineer indicated that the Volta River Authority (VRA) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) had their sub stations very close to the area, which was dangerous for the residents.<span> </span></span></span><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>He said the decision to demolish the place was taken about two years ago when the KMA informed the residents accordingly.</span><br><span>However, the leaders of the ‘community’ petitioned the KMA to extend the deadline for the exercise “ and we agreed”.</span></span><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVSW7O06VI/AAAAAAAAAU4/vM6GNsULaKU/s1600-h/sodom+%284%29.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVSW7O06VI/AAAAAAAAAU4/vM6GNsULaKU/s400/sodom+%284%29.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><br><span>Mr Ampomah-Mensah said when the deadline expired the leaders again petitioned the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) over the intended exercise “and again we have to wait until the commission saw that the petitioners had no case”.</span></span><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVRbbO06UI/AAAAAAAAAUw/EsJlblVzDRU/s1600-h/sodom+%285%29.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_nXCB4LUvARw/RlVRbbO06UI/AAAAAAAAAUw/EsJlblVzDRU/s400/sodom+%285%29.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%\"><span>To a question as to whether the KMA would look for an alternative place for the residents to live, the engineer said “we are not duty-bound to look for a place for them”</span><br><span>He said the KMA was planning on what to do in the area but said it was likely the place would first be beautified to serve as a green zone for a recreational centre.</span><br><br></span>"
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"content" : "<p>At this time of year, I’ve usually got a list an arm’s length long of projects I need to work on around the house. Eight years ago, Rachel and I bought a house that hadn’t been occupied for over a dozen years. While we got a great deal on the property, we also got seven summer’s worth of projects. This isn’t a bad thing - my favorite weekend passtimes involve hammers, paintbrushes and wheelbarrows, and I have been half-considering buying <a href=\"http://www.oldhousejournal.com/magazine/2003/february/greek_revival.shtml\">a Greek Revival farmhouse</a> in <a href=\"http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/genInfo.php?locIndex=2905\">Cheshire</a> just so I could have more home renovation projects to work on. </p>\n<p>But our house is in pretty good shape these days. Last year, I repaired a large section of roof, and with help from a contractor friend, replaced two large windows and 30′ x 20′ wall covered in clapboard. This year, there’s little more than cracks to fill in the driveway, a coat of paint on the chimney, the lawn to mow…</p>\n<p>Except.</p>\n<p>There’s one beam in the kitchen that looks on the verge of falling from the ceiling. It’s the victim of a pernicious roof leak that I haven’t been able to eliminate, despite dozens of hours of work, the intervention of several skilled professionals, and thousands of dollars in abortive roof repairs by a charming but ineffectual Irish carpenter. The problem, ultimately, is that no one seems to be able to determine where the leak is coming from. Three rooflines could be causing the leak. Or it could be one of two walls, or an internal plumbing leak. Or gremlins. Basically, all we know is that it shouldn’t be happening and that we don’t know why it’s happening. </p>\n<p>It’s <a href=\"http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/cryptogenic\">cryptogenic</a>.</p>\n<p>Because we don’t know what’s causing the leak, it’s very hard to eliminate it. I’ve caulked roof seams, replaced siding, used expansion foam and silicone to close holes that might allow water into the skin of the house. Nothing works, and I’m running short on theories to test next.</p>\n<p>On the whiteboard in my office, where I list the projects I need to complete, there’s a year-old entry: “replaster kitchen beam”. But why replaster when I know that the next major rainstorm is going to cause another leak, dropping my carefully-applied spackle onto the kitchen floor? The ragged, unplastered beam is a constant reminder that, contrary to all other indications, everything is not okay here. There’s an unsolved problem here, one that ultimately is going to damage this part of the house if I don’t figure out how to solve it.</p>\n<p>This is not a post about home repair.</p>\n<p>Last Christmas, <a href=\"http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2006/12/unexpected.html\">Rachel had a stroke</a>. While we sat on the couch watching “Little Miss Sunshine”, the left side of her field of vision disappeared. A month later, most of her vision returned, and since then, she’s been in apparent good health. But the more we’ve looked, the more mysterious the Christmas stroke gets.</p>\n<p>For one thing, it’s one of three strokes that she’s apparently experienced. Those strokes were all in different parts of the brain, and all the likely explanations for stroke in a young women (like <a href=\"http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/patent-foramen-ovale/DS00728\">patent foramen ovale</a>) have been eliminated. As we’ve moved from local medical experts to nationally-recognized stroke experts to the experts those nationally-recognized stroke experts consult with, we’re starting to see a difference of opinion in doctors. Our family doctor, a dear friend for many years, has been urging us to accept that we’ll never know why the strokes occurred. The stroke experts, on the other hand, are tracking down different genetic factors, trading theories and eliminating conventional wisdom.</p>\n<p>We went to see a new stroke specialist yesterday, hoping he’d tell us the stroke was cryptogenic and that we should focus on staying healthy in the future. Instead, he explained why all the possible explanations offered by other doctors don’t make sense. Long term use of birth control pills? Nope - associated with strokes in the veins, not in the arteries. Sudafed use? Again, a loose correlation to strokes in the veins, but not a good explanation for arterial stroke. A staph infection inside the heart? We’d see scarring on the mitral valve. </p>\n<p>In other words, the explanations we’ve been getting our heads around - high blood pressure + birth control pills + sudafed = stroke - isn’t accurate, if this expert is to be believed. Which means the mystery is still open. Which in turn means that there may be some underlying condition that causes the strokes, which we might or might not be able to treat. Or that the next round of tests leaves us where we were before yesterday: cryptogenic stroke.</p>\n<p>I’m a strong, smart, hard-working guy. If I know what needs to be done, I will get it done. Not knowing what to do? That’s hard.</p>\n<p>There are moments in life where you’re facing enough similar challenges that it’s easy to conclude that God / the universe / chance / higher-power-of-your-choice is trying to teach you a specific lesson. This lesson seems to be about living with uncertainty. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m going through a series of laser treatments and drug injections to preserve my vision from <a href=\"http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1203\">damage due to diabetic retinopathy</a>. Those treatments aren’t working as well as we’d like. Why? No one knows. What should we do next? No one knows. Why am I, a reasonably healthy guy who takes care of his diabetes, dealing with these complications? No one knows.</p>\n<p>Over the past four months, Rachel’s had several MRIs, two TEEs, a contrast MRA and endless bloodwork. I’ve had three laser treatments and an avastin injection. We’ve both had more than a few sleepless nights. For the most part, I think we’re holding up okay - we’re both getting up and going to work every day, making it to meetings and conferences, seeing friends, watching bad TV.</p>\n<p>But the unplastered beam is visible, too. We haven’t sat down to pay the bills for two months, and I haven’t sent any of the invoices I need to send so we can pay those bills. We haven’t folded the laundry in months. And I’ve got a steady low-grade panic about an upcoming trip to Tanzania and South Africa. If something happens and Rachel needs to go to the hospital, it would require 24 to 36 hours for me to get back. I can tell myself that nothing’s going to happen… but nothing was supposed to happen when we sat down on the couch to watch a movie five months ago.</p>\n<p>I can’t fix the roof leak, but I can plaster the beam. That’s the first project for tomorrow. It won’t solve the underlying problem, but it lets me get through the day without worrying about it. Sometimes that’s all you can do.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Travel tips to Ghana",
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"content" : "Some advice for people travelling from the US to Ghana...<br><br>If you are a student or teacher, you may be eligible for lower travel rates through <a href=\"http://www.sta.com/\">STA Travel</a>. They have local offices near most universities and in major cities around the world. They also have good online support (give them a call). Usually you cannot book your flights directly on <a href=\"http://www.expedia.com/\">Expedia</a>, <a href=\"http://www.orbitz.com/\">Orbitz</a> or <a href=\"http://www.travelocity.com/\">Travelocity</a> as the Accra airport (ACC) requires you to work with an agent or airline directly. But check, there are times when it goes through.<br><br>I've also had good results with Indian-run travel agents who are used to planning low-cost travel for immigrants. When I was in Boston, the local agent I used was: Apollo Travels in Central Square (617)-876-4471. They have made flight arrangements for my family living elsewhere. It might be worth giving them a call, but you need to be persistent and patient.<br><br>'Summer' (June-August) and Christmas/Eid (Dec-Jan) are peak seasons. During these periods it is usually difficult to get flights in and out as they book up quickly with Ghanaian students and families on holiday. In general, you should expect to pay at least $2500. If you can fly before June 1st for any reason, you may be able to get a low season rate below $1500. Airlines to check: <ol> <li> My preferred airline is British Airways, which partners with American Airlines. You can book directly on <a href=\"http://www.baa.com/\">baa.com</a>, provided you call them once you make the online reservation.<br></li><li>You can now fly directly through NYC or DC on a new Delta route. Check <a href=\"http://delta.com/\">delta.com</a> </li><li><a href=\"http://www.ghanainternationalairlines.com/\">Ghana International Airlines</a> also flies from London for less, though it is sometimes difficult to book a good rate from the US.</li> </ol> Be very careful to read the itinerary closely before booking. Especially if an agent at STA makes your flight and is unfamiliar with travel to West Africa. Things to avoid: Any flights that have you making quick stops in neighboring African countries: Luftansa via Lagos (Nigeria) and the Libyan Airlines Afriqiyah via Tripoli or Dakar etc. Although they can be cheaper, friends and family have lost luggage and experienced delays. Also check the hours for very long flights with long layovers. On the other hand, if you are a hardcore backpacker, up for more sketchy methods of travelling, you might check <a href=\"http://sleepinginairports.com/\">sleepinginairports.com</a> for more on how to get around Africa on the (extremely) cheap.<br><br>(Don't forget you need a visa to fly to Ghana. Check the <a href=\"http://www.ghana-embassy.org/corp_div_embassy3.cfm?BrandsID=45\">embassy website</a>. I recommend sending it through the NYC office and calling daily until your passport is returned. If you are yet to get a United States passport, do that ASAP also through the <a href=\"http://travel.state.gov/passport/passport_1738.html\">express service</a> as there are now several month delays given new requirements flying to Canada and the Caribbean).<br><br>If you are going for a conference, check with the organizers as they may also be making group flights for speakers. You must have someone meet you at the airport as it is not safe to just find a taxi. Many hotels will arrange for a pick up.<div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7377987806222322428-194630259554530254?l=africaliving.blogspot.com\"></div>"
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"title" : "Sharing as exercise",
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"content" : "<p>I hate most explanations for why people participate in Open Source. I care about this question. I enjoy the game of puzzling out the answer. In a reversal of the usual cliche I love the game and hate the players; the casual players who think they know the answer. After two decades of thinking about this question I love that I stumble upon new answers.</p>\n<p><img width=\"180\" height=\"460\" align=\"left\" alt=\"Owners of Capital Goods often have excess capacity that they might share.\" title=\"Owners of Capital Goods often have excess capacity that they might share.\" src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/capacity_to_share.png\">This morning I was attempting to read, yet again, <a href=\"http://www.benkler.org/SharingNicely.html\">Benkler’s essay on sharing nicely</a> where in he argues that the usual dialectic framing of how to coordinate activities (hierarchy v.s. markets) has blinded us to a third scheme; i.e. sharing. He points out some huge coordination problems that are solved via sharing and he does the good and necessary work of constructing an economic model for why some problems are well solved by sharing.</p>\n<p>Part of his model explains why owners have excess lying around, that is suitable for sharing. In that explanation I was excited to to notice a new motivation for sharing.</p>\n<p>Benkler draws our attention to excess capacity that owners can not consume. Idle cycles on your PC or empty seats in your car as you drive hither and yon. He model for this is analogous to that seen in value pricing models - i.e. if you own a hotel full of rooms and as the hour grows late you should consider selling those rooms for less; since otherwise they will go idle an you will get nothing.</p>\n<p>I found my self thinking at that point about the emotions an owner has about this excess capacity, for example the sense of of lost opportunity, leading to emotions of frustration, grief, guilt. The hostess pressing left overs on her guests as the party wraps up is motivated by a horror at the waste shows how motivating this kind of sharing might be.</p>\n<p>But the resource that drives open source is talent so the question naturally arises at this point does this model have something to say about sharing around the creation of these knowledge pools? This is delightful bit. If we think of skill as a capital good then talented people own building full of skills; and they lease out to earn their living. Of course most of the time they can’t find a buyer for all their skills. The rooms are empty. It’s not surprising that they are willing to share freely some of this capacity.</p>\n<p><img align=\"right\" title=\"Skill, unlike capital equipment, can improves with use; creating an incentive for sharing.\" alt=\"Skill, unlike capital equipment, can improves with use; creating an incentive for sharing.\" src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/skill_is_not_capital.png\">I had already noted many of the motivations outlined above for sharing one’s talents: countering the guilt for letting it go to waste, the positive emotions of generosity, the low cost of giving away the excess capacity. But I had not noticed something else: skills that are not exercised decay. While the hotel room left idle depreciates only slightly, a skill unused decays quickly. The skill demands that I exercise it, it’s survival depends on that exercise. If I horde it, it evaporates.\n</p>"
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"title" : "se woankasa wo tiri ho a...:Porn In Ghana????",
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"content" : "<p>Perhaps it's just me, but the threat of potential emergence of a pornography industry in Ghana has received less attention than expected. So i wonder: Is it because we are ready for such an industry or, as usual, we are waiting for it to become a problem before we start to address it (better late than never, right?)? If it's being debated on in parliament, then fine; else let's start to ponder on this porn issue that seems to be few steps away from us. THE QUESTION IS, SHOULD WE APPROVE PORN IN GHANA? (I heard about the strippers in nite clubs debate but haven't yet heard an argument on porn)<br>\nMY POINT OF VIEW (PLEASE READ ALL BEFORE YOU CRITIQUE)<br>\n****I think in pondering over this, we ought to not let our religious beliefs bias our comments as we all don't practice the same religion!<br>\nIn my opinion, the emergence of a porn industry could help accelerate Ghana's economic growth (Creation of jobs). However, I am worried about when we approve of such an industry. If Ama or Kwame had a variety of job opportunities to choose from, and she/he decides to choose do porn, pas de probleme (not a problem); it's not a problem because Ama/Kwame chose the profession-pornography- that would benefit her/him the most. However, if Kwame chose porn because he had no other option, then we need to be concerned (a lot!). In this light, I careless about the emergence of a porn industry but I do worry about when we endorse it as legal. If Ghana doesn't create options for her children before she welcomes pornography, I worry that porn will be the only highly attractive option to our sons and daughters (as drug-dealing used to be for our fellow black folks in the ghettos of United States).<br>\nOn the contrary, if Ghana welcomes porn after it has provided her children with a number of job opportunities, then we know that the people who choose to become porn actors are the ones who actually love and enjoy the profession.<br>\nOur ancestors were right in thinking that: \"Akokora bone na oma nkwadaa we amane tire!\".</p>"
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"title" : "D.R. of Congo: Should Christian Revivalist Churches Be Encouraging Political Activism?",
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"content" : "<p><img vspace=\"8\" hspace=\"10\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" src=\"http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/congo_church_election_day.jpg\">Continuing an age-old debate–is religion the “<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_People\">opium of the people</a>” or can it be a catalyst for social change?–Congolese blogger Blaise Mantoto at <em>UDPS Liege</em> says the Congo’s Christian revivalist churches, which he cynically refers to as “for-profit spiritual shops,”<br>\n<a href=\"http://udpsliege.afrikblog.com/archives/2007/05/16/4973453.html\">encourage political disengagement</a> [Fr]. He calls on revivalist churches to rewrite their missions, arguing they should inspire their followers to improve their social and economic situation through political activism.</p>\n<p>UDPS Liege is the Belgium-based branch of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_for_Democracy_and_Social_Progress\">Union for Democracy and Social Progress</a>, a major Congolese opposition party and a vocal critic of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kabila\">Joseph Kabila</a>, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo.</p>\n<p>Revivalist and charismatic churches have become increasingly popular in the Congo–at the expense of Catholic churches–by offering magical and miraculous solutions to the misery and insecurity Congolese have faced for decades. (These churches have also made news for making money off of the <a href=\"http://blogs.salon.com/0003494/2006/02/14.html\">cruel exorcisms</a> of <a href=\"http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsID=65\">child witches</a>.)</p>\n<p>But whether or not these churches encourage apathy, not everyone agrees that religion and politics should mix.<br>\n<a></a></p>\n<p><strong>On what should be given to Caesar</strong></p>\n<p><img vspace=\"8\" hspace=\"10\" border=\"0\" align=\"left\" src=\"http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/catholic_church_congo.jpg\">Mantoto cites a 2005 study of the capital, Kinshasa, by <a href=\"http://www.enfants-des-rues.com/pages/uk/thematiques_reseaux.asp\">REEJER</a> (Réseau des Educateurs des Enfants et Jeunes de la Rue) and the University of Kinshasa which found that each of the city’s districts was home, on average, to 300 revivalist churches.</p>\n<p>He writes:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Ces églises incitent , pour la plupart, leurs adeptes à prendre de la distance vis-à-vis de la politique en s’appuyant sur l’ ingénieuse déclaration de Jésus résumée en ces termes: ” Donnez à César ce qui est à César et à Dieu ce qui est à Dieu ” interprétée de manière abusive pour leur dire « laissez la politique aux politiciens , ne vous immiscez pas »</p></blockquote>\n<div>For the most part, these churches encourage their followers to distance themselves from politics on the basis of a clever saying of Jesus summed up in these words: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” abusively interpreted to tell them “leave politics to the politicians, don’t get involved.”Quoting Jean Duquesne’s <em>Jesus</em>, Mantoto explains the historical context of “render unto Caesar.” He is ask whether the Jews, an occupied people, should pay taxes to Caesar. It is in effect a trick question, but one he cannot ignore:</div>\n<blockquote><p>Répondre qu’il faut payer l’impôt, c’est se faire considérer comme un sujet docile de l’occupant, voire un collaborateur actif. Répondre le contraire, c’est se ranger parmi les héritiers de <a href=\"http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_le_Galil%C3%A9en\">Juda le Gaulonite</a>, qui avait recommandé de ne pas payer l’impôt. Jésus s’en tire en montrant une pièce : « De qui est cette image ? – De césar - Eh bien, donnez à César ce qui est à César et à Dieu ce qui est à Dieu » (Jean Duquesne, Jésus, p. 185)</p></blockquote>\n<div>To reply that taxes must be paid would be to make himself considered a docile subject of the occupier, or even an active collaborator. To reply the opposite would be to align himself with the heir of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_of_Galilee\">Judas of Galilee</a>, who advocated not paying taxes. Jesus get out of it by showing a coin: “Whose picture is this? - Caesar’s - So, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s” (Jean Duquesne, Jésus, p. 185)</div>\n<p><strong>Religion should engage oppressed peoples to improve their condition</strong></p>\n<p>Mantoto argues this is not a “the solemn call of Christ for the separation of Church and State” and that it should not be used to “hold back a whole people from participating in the building of their social and economic well-being.”</p>\n<blockquote><p>Les églises dites de réveil, porteuses pour la plupart, de cette interprétation erronée, tronquée, démobilisatrice, profitant du dénuement du peuple congolais, l’enferment dans un conditionnement avilissant du type « Dites Amen, mon frère et ma sœur » au lieu de susciter en lui, l’éveil de l’esprit critique et d’analyse indispensable à une prise de conscience des enjeux liés à son avenir, à celui de ses filles et fils et à celui de son territoire en occupation progressive par des armées étrangères : angolaise, rwandaise, ougandaise, burundaise.</p></blockquote>\n<div>These so-called revivalist churches, most of whom advance this erroneous, pared down, demobilizing interpretation, profit from the destitution of the Congolese people, from their imprisonment in the degrading condition of “Say Amen, my brother and my sister” instead of kindling in them the spirit of criticism and analysis essential for becoming aware of the issues their future, the futures of their sons and daughters, and that of their territory occupied by foreign armies–Angolan, Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian–depend on.</div>\n<p><img vspace=\"8\" hspace=\"10\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/congo_outdoor_church.jpg\"></p>\n<p><strong>Revivalist churches benefit from misery, from the Kabila regime</strong></p>\n<blockquote><p>Ce qui est paradoxal dans le chef de certains de pasteurs tenanciers de ces boutiques spirituelles à but lucratif, c’est que tout en se réclamant apolitiques, ils sont devenus des lieutenants ou des généraux au service du pouvoir de Kinshasa. Ils pactisent avec ces politiques véreux qui paupérisent le peuple congolais en échange de l’endormissement de ce dernier, au nom de cette interprétation…Ces pasteurs « collabo » ne s’interrogent pas quand il s’agit de faire des affaires nébuleuses avec le régime de Kabila. Pourquoi leur foi ne leur interdit pas de se remplir les poches avec l’argent de César, plutôt de Joseph Kabila et de sa bande ? Alors pourquoi contraindre leurs adeptes à se désintéresser de la politique si eux- mêmes y sont très attachés, si eux-mêmes en sont des mouchards ?</p></blockquote>\n<div>What’s ironic about the tenacious pastors of these for-profit spiritual shops is that they all claim to be apolitical, and yet they have become lieutenants and generals in the service of the powers that be in Kinshasa. They sign a pact with the shady politics that impoverish the Congolese people in exchange for their slumber…These collaborating pastors don’t question themselves when it comes doing the biddings of the Kabila regime. Why doesn’t their faith prohibit them from filling their pockets with the money of Caesar, or rather of Joseph Kabila and his crew? Why make their followers retreat from politics when they themselves are very much attached, if they themselves are [Kabila’s] stooges?</div>\n<p><strong>Revivalist churches should rewrite their missions</strong></p>\n<blockquote><p>Il me semble que le temps est venu pour ces pasteurs et ces églises d’intégrer désormais dans leur mission apostolique et prophétique, la lutte pour la libération du peuple congolais comme l’ont fait jadis Kimpa Vita, Simon Kimbangu, cardinal Malula, cardinal Etsou …ou encore comme le font de nos jours, Bundu dia Kongo sous l’instigation de Ne Muanda Nsemi, l’église catholique par l’entremise du Conseil Episcopal National Congolais (Cenco) ou encore par celle de communautés ecclésiales vivantes de base (CEVB)…</p></blockquote>\n<div>It seems to me that the time has come for these pastors and these churches to integrate the struggle for the liberation of the Congolese people into their apostolic and prophetic mission as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimpa_Vita\">Kimpa Vita</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kimbangu\">Simon Kimbangu</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph-Albert_Malula\">Cardinal Malula</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Cardinal_Etsou-Nzabi-Bamungwabi\">Cardinal Etsou</a> all did…or as <a href=\"http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundu_dia_Kongo\">Bundu dia Kongo</a> under the encouragement of Ne Muanda Nsemi, the Catholic church by the intervention of the National Congolese Episcopal Council (Cenco) or by the living, grassroots ecclesiastical communities…</div>\n<blockquote><p>Cette lutte devra s’inscrire dans une perspective de démocratie participative, c’est à dire dans une dynamique consistant à inciter les croyants, les chrétiens… à s’intéresser voire se réapproprier le contrôle de la gestion politique du pays, à exiger des politiques des engagements précis sur des questions liées au bien-être social de la population, à se réserver le droit démocratique et constitutionnel de poser des actions concrètes et d’envergure pour faire pression sur les gouvernants. On se souviendra que la marche de chrétiens du 16 février1992 avait montré, en son temps, que les chrétiens mobilisés pouvaient faire bouger bien des choses. C’était l’initiative d’un groupe de religieux et intellectuels laïcs, tous catholique, dans le cadre du groupe « Amos » . Pourquoi pas s’inspirer de cette initiative aujourd’hui?</p></blockquote>\n<div>This struggle will have to be entered into with a democratic perspective, meaning with a consistent dynamic to incite believers, the Christians…to really become interested in regaining control of the political management of the country, to compel specific political interventions on issues related to the social well-being of the population, to reserve the democratic and constitutional right to take concrete and wide-ranging actions to put pressure on leaders. Remember the Christian march on February 16, 1992 that showed that at that time Christians could mobilize to make things happen. It was the initiative of a group of religious people and secular intellectuals, all Catholic, belonging to the group “Amos.” Why not inspire that kind of initiative today?</div>\n<blockquote><p>Ainsi, nous en appelons à la hiérarchie des églises : catholique, protestante, indépendante ou de « réveil » sans oublier les imams, de faire prendre conscience aux croyants, aux chrétiens que la reconstruction du Congo-Kinshasa ne peut se faire sans leur implication active dans la surveillance de la gestion du pays et la dénonciation de toute mauvaise gouvernance au travers des « actions-citoyen » concrètes et d’envergures. C’est ainsi que l’on passera entre autre de la religiosité à la libération tous azimuts, du peuple congolais.</p></blockquote>\n<div>In this way, we call upon of churches: catholic, protestant, independent, or revivalist not to mention the imams, to raise the consciousness of believers, of Christians that the reconstruction of Congo-Kinshasa won’t happen without their active involvement in keeping track of the management of the country and denouncing all bad governance through concrete and large-scale “citizen activism.” This is how we will move from religiosity to the liberation of the Congolese people in all directions.</div>\n<p><img vspace=\"8\" hspace=\"10\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/congo_catholic_church.jpg\"></p>\n<p><strong>But should religion and politics mix?</strong></p>\n<p>Hasn’t religious involvement in politics often been, throughout history, a recipe for disaster?</p>\n<p>This is exactly the question that Alex Engwete addresses in a comment on the <em>UDPS Liege </em>blog. He agrees that churches have an adverse effect on political engagement:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Mais là où je disconviens avec votre position, c’est quand vous encouragez ces mouvements religieux à s’ingérer activement, en tant que groupes, dans les questions politiques. C’est une chose que d’encourager les « croyants » en tant que citoyens à prendre une part active dans les affaires de la cité dans des groupes de société civile ou des groupements politiques. Et vous faites vous-même mention de certains mouvements religieux qui ne seraient que des pions au service du pouvoir en place. Qu’est-ce qui empêcherait ceux que vous appelez des « tenanciers des boutiques spirituelles » de jouer le même jeu de l’autre côté du terrain ? Pire, vous nous apprenez qu’il y aurait même des « mouchards » parmi eux, ce qui ravale ces gens au niveau des délateurs honnis dans toutes les sociétés respectables du monde.</p></blockquote>\n<div>But where I depart from your position is when you encourage these religious movements to actively insinuate themselves into political questions as groups. It’s one thing to encourage “believers” to take an active part in the affairs of the city as citizens as part of civil society or political groups. And you yourself mention that certain religious movements would be nothing more than peons in the service of the powers that be. What would stop those that you call “tenacious spiritual shops” from playing the same game from the other side of the field? Or worse, you tell us that there would even be “stool pigeons” among them, which reduces these people to the level of informants despised in every respectable society in the world.</div>\n<blockquote><p>C’est pour cette raison que les grandes démocraties occidentales ont érigé le principe de la séparation étanche des églises et de l’Etat…Eh bien, quand l’église et l’Etat se confondaient, c’étaient des régimes monarchiques et totalitaires dans lesquels la religion du Roi était la Religion officielle du pays et de chaque citoyen. Et gare au citoyen qui s’avisait à afficher une autre religion—là où cette alternative pouvait exister. Je ne vous rappellerais pas ici les tortures et les crimes commis par l’Eglise Catholique au cours de l’Inquisition avec, entre autres, le bûcher pour ceux déclarés « sorciers » ou « possédés par les démons »—surtout les femmes, comme Jeanne d’Arc. Je ne vous rappellerais quand même pas les guerres de religion en France entre Catholiques et Protestants—avec le Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, épuration religieuse des Protestants orchestrés par le Roi de France. Je ne vous rappellerais non plus le nom de tous ces savants dont les découvertes contredisaient les doctrines de l’Eglise et qui étaient condamnés à la peine de mort ou excommuniés… C’était l’intolérance la plus sauvage !</p></blockquote>\n<div>For this reason, major Western democracies the established the watertight principle of the separation of Church and State…After all when Church and State mixed, it was in monarchies and totalitarian regimes in which the religion of the king was the official religion of the country and of every citizen. And woe to the citizen who had the audacity to publicly practice another religion—where that alternative was possible. I won’t remind you here of the tortures and crimes committed by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition with, among others, the slaughter of those declared “witches” or “possessed by demons”—especially women like Joan of Arc. I won’t remind even remind you of the wars of religion in France between Catholics and Protestants—with the <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre</a>, the religious purging of Protestants orchestrated by the King of France. Nor will I remind you of the thinkers who went against church doctrine and were condemned to death or excommunicated…It was intolerance of the most savage kind!</div>\n<blockquote><p>C’est l’intolérance la plus sauvage même aujourd’hui—regardez les théocraties de l’Iran et de l’Arabie Saoudite avec leur sharia, ou l’Afghanistan à l’époque des Talibans—les fameux « étudiants en théologie », ou encore Al Qaeda, la Lord Resistance Army de John Kony en Ouganda, ou, plus près de chez nous, le « Bundu dia Kongo » que vous embrassez, me semble-t-il, sans en connaître le précepte fondamental qui est le suivant : l’érection d’une théocratie Kongo sur le territoire de l’ancien territoire Kongo (qui comprend le nord de l’Angola et le sud du Congo-Brazzaville) parce que ce groupe ethnique est l’heureux élu qui devra se séparer de la RDC pour y vivre dans une utopie messianique ! Comme vous pouvez l’imaginer, les Bakongo libres-penseurs n’auront pas droit de cité dans ce royaume (« bundu » en Kikongo signifie bien « royaume »).</p></blockquote>\n<div>This kind of savage intolerance even exists today—just look at the theocracies of Iran and Saudi Arabia with their sharia, or Afghanistan under the Taliban—the famous “theology students,” or Al Qaeda, the John Kony’s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord's_Resistance_Army\">Lord’s Resistance Army</a> in Uganda, or even closer to us, the “<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundu_dia_Kongo\">Bundu dia Kongo</a>” which you embrace, it seems to me, without knowing the fundamental principle that they follow: the establishment of a theocratic Congo over the former territory (which includes northern Angola and southern Congo-Brazzaville) because this ethnic group are the happy chosen who will separate themselves from the DRC to live in a messianic utopia! As you can imagine, the freethinkers of Bakongo [i.e., freethinking Congolese] will not have civil rights in this kingdom (”bundu” in Kikongo means “kingdom”).</div>\n<blockquote><p>La « laïcité » que vous invoquez en passant a été justement introduite avec le Siècle des Lumières au 18ème Siècle qui a érigé la Raison et l’Humanisme dans les affaires humaines—pour ainsi en arriver à la tolérance religieuse, philosophique, et à la connaissance scientifique. On a d’ailleurs appelé ce siècle Le Siècle des Philosophes, siècle à partir duquel on a commencé à voir ce qu’était vraiment la religion : un tissu d’histoires à dormir debout, sans tête ni queue, sans aucune emprise sur le réel…</p></blockquote>\n<div>The “laïcité” that you invoke in passing was rightly introduced during the Enlightenment in the 18th century that brought Reason and Humanism into human affairs—through [this movement] came religious tolerance, philosophy, and scientific knowledge. This period was also called the Age of Philosophers, the age when we tarted to see religion for what it really was: an amazing and absurd story without any power over reality…</div>\n<p><em>Photo credits: </em>1. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/papester/284109528/\">A church in Kinshasa on election day</a>, October 29, 2006 by Flickr user epape; 2. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredr/103451677/\">Paroisse Mbanza Mvuluzi</a> by Flickr user Fred R., also a <a href=\"http://globalvoicesonline.org/author/fred-r/\">Global Voices contributor</a> and author of <a href=\"http://www.thiswayplease.com/extra-extra\">Extra Extra</a>; 3. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillpoole/182398048/\">An outdoor church in Bukavu holding adult literacy classes</a> by Flickr user crunklygill; and 4. <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillpoole/182397627/\">An assemblage of Congolese bishops</a>, also by crinklygill.<em><br>\n</em>\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p><em>Note to readers: For a while now, I've <a href=\"http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/BillHiggins?entry=any_good_books_on_message\" title=\"Bill Higgins :: Any good books on message design?\">been looking</a> for guidance on designing useful messages and message-based systems, but without much luck. To help others and also because I <a href=\"http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/BillHiggins?entry=writing_to_learn&ca=drs-bl\" title=\"Bill Higgins :: writing to learn\">learn by writing</a>, I'm going to use my blog to document some of the messaging lessons I've learned over the past couple of years. I hope this blog entry and future ones like it don't seem overly-pedantic; my only goal is to help clarify my own thoughts and perhaps help others looking for similar information on a topic with which I've personally struggled. </em></p>\n\n<p><em>In this blog entry, I talk about the fundamentals of caching resource representations in HTTP-based distributed systems using the language of basic concepts while avoiding HTTP terminology which might sidetrack novice readers. This entry does assume some knowledge of HTTP (e.g. requests, responses, URIs), so if you find these concepts sidetracking you, I'd suggest you read the first couple of chapters of a book like <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/HTTP-Definitive-Guide-David-Gourley/dp/1565925092/\" title=\"HTTP: The Definitive Guide (Amazon.com)\">HTTP: The Definitive Guide</a> to familiarize yourself.</em></p>\n\n<p><em>If you're already familiar with HTTP caching (e.g. most likely anyone reading this via <a href=\"http://planet.intertwingly.net/\" title=\"Planet Intertwingly\">Planet Intertwingly</a>)</em><em>, you may wish to skip this entry altogether, unless you're curious about my take on the topic or are interested in looking for mistakes or misrepresentations. If you do find a problem, please add a comment and I'll attempt to correct and/or clarify.</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>Intro</strong></p>\n\n<p>One of the benefits of developing distributed applications using <a href=\"http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm\" title=\"Fielding dissertation\">the REST architectural style</a> with <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html\" title=\"HTTP/1.1\">the HTTP protocol</a> is their first-class support for caching documents (or 'entities-bodies' in HTTP terminology). If you're simply serving files using a world-class web server like <a href=\"http://httpd.apache.org/\" title=\"The Apache HTTP Server Project\">Apache HTTP Server</a>, you get some degree of caching for free. But in dynamic web applications, you're often generating dynamic documents (e.g. an XML document containing data from a row in a relational database) rather than simply serving files, where the resource and the representation are equivalent.</p>\n\n<p>Unless you're using an application framework that automatically generates caching information for HTTP responses based on the framework's meta-data model, you'll likely have to roll your own caching logic. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that you must learn about the various HTTP caching options so that you can intelligently apply them to your particular data model; the opportunity is that you can often take advantage of your data model's semantics to perform smarter caching logic than out-of-the-box file system caching.</p>\n\n<p>In this entry I describe the basic rationale for caching and then discuss the basic caching options possible with the HTTP protocol. Note that I describe these caching options at a very high level, without getting into many implementation details, and at this level the 'HTTP caching options' are more like general caching patterns, but nevertheless I describe them in the context and using the language of HTTP, since it's both a ubiquitously deployed protocol and also the protocol with which I'm most familiar.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Why Cache?</strong></p>\n\n<p>Caching may be one of the most boring topics in software, but if you're working with distributed systems (like the web), smart cache design is absolutely vital to both system scalability and responsiveness, among other things. In brief, a <em>cache</em> is simply a local copy of data that resides elsewhere. A computing component (whether hardware or software) uses a data cache to avoid performing an expensive operation like fetching data over a network or executing a computationally-expensive algorithm. The trade-off is that your copy of the data may become out of sync with the original data source, or <em>stale</em>, in caching terminology. Whether or not staleness matters depends on the nature of the data and the needs of your application.</p>\n\n<p>For example if your web site displays the average daily temperature for Philadelphia over the past hundred years, you probably display a simple stored data element (e.g. \"59 degrees F\") rather than performing this very expensive computation in realtime. Because it would take a long period of unusual weather to noticably affect the result, it doesn't really matter if your cached copy doesn't consider very recent temperatures. At the other extreme, an automated teller machine (ATM) definitely <em>should not</em> use a cached copy of your checking account balance when determining whether you have enough money to make a withdrawl since this might allow a malicious customer to make simultaneous withdrawls of his entire balance from multiple ATMs.</p>\n\n<p>Generally speaking, the cacheability of a particular piece of data varies along two axes:</p>\n<ul>\n\t<li>the volatility of the data</li>\n\t<li>the potential negative impact of using stale data</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>HTTP Caching Options</strong></p>\n\n<p>Caching is a first-class concern of <a href=\"http://billhiggins.us/weblog/wp-admin/the%20Design%20of%20Network-based%20Software%20Architectures\" title=\"Fielding dissertation\">the REST architectural style</a> and <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html\" title=\"HTTP/1.1\">the HTTP protocol</a>. Indeed, one of the main goals of HTTP/1.1 was to enhance the basic caching capabilities provided by HTTP/1.0 (see chapter 7 of Krishnamurthy and Rexford's <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Web-Protocols-Practice-Networking-Measurement/dp/0201710889/\" title=\"Book - Web Protocols and Practice (Amazon.com)\"><em>Web Protocols and Practice</em></a> for an excellent discussion on the design goals of HTTP 1.1). At the risk of oversimplifying, for a given RESTful HTTP URI, you have three basic caching options:</p>\n<ol>\n\t<li>don't use caching</li>\n\t<li>use validation-based caching</li>\n\t<li>use expiration-based caching</li>\n</ol>\n<p>These options demonstrate the trade-offs between the need to avoid stale data and the performance benefits of using cached data. The <em>no caching</em> option means that a client will always fetch the most recent data available from an origin server. This is useful in cases where the data is extremely volatile and using stale data may have dire consequences. For example, anytime you view a list of current auctions on eBay (e.g. for <a href=\"http://stamps.listings.ebay.com/United-States_19th-Century-Unused_W0QQfromZR4QQsacatZ676QQsocmdZListingItemList\" title=\"eBay - us stamp, 19th Century Unused\">19th Century Unused US Stamps</a>), you'll notice many anti-caching directives in the HTTP response included to ensure that you always see the most recent state of the various auctions. The downside of no caching is that every request is guaranteed to incur some cost in terms of client-perceived latency, server resources (e.g. CPU, memory), and network bandwidth.</p>\n\n<p><em>Validation-based caching</em> allows an HTTP response to include a logical 'state identifier' (such as an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag\" title=\"Wikipedia: HTTP ETag\">HTTP ETag</a> or Last-Modified timestamp) which a client can then resend on subsequent requests for the same URI, potentially resulting in a short 'not modified' message from the server. Validation-based caching provides a useful trade-off between the need for fresh data and the goal to reduce consumption of network bandwidth and, to a lesser extent, server resources and client-perceived latency.</p>\n\n<p>For example, imagine a web page that changes frequently but not on a regular schedule. This web page could use validation-based caching so that each time a client attempts to view the page, the request goes all the way back to the origin server but may result in either a full response (if the client either has an old version of the page or no cached version of the page) or a terse 'not modified' response (if the client has the most recent version of the page). All other things being equal, in the 'not modified' case the response will be smaller (since the server sent no document), the server will do less work (since it doesn't have to stream the page bytes from disk or memory), and the client may observe a faster load time since the message is smaller and the user agent (e.g. the browser) may even have a cached rendering of the page. These are certainly superior non-functional characteristics to the 'no caching' case and we don't have to worry about seeing stale data (assuming the client does the right thing). However, the server still did some work to determine that the client had the most recent resource, the client still experienced some latency waiting for the 'not modified' message, and we still used some network bandwidth to send the request and received the (albeit short) response.</p>\n\n<p><em>Expiration-based caching</em> allows an origin server associate an expiration timestamp on a particular document so that clients can simply assume that their cached copy is safe to use if it not passed its expiration date. In other words, an origin server asserts that the document is 'good' or 'good enough' for a certain period of tme. This sort of caching has fantastic performance characteristics but requires the designer to ensure either that:</p>\n<ul>\n\t<li>the data won't become stale before the expiration period ends, or</li>\n\t<li>the impact of a client using stale data is negligible</li>\n</ul>\n<p>An example of a resource that is well-suited for expiration-based caching is an image of a book cover on Amazon.com (e.g. <a href=\"http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51W8l2Zy3WL._AA240_.jpg\" title=\"image of the cover of Steve Krug's book \">the image of the cover of Steve Krug's <em>Don't Make Me Think</em></a>). While it's possible that the book cover could change, it's extremely unlikely and since image files are relatively large, it would be wise for Amazon to set an expiration date so that clients load the image from their cache without even asking Amazon whether or not they have the most recent version. If somehow the cover of the book does change between when you cache your copy and when your cache copy expires, it's not a big deal unless you base your purchasing decisions on book cover aesthetics.</p>\n\n<p>Another performance benefit of expiration-based caching is that even in the case where a client doesn't have a valid cached copy of a document, it's possible that a network intermediary (e.g. a proxy server) does. In this case a client requests a particular URI and before the request reaches the origin server, an intermediary determines that it has a still-valid cached copy of the document and returns its copy immediately rather than forwarding the request to the next intermediary or the origin server. It should be clear from these examples that expiration-based caching results in significantly less user-perceived latency and consumes significantly less network bandwith and server resources. The trick is that you have to guarantee either no staleness or feel confident that the risks involved in a client processing stale data are justified by the performance benefits. Note that its generally not possible to take advantage of intermediary caching over an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS\" title=\"Wikipedia: HTTPS\">HTTPS</a> connection.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Summary</strong></p>\n\n<p>In this entry I've explained the basic rationale for why we cache things in distributed systems and given an overview of the three basic caching options in REST/HTTP-based systems. This information represents a bare-bone set of fundamental caching concepts, but you must understand these concepts thoroughly before being able to make informed caching design choices vis-à-vis your data model.</p>\n\n<p>In future entries, I'll build upon these foundational concepts to discuss caching design strategies for various scenarios.</p>"
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"content" : "<p></p>\n\n<p>I'm writing this on my flight back from XTech 2007, Paris, France. This gives me a decent block of time to express some thoughts and recent developments. This is the only significant time I've had \nin a while to do any writing. <br>\n<img src=\"http://static.flickr.com/50/124640822_d0d5f6aed0_m.jpg\" alt=\"My family\" style=\"float:left;padding:10px\"></p>\n\n<p>Between raising a large family, software development / evangelism, and blogging I can only afford to do two of these. So, blogging loses out consistently.</p>\n\n<p>My paper (XML-powered Exhibit: A Case Study of JSON and XML Coexistence) is now <a href=\"http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/paper/59\">online</a>. I'll be writing a follow-up blog on how \nhttp://planetatom.net demonstrates some of what was discussed in that paper. I ran into some technical difficulties with projecting from Ubuntu, but the paper covers everything in detail. The \nslides are <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/files/XMLExhibit.odp\">here</a>.</p>\n\n<p>My blog todo list has become ridiculously long. I've been heads-down on a handful of open source projects (mostly semantic web related) when I'm not focusing on work-related software development. <br>\nLuckily there has been a very healthy intersection of the open source projects I work on and what I do at work (and have been doing non-stop for about 4 years). In a few cases, I've spun these \n'mini-projects' off under an umbrella project I've been working on called <a href=\"http://code.google.com/p/python-dlp/\">python-dlp</a>. It is meant (in the end) to be a toolkit for semantic web hackers (such \nas myself) who want to get their hands dirty and have an aptitude for Python. There is more information on the main python-dlp page (linked above).</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/files/sparql-p-evaluation.png\" alt=\"sparql-p evaluation algorithm\" style=\"padding:10px;float:left\">\nSome of the other things I've been working on I'd prefer to submit to appropriate peer-reviewed outlets considering the amount of time I've put into them. First, I really would like to do a 'proper' \nwrite-up on the map/reduce approach for evaluating SPARQL Algebra expressions and the inner mechanics of Ivan Herman's \n<a href=\"http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2004/PythonLib-IH/Doc/sparqlDesc.html?rev=1.11&content-type=text/html;%20charset=iso-8859-1\">sparql-p</a> evaluation algorithm. The latter is one of those hidden \ngems I've become closely familiar with for some time that I would very much like to examine in a peer-reviewed paper especially if Ivan is interested doing so in tandem =).</p>\n\n<p>Since joining the W3C DAWG, I've had much more time to get even more familiar with the formal semantics of the Algebra and how to efficiently implement it on-top of sparql-p to overcome the original \nlimitation on the kinds of patterns it can resolve.</p>\n\n<p>I was hoping (also) to release and talk a bit about a SPARQL server implementation I wrote in CherryPy / 4Suite / RDFLib for those who may find it useful as a quick and dirty way to contribute to the \ngrowing number of SPARQL <a href=\"http://esw.w3.org/topic/SparqlEndpoints\">endpoints</a> out there. A few folks in irc:///freenode.net/redfoot (where the RDFLib developers hang out) have expressed interest, \nbut I just haven't found the time to 'shrink-wrap' what I have so far.</p>\n\n<p>On a different (non-sem-web) note, I spoke some with Mark Birbeck (at XTech 2007) about my interest in working on a 4Suite / FormsPlayer demonstration. I've spent the better part of 3 years \nworking \non FormsPlayer as a client-side platform for XML-driven applications served from a 4Suite repository and I've found the combination quite powerful. FormsPlayer (and XForms 1.1 specifically) is \nreally the icing on the cake which takes an XML / RDF Content Management System like the 4Suite repository and turns it into a complete platform for deploying next generation rich web applications. \n</p> \n\n<p><img src=\"http://2006.xmlconference.org/proceedings/90/backplane.png\" border=\"0\" style=\"float:right;padding:10px\"></p>\n\n<p>The combination is a perfect realization of the <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/backplane/\">Rich Web Application Backplane</a> (a reoccurring theme in my last two presentations / papers) and it is very much worth \nnoting that some of the challenges / requirements I've been able address with this methodology can simply not be reproduced in any other approach: neither vanilla DHTML, .NET, J2EE, Ruby on Rails, \nDjango, nor Jackrabbit. The same is probably the case with Silverlight and Apollo.</p>\n\n<p>In particular, when it comes to <a href=\"http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2006-12-18/xml-2006-paper\">declarative generation</a> of user interfaces, I have yet to find a more complete approach than via XForms.</p>\n\n<p>Mark Birbeck's presentation on <a href=\"http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/114\">Skimming</a> is a good read (slides / paper is not up yet) for those not quite familiar with the architectural merits of \nthis larger methodology. However, in his presentation <a href=\"http://exist.sourceforge.net/\">eXist</a> was used as the XML store and it struck me that you could do much more with 4Suite instead. In \nparticular, as a CMS with native support for RDF as well as XML it opens up additional avenues. Consider extending Skimming by leveraging the SPARQL protocol as an additional mode of expressive \ncommunication beyond 'vanilla' RESTful operations on XML documents.</p>\n\n<p>These are very exciting times as the value proposition of rich web (I much prefer this term over the much beleaguered Web 2.0+) and semantic web applications has fully transitioned from vacuous / \nacademic musings to concretely demonstrable in my estimation. This value proposition is still not being communicated as well as it could, but having bundled demos can bridge this gap \nsignificantly in my opinion; much more so than just literature alone.</p>\n\n<p>This is one of the reasons why I've been more passionate about doing much less writing / blogging and more hands-on hacking (if you will). The original thought (early on this year) was that I would \nhave plenty to write about towards the middle of this year and time spent discussing the ongoing work would be premature. As it happens, things turned out exactly this way.</p>\n\n<p>There is a lesson to be learned for how the Joost project progressed to where it is. The approach of talking about deployed / tested / running code has worked perfectly for them. I don't recall \nmuch public dialog about that particular effort until very recently and now they have running code doing unprecedented things and the opportunity (I'm guessing) to switch gears to do more evangelism \nwith a much more effective 'wow' factor.</p>\n\n<p>Speaking of wow, I must say of all the sessions at XTech 2007, the Joost <a href=\"http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/53\">session</a> was the most impressive. The number of architectures they bridged, \nthe list of demonstrable value propositions, the slick design, the incredibly agile and visionary use the most appropriate technology in each case etc.. is an absolutely stunning achievement.</p>\n\n<p>The fact that they did this all while remembering their roots: open standards, open source, open communities leaves me with a deep sense of respect for all those involved in the project. I hope this \nbecomes a much larger trend. Intellectual property paranoia and cloak / dagger completive edge is a thing of the past in today's software problem solving landscape. It is a ridiculously outdated \nmindset and I hope those who can effect real change (those higher up in their respective ORG charts than the enthusiastic hackers) in this regard are paying close attention. Oh boy. I'm about to \nlaunch into a rant, so I think I'll leave it at that.</p>\n\n<p>The short of it is that I'm hoping (very soon) to switch gears from heads-down design / development / testing to much more targeted write-ups, evangelism, and such. The starting point (for me) will \nbe Semantic Technology <a href=\"http://www.semantic-conference.com/2007/conferenceglance.html\">Conference</a> in San Jose. If the above topics are of interest to you, I strongly suggest you attend my \ncolleague's (Dr. Chris Pierce) <a href=\"http://www.semantic-conference.com/2007/sessions/t5.html\">session</a> on SemanticDB (the flagship XML & RDF CMS we've been working on at the Clinic as a basis for \n<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Based-Patient-Record-Essential-Technology/dp/0309055326/ref=sr_1_1/002-2186293-1456848?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179590783&sr=8-1\">Computerized Patient Records</a>) as well as \nmy <a href=\"http://www.semantic-conference.com/2007/sessions/r3.html\">session</a> on how we <em>need</em> to pave a path to a new generation of XML / RDF CMSes and a few suggestions on how to go about paving this \npath. They are complementary sessions.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://jackrabbit.apache.org/images/arch/overview.png\" alt=\"Jackrabbit architecture\" border=\"0\"></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=170\">JSR 170</a> is a start in the right direction, but the work we've been doing with the 4Suite repository for some time leaves me with the strong, intuitive \nimpression that CMSes that have a natural (and standardized) synthesis with XML processing is only half the step towards eradicating the stronghold that monolithic technology stacks have over those \n(such as myself) with 'enterprise' requirements that can truly only be met with the newly emerging sets of architectural patterns: Semantic / Rich Web Applications. This stronghold can only be \neradicated by addressing the absence of a coherent landscape with peer-reviewed standards. Dr. Macro has an incredibly visionary \n<a href=\"http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/search/label/XCMTDMW%20%22xml%20content%20management%22%20%22cms%20characteristics%22\">series</a> of 'write-ups' on XML CMS that paints a comprehensive picture of \nsome best practices in this regard:</p>\n\n<p>However (as with JSR 170), there is no reason why there isn't a bridge or some form of synthesis with RDF processing within the confines of a CMS.</p>\n\n<p>There is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to implement an application which is written against an abstract API for document <em>and</em> knowledge management irrespective of how this API is \nimplemented (this is very much aligned with larger goal of JSR 170). There is no reason why the 4Suite repository is the only available infrastructure for supporting both XML <em>and</em> RDF processing in \n(standardized) synthesis.</p>\n\n<p>I should be able to 'hot-swap' RDFLib with Jena or Redland, 4Suite XML with Saxon / Libxml / etc.., and the 4Suite repository with an implementation of a standard API for synchronized XML / RDF \ncontent management. The value of setting a foundation in this arena is applicable to virtually any domain in which a CMS is a necessary first component.</p>\n\n<p>Until such a time, I will continue to start with 4Suite repository / RDFLib / formsPlayer as a platform for \nSemantic / Rich Web applications. However, I'm hoping (with my presentation at San Jose) to paint a picture of this vacuum with the intent of contributing towards enough of a critical mass to \n(perhaps) start putting together some standards towards this end.</p>"
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"title" : "About Google Reader's Birth: Part 1.",
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"content" : "<em>This story of Google Reader's birth isn't just about me. But for a long, bad while it is. So here's how it started...</em><h2>It's Kottke's Fault.</h2><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1/512824_f422bf720e_s.jpg\" style=\"padding:15px\" align=\"right\">Sometime around early 2001, while not working at work, I was reading a post on <a href=\"http://kottke.org/\">Jason Kottke's blog</a> where he mentioned a company named <em>Moreover</em>. Moreover <a href=\"http://web.archive.org/web/20010124094700/http://w.moreover.com/site/products/webmaster/index.html\">had a pitch</a> about putting free headlines on your site. At the time, Moreover's pitch sounded like tin-toned boilerplate barkery with a voice about as authentic as a \"sale\" at Guitar Center. But I trust Jason, and, besides, could I write marketing copy any better? (<a href=\"http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2006/04/stay-tuned-its-video-in-google-reader.html\">Answer: no.</a>)<br><br>I followed the instructions and put headlines on my site. It was easily accomplished.<br><br>I realized that instead of this neat solution, someone should replace it with something tedious and lame and less re-usable. I was clearly that someone.<h2>All the choices of a Model T.</h2>I decided I wanted a site with headlines from many different sites. In the irrational exuberance days, these were sometimes referred to as \"web directories\" or \"web portals\" if they were customizable.<br><br>I made a poorly-written, open-sourced Java library to get headlines based on Moreover's \"webfeeds.\" Then I made <a href=\"http://web.archive.org/web/20010223170146/http://www.chriswetherell.com/portal.asp\">a mini-portal</a>. It got the \"<em>mini</em>\" qualification because the customization was narrow since users could only choose headlines from sites I liked because I was too lazy to build the customization engine. Naturally, I included my own weblog, so my hand would have been raised high in a \"raise your hand if you're a jerk\" contest.<br><br>I finished and sent a link to friends. The site was alive and browsers could see it, so I was satisfied. Except CNN didn't have a feed, so I modified the code to scrape the lead story and some other links. Later that year, on September 11th, that would turn out to be a surreal snapshot on a bandwidth-choked day as the cache contained information from sites that remained inaccessible.<h2>There are many copies.</h2>The mini-portal puttered along on a server in my apartment throughout the next couple of years as my professional life was significantly changed by joining Google. I remain grateful for this; I am exceedingly lucky this occurred.<br><br>I was working on Blogger, for whom syndication was an important and contentious topic. I'll elide over the technical details and specific history of the evolution of feeds and instead give you my bird's-eye first impression as a developer wading into the food fight over standards and implementation. My first impression? <br><br>Blogger had Moreover's webfeeds, except they were calling them just \"feeds.\" And other people before Moreover had originally called them RDF for a while but simplified them to RSS. Except then they called them Echo. Which stopped after a while and they called them Atom though they planned several versions. Except there was still RSS. Also with several versions. And everyone hated each other. Weird, huh?<br><br><small>(If you're mad about the preceding paragraph, please know I think you are a beautiful person. And sexy. You are loved, it is presumed.)</small><br><br>The mini-portal kept breaking and friends kept telling me they relied on it, so I <a href=\"http://web.archive.org/web/20040622205220/http://www.chriswetherell.com/portal.asp\">kept updating it</a>. I was surprised anyone relied on it, especially as it wasn't very powerful. They seemed addicted.<h2>Parser.</h2><img style=\"padding:15px\" src=\"http://www.massless.org/blogger/php/uploaded_images/shellen-778738.jpg\" align=\"right\">At Google one day, like every day, I was really busy.<br><br>Turns out that with <a href=\"http://shellen.com/\">Jason Shellen</a> that wasn't really much of a deterrent. \"Why don't you make an Atom parser in Javascript?\", he asked.<br><br>Which, for the non-geeks, is his asking me to make <em>something</em> that turns <em>something</em> into <em>something else</em> which could be used to represent data that was basically about cat photos. Generally the people who appreciate this kind of thing have been given a Lego-based Millenium Falcon as a birthday present.<br><br>So, okay. That sounded fun (kinda). And I was only doing several thousand things at the time, so it seemed a reasonable request.<h2>Normalization.</h2><img style=\"padding:15px\" src=\"http://www.massless.org/blogger/php/uploaded_images/jenson-792569.jpg\" align=\"right\">After writing an Atom parser and getting a way to run unit tests automatically for a group of Atom feeds I went back to the thousands of things I was supposed to be doing and rested with some contentment.<br><br>\"You suck,\" mentioned <a href=\"http://saladwithsteve.com/\">Steve Jenson</a>.<br><br>\"Having a normalizer could fit every kind of feed content into your model,\" he continued while watching me review the unit tests in shame. \"Then you would suck less. And I could write that in ten minutes. Nine, if I don't take time to blink.\"<br><br>Steve whipped together a Python-based normalizer based on the <a href=\"http://www.feedparser.org/\">Universal Feed Parser</a> and made me watch. He agreed to let me use it if I danced a jig which I performed <em>mio gusto</em> as requested. I'd already abandoned my dignity earlier in life so the joke was on him.<h2>A moment of clarity.</h2>Normally, programmers are supposed to <em>minimize</em> duplication of effort so I wasn't thinking about making a feed reader, there were plenty of those - I was just making a web page that tested the parser. I narrowed the parser effort to just one bug that concerned me, and one night I finally discovered a workaround, <a href=\"http://www.massless.org/?archive=2004/08/fragments-are-tricky\">posted about it</a>, and ran the tests again to review the content.<br><br>Oh. Well, would you look at that. <br><br>See, that night a little wheel reinvention occurred ... as a square. The parser became a reader by accident. <br><br>It's difficult to describe my excitement at that moment. <br><br>For the non-geeks, I mostly work on the stuff you can actually see when you use software: the layout, forms, graphics, the logic behind what happens when you click on something. <br><br>Each time I'd want to do something useful that was also complex, I'd have to create a layer which described data in a way that I could easily transform. It almost never came out from a database that way.<br><br>But in this moment, I reviewed the tests and was reminded that a layer had been bypassed. Feeds were already describing data in a way that I could easily transform. This was more convenient than any other confluence of data and language than I'd seen. I could work less and take naps and just be lazier and that's all I'd really wanted anyways.<br><br>An anecdote for the geeks: I'd also realized it could be neat to attach events processing to individual items in a feed. I hoped that could be useful. (As <a href=\"http://persistent.info/\">Mihai</a> has shown all of us in abundance: it has been. More on that later.)<br><br>The pages looked reasonably pretty.<br><br>I put it on the Google intranet to show Steve even though the reading interface had lots of bugs. Code quality seemed unimportant since, I thought, this is just a little thing. It's not like it's going to be something real.<br><br><small><em>End Part 1.</em></small><div><img width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6723081-1852978594220044126?l=www.massless.org%2Fblogger%2Fphp%2Fcontent.php\" alt=\"\"></div>"
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"title" : "The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth",
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"content" : "<p>A couple of weeks ago, Fred Wilson wrote, in <a href=\"http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/05/the_mid_life_en.html\">The Mid Life Entrepreneur Crisis</a> “…prime time entrepreneurship is 30s. And its possibly getting younger as web technology meets youth culture.” After some <a href=\"http://valleywag.com/tech/the-question/is-30-too-old-to-start-a-company-260742.php\">followup from Valleywag</a>, he addressed the question at greater length in <a href=\"http://avc.blogs.com/\">The Age Question (continued)</a>, saying “I don’t totally buy that age matters. I think, as I said in my original post, that age is a mind set.”</p>\n\n<p>This is a relief for people like me — you’re as young as you feel, and all that — or rather it would be a relief but for one little problem: Fred was right before, and he’s wrong now. Young entrepreneurs have an advantage over older ones (and by older I mean over 30), and contra Fred’s second post, age isn’t in fact a mindset. Young people have an advantage that older people don’t have and can’t fake, and it isn’t about vigor or hunger — it’s a mental advantage. The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things. </p>\n\n<p>In almost every other circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now. The reason this is so (and the reason smart old people can’t fake their way into this asset) has everything to do with our innate ability to cement past experience into knowledge.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Probability and the Crisis of Novelty</strong></p>\n\n<p>The classic illustration for learning outcomes based on probability uses a bag of colored balls. Imagine that you can take out one ball, record its color, put it back, and draw again. How long does it take you to form an opinion about the contents of the bag, and how correct is that opinion? </p>\n\n<p>Imagine a bag of black and white balls, with a slight majority of white. Drawing out a single ball would provide little information beyond “There is at least one white (or black) ball in this bag.” If you drew out ten balls in a row, you might guess that there are a similar number of black and white balls. A hundred would make you relatively certain of that, and might give you an inkling that white slightly outnumbers black. By a thousand draws, you could put a rough percentage on that imbalance, and by ten thousand draws, you could say something like “53% white to 47% black” with some confidence.</p>\n\n<p>This is the world most of us live in, most of the time; the people with the most experience know the most.</p>\n\n<p>But what would happen if the contents of the bag changed overnight? What if the bag suddenly started yielding balls of all colors and patterns — black and white but also green and blue, striped and spotted? The next day, when the expert draws a striped ball, he might well regard it as a mere anomaly. After all, his considerable experience has revealed a predictable and stable distribution over tens of thousands of draws, so no need to throw out the old theory because of just one anomaly. (To put it in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem\">Bayesian terms</a>, the prior beliefs of the expert are valuable precisely because they have been strengthened through repetition, which repetition makes the expert confident in them even in the face of a small number of challenging cases.)</p>\n\n<p>But the expert keeps drawing odd colors, and so after a while, he is forced to throw out the ‘this is an anomaly, and the bag is otherwise as it was’ theory, and start on a new one, which is that some novel variability has indeed entered the system. Now, the expert thinks, we have a world of mostly black and white, but with some new colors as well. </p>\n\n<p>But the expert is still wrong. The bag changed overnight, and the new degree of variation is huge compared to the older black-and-white world. Critically, <em>any</em> attempt to rescue the older theory will cause the expert to misunderstand the world, and the more carefully the expert relies on the very knowledge that constitutes his expertise, the worse his misunderstanding will be.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, on the morning after the contents of the bag turn technicolor, someone who just showed up five minutes ago would say “Hey, this bag has lots of colors and patterns in it.” While the expert is still trying to explain away or minimize the change as a fluke, or as a slight adjustment to an otherwise stable situation, the novice, who has no prior theory to throw out, understands exactly what’s going on. </p>\n\n<p>What our expert should have done, the minute he saw the first odd ball, is to say “I must abandon everything I have ever thought about how this bag works, and start from scratch.” He should, in other words, start behaving like a novice. </p>\n\n<p>Which is exactly the thing he — we — cannot do. We are wired to learn from experience. This is, in almost all cases, absolutely the right strategy, because most things in life benefit from mental continuity. Again, today, gravity pulls things downwards. Again, today, I get hungry and need to eat something in the middle of the day. Again, today, my wife will be happier if I put my socks in the hamper than on the floor. We don’t need to re-learn things like this; once we get the pattern, we can internalize it and move on.</p>\n\n<p><strong>A Lot of Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing</strong></p>\n\n<p>This is where Fred’s earlier argument comes in. In 999,999 cases, learning from experience is a good idea, but what entrepreneurs do is look for the one in a million shot. When the world really has changed overnight, when wild new things are possible if you don’t have any sense of how things used to be, then it is the people who got here five minutes ago who understand that new possibility, and they understand it precisely because, to them, it isn’t new. </p>\n\n<p>These cases, let it be said, are rare. The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they are at risk of regarding it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.</p>\n\n<p>Here’s a tech history question: Which went mainstream first, the PC or the <span>VCR</span>? </p>\n\n<p>People over 35 have a hard time even understanding why you’d even ask — <span>VCR</span>s obviously pre-date PCs for general adoption. </p>\n\n<p>Here’s another: Which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? </p>\n\n<p>The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical demonstration of radio came almost two decades after the practical demonstration of the telephone. We have to think about that second question because, to us, radio and the telephone arrived at the same time, which is to say the day we were born. And for college students today, that is true of the <span>VCR </span>and the <span>PC.</span></p>\n\n<p>People who think of the <span>VCR </span>as old and stable, and the PC as a newer invention, are not the kind of people who think up Tivo. It’s people who are presented with two storage choices, tape or disk, without historical bias making tape seem more normal and disk more provisional, who do that kind of work, and those people are, overwhelmingly, young.</p>\n\n<p>This is sad for a lot of us, but its also true, and Fred’s kind lies about age being a mind set won’t reverse that.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The Uses of Experience</strong></p>\n\n<p>I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that music comes from stores. I know that you have to try on pants before you buy them. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that the library is the most important building on a college campus. I know that if you need to take a trip, you visit a travel agent. </p>\n\n<p>In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first — I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur. </p>\n\n<p>Ten years ago, I was the <span>CTO </span>of a web company we built and sold in what seemed like an eon but what was in retrospect an eyeblink. Looking back, I’m embarrassed at how little I knew, but I was a better entrepreneur because of it. </p>\n\n<p>I can take some comfort in the fact that people much more successful than I succumb to the same fate. <span>IBM </span>learned, from decades of experience, that competitive advantage lay in the hardware; Bill Gates had never had those experiences, and didn’t have to unlearn them. Jerry and David at Yahoo learned, after a few short years, that search was a commodity. Sergey and Larry never knew that. Mark Cuban learned that the infrastructure required for online video made the economics of web video look a lot like <span>TV.</span> That memo was never circulated at YouTube.</p>\n\n<p>So what can you do when you get kicked out of the club? My answer has been to do the things older and wiser people do. I teach, I write, I consult, and when I work with startups, it’s as an advisor, not as a founder. </p>\n\n<p>And the hardest discipline, whether talking to my students or the companies I work with, is to hold back from offering too much advice, too definitively. When I see students or startups thinking up something crazy, and I want to explain why that won’t work, couldn’t possibly work, why this recapitulates the very argument that led to <span>RFC</span> 939 back in the day, I have to remind myself to shut up for a minute and just watch, because it may be me who will be surprised when I see what color comes out of the bag next.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Many-to-many?a=4xK290\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Many-to-many?i=4xK290\" border=\"0\"></a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Many-to-many?a=DV6euePr\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Many-to-many?i=DV6euePr\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Many-to-many/~4/118089353\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">"
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"title" : "Getting Sarkozy Wrong",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://medias.lemonde.fr/mmpub/edt/ill/2007/01/09/h_4_ill_812421_sarkozy-bush.jpg\" width=\"300\"><br>\n<i>Bonhomie does not a policy make:<br>\nSarkozy’s agenda is “to the left of Kucinich”</i></p>\n\t<p><i>One of the reasons I know I’m doing something right on this web site is the fact that I’m lucky enough to have Bernard Chazelle as a frequent reader of and commentator on my postings, be they on matters Middle Eastern or the state of European football. A Princeton computer science professor, Bernard is an unfailingly erudite commentator with spectacularly diverse interests and fascinating insights — check out <a href=\"http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/\"> his personal page</a> — and when I recently waded, rather ignorantly, into the minefield of French politics, he set me straight on a few questions. Now that Nicolas Sarkozy is the new president — and is being claimed in the U.S. media as being as pro-American as Chirac was ostensibly anti- — I invited Bernard to offer us some insights on what we should really expect to change in France as a result of a Sarko presidency. Bernard elegantly shreds the mainstream media picture of “France in decline,” but at the same time skewers the received notion of Sarkozy as an anti-immigrant vigilante or a Gallic Tony Blair.</i></p>\n\t<p>I’m delighted to welcome Bernard in what I hope will be the first of many guest appearances on Rootless Cosmopolitan</p>\n\t<p><b>Why Sarkozy Will Disappoint the White House </b></p>\n\t<p>by Bernard Chazelle</p>\n\t<p>\nThe story has been all over the media: Nicolas Sarkozy might not be an easy man to like but France is the “sick man of Europe” and tough love is what it needs. If its new president’s odes to the liberating power of work<br>\nand paeons to “the France that gets up early” grate on the ears of his 35-hour-work-week nation, so be it.<br>\nYeah, yeah, Sarko made few friends in the riot-prone <i>banlieues</i> when he called the locals “scum” and threatened to clean up the projects with a Kärcher power hose (a German brand, no less). But at least he promised them jobs and not more empty socialist rhetoric. Having missed the train of globalization, the French economy is collapsing under the strain of a creaky welfare system and a chronic incapacity to create jobs.<br>\nBy rejecting the neoliberal creed, France has turned its back on modernity. Aware of its decline, the nation pines for its lost <i>grandeur</i>, a risible notion so quintessentially Gallic English doesn’t even have a word for it. The pro-US, pro-Israel, tax-cutting, union-busting Sarko is France’s best hope for breaking with the gloomy years of the past.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nNice story. Too bad it bears so little connection to reality. France faces serious problems but they are none of the above. Oddly, to get the country all wrong seems a bit of an art form in the U.S. media. On any given day, Tom Friedman can be found berating the French for “<i>trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.</i>” Friedman’s genius is to suppress in the reader the commonsense reaction—Indian engineers have no life—and improbably redirect the pity toward the French. That takes some skill.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n<b>‘French decline’ by the numbers</b><br>\n </p>\n\t<p>With the highest birth rate in Europe after Ireland, France contributes 70% of Europe’s natural population growth. GDP per head in France, Germany, Japan, and the UK are nearly identical. Growth over the last 10 years has averaged 2% in france, 2.1% in the U.S., and 2.3% in the UK. In the last quarter, France actually raced ahead of Britain and the U.S. Productivity is higher in France than in both countries (and 50% more so than in Japan). But pity the French: with their 35-hour work week, 5-week paid vacations, and 16-week paid maternity leaves, they work 30% fewer hours than Americans. Maybe that’s why they live longer (81 years vs 78) and infant mortality is lower (4.3 vs 7 per 1000). Unless the reason is France’s health care system: the best in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Or perhaps it’s the narrower inequality gap: child poverty in France is half the British rate and one third the American.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n“French decline” experts like to contrast France’s catastrophic unemployment rate of 8.3% (lower than the U.S. rate during the Reagan years) with Britain’s marvellous 5.5%. In the process they miss two points: First,<br>\nFrance created more jobs than the UK in the last 10 years. (The discrepancy comes from the fact that France is younger and has experienced higher labor force growth). Second, virtually all of the job growth in the UK since 2000 has been the result of public spending. The neoliberals who so admire Britain’s recent growth<br>\nconveniently forget that it was built on a Keynesian binge through tax increases and a huge public sector expansion: from 37% to 46% of GDP in a mere 6 years. Gordon Brown at the Exchequer has, indeed, looked much the part of a French finance minister with a London office.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nJosé Bové, the <i>Astérix</i> of French politics, has burnished France’s antiglobalisation<br>\nimage by ransacking McDonald’s outlets wherever he can find enough TV cameras to capture his exploits.<br>\nBut while France has been noisily scoffing at globalization for decades, it has quietly become one of the most globalized nations on earth. (Reform by stealth is a French disease.)<br>\nSome of the evidence:</p>\n\t<li> France has more companies listed in the Fortune Global 500 than<br>\nBritain and Germany;\n</li>\n\t<li> for the last 10 years, France’s net foreign investments (FDI) have ranked in the top 5,<br>\nand its net FDI outflows have been the world’s largest;\n</li>\n\t<li> foreign investors own 45% of all French stocks. The comparable<br>\nfigure is 33% for Britain’s and only 10% for the US.\n</li>\n\t<p>\n<b>What, then, is wrong with France?</b><br>\n <br>\nSimply put, the French system serves the interests of two-thirds of the population (the insiders). The outsiders (the young and the old) have been knocking at the door for 40 years. The sons and daughters of North-African immigrants have paid the highest price. While a few might be seeking a new Muslim identity, which their parents shunned, the overwhelming majority of them have no greater desire than to integrate into secular French society. Savor the irony: the only practicing Muslim on the French national soccer team, Franck Ribéry, is a white Christian who converted to Islam. Integration has failed but the battle is not lost.<br>\nHalf of all immigrant couples are racially mixed and a quarter of all French women of Algerian descent marry non-Muslims. (By comparison, only 2 to 4 percent of African-American women marry outside their race<br>\nand 5 percent of Britain’s South-Asian women do so.) The crisis of the projects is France’s biggest challenge in the years ahead. The problem is rooted in the twin evil of racism and the insiders’ fierce defense of the status quo. Sarkozy’s presidency will succeed or fail on his ability to break the door open to let the outsiders in,<br>\nand create jobs for the unemployed youths.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nSarkozy is blessed with all the attributes of a successful politician, including a unique gift for being a jerk.<br>\nIn the back alleys of the <i>banlieues</i>, France’s former top cop comes off as just another white racist thug.<br>\nSoccer star Lilian Thuram might well be right that “<i>Sarkozy stirs up people’s latent racism,</i>” but as to being a racist himself the evidence is thin. Sarko actually never used the word “scum.” An exasperated resident of the projects asked him when he would rid them of the <i>racaille</i> (wrongly translated as scum; it means<br>\nrabble) and he repeated her plea in the affirmative. Likewise, “<i>I’ll clean up the place with a power hose</i>” were the angry words Sarkozy spoke to the parents of an 11-year old boy who had just been killed in a gang shootout—hardly Hitler addressing the 1927 Nuremberg rally. However, Sarko’s open admiration for the rancid views of my former Ecole Polytechnique colleague, Alain Finkielkraut, makes one wonder. One of the “new philosophers,” he is the French Niall Ferguson, who goes whining to Haaretz that “<i>In France… we no longer teach that the colonial project sought… to bring civilization to the savages.</i>”\n</p>\n\t<p>\nOn a personal note, I can never forgive Mitterrand for intentionally boosting Le Pen’s fortunes at the ballot box<br>\nin a Machiavellian divide-and-rule strategy. On the other hand, as someone who did not vote for Sarko,<br>\nI am still grateful to him for dealing Le Pen his biggest electoral blow. I also note that while other politicians regurgitate the same tired “solutions” to the crisis of the <i>banlieues</i>—namely, building more community centers named after great poets—Sarko has suggested somewhat more adventurous ideas,<br>\nsuch as a restructuring of labor relations, a more flexible labor market, hiring incentives, and even that big French bugaboo, affirmative action, all the while reaffirming France’s traditional rejection of <i>communautarisme</i>. But he is a figure of hate among minorities and, unless he can repair his image and build bridges, he will not accomplish much. The issue of ethnic integration towers above all others. The future of France hangs in the balance. Jacques Chirac, the friendliest and most ineffective French president in memory,<br>\nspoke endlessly about solidarity but never did a thing about it. Sarkozy has a mandate: 32% of France voted for him; by comparison, only 15% of the U.S. voted for Clinton in ‘92. His ideas might well fail but he’s earned the right to try them out. His success on integration will be the ultimate test.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n<b>Who is Nicolas Sarkozy?</b></p>\n\t<p> <br>\nUnlike Chirac, Sarko is a true man of the right. Being France, of course, that still puts his agenda, though not necessarily his character, to the left of Kucinich. But he faces a French left that, unlike its American version,<br>\nlost the battles but won the war. France typically elects rightwing presidents to implement leftwing policies.<br>\nThe consummate pragmatist, Sarko will not fight his battles on ideological grounds. In anticipation of the social unrest that is sure to greet his reform of labor laws, he intends to use his (likely) new majority in parliament<br>\nto pass a minimum service public transportation law to dull the effect of transit strikes. Sarko is the shrewdest French politician of his generation: a coopting master.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nCommentators who wrongly see significance in his mixed Hungarian/Greek/Jewish background seem unaware that France is the most ethnically mixed country in Europe: 20% of the population has a foreign parent or grandparent; and the density of foreign-born, the highest in Europe, is similar to that of the United States.<br>\nIn that regard, Sarko is the textbook French success story. What <i>is</i> highly significant, however, is that<br>\nhe did not graduate from ENA, the breeding ground of French politicians. This gives him the independent streak to, say, staff half of his cabinet with women, as is his stated intention, without thinking twice about it.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n<b>What foreign policy?</b></p>\n\t<p> <br>\nHis likely selection of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister is a master stroke. The highly popular founder of the Nobel-prize winning Doctors Without Borders is a former Communist who worked for Mitterrand, campaigned for Ségolène Royal, and, as the chief advocate of the wooly concept of “<i>droit d’ingérence</i>” (right of humanitarian intervention), played Bush’s useful idiot in the run-up to the Iraq war. His selection is a canny way to please, annoy, and confuse everyone all at once.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nFrench foreign policy is framed within a “Gaullist consensus” that has been remarkably consistent over the years. On the European front, Germany will remain France’s only indispensable partner. Merkel’s first foreign trip was to the Elysée Palace. Sarkozy returned the favor on Inauguration Day. London’s hopes for a weakening of the Paris-Berlin axis will once again be frustrated. The axis will put the final nail in the coffin of Turkey’s EU admission, to the chagrin of Britain and the U.S. This will be made all the easier by troublesome new members like Poland, who offer daily reminders to the growing legions of Eurosceptics that the EU is already too big and the last thing it needs is the addition of an impoverished Muslim nation that would soon be its largest member. Sarko and Brown will lower Merkel’s ambition for a new European constitution and they’ll all agree on a referendum-free slimline treaty. True to his faith in industrial policy (which seems to have escaped the eagle eyes of his neoliberal admirers stateside), Sarko will strong-arm the European Central Bank into putting downward pressure on the Euro. He will fail.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nSarkozy’s pious words about changing France’s (shameful) neocolonial position in sub-Saharan Africa will come to naught. France’s <i>chasse guardée</i> will remain well guarded. His proposed Mediterranean union is a different story. France is the strongest power in the Mediterranean rim and it’s a mystery why no Gaullist leader had yet thought of making a move in that direction. Actually, Chirac did: he signed on to the 1995 EU Barcelona Initiative, but the EU’s focus on eastward expansion and the NAFTA-esque imbalances of the project led it to its current vegetative state. Except for Turkey, which will regard Sarko’s Mediterranean initiative as yet another “nail in the coffin” (see above), the reaction in the region will be globally positive. Even Israel might take a shine to it. The U.S. would be wise to support it, but it’s unclear it will.<br>\nRegarding Russia, Sarko will follow Merkel’s lead in being firm with Moscow but opposed to an aggressive stand by the U.S. The neocons’ push for a new cold war meant to reverse America’s declining superpower status, which is what the missile shields in Central Europe are all about, will be strongly resisted.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nFrance’s interests in the Levant coincide with America’s. Methods have differed in the past but, after the fiascos of the Iraq and Lebanon wars, they will increasingly converge. Sarko’s take on Syria won’t be as personal as Chirac’s (who never forgave Bashar’s goons for killing his buddy Hariri) but he will work to contain Syrian and Iranian influences. Paris will see eye-to-eye with Washington about Hezbollah and will bark alongside against Iran’s nuclear intentions while opposing military action. The French policy in Iraq? There is none. France has no policy about Dante’s lower rings of hell.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nSarko will initiate a rapprochement with Israel. Given the dysfunctional state of Israeli politics and the 40 years of bad blood between the two countries, he won’t get far. (Hard to believe that France was once Israel’s closest ally.) The contour of French support for a two-state solution around the 1967 lines will not change. Is Sarko pro-Israel? Yes. Does it matter? No. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe and the world’s third biggest (as well as Europe’s largest Muslim population) but there is no “Jewish vote” and no French AIPAC.<br>\nSarko is likely to have done well with Jewish voters (he got an astounding 90% of he absentee ballots in Israel).<br>\nBut one should not read too much into it. France’s Arab policy might tilt toward Israel ever so slightly but Sarko will quickly discover that his room for manoeuvre is very limited.\n</p>\n\t<p>\nSarko’s Jewish roots are irrelevant. His strong support among Sephardic Jews reflect his tough stance against the antisemitic violence that flared up during the second Intifada. Many Sephardim live near or in the “hottest” <i>banlieues</i> and suffered the brunt of Muslim anti-Jewish hostility. Although this new form of European antisemitism has since declined, it would be tragic to dismiss it. To his credit, Sarkozy did not. Some perspective might be useful, however. Sharon’s attempts to portray France as an antisemitic country<br>\nwas silly pandering. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey asked the question: “<i>Do you have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Jews?</i>” The answer was “<i>yes</i>” for 86% in France, 77% in the US, and 74% in Britain (the figure for that staunch Israeli ally, Turkey, was 15%). More interesting, among Muslim respondents, the answer was “<i>yes</i>” for 71% in France but only 32% in Britain (even though the UK has far fewer Arab Muslims). It would appear, therefore, that the antisemitic violence is hardly representative of French Muslim society as a whole. It must also be pointed out, if there were any need for it, that the most prevalent form of racism in France is not against Jews but Muslims.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n<b>Sarko the American?</b><br>\n <br>\nWashington will have a hard time getting its head around it, but trans-Atlantic relations have ceased to be Europe’s main focus (except in Britain). U.S.-EU relations will improve but the era of a grand common planned destiny is over. Europe will let America’s dreams of liberal hegemony vanish, the idea having outlived its usefulness. The EU has a bigger economy and a larger population than the U.S. With the end of the Cold War and the Iraq war debacle, America’s military umbrella has lost credibility (at least in Western Europe). NATO got its second wind in Kosovo but is now dying a painful death in Afghanistan. (Sarko wants out.)\n</p>\n\t<p>\nFrance’s priorities outside the EU will be on the global South, while it channels its Asian policy through the EU.<br>\nOn a personal level, Sarko loves America. But so did Chirac; and, to measure the full irrelevance of personal leanings in this matter, consider that the closest Franco-American relations in the last 50 years took place under the most ideologically anti-American president, François Mitterrand. A President Sarkozy in 2003 would have never joined America’s war in Iraq (pace Kouchner). Sarko will be friendly to the White House and kind to Brown and Merkel’s Atlanticist sensitivities. But smiles don’t make policy.\n</p>\n\t<p>\n<b>Good luck, Mr President!</b><br>\n <br>\nNicolas Sarkozy once confided to a journalist: “<i>I don’t want to be president. I must be president.</i>” Ruling France might prove a good therapy for Sarko. Let’s hope it is good for the French, too—especially<br>\nthose of a darker skin tone who’ve been left behind. I am full of doubts about Sarko. But I’ll root for his success<br>\nand hope he proves me wrong.\n</p>\n\t<p><a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Sarkozy\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/France\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Chirac\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Turkey\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Iraq\" rel=\"tag\"></a><a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/immigrant\" rel=\"tag\"></a>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://electronicintifada.net/artman/uploads/dahlan483.jpg\" width=\"300\"></p>\n\t<p>There’s something a little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy. </p>\n\t<p>The Fatah gunmen who <a href=\"http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/859556.html\"> are reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government and provoked the latest fighting</a> may profess fealty to President Abbas, but it’s not from him that they get their orders. The leader to whom they answer is Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington’s anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet. And while Dahlan is formally subordinate to Abbas, whom he supposedly serves as National Security Adviser, nobody believes that Dahlan answers to Abbas — in fact, it was suggested at the time that Abbas appointed Dahlan only under pressure from Washington, which was irked by the Palestinian Authority president’s decision to join a unity government with Hamas. </p>\n\t<p>If Dahlan takes orders from anyone at all, it’s certainly not from Abbas. Abbas has long recognized the democratic legitimacy and popularity of Hamas, and embraced the reality that no peace process is possible unless the Islamists are given the place in the Palestinian power structure that their popular support necessitates. He has always favored negotiation and cooperation with Hamas — much to the exasperation of the Bush Administration, and also of the Fatah warlords whose power of patronage was threatened by the Hamas election victory — and could see the logic of the unity government proposed by the Saudis even when Washington couldn’t. Indeed, as the indispensable Robert Malley and Hussein Agha note, <a href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20176\">nothing has hurt Abbas’s political standing as much as the misguided efforts of Washington to boost his standing in the hope of undermining the elected Hamas government.</a></p>\n\t<p>Needless to say, only an Administration as deluded about its ability to reorder Arab political realities in line with its own fantasies — and also, frankly, as utterly contemptuous of Arab life and of Arab democracy, empty sloganizing notwithstanding — as the current one has proved to be could imagine that <a href=\"http://tonykaron.com/2007/01/07/condis-savage-war-on-the-palestinians/\"><br>\nthe Palestinians could be starved, battered and manipulated into choosing a Washington-approved political leadership</a>. Yet, that’s exactly what the U.S. has attempted to do ever since Hamas won the last Palestinian election, imposing a financial and economic chokehold on an already distressed population, pouring money and arms into the forces under Dahlan’s control, and eventually adapting itself to funnel monies only through Abbas, as if casting in him in the role of a kind of Quisling-provider would somehow burnish his appeal among Palestinian voters. (As I said, their contempt for Arab intelligence knows no bounds. )</p>\n\t<p>But while the hapless Abbas is little more than a reluctant passenger in Washington’s strategy — and will, I still believe, repair to his former exile lodgings in Qatar in the not too distant future — <a href=\"http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6275.shtml\">Mohammed Dahlan is its point man</a>, the warlord who commands the troops and who has been spoiling for a fight with Hamas since they had the temerity to trounce his organization at the polls on home turf. </p>\n\t<p>Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to <a href=\"http://conflictsforum.org/2007/elliot-abrams-uncivil-war/\">arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the Hamas government</a>. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House, Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and Dahlan. </p>\n\t<p>Seeing the disastrous implications of the U.S. policy, the Saudis appeared to have put the kibosh on Abrams’ coup plan by drawing Abbas into a unity government with Hamas. And as <a href=\"http://conflictsforum.org/2007/how-the-saudis-stole-a-march-on-the-us/\"> Mark Perry at Conflict Forum detailed in an excellent analysis</a> Dahlan was just about the only thing that the U.S. had going for it in terms of resisting the move towards a unity government. Although his fretting and sulking in Mecca couldn’t prevent the deal, the U.S. appears to have helped him fight back afterwards by ensuring that he was appointed national security adviser, a move calculated to provoke Hamas, whose leaders tend to view Dahlan as little more than a torturer and a de facto enforcer for Israel.</p>\n\t<p>But Dahlan appears to have made his move when it came to integrating the Palestinian Authority security forces (currently dominated by Fatah) by drawing in Hamas fighters and subjecting the forces to the control of a politically neutral interior minister. Dahlan simply refused, and set off the current confrontations by ordering his men out onto the street last weekend without any authorization from the government of which he is supposedly a part.</p>\n\t<p>The new provocation appears consistent with a <a href=\"http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE16Ak04.html\">revised U.S. plan, reported on by Mark Perry and Paul Woodward, that emphasized the urgency of toppling the unity government</a>. They suggest the plan emanates from Abrams, who they say is operating at cross purposes with Condi Rice’s efforts to appease the Arab moderate regimes by reviving some form of peace process. They note, for example, that Jewish American sources have told the Forward and Haaretz that Abrams recently briefed Jewish Republicans and made clear to them that Rice’s efforts were merely a symbolic exercise aimed at showing Arab allies that the U.S. was “doing something,” but that President Bush would ensure that nothing would come of them, in the sense that Israel would not be required to make any concessions.</p>\n\t<p>Whatever the precise breakdown within the Bush Administration, it’s plain that Dahlan, like Pinochet a quarter century, would not move onto a path of confrontation with an elected government unless he believed he had the sanction of powerful forces abroad to do so. If does move to turn the current street battle into a frontal assault on the unity government, chances are it will be because he got a green light from somewhere — and certainly not from Mahmoud Abbas. </p>\n\t<p>But the confrontation under way has assumed a momentum of its own, and it may now be beyond the capability of the Palestinian leadership as a whole to contain it. If that proves true, the petulance that has substituted for policy in the Bush Administration’s response to the 2006 Palestinian election will have succeeded in turning Gaza into Mogadishu. But it may be too much to expect the Administration capable of anything different — after all, they’re still busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu all over again.<br>\n<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Palestinian\" rel=\"tag\"></a><a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Hamas\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Fatah\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Abbas\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Gaza\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Israel\" rel=\"tag\"></a><br>\n<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Abrams\" rel=\"tag\"></a><br>\n<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Rice\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Bush\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Dahlan\" rel=\"tag\"></a> <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Haniyeh\" rel=\"tag\"></a> </p>"
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"title" : "Motivation, context, and citizen analysis of government data",
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"content" : "<div><p>\nMatt McAlister heard “crackling firearms” in his San Francisco neighborhood and wrote a <a href=\"http://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/2007/05/17/175/crime-data-stories/\">wonderful essay</a> on a theme that was central to my keynote talk last week at the GOVIS conference: how citizens can and will work with governments to diagnose social problems and develop solutions. When the District of Columbia’s DCStat program rolled out last summer, I was <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/06/28.html\">delighted</a> by the forward thinking involved. Publishing the city’s operational data directly to the web, for everyone to see and analyze, with the explicit goal of making the delivery of government services transparent and accountable, was and is an astonishingly bold move. And as Matt found when investigating crime in his neighborhood, it’s still part of the unevenly distributed future:\n</p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI then found the official <a href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/site/police_index.asp?id=23813\">San Francisco Police Department Crime Map</a>. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats.\n</p></blockquote>\n<p>\nAccess to data is good, and access to data in useful formats is better, but these are only the first steps. We need to make interpretations of the data, compare and discuss those interpretations, and use them to inform policy advocacy. The mashups that Matt reviews are a glimpse of what’s to come, but these interactive visualizations have a long way to go.\n</p>\n<p>\nHere’s another glimpse of what’s to come: I took a snapshot of the DC crime data, uploaded it to Dabble DB, built a view of burglary by district and neighborhood, and published it at <a href=\"http://udell.dabbledb.com/publish/dcstatreportedcrimes/db74f008-7be0-4677-a54c-92a24480878c/homicidesbydistrictandneighborhood.html\">this public URL</a>. There are two key points here. First, discussion can attach to (and will be discoverable in relation to) that URL. Second, the data behind the view is also available at that URL, in a variety of useful formats, so alternate views can be produced, pointed to, and discussed.\n</p>\n<p>\nStill, these are only views of data. There’s no analysis and interpretation, no statistical rigor. Since most ordinary citizens lack the expertise to engage at that level, are governments that publish raw data simply asking for trouble? Will bogus interpretations by unqualified observers wind up doing more harm than good?\n</p>\n<p>\nThat’s a legitimate concern, and while the issue hasn’t yet arisen, because public access to this level of data is a very new phenomenon, it certainly will. To address that concern I’ll reiterate part of <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/30.html\">another item</a> in which I mentioned <a href=\"http://www.lled.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/willinsky.htm\">John Willinsky’s</a> amazing <a href=\"http://people.ok.ubc.ca/ctl/Willinsky%20.mp3\">talk</a> on the future of education:\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nWillinsky talks about how he, as a reading specialist, would never have predicted what has now become routine. Patients with no ability to read specialized medical literature are, nonetheless, doing so, and then arriving in their doctors’ offices asking well-informed questions. Willinsky (only semi-jokingly) says the Canadian Medical Association decided this shouldn’t be called “patient intimidation” but, rather, “shared decision-making.”\n</p>\n<p>\nHow can level 8 readers absorb level 14 material? There are only two factors that govern reading success, Willinsky says: motivation, and context. When you’re sick, or when a loved one is sick, your motivation is a given. As for context:</p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThey don’t have a context? They build a context. The first time they get a medical article, duh, I don’t know what’s going on here, I can’t read the title. But what happened when I did that search? I got 20 other articles on the same topic. And of those 20, one of them, I got a start on. It was from the New York Times, or the Globe and Mail, and when I take that explanation back to the medical research, I’ve got a context. And then when I go into the doctor’s office…and actually, one of the interesting things…is that a study showed that 65% of the doctors who had had this experience of <s>patient intimidation</s> shared decision-making said the research was new to them, and they were kind of grateful, because they don’t have time to check every new development.\n</p></blockquote>\n</blockquote>\n<p>\nWhen your loved one is sick, you’re motivated to engage with primary medical literature, and you’ll build yourself a context in which to do that. Similarly, when your neighborhood is sick, you’ll be motivated to engage with government data, and you’ll build yourself a context for that.\n</p>\n<p>\nThe quest for context could, among other things, lead to a renewed appreciation for a tool that’s widely available but radically underutilized: Excel. Most people don’t earn a living as quants, so Excel, for most people, winds up being a tool for summing columns of numbers and arranging text in tabular format. That may change as more public data surfaces, and as more people realize they want to be able to interpret it. In which case <a href=\"http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/04/21.html\">Chris Gemignani</a> and the rest of the <a href=\"http://juiceanalytics.com/writing/\">Juice Analytics</a> team will emerge as leading resources available to motivated citizens wanting to learn how to make better use of Excel.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "the Uncanny Valley of user interface design",
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"content" : "<p>There's a theory called 'The Uncanny Valley' regarding humans' emotional response to <em>human-like</em> robots. From <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny_Valley\" title=\"Wikipedia: The Uncanny Valley\">The Wikipedia entry</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>The <strong>Uncanny Valley</strong> is a hypothesis about robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 [...]</p>\n\n<p>Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes strongly repulsive. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being's, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.</p>\n\n<p>This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a \"barely-human\" and \"fully human\" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is \"almost human\" will seem overly \"strange\" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n\n<p>While most of us don't interact with human-like robots frequently enough to accept or reject this theory, many of us have seen a movie like <em><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polar_Express_%28film%29\" title=\"Wikipedia: The Polar Express (film)\">The Polar Express</a></em> or <em><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within\" title=\"Wikipedia: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within\">Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within</a></em>, which use realistic - as opposed to cartoonish - computer-generated human characters. Although the filmmakers take great care to make the characters' expressions and movements replicate those of real human actors, many viewers find these almost-but-not-quite-human characters to be unsettling or even creepy.</p>\n\n<p>The problem is that our minds have a model of how humans should behave and the pseudo-humans, whether robotic or computer-generated images, don't quite fit this model, producing a sense of unease - in other words, we know that something's not right - even if we can't precisely articulate what's wrong.</p>\n\n<p>Why don't we feel a similar sense of unease when we watch a cartoon like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons\" title=\"Wikipedia: The Simpsons\">The Simpsons</a>, where the characters are even further away from our concept of humanness? Because in the cartoon environment, we accept that the characters are not really human at all - they're cartoon characters and are self-consistent within their animated environment. Conversely, it <em>would</em> be jarring if a real human entered the frame and interacted with the Simpsons, because eighteen years of Simspons cartoons and eighty years of cartoons in general have conditioned us not to expect this [Footnote 1].</p>\n\n<p>There's a lesson here for software designers, and one that <a href=\"http://billhiggins.us/weblog/2007/04/20/the-value-of-ui-consistency/\" title=\"Bill Higgins :: the value of UI consistency\">I've talked about recently</a> - we must ensure that we design our applications to remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application.</p>\n\n<p>Obvious, you say? I'd agree that software designers and developers generally observe this rule <em>except in the midst of a technological paradigm shift</em>. During periods of rapid innovation and exploration, it's tempting and more acceptable to violate the expectations of a particular environment. I know this is a sweeping and abstract claim, so let me back it up with a few examples.</p>\n\n<p>Does anyone remember <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop\" title=\"Wikipedia: Active Desktop\">Active Desktop</a>? When Bill Gates realized that the web was a big deal, he <a href=\"http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf\" title=\"Bill Gates' 'Internet Tidal Wave' memo (PDF)\">directed</a> all of Microsoft to web-enable all Microsoft software products. Active Desktop was a feature that made the Windows desktop look like a web page and allowed users to initiate the default action on a file or folder via a hyperlink-like single-click rather than the traditional double-click. One of the problems with Active Desktop was that it broke all of users expectations about interacting with files and folders. Changing from the double-click to single-click model subtley changed other interactions, like drag and drop, select, and rename. The only reason I remember this feature is because so many non-technical friends at Penn State asked me to help them turn it off.</p>\n\n<p>Another game-changing technology of the 1990s was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_platform\" title=\"Wikipedia: The Java Platform\">the Java platform</a>. Java's attraction was that the language's syntax looked and felt a lot like C and C++ (which many programmers knew) but it was (in theory) 'write once, run anywhere' - in other words, multiplatform. Although Java took hold on the server-side, it never took off on the desktop as many predicted it would. Why didn't it take off on the desktop? My own experience with using Java GUI apps of the late 1990s was that they were slow and they looked and behaved weirdly vs. standard Windows (or Mac or Linux) applications. That's because they weren't true Windows/Mac/Linux apps. They were <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Swing\" title=\"Wikipedia: Swing (Java)\">Java Swing</a> apps which <em>emulated</em> Windows/Mac/Linux apps. Despite the herculean efforts of the Swing designers and implementers, they couldn't escape the Uncanny Valley of emulated user interfaces.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_%28software%29\" title=\"Wikipedia: Eclipse (software)\">Eclipse</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit\" title=\"Wikipedia: Standard Widget Toolkit\">SWT</a> took a different approach to Java-based desktop apps [Footnote 2]. Rather than <em>emulating</em> native desktop widgets, SWT favor direct delegation to native desktop widgets [Footnote 3], resulting in applications that look like Windows/Mac/Linux applications rather than Java Swing applications. The downside of this design decision is that SWT widget developers must manually port a new widget to each supported desktop environment. This development-time and maintenance pain point only serves to emphasize how important the Eclipse/SWT designers judged native look and feel to be.</p>\n\n<p>Just like Windows/Mac/Linux apps have a native look and feel, so too do browser-based applications. The native widgets of the web are the standard HTML elements - hyperlinks, tables, buttons, text inputs, select boxes, and colored spans and divs. We've had the tools to create richer web applications ever since pre-standards DOMs and Javascript 1.0, but it's only been the combination of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model\" title=\"Wikipedia: Document Object Model\">DOM</a> (<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Standards_support_2\" title=\"Wikipedia: Internet Explorer - Standards support\">semi-</a>)<a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/\" title=\"w3c: Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification\">standardization</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XmlHttpRequest\" title=\"Wikipedia: XmlHttpRequest\">XHR</a> de-facto standardization, <a href=\"http://dojotoolkit.org/\" title=\"Dojo Toolkit\">emerging</a> <a href=\"http://www.prototypejs.org/\" title=\"Prototype Javascript Library\">libraries</a>, and exemplary next-gen apps like <a href=\"http://labs.google.com/suggest/\" title=\"Google Suggest\">Google Suggest</a> and <a href=\"http://mail.google.com/\" title=\"Gmail\">Gmail</a> that have led to a non-trivial segment of the software community to attempt richer web UIs which I believe we're now lumping under the banner of 'Ajax' (or is it 'RIA'?). Like the web and Java before it, the availability of Ajax technology is causing some developers to diverge from the native look and feel of the web in favor of a user interface style I call \"desktop app in a web browser\". For an example of this style of Ajax app, take a few minutes and view <a href=\"http://www.zimbra.com/demos/zimbra_overview.html\" title=\"Zimbra Collaboration Suite Demo (Flash)\">this Flash demo of the Zimbra collaboration suite</a>.</p>\n\n<p>To me, Zimbra doesn't in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook [Footnote 4]. On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel (<a href=\"http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about.html#screenshots\" title=\"Gmail screenshots\">screenshots</a>). Do I prefer the Gmail look and feel over the Zimbra look and feel? Yes. Why? Because over the past twelve years, my mind has developed a very specific model of how a web application should look and feel, and because Gmail aligns to this model, I can immediately use it and it <em>feels natural to me</em>. Gmail uses Ajax to accelerate common operations (e.g. email address auto-complete) and to enable data transfer sans jarring page refresh (e.g. refresh Inbox contents) but its core look and feel remains very similar to that of a traditional web page. In my view, this is not a shortcoming; it's a smart design decision.</p>\n\n<p>So I'd recommend that if you're considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design and recognize that when you build a \"desktop in the web browser\"-style application, you're violating users' unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption. The fact that you <em>can</em> create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you <em>should</em>; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.</p>\n\n<p>[Footnote 1] <em><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit\" title=\"Wikipedia: Who Framed Roger Rabbit\">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a></em> is a notable exception.</p>\n\n<p>[Footnote 2] I work for the IBM group (Eclipse/Jazz) that created SWT, so I may be biased.</p>\n\n<p>[Footnote 3] Though SWT favors delegation to native platform widgets, it sometimes uses emulated widgets if the particular platform doesn't provide an acceptable native widget. This helps it get around the 'least-common denominator' problem of AWT.</p>\n\n<p>[Footnote 4] I'm being a bit unfair to Zimbra here because there's a scenario where its Outlook-like L&F really shines. If I were a CIO looking to migrate off of Exchange/Outlook to a cheaper multiplatform alternative, Zimbra would be very attractive because since Zimbra is <em>functionally consistent</em> with Outlook, I'd expect that Outlook users could transition to Zimbra fairly quickly.</p>"
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"title" : "Outrageous",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/05/the_microsoft_o.html\">Stephen Walli wrote</a>, “Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client. But I swear I’m reconsidering that decision. It’s unclear to me that the mortgage payment is worth this much aggravation.”</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/05/14/msft_goes_sco.html\">Stefan Tilkov wrote</a>, “If your name is on a software patent, you should feel ashamed.”</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Surprise-Paul-Simon/dp/B000F0UV1S\">Paul Simon wrote</a>, “Who’s gonna love you when your looks are gone? / God will / Like he waters the flowers on your windowsill.”</p>\n\n<p>My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM. The patent is not yet issued (as I understand it, issuance may take years) and does not show up in <a href=\"http://www.uspto.gov/\">USPTO</a> or <a href=\"http://www.google.com/patents\">Google Patent Search</a>. But it will, someday.</p>\n\n<p>The patent describes <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/adaptable/HTML4/embedding-20060318.html\">this method of embedding accessibility metadata in HTML documents</a>. Please don’t flood my comments with calls of “prior art.” Yes, I know (and knew) all about <a href=\"http://microformats.org/\">microformats</a>. This is not a microformat anyway, for reasons that would be interesting to very few people. Regardless, the patent is very narrow; there was no prior art. No one had done this exact thing, in this exact way, for this exact purpose, before we did. The patent was original, it was innovative, and it was still shameful.</p>\n\n<p>I delayed writing the patent as long as possible. Weeks passed. My manager bugged me. We argued internally about whether we should patent it at all. Powerful people in our department — people who had personally written dozens of patents — argued <em>against</em> patenting the technique. They wanted the technique to be widely adopted by assistive technology vendors, web authoring tool vendors, and web publishers across the board, and they felt that patenting it would slow down that adoption. (They were right.) My manager insisted. He assured me (and them) that IBM would only use the patent for defensive purposes. He assured me that IBM would grant a royalty-free license for anyone to implement the patented technique, even in open source (<a href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/ipr_detail_show.cgi?ipr_id=804\">like this one for APP</a>). I didn’t believe him. Things like that have a way of falling off the Gantt chart.</p>\n\n<p>You can ask why I would want to work for a company like that, if I feel so strongly. What can I say? I didn’t know how strongly they felt or how strongly I felt, until I was in the thick of it. Even then, I didn’t think it would affect me. Then I tried to resist it from the inside. Then I tried to delay it. I considered quitting. I actively looked for other employment. I made sure I was extra busy with all my other assignments. Weeks turned to months. My job leads petered out. Finally, I reached the now-or-never moment with my manager. I considered quitting anyway. I considered my mortgage payment. I took stock of my personal finances. My mortgage payment won out. I sat down and did what they paid me to do. It’s hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren’t worth a damn anyway.</p>\n\n<p>After it was filed, I got a $1500 bonus in my next paycheck. I saw the money and cried. I swore I would donate the money to the <a href=\"http://www.eff.org/patent/wp.php\">EFF Patent Busting Project</a>, but it too got swallowed up by food and medical expenses and daycare and an unexpected tax payment and yes, mortgage payments. At our next quarterly all-hands meeting, my boss’s boss’s boss called me out specifically for a job well done on my first patent. I put the phone on mute and cried some more.</p>\n\n<p>Later we really did release it royalty-free. The patent. Or so I’m told. I never saw it in writing. Either way, it cost us time and money, bought us nothing but aggravation, and delayed adoption of an important piece of the crazy puzzle that is modern web accessibility. IBM shits patents like God waters flowers. It’s what they do. No, I take it back. To say “it’s what they do” implies a level of choice that I don’t think is present. Even our most seasoned patent writers argued against it, and we did it anyway. And for what?</p>\n\n<p>Later I really did quit, but only after I secured another job, and not because of patents. I’m told that once the patent is issued, I’ll get another $500, even though I don’t work for IBM anymore. Issuance takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years. By then, IBM will have filed tens of thousands more. It’s an institutionalized form of madness, outrageous, all-consuming, and incurable. I’m ashamed to have been a part of it.</p>"
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"content" : "One of the abiding tragedies of Nigerian popular music is the fact that there's so little audiovisual documentation of its development. It kinda hurts my heart when I watch, say, the extensive collection of vintage Congolese music performances on <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/innosita\">Innosita TV</a> because they remind me so much of similar performances I used to watch of Nigerian music stars of the 1970s and early 80s (back when artists used to make videos for every track on their albums!). Not to mention the numerous TV variety shows like <i>The Bar Beach Show with Art Alade,</i> <i>The Tee-Mac Show,</i> <i>Sir Victor Uwaifo's Expo!</i> and <i>The Bala Miller Show.</i><br><br>Today, I don't know if anybody knows for sure where <i>any</i> of that footage is, thanks laregly to the <a href=\"http://www.nta.com.ng/index.php\">Nigerian Television Authority's</a> shoddy job of protecting their archives. You see, during the lean days of the late 80s and early 90s, it became fairly standard procedure to dub over old tapes. What are you gonna do? Stuff like that happens from time to time, but it's the indiscriminate nature of it that beggars belief. From what I've heard, corner-cutting producers were sneaking into the tape libraries and snatching not just music videos, but even master copies of important television shows like <i>The Village Headmaster</i> and <i>The Adio Family</i> to tape their shows over. Huge chunks of historically significant popular culture disappear with the push of a \"record\" button (or rather, the simultaneous pushing of the \"record\" and \"play\" buttons for my old school heads).<br><br>Still, I remain hopeful that at least <i>some</i> of that footage has survived <i>somewhere</i> out there. Lately <a href=\"http://www.iNollywood.com/\">iNollywood.com</a> has been streaming classic NTA shows like <i>The New Masquerade</i> and <i>Second Chance,</i> and even <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPXAqzCqFMY\">vintage TV commercials.</a> I have no clue <i>how</i> they acquired this content--and believe me, I have asked--but if they've got it, maybe someone else has some other stuff too, like some heretofore lost performances by the likes of Bobby Benson, The Sunshine Sisters, and Sir Patrick Idahosa & His African Sound Makers.<br><br>Fela has fared a lot better than most Nigerian musicians in this regard because his colorful reputation has made him a subject of fascination for filmmakers across the globe. Even then, there's only so much existing performance footage of the man, and a lot of that can be attributed his abrasive personality as well: I can't remember the name of the European filmmaker who traveled to Lagos to shoot a Fela documentary and had to go home with his dreams crushed after the Chief Priest demanded an exorbitant sum for the rights to film him; former NTA producer Chris Obi-Rapu has <a href=\"http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/showtime/2005/june/10/showtime-10-06-2005-003.htm\">revealed</a> that plans were in motion for Fela to get his own TV show in the 1970s but network got scared and pulled the plug; and then there was Fela's self-produced hagiopic, <i>The Black President,</i> whose master print was destroyed when soldiers burned down his house in 1977. <br><br>This makes it all the more a joy to behold previously unseen footage, especially when its from the less-documented early periods of Fela's career. I'm talking, of course, about the DVD <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Ginger-Baker-Africa/dp/B000H7JCC8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-0471169-8519056?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1179083486&sr=8-1\"><i>Ginger Baker in Africa.</i></a><br><br>For those who don't know the story, here's a quick recap: In 1971, Ginger Baker, the drummer of the legendary rock group Cream, decided to take a trip to Nigeria, traveling across the Sahara desert. Once in Nigeria, he situated himself within the local music scene, built the first multitrack recording studio in West Africa, and planted the seeds for the \"Afro-rock\" era by forming the band SALT (featuring Berkley Jones, Laolu Akins and Mike Odumosu--who would break off as the power trio BLO--and the Lijadu Sisters). <br><br>Apparently, Baker filmed some of his travels but sat on the footage for more than 30 years. Now, finally, he's unveiled it and given us an intriguing (if nebulous) inside look at the Nigerian music scene in the immediate post-Biafra period. To be honest, the film is very clearly a product of its drug-addled times, with incoherent editing reminiscent of the LSD scene from <i>Easy Rider</i> and meandering narration by Baker. But it's worth it all to see the documentary's centerpiece: Baker reunites with his old friend Fela Ransome-Kuti as the rising king of afrobeat performs in a rain-soaked open-air nightclub in Calabar:<br><br> <iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://www.youtube.com/v/p-SQH94Pifc&width=425&height=350\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe> <br><br>Apropos of nothing, I'll mention right off the top that I was rather tickled to see the \"Luna Nite Club\" sign at the end, because that place was still rocking on Fosbury Road when I was growing up in Calabar in the 80s.<br><br>Other than that, while the sound isn't great, but I think it's still a lot of fun to watch what a good time he seems to be having onstage (especially as he playfully \"manhandles\" his dancers and players). The show seems a lot looser than than his later performance style, and he's still rocking that weird snakeskin vest thing he used to wear before he got into the custom-made embroidered jumpsuits. Ginger Baker has got to have more stuff like this, and I hope he puts it out soon. (Come to think of it, Roy Ayers has said that he's got a boatload of footage from his stay with Fela in 1979/80... Give up the goods, Roy!)"
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"title" : "names are doors",
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"content" : "<div><p>For a long time, I've been less worried about what Africa needs to learn from the West (which, after all, is rather obvious, and mightily struggled-for) than about what the West needs to learn from Africa. Indeed, to many Europeans and Americans, the idea that they can learn anything at all from these badly-governed "darker nations" is news. The language of "developed" versus "developing" countries is itself revealing. Certain peoples are taken to have reached an end-point in their progress, while certain others are still in formation.</p>\n\n<p>An argument to the contrary would be the work of an entire book, or series of books, not of a tiny essay like this one. In addition to the expected discussion of the Enlightenment, I would also want to think about the forcible conversion of all of Europe to Christianity, mass European immigration to North America, the industrial revolution in the 19th century, and the colonial project. The West's strengths and weaknesses lie in these events.</p>\n\n<p>But, for today, I only want to look at a simple example. My friend Jeremy has <a href=\"http://naijablog.blogspot.com/2007/05/nigerian-names.html\">a recent post</a> up about some of the funny school names he's seen recently around Nigeria. He describes it as a "constant source of amazement and puzzlement." This is interesting. The comic value of the names, for someone with a Western idiom of English, is obvious: Holy Ghost Juniorate, Greater Tomorrow Secondary School, Hope High International School, Oyewole Twins International Secondary School, Funtaj International School. </p>\n\n<p>What is less obvious is that a meaningful name is an important aspect of being-in-the-world. The myth of Adam claims that his first task was to name the aspects of the created world. It is a myth common to many traditional societies. To name something is to enter into its being-there. A name, therefore, is not lightly chosen: the name's duty is to represent, as truthfully as possible, the nature of that which is named. This ethos has survived, in spite of everything else that has been destroyed in Nigeria.</p>\n\n<p>What <em>I</em> find amazing and puzzling is that few people around me in America have a feeling for names. Branding, yes, but not naming. It is an area of underdevelopment, actually. When a Nigerian sits down to give a name to a neighborhood, or school, or to a child, the priority is to say something meaningful, something that expresses a hope or that establishes a kinship in a fashion that would be interpretable by the public. To give something or someone a name simply because "it sounds good" would be weird and sad. Language is a bearer of meaning. In the naming of the schools, we see a direct translation into English of a Yoruba concept. Names like "Greater Tomorrow Secondary School" are indeed idiomatic, but they are idiomatic to Nigerian English. Ask the man on the London street what "Choate" or "Eton" means and you'll draw a blank. But for us, meanings are not hidden. Names are doors.</p>\n\n<p>For the Yoruba, the name of a child is a metonymic marker of her destiny. A given name situates each person within a web of positive speech and prophetic allusion. I'd like to say more about this in the second part of this post.</p></div>"
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"title" : "Shared navigation of online bureaucracies",
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"content" : "<div><p> In my talk on Friday at the GOVIS (government information systems) conference in Wellington, I wasn’t the only one to suggest that web 2.0 attitudes will change the relationship between governments and citizens. That notion now seems to be pretty firmly established, and the question is not whether citizens will collaborate with their governments, but rather how.</p>\n<p>Among other developments, I think we’ll soon see a refreshing new approach to the consumption of government services. A couple of weeks ago at Berkeley’s school of information I met Anna Kartavenko, one of Bob Glushko’s graduate students, She’s working on ways to make the byzantine California regulatory apparatus more accessible. If you’re starting a business in that state, it’s really hard to figure out which licenses you need to apply for, as well as how (and in what order) to apply for them.</p>\n<p>The problem is universal, of course, and folks at GOVIS were wrestling with it too. When you’re providing the information systems that both document and implement government services, you certainly want to do everything right in terms of system and information architecture. But I suspect there’s about to be a new force in the world that will work toward the same ends — easy discovery and effective use of services — by very different means. That force is shared experiential knowledge.</p>\n<p>Yes, search should give the right answer, and the systems that search points you to should work well. No, these things don’t always happen. But even if they do, you’d still like to plug into somebody who’s been down the same path you are traveling. A formal description of a procedure is never enough. If possible, we’d always like to hear from somebody who’s been there, done that, knows the drill, and can point out the pitfalls.</p>\n<p>What we loosely call social media are beginning to create that possibility. For a variety of reasons, people are beginning to document and share what they know. If you write it down, you’ll be able to remember it yourself in case you have to replay the steps. And writing it down in a shared information system in the cloud is becoming a more reliable way to assure your own future access to this documentation than writing it down locally.</p>\n<p>To the extent your knowledge is a source of competitive advantage, you’ll want to be cautious about how much of it you publish. But then again, the reputation you establish by publishing some of your knowledge may lead to new opportunities to use that knowledge for your own gain.</p>\n<p>Along with these incentives, which I classify as examples of enlightened self interest, there are also purely altruistic motives, and I don’t discount those. But let’s just stick with enlightened self interest for now. Given those incentives to share knowledge, how can we lower the activation threshold for sharing?</p>\n<p>I think one answer will emerge from the intersection of social bookmarking and clickstream logging. Suppose that instead of bookmarking and tagging a single URL, you could bookmark and tag a sequence of page-visiting and form-filling events. The sequence corresponds to some complex multi-step task. The performance of the task crosses several (or many) online jurisdictions. The outcome might be successful or not: “Yes, I got the license,” or “No I didn’t.” But in either case, it would be qualified by an anecdotal report: “Yes, I got the license, but I found out that if you’re in my category you need an import license and you have to meet the following insurance requirement.”</p>\n<p>You couldn’t reasonably expect very many people to reflect on their encounters with online bureaucracy and take time to write reports like that. But what if it were a much more lightweight activity, like the difference between writing a blog entry and tossing off a del.icio.us bookmark or a Twitter message? Then participation becomes much more likely.</p>\n<p>The key ingredient here is identifying a sequence of events in the browser (or rich client), and enabling people to visualize and then categorize and describe that sequence. And that seems eminently doable.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Shaping the future",
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"content" : "(<em>One of the things that goes with being an SF writer is that people expect you to talk about, well, the future. Last week, engineering consultancy <a href=\"http://www.tngtech.com/\">TNG Technology Consulting</a> invited me to Munich to address one of their technology open days. Here's a transcript of my talk, which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies that you're probably already becoming familiar with. Note that this is a long blog entry — even by my verbose standards — so you'll need to hit on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.</em>)\n<p>\n<p>\nGood afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you're expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us, how far technology will go, how people will use the net, and whether big shoulder pads and food pills will be fashionable. Personally, I'm still waiting for my personal jet car — I've been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention this as a note of caution: while personal jet cars aren't obviously impossible, their non-appearance should give us some insights into how attempts to predict the future go wrong.\n</p><p>\nI'm a science fiction writer by trade, and people often think that means I spend a lot of time trying to predict possible futures. Actually, that's not the job of the SF writer at all — we're not professional futurologists, and we probably get things wrong as often as anybody else. But because we're not tied to a specific technical field we are at least supposed to keep our eyes open for surprises.\n</p><p>\nSo I'm going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects — global warming, bioengineering, the green revolution, the intellectual property wars — and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia. And I'm going to get us there the long way round ...\n</p> \n <p>\n<h3>Speed</h3>\n</p><p>\nThe big surprise in the 20th century — remember that personal jet car? — was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970.\n</p><p>\nBefore 1800, human beings didn't travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was unpleasant, slow, and usually involved a lot of exercise — or the hazards of the seas. Then something odd happened; a constant that had held for all of human history — the upper limit on travel speed — turned into a variable. By 1980, the upper limit on travel speed had risen (for some lucky people on some routes) to just over Mach Two, and to just under Mach One on many other shorter routes. But from 1970 onwards, the change in the rate at which human beings travel ceased — to all intents and purposes, we aren't any faster today than we were when the Comet and Boeing 707 airliners first flew.\n</p><p>\nWe can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it's a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970. Today, the fastest vehicle ever built, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto, is moving at approximately 21 kilometres per second — only twice as fast as an Apollo spacecraft from the late-1960s. Forty-five years to double the maximum velocity; back in the 1930s it was happening in less than a decade.\n</p><p>\nOne side-effect of faster travel was that people traveled more. A brief google told me that in 1900, the average American traveled 210 miles per year by steam-traction railroad, and 130 miles by electric railways. Today, comparable travel figures are 16,000 miles by road and air — a fifty-fold increase in distance traveled. I'd like to note that the new transport technologies consume one-fifth the energy per passenger-kilometer, but overall energy consumption is much higher because of the distances involved. We probably don't spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we're doing so.\n</p><p>\n<h3>Information</h3>\n</p><p>\nAround 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed.\n</p><p>\nBut as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense — punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.\n</p><p>\nWe can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph.\n</p><p>\nIt's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.\n</p><p>\nSpeaking of engineering practicalities, I'm sure everyone here has heard of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of Intel coined this one back in 1965 when he observed that the number of transistor count on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. This isn't just about the number of transistors on a chip, but the density of transistors. A similar law seems to govern storage density in bits per unit area for rotating media. \n</p><p>\nAs a given circuit becomes physically smaller, the time taken for a signal to propagate across it decreases — and if it's printed on a material of a given resistivity, the amount of power dissipated in the process decreases. (I hope I've got that right: my basic physics is a little rusty.) So we get faster operation, or we get lower power operation, by going smaller.\n</p><p>\nWe know that Moore's Law has some way to run before we run up against the irreducible limit to downsizing. However, it looks unlikely that we'll ever be able to build circuits where the component count exceeds the number of component atoms, so I'm going to draw a line in the sand and suggest that this exponential increase in component count isn't going to go on forever; it's going to stop around the time we wake up and discover we've hit the nanoscale limits.\n</p><p>\nThe cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.\n</p><p>\nAll of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.\n</p><p>\n<h3>Bandwidth</h3>\n</p><p>\nI don't expect I need to lecture you about bandwidth. Let's just say that our communication bandwidth has been increasing in what should by now be a very familiar pattern since, oh, the eighteenth century, and the elaborate system of semaphore stations the French crown used for its own purposes. \n</p><p>\nImprovements in bandwidth are something we get from improvements in travel speed or information processing; you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of magnetic tapes driving cross-country (or an Airbus full of DVDs), and similarly, moving more data per unit time over fiber requires faster switches at each end.\n</p><p>\nNow, with little or no bandwidth, when it was expensive and scarce and modems were boxes the size of filing cabinets that could pump out a few hundred bits per second, computers weren't that interesting; they tended to be big, centralized sorting machines that very few people could get to and make use of, and they tended to be used for the kind of jobs that can be centralized, by large institutions. That's the past, where we've come from.\n</p><p>\nWith lots of bandwidth, the picture is very different — but you don't get lots of bandwidth without also getting lots of cheap information processing, lots of small but dense circuitry, hordes of small computers spliced into everything around us. So the picture we've got today is of a world where there are nearly as many mobile phones in the EU as there are people, where each mobile phone is a small computer, and where the fast 3G, UMTS phones are moving up to a megabit or so of data per second over the air — and the next-generation 4G standards are looking to move 100 mbps of data. So that's where we are now. And this picture differs from the past in a very interesting way: because lots of people are interacting with them.\n</p><p>\n(That, incidentally, is what makes the world wide web possible; it's not the technology but the fact that millions of people are throwing random stuff into their computers and publishing on it. You can't do that without ubiquitous cheap bandwidth and cheap terminals to let people publish stuff. And there seems to be a critical threshold for it to work; any BBS or network system seems to require a certain size of user base before it begins to acquire a culture of its own.)\n</p><p>\nWhich didn't happen before, with computers. It's like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.\n</p><p>\n<h3>Unintended Consequences</h3>\n</p><p>\nIt typically takes at least a generation before the social impact of a ubiquitous new technology becomes obvious.\n</p><p>\nWe are currently aware of the consequences of the switch to personal high-speed transportation — the car — and road freight distribution. It shapes our cities and towns, dictates where we live and work, and turns out to have disadvantages our ancestors were not aware of, from particulate air pollution to suburban sprawl and the decay of city centers in some countries. \n</p><p>\nWe tend to be less aware of the social consequences, too. Compare that 1900-era figure of 360 miles per year traveled by rail, against the 16,000 miles of a typical modern American. It is no longer rare to live a long way from relatives, workplaces, and educational institutions. Countries look much more homogeneous on the large scale — the same shops in every high street — because community has become delocalized from geography. Often we don't know our neighbours as well as we know people who live hundreds of kilometers away. This is the effect of cheap, convenient high speed transport.\n</p><p>\nNow, we're still in the early stages of the uptake of mobile telephony, but some lessons are already becoming clear.\n</p><p>\nTraditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there.\n</p><p>\nMobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.\n</p><p>\nThis has interesting social effects. Sometimes it's benign; you never have to wonder if someone you're meeting is lost or unable to find the venue, you never lose track of people. On the other hand, it has bad effects, especially when combined with other technologies: bullying via mobile phone is rife in British schools, and "happy slapping" wouldn't be possible without them. (Assaulting people while an accomplice films it with a cameraphone, for the purpose of sending the movie footage around — often used for intimidation, sometimes used just for vicarious violent fun.)\n</p><p>\n<h3>Convergence</h3>\n</p><p>\nIt's even harder to predict the second-order consequences of new technologies when they start merging at the edges, and hybridizing.\n</p><p>\nA modern cellphone is nothing like a late-1980s cellphone. Back then, the cellphone was basically a voice terminal. Today it's as likely as not to be a video and still camera, a GPS navigation unit, have a keyboard for texting, a screen for surfing the web, an MP3 player, and it may also be a full-blown business computer with word processing and spreadsheet applications aboard. \n</p><p>\nIn future it may end up as a pocket computer that simply runs voice-over-IP software, using the cellular telephony network — or WiFi or WiMax or just about any other transport layer that comes to hand — to move speech packets back and forth with acceptable latency.\n</p><p>\nAnd it's got peripherals. GPS location, cameras, text input. What does it all mean?\n</p><p>\n<h3>Putting it all together</h3>\n</p><p>\nLet's look at our notional end-point where the bandwidth and information processing revolutions are taking us — as far ahead as we can see without positing real breakthroughs and new technologies, such as cheap quantum computing, pocket fusion reactors, and an artificial intelligence that is as flexible and unpredictable as ourselves. It's about 25-50 years away.\n</p><p>\nFirstly, storage. I like to look at the trailing edge; how much non-volatile solid-state storage can you buy for, say, ten euros? (I don't like rotating media; they tend to be fragile, slow, and subject to amnesia after a few years. So this isn't the cheapest storage you can buy — just the cheapest reasonably robust solid-state storage.)\n</p><p>\nToday, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that'll be 100Gb. Two decades and we'll be up to 10Tb.\n</p><p>\n10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I'm awake. All the time. It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it's actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)\n</p><p>\nWhy would anyone want to do this? \n</p><p>\nI can think of several reasons. Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis. \n</p><p>\nAdd optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. \"What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?\" \n</p><p>\nThink of it as google for real life.\n</p><p>\nWe may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers — in many towns in the UK, it is impossible for shops to get insurance, a condition of doing business, without demonstrating that they have CCTV cameras in place. Having such a lifelog would certainly make things easier for teachers and social workers at risk of being maliciously accused by a student or client. \n</p><p>\n(There are also a whole bunch of very nasty drawbacks to this technology — I'll talk about some of them later, but right now I'd just like to note that it would fundamentally change our understanding of privacy, redefine the boundary between memory and public record, and be subject to new and excitingly unpleasant forms of abuse — but I suspect it's inevitable, and rather than asking whether this technology is avoidable, I think we need to be thinking about how we're going to live with it.)\n</p><p>\nNow, this might seem as if it's generating mountains of data — but really, it isn't. There are roughly 80 million people in Germany. Let's assume they all have lifelogs. They're generating something like 10Tb of data each, 10<sup>13</sup> bits, per year, or 10<sup>21</sup> bits for the entire nation every year. 10<sup>23</sup> bits per century.\n</p><p>\nIs 10<sup>23</sup> bits a huge number? No it isn't, when we pursue Moore's Law to the bitter end.\n</p><p>\nThere's a model for long term high volume storage that I like to use as a reference point. Obviously, we want our storage to be as compact as possible — one bit per atom, ideally, if not more, but one bit per atom seems as if it might be achievable. We want it to be stable, too. (In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.)\n</p><p>\nMy model of a long term high volume data storage medium is a synthetic diamond. Carbon occurs in a variety of isotopes, and the commonest stable ones are carbon-12 and carbon-13, occurring in roughly equal abundance. We can speculate that if molecular nanotechnology as described by, among others, Eric Drexler, is possible, we can build a device that will create a diamond, one layer at a time, atom by atom, by stacking individual atoms — and with enough discrimination to stack carbon-12 and carbon-13, we've got a tool for writing memory diamond. Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa.\n</p><p>\nIt's hard, it's very stable, and it's very dense. How much data does it store, in practical terms?\n</p><p>\nThe capacity of memory diamond storage is of the order of Avogadro's number of bits per two molar weights. For diamond, that works out at 6.022 x 10<sup>23</sup> bits per 25 grams. So going back to my earlier figure for the combined lifelog data streams of everyone in Germany — twenty five grams of memory diamond would store six years' worth of data. \n</p><p>\nSix hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.\n</p><p>\nIn more familiar terms: by the best estimate I can track down, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2500 petabytes — 2.5 x 10<sup>18</sup> bytes — of data. That's almost ten milligrams. The Google cluster, as of mid-2006, was estimated to have 4 petabytes of RAM. In memory diamond, you'd need a microscope to see it.\n</p><p>\nSo, it's reasonable to conclude that we're not going to run out of storage any time soon.\n</p><p>\nNow, capturing the data, indexing and searching the storage, and identifying relevance — that's another matter entirely, and it's going to be one that imprint the shape of our current century on those ahead, much as the great 19th century infrastructure projects (that gave our cities paved roads and sewers and railways) define that era for us. \n</p><p>\nI'd like to suggest that really fine-grained distributed processing is going to help; small processors embedded with every few hundred terabytes of storage. You want to know something, you broadcast a query: the local processors handle the problem of searching their respective chunks of the 128-bit address space, and when one of them finds something, it reports back. But this is actually boring. It's an implementation detail. \n</p><p>\nWhat I'd like to look at is the effect this sort of project is going to have on human civilization.\n</p><p>\n</p><p>\n<h3>The Singularity reconsidered</h3>\n</p><p>\nThose of you who're familiar with my writing might expect me to spend some time talking about the singularity. It's an interesting term, coined by computer scientist and SF writer Vernor Vinge. Earlier, I was discussing the way in which new technological fields show a curve of accelerating progress — until it hits a plateau and slows down rapidly. It's the familiar sigmoid curve. Vinge asked, "what if there exist new technologies where the curve never flattens, but looks exponential?" The obvious example — to him — was Artificial Intelligence. It's still thirty years away today, just as it was in the 1950s, but the idea of building machines that think has been around for centuries, and more recently, the idea of understanding how the human brain processes information and coding some kind of procedural system in software for doing the same sort of thing has soaked up a lot of research.\n</p><p>\nVernor came up with two postulates. Firstly, if we can design a true artificial intelligence, something that's cognitively our equal, then we can make it run faster by throwing more computing resources at it. (Yes, I know this is questionable — it begs the question of whether intelligence is parallelizeable, or what resources it takes.) And if you can make it run faster, you can make it run much faster — hundreds, millions, of times faster. Which means problems get solved fast. This is your basic weakly superhuman AI: the one you deploy if you want it to spend an afternoon and crack a problem that's been bugging everyone for a few centuries.\n</p><p>\nHe also noted something else: we humans are pretty dumb. We can see most of the elements of our own success in other species, and individually, on average, we're not terribly smart. But we've got the ability to communicate, to bind time, and to plan, and we've got a theory of mind that lets us model the behaviour of other animals. What if there can exist other forms of intelligence, other types of consciousness, which are fundamentally better than ours at doing whatever it is that consciousness does? Just as a quicksort algorithm that sorts in O(n log n) comparisons is fundamentally better (except in very small sets) than a bubble sort that typically takes O(n<sup>2</sup>) comparisons.\n</p><p>\nIf such higher types of intelligence can exist, and if a human-equivalent intelligence can build an AI that runs one of them, then it's going to appear very rapidly after the first weakly superhuman AI. And we're not going to be able to second guess it because it'll be as much smarter than us as we are than a frog.\n</p><p>\nVernor's singularity is therefore usually presented as an artificial intelligence induced leap into the unknown: we can't predict where things are going on the other side of that event because it's simply unprecedented. It's as if the steadily steepening rate of improvement in transportation technologies that gave us the Apollo flights by the late 1960s kept on going, with a Jupiter mission in 1982, a fast relativistic flight to Alpha Centauri by 1990, a faster than light drive by 2000, and then a time machine so we could arrive before we set off. It makes a mockery of attempts to extrapolate from prior conditions.\n</p><p>\nOf course, aside from making it possible to write very interesting science fiction stories, the Singularity is a very controversial idea. For one thing, there's the whole question of whether a machine can think — although as the late, eminent professor Edsger Djikstra said, "the question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". A secondary pathway to the Singularity is the idea of augmented intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence: we may not need machines that think, if we can come up with tools that help us think faster and more efficiently. The world wide web seems to be one example. The memory prostheses I've been muttering about are another. \n</p><p>\nAnd then there's a school of thought that holds that, even if AI is possible, the Singularity idea is hogwash — it just looks like an insuperable barrier or a permanent step change because we're too far away from it to see the fine-grained detail. Canadian SF writer Karl Schroeder has explored a different hypothesis: that there may be an end to progress. We may reach a point where the scientific enterprise is done — where all the outstanding questions have been answered and the unanswered ones are physically impossible for us to address. (He's also opined that the idea of an AI-induced Singularity is actually an example of erroneous thinking that makes the same mistake as the proponents of intelligent design (Creationism) — the assumption that complex systems cannot be produced by simple non-consciously directed processes.) An end to science is still a very long way away right now; for example, I've completely failed to talk about the real elephant in the living room, the recent explosion in our understanding of biological systems that started in the 1950s but only really began to gather pace in the 1990s. But what then?\n</p><p>\nWell, we're going to end up with — at the least — lifelogs, ubiquitous positioning and communication services, a civilization where every artifact more complicated than a spoon is on the internet and attentive to our moods and desires, cars that drive themselves, and a whole lot of other mind-bending consequences. All within the next two or three decades. So what can we expect of this collision between transportation, information processing, and bandwidth?\n</p><p>\n<h3>Drawing Conclusions</h3>\n</p><p>\nWe're already living in a future nobody anticipated. We don't have personal jet cars, but we have ridiculously cheap intercontinental airline travel. (Holidays on the Moon? Not yet, but if you're a billionaire you can pay for a week in orbit.) On the other hand, we discovered that we do, in fact, require more than four computers for the entire planet (as Thomas Watson is alleged to have said). An increasing number of people don't have telephone lines any more — they rely on a radio network instead. \n</p><p>\nThe flip side of Moore's Law, which we don't pay much attention to, is that the cost of electronic components is in deflationary free fall of a kind that would have given a Depression-era economist nightmares. When we hit the brick wall at the end of the road — when further miniaturization is impossible — things are going to get very bumpy indeed, much as the aerospace industry hit the buffers at the end of the 1960s in North America and elsewhere. This stuff isn't big and it doesn't have to be expensive, as the One Laptop Per Child project is attempting to demonstrate. Sooner or later there won't be a new model to upgrade to every year, the fab lines will have paid for themselves, and the bottom will fall out of the consumer electronics industry, just as it did for the steam locomotive workshops before them.\n</p><p>\nBefore that happens, we're going to get used to some very disorienting social changes.\n</p><p>\nHands up, anyone in the audience, who owns a slide rule? Or a set of trigonometric tables? Who's actually used them, for work, in the past year? Or decade?\n</p><p>\nI think I've made my point: the pocket calculator and the computer algebra program have effectively driven those tools into obsolescence. This happened some time between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Now we're about to see a whole bunch of similar and much weirder types of obsolescence.\n</p><p>\nRight now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map. And GPS is pretty crude — you need open line of sight on the satellites, and the signal's messed up. We can do better than this, and we will. In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.\n</p><p>\nThink about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.\n</p><p>\nWe're also in some danger of losing the concepts of privacy, and warping history out of all recognition.\n</p><p>\nOur concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable. \n</p><p>\nNow, in this age of rapid, transparent information retrieval, what happens if you've got a lifelog, registering your precise GPS coordinates and scanning everything around you? If you're updating your whereabouts via a lightweight protocol like Twitter and keeping in touch with friends and associates via a blog? It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this — kids who've grown up with little expectation of or understanding of privacy. Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms, but that's not our problem. Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.\n</p><p>\nYou know something? Keeping track of those quaint old laws about personal privacy is going to be really important. Because in countries with no explicit right to privacy — I believe the US constitution is mostly silent on the subject — we're going to end up blurring the boundary between our Second Lives and the first life, the one we live from moment to moment. We're time-binding animals and nothing binds time tighter than a cradle to grave recording of our every moment.\n</p><p>\nThe political hazards of lifelogging are, or should be, semi-obvious. In the short term, we're going to have to learn to do without a lot of bad laws. If it's an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a 'bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there's no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I'm asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? And everything they see is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing.\n</p><p>\nOne of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.\n</p><p>\nAnd then there's history.\n</p><p>\nHistory today is patchy. I never met either of my grandfathers — both of them died before I was born. One of them I recognize from three photographs; the other, from two photographs and about a minute of cine film. Silent, of course. Going back further, to their parents ... I know nothing of these people beyond names and dates. (They died thirty years before I was born.)\n</p><p>\nThis century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future. \n</p><p>\nAnd with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.\n</p><p>\nTotal history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet. I'm really not sure what its implications are, but then, I'm one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.\n</p><p>\nMeet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word \"privacy\", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.\n</p><p>\nAnd yet, these trends are emergent from the current direction of the telecommunications industry, and are likely to become visible as major cultural changes within the next ten to thirty years. None of them require anything but a linear progression from where we are now, in a direction we're already going in. None of them take into account external technological synergies, stuff that's not obviously predictable like brain/computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, or magic wands. I've purposefully ignored discussion of nanotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, genomics, proteomics, the future of nuclear power, the future of environmentalism and religion, demographics, our environment, peak oil and our future energy economy, space exploration, and a host of other topics.\n</p><p>\n<h3>The wrap</h3>\n</p><p>\nAs projections of a near future go, the one I've presented in this talk is pretty poor. In my defense, I'd like to say that the only thing I can be sure of is that I'm probably wrong, or at least missing something as big as the internet, or antibiotics. \n</p><p>\n(I know: driverless cars. They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles. \n</p><p>\n(Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi. If I was malicious, I'd suggest that the move to autonomous vehicles will kill the personal automobile market; but instead I'll assume that people will still want to own their own four-wheeled living room, even though their relationship with it will change fundamentally. But I digress ...)\n</p><p>\nAnyway, this is the future that some of you are building. It's not the future you thought you were building, any more than the rocket designers of the 1940s would have recognized a future in which GPS-equipped hobbyists go geocaching at weekends. But it's a future that's taking shape right now, and I'd like to urge you to think hard about what kind of future you'd like your descendants — or yourselves — to live in. Engineers and programmers are the often-anonymous architects of society, and what you do now could make a huge difference to the lives of millions, even billions, of people in decades to come.\n</p><p>\nThank you, and good afternoon.\n</p></p>"
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"title" : "Google News Personalization paper",
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"content" : "I probably started drooling when I first noticed this paper, \"<a href=\"http://www2007.org/paper570.php\">Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering</a>\" (<a href=\"http://www2007.org/papers/paper570.pdf\">PDF</a>), by four Googlers that is being presented at the WWW 2007 Conference this weekend.<br><br>The paper does not disappoint. It is an awesome example of what can be done at Google scale with their data, traffic, and massive computational cluster.<br><br>The paper tested three methods of making news recommendations on the Google News front page. From the abstract:<blockquote><i>We describe our approach to collaborative filtering for generating personalized recommendations for users of Google News. We generate recommendations using three approaches: collaborative filtering using MinHash clustering, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI), and covisitation counts.</i></blockquote>MinHash and PLSI are both clustering methods; a user is matched to a cluster of similar users, then they look at the aggregate behavior of users in that cluster to find recommendations. Covisitation is an item-based method that computes which articles people tend to look at if they looked at a given article (i.e. \"Customers who visited X also visited...\").<br><br>The paper does a nice job motivating the use of recommendations for news:<blockquote><i>The Internet has no dearth of content. The challenge is in finding the right content for yourself: something that will answer your current information needs or something that you would love to read, listen or watch.<br><br>Search engines help solve the former problem; particularly if you are looking for something specific that can be formulated as a keyword query.<br><br>However, in many cases, a user may not even know what to look for ... Users ... end up ... looking around ... with the attitude: Show me something interesting.<br><br>In such cases, we would like to present recommendations to a user based on her interests as demonstrated by her past activity on the relevant site .... [and] the click history of the community.</i></blockquote>The authors then explain that what makes this problem so difficult is doing it at scale in real-time over rapidly changing data.<blockquote><i>Google News (<a href=\"http://news.google.com\">http://news.google.com</a>) is visited by several million unique visitors ... [and] the number of ... news stories ... is also of the order of several million.<br><br>[On] Google News, the underlying item-set undergoes churn (insertions and deletions) every few minutes and at any given time the stories of interest are the ones that appeared in last couple of hours. Therefore any model older than a few hours may no longer be of interest.<br><br>The Google News website strives to maintain a strict response time requirement for any page views ... [Within] a few hundred milliseconds ... the recommendation engine ... [must] generate recommendations.</i></blockquote>The authors note that, while Amazon.com may be doing recommendations at a similar scale and speed, the item churn rate of news is much faster than of Amazon's product catalog, making the problem more difficult and requiring different methods.<br><br>The Googlers did several evaluations of their system, but the key results are that two versions that combined all three of the approaches in different ways generated 38% more clickthroughs than just showing the most popular news articles. That seems surprisingly lower than our results for product recommendations at Amazon.com -- we found recommendations generated a couple orders of magnitude more sales than just showing top sellers -- but Google's results are still a good lift.<br><br>On the reason for the lower lift, I did end the paper with a couple questions about parts of their work.<br><br>First, it appears that the cluster membership is not updated in real-time. When discussing PLSI, the authors say they \"update the counts associated with that story for all the clusters to which the user belongs\" but that this is an approximation (since cluster membership cannot change in this step) and does not work for new users (who have no cluster memberships yet).<br><br>This is a typical problem with clustering approaches -- building the clusters usually is an expensive offline computation -- but it seems like a cause for concern if their goal is to offer \"instant gratification\" to users by changing when they click on new articles.<br><br>Second, it appears to me that the item-based covisitation technique will be biased toward popular items. In describing that algorithm, the authors say, \"Given an item <i>s</i>, its near neighbors are effectively the set of items that have been covisited with it, weighted by the age discounted count of how often they were visited.\"<br><br>If that is right, this calculation would seem to suffer from what we used to call the \"Harry Potter problem\", so-called because everyone who buys any book, even books like Applied Cryptography, probably also has bought Harry Potter. Not compensating for that issue almost certainly would reduce the effectiveness of the recommendations, especially since the recommendations from the two clustering methods likely also would have a tendency toward popular items.<br><br>I have to say, having worked on this problem with <a href=\"http://findory.com\">Findory</a> for the last four years, I feel like I know it well. Findory needs to generate recommendations for hundreds of thousands of users (not yet millions) in real-time. New articles enter and leave the system rapidly; newer stories tend to be the stories of interest. The recommendations must change immediately when someone reads something new.<br><br>This work at Google certainly is impressive. I would have loved to have access to the kind of resources -- the cluster, MapReduce, BigTable, the news crawl, the traffic and user behavior data, and hordes of smart people everywhere around -- that these Googlers had. Good fun, and an excellent example of the power of Google scale for trying to solve these kinds of problems."
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"title" : "SCOTT HORTON—Mission Accomplished: Year Four",
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"content" : "Today marks four years after President Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln—just beyond sight of the coastline at San Diego, California. With a prompt from Editor & Publisher, let’s take a look at how our newspaper of record covered the event. Pride of place belongs to Elisabeth Bumiller, whose classic contributions to the literature include a detailed account of Bush’s iPod, essential information on the thread-count of pillowcases for Bush’s pillows, and a confession of how “frightening” it is to ask questions of the President in wartime: . . ."
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"title" : "The Miracle of Asset Price Inflation (and the nigh...",
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"content" : "The Miracle of Asset Price Inflation (and the nightmare of widening inequality) imply that we have millionaires of relatively modest means these days<br><br><blockquote>Giuliani left office on Dec. 31, 2001, with relatively modest means. His final ethics report to the city listed gross assets of between $1.16 million and $1.83 million in 2001;</blockquote>.<br><br>This is a cost of inflation that I hadn't considered. To be rich these days your wealth has to be in the tens of millions. Mere millions are upper middle class (unless it's all in the house where you really live and which didn't cost much when you bought it, in which case it is perfectly possible to be a blue collar regular guy working class stiff millionaire). So what do you call the rich ? tensofmillionaires ? dozensofmillionaires ? I think the technical term would be decamillionaires which does have a nice alliteration with decadence."
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"title" : "Martin Wolf Asks: "Where Is Everybody?": The Paul Wolfowitz Case",
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"content" : "<div><p>Martin Wolf wonders why his Economic Forum members are so silent on the issue of Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><a href=\"http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2007/04/good_governance.html#comments\">Economists' forum</a>: One should not be the only person to comment on one's own column, but I am shocked that not one member of the forum had anything to say on corruption, governance, the World Bank or Mr Wolfowitz. These are surely pretty big topics - or, at least, the first two are.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Some of it is that we are not at all sure what went on, and many people wish to reserve judgment. </p>\n\n<p>But judgment is getting hard to reserve. The principal thing to note is that Mr. Wolfowitz is now on story #4. In order, the stories are:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>That Shaha Riza's extra-sweet deal at the U.S. State Department was decided on not by Paul Wolfowitz--who had nothing to do with it--but by the World Bank's Board of Directors.</li>\n<li>That Shaha Riza's extra-sweet deal at the U.S. State Department was negotiated by Paul Wolfowitz, but he was doing exactly what the Board of Directors wanted.</li>\n<li>That Shaha Riza's extra-sweet deal at the U.S. State Department was dictated by Paul Wolfowitz, but that he had kept the Bank Board of Directors informed of what he was going to do beforehand.</li>\n<li>That Shaha Riza's extra-sweet deal at the U.S. State Department was dictated by Paul Wolfowitz, and Wolfowitz did not inform the Bank Board of Directors, but a whistle blower wrote to the Board's Ethics Committee after the deal was done, and the Ethics Committee did not object, so nobody now has any standing to object.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>From this and other evidence, I don't know but I think I can guess what the story Paul Wolfowitz tells himself is, and it goes like this:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>They hated me. And so they told me that I couldn't have Shaha Riza as one of my close personal aides and pay her what I was paying Kellums and Cleveland. They told me I couldn't have her as one of my close personal aides at all. This was unfair: she, after all, was the reason I got interested in being World Bank president in the first place. Well, if I couldn't have her at my right hand, I was at least going to make sure that she was paid well. What I did was no deep secret--anybody who wanted to could have found out about it. But I was strong then, and nobody's home government wanted to pick another fight with the Bush administration, so they pretended that they did not know. Now I am weaker, and they think they can take me down, and so they pretend to be shocked! shocked!--they are having their own little Claude-Rains-Captain-Renault-Holier-than-Thou moment. Liars. Hypocrites. Bureaucrats. Corrupt friends of kleptocrats. They knew, and they didn't object. Or they ought to have known. Or they could have found out if they had dug for the details. And it's all their fault.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>By contrast, the Bank staff have not changed their public story. And, reading between the lines, I think I know what the real story is:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>We told Wolfowitz that he could not recuse himself on personnel matters involving Shaha Riza and yet keep her in the Bank as one of his confidential aides and with him as her boss. We told him to move her somewhere outside his authority. We never imagined--having told him that recusal on personnel matters was insufficient--that he would then interfere in personnel matters affecting her to the extent that he would dictate her salary and give her a massive raise: we expected him to delegate that task of exactly where and at what pay grade to some vice president somewhere.</p>\n \n <p>When we discovered what he had done after the fact, we knew that our home country governments did not want another fight with the Bush administration, so we let it drop. But it was still a bad and unethical thing for Wolfowitz to do. And now that the Bush administration is weak and people care little about appeasing further, now that it is clear that Wolfowitz has been a disaster as World Bank president, now that the issue has been raised not by us but by the press, and now that Wolfowitz has responded by telling lots of lies, we are ready to do now what we should have done when we discovered this and make a huge stink--hopefully, a huge enough stink to drive him out of the World Bank presidency, for which he has shown himself unsuited.</p>\n \n <p>As corruption goes, this particular episode is penny-ante corruption--a matter of $50,000 a year, perhaps $500,000 in present value--but it is corruption, it is a straw, and it is the straw that breaks the camel's back.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Should this be the straw that breaks the camel's back? The only difference between Wolfowitz's intervention in Riza's salary and his intervention in Kellums's and Cleveland's is that there were rules against the first because Riza was already at the World Bank. If Wolfowitz were highly qualified to be World Bank president and were doing an excellent job, it would be time for a simple reprimand. This doesn't mean that what Wolfowitz did is a good and ethical thing--it is a bad and unethical thing. But it is not worth ending the tenure of an excellent and effective World Bank president.</p>\n\n<p>But Wolfowitz is not an effective and excellent World Bank president. In a good world, this act of corruption would be the straw that breaks the camel's back.</p>\n</div>"
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"title" : "Mobiles for Rural India",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/06/business/wireless07.1-44394.php\">International Herald Tribune</a> writes:<br>\n<blockquote><br>\nMobile phone usage is rising faster in India than anywhere else in the world, with some six million customers added every month. Large cities and many medium-sized towns are already blanketed with retail outlets, and competition among manufacturers and carriers is fierce.</blockquote></p>\n\n<p>Rural India has become the next frontier for the industry's biggest players. About 70 percent of India's 1.1 billion population, 770 million people, live in villages and rural areas.<br>\n...<br>\nPhone manufacturers have begun introducing new products that will be targeted at rural markets. On Thursday, Reliance, the Indian mobile phone service provider, said it would sell a Chinese-made phone that would retail for 777 rupees, or $19. Nokia also unveiled seven new models last week targeted at emerging markets to be priced at $45 to $120. In November, Motorola introduced the ultra-low-cost Motofone in India, costing about $40.<br>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Rental Dementia",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.nypress.com/20/19/news&columns/rentaldem.cfm\">This column</a> in a NYC alternative weekly is just wonderful. I’m subscribe to it using google alerts.\n</p>"
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"title" : "“Engineer for serendipity”",
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"content" : "<blockquote><p>\nEngineer for serendipity. — <a href=\"http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/8343\">Roy Fielding</a></p></blockquote>\n<p>Brilliant. More delightful then what I call creating large option spaces.</p>\n<p>Surprisingly hard to get funded though.\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p>Today I noticed <a href=\"http://www.nassauparadiseisland.com/passports/\">this ad</a> offering to reimburse you for getting a passport. $157 per adult. I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean. A place people go for the weekend; well they used to. The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have discovered that the newly increased tedium of getting a passport has caused huge numbers of idle travelers to decided to, well, just go someplace else.</p>\n<p>When my 1st son got his learner’s permit it took us three trips to the registry before we managed to accumulate enough documentation to convince them to let him have the learner’s permit. My 2nd son submitted his first pay check’s stub rather than the check and the bank called to correct the error. A bit got set on his account that didn’t get cleared. So the ATM ate his bank card. It took months to get a replacement card since his school was yet to issue the ID card they required. All N of my financial institutions have recently insisted that I add four security questions, including one involving a photograph; which is a pain since I share access to these accounts with my spouse so all 30 odd questions and their answers all have to be in some shared location. We recently got new passports, a project that was at least a dozen times more expensive and tedious than doing my taxes.<br>\nI once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users. Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit. That wasn’t the case two decades ago.<br>\nThe Republicans have done a lot of work over the last decade to make it harder to vote; creating additional friction in the process of getting to the polling booth. The increased barriers for getting a drivers license, passport, etc. are all part of that. This make sense because now, unlike 30 years ago, there is now a significant difference in the wealth of Democratic v.s. Republican voters.</p>\n<p>Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones. So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms. Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.</p>\n<p>I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating. This is at the heart of what your doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free. Ideas like this are behind the intuition of some managers who insist on getting everybody in the team working in the same room with no walls between them.<br>\nIn the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two counter vialing forces are at work. One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it. Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp. and increase the friction. Thus you get the mess around the passport, real-id, and the banks. Wearing that hat it seems perfectly reasonable that one should present photo id when you vote, or have your <a href=\"http://www.schneier.com/essay-026.html\">biometrics captured</a> if you cross a boarder. On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction. That more rather than less transactions would take place. That more blog postings garner good coments, that more wiki pages will be touched up, that more account relationships will emerge rather than less.</p>\n<p>Of course the experts in the internet identity space are trying to strike a balance. It’s clearly one of those high-risk high-benefit cases that people have trouble holding in their head.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Moral compass in the invisble hand",
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"content" : "<p>I love this line <a>from the Financial Time’s blog</a>.</p>\n<blockquote><p>\nWith staggering faith in the moral compass of market forces, the Economist sanguinely concludes…”</p></blockquote>\n<p>People to seem to become <a href=\"http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/05/free_trades_gre.html\">sympathetic</a> to certain issues only when they show up in their living room.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Risk v.s. Benefit",
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"content" : "<p>The “Ben Franklin” is a decision making device who’s legitimacy rests on Ben’s fame and the authority of arithmetic. You make two columns and in the first you enumerate the reasons for proceeding and in the other you enumerate the costs. Finally you, presumably, sum up the two columns and make your decision. This is all well and good until you discover that the same technique is prescribed as a good closing device for the saleman.</p>\n<p>The advice to the closer is to pull out a sheet of paper; draw two columns and then fill in one column with all the reasons to buy the product. You then hand the paper to your customer and invite him to fill in the second column. The nominal reason why this approach works is that you, the salesman, will be well prepared for this pop quiz while the buyer won’t. There is a secondary rational based on <a>availablity</a>; i.e. when you hand over the list your list of positive reasons will be close by while the objections won’t be.<br>\nI was reminded of this yesterday after reading a few papers upstream from a paper that Bruce Schneier pointed out. The paper he pointed out <a href=\"http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/the_myth_of_the.html\">The myth of the Superuser</a> is an interesting and provocative paper; but I enjoyed more the work it rests upon, i.e. a body of work that attempt to dig into the puzzle of how people think about risk. There are lots of amusing facts in that body of work; as well as a tremendous amount of posing. Each paper is just like being handed the Ben Franklin by a salesman.<br>\nOne of the fact’s I’d not noticed before says there is some experimental evidence that people are not able to treat the two columns as independent. As you learn of benefits you tend to discount the risks and visa versa as you learn of risks you tend to discount the benefits. Oh dear, the landscape we make decisions upon is ill-formed. It is easier to push choices in some directions versus others. If you try to push a decision, say to clarify it’s benefits, you running against the natural grain of the choice making surface. You will have an easier time if at the same time you make a counter vailing points clarifying the risk. If we visualize the choices as sitting on a x-y plane of risk v.s. benefit it is hard to move the discussion along the 45% line; and easy to move the perpendicular to that line.</p>\n<p>our marbles roll naturally to into the gutters on one or another axis. The Ben Franklin forces the decision onto this two dimensional plane. That’s why it makes a great closing device. We are good at making decisions and good at getting comfortable with them. Time spent in the middle of that plain is a pain; and it’s more painful in it’s higher regions. Specialists (technocrats, scientists, the thoughtful) who are skilled at surviving in the inner regions and high altitudes of this landscape are a pain in the neck for other people.<br>\nPeople, the literature reports, have a difficult time holding in their head options that are both high-risk and high-benefit. Scenarios that feature that combination tend to be converted by the mind into something else. Going into the war in Iraq is reasonable example. The desired benefit was high and the risk was high. The inability of individuals (and I presume it the same for groups) to hold in their head that extreme combination rapidly leads to polarized views of the situation.\n</p>"
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"title" : "On white privilege",
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"content" : "<p>A few weeks ago, somebody physically attacked me. He is one foot taller, weights fifty pounds more, and is white.<br>\nObviously, I called the police.<br>\nImagine my surprise when they arrive, and they yell at me! “You get away now!” Mr. White policeman shouts, while taking his hand to his pistol. Five of them are converging on me. Not good: I can picture in my mind all these news about non-whites being beaten by the police, and consider the irony of being beaten <em>after</em> being beaten.</p>\n<p>I yell back “I called you”, and then I see this police guy, somehow, doubt.</p>\n<p>Regardless, they take his statement, but despite the fact that he is armed with a gun and a knife, they don’t search him. I go to the hospital, and they perform a cursory examination: I have been beaten in the head and face, have abrasions, and am almost in shock, but the physicians look at me and let me go without much fuss. I overhear the physician outside my room, before coming in to see me, “does he speak English?”, and something like “domestic fight.” You know how these Latinos are.</p>\n<p>This guy that hit me? Still driving around the house. Later, I was informed that he has vowed to kill me: His own hate is poisoning him. And that’s about it.</p>\n<p>But the real problem here is the implicit discrimination at every level of society: the police assume my fault, and put themselves and me in danger by failing to frisk an armed suspect. The physicians fail to check for other wounds, and are just content with their two bit machine, regardless of the pain and the bloody abrasions. Some of my white acquaintances even tell me that I am exaggerating: it can not be all that bad, I am making stuff up.</p>\n<p>And then suddenly I find this little gem about <a href=\"http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html\" title=\"White Privilege\">white privilege</a>. Check it up. (And here is the PDF:<a href=\"http://www.mercurial.cc/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/aw_article17.pdf\" title=\"White Privilege Checklist\">White Privilege Checklist</a>)</p>\n<blockquote><p>My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”</p></blockquote>\n<p>Not to mention that, as part of the privilege, people will believe you.</p>"
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"title" : "How'd We Get Into This Mess?",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.uncov.com/assets/2007/5/11/ysati.jpg\">In 1997, if you were a content producer on the web, nobody gave a shit what you had to say. You got to pretend like a lot of people cared, because hey, there are millions of people using the internet, <em>someone</em> out there has to be reading what you write. Today, if you're a content producer, it's still the case that nobody gives a shit what you have to say. The only difference between today and 1997 is that there are a lot more content producers out there, and a lot more people who don't give a shit. Mike Arrington will hail this situation as a <em>revolution</em>, but Mike Arrington is a <em>retard</em>.</p>\n\n<p>What I want to know is, at what point during the professional history of software development did we decide that a <a href=\"http://www.uncov.com/2007/4/11/meebo-is-what-s-wrong-with-web-2-0\">Javascript-based IM client</a> was a good idea? Are we really that helpless?</p>\n\n<h3>In The Beginning, There Was PHP</h3>\n<p>The seeds of Web 2.0 were planted in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf released a set of Perl scripts called PHP. Eventually PHP became a language in its own right, albeit a crappy one. PHP was critical in that it allowed less-than-mediocre programmers to create rich web applications. Sure, occasionally these shitty programmers were stumped by tricky stuff like database deadlocks, transactions, and scaling, but you could, without a whole lot of skill, hack out a program that appeared to work.</p>\n\n<p>So with PHP, you've got shitty programmers who don't understand fundamental things like concurrency making applications. Great. The other great draw for CS-dropouts was HTML. With HTML, you didn't have to deal with <em>hard stuff</em> like event-driven graphical interface programming. Tables were easy to understand, Windows GUIs were not. And so a new wave of apps was born, under the guise of the \"network computing model\", which is really a sorry excuse for \"we can't code for shit and this is the best we've got.\"</p>\n\n<h3>California Gold Rush</h3>\n<p>The first dotcom bubble was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to get their taste for pump-and-dump scams. Sure, a handful of sustainable businesses came out of the first bubble, but <em>Webvan?</em> Give me a break. So yeah, a ton of startups went down the shitter and took billions of dollars in venture capital with them. A lot of people got burned, and we all knew there was gold in them thar' internets. But where?</p>\n\n<h3>Ask Why, Asshole</h3>\n<p>Web 2.0 would have been useless given any alternate course of history, but I can attribute its current state of uselessness to a single corporation from Houston, Texas: Enron. When the dotcom bubble burst, the stock market went a little haywire. Enron's stock started falling, and eventually it fell past a point where debts they had secured with their stock were required to be paid back in cash. It would have happened eventually, but suffice it to say that the dotcom crash caused Enron's collapse to happen at that time.</p>\n\n<p>After Enron, the US government stepped in and gifted the country with the Sarbanes-Oxley act. I can rabble rabble all day about SOX, but the end effect is that these tighter accounting controls severely stifled initial public offerings. The next web bubble would have an entirely different face.</p>\n\n<h3>Development Gets Easier, Programmers Get Dumber</h3>\n<p>In the beginning, there was PHP, and developers had to learn a little bit of SQL. This was a disaster for the most part because nobody could understand what XSS and SQL injection were. So, to make things easier for the average idiot, Ruby on Rails was invented. Developers didn't even have to think about complicated stuff like, I don't know, LEFT JOINs. Gee whiz, that's some tricky shit. \n\n<h3>Getting Paid And Laid</h3>\n<p>Enter Google. They start to pay <em>anyone</em> to syndicate their ads. Who cares how much traffic you get? As long as a small percentage of your users click an ad, you make money. In the finance world we call this statistical arbitrage. In the Web 2.0 world, we call it a fool's errand. The Grand Unified Theory of Web 2.0 is that if you get enough users, you can support yourself completely with AdSense. Any entrepreneur who tells you this has an extra 21st chromosome.</p>\n\n<p>When your pathologically stupid startup fails, Google doesn't give a shit. They're laughing all the way to the bank.</p>\n\n<h3>This Is The Recipe</h3>\n<p>Thus far, Web 2.0 is composed of these ingredients:</p>\n<ul>\n <li>Dumb programmers with easy to use frameworks</li>\n <li>IPO no longer being an exit strategy, you must get bought out</li>\n <li>Google paying you money that's proportional to the number of pageviews you get</li>\n <li>Developers drooling over YouTube's $1.65B acquisition</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The end result of this is our current state of affairs: a marginally useful feature of an existing product gets marketed as its own <em>company</em>. All you've got to do is identify your buyer, expand a product they already offer, and hope they acquire you.</p>\n\n<p>Eventually it will collapse for the same reason the dotcom bubble burst: normal people don't give a shit. They will never give a shit. But when the ship sinks, I can guarantee you this: TechCrunch will hail it as a new revolution.</p>\n \n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/uncov?a=ZoZMeg\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/uncov?i=ZoZMeg\" border=\"0\"></a></p><div>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?a=f0zUQXC5\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?i=f0zUQXC5\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?a=s8G5NVBJ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?i=s8G5NVBJ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?a=QxLMUbGK\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?i=QxLMUbGK\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?a=EOlxzVlV\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?i=EOlxzVlV\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?a=LHepgRak\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/uncov?i=LHepgRak\" border=\"0\"></a>\n</div></p>"
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"title" : "Intelligent Design, Eames-Style",
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"content" : "<p>\nFor a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed aggregator, you’ll have to go to one of the HTML pages to see it).\n</p><p>\nIn putting together one of her classes, Anitra came across the <a href=\"http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/arq/n49/art11.pdf\">full interview</a> from which it was sourced. The relevant section says it well, whether the topic is furniture design, graphic design or designing the <a href=\"http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm\">architecture of networked software</a>;\n</p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<strong>Does the creation of design admit constraint?</strong>\n<br>Design depends largely on constraints.\n</p><p>\n<strong>What constraints?</strong>\n<br>The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints—the constraints of price, of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time, etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.\n</p><p>\n<strong>Does design obey laws?</strong>\n<br>Aren’t constraints enough?\n</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>\nRead the whole thing, though; it’s only a single page, and there are a few other gems applicable to programmers as well; e.g.,\n</p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<strong>Ought form to derive from the analysis of function?</strong>\n<br>The great risk here is that the analysis may not be complete.\n</p></blockquote>"
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"title" : "A PURE THEORY OF ECONOMIC MISINFORMATION",
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"content" : "<p>by the Sandwichman</p>\n\n<p>In his column anticipating the French presidential election (cited by Max), <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/economic-misinformation-p_b_47265.html\">Mark Weisbrot</a> concluded, \"If France makes a historic shift to the right in this election, it will be largely due to economic misinformation.\" I'm not sure if that was an accurate prediction. For all I know, the result may have been due to Sarko's hairstyle or Sego's inept campaign. But <i>assuming</i> it to be true, the statement raises questions about just what is \"economic misinformation\".</p>\n\n<p>I would like to nominate three principal sources of economic misinformation and to suggest that ultimately the \"science of economics\" is founded on the durability and malleability of those errors. The first source of misinformation is the claim -- implicit or explicit -- that a given piece of information, constructed from statistical data, describes how well or badly \"the economy\" is functioning. The second source is the almost always implicit claim that the economy is a self-standing institution whose efficient operation is the ultimate foundation of a way of life. The third source of misinformation is the feckless and hypocritical zig-zagging between so-called theoretical models and practical lessons that has become a hallmark of economic policy prescription.</p>\n<p>There is a <i>New Yorker</i> cartoon from the 1980s by Robert Weber that shows a pair of economists standing in front of a politician seated at a desk, with a view of the capitol dome out the window. One of the economists is holding a sheet of paper and saying, <a href=\"http://www.cartoonbank.com/item/22808\">\"These projected figures are a figment of our imagination. We hope you like them.\"</a> As a low-level number cruncher in a school board bureaucracy at the time, I loved that cartoon's honesty and redundancy. Projected, figment and imagination are synonymous.</p>\n\n<p>The magical belief in the economy as a self-standing institution is a metaphor gone berserk. Metaphors have their use when they enable us to conceive of something that otherwise must remain nameless. But it is dangerous to forget that there is no such thing as \"the economy\". Linguistically, the economy is a quasi-God-like entity. But given the choice between the latter-day economy and good old mammon, I'll settle for the traditional name.</p>\n\n<p>If the economy is a metaphor, a mathematical model of the economy is a metaphor of a metaphor. In plain Greek, it's a <i>catachresis</i> -- an incorrect use of words. Now, even an incorrect use of words has the power to create meaning, provided we continuously keep in mind the incongruity of what we're saying. </p>\n\n<p>Marx's <a href=\"http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4\">\"fetishism of the commodity\"</a> is a case in point. The trouble with Marxism is that probably even Marx himself couldn't always keep that disclaimer in mind. The trouble with \"economic science\" (as defined by Lionel Robbins) is that it is founded on the principle of the fetish's ultimate reality.</p>\n\n<p>\"Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.\" Sounds simple enough until you realize that, first, the separation of ends and means is an analytical abstraction that misrepresents the interrelatedness of ends and means in real life and, second, that the adjective \"scarce\" excludes from the core analysis the most economically-relevant attributes of human behavior -- like knowledge, learning and trust. Economic science is thus <i>defined</i> as an art of building castles in the air. <b>\"These models are a figment of our imagination. We hope they overwhelm you with their sheer elegance.\"</b></p>\n\n<p>Theoretical castles in the air have no policy relevance, so where do policy prescriptions come in? Cherry picking and assumption laundering. In the course of building their abstract models, economists make a lot of assumptions. Those assumptions, predictably enough, just may come out the other end of the theory pipe as results. Given an infinite number of economists randomly typing in an infinite number of assumptions, eventually one of them is going to type in the complete works of Vilfred Pareto or Leon Walras. It's not even that hard. Economists are trained to type in the assumptions that will maximize the career-utility of their results. Obviously, not all of them are constrained by this training. But enough of them are to ensure a steady supply of ideologically-suitable \"results\".</p>\n\n<p><b>\"These policy proposals are a figment of our imagination. We hope you buy them.\"</b></p>\n\n<p>By the way, the Weber cartoon appeared in the March 22, 1982 of the <i>New Yorker</i>. William Greider's The Education of David Stockman had appeared in the December, 1981 issue of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>. </p>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Maxspeak?a=D6bhhp\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Maxspeak?i=D6bhhp\" border=\"0\"></a></p>"
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"title" : "Yam & Shitto",
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"content" : "I have written about my <a href=\"http://indodreamin.blogspot.com/2006/11/small-chop-part-one.html\">home made Ghanaian chilli paste called SHITTO before</a>. Here in China I have had not other choice then to eat my Shitto with fried pakora, sambosas, or kebabs. They do fine when there is no YAM available. I do not know what you call yam in English but that yam from Ghana is not like the yam in America. It is a large tuber that grows underground and is a staple in Ghana. It is kind of like UBI, which we get in Indonesia, but at the same time it is not. It is a lot larger and not at all sweet. I have never seen this type of yam growing anywhere except for Ghana. Therefore the only time I get to enjoy yam is when I go back to Ghana or when one of my visitors is gracious enough to carry one on. My buddy Doc, being he true hero that he is, did not only bring me one, but he brought me 5 tubers of yam!! These puppies way quite a bit and to ask a man on a business trip to lug around 5 tubers of yam is quite a favor. But he did it and for that I am thankful. This piece here is about a foot and a half long.<br><br><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj6xnHpDpEI/AAAAAAAABVE/bTo4FGu8DEI/s400/Yam+1.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>First I had to chop up the yam. It is not as easy as one would imagine chopping up a tuber of yam. The skin on the outside is very rough and hard, not to mention caked in dirt. No potato peeler would be up to this task. So I broke out the biggest knife I own and it worked surprisingly well. I have a really bad track record with sharp objects so I was especially careful and I came out of the experience without a scratch. But there were a few close calls when I tried to act like the cooks on TV.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj6zd3pDpFI/AAAAAAAABVM/rkOI2TbvoiQ/s400/Yam+2.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>I usually go for fat chip style sizes but I make some slices thick and others thicker. The texture of the yam is tough but easy to cut through, not like a potato, so the shapes really hold. As I am cutting up the pieces of yam I drop them into a bowl with cold water and salt. This keeps them clean and flavored. Chopping yam can be a bit of a messy process so be prepared for some post clean ups.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj61DHpDpGI/AAAAAAAABVU/yi9SEKCWXKM/s400/Yam+3.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Yam can be eaten fried or boiled. I much prefer the fried method. I am a bit of a neat freak in the kitchen so I lay out my tray with tissues to absorb the oil in advance. There will be a lot of oil to absorb. A foot and a half of yam is quite a load.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj62SnpDpHI/AAAAAAAABVc/E4PP_S5wD4E/s400/Yam+4.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Some people prefer to go with a deep frying dish but I rather use a pan gilled with only half an inch or so of oil. It is more of an effort to cook this way but I feel the food absorbs less of the oil and I have more control over how it is cooking.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj637HpDpII/AAAAAAAABVk/copGA8X6sDM/s400/Yam+5.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Because of the small pan I can only cook the yam 2 handfuls at a time. Be very careful to drip off as much water from the yam before adding it to the oil. I almost started a huge ass fire the other day. I let the oil get really hot then set it to medium heat before adding the yam. This way it cooks nice and slow to a light brown color. If you are using the shallow oil pan then keep the yams moving so they do not burn or overcook on one side.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj65rHpDpJI/AAAAAAAABVs/18Wf1Cz-Do0/s400/Yam+6.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Whilst frying the yams on the left burner I can skillfully prepare my Shitto on the right burner. Having already chopped and blended the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers in advance, I just have to keep them moving in the pan so as not to stick. I was planning to eat this batch of shitto with yam, I made it super extra hot with more than 10 red hot chilli peppers in it!!! That kids, is what I call multi-tasking’.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj66XHpDpKI/AAAAAAAABV0/FleR4T6D2cM/s400/Yam+9.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Now we all know what a stickler for safety I am. DO NOT FUCK WITH HOT OIL! I have learned these lessons in the hardest way possible so while multi tasking do not leave your spatulas unattended. They can easily fall and spill drops of hot oil on your feet. Keep your senses about you above and below the cooking surface. I like to take my time cooking the yam, getting the color and texture just right before taking them out onto the cooling surface. Then you can carefully use a few to sample your Shitto and vice versa while you finish off the rest. I usually get quite a fill in the cooking process.</p><p><br></p><p><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj67EnpDpLI/AAAAAAAABV8/mP2cX3N_g_s/s400/Yam+7.jpg\" border=\"0\"><br>Yam and Shitto baby! That’s how you serve it up. These 2 dishes compliment each other perfectly and go down best with a glass of Jonnie Walker Black Label with soda and ice. Small chop does not get better than this. Spending a good hour pre dinner with friends and family over drinks and snacks like this really bring back memories of the ‘good old days’ growing up in Ghana. One of the things I love about food is how the simple flavors and aromas can stir up emotions and actually cause a person to feel safer. Safer in sense that I let my guard down and my mind can truly accept the fact that I am back amongst good friends. It was a great week fella’s, I am looking forward to doing this again in October.</p><p><br><img style=\"DISPLAY:block;MARGIN:0px auto 10px;TEXT-ALIGN:center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_sNiV432AuZ8/Rj68SnpDpMI/AAAAAAAABWE/SOKLYuYK6pU/s400/Yam+11.jpg\" border=\"0\"></p>"
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"title" : "It's Easy To Say\n\nby tristero\n\nFrank Rich: Until t...",
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"content" : "<b>It's Easy To Say</b><br><br>by tristero<br><br><a href=\"http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/opinion/06rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print\">Frank Rich:</a> <blockquote>Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.</blockquote>Well, yes, of course. But also, of course, exactly what's meant by accountability is left unsaid. Well, here's how to hold them accountable:<br><br>1. Impeach Cheney and Bush - not necessarily in that order.<br><br>2. Hand over Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Shulsky, etc, etc, to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. <br><br>Think it's gonna happen? Think <i>any</i> of it's gonna happen? If so, I urge you to take a course in American politics 101 - and also get professional help - not necessarily in that order. But that's what accountability means. <br><br>Now, gettting these people out of office, marginalizing the American extreme right - yes, that is doable and there are many encouraging signs. And don't get me wrong - that's gonna take a lot of hard, hard work and is no small achievement! But accountability - impossible. Even with Bush at half his current approval rate. Like it or not, the American government and public life doesn't work that way. The murderous Nixon was pardoned, The murderous Kissinger not only was never indicted, he went on to earn a huge fortune and is thought by the MSM an honored statesman. Accountability's a non-starter for America's rotten Republican elite. If the Worst President Ever is a part of that rotten elite, then no jail, no indictments, no nothing. No accountability. Maybe a few scapegoats, but Rumsfeld? Cheney? Bush? Never.<br><br>But is accountability really all that important? Let's put it this way. Once Bush stole his way into the White House, America entered a period of decline. Declining influence in the world, declining pre-eminence in science, and declining trust in international affairs. Some of this is normal and some of America's decline is not necessarily such a bad thing. But a lot of it is very bad news indeed. Perhaps the worst decline is that last one I mentioned, trust that the American system will, at the very least, place major checks upon, the megalomania of mentally unstable executives. And here's the nut of the problem:<br><br>Even assuming the next president makes Lincoln look like a log, would <i>you</i> trust this country if you were a foreign leader, knowing that not only had it enabled a George W. Bush to run the show but, worse, never held either him or his administration accountable for its serial crimes and failures? What - you think it's gonna be easy to say it's the dawning of a new era? Y'think the next President can just appeal to multiculturalism and s'plain away Bush? Like \"it's just our culture\" to let monumentally incompetent and murderous fuck-ups get off scot-free?<br><br>No. Until the Whole Sick Crew of Bushites is held accountable, this country will continue to lose influence and trust. It will mean that life for Americans who deal with other countries - that means all of us, Chucko, 'cause of the importance of our imports - will become increasingly more inconvenient. And the United States on many fronts, will continue to become less secure. It's hard to build alliances with assholes. But, as cynics are quick to point out, it's also true that when it comes to international relations, most governments can be best described as rectally empowered. The problem is that after Bush, if there is no \"catharsis\" as Rich delicately puts it - and there won't be - many governments will conclude they're still dealing with an unpredictable, incontinent, and explosive asshole which also happens to be the largest on the planet. <br><br>That's one of the worst tragedies of the ongoing disaster that is Bush. Even assuming no Giuliani (no god could be cruel enough to permit a Rudolph Giuliani to occupy the White House. I hope.), the problems Bush caused - deliberately caused - will be with us for years and years to come.<br>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Hullabaloo?a=iH6UTV\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Hullabaloo?i=iH6UTV\" border=\"0\"></a></p>"
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"content" : "<b>Guest Comment: Iraq Prognosis </b><br><br>A canny Vietnam veteran wrote me the below but requested that it be posted without attribution. I thought it well worth sharing.<br><table><td><br><tr><br><td bgcolor=\"#F8F8F8\"><br>As I see it, these are some of the things we can expect in the next seven months in Iraq: <br><br>1. The last of the \"surge\" forces (American), will arrive by mid June; <br><br>2. About 1400 British soldiers, well trained and adept at urban conflict, will leave the South of Iraq. As one can see by reviewing icasualties.org's latest listings, 13 (at least), British and/or Polish troops stationed in the South have been killed, almost all by hostile fire. Ths is a increase in British hostile fire losses, and comes when the prospect of Iraqi or American troops entering the fray in the south would pose a dilution of the surge forces. No Americans have really ever been stationed in the south of Iraq, among predominantly Shia populations. The methodology the UK forces have used has been learned in Northern Ireland, and is much more sophisticated than any approach Americans have used. As a result, units which may have been in Iraq previously, but are now peopled by a fair number of new grunts, will cut their teeth in the southern Iraq. Because of much more heavy handed approaches, lack of sophisticated skills in urban war, and an increase in various Shia militia more radical than Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the Americans will cause one incident of cause celébre in the South; <br><br>3. More EFP's (Explosive Formed Projectiles), manufactured and assembled by more radical Shia militia, will take a serious toll on Americans moving in behind British troops leaving; <br><br>4. The U.S. WILL have more difficulties as they step between rival Shia groups in the south, and elsewhere; <br><br>5. As was demonstrated by an entire school being wired as a complete booby trap, insurgents with good inside intelligence are anticipating American-Iraqi troops taking over abandoned schools, police stations, etc., as \"outposts.\" Even if Americans inspect these facilities early, with sophisticated devices, there is no guarantee that stay behind explosives experts among the insurgents won't trigger these massive booby traps -- killing American and Iraqi inspection teams; <br><br>6. At least one more outpost will be attacked by al-Qaeda, or others, as we recently saw, where 9 Americans were killed and two dozen or more wounded. Al-Qaeda will try a Khobar tower attack, where they used an 18-wheeler fully loaded with tons of explosives. This will depend on whether an outpost is sufficiently distanced from the local population enough to destroy the outpost, but not killed any more Iraqis than necessary; <br><br>7. improved rocket and mortar fire will continue to hit the Green Zone with greater accuracy. As a result, we will see a \"time on target\" attack against the Green Zone, where multiple katyusha rockets or heavy mortars will fire, simultaneously, on a mark, on the Green Zone, with any number of rockets or mortar rounds hitting simultaneously. There is evidence that the mortar and rocket fire is becoming more accurate. That implies insiders gauging the accuracy and feeding that data back to the gunners. Multiple rockets/mortars fired from multiple azimuths on the compass will make counter battery fire more difficult; <br><br>8. Every attempt will be made in the next seven months to cause at least two dozen or more American fatalities in one event, plus many more wounded; <br><br>9. As the Army and Marine Corps troops are told that they will stay the entire 15 month tour, and the follow on forces get notified of deployments for same, it will become evident that President Bush WILL NOT reduce American numbers in Iraq in 2007. His arrogance and stubborness will cost him support by year's end among the GOP; <br><br>10. It will become increasingly clearer that Maliki, and his Shia dominated government, have no intent on handing back any substantive power to Sunnis or even Kurds; <br><br>11. As the Kurds become more disillusioned and embittered at not receiving substantive increases in their real power, they will make moves which will draw severe warnings from Turkey of intervention if Iraqi Kurds stir up Turkish Kurds; <br><br>12. If the Sunnis do not cooperate with the Kurds, they will be ejected from the Kurdish north, or at least threatened of that possibility. If so, more violence could erupt in those areas which thus far do not present a severe test for American occupiers; <br><br>13. More attempts will be made to capture Americans and hold them hostage. Additionally, in a symbol of resistance that will become a cause for rally, more Iraqis will booby trap their doors or front gates, so that the scene of Americans kicking in doors, or knocking them open with battering rams will be less prevalent as some Americans are blown up performing that task. A simple tactical response to the occupation such as that will lead to a slow down in American offensive operations as more Americans are killed or wounded, and they become more hesitant to perform such duties. This will become the counter part to Americans crawling down into tunnels in Vietnam -- a very nasty and undesirable task which had to be performed, but which was psychologically very anxiety producing; <br><br>14. At least one event will occur where Sunnis with ground-to-air missiles will take out more than two choppers in one fire fight; <br><br>15. If any additional Iranian officials are captured by Americans (like the four captured whom the Iranian Government say are Iranian diplomats), another ambush will occur where Americans are killed or captured; <br><br>16. The effects of the recent DOD study on the increasing number of mental health risks American soldiers and marines face in Iraq will be one more very serious reason for at least a few more congressmen or women to call for a real change in the level of forces maintained in Iraq; <br><br>17. Some Republicans will demand that if the \"surge\" is deemed to \"be working,\" that that be used as a positive reason to lower American force presence in Iraq. Bush won't do it; <br><br>18. At least one high level intelligence failure will occur do to infiltration or manipulation by an Iraqi \"agent in place\" which will cause the loss of American lives; <br><br>19. Some Democrats, and certainly, many night time comedians will begin calling George Bush, Our Decider in Chief; or, \"Our Commander Guy,\" or, His Majesty, King George II, or His Highness, when referring to our fearless leader; <br><br>20. If the \"surge\" does not show appreciable improvement on the ground in Iraq, Bush will ABSOLUTELY refuse to bring any troops home by Christmas. Very, very sadly, American soldiers or marines will show an increase in suicides, in Iraq, and among troops alerted for a second, third or fourth deployment. There will be at least one family killing by an American soldier or marine slated to return for a multiple tour in Iraq.<br><br></td></tr><td><br></td><td><br></td></td></table>"
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"title" : "Kelewele: My favorite Ghanaian Snack",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/hwentia-782256.JPG\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left;width:231px;height:253px\" src=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/hwentia-782253.JPG\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><a href=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/keleweleprep-743078.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:270px;height:202px\" src=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/keleweleprep-743072.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>I'm in the midst of packing to spend a year in Brazil and Ghana but just caught sight of a bag of Nina International's \"All Natural UDA <span style=\"font-style:italic\">Hwentia,</span>\" sitting on my desk. It made me wish for some fresh <span style=\"font-weight:bold;font-style:italic\">kelewele,</span> one of my all-time favorite snack foods from Ghana. Western cookbooks generally describe <span style=\"font-style:italic\">kelewele </span>as something like \"spicy fried plantain cubes,\" but that is like calling a sunset \"beautiful.\" All the recipes I've seen in Western cookbooks are anemic versions of the best <span style=\"font-style:italic\">kelewele</span> as it's prepared in Ghana. First of all, Western versions only call for salt, ginger, and dried red pepper, but in Ghana in addition to grinding fresh ginger and onion, they also commonly pound and add <span style=\"font-style:italic\">sekoni </span>(aniseed), <span style=\"font-style:italic\">hwentia</span> (a kind of long black stick I've yet to name botanically. Can anyone help me out?), and cloves. The plantain should be very ripe and sweet, and nicely coated with the mixture before it is deep-fried. <span>The plantain</span><span style=\"font-style:italic\"><span style=\"font-style:italic\"> </span></span><span>is </span><span>generally cut on a diagonal rather than into a straight cube</span><span style=\"font-style:italic\">. Kelewele</span> tastes superb accompanied with dry roasted peanuts. The sweet, spicy, and chewy plantain is a perfect counter to the mild crunchy/creamy flavor and texture of the peanuts. Both go well with an ice cold beer or drink like ginger beer or <span style=\"font-style:italic\">bissap. </span><span>Nina International distributes many West African foods through its office in Maryland (</span><strong></strong>PO Box 6566, Hyatsville, MD 20789). More information on suppliers is available at <a href=\"http://afrodrive.com/AfricanStores/\">African Food Stores</a><br>Rest assured, Barbara Baeta and I will include an authentic recipe for gourmet <span style=\"font-style:italic\">kelewele</span> in our upcoming book.<br><a href=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/keleweleingredients-720208.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float:left\" src=\"http://www.betumi.com/uploaded_images/keleweleingredients-720203.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>"
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"content" : "<p>In <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465021212/\">The Evolution of Cooperation</a>, written in 1984!, Robert Axelrod suggests there are three necessary conditions for people to cooperate with each other. </p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>A likelihood of meeting in the future</strong><br>\nIf people don’t think they’ll meet again in the future, there are no repercussions for not cooperating. Threats of not cooperating are of no use. People will act selfish if there is no future to the relationship. Therefore, the knowledge of future meetings changes our behavior because we feel some level of impending accountability for our actions.</li>\n<li><strong>An ability to identify each other</strong><br>\nIdentity is really important for cooperation because it allows us to know who we’re dealing with. If people can’t identify who they’re dealing with, then they can’t hold that person accountable. This doesn’t mean that we have to know everything about the person, like their address and where they live, it means that they are identified as a person to the system they’re in and the people they’re dealing with.</li>\n<li><strong>A record of past behavior</strong><br>\nWe have learned to assume that the best way to judge future behavior is by looking at past behavior. Thus having a positive record of behavior leads to cooperation. eBay’s seller ratings are a great example of this in action. Sellers accumulate status over time as they do business on the site. Sellers who have a rich transaction history with a high percentage of positive transactions are much more likely to be successful than those with no history.\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Design accordingly.</p>\n<p>More <a href=\"http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/design.htm\">here</a>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Different Drummer",
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"content" : "<div><div style=\"width:8.1875em;height:4.75em;float:right\">\n \n \n</div>\n<p><a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/1598.html\"><cite>Dan Connolly</cite></a>: <em>Anyway... if we don’t see a whole lot more trust and cooperation than I’ve seen lately, we’ll either have to leave a bunch of stuff unspecified or get creative about decision-making processes</em></p>\n<p><b>Question</b>: Who would benefit most from a widespread perception that the W3C HTML Working Group is mostly dysfunctional?</p>\n<p><b>Compare</b>: The <a href=\"http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap\">Atom Design Principles</a> consisted of four bullets and approximately fifteen words.</p>\n<p><b>Compare</b>: The <a href=\"http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples\">HTML Design Principles (Proposed)</a> have four categories of principles and over eighteen hundred words.</p>\n<p>But perhaps most significant difference here is that the <acronym title=\"freely extensible by anybody\">third Atom principle</acronym> has been <a href=\"http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples#head-17f302aa4bc2b8085aab4ac28dbeb23397373076\">placed</a> in the “Disputed Principles” category by the HTML Working Group.</p>\n<h3>Inclusive or Exclusive?</h3>\n<p><a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/1769.html\">David Hyatt</a>: <em>Maybe we fundamentally disagree on this point, but to me an HTML5 document should be a superset of an HTML4 document. Any HTML4 document should render correctly as an HTML5 document</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0209.html\">Anne van Kesteren</a>: <em>HTML5 gives you one better. It has in fact removed (obsoleted, if you wish) presentational markup</em></p>\n<p>Both statements are mostly true, contradictory, and (in an absolute sense) false.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://intertwingly.net/stories/2007/05/02/valid.html\">Here’s a document</a> which is spec compliant, and will be <a href=\"http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fintertwingly.net%2Fstories%2F2007%2F05%2F02%2Fvalid.html\">declared as such</a> by the <a href=\"http://validator.w3.org/\">W3C Markup Validation Service</a> (and the <a href=\"http://validator-test.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fintertwingly.net%2Fstories%2F2007%2F05%2F02%2Fvalid.html\">beta</a>!), yet isn’t handled correctly by <b>any</b> major browser vendor, nor does it conform to the current <a href=\"http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/\">HTML5 draft</a>.</p>\n<p>The reality is that validators that accept documents that nobody supports and yet spew out reams of dire warnings that bear little correlation to what is actually implemented tend to get ignored. Of all groups, the HTML Working Group should be the one most acutely aware of this fact.</p>\n<h3>Follow <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_%28lawgiver%29#The_Draconic_constitution\">Draco</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel#Postel.27s_Law\">Postel</a>?</h3>\n<p><a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0103.html\">T.V Raman</a>: <em>I still dont want to see a language that “blesses” ill-formed authoring and turns it into something that all of us have to repeatedly implement</em></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0193.html\">James Graham</a>: <em>If HTML5 were to take the path of ensuring well-formedness, I would expect HTML4, presumably with all the same interoperability problems we have today, to remain the defacto current HTML for much of the web</em></p>\n<p>Again, both statements are mostly true, contradictory, and (in an absolute sense) false.</p>\n<p>For the moment, put yourself in the shoes of the vendor who both enjoys the largest market share in this arena, and accordingly shoulders a disproportionate need to maintain absolute compatibility. To such a vendor, the desire to follow a plan such as <a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0083.html\">the following</a> must be overwhelming:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Define a lean,clean language.</li>\n<li>Define how legacy bits map to the clean language.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Now add a backdrop where the W3C has proven to be a bit, well, constipated in this area — a situation that now is markedly improving, but only years after that same vendor has been executing on an alternative plan — and that’s exactly the point where this story gets a bit <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times\">interesting</a>...</p>\n<h3>Silverlight and SVG Side-by-Side</h3>\n<p>Let’s start with <a href=\"http://intertwingly.net/stories/2007/05/02/msft.html\">this page</a> which includes a simple four color logo rendered in both <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/\">SVG</a> and <a href=\"http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default01.aspx\">Silverlight</a>. View Source. The similarities are striking... mostly capitalization differences... almost reminiscent of C# vs Java, but let’s not digress...</p>\n<p>Depending on your browser and what plugin you have installed, you may not see either image, or only one. If anybody finds a browser that displays both, I’d be interested in hearing about it. IE refuses to display any content served as <code>application/xhtml+xml</code>, other browsers will <b>only</b> display SVG if the content is served as <code>application/xhtml+xml</code>, and the Firefox plugin that Microsoft provides won’t display Silverlight content if the content type is <code>application/xhtml+xml</code>, or (as near as I can tell) if there is a DOCTYPE that triggers standards mode (and, yes, this includes HTML5’s minimal doctype). All this notwithstanding, I have managed to find a <a href=\"http://intertwingly.net/stories/2007/05/02/msft.html4\">combination that works</a>. On Firefox. On Windows.</p>\n<p>But again, I don’t want to get sidetracked. The more important thing to note is that the entire page is <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed\">well-formed</a> according to XML’s definition of the term. More on that in a minute.</p>\n<p>But first, let’s look at a <a href=\"http://intertwingly.net/stories/2007/05/02/atom.html\">slightly more complicated example</a>. Here you can see a bit of divergence, and the Silverlight sample seems to be a bit more verbose. That could be my ignorance of the idioms showing through, but in any case, the parallels between the SVG and Silverlight implementation are obvious, and the Silverlight version is still quite readable.</p>\n<p>In developing that sample, and trying to follow <a href=\"http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479869.aspx#longhornch03_topic5\">this advice</a>, I became aware of one thing: Silverlight is draconian. I’m not talking about mere well-formedness checks, I’m talking about a <b>much</b> more extreme sense. Simply include a <b>single</b> element or attribute that is not recognized, and absolutely <b>nothing</b> in the entire canvas will be rendered.</p>\n<p>Nothing.</p>\n<p>It is my guess that the reasoning is thus: experts will find a way to make it work; and non-experts will make use of a tool, and sometimes even a moderately expensive tool at that.</p>\n<h3>Future</h3>\n<p>I certainly have no crystal ball, and the potential futures are many. One potential future is that HTML has survived many assaults from the likes of Flash, has assimilated and/or accommodated all of them, and is still going strong. Another one is that HTML has rested on its laurels for a bit too long, and the lessons of REST and Flash have been well learned.</p>\n<p>A worst case scenario may very well be that, over time, increasingly more and more content gets rendered by a common plugin that is closed source and controlled by a single vendor. To achieve this would require a multi-pronged attack: step 1 might be to <a href=\"http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/news-pr.aspx\">sign up a string of vendors to provide content</a>, enough so to entice users to download the plugin. Step 2 would be to provide some <a href=\"http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2007/04/30/a-dynamic-language-runtime-dlr.aspx\">unique hook</a> that will appeal to developers. And do so with an <a href=\"http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/permissivelicense.mspx\">permissive license</a> that is assured to be <a href=\"http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/May-01.html\">picked up by others</a>. After all, in the final analysis, a solid implementation with a no-excuses license often is the sure path to ubiquity, and quicker than a capital-S “Standard” too.</p>\n<p>For example, just imagine how fast the Rails guys will climb aboard if they can be assured that 80% of the Mac developers already have the ability to directly run Ruby in the browser installed on their machine. Particularly if Ruby runs <b>fast</b> there.</p>\n<p>This certainly has the potential to significantly raise the bar for <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28JIT%29\">Tamarin</a>.</p>\n<p>And if it should so happen to inconvenience <a href=\"http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/05/01/13147.aspx\">vendors that chose to defect</a>, so be it.</p>\n<p>In any case, as tempting as it may be to place the blame on any one vendor, the true villan in all this may be the unreasonable desire to funnel all innovation through one specification, and in the process shut down extensions. While it is true the incremental change is often the key to successful <a href=\"http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html\">evolution</a>, it is equally true that random change and Darwinian weeding are the fuels that drive progress.</p>\n<h3>Footnote1: XAML</h3>\n<p>I’ve seen references to XAML vs SVG or XAML vs XUL, but in reality XAML is nothing but a window into the underlying class libraries provided by the runtime in question. An XML binding, if you will. <a href=\"http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.shapes.ellipse.aspx\">Ellipse</a>, for example, is a class. One that is not standardized by <a href=\"http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm\">ECMA</a>, but rather provided by Microsoft with the proprietary CLR implementation. Nor is it provided with the permissively licensed DLR.</p>\n<h3>Footnote2: XHTML and other alternatives</h3>\n<p>XHTML meets <a href=\"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0612.html\">Microsoft’s criteria</a> for an explicit “opt in”. Of course, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom that was the requirement to <a href=\"http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166\">include quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags</a> that did XHTML in, and not, say, the lack of compelling new features.</p>\n<p>Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was the insistence of the browser vendors that happened to implement namespaces like SVG and MathML to stick to the letter of the XML specification whereas these same vendors had long ago collectively chosen to not follow the SGML specification quite as closely.</p>\n<p>A third possibility would be that an entirely new vocabularly, such as <a href=\"http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/\">XUL</a> or <a href=\"http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo\">Apollo</a> would address the issue. As would the mega draconian Silverlight itself, should Microsoft chose to pursue that path.</p>\n<p>Perhaps what HTML needs most of all is a <a href=\"http://backend.userland.com/rss094#roadmap\">Roadmap</a>.</p>\n<h3>P.S.</h3>\n<p>The correct answer to the rhetorical question posed at the top of this post is “nobody”.</p></div>"
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"title" : "Squid is My Service Bus",
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"content" : "<p>(for comments by:\n schickb,\n \n see <a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/blog/2007/04/29/squid\">this entry's page</a>.)</p>\n \n<p>\nThe <a href=\"http://qcon.infoq.com/qcon/speakers/show_speaker.jsp?oid=185\">QCon presentation</a> (<a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/papers/qcon-http.pdf\">slides</a>) was ostensibly about how we use HTTP for services within Yahoo’s Media Group. When I started thinking about the talk, however, I quickly concluded that everyone’s heard enough about the high-level benefits of HTTP and not nearly enough details of what it does on the ground. So, I decided to concentrate on one aspect of the value that we get from using HTTP for services; <em>intermediation</em>, as an example.\n</p>\n<p>If your service is struggling to do 20 or 50 requests a second, the thousands that a modern HTTP cache can handle is a relief.</p>\n<p>The most obvious advantage of using an HTTP intermediary is <a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/\">caching</a>; if your service is struggling to do 20 or 50 requests a second, the thousands that a modern HTTP cache can handle is a relief, to say nothing of the superior connection handling you’ll get thanks to the easier utilisation of event looping techniques like epoll and kqueue. This is often the difference between deploying two boxes and twenty or more.</p><p>\n\n<img src=\"http://www.mnot.net/blog/2007/04/29/intermediaries.png\" height=\"326\" width=\"167\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"8\" vspace=\"4\"> \n</p><p>\nMy intermediary of choice at the moment is <a href=\"http://www.squid-cache.org/\">Squid</a>, which is by far the most predominant Open Source Web proxy cache implementation. It’s not particularly performant compared to the competition (it can only serve about 7,000 requests a second out of memory on a Xeon, although it will do 12,000 on a Core2 Duo), it’s single-threaded, and perhaps most damning, it’s <em>still</em> only HTTP/1.0 as far as connection handling goes. However, it makes up for it in features and flexibility.\n</p><p>\nNot only can Squid be used to cache content and route requests (using <a href=\"http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/SquidRedirectors\">redirectors</a>), it can also enforce security policy (using <a href=\"http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/SquidAcl\">ACLs and authentication</a>), serve as a metrics collection point (e.g., see the histograms on <a href=\"http://www.mnot.net/papers/qcon-http.pdf#page=31\">slide 31</a>), and it can be used for load balancing between multiple origin servers (to the point where you can dynamically route at the application level through a network). Cache peering protocols like <a href=\"http://icp.ircache.net/\">ICP</a> and <a href=\"http://www.htcp.org/\">HTCP</a> can be used to tie caches together, both increasing their footprint as well as their reliability and efficiency. <a href=\"http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/CacheDigests\">Cache Digests</a> can be used to further improve performance by predicting what’s in a peer’s cache.\n</p><p>\nMore specialised features can help reliability and scaling even more; for example, <a href=\"http://devel.squid-cache.org/collapsed_forwarding/\">collapsed forwarding</a> prevents storms of requests from overcoming the server by collapsing multiple requests for the same URI into one. Squid can retry requests intelligently, and re-route as necessary upon failure — without breaking the semantics of HTTP. It will also intelligently pool persistent connections, to reduce the latency of opening new ones. There are some more enhancements along this track in the pipeline that I’ll talk about separately soon.\n</p><p>\nThese are just a few examples; Squid has been under development for more than a decade (growing out of the <a href=\"http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/64388.html\">Harvest project</a>, the granddaddy of pretty much every Web cache *and* search engine out there), and because it’s community-developed, it’s <em>very</em> feature-rich. \n</p><p>\nThe point of this is that Squid — or most any other HTTP cache implementation, for that matter (because HTTP has a well-defined intermediary role, it’s easy to drop a new one in) — can serve as the basis of what most people think of as an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus\">Enterprise Service Bus</a> for HTTP. True, it doesn’t support any WS-*, but more people are considering that a plus, not a minus, and you don’t have to pay a vendor for the privilege of debugging their beta product; it’s free and battle-tested. Oh, and a hell of a lot faster.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Abolition of the African Artist by Joe Pollitt",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDv-7qsLMI/AAAAAAAAAGM/1xA7Uj5HcYc/s1600-h/Zenzele.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDv-7qsLMI/AAAAAAAAAGM/1xA7Uj5HcYc/s320/Zenzele.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br><br>Abolition of the African Artist <br><br>The Live Issue in the 21st Century – Contemporary Africa Art<br><br>In West Africa, where men, women and children were sold by their fellow Africans into slavery and transported to the new world, certain comments are arising out of the region that have raised a few European eyebrows. For many onlookers, there is mounting concern on the issue of Africa's cultural development and the ability to develop successful creative lives in the territory. Here in the West of Africa, the youth of Ghana, Nigeria, Benin and Togo seemingly regard those that were taken as slaves in years gone by as, 'the lucky ones'. Viewed by the young as the descendents of those able to make something of their lives as they watch black singers on videos on MTV; when they witness all the black athletes winning at the Olympics and in the boxing rings around the world; as they read in the international journals about various African artists and writers in the United States and the UK being heralded as geniuses; obviously, they too crave opportunity and recognition but they are deprived of this and to them the global village does not apply. Being outspoken in Africa is not something to be encouraged. Corruption, mismanagement and cultural terrorism are elements within the continent that are on the increase rather than the decline. Many would rather brave the treacherous journey from the west coast of Africa, up through the Sahara desert to the Arab nations in the north than face the existence of the world that they exist in. This continent is immense and to put this into perspective, all 50 States of America would not even fit into the size of the Sahara desert, yet so many people still attempt this hazardous trip, purely in search for a better, safer life and opportunities that are denied them at home. The grave reality of this perilous voyage was witnessed last year in national newspapers across the country. Shocking images of the brave Africans washed up on a daily basis on the beaches of the Canary Islands. With dwindling funds after being exploited by opportunists many die of hunger or suffocate from the cramped spaces that they have been allotted on the various, human cattle trucks - there is no 'Middle Passage' these days. Surely, the journey from West Africa to North Africa and onto Europe could be no harder than that faced by the African slaves 200 years ago. The obvious difference today is that the Africans are no longer in chains nor have they been sold into slavery instead it is unimportant whether or not they arrive at their destination alive. Entrepreneurs and opportunists dictate and we call this is progress. This abominable hardship suffered by the desperate is known as their journey for 'Liberty' yet it seems the word 'Freedom' echoes a hollow sound even for those that find it. In this year 2007, the bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery it seems almost poetic justice that those that left the continent in chains, betrayed by their fellow tribesmen are now the beneficiaries of the struggle and hardship their ancestors faced over 200 years ago. <br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDpnLqsLDI/AAAAAAAAAFE/eTvvO7DDWZc/s1600-h/Etona.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDpnLqsLDI/AAAAAAAAAFE/eTvvO7DDWZc/s320/Etona.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>The chaotic and violent elections in Nigeria over the past couple of weeks has shown the world just how impossible it is to live safely in a country that is at least six times the size of England with an economy that could ironically, pay off the United Kingdom's national debt in a matter of under 2 weeks. So the question remains, who really does run Nigeria? And who runs Africa? Whoever it is wants the world to concentrate on a foolish vision of freedom and democracy rather than hush money and resources. It is no coincidence that the Nigerian cultural elite is now based on US soil rather than Nigerian. Africa is haemorrhaging artists and writers and this phenomenon is commonly known as the brain drain of Africa. This seem ludicrous as the continent that has more resources than any other and should be an ideal haven for artists - in fact, if we take a closer look at the actual continent's resources it becomes obviously clear that Africa is the world economy. Independence may have been gained over the past half a century but all the economic value still remains in western hands. Brazenly, the Ashanti Goldmines are on the London Stock Exchange and in reading Kwame Nkumah's book on 'Consciencism: Philosophy and the Ideology for Decolonisation', it becomes evidently clear, even in paperback, that African independence is far from being won. <br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDpWLqsLCI/AAAAAAAAAE8/xc3vge-ecn4/s1600-h/Gethuan.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDpWLqsLCI/AAAAAAAAAE8/xc3vge-ecn4/s320/Gethuan.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>Over the past two decades there has been an enormous amount of interest and support for the cultural development of contemporary African culture. Individuals have created various exciting galleries in order to support and profit from the astonishing works being produced by artists from Africa. The reality is that the financial pressures placed on the Gallery owners, has forced their demise. Private enterprise has been denied, as the art markets have not opened their doors to the works of contemporary African art. This is primary due to the establishment not wanting to invest in the unknown. It seems, from an outsider's point of view, simply institutional racism, but it is not as clinical as all that as it the art market that dictates and that is always down to pure economics. Pure economics is colour-blind and the market would exist if the African rich were to dip into their deep pockets and support their National Culture. Nevertheless nobody in these corrupt countries wants to be identified as the exploiter of their country's wealth by displaying unnecessary generosity so the pocket stay full to the detriment of the artists; that aside one must wonder why Sotheby's took on the artwork from Chimpanzee's from the Congo and even created a catalogue on the work whereupon when it came to Jean Pigozzi's African Art Collection of Congolese artists (humans) the Collection had to go under the banner of an African Charity Auction in Sotheby's Contemporary Summer Art Sale in 1999. <br><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDp57qsLEI/AAAAAAAAAFM/bI0XSdS_09w/s1600-h/Vision__1.JPG\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDp57qsLEI/AAAAAAAAAFM/bI0XSdS_09w/s320/Vision__1.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Africa as Charity! Should we consider the art and the artists from Africa as Charity? Should their work be considered as Secondary Art or even Thirdly (Worldly) Art? Without proper international representation the African artists, who inevitably want to be perceived as equal to his/her western counterpart, are left with being treated as a seemingly inferior artist who is reliant on galleries that are Government supported or run as Charitable Organizations. This is not to say that the work done by charities is unimportant or that the artists that they support are inferior. The October Gallery for example has been a steady support for several artists due to Elisabeth Lalouschek tireless efforts to promote contemporary African art. Nevertheless even with Elisabeth's support the artists do need private representation to further their careers. Charitable Organization's role in the art world is purely to highlight exceptional work from around the globe and bring it the attention of the general public.<br><br><a href=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDqXrqsLFI/AAAAAAAAAFU/Do3p1l9wcps/s1600-h/000future_d.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px\" src=\"http://bp0.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDqXrqsLFI/AAAAAAAAAFU/Do3p1l9wcps/s320/000future_d.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a> <br><br>The problem lies in the fact that if the galleries are financially supported then the work housed in these galleries will not increase in accordance with market forces. Unlike private galleries, state or Government funded galleries are not pressured by everyday economics. The knock-on effect of this is that the value of the work does not increase in accordance with inflation; this is due to the rent, wages and bills all being paid by a third party, therefore the normal monitory factors that are factored in to the evaluation of a work of art are not applicable to the Charitable Organizations. The value of the artists work becomes static and therefore un-collectable and worthless so in some respects the Charities are sometimes doing more harm than good by taking on unknown artists. Normally works of art are bought on a viable and sensible investment basis. Banks have become the new Patrons of the Arts. For example, The Tate Modern is HSBC's Art Warehouse for the pleasure and enjoyment of the Great British public. Eventually, we will begin to see the Banks playing a far more pivotal role in both the collection of contemporary African art coupled with serious initiatives in regards to the country's cultural development, this will obviously be aligned with the interest the Bank has in the different countries in Africa. <br><br><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDvm7qsLLI/AAAAAAAAAGE/fw_D5Dt-00k/s1600-h/Knife.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDvm7qsLLI/AAAAAAAAAGE/fw_D5Dt-00k/s320/Knife.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Over the past decade I have been watching, travelling and thinking. From all this thought I have built a series of websites and trendy MySpaces and an impressive uncommented-on Blog. The focal point on each Internet site has been to try and achieve positive representation of a trouble continent. The idea has been to decode what we has been force fed upon us, thrown down our throats for the past three decades with the bombardment of negative media about the continent of Africa. Ironically, this was ignited by the charitable efforts made by Sir Bob Geldof and chums. Since the emotive images of starving Ethiopian babies hit the British television screens in 1983 the change in the British psyche has been overwhelming. The consciousness of ordinary British citizens has converted a compassionate Nation of well-wishers into queasy, bloodthirsty, terror spectators greedy and eager to scrutinize the horrors that befalls mankind. We carelessly watch Africans suffer on a daily basis. Spoon fed by the Beeb's images of Darfur, Don McCullen's beautiful black and white photos from Chad, images of baby-eating warriors in the depths of the Congo, washed down with a few skeletons from Niger busy dying from starvation just for our entertainment. The images can be seen now – online - just press your red button and in this way we can feel safe on our sofas. Safe in the knowledge that Africa is far from here.<br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDrELqsLHI/AAAAAAAAAFk/ipVj8hq5h_s/s1600-h/Espace+Noir+II+-+Kisito+Assangni.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDrELqsLHI/AAAAAAAAAFk/ipVj8hq5h_s/s320/Espace+Noir+II+-+Kisito+Assangni.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>Personally, I would like to strike a balance and show another side to this wonderful continent. Fortunately, I was diagnosed with Cancer in 1999 and this put me in the glorious position of having time. Time to focus on what is really important in my life. These days love and fairness are my primary goals and with that in mind I decided to form African Painters. In 2000 African Painters wrote to numerous artists from all the countries of Africa asking them to donate their work to the website – African Painters | www.africanpainters.com – In exchange, the artists are represented, written about and featured on the website. What is essential is to create a bridge, a strong relationship between artists and investors. Encouraging investors to look at Africa with renewed vision. What was encouraging was that the investors began to see themselves as Patrons of the Arts and Cultural Developers rather than Collectors of artwork from Africans. The artists were bestowed a certain amount of webspace in order to display and sell their work without commission. Our ultimate goal was to achieve international recognition but most importantly to be treated as equals within the International Art Market. <br><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDrX7qsLII/AAAAAAAAAFs/lhIX2A1V93k/s1600-h/994.jpg\"><img style=\"float:left;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDrX7qsLII/AAAAAAAAAFs/lhIX2A1V93k/s320/994.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>For years now African Painters have been pestering Sotheby's, Christies and Bonhams to take on the work of various contemporary African artists. The hesitation and reservations the British art establishment has in embracing contemporary African art has been mildly irritating and somewhat embarrassing since all the artists chosen are extremely well-known in their respective countries. Previously, experts in the field have kindly and adamantly told African Painters that there was genuinely no interest in the work and the advice that was given was to try and put on an African Charity Auction – So it became clear to African Painters that the artists would have to use the 'Tradesman's Entrance' to enter the precious world of the International Art Market.<br><br><br><br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDr7LqsLJI/AAAAAAAAAF0/-bnE9GUKKcA/s1600-h/Tajan.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 10px 10px 0\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDr7LqsLJI/AAAAAAAAAF0/-bnE9GUKKcA/s320/Tajan.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a>- No interest in the Art? No interest in the development of a country's contemporary culture? Impossible- we thought and unanimously felt that this was unacceptable and we started to look elsewhere. In September of last year we wrote to a number of high profile International Auction Houses and in early March received a surprising invitation to show all the work at Tajan Auctioneers, Paris this coming June.<br><br><a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDskbqsLKI/AAAAAAAAAF8/8BNKzalQhSk/s1600-h/Tomato+Boy.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right;margin:0 0 10px 10px\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_b3dS9azq_2M/RjDskbqsLKI/AAAAAAAAAF8/8BNKzalQhSk/s320/Tomato+Boy.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"></a><br>Tajan, the Auction House, the location and the timing could not be more perfect, especially in lieu of the events that occurred on the outskirts of Paris last year. The fires burnt in anger, orchestrated by those on the outskirts of French society. The multiple riots on the periphery of Paris were triggered by the collapse of a crumbling building that killed an entire Beninois family. A family that should never have been placed in a house that was knowingly unfit for human habitation. In regards to this tragedy it seem the perfect opportunity to enter the International art world through the front door. In this modern world of ownership we can all play our part in changing the way we see Africa and the African. This Collection of Contemporary African Art is by far the best ever seen at an International auction. For the first time ever African artists have be given an equal opportunity to show their genius, let us not waste this moment. The artist's that have been chosen deserve our utmost respect. Through your support we can make the Abolition of African Artists a reality. African Painters would like to thank Tajan Auctioneers, especially Parsy Arnaud for recognising the importance of the artwork and the significance of this moment."
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"content" : "<p>I started working on this over a week ago, but life always has a way of interfering and slowing stuff down. I'm now crossing my fingers and hoping that Imageshack won't exceed its bandwidth limitations on this pic... (<i>The Editors uploaded the photo to The Agonist server, so no bandwidth worries! ~spk)</i></p>\n<p>Original post is <a href=\"http://agonist.org/bolo/20070417/whats_your_age_in_friedmans\">here</a>.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://agonist.org/files/active/1/finalfugl2.jpg\"><img src=\"http://agonist.org/files/active/1/finalfugl2.th.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us\"></a></p>"
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"title" : "Why I Love Africa (The European Colonizers' Creed in Contempt of the African)",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_zStNqyVIPz0/Rhx0djZG07I/AAAAAAAAACI/sEVsNXtjGQs/s1600-h/Dutch_Colonial_Soldier.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_zStNqyVIPz0/Rhx0djZG07I/AAAAAAAAACI/sEVsNXtjGQs/s200/Dutch_Colonial_Soldier.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><br><blockquote> I thought I'd share this poem which first appeared on www.ghanathink.org as part of an article I submitted last year. Check out www.ghanathink.org, they are great guys doing great work in the service of Ghana and Africa.<br></blockquote><br><br><br><br><br><br>They welcome me at first Sight<br>First sight 'cause I'm white<br>They bow to me and call me Sir<br>Sir 'cause my skin is fair<br>They enthrone me and dance for me<br>Dance because I crossed the sea<br>They give me gold and wealth untold<br>Wealth untold for guns I’ve sold<br>They smash their gods and pray to mine<br>Pray to mine for rain and shine<br>They cry on me to give them light<br>Light for sight to walk their night<br>They say I oppress but love me still<br>Love me still of their free will<br>They count on me to show the way<br>Show the way each single day<br>They know my tongue as well as I<br>As well as I, and I don’t lie<br>They’ve loved my ways and hated theirs<br>Hated theirs too many years<br>They know my Art,my Science my Maths<br>Science and Maths but not themselves"
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"title" : "The Culture of Risk",
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"content" : "<p>Everyone knows the economic statistics and platitudes about India’s recent rise: “From Hindu rate of growth to 9%”; “Chindia rising”; “From emerging to surging”; etc. All of us abroad who are witnessing this miracle, and some of those in India who are living it have tried to figure out what are the underlying causes of this paradigm shift.</p>\n<p>Is it because of reforms? Or excess global liquidity and foreign capital? Y2K and Infosys? Or is it our loose fiscal and monetary policy? <strong>What are the fundamental changes which are responsible for India’s rapid growth?</strong></p>\n<p>Economists, by training, seek practical and (ideally) empirically-verifiable answers; and we shun cultural and sociological reasoning whenever possible. Nevertheless, I would like to argue here that a subtle and far more powerful force has been guiding <em>all</em> the recent changes in India (including the ones mentioned above): <em>the gradual introduction of a culture of risk</em>.</p>\n<p>Now I’m being dramatic here of course. Risk is indeed an economic concept – and an oft measured one. It is usually applied to an individual’s risk aversion; a company or a country’s risk-premium; and generally for all significant financial transactions. What I’m trying to refer to, however, is a far broader change in the way Indians perceive risk, and how we respond to it.</p>\n<p>I’m not a sociologist – so my ‘evidence’ is going to be purely anecdotal and speculative. I would like to highlight three observations I have made over the last couple of years avidly watching India from abroad, and what I am most excited about as I prepare to move back to Mumbai in the summer.</p>\n<p>Firstly – in what is now a common refrain – the private sector has completely transformed. Managers are beginning to accept the idea of relinquishing control, and are looking for creative sources of capital. Companies are getting aggressive with their expansion plans – sometimes too aggressive. Some corporates have even picked up a taste for overseas acquisitions. There is an unmeasured commonality to all of this. Marketing gurus would call it “renewed self confidence”; cynics would call it dumb luck; I call it ‘taking risks’.</p>\n<p>This change in risk tolerance is not confined to the merchants of wealth alone – it is gradually beginning to infect the government too. Begrudgingly, it is either internally corporatizing; listening to outside voices and sharing responsibility; or in some cases, completely moving out of the way in areas where it knows it is underperforming: infrastructure, finance, education, health. Its manner of doing so is bumbling and idiotic (for instance the recent SEZ debacle), but the change in its intention is mostly clear. Of course, our politicians have fickle wills so that could quickly change – were it not for the third, and most important observation.</p>\n<p>Indian families and individuals, the foundations or our political economy, are also becoming bigger risk takers. There is scant evidence for this (except a rising domestic savings/investment rate) so I am basing it on personal experience. I am a tail-ender in the great reverse migration – expats returning to India to take advantage of the new opportunities that are coming available. Two or three years ago, that was impossible – the RoI on my US college education would have been terrible (Gujarati parents – that’s how they think). Today, for young people, the potential long-term rewards of returning to fast-growing India could be far greater than those from working on an overstretched Wall Street.</p>\n<p>More fascinating than even the NRIs’ new risky behavior are the choices being made by the people I know in India. With more careers for their kids to choose from, parents from all income strata are seeing the value of a good and practical education and bypassing the government when necessary. Other examples abound: people are travelling a lot more for work, women are gradually entering the labor force. Hell, online matrimony itself is quite a risk – and parents seem to have happily taken to it.</p>\n<p>The introduction of the culture of risk at this grassroot level ensures that all the other pieces move – that the government and companies are given the message to change. This new inflexion point in our behavior is at least partially the result of the burgeoning young population. And no one can really doubt that it is the old guard who are reluctant to admit that the doctrine of governing a society through <em>babudom</em> has lost.</p>\n<p>The trillion dollar* question, of course, is whether the government’s stupidity has the ability to derail this amazing transformation. Or is the change so profound and deeply-rooted now that it will continue in spite of all the obstacles?</p>\n<p>I heard an astounding statistic recently. I knew the numbers but hadn’t ever thought about it that way:</p>\n<p>“…<strong>10% of the <u>world’s</u> population is Indians under the age of 25</strong>…”</p>\n<p>I’ll place my bets with them.</p>\n<p>______________________________________ </p>\n<p>* Rs 4.2 million crores (I’m moving to Mumbai – I have to practice conversions)\n</p>"
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"title" : "Indian IT Industry",
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"content" : "<p>There has been a lot of discussion on how the IT industry should do more for India. There are some <a href=\"http://datelinebombay.blogspot.com/2007/02/amartya-sen-tunnel-effect-of-indian-it.html\">out of touch views</a> and <a href=\"http://indianeconomy.org/2007/02/21/on-corporate-political-resposibility/\">some sane</a> views. It is nothing short of a miracle that we are talking about an industry today, which was almost not an industry. The IT industry would not have happened had it not been for the foresight of some of those who laid the foundation of what is today a billion dollar industry.</p>\n<p>My comparison here stems from the supply of Indian “skilled” labour supply to the Middle East in parallel to the bodyshopper mode, which was the way the IT industry began.</p>\n<p>The Gulf boom was a labour market. Companies would operate through recruiters in India - some good, many shady - and work in supplying people to the foreign companies. Here, the companies had no interest in their people succeeding and to a certain extent, the people also couldn’t care less beyond the money. Result, engineers were sent as plumbers, drivers - the agent would get his cut on a per person basis if the person served his contract. Almost all assignments were on contract - nothing like being a permanent employee with strong legalities if someone broke the contract. Some came back, some stayed, but nobody could protest or do anything, since it was a choice that most of them made. At the lower end, this has resulted in exploitation - but thats a different story.</p>\n<p>The so called IT industry in India started exactly the same way as the demand for labour in the Middle East. It was not even an industry when it began. Companies, fly by night agents, would hire people and send them out on lucrative assignments to the US, UK or even the Middle East. They would send out people, “trained” (usually for not more than a few days and the rest of it would be picked up by the person themselves. Many people were trained in no more than house or a second hand desktop. The luckier ones found themselves going through organized training shops like NIIT etc. If it continued in this way, it would have been another story of missed opportunities, like the Gulf boom.</p>\n<p>Fortunately, some companies, notably TCS, Infosys saw a way to make this work. By creating a company organizing people, skills, training they were able to create a lucrative business model out of IT outsourcing. Even then, when they began, most of these companies worked on a staff augmentation mode. Over time, they realized, very smartly, that their margins on a per person basis is much lower than their margin on a per project or assignment. Using the time difference to our advantage, using people here, using onsite coordinators they created a skillset, a repository of skills of their employees which they used to bid for projects. Try talking to an Indian IT biggie for “staff augmentation” today and you will be shooed away by the security guard at the gate itself. They bid for projects and usually are not interested in tidbits unless they see an opportunity beyond that.</p>\n<p>The Gulf boom, could have led to Indian companies becoming infrastructure giants, could have led to the creation of atleast one good infrastructure consulting company or an architecture firm or an engineering firm or an accounting firm or if not anything else, a good human resource placement bureau. Did it result in anything? It did not.</p>\n<p>The IT industry, likewise, could have become your friendly neighbourhood recruiting agent, sending people out of the country to become coders. Yet it grew from nothing. From unfriendly laws, difficult regulations to become Indians defining norm, otherwise we would still be known only for elephants and (paper) tigers.</p>\n<p>Those who talk of or question social contribution of the IT industry might do well to remember this - and this, without the <a href=\"http://indianeconomy.org/2007/02/23/the-multipliers-at-last/\">multiplier effect</a> of the industry in India and the economy. Where the industry is today is a matter of pride, reached after overcoming a fair share of obstacles and there is no easy money here. This industry almost never made it. The returns for India are huge even at this level. And we all know the multiplier effect of the gulf boom in India - except for large houses for those who went there, we have precious little to show.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Rich Relationship",
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"content" : "<p>I’ve been musing about Google’s acquisition of Double Click.</p>\n<p>I have a friend who had a problem. When you put his name into Google the results consisted entirely of articles about a contentious event he was peripherally associated with. He spend 3 years engineering other materials on the web, including soliciting links from me and other friends, to drive that drivel off the first page of “his” results. Here’s a guy with an impressive resume of fine work; so the phrase slander comes to mine. We are all coming to fear Google; because it can casually can destroy.</p>\n<p>I’ve mentioned before Double Click is very likely the largest identity provider on the net. They manage that trick by avoiding the hard problem: moving the installed base. They don’t try to change the installed base of browsers. They don’t try to get the installed base of users to sign up. They adopt the <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/07/identityprivacy-this-weeks-model\">gossip model for identity</a>, they build statistical models based on gossip. They sell the gossip models to firms. Part of their payment is gossip about the users.</p>\n<p>I hadn’t noticed before how this is similar to Google’s scheme for modeling the value of sites. In original Google they build statistical models of sites based on the link graph. (Obviously the data that web bugs collect is can improve those models).</p>\n<p>When I first began thinking about Double Click as an identity provider I was more focused on how evil they appear because they have no relationship with the users they are modeling. That, not surprisingly, makes the user suspicious. “Who are these people talking about me without my involvement!” That Google does the same thing for web sites and that we treat that as less offensive says something deep. Both how alienated we are from our sites; and it reminds one about the entire industry around self presentation (pr, search engine optimization, etc. etc.).</p>\n<p>The key reason Double Click offends us is the fear that their model will bite us. While they maybe malicious they are almost certain to be cavalier. The concerns arises regarding Google and the models it builds of our sites. It can casually destroy them.</p>\n<p>Nobody should continue to pretend that these gossip models can be avoided and that a handful of firms will have extensive ones. I wondered sometime ago if “you were king of Double Click could you fix this problem”? At the time it seemed to me that part of fixing it would be to begin to build a relationship with the users. I guess it will be interesting, as in “may you live in interesting times,” to see how Google tackles that problem. Hopefully they can do a better job that the credit reporting firms have. The puzzle is how to do that with the tools at hand: vast numbers of <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/03/talent-scrapping\">people</a> and <a href=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/04/three-species-of-operating-systems/\">computers</a>.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Radically private water",
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"content" : "<p>When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was <strong>hot</strong> in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning. </p>\n\n<p>Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the <a href=\"http://pgpblog.worldbank.org/water_and_poverty\">2 million children who die each year</a> for want of proper water and sanitation.</p>\n\n<p>The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (<a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/000175.html\">maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water</a>), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm. </p>\n\n<p>Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.</p>\n\n<p>For example, the <a href=\"http://www.lifestraw.com/en/low/low.asp\">Lifestraw</a> is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:<a href=\"http://www.audeamus.com/50226711/innovations_and_social_entrepreneurs.php\"><img height=\"167\" hspace=\"20\" src=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/images/lifestraw%5B1%5D_1.jpg\" width=\"250\" align=\"right\" vspace=\"10\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.<br><br>Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [<a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/science/10find.html?ex=1318132800&en=4287b1372fabfbf9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>\n<p>The original Lifestraw was field tested <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/science/10find.html?ex=1318132800&en=4287b1372fabfbf9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product - that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [<a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4967452.stm\">Link</a>]. </p>\n\n<p>There there is Dean Kamen’s Slingshot project. Kamen is the inventor of the <a href=\"http://www.segway.com/products/\">Segway</a>, and his idea was to use cow dung (and other easily available fuels) to run a special high efficiency <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine\">Stirling Engine</a> which would produce electricity and clean water for sale:</p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, has invented two new devices, each about the size of a washing machine, that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.<br><br>The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day from any water source, even sewage. The power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.<br><br>The prototypes cost about $100,000 but eventually he hopes to mass produce them for about $1000 to $2000 which he will lease to local entrepreneurs, who will resell the power and water to local rural villagers in third world countries. The market potential is huge - about 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and another 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. [<a href=\"http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/02/segway_turns_to.html\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>He’s working with Iqbal Qadir, founder of the Grameen Phone business, to try to create the entrepreneurial infrastructure for this to work:</p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water … and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine’s waste heat.<br><br>“Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies…” </p>\n<p>Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.[<a href=\"http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/16/technology/business2_futureboy0216/index.htm\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>I haven’t heard anything since the project was unveiled in February, and couldn’t find a website for it, so I hope the project hasn’t fallen by the wayside already.</p>\n\n<p>Both of these approaches have the virtue of bypassing an ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy. Both also seem too expensive to work as purely for-profit ventures. Despite what advocates of the Bottom of the Pyramid approach argue, it’s very hard to make money off of the poorest of the poor since they have so little to spend. Even when it might make sense for the poor to invest in private water systems, they simply don’t have the cash to do so.</p>\n\n<p>This is where a third approach comes in, one that emphasizes finance over technical innovation:</p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>The WaterCredit Initiative has a more scaleable approach. Recognizing the creditworthiness of the poor, it has moved from one-time grants to providing small loans, successfully applying microfinance principles to cover the upfront costs of water systems. [<a href=\"http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/2007/03/microfinance_fo.html\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>This is more eclectic, and relies purely on available technology. It is not likely to be a full solution to the problem either - people can only invest in water where it is cheap enough to provide a short term economic benefit as opposed to a long term health benefit, which again leaves out the poorest of the poor. Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle. The Water Credit Initiative has field projects in <a href=\"http://www.water.org/programs/bangladesh/crisis.htm\">Bangladesh</a> and <a href=\"http://www.water.org/programs/india/crisis.htm\">India</a> as well as Ethiopia, Honduras and Kenya.</p>\n\n<p>This problem will not be solved overnight. Instead, this is a battle that can only be won drop by drop.</p>\n\n<p>\n<p>\n<p></p>Related posts: <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/004274.html\">World Water Day</a>, <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/000175.html\">A nation parched</a>, <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003826.html\">Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Paani?</a> \n<p></p>\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/4167\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Why do the poor choose TVs over toilets?",
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"content" : "<p>A couple of years ago, one of my classmates from graduate school did some research on poverty in rural North Carolina. She visited homes to ask people why they thought they were poor. One thing she discovered was that you could basically tell how poor a family was by the size of their television: the bigger the TV, the poorer the family.</p><p>Anyone who's lived in the United States long enough has heard middle-class people complain about poor people (especially those on government welfare) who waste their money on nonessentials such as cable TV, Tommy Hilfiger clothing, etc.</p><div style=\"float:right;margin-left:10px\"><img src=\"http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/system/files?file=images/070424_dharavi_0.jpg\" alt=\"\"></div><p>The phenomenon isn't limited to the United States though. As I was browsing the photos of an excellent <em>National Geographic </em>article about <a href=\"http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0705/feature3/index.html\" title=\"National Geographic article about Dharavi\">Dharavi</a>, "Mumbai's <a href=\"http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0705/index.html\" title=\"Dharavai, "Mumbai's premier slum"\">premier</a> slum," I noticed the caption to a <a href=\"http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0705/feature3/gallery13.html\" title=\"Photo of Mumbia slum girl in jute-bag shack\">photo</a> of a 9-year-old girl living in a shack whose walls are made of jute bags:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Few homes have running water or toilets, but a household without a television is uncommon in Dharavi.</p></blockquote>\n<p>I've visited Mumbai many times myself, and I've always wondered about the TV antennas poking through thatched-roofed shacks. How can "these people" buy TVs when their kids are malnourished and wading through sewage-infested water?</p><p>I suppose it's a matter of priorities. If you are accustomed to eating light meals and not having a toilet, you just might prefer a TV over heartier food and latrines. TV provides an escape from misery. Anyone who's seen a Bollywood movie knows it's about vicariously experiencing a level of wealth and happiness that's hopelessly unattainable in the real world. Why, you might just say that television is the new opiate of the masses.</p>"
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"title" : "Recycling While Brown",
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"content" : "<p><em>Given what happened last week in Virginia, the events described in this post might seem trivial, but I feel quite strongly that they are not. What’s at issue is a fundamental question of civil rights — the right to live one’s life without being harrassed, investigated, or needlessly spied on.</em></p>\n\n<p>The Indian-American poet Kazim Ali teaches at Shippensburg University, which is a little west of Harrisburg, PA (and not too far from where I myself teach). </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.kazimali.com/default.html\">On his website</a>, he recently described how his “suspicious” behavior led to his entire campus being shut down. The behavior in question? Recycling. He was doing nothing other than dropping off a stack of printouts of poems to be recycled when someone from the campus ROTC called the police:</p>\n\n<blockquote>A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.<br><br>\n\nUpon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has New York plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have the heart to take off these days, says “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.”<br><br>\n\nBecause of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us safe. […]<br><br>\n\nOne of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description—a Middle Eastern man driving a white beetle with out of state plates—and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, “What country is he from?”<br><br>\n\n“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant. (<a href=\"http://www.kazimali.com/default.html\">link</a>)</blockquote>\n\n<p>Now, I normally try and avoid the “rant” voice, but I must say, I’ve had just about enough of these incidents. Don’t the campus police at Shippensburg U. have a minimum criterion for “suspicious”? Was it necessary to call the state police and the bomb squad? A faculty member dropping off a box of papers by a recycling bin at a semi-rural university simply ought not to have to deal with this kind of nonsense. It’s just insane.</p>\n\n<p>It must have been a harrowing experience, but fortunately it ended without further incident. </p>\n\n<p>The University wrote a statement to Ali following this incident, but Kazim Ali isn’t at all satisfied with it, presumably because the university wouldn’t want to acknowledge that Ali’s race was a factor in an incident where his civil rights may have been violated:</p>\n\n<blockquote>The university’s bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the “suspicious package” beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, “We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community.”<br><br>\n\nWhat does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall—who was watched, noted, and reported, all in a days work? Today we gave in willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. <strong>It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and fascist societies.</strong><br><br>\n\nThe university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became “suspicious” because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.<br><br>\n\nIt was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled. (<a href=\"http://www.kazimali.com/default.html\">link</a>)</blockquote>\n\n<p>“Fascism” is a strong word, but sometimes you need to go there. Perhaps the key difference is, at least here the police have to adhere to basic concepts of due process. In a truly fascist society, none of that would apply. (We could, of course, debate matters such as Guantanamo Bay, CIA secret detention facilities, the practice of “rendition,” and the currently blurry line between “interrogation techniques” and torture. Those practices by themselves certainly don’t make the U.S. a “fascist” society, but they do force us to consider the troubling gap between the <em>rhetoric</em> of democracy and its actual practice in the U.S. under the present administration.)</p>\n\n<p><hr>\nAs a side note, the <strong>“—— while brown” </strong> meme seems to be one that has legs. Here are some other posts at SM that use the term:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/002648.html\">Flying While Brown</a> (Actually, quite a number of posts use this phrase.)</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003243.html\">Shopkeeping while brown</a> (Admittedly a more complicated incident — Operation Meth Merchant)</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/001915.html\">Filming While Brown</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.vij.com/archive/camping_while_brown.html\">Camping While Brown</a> (a post from Manish from before Sepia Mutiny; not sure what the title is about)</p>\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/4160\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p>"
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"title" : "Social Technographics and a Power Law of Participation",
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"content" : "<div><p><a href=\"http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/04/forresters_new_.html\">Charlene Li</a> at Forrester just came out with a <a href=\"http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,42057,00.html\">report on Social Technographics</a> that surveyed user engagement. The framework is very similar to my <a href=\"http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html\">Power Law of Participation</a>, but it is an entirely different thing to have some data behind it.<a title=\"Photo Sharing\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/470424239/\"><img width=\"400\" alt=\"Participation Ladder\" src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/202/470424239_c3a3511ef6_o.png\"></a></p>\n\n<p>I haven't seen the report itself, but <a href=\"http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/04/forresters_part.html\">Steve Rubel</a> says "this is <a href=\"http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,42057,00.html\">the first report</a> I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web." I'll get a copy of it and see.</p>\n\n<p>But I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure. What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law -- not just to test Forrester's findings, but to help a given company realize -- "we are under-weighted in critics!"</p>\n\n<p>UPDATE: I got a copy of the report, which is a pragmatic approach that starts by valuing different kinds of participation. A given site could survey its users to understand existing psychodemographic profiles, then review participation points. It may discover latent potential in the Creator category and create a participation point for them. How the profiles vary by age is interesting:</p>\n\n<ul><li><strong>Teenagers create more than any other generation.</strong> Youth between 12 and 17 years old are avid<br>users of Social Computing technologies, with more than one-third engaging as Creators. But<br>this is a fairly self-centered age group — while very likely to create their own content, they are<br>less likely than Gen Yers to be Critics and Collectors...</li>\n\n<li><strong>Joiners dominate Gen Yers.</strong> While this age group has higher percentages in each category than<br>every other age group (except for youth Creators), it’s their sky-high participation in social<br>networks that stands out. In fact, there are slightly more Joiners than Spectators — meaning<br>that Gen Yers are less likely to passively read, watch, or listen to social media, even when it’s<br>created by their peers...</li>\n\n<li><strong>Gen X Spectators form the foundation for future participation.</strong> While significantly fewer<br>members of Gen X are at the top of the participation ladder, that four out of 10 are already<br>using social media as Spectators means that they are well positioned to take the next step...</li></ul>\n\n<p>Also note that Creators self-identify themselves as leaders (38% say "I am a natural leader") than any other group, and those who participate in social software are greater influencers (Active categories range from 52-56% saying "I often tell my friends about products that interest me, compared to 33% for Inactives).</p>\n\n<p>UPDATE: <a href=\"http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/2007/04/five_things_missing_in_the_par.html\">Phil Wolff's remix</a> is seriously funny:</p>\n<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/471494112/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/187/471494112_c48b8e76ca_o.png\" width=\"400\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Ladder of Disclosure\"></a></div>"
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"title" : "Alec Baldwin's Daughter Is a Disgrace",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rit15jSc4pI/AAAAAAAAAE8/vXBphH4hMMw/s1600-h/Alec-Baldwin.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rit15jSc4pI/AAAAAAAAAE8/vXBphH4hMMw/s320/Alec-Baldwin.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>I don't care if Alec Baldwin's daughter is 11 years old or 12 years old or however old she is, she is a disgrace and her treatment of her father is beyond the pale. It's hard not to feel sympathy for Baldwin as he outlines his grievances against the little monster in a telephone message that was released to <a href=\"http://www.tmz.com/2007/04/19/alec-baldwins-threatening-message-to-daughter/\">TMZ</a>. \"Once again I've made an ass out of myself trying to get to a phone at a specific time,\" <a href=\"http://www.alecbaldwin.com\">Baldwin</a> angrily told his daughter dearest when she missed a previously scheduled telephone call. \"I'm tired of playing this game with you. You have insulted me for the last time.\" He concluded by vowing to \"straighten her out\" when he sees her again.<br><br>Apparently this \"rude, thoughtless little pig,\" as <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Baldwin\">Baldwin</a> called her, who doesn't \"have the brains or the decency as a human being,\" either doesn't know or doesn't care how her inconsiderate actions affect her father. While not answering the telephone when your father calls may seem trivial, even the smallest of cruelties can be very hurtful to a parent. Fathers are extremely vulnerable and children should be very careful about what they say and do to them. Above all fathers need to know that their children love them. What Alec Baldwin's daughter did to him is the kind of thing that could emotionally scar him for life.<br><br>Even though <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000285/\">Baldwin</a> is a liberal, this is not a <a href=\"http://www.oliverwillis.com/2007/04/alec_baldwins_i.html\">liberal</a> or <a href=\"http://wizbangblog.com/2007/04/20/daddy-dearest.php\">conservative</a> issue. Some <a href=\"http://patterico.com/2007/04/20/alec-baldwin-phone-message/\">conservatives</a> are using this incident to bash <a href=\"http://www.smokesignalsblog.com/2007/04/20/classic-hollyweird-liberal-parenting\">Hollywood</a> or take the aging <a href=\"http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/top-10-reasons-to-hate-alec-baldwin.php\">movie</a> and TV star to task for his politics, but I think all fathers, <a href=\"http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/4/20/61554/9990\">liberal</a> and conservative alike, know what Baldwin is going through and we should set aside our political differences and back him up. The star of TV's <em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496424/\">30 Rock</a></em> and of such films as <em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/\">Glengarry Glen Ross</a></em>, <em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318374/\">The Cooler</a></em> and <em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/\">The Departed</a></em> is not someone who easily loses his temper, so his daughter's treatment of him must have been truly egregious to send him over the edge like that.<br><br>What <a href=\"http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwin-father-of-year.html\">Baldwin</a>'s daughter did to him is bad enough but it could have far-reaching implications. What if other children get the idea that they can behave as she did? As the daughter of a celebrity she is role model to youth so she needs to be extra careful about her behavior. Her reprehensible conduct could set off a host of copycat incidents where children insult their parents and then sneer, \"Well, Alec Baldwin's daughter did it so it must be OK.\" I hope our children understand that just because a celebrity's daughter does something, that does not make it right.<br><br>I also feel very sympathetic about the plight of the girl's mother, Oscar-winning actress <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000107/\">Kim Basinger</a> (<em><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119488/\">LA Confidential</a></em>). After all, under the custody agreement she has with the Oscarless Baldwin, she has to live with the little brat. I'm sure she was frustrated by having to rely on coddling liberal activist judges to straighten her daughter out and felt that the only way to nip this problem in the bud was to defy a court order and embarrass her daughter by releasing this tape to the media. Hillary Clinton may think it takes a village to raise a child, but a global village is a lot more effective when it comes to disciplining a child. Airing her family's <a href=\"http://perezhilton.com/topics/alec_baldwin/fill_in_the_blank_20070420.php\">dirty</a> linen on the Internet and subjecting her daughter to public humiliation is the only way to make sure this never happens again. There is nothing like being the butt of cruel jokes from kids in school to keep a child on the straight and narrow.<br><br>I'm glad to see that Baldwin and Basinger have thrown out Dr. Spock's outdated book, <em>Baby and Child Care</em>, which created a generation of spoiled baby boomers, and are using new technology such as the Internet to help raise their daughter. I think their actions will inspire <a href=\"http://caosblog.com/5037\">parents</a> around the world to post their own humiliating audio clips and pictures of their children to their blogs. The next time your child throws a tantrum, just threaten to post a video of it to YouTube where all their friends can see. That should quiet them down. The Internet opens up a host of potential avenues for embarrassing your children into behaving. However, there are some tried and true methods that parents have used for centuries that Baldwin and Basinger might also want to try, such as threatening to sell your children to gypsies. If there is one idea I have strived to instill in my children it is that having parents is a privilege not a right.<br><br>Parents should be honest with their children and I think Baldwin did the right thing by not hypocritically hiding his contempt for his ex-wife when he told his daughter that her mother is a \"pain in the ass.\" I think we shield our children too much from reality. They need to grow up and face facts. Children should also be held accountable when their actions are causing a rift between parents. Some liberal psychiatrists claim parents who divorce shouldn't let their kids believe that they are at fault. But I think if the kids are to blame for breaking up their parents they should be forced to take full responsibility. Some narcissistic kids will selfishly exploit any angle, even going so far as to pit one divorced parent against the other and use them as pawns to further their own selfish agendas instead of thinking about what is best for their parents. Perhaps Alec Baldwin's daughter should be reminded that there is a whole network of foster parents who could use the extra few hundred bucks a month they would get from taking her in.<br><br>Professor <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/04/imus_versus_bal.html\">Stephen Bainbridge</a> has another good suggestion: hand her over to <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/04/imus_versus_bal.html\">Don Imus</a>. At least, that's what I think he is proposing since it's a bit difficult to tell what the point of his post is.<br><br>So I hope Alec Baldwin's <a href=\"http://glosslip.com/2007/04/20/kim-basinger-likely-violated-court-order-daughter-might-be-rude-and-thoughtless/\">ungrateful</a> little <a href=\"http://www.chronicallypissed.com/chronically_pissed/2007/04/in_defense_of_a.html\">wretch</a> realizes just how good she has it. She may have succeeded in hurting her parents this time, but in the end, if she's not careful, she'll find out her parents can hurt her a lot more.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a title=\"Fark\" href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&new_comment=\"><img alt=\"Fark\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\"></a> <a title=\"Furl\" href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&t=\"><img alt=\"Furl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\"></a> <a title=\"LinkaGoGo\" href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"LinkaGoGo\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\"></a> <a title=\"Ma.gnolia\" href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Ma.gnolia\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\"></a> <a title=\"NewsVine\" href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&h=\"><img alt=\"NewsVine\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\"></a> <a title=\"Reddit\" href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Reddit\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\"></a> <a title=\"Shadows\" href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Shadows\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\"></a> <a title=\"Simpy\" href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Simpy\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/alec-baldwins-daughter-is-disgrace.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" height=\"20\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" width=\"20\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br><a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Alec+Baldwin\" rel=\"tag\">Alec Baldwin</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Kim+Basinger\" rel=\"tag\">Kim Basinger</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Oscars\" rel=\"tag\">Oscars</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Academy+Awards\" rel=\"tag\">Academy Awards</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Hollywood\" rel=\"tag\">Hollywood</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Dr.+Spock\" rel=\"tag\">Dr. Spock</a>,<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Child+Care\" rel=\"tag\">Child Care</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Film\" rel=\"tag\">Film</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Movies\" rel=\"tag\">Movies</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Movie\" rel=\"tag\">Movie</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"title" : "GET and POST: The rest is history",
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"content" : "<div><br><p>This is going to be some sort of tribute to the web, and all the people who helped the web to become possible.</p>\n<p>The web could have been a read-only medium. I think it could have been succesful; people uploading HTML pages (and HTML page-generating scripts) through FTP while submitting the corresponding URLs of the Hypertext Reading Protocol to search engines, and let them crawl and index their pages. It would have been the biggest library in the world.</p>\n<p>“A read-only medium is nice, but what about a read/write medium?” Someone must have thought. If we would specifify an explicit read method, we can just as well make a write and delete method. So GET, PUT and DELETE where born, resulting in an early form was what going to be the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The protocol had striking similarities with a filesystem.</p>\n<p>The designers thought of one other feature. They wanted to make publishing new content as easily as possible. This is were HTTP and filesystems diverge. They added an extra method, POST, which was a little like PUT, in the sense that you could instruct the webserver to store a new resource. Only this time, the server was in control of the URL space. In other words, the server decides where your new resource will be located. This relieved the content author from the task of finding an empty location to store the new resource. Now, all CRUD functionality had been accounted for. This was nice.</p>\n<p>So far, it has been all quite predictable. Now something strange happens. Someone apperantly gets the idea that it would be advantegous to overload the POST method. The POST method already gave the server much responsibilities. For example, it could check the contents of the resource to decide where to place it. But, with reasons not apparantly clear to me, they let go of all semantic constraints of the POST method. POST became a catch-all, a ‘do as you please’ method of sorts. For all HTTP cares about, it’s just a message that’s posted to the resource identified by the URL. [See the posting '<a href=\"http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-development/2005/12/08/post-vs-put/\">Post vs PUT</a>']</p>\n<p>Aside from that, they also extended the <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/\">HTML specification</a> with forms to aid webpage visitors to send a structured message. The adding of the POST method, as we will see, would turn out to be genius.</p>\n<p>The Hypertext Reading Protocol allowed for arbitrary information discovery. The new Hypertext Transfer Protocol however, allowed for arbitrary service discovery. I can’t stress the importance of that enough.</p>\n<p>The web in it’s early days must have surely been a nice and exciting place, with all it’s interlinked webpages. But just reading would get boring. To read, and then being able to actually do something, that was exciting. Leave a message in a guestbook, ask or answer a question in a forum, or order a rare book from Amazon: That’s exciting.</p>\n<p>Fast forward to the present time. E-commerce, online communities, online auctions, bug databases, blogs (decentralized, but <a href=\"http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/\">interconnected by trackbacks</a>!), webbased feed readers, social bookmarking: What do they all have in common? Arbitrary service discovery. That’s what the web is all about.</p>\n<p>Funny thing is that - despite it clear presence in the <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html\">HTTP specification</a> - PUT and DELETE are rarely used, if at all. It could very well be that we don’t really need those, because we’re blessed with arbitrary service discovery. A plain, dumb filesystem is a good example of one such possible service, but not neccesarily the most important one.</p>\n<p>The Hypertext Reading Protocol is fictional. However, there was a protocol called <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP0.9Summary.html\">HTTP 0.9</a> which only supported GET. Actually, I made up the whole story. But it’s based on true facts. It’s a story how it could have been. I expect that most of you who’ve read this far, know the rest of history yourselves.</p>\n<p>For any of you who are interested in SOAP/WSDL/etc Web Services, or ever took interest in them, you should take note of a quote of <a href=\"http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/09/Blog/\">Mark Baker</a>: <a href=\"http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/09/Blog/2004/12/09\">The web is what Web Services are trying to be.</a> Also read <a href=\"http://www.coactus.com/blog/2005/07/towards-truly-document-oriented-web-services/\">Towards fully document-oriented Web services</a>, also by Mark Baker. Better yet, subscribe to his blog. You’ll be a better developer, architect or analist because of it.</p>\n<p>If you want to fully appreciate the architecture of the web, you should read Roy Fielding’s dissertation: <a href=\"http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm\">Architectural Styles and<br>\nthe Design of Network-based Software Architectures</a>.</p>\n<img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/categories/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/tags/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"></a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"><img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/meryn.wordpress.com/15/\"></a> <img alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=meryn.wordpress.com&blog=50367&post=15&subd=meryn&ref=&feed=1\"></div>"
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"title" : "me(me) think good",
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"content" : "<div style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiVsUTmp67I/AAAAAAAAAXk/PSkAPqBpwtU/s1600-h/frenmap6.gif\"><img style=\"margin:0px auto 10px;display:block;text-align:center;width:277px;height:264px\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiVsUTmp67I/AAAAAAAAAXk/PSkAPqBpwtU/s400/frenmap6.gif\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a><span style=\"font-size:85%\">obvious nod to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roots\">The Roots</a>' <a href=\"http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:iqjv7i83g76r\"><em>Phrenology</em></a></span><br></div><br>I've never participated in a meme, but this one was hard to resist. You see, I was honored and humbled when noted Ghanaian writer and performance poet <a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/one.html\">Nii Ayikwei Parkes</a>, who has a <a href=\"http://odeo.com/audio/5219513/view\">podcast</a> and blogs at <a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/weblogue/thtmvt.html\">the thought movement</a>, tagged me (whoda thunk it?) as a \"<a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/weblogue/2007/04/he-what-he-stinks.html\">Thinking Blogger Award</a>\" winner.<br><br><a href=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiQ5ujmp65I/AAAAAAAAAXU/MGzaaKN3nLE/s1600-h/thinkingbloggerpf8.jpg\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right\" src=\"http://bp1.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiQ5ujmp65I/AAAAAAAAAXU/MGzaaKN3nLE/s400/thinkingbloggerpf8.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>a WTF winner? Well, the \"<a href=\"http://www.thethinkingblog.com/2007/02/thinking-blogger-awards_11.html\">Thinking Blogger Award</a>\" was created and propagated as a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetag\">meme</a>.<br><br>Here's how it works (the meme \"award\" rules):<br><br><span style=\"font-size:85%\">1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,<br>2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,<br>3. Optional: Proudly display the congratulations! you've won a \"Thinking Blogger Award\" badge.</span><br><br>Like I said, I normally wouldn't participate in a meme, but the tag by Nii Parkes gave me pause. A bit more on Parkes: he's released two spoken word poetry CDs, <em>Incredible Blues</em> and <em>Nocturne of Phrase</em>, has published four collections of poetry, several short stories, and a novel, \"The Cost of Red Eyes.\" Among many other honors and prestigious awards, he's recently been a writer-in-residence at London's Poetry Cafe and at BBC Radio 3. Check Parkes' <a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/work.html\">work and projects</a>, <a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/about.html\">bio</a>, and, of course, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nii_Ayikwei_Parkes\">wikipedia entry</a> and <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/niiayikweiparkes\">myspace music page</a>.<br><br>So anyway, WTF, I thought, why not share a bit of link love with some of my favorite, thought provoking, \"must read\" music blogs. NOTE: I've excluded a few obvious los amigos top choices: <a href=\"http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/index.cfm\">Jeff Chang</a>, O-dub's <a href=\"http://soul-sides.com/\">Soul Sides</a>, Kevin's <a href=\"http://somuchsilence.com/\">So Much Silence</a>, and Simon Reynolds' <a href=\"http://blissout.blogspot.com/\">Blissblog</a> just because <a href=\"http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/\">Jeff</a>, Oliver, Kevin, and Simon get plenty of link love. Plus it was hard enough to pick just five \"thinking person's music blogs\" without somehow narrowing the field.<br><br>In any event, in no particular order, here are my \"Thinking Blogger Award\" winner tags:<br><br>1. Scholar's <a href=\"http://souledonmusic.blogspot.com/\">Souled On (music, art, politics)</a><br>2. <a href=\"http://secretsociety.typepad.com/darcy_james_argues_secret/\">Darcy James Argue's Secret Society</a><br>3. <a href=\"http://www.destination-out.com/\">Destination: Out</a><br>4. <a href=\"http://www.etnobofin.com/\">etnobofin</a><br>5. (tie): two relatively new blogs: doctashock & the gang's <a href=\"http://thealternakids.wordpress.com/\">The Alternakids</a> and Adam & friends' <a href=\"http://hahamusic.wordpress.com/\">hahamusic</a><br><br>I realize posting a \"tie\" is prob cheating, but I don't think anyone's gonna take away my \"award.\"<br><br><a href=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiWEtjmp68I/AAAAAAAAAXs/ClYf5YPFd9M/s1600-h/hbms-white+people.png\"><img style=\"margin:0pt 0pt 10px 10px;float:right;width:200px;height:194px\" src=\"http://bp2.blogger.com/_PfwJmff_7Y8/RiWEtjmp68I/AAAAAAAAAXs/ClYf5YPFd9M/s200/hbms-white+people.png\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"></a>Speaking of thinking, I thought some musical accompaniment might take some of the shameless self promotion edge off this post. So I made a smart playlist using \"think,\" which yielded, <em>inter alia</em>, things like Madlib's "Thinking of You," Medeski Martin & Wood's "Think," Chick Coera's "Think of One," X's "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts," The Ramones "Everytime I Eat Vegetables It makes Me Think of You," The Street's "What is He Thinking," St. Germain's "What You Think About. . . " and these goodies:<br><br><br><li><a href=\"http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/11/22/407767/02%20Ive%20Been%20Thinking%20%28feat%20Cat%20Power%29.mp3\"><strong><span style=\"color:rgb(255,153,0)\">I've Been Thinking</span></strong></a> -- Handsome Boy Modeling School feat. Cat Power: <em>White People</em> (2004)</li><li><a href=\"http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/11/22/407767/01%20What%20Would%20the%20Community%20Think.mp3\"><strong><span style=\"color:rgb(255,153,0)\">What Would the Community Think?</span></strong></a> -- Cat Power: <em>WWTCT</em> (1996)</li><li><a href=\"http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/11/22/407767/10%20We%20Think%20After.mp3\"><strong><span style=\"color:rgb(255,153,0)\">We Think After</span></strong></a> -- DJ Z-Trip & DJ P: <em>Uneasy Listening</em> (2001)</li><br><br><br>Although <em>White People</em> was not as impressive, overall, as <a href=\"http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE47E1CDA4EA47620C9932B4DDBB17FF307DA63FB81126E495AD1A93C49871E63E640A1C6CCB6E577B479A8B327AE590CD9CAEF469CA1&searchlink=HANDSOME%7CBOY%7CMODELING%7CSCHOOL&samples=1&sql=11:fnfuxq9jldte%7ET1\">HBMS</a>'s <a href=\"http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;token=ADFEAEE47E1CDA4EA47620C9932B4DDBB17FF307DA63FB81126E495AD1A93C49871E63E640A1C6CCB6E577B479A8B327AE590BD9C8EE469CA1&sql=10:kxfwxqlkldke\"><em>So . . . How's Your Girl?</em></a>, it's hard to go wrong with Automator and Prince Paul. And <a href=\"http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE47E1CDA4EA47620C9932B4DDBB17FF307DA63FB81126E495AD1A93C49871E63E640A1C6CCB6E577B479A8B327AE5E09D9CFED469CA1&sql=11:gjfqxq8gldte\">Chan Marshall</a> (Cat Power) is <strike>always</strike> almost always compelling. Z-Trip's and P's <a href=\"http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;token=ADFEAEE47E1CDA4EA47620C9932B4DDBB17FF307DA63FB81126E495AD1A93C49871E63E640A1C6CCB6E577B479A8B327AE5F0ED9CEE7469CA1&sql=10:djfexq90ld0e\"><em>Uneasy Listening</em></a> is a DJ mixtape/mash-up masterpiece (thanks to the above mentioned <a href=\"http://somuchsilence.com/\">Kevin</a> for turning me on to <em>Uneasy Listening</em> nearly two years ago). Enjoy. And keep on thinking.<br><br>peace (and many thanks <a href=\"http://www.niiparkes.com/one.html\">Nii</a>!)<br><br>p.s. I'll be back tomorrow and/or Thurs with a 2 part series on new, experimental/underground Berlin electronica (Monotekktoni) and jazz and funked-up hip hop (Lychee Lassi) (which I was gonna start tonight until the above sidetrack). see you then.<br><br><strong>UPDATE</strong>: <span style=\"font-size:100%\">I want to share how this meme created a \"small world\" moment. One of Nii's other tagged \"thinking blogger award\" winners is <a href=\"https://koranteng.blogspot.com/\">Koranteng's Toli</a> -- a fascinating blog (check it out!) by a software engineer who works a stones throw across the river from me in Cambridge: Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah \"from Ghana by way of France and England.\" He just happens to have great taste in music. Koranteng's Toli is not a music blog, but music references and accompanying \"soundtracks\" pervade the writing. The two most recent posts are accompanied by, among others, Pharcyde, De La Soul, Herbie Hancock, Freestyle Fellowship, Digable Planets, and Erykah Badu. ANYWAY, turns out we were both at ropeadope's \"What is Jazz\" festival at Berklee last year and Koranteng del.ico.us bookmarked and linked on his site my <a href=\"http://www.bostonist.com/archives/2006/04/19/concert_review_ropeadopes_what_is_jazz_festival.php\">Bostonist review</a> of that gig. And it appears we were both at other Boston shows, like the diagable planets reunion. All this revealed by a London blogger currently in residence/teaching in LA. cool. The big wide world be small indeed.</span><br>. . ."
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"title" : "Aneel’s razor",
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"content" : "<p>Aneel’s razor: do not multiply tools beyond necessity.<a href=\"http://joga.be/tag/tools\" rel=\"tag\">tools</a></p>"
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"title" : "Collaboration is the Killer App",
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"content" : "<p>A bulk of what’s happening on the Web right now can be characterized as retrofitting…remaking software to fit within the framework of the Web. And the framework of the Web is a network, and what people do in networks (of all kinds) is <em>collaborate</em>. </p>\n<p>Most of the software coming out isn’t new from a functional standpoint. Most of it is simply the basic tools that people need with collaboration features maxed out. This is great…it really helps us get over the do-everything-through-email approach. It wasn’t obvious until recently just how much of a bottleneck email is when you’re trying to collaborate. It’s fine for two people to go back and forth. Add a third and you get into problems quickly. It’s just too easy to say “I didn’t get that email”. </p>\n<p>The biggest problem is that there is no central storage of email that everyone can see. On the Web this is a web page or app…anything with a URI. In email it just never existed…</p>\n<p>My good buddy Richard MacManus has a nice post digging into the topic on everyone’s minds: <a href=\"http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/poll_is_eric_schmidt_kidding.php\">Is Google competing with Microsoft for a Web-based Office</a>? The obvious answer is “Yes, of course”. But a Google engineer that Richard talked to provided a slightly different answer, that gets to the notion of using the Web for what its good at. The notion he told Richard was to leverage “the native use of the Internet”. </p>\n<p>So in that sense Google isn’t competing with Microsoft to bring Office to the Web. What they’re doing is building tools that allows those in the Office to collaborate. For my money I don’t care if I ever use Office again…but what is important is to be able to do create and send documents to each other. That seems to be the level that Google is playing at right now…to facilitate collaboration as much as anything. </p>\n<p>This dovetails nicely with the book I’ve been reading: <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zippers-Came/dp/0679740392\">The Evolution of Useful Things</a> by Henry Petroski. He claims that most design is a series of failures that revolve around the idea that there is no perfect design, just design that seems to solve the problems as we current see them. </p>\n<p>At the current moment, with broadband reaching a large percentage of the U.S. and people working more and more outside the office, the problem of collaboration is increasingly on people’s minds. Many folks are working on projects now in which they never even meet the others on the team, let alone grab a beer with them.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Social Software for the Readers",
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"content" : "<p>I was involved in a discussion earlier today about social software adoption. The discussion was about social software adaption and content creators. Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the users. The question was raised if that shows a lack of adoption for Wikipedia?<br><br>I consider the readers as already adopted even if they choose not to contribute. [<a href=\"http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/insidelotusblog.nsf/dx/04182007094218PMTST3ZQ.htm\">read more</a>] <br><br>Ted<br></p>"
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"title" : "I Don't Recall the Title for This Alberto Gonzales Post",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rij0-TSc4oI/AAAAAAAAAE0/ga3yWLZFn4I/s1600-h/hangintherebabygonzales2.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rij0-TSc4oI/AAAAAAAAAE0/ga3yWLZFn4I/s320/hangintherebabygonzales2.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>The White House was <a href=\"http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/04/alternate-realities.html\">pleased</a> with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902571.html\">testimony</a> in <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902035.html?hpid=topnews\">front</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/washington/20gonzales.html?ex=1334721600&en=f75a22ed9961522f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">Senate</a> Judiciary Committee, and it's easy to see <a href=\"http://themoderatevoice.com/politics/12308/gonzales-flops-in-senate-hearings/\">why</a>. Instead of making up excuses for why the U.S. attorneys were fired, Gonzales looked the committee members in the eye and <a href=\"http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1398\">straightforwardly</a> told them he just didn't <a href=\"http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/2007/04/19/alberto-earns-a-schultzie/\">remember</a> what had happened--64 times. His honesty and forthrightness was reminiscent of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North\">Oliver North</a> when he turned the tables on a congressional committee that was investigating him and came out the hero. I think Gonzales' <a href=\"http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/04/the_gonzales_st.html\">brilliant</a> performance probably saved his job.<br><br>I can't remember all the details of this complicated scandal, so who expects the <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html\">Attorney General</a>, who has a lot more important things on his mind, to remember them? Besides, if this scandal was as important as some Democrats want to believe, then you would think he would have remembered what happened. If he couldn't remember, then it must not have been that important.<br><br>Unfortunately, the liberal media just doesn't get it. We don't want our leaders to be superhuman. We want them to be the kind of people we could share a drink with. In the face of mean trick questions, even from <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/009743.php\">members</a> of his own <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20capital.html?ex=1334721600&en=9f99441600072e1e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss\">party</a>, Gonzales came off as a really nice guy, who, like a lot of drinking buddies, is a little fuzzy on the details of what happened the night before. I think this hearing will backfire and make people more sympathetic to Gonzales, just as the pop quiz a reporter administered to Bush during his first presidential campaign ended up him look good and the reporter look bad. Nobody likes \"gotcha\" questions and to see a smug journalist ambush Bush with such trivialities as \"Who is the leader of Pakistan\"--as if the President would even need to know something like that--just ended up humanizing Bush.<br><br>Ostensibly, Congress holds hearings in order to try to get information. If that was really the goal of the Gonzales hearing, they failed miserably. Who wouldn't get a little flustered and have trouble remembering things under a <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902350.html\">barrage</a> of <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902935.html\">hostile</a> questions? When Sen. Arlen Specter hounded Gonzales about his <a href=\"http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/19/gonzales-prep/\">preparation</a>, it just reminded people of teachers who have scolded us for doing badly on a test even after we crammed all night. We can all be a little forgetful sometimes. I think I would forget my own address if my wife didn't pin it to my clothes every morning.<br><br>And Gonzales isn't the only <a href=\"http://edgeing.blogspot.com/2007/03/alberto-gone-zales.html\">person</a> in the <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-cant-president-fire-everyone.html\">Bush Administration</a> who can't remember every little meeting he attended and every little conversation so it's pretty unfair to single him out. His assistant Kyle Sampson told the committee he didn't remember 122 times. Scooter Libby is being sent to prison just because he forgot what he told some journalists about Valerie Plame. And when GSA chief Lurita Doan couldn't remember some boring meeting about using her agency to target Democrats in the last election she got hounded for it.<br><br>In a recent column <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/30/BL2007033000675.htm\">Howard Kurtz</a> asked self-righteously, \"Does everyone in the Bush administration have amnesia?\" Well, maybe someone should ask Kurtz if he can remember what happened at an editorial meeting a few months ago. I bet he couldn't.<br><br>If it is true that the Administration is suffering from some sort of mass amnesia, as Kurtz implies, there may be perfectly plausible explanations. Amnesia can be brought on by traumatic events and certainly the last election was traumatic for many in the Bush Administration as well as their supporters. I don't think my memory has been working as well as it did before the election and I am sure that I am not alone. I don't think my memory has been working as well as it did before the election and I am sure that I am not alone. Sometimes I even have problems remembering what I have just said.<br><br>Memories can also be displaced by more important memories so it shouldn't be a surprise that people with important jobs get a little forgetful. For example, Dorita Loan couldn't remember some boring PowerPoint presentation she had to sit through, but she did remember that cookies were served. If the cookies were really good, then it is perfectly reasonable that the memory of them would displace the memory of a boring PowerPoint conversation. In the future the GSA might consider not serving really good cookies at presentations so this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Memories of food, however, can also have the opposite effect. <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/01/who-needs-books.html\">Marcel Proust</a> wrote seven books after his memories came flooding back when he dipped one Madeleine in some tea. If Congress was really interested in finding out the facts instead of setting up memory traps and making people look bad, they could have found out what cookies were served during the PowerPoint presentation and then served them at the hearing. This might have jarred her memory.<br><br>A blow to the head can also cause memory loss. Maybe someone has been going around the White House bonking people on the head. It's something that the Secret Service should really look into. Senator Grassley hit on another possible <a href=\"http://imissfaf.blogspot.com/2007/04/alberto-gonzales-testifying-before.html\">explanation</a> that should be investigated: \"\"Why are there so many inconsistencies, is it something about the environment you work in?\" But there is an even more frightening possibility. What if terrorists have developed some kind of amnesia weapon and launched it against the White House. Sure, it sounds farfetched but no more unlikely than the \"<a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4174519.stm\">gay bomb</a>\" the Pentagon once tried to develop.<br><br>The point is, instead of <a href=\"http://bloggernista.com/2007/03/20/gonzales-on-the-way-out/\">beating</a> up Attorney General Alberto Whatshisname for not remembering a few conversations, maybe Congress should try to work with the White House to try to get to the bottom of this whole <a href=\"http://www.rogelsview.com/in-the-news/whose-poor-performance/\">memory</a> problem.<br><br>Did I mention that Howard Kurtz wrote a piece in TK (<span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Washington Post</span> or <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Washington Times</span>? Remember to Google before posting) about members of the Bush Administration suffering from memory loss or something? Or maybe it was the guy who wrote that book about the thing. You know the one.<br><br>I had another point to make but it slipped my mind.<br><br>When I can't remember something sometimes I try to think of something else completely unrelated and then the memory comes back. Thank goodness <a href=\"http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/sanjaya-must-be-stopped.html\">Sanjaya</a> has been booted off <em>American Idol</em>. I think we can all sleep a bit more soundly now. Did you see that ponyhawk he wore? What was that about?<br><br>I think I got sidetracked. Where was I? Oh right. Amnesia. A lot of it going around.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a title=\"Fark\" href=\"http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&new_comment=\"><img alt=\"Fark\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/fark.png\"></a> <a title=\"Furl\" href=\"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&t=\"><img alt=\"Furl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/furl.png\"></a> <a title=\"LinkaGoGo\" href=\"http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"LinkaGoGo\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/linkagogo.png\"></a> <a title=\"Ma.gnolia\" href=\"http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Ma.gnolia\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/magnolia.png\"></a> <a title=\"NewsVine\" href=\"http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&h=\"><img alt=\"NewsVine\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/newsvine.png\"></a> <a title=\"Reddit\" href=\"http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Reddit\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/reddit.png\"></a> <a title=\"Shadows\" href=\"http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Shadows\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/shadows.png\"></a> <a title=\"Simpy\" href=\"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Simpy\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/simpy.png\"></a> <a title=\"Spurl\" href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-dont-recall-title-for-this-alberto.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" height=\"20\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" width=\"20\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Alberto+Gonzalez\" rel=\"tag\">Alberto Gonzalez</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Justice+Department\" rel=\"tag\">Justice Department</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Terrorism\" rel=\"tag\">Terrorism</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Bush\" rel=\"tag\">Bush</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"title" : "Why IBM Should Acquire Amazon",
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"content" : "<p>I have written a couple of pieces recently arguing that IBM needs to rethink its attitudes to “consumer” vs enterprise, because the distinctions are blurring. But rather than go negative all the time, I figure now is a good time to drop a post I have been considering for a while. </p>\n<p>I am not a numbers guy but I understand Amazon is not over-valued at the moment. Buying the company could be a transformative acquisition that would bring IBM new opportunities in both business process outsourcing (BPO) and grassroots development. Most importantly buying Amazon would also put IBM back in touch with consumers again, a calling card it lost when it spun off Lenovo, as well as bringing thousands of small booksellers to IBM as customers, expanding its small to medium enterprise footprint. Did I happen to mention that Amazon is emerging as a major software-as-a-service player…What might some objections be?</p>\n<p>IBM can’t compete with its customers, and Amazon is an online retailer, which might damage relationships with other retailers.</p>\n<p>This objection can be answered by pointing out that Amazon provided fulfillment services to Borders.com for seven years, before the ties were recently broken. Amazon long ago became more than an ecommerce site, and its distribution network is a powerful one. Its a tremendous asset. </p>\n<p>What about smaller retailers? There was a time when people argued Amazon would put smaller booksellers out of business. The opposite may be true. I remember my surprise when I talked to a small bookshop once a few years ago, and the owner talked passionately about how easy it was to sell books through Amazon, to get on its platform (a classic onramp for sales and continuing trust) and to sell against major retailers.</p>\n<p>Is it really off limits for IBM to buy into retail anyway? If IBM can buy a share in a Chinese bank, as it recently did, its clearly time to rethink what IBM is, and what risks it is prepared to take. </p>\n<p>Talking of risk, I would argue IBM is too risk averse at the moment. IBM is doing a great job of deepening its ties with the Fortune 500 - increasing its sales there at the expense of competitors. Collaborative innovation is great, and will earn IBM billions of dollars of revenues over the next few years. But would IBM ever foster the next YouTube or Twitter? I can’t see it.</p>\n<p>Grassroots developers don’t see IBM as a potential supplier. Sun is explicitly targeting startups at the moment, and next gen Web 2.0 datacenters.</p>\n<p>IBM R&D is now almost entirely large-enterprise customer driven, a massive change from the old days of invent it, sit back and watch someone else make the money on the idea. But this conservatism goes to far. After all - the big companies IBM will engage in collaborative innovation projects with are just too big to be truly innovative. Even Google is finding it hard to compete these days in some areas as it morphs into a BigCo - Twitter <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/\">handed Dodgeball a beating</a>. Twitter runs Ruby on Rails on Joyent which runs on Sun hardware. Wait a minute - anyone would think Sun had a plan… they should come up with a cool name for it, participation age or something, because its about helping people to participate in the network…</p>\n<p>IBM talked about On Demand then seemingly dropped it like a hot brick just as the concepts started to become reality. Amazon may not be making money on its On Demand offerings yet, but developers and startups are heading to <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/AWS-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_iw_l_0_3435361_2/104-2683505-7763102?ie=UTF8&node=3435361&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA\">Amazon Web Services</a> in droves. People blog their monthly payments to Amazon EC2 as a badge of honour. People argue that Amazon has <a href=\"http://atlantiscomputing.com/blog/2006/11/amazin_amazon_or_why_ec2_is_th.html\">removed the need for capacity planning</a>.</p>\n<p>How many IBM customers are like Gumiyo?</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Within three weeks, Gumiyo, an online mobile commerce provider, had a complete production environment running on the Amazon Web Services platform, including web servers, database servers, and load balancers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>So IBM could gain new SMB customers, a new and truly On Demand infrastructure for developers, and a new Business Process outsourcing capability. What’s not to like?</p>\n<p>Of course such an acquisition would entail significant risk. It would mean IBM changing its views on some things - but it would also be a swing to the reality of individual2enterprise network convergence. Sramana Mitra calls out the Extended Enterprise <a href=\"http://www.sramanamitra.com/blog/613\">thusly</a>: </p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The modern enterprise is no longer one, monolithic organization. Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Outsourcers, Distributors, Resellers, … all kinds of entities extend and expand the boundaries of the enterprise, and make “collaboration” and “sharing” important.</p>\n<p>Let’s take some examples. The Salesforce needs to share leads with distributors and resellers. The Product Design team needs to share CAD files with parts suppliers. <strong>Customers and Vendors need to share workspace often</strong>. Consultants, Contractors, Outsourcers often need to seamlessly participate in the workflow of a project, share files, upload information. All this, across a secure, seamlessly authenticated system.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Right now IBM is very well set up for selling to Enterprise 1.0. But selling to Enterprise 2.0 is going to mean selling to the active end-points, or at least having a conversation with them. IBM needs a ubiquity play. It needs an storage cloud play. With Amazon on board it would have these things. IBM would be part of the internet backbone, and that’s where it has to be.</p>\n\n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?a=eJ3epHzj\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?i=eJ3epHzj\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?a=ilytxBTD\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?i=ilytxBTD\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?a=LA8UwoPw\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JamesGovernorsMonkchips?i=LA8UwoPw\" border=\"0\"></a></div>"
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"title" : "Guns, Anti-Depressants, and the Massacre in Virginia",
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"content" : "In the United States, if you are seriously depressed, you can purchase anti-depressive drugs like Prozac, but only if you have a prescription from a doctor. Anti-depressants are enormously beneficial to millions of people but they are also potentially dangerous if used improperly. So, you have to see a doctor and get an assessment before you can go to a drug store and purchase one. <br><br>But in the United States, in places like Virginia, a seriously depressed or deranged person can walk into a store and buy a semi-automatic handgun and a box of ammunition. All you need is two forms of identification. You don’t need permission from a doctor or counselor or anyone in the business of screening people to make sure they’re fit to have a gun. <br><br>We can debate the relative benefits and dangers of anti-depressants and semi-automatic handguns, but if 30,000 Americans were killed each year by anti-depressants, as they are by handguns, anti-depressants would be even more strictly regulated. So why aren't handguns? Consider the politics. <br><br>The Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s Association is thought to be one of the most powerful lobbies in America. Years ago, it was illegal to advertise prescription drugs. Now, due in part to Big Pharma’s clout, our airwaves and magazines are filled with images of happy people who weren’t until their physician prescribed a pill. But Big Pharma still hasn’t been able to cut out the physician altogether because the process for screening people before they can buy an anti-depressant is just too important. <br><br>By contrast, the National Rifle Association -- with more money and organization than even Big Pharma -- has eliminated almost all screening measures for buying guns. In recent years, the NRA has even shielded gun dealers from liability. Not even Big Pharma and the powerful American Medical Association have managed to shield doctors from liability. <br><br>Look abroad and you have another useful point of contrast. In United States, many people who are seriously depressed can’t afford to see a doctor, let alone get a prescription. Unlike every other advanced nation, we do not provide universal health care, or ready access to mental health services. But unlike every other advanced nation, we do allow almost anyone buy a handgun."
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"title" : "Outsourcing my Feed Reading: Info Consumption with the del.icio.us network from PeopleOverProcess.com",
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"content" : "<blockquote><p>\nSome years back, I wrote a “Page Two” observing that <a href=\"http://www.drunkandretired.com/2006/07/17/though-you-are-dead-happy-birthday-hst/\">Hunter S. Thompson</a> had been the major literary influence on many letter-writers and would-be <a href=\"http://www.austinchronicle.com/\"><i>[Austin] Chronicle</i></a> contributors who submitted long, drug-fueled rants of run-on sentences stacked on each other as though that is <a href=\"http://proitalia.com/reviews/hst.html\">the way Thompson wrote</a>. Really, the only things most of these writers missed was his brilliant sense of style, writing skill, wit, intelligence, and inspiration. <i>–<a href=\"http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A465079\">Louis Black</a>, see also <a href=\"http://2007.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2007/03/14/bruce_sterling_s_sxsw_rant\">Bruce Sterling’s SXSW 2007 keynote</a>.</i>\n</p></blockquote>\n<p>As most folks in my line of work, I’m always thinking about my information consumption patterns. Over my online life, I’ve read BBSes, USEnet, hunted <a href=\"http://www.textfiles.com/\">text files</a> in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)\">Gopher</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server\">WAIS</a>, read the web, then blogs, then RSS, podcasts, video casts, email, IM…if there’s a digital way of representing “content,” I’ve tried to eat it.</p>\n<p>That “eating” is a continual process of re-fining and re-learning the best way to go about finding the best things to read and then converting them into my own content.</p>\n<p>The general problem is this: the allure of just “surfing” around is strong, be it in an RSS reader (where you make your own waves to surf) the “raw web,” your email inbox, IRC, IM, or any combination of those. Some may say that the problem is that there’s too much information. Instead, I think I just get charmed by the allure of surfing instead of <i>working</i> at consuming that content…with tools and systems that make it possible.</p>\n<p>A vital part of existing in this information sea is producing what I call “original content.” This is content that isn’t just a brain-storm bounce off something else. While original content can be kicked off by other content — all you English and Philosophy majors out there know this is how knowledge works across time — the point is that there are new ideas and perspectives, if only <i>judgments</i> in original content.</p>\n<p>As Bruce Sterling said <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/bushwald/brucesterling+system:media:audio\">in some podcast</a>, it’s easy and <i>fun</i> to sit around and “be a genius.” Actually producing something is the hard part.</p>\n<h2>Consume, Talk, Judge, Produce, GOTO “Consume”</h2>\n<p>This weekend, while Kim was slaving away for Freedom, I fiddled around with the below diagram:</p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/460253143/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/197/460253143_5e12c67b7c.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"377\" alt=\"Information-to-Content\"></a></p>\n<p>I went a little nuts there, but the key thing I started with was that top box, and it’s the topic for the rest of the below.</p>\n<h2>Reading Feeds</h2>\n<p>I’ve wanted to re-do the way I “read feeds.” Currently, I just have a pile of groups/folders with RSS feeds in them. I’ve got one for RedMonk stuff, one for my stuff, one for systems management, one for RedMonk customers, one for general code monkeyerier, one for news, etc. You can see <a href=\"http://share.opml.org/viewsharedfeeds/?user_id=3937\">a flattened list of my subscriptions over on my OPML.org page</a>.</p>\n<p>Over the past 3 weeks I’ve sort of been ignoring the feeds on a daily basis. About once a week, I’ll go in a whack through a bunch of them. I went from 7,000+ unread the 3,000+ (still!) this past Sunday.</p>\n<p>To me, this system is broken. I haven’t properly narrowed down and prioritized the feeds. The problem is, most feeds are of inconsistent priority. RedMonk feeds and my own are always top priority because they’re part of “me,” but other ones come and go in importance. I’ve been abusive towards all my friends feeds the most: you’d think I’d read those all the time, but I read them the least.</p>\n<p>Now, let me clarify something: the system is broken <i>for my need</i>, my <i>professional</i> need. That need is to find the smartest, coolest, most helpful posts and pointers for what’s going in the world of software and hi-tech in general. Then, as the diagram above shows, be part of the input for me producing content in the form of blog posts, conversations, or anything else.</p>\n<p>It’s not at all broken for me just wanted to have fun: I could spend all day just reading through all those feeds if all I wanted to do was entertain myself. But, my needs are in addition to entertainment. (And I’ve got all that damn travel and meeting planning to do as well ;>)</p>\n<p>So, I got to thinking: what’s a new approach?</p>\n<h2>del.icio.us network</h2>\n<p>My current theory, which I’ve yet to put into practice, is to find the top 10% feeds (screw that <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle\">80/20</a> hogwash! if the creationist wanted to piss off the Goddless, secular humanists, they outta ask how everything can so conveniently be split into 80/20…surely a Divine Intelligence must be behind such slashery) and just subscribe to those. Then, I’ll subscribe to <a href=\"http://del.icio.us/network/bushwald\">my del.icio.us network</a> which I’ve been slowly gardening over the past year or so.</p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/463153245/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/173/463153245_1f4274579f.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"439\" alt=\"del.icio.us/network/bushwald\"></a></p>\n<p>The del.icio.us network isn’t the wonderful <code>for:</code> thing I’ve mentioned before. Instead, it’s a way of:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>declaring, yet again, who your “friends” are in some web app (del.icio.us), and, more importantly</li>\n<li>aggregating all the bookmarks from said friends.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>I used to read my del.icio.us network <i>in addition</i> to all my feeds. But, as I got up to 20, 30, 50, now 72 people in my network, it was too much. In fact, it often gets up the 1,000’s of items before I whack at it.</p>\n<p>The thing is, all those bookmarks in my del.icio.us network are often awesome. My theory of why is this:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>People I “friend” in del.icio.us are often interested in several of the same things I am.</li>\n<li>If someone goes to the trouble to bookmark something in del.icio.us, it’s probably quite good. Otherwise, why bother?</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Now, it’s not a sure perfect system: there’re duplicates, and I don’t always care about some of the links. But, combined with the terse descriptions/commentary (hints of Twitter 140 character limits to updates here, eh? Eh?) I often find more usefulness and happiness in the del.icio.us network than my pile of feeds.</p>\n<h2>Other Sources</h2>\n<p>Now, there are other info sources:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/cote/with_friends\">Twitter</a> - you know this one is good for high value links and even original content. In fact, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/annez/statuses/31171281\">Anne reminded me of this topic this morning</a> via Twitter.</li>\n<li>Pulling - RSS heads are used to having information delivered to them. It’s time to repeat the cycle and go back to searching for items. I do this quite frequently now because I more often know what I want to read about rather than looking to stumble upon something. For example, <a href=\"http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2007/04/16/the-shackles-of-success-with-closed-vs-open-source/\">ColdFusion</a>. <a href=\"http://blogsearch.google.com/\">Google Blog Search</a>, <a href=\"http://news.google.com/\">Google News</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/search/\">Technorati</a> are good here. Search feeds are a sort of gray area; I’ve had happy success with search feeds with-in the context of my subscribed feeds.</li>\n<li>Aggregators - sites like <a href=\"http://www.techmeme.com/\">Techmeme</a>, <a href=\"http://reddit.com/\">reddit</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.digg.com\">The Mighty Digg</a>. I like looking at these when I’m bored, but their news is always a little more entertainment to me than “work reading.” Nothing wrong there at all! I look at Techmeme pretty frequently. But, I find that the items I’m interested in those streams show up in my del.icio.us network…so why duplicate the effort except when I want some entertainment?</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://redmonk.com/cote/2006/08/16/redmonk/\">IRC</a> and IM - I actually get a lot of good links and original content in IRC and IM. I’m thankful for all the people who take the trouble to IM with me or spend time chatting in <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">#redmonk</a> and <a href=\"javascript:void(0);\">#drunkandretired</a>. I’m sure SecondLife could be like this, but sorely need that light weight, wire-frame only TronMode: <i>at the moment</i> I’m just interested in the conversation, not the visuals…and my crotchety old PowerBook can’t quite take full rendering along with everything else I run.</li>\n</ul>\n<h2>Getting Started</h2>\n<p>Ironically, I feel the need to read through all my current feeds to get started with reading less feeds. Somehow I’ve gotta find those 10% of feeds that I must read.</p>\n<p>A large part of my job is keeping up with things, so I’m of course hesitant to screw around with The System I currently have, broken or no. It’s sort of <a href=\"http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2007/04/16/the-shackles-of-success-with-closed-vs-open-source/\">a person shackles of success problem</a>. But, hey, you know what I would advice someone else: dude, just do it…why assume you current system is any better?</p>\n<p>Allow me to ask you, though, dear readers, what do you think? Do you use the del.icio.us network? Something else other than straight up feed reading (even prioritized into “must read,” “maybe,” “dead to me” groups)?</p>\n<p><b>Disclaimer:</b> Adobe is a client, but I don’t only search around for info about their stuff.</p>\n<p>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/del.icio.us\" rel=\"tag\">del.icio.us</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/aggregators\" rel=\"tag\">aggregators</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/reading\" rel=\"tag\">reading</a>, <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tag/infoglut\" rel=\"tag\">infoglut</a></p>\n<p></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.redmonk.com/cote/?p=734&akst_action=share-this\" title=\"E-mail this, post to del.icio.us, etc.\">Share This</a>\n</p>\n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?a=SSvkd5xe\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?i=SSvkd5xe\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?a=yz8NgMTQ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?i=yz8NgMTQ\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?a=mgLzCSVe\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/cote?i=mgLzCSVe\" border=\"0\"></a></div></p>"
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"content" : "This is Part III of a four-part post.<br><br>In <a href=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/03/case-for-single-document-format-part-i.html\">Part I</a> we surveyed of a number of different problem domains, some that resulted in a single standard, some that resulted in multiple standards.<br><br>In <a href=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/03/case-for-single-document-format-part-ii.html\">Part II</a>, we described the forces that tend to unify or divide standards and showed in particular how network effects can drive the adoption of a single standard.<br><br>In this Part III we'll look at the document formats in particular, how we got to the present point, and how and why historically there has been but a single universally-accepted document format.<br><br>In Part IV, we'll tie it all together and show why there should be, and will be, only a single open digital document format.<br><br><h3>The Meeting</h3>It is 9:55 on an average Tuesday morning. I'm late (as usual) preparing for a meeting. With 5-minutes to go, I send out an updated meeting invite, with an updated agenda and a URL for the web conference. I also send out another email with an updated presentation attachment. It is the standard last-minute, pre-meeting shuffle that we all do. I expect that an examination of traffic statistics on IBM's email servers shows a spike 5-minutes before every hour, as we all send out last-minute meeting updates. I login to my web conference and dial into the call. I'll be meeting with my teammates, some in Westford, some in Raleigh, some in Portsmouth, some in Lexington, some in Dublin and some in Shanghai, a far-flung group. I've worked with some of these guys for years but still have never met most of them face-to-face. This is the nature of collaboration in a modern, global company. The call starts and I take a deep breath, push off my slippers and stretch my toes. Yes, I'm leading this meeting from home today.<br><br>\"Don't be impatient, Comrade Engineer; We've come very far, very fast\", in the words of Yevgraf Zhivago, Alec Guinness's character in <cite>Doctor Zhivago</cite>. Let's flash back 10 years ago and remind ourselves how we worked them...<br><br>It is 9:55 on an average Tuesday morning. I'm late (as usual) preparing for a meeting. With 5-minutes to go, I print out the agenda and handouts to the laser printer down the hall. It has printed by the time I arrive, and I sort through the three or four other print jobs to find the one that is mine. I need twelve copies for the meeting, so I join the queue at the photocopier, with everyone else who also waited to the last minute to print out the materials for their meetings. It is the standard last-minute, pre-meeting shuffle that we all do. I expect that an examination of statistics on IBM's photocopiers shows a spike 5-minutes before every hour. I head over to the conference room and start the meeting. At the end of the call, 80% of the printed materials will be discarded, hopefully into the recycling bin. This was the nature of collaboration in a modern, global company, circa 1995.<br><br>What has changed? Why did it change? What does this mean for document formats?<br><br><h3>My family in documents</h3>Let me take you on a detour, back in time, to tell a 200-year family story, illustrated with official documents of the period.<br><br>I'll start with the following excerpt from the 1930 Federal Census returns for Abington, Massachusetts, showing my grandmother, Florence Mae Cushing, then age 18, and her parents William and Mary, and household. The columns indicate the following:<br><ol><li>Name</li><li>Relationship to the head of household</li><li>Whether they own or rent their dwelling</li><li>Value of their dwelling</li><li>Whether they own a radio</li><li>Whether they own a farm</li><li>Sex</li><li>Race</li><li>Age</li><li>Marital condition</li><li>Age at first marriage</li><li>Whether they are in school<br></li></ol><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/William_E_1930_census.jpg\"><br><br>The thing that caught by eye about this record is that it lists a, \"Damon, Mary K\" as William's mother-in-law, widowed, age 73, living with them. Let's see what we can find out about this woman. First step is to find her maiden name. A search for her marriage record in Abington failed, so we tried for Mary E. Damon's birth record, which we did find in Abington's birth register for in 1887 revealing her mother's maiden name as, \"Chessman\":<br><br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Mary_Damon_Birth.jpg\"><br><br><br>This then allows us to find Mary K. Chessman's birth record, also in Abington, from 1856 listing her parents as Edward and Emily:<br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Mary_Chessman_birth.jpg\"><br><br>And then from here we can go back and find the family in the 1860 Federal Census:<br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Edward_1860_census.jpg\"><br><br>We see the family as owning $500 in real estate and $100 in personal property, having 5 children, the oldest 8 years old. Mary K. is only 3.<br><br>But when I skip ahead to the 1870 Census, something is clearly wrong:<br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Emily_1870.jpg\"><br><br>As you can see above, Emily is listed as head of household, and there is no Edward. And where is our Mary K? Age age 13, she has moved out and is working as a \"domestic servant\" with a family of factory workers. Her sister Harriet, age 15, is also living there and working in an \"eyelet factory\":<br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Manning_1870_census.jpg\"><br><br>So what happened? Resolving this mystery required a bit more sleuthing, but I eventually found the answer in a response to a records request to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA):<br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Sugeon_General.jpg\"><br><br><br>From this I learned that Edward Blanchard Chessman, Mary K's father, had served in the Civil War with the Massachusetts 32nd Volunteers and had died of disease in 1863 at a military hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. This along, with a dozen pages of additional documents from NARA, detailed the pension application of his widow, the depositions of witnesses who vouched for their marriage and his service, the periodic requests for pension increases, all the way to 1903 when Emily died and her pension file was closed, marked \"DEAD\" with a big, bold stamp.<br><br>Since I was now tipped off to the value of pension records, I next searched for Edward's grandfather, Ziba Chessman, who I knew had served in the Revolutionary War. I was able to locate his widow's pension application as well:<br><br><br><img src=\"http://www.robweir.com/blog/images/Ziba_Chessman.jpg\"><br><br><br>The hand of this writer is not so easy to read, but I'd transcribe the start of it as:<br><br><blockquote>Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Norfolk County. On this twenty second day of August 1838 personally appeared before Herman **** The *** of Probate in **** County, Mehitable Chessman a resident in the Town of Braintree in the County of Norfolk and state of Massachusetts aged seventy three years, who being first duly sworn according to law doth on her oath make the following declaration in order to obtain the benefit of the provision made by the Act of Congress passed July 7th 1838 entitled \"An Act Granting Half Pay and Pensions to Certain Widows\", that she is the widow of Ziba Chessman late of Braintree in the County of Norfolk and state aforementioned deceased, who was a Solider in the War of the Revolution; that her said husband Ziba Chessman enlisted into Captain Isaac Thayers or Captain Nathaniel Belchers Company in the year 1775 and served a short period of time as a private with the Massachusetts Militia, around the shores of Boston, according to the best of her knowledge....</blockquote><br>I am in awe that these records have been maintained and preserved for so long, and made available to people like me who are researching their family tree. There is a continuity of records in New England that goes back almost 400 years. Birth, education records, draft registration, military service, marriage, court appearances and eventually death and burial. Whenever your personal life crossed paths with the government, it generated a record and this record may last forever, and more importantly, once the physical preservation aspects are taken care of, these records can be read forever.<br><br><h3>A brief history of document technology</h3> It is somewhat odd that we've been debating document formats for so long and have not really said what they are. I'll recommend the following for our discussion:<br><br><blockquote>A document format consists of the conventions that allow a document to be fixed in a persistent state and then exchanged with other parties who are able to use these same conventions to read and further edit that document. If you and I understand the same document format, then you and I can exchange documents in that format and we can collaborate using that format.<br></blockquote><br>Since around 1450, with Gutenberg's first notable success of combining document production and automation, and even before (and since) with manual document production, there has been a single globally relevant interoperable document format — ink on paper. Everyone could create it, everyone could read it, everyone could exchange it. It worked then and it works now.<br><br>Some noticeable advances in documents since 1450 include the invention of pre-printed forms, around 1850. These seem obvious now, but for many years we had what were called \"formulary documents\" which had boilerplate text which the clerk wrote out in full for each document, in addition to the customized language for each specific instance. You can get a sense of this from Ziba Chessman's pension application quoted earlier. From an engineering perspective you can think of this as reuse of design, but not implementation.<br><br>Having a pre-printed form was a step forward in productivity, allowing a greater degree of reuse. The Surgeon General's form shown above is an early example. Such forms were quickly associated with bureaucracy . In fact, the first written use of the word \"form\" in the English language (according to the <cite>Oxford English Dictionary</cite>) was this critical view of a 19th century government office:<br><br><blockquote>The waiting-rooms of that Department soon began to be familiar with his presence, and he was generally ushered into them by its janitors much as a pickpocket might be shown into a police-office; the principal difference being that the object of the latter class of public business is to keep the pickpocket, while the Circumlocution object was to get rid of Clennam. However, he was resolved to stick to the Great Department; and so the work of form-filling, corresponding, minuting, memorandum-making, signing, counter-signing, counter-counter-signing, referring backwards and forwards, and referring sideways, crosswise, and zig-zag, recommenced — Dickens, <cite>Little Dorrit</cite> (1855)<br></blockquote><br>The telegraph (1837) and teletype (1910) gave new, faster ways of moving documents around. Was Morse Code a new document format? Although the telegraph operators may have worked in Morse Code, the author of the document, and the person who ultimately received and read the document still worked with ink on paper.<br><br>The typewriter (1872) increase the speed and uniformity of personal document production. This also lead to a new use for carbon paper, an invention of 1806 <a href=\"http://www.kevinlaurence.net/essays/cc.php\">originally created</a> as an aid for the blind.<br><br>In the late 1880's, Edison's \"Autographic Printing\" was commercialized as the Mimeograph, giving a cheaper method of small batch document production.<br><br>Melvin Dewey (of Dewey Decimal fame) invents the hanging file folder (1893), leading to increased efficiency of document storage and retrieval.<br><br>The <a href=\"http://www.harris.com/company-history.html\">Harris Automatic Press Company</a> is incorporated in 1895, ushering in the commercial use of offset printing and a 10-fold increase in document output rates.<br><br>The invention of the Soundex algorithm by Robert Russell of Pittsburgh in 1918 allowed more efficient searching of files and cards indexed by surnames, by grouping together names which were phonetically similar.<br><br>In 1924 radio facsimile allows pictures, as well as text, to be transmitted long distances.<br><br>In 1948 Xerography gave us document duplication without the use of wet, messy chemicals.<br><br>In 1969, IBM's Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie <a href=\"http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm\">invented GML</a>, the Generalized Markup Language, the ancestor of SGML, HTML and XML.<br><br>The 1970's saw the rise of the first computer-based word processors, including Wang's Office Information System.<br><br>In 1974 Xerox PARC engineers create Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor.<br><br>In 1975, with the rise of office automation systems and early word processors, Business Week boldly proclaimed the \"Paperless Office\".<br><br>At this point we reach an important fork in the road of history. What role would the computer and office automation mean for the future of documents? Does the paperless office become a reality? Or do we remain with paper-based documents? As Xerox PARC engineers were developing the world's first WYSIWYG word processor, at the same time they were also developing a system for transporting documents electronically, from one computer to another. But this innovation was dropped because it went against Xerox's core business, the creation and duplication of paper documents. So the choice was made. Paper still ruled. Paper consumption went up, not down. The word processor made it easier to produce more paper, faster. The paperless office did not happen, at least not yet. More first-hand details on this fascinating topic can be read in Sellen & Harper's <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMyth-Paperless-Office-Abigail-Sellen%2Fdp%2F026269283X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1177086034%26sr%3D8-1&tag=ananticdispos-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325\">The Myth of the Paperless Office</a><img src=\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ananticdispos-20&l=ur2&o=1\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:medium none!important;margin:0px!important\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\">. In their words, \"...paper became a surrogate for the network, enabling users with different machines to share documents...\".<br><br>And so we continued, for another 20 years, of WYSIWYG word processors, WordStar, MacWrite, Writing Assistant, Manuscript, WordPerfect, Word, WordPro, etc. We all created documents and hid the files away on our hard-drives in incompatible formats. When we needed to work with others we usually just printed out the document and exchanged the printout, using the 500-year old format of ink on paper.<br><br>Let's pause here and make some observations.<br><br>First, note the areas of sustained and recurring innovation. These have been consistent throughout the past 500 years and reflect the ongoing nature and practical concerns of business communications:<br><ol><li>Document authoring<br></li><li>Document duplication<br></li><li>Document distribution</li><li>Filling out of forms</li><li>Submission of forms</li><li>Processing of forms</li><li>Storage and Retrieval of documents</li><li>Authentication of documents (not mentioned in the history above, but the use of Notary Publics and corporate seals has facilitated this with ink and paper documents, in some forms back to ancient Rome.)<br></li></ol>Note also that the engineering progress and increases in efficiencies in these areas occurred without challenging the primacy of a single document format. The universality of ink and paper did not stifle innovation over these 500 years. On the contrary a single standard document format encouraged and focused innovation. We went from documents authored by pen, then set in moveable type, manually pressed, bound and distributed at the speed of a horse, to where we were circa 1995, when I authored documents on a computer, printed to a laser printer and then queued up at the photocopier to make copies of my agenda before the meeting started. Ink on paper — it was the standard document format for 500 years.<br><br>But of course, we don't work this way anymore. Something changed, very recently. I don't print out agendas any more. I send them via email. I don't print out reports and review them with a red pen in hand. I mark them up electronically. In fact, unless I need to sign it or staple a receipt to it, I don't print out anything. I think I can live out the remainder of my professional career on only 2 reams of paper.<br><br>What happened then to change this? Why is there less of an emphasis on printed output today? What does this mean for WYSIWYG? And what does this mean for document formats?<br><br>These questions and others when I finish up this series in Part IV.<br><br><hr>20 April 2007 — Another editing pass, tightening up the language, but still too long. Added link to \"The Myth of the Paperless Office\"."
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"content" : "<h3>Does anyone care?</h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/04/02/WS-Silliness\"><br>\nTim Bray:</a> \"This happens over and over. New WS-* spec submission, check. Insanely huge charter locking down the conclusion and ensuring a rubber-stamp outcome, check. Loads of dependencies on WS-standards, WS-drafts, WS-submissions, and other WS-handwaving, check. Resolute obliviousness to other technologies that address the same problem, check.\"</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://identityblog.burtongroup.com/bgidps/2007/04/proposed_wsfed_.html\">Burton Group:</a> \"The WSFED charter gives lip service to working on convergence with SAML 2.0. Like other commenters, we find this less than convincing; the WSFED charter's invitation to other standards committees looks like a passive-aggressive maneuver. It puts the onus on SAML 2.0, which has already been standardized, to come to WSFED on their terms and make changes to an established standard to accommodate features of a specification which was not developed in an open forum and is not yet a standard.\"</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/archives/2007/04/04/ws-federation-tc-roundup-and-thoughts/\">Eve Maler:</a> \"UPDATE: The telecon was held this morning. TC convener Paul Cotton responded to the collected comments by reading from a prepared text that gave the same answer 30 times: “Proposed response: no changes to the WSFED TC charter are required.” The sole exception was to accept the comment noting extraneous characters. Message received loud and clear\"</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://connectid.blogspot.com/2007/04/proposed-response.html\">Paul Madsen</a>: \"No change is required\"</p>\n\n<p>I read what Tim, Eve, Paul and The Burton Group had to say. The criticisms lacked bite. I found myself strangely unmoved, unsurprised, unshocked, unconcerned. I saw that a firestorm has not been lit across weblogs, as would have been the case not even a year ago. It seems that no-one cares anymore, and WSFED will be consigned to irrelevance and along with it, much of the promotion around WS-*. WS-* as a process, as a technical means designing systems , as a way to generate 'future business value' now lacks credibility. This has less to the do with the technology involved and more to do with how the technology has be presented to the market, and consequently how it has evolved.</p>\n\n<h3>The Business of IT is Business</h3> \n\n<p>This apathy is bad news for the handful of vendors and OSS communities who are at least trying to get something done with WS-*, instead of managing incumbent revenue streams via standardisation. It's bad news for those technologists, consultants and analysts who promoted WS-* years ago, and now have to quietly disassociate themselves or reframe the past as a great learning. It's bad news for those with deployed WS-* systems, who might be facing yet another re-architecting exercise in the coming years. </p>\n\n<p>The lessons to be learned from the heavy-handed promotion of WS-* are twofold. </p>\n\n<p>First, both enterprise software and services organisations need to rein in their marketing and sales divisions, as strange as that might sound. In essence, they need to stop promising miracles. What has happened with WS-* promotion, and what is happening with SOA is bad for the industry, bad for shareholder value. Customers will come to reject the vendor/analyst/consultant triumvirate if it comes to appear to be nothing more than a racket. In effect, that would be a rejection of the entire market. This helps no-one, least of all customers, dependent as they are on software and related services. More realistic approaches to the market need to be found - \"rip and replace\" of IT assets isn't a sustainable model (ironically WS-* in the beginning was about avoiding such expense).</p>\n\n<p>Second, and more important, one cannot cleave technology from business and expect good results in technological matters. This has afflicted the evolution of WS-* for years. There has been much talk since the dotbomb collapse about alignment and governance, yet what seems to have happened is that technology and delivery aspects have been given short shrift. In the meantime business people make uninformed technology bets that have to be honored with vigorish later by IT departments and project teams. The notion that the \"business of IT is business\", has been transformed into \"IT doesn't matter\", with the consequence that the valid concerns of IT people are not heeded. </p>\n\n<h3>IT is Business, Business is IT.</h3> \n\n<p>However good the slogan the \"business of IT is business\" might have sounded after the dotcom bubble, the gap has in fact widened. Critically the upkeep and maintenance of legacy systems has come to dominate business software spending. Most large enterprise IT divisions now have the equivalent of a pensions fund crisis, except that all the money is being spent on old systems instead of old people.</p>\n\n<p>In software projects, the devil is truly in the details. IT projects tend flounder not due to big picture issues. They fail due to the details of delivery, which leads to gross cost under-estimations and to project death spirals. Getting into details \"at another date\", one which is always deferred, cannot be therefor considered a sound approach to project risk. Nor can the diversion of funds to new grand projects based on new architectural precepts away from upkeep and modernisation of existing systems that literally \"run the enterprise\". </p>\n\n<p>By the same token, process models that encourage strong separation of software and business functions are arguably broken - just why can't your business analysts make initial assessments of the technical costs instead of drawing matchstick men? Why is it that VPs, well able to understand complex matters like logistics, options theory and even spreadsheet programming, get a pass when it comes to something conceptually simple like their intranet or email systems? The result is further cost and inefficiency as requirements and needs are transliterated back and forth between competing specialisations. That WS-* was pitched as an abstraction, as a way to not have to care about technical details has not helped.</p>\n\n<h3>What's next for IT?</h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://blog.labnotes.org/2007/03/30/rounded-corners-119/\">Assaf Arkin correctly observes</a> that REST is now the <a href=\"http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=regrep-rest\">\"cool by association\"</a> technology. That will be interesting - REST is technically grounded and puports to describe the as-is architecture of the Web. The grassroots that promote it and build in that style have made it clear they have no truck with the marketing spiel that currently surrounds WS-* and SOA. Indeed the growth and promotion of REST and Internet style has been done in sharp counterpoint to WS-* technologies. Expect a lot of people to get grilled, if not flamed, as they try and repurpose the REST label. Yet however curmudgeonly REST proponents like to act, some dilution seems inevitable, as has been the case with with business adoption of open source (both its software and its processes). And do not be surprised to see specific WS-* technologies and ideas with technical merit, such as SAML and payload encryption, make an appearance while the process that generated them is discarded. </p>"
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"title" : "Tartan and Turban",
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"content" : "<p>It’s not just Good Friday today, it’s also <a href=\"http://www.tartanday.org/\">National Tartan Day</a> so greetings and felicitations to all you national tarts out there. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.treklens.com/gallery/Asia/India/North/Himachal_Pradesh/photo55913.htm\"><img height=\"300\" hspace=\"20\" src=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/images/sikhbagpiperw%5B1%5D_1.jpg\" width=\"245\" align=\"right\" vspace=\"10\" border=\"0\"></a>I’ve been waiting for this day all year, and have managed to store up a large number of desi angles for this story, most of which, oddly enough are Sikh. The bagpiper at right is easy enough to explain - bagpipes came with the British army all over the world. It’s just a great image, as is <a href=\"http://www.vothphoto.com/recent/india%202004/images/gallery_1/India-2004-442.jpg\">this</a>.</p>\n\n<p>But the connections go far deeper than just bagpipes. For example, there is actually a Sikh Laird in Scotland, <a href=\"http://www.nls.uk/news/pop_ups/sirdar_iqbal_singh.html\">Baron Sirdar Iqbal Singh</a>, who commissioned his own family tartan:</p>\n\n<blockquote>Mr. Singh, 67, who lives in Little Castle, a turreted Elizabethan mansion in Lesmahagow, South Lanarkshire, and holds the title Lord of Butley Manor, Suffolk, said … “I remember thinking ‘I’m in Scotland, so why not have my own tartan?’” \n<p></p>\n<p>The new plaid, which is on display at Paisley Museum, incorporates the Singh family colour of blue, yellow for peace, green to represent the landed gentry and red as a tribute to Gertrude, his Swiss wife. [<a href=\"http://www.sikhspectrum.com/122002/tartan_scot.htm\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.sikhspectrum.com/122002/tartan_scot.htm\">Here</a> is the plaid as registered with the Scottish Tartans Society.</p>\n\n<p><p></p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p>The Baron is also a patron of the arts, having commissioned a series of paintings from the <a href=\"http://www.drumcroon.org.uk/Arch1/MRaga/arsingh.html\">Singh Twins</a>, two British sisters who combine Indian miniatures with western elements. <a href=\"http://www.salidaa.org.uk/salidaa/site/Collections?adlib_id=400001129&image_index=0\"><img height=\"300\" hspace=\"20\" src=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/images/st13-01%5B1%5D_1.jpg\" width=\"219\" align=\"right\" vspace=\"10\" border=\"0\"></a>At right is their image of the Baron, and you can see two other images from the same series <a href=\"http://www.salidaa.org.uk/salidaa/site/Collections?adlib_id=400001131&image_index=0\">here</a> and <a href=\"http://www.salidaa.org.uk/salidaa/site/Collections?adlib_id=400001126&image_index=0\">here</a>. [You can also see some of their more modern efforts <a href=\"http://www.drumcroon.org.uk/Arch1/MRaga/singhtwins/alover.html\">here</a> and <a href=\"http://www.drumcroon.org.uk/Arch1/MRaga/singhtwins/bdesire.html\">here</a>.] \n<p>But there’s far more to being Scottish than just the Baron. For example, there are various versions of <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003956.html\">Punjabi Haggis</a>!</p>\n\n<blockquote>By using an exotic blend of fresh tomatoes, green chilli and garam masala, the women of an Edinburgh community group believe their dish will appeal to Scots looking for a healthy alternative this Burns Night… <font style=\"background-color:rgb(255,210,189)\">They hit upon the idea of curried haggis while trying to come up with ways of making the traditionally high-fat Sikh diet healthier.</font> [<a href=\"http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=92482006\">Link</a>]</blockquote>\n\n<p>There’s also <a href=\"http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=92482006\">haggis pakoras and haggis curry</a>. </p>\n\n<p>How do the Scots feel about all of this masala fusion? Well, I can’t speak directly to their opinions on haggis pakora, but surprisingly enough for a group that is trying to assert its separate identity from that of England, Scots don’t feel that you have to be white to be Scottish:</p>\n\n<blockquote>More than half thought a “true Scot” had to be born in Scotland but <font style=\"background-color:#ffd2bd\">only 16% thought a “true Scot” had to be white</font>…. [<a href=\"http://korematsu.blogspot.com/2006/07/research-studies-race-attitudes.html\">Link</a>]</blockquote>\n\n<p>That said, they’re <a href=\"http://korematsu.blogspot.com/2006/07/research-studies-race-attitudes.html\">not equally welcoming to all desis</a>. They are even more negative towards Muslims than they are towards the English, although a majority felt that there should be a law banning discrimination against both!</p>\n\n<p>So just remember, for today at least, if it’s not Scottish it’s …. </p>\n\n<p>p.s. are these guys the next <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/tigerstyleonline\">Tigerstyle</a> or what? [I think this link came courtesy of Fuerza Dulce but I’ve forgotten now]</p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p><center><iframe src=\"http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/embediframe?src=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId%3D1950999456277658780%26hl%3Den&width=300&height=150&flashVars\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"></iframe></center></p>\n\n<p></p>\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/4107\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p></p></p>"
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"title" : "Last post from Doha: Five Stories",
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"content" : "<p>I’m walking out of the mall where I’ve bought a pineapple and two cans of soda. Sitting on a concrete road barrier in front of the mall is the long-haired guy with the Fu Manchu moustache. He was standing next to me half an hour ago as we watched the hockey game, and we traded a few words about the teams playing. I sit down, offer some pineapple, which he refuses, and ask him what he’s doing in Doha.</p>\n<p>He’s Filipino, and has been in Doha for a year, working as a glazier. He’s trying to decide whether to stay in Doha or to give Dubai a try. “I make 1200, but the contract says I get 1300 plus 200 for food. If I get that, I will stay.” To translate: that’s 1200 Qatari riyals a month, or $328. His job likely includes housing in a worker’s dorm and some food - he’s waiting for the bus to take him back to the dorm, for a riyal. The mall is a good source of cheap entertainment - there are hundreds of expat workers lining the ice rink as I watch expat Canadians crash into each other. </p>\n<p>“How much money do you send home?” I ask. I’ve already guessed the answer.</p>\n<p>“800 or 900 most months. More if I have overtime.” The money might be better in Dubai, he’s heard, but it can be more expensive to live. If he gets the raise, he’s staying in Qatar.</p>\n<p>I take a taxi to my next stop for eight riyals, or about $3… or about what my friend can spend a day and still send money home. The taxi passes the site of the Dubai Tower, which will be over 80 stories high. That’s a lot of glass to install.</p>\n<hr>\n<p>“How hot does it get in the summer in Qatar?” I ask a friend over dinner. </p>\n<p>“Officially, never over 50C. There’s a law on the books that says that laborers have to stop working if it’s over 50C. You’ll see the weather report hover at 49 degrees, but it never seems to go over 50.”</p>\n<p>50 centigrade is 122 farenheight. It’s not a dry heat. Doha is on the ocean, and humidity in the summer runs 80%. That’s “three steps and drenched in sweat” hot. </p>\n<p>“You can’t turn on your shower in the middle of the day in the summer. The sun will heat the water in the tank on your house to the point where you’ll burn.”</p>\n<p>We eat songbirds, deep fried and glazed in honey. They look like tiny chickens, and you eat them bones and all.</p>\n<hr>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanz/442576376/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/201/442576376_a3a1fbe195.jpg\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\" alt=\"Small mosque, Doha, Qatar\"></a></p>\n<p>I work out in the hotel gym and am getting dressed in the locker room. The Qatari men are changing in private cubicles to one side of the dressing room; North Americans and Euros are sitting on benches, pulling on socks, toweling their hair. The conversation touches on cars, car crashes, tennis lessons, the kid’s semester in France and to the best place for a contract.</p>\n<p>“Jim just got back from Amman, turned down a long-term there.”</p>\n<p>“That’s hard to believe. Amman’s as good as it gets in the Shell system. You can make more money in a place like Nigeria, but the quality of life isn’t as good. Or you can go somewhere with better quality of life, but the money’s not as good. Amman is as good as it gets as far as bang for the buck is concerned.”</p>\n<p>I lace my shoes, walk out of the locker room into the lobby of the health club. There’s a bar with Heineken and Guinness on draft, an italian restaurant, a pool table, signs for classes in yoga and karate. It’s packed with non-Arab families, the women playing tennis, the men shooting pool, the kids sitting on the stoop outside and horsing around. It’s a suburban country club, fifty paces from the Sheraton, inside the hotel walls.</p>\n<hr>\n<p>When I last came to Doha, I asked people where to go and what to do. Most of my friends recommended the City Center Mall. This year I ask what’s new. Everyone has the same response - a slightly blissed out expression on the face, and the reverent announcement, “There’s a new Virgin megastore.” </p>\n<p>It’s not the music - you can download that. And there are decent movie channels on the satellite. It’s the books. “Sometimes when I go to Europe, I go to a bookstore and just stand there, soaking in all those books for a little while. It feels good just to be near them.”</p>\n<p>This friend home-schools his kids, a good decision since the Australian-run school is now over-enrolled and it’s very difficult to get your kids a place there. “But it’s so hard to homeschool here. You have to order all the books from abroad. And it’s hard to take the kids places - there’s only one museum, and there are no libraries.”</p>\n<p>There are plans for a library, though. The largest library in the world. “It might have 10,000 copies of the same book,” another friend speculates, “but it will be the largest library in the world.”</p>\n<hr>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanz/94634851/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img src=\"http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/94634851_4cdba7aff5.jpg\" width=\"450\" alt=\"Satellite dishes at Al Jazeera HQ\"></a></p>\n<p>The Mercedes speeds down the Corniche, taking us to the airport, to a business and first-class terminal that’s entirely separate from the main terminal. (When you fly business class on Qatar airways you’re unlikely to see a coach passenger - they take a separate bus from a separate terminal and board at the rear of the plane.) We pass gleaming twenty-story buildings, the unfinished frames of forty-story buildings, signs announcing the future site of eighty-story buildings. </p>\n<p>Just before the turn to the airport, there’s a portrait of the Emir covering the front facade of a twenty story building. He’s got a confident look, a slight smile, the sort of glint in the eye that might come from knowing that you’ve got the world’s second largest supply of natural gas under your nation and a big US military base across town. Or maybe it’s a smile from the knowledge that much of the gas revenue is going into a vast investment portfolio, with the goal of ensuring that half the nation’s revenue comes from sources other than energy by 2015. Or from knowing that his visage will soon be dwarfed by even larger towers, built by Sri Lankan steelworkers and Filipino glaziers to house American oil companies.</p>\n<p>We turn toward the airport. Beyond the terminal buildings and runway, there’s nothing. Literally nothing. No buildings on the horizon, no features beyond sandy ground and the occasional rock. Nothing but potential.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanz/sets/72157600042080095/\">Photos from Qatar, March 2007</a>.<br>\n<a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanz/sets/72057594059073055/\">Photos from Qatar, February 2006</a>.\n</p>"
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"title" : "Las Drogas",
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"content" : "<p>This week NPR has been running a series on the “War against Meth ” as part of Morning Edition. These stories state that new laws restricting the retail sale of Sudafed — the same laws that gave birth to the “Operation Meth Merchant” prosecutions (see <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sepiamutiny.com%2Fsepia%2Farchives%2F001699.html&ei=3F8URt7NNpj0iAHUn-n0Ag&usg=__7GYodTaojN-HmqC83fE-dpeJRHQ=&sig2=MsFLkbLjKab0ejIxJ9jHfw\">1</a>, <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sepiamutiny.com%2Fsepia%2Farchives%2F002977.html&ei=3F8URt7NNpj0iAHUn-n0Ag&usg=__SD0bGJ1bkYinBIF7Pe_fUKkKksY=&sig2=cVO6jkHNQ5563K8f4kPfvA\">2</a>, <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sepiamutiny.com%2Fsepia%2Farchives%2F003654.html&ei=3F8URt7NNpj0iAHUn-n0Ag&usg=__tlcPqZpUWTYF869kZKgWUCmx4po=&sig2=Lbo86PWVETyJJ-miTKDmUQ\">3</a>, <a href=\"http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sepiamutiny.com%2Fsepia%2Farchives%2F003243.html&ei=3F8URt7NNpj0iAHUn-n0Ag&usg=__zwIwTyE5lfRHZaf8h3y0_N2Lves=&sig2=naXmKtB8OLFxSfOX0J-xcw\">4</a>) — have have been effective and meth production has drastically plummeted. With 44 states restricting the sale of various meth precursors, and a new federal law on the books:</p>\n\n<blockquote>The impact on meth labs was swift and dramatic, especially in the Midwest, where meth makers were especially prolific. Meth lab seizures are down 55 percent in Missouri, 73 percent in Iowa and Kansas and 88 percent in Nebraska [<a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9193186\">Link</a>]</blockquote>\n\n<p>However, with a decline in domestic meth production has come an increase in imports of more dangerous crystal meth from Mexico:</p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>Meth seizures at California’s ports of entry rose 40 percent in the last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Meth seizures at the border at El Paso, Texas, jumped 479 percent since 2002. [<a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9310479\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>The Mexican government recently recovered more than $205 million from a safe house in Mexico City as part of a crackdown. Interestingly enough, they found the safe house while trying after busting a company importing pseudoephedrine … from India:</p>\n\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right:0px\">\n<p>Prosecutors said the raid was part of an investigation into a pharmaceutical company suspected of <font style=\"background-color:#ffd2bd\">importing chemicals to make the drugs from India</font>. The investigation began with the seizure of 19.5 metric tons of pseudoephedrine in the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, they said. [<a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6459301.stm\">Link</a>]</p></blockquote>\n\n<p>So US cops are blaming Indians for supplying American meth producers and Mexican cops are blaming Indians for supplying Mexican meth producers. We’re lucky that in Canada they’re just <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/001876.html\">blaming</a> <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003258.html\">Indians</a> <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/000205.html\">for</a> <a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/001243.html\">bhang</a>. <img src=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/images/wink.gif\" border=\"0\"></p>\n\n\n\n<p></p><p><b>Who linked:</b></p>\n<i><a href=\"http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/cgi-bin/mt/mt-linkers.cgi/4103\">T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link</a></i><p></p>"
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"title" : "A melancholy moment",
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/wp-content/photos/flag480.JPG\" alt=\"the Congolese flag on a battle-damaged wall\"><br>\n<small>The flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo</small></p>\n<p>I spent much of Tuesday at a funeral of a man who had spent his entire working life in the Congo’s neglected justice system. It had been postponed for a few days, due to urban combat, martial law, etc. (I heard about a wedding which went ahead last Saturday, though.)</p>\n<p>The mass took place on a dusty football pitch not far from Lumumba’s statue (the family could not afford a church service). Around the perimeter, various food stalls were doing business. Grubby canvas awnings provided limited protection from the fierce heat and glare of the sun. The choir was good, but the microphones were not. The person who was due to give the elegy rang to say he was stuck in traffic, so someone else had to step in and improvise by reading out the deceased man’s CV, and exclaiming ‘Amen!’ a lot. </p>\n<p>There was also an official ceremony, attended by a minister and the city governor, both of whom had more armed police protection than usual. The proper location for this event could not be used because it had been burned and looted in <a href=\"http://www.thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/?p=418\">November</a>, and further damaged last week by inept tank gunners.</p>\n<p>The coffin was draped with the Congolese flag, and after the address there was a ripple of disapproval and embarrassment when wreathes were laid in the wrong order. I have never heard such a gloomy rendition of the national anthem. Behind me, a man answered his phone and said, ‘My condolences. Where is the wake? I’ll try to come this evening.’</p>\n<p>The cortège proceeded to the cemetery, without the usual <a href=\"http://www.thiswayplease.com/extra-extra/?p=472\">fanfare</a>. Mourners crowded around the grave, clambered on tombstones for a better view, and took turns to scatter artificial flowers onto the coffin. I could not hear what was said, and did not see what was written on the headstone.</p>\n<p>A group of builders laughed about something as they looked on from a nearby rooftop. Under the banana trees, boys were selling water in plastic sachets. As I shook hands with some of the departing mourners, I was both there, and not there.\n</p>\n\n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=0d8qfRvG\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=0d8qfRvG\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=Xzj8Z2rc\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=Xzj8Z2rc\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?a=SkzCqVJM\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/extra-extra?i=SkzCqVJM\" border=\"0\"></a></div>"
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"content" : "<p>\n<a href=\"http://dannyayers.com/\">Danny Ayers</a> responds, via his post titled:\n<a href=\"http://dannyayers.com/2007/03/30/sampling\">Sampling</a>, to "Stefano Mazzochi's post about <a href=\"http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/101/\">Data Integration using Semantic Web Technologies</a>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>"There is a potential problem with republication of transformed data, in that right away there may be inconsistency with the original source data. Here provenance tracking (probably via named graphs) becomes a must-have. The web data space itself can support very granular separation. Whatever, data integration is a hard problem. But if you have a uniform language for describing resources, at least it can be possible."<br>\n</p>\n<p>Alex James also chimes in with valuable insights in his post: <a href=\"http://www.base4.net\">Sampling the global data model</a>, where he concludes:</p>\n<blockquote>"Exactly we need to use projected views, or conceptual models. '\n<p>\nSee a projected view can be thought of as a conceptual model that has some mapping to a *sampling* of the global data model.</p>\n\n<p>The benefits of introducing this extra layer are many and varied: Simplicity, URI predictability, Domain Specificity and the ability to separate semantics from lower level details like data mapping.</p>\n\n<p>Unfortunately if you look at today’s ORMs you will quickly notice that they simply map directly from Object Model to Data Model in one step.</p>\n\n<p>This naïve approach provides no place to manage the mapping to a conceptual model that sampling the world’s data requires.</p>\n\n<p>What we need to solve the problems Stefano sees is to bring together the world of mapping and semantics. And the place they will meet is simply the Conceptual Model."</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Data Integration challenges arise because the following facts hold true all of the time (whether we like it or not):</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Data Heterogeneity is a fact of life at the intranet and internet levels </li>\n<li>Data is rarely clean</li>\n<li>Data Integration prowess are ultimately measured by pain alleviation</li>\n<li>A some point human participation is required, but the trick is to move human activity up the value chain</li>\n<li>Glue code size and Data Integration success are inversely related</li>\n<li>Data Integration is best addressed via "M" rather than "C" (if we use the MVC pattern as a guide. "V" is dead on arrival for the scrappers out there)</li> \n</ol>\n<p>In 1997 we commenced the <a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso/\">Virtuoso</a> Virtual DBMS Project that morphed into the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuoso_Universal_Server\">Virtuoso Universal Server</a>; A fusion of DBMS functionality and Middleware functionality in a single product. The goal of this undertaking remains alleviation of the costs associated with Data Integration Challenges by Virtualizing Data at the Logical and Conceptual Layers.</p>\n<p>The Logical Data Layer has been concrete for a while (e.g Relational DBMS Engines), what hasn't reached the mainstream is the <a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/weblog/public/search.vspx?blogid=127&q=conceptual%20data%20model&type=text&output=html\">Concrete Conceptual Model</a>, but this is changing fast courtesy of the activity taking place in the realm of RDF.</p>\n<p>RDF provides an Open and Standards compliant vehicle for developing and exploiting Concrete Conceptual Data Models that ultimately move the Human aspect of the "Data Integration alleviation quest" higher up the value chain. </p>\n\n\n</blockquote>"
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"title" : "The Cell Phone",
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"content" : "<p><img width=\"166\" height=\"248\" alt=\"thecellphone.gif\" src=\"http://www.fadetoplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/thecellphone.gif\">I am reading <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Cell-Phone-Anthropology-Communication/dp/1845204018/ref=sr_1_1/103-3597389-7673440?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174665701&sr=8-1\">The Cell Phone</a> (2006) by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller. It is a detailed ethnography of the mobile phone in Jamaica, focusing primarily on the low income inhabitants. It is a insightful window into the Jamaican culture to help provide a context to mobile phone usage.</p>\n<p>I was fortunate at breakfast today to chat with <a href=\"http://www.afuacooper.com/\">Afua Cooper</a>, she was a guest in my <a href=\"http://www.greencollege.ubc.ca/\">residence</a> while here at UBC as the keynote for a conference. As she immigrated from Jamaica and is still quite connected to the island, she was able to provide additional information about the availability of landlines with the rural areas of Jamaica and about how mobile phones are been integrated into society. Apparently, some people have more than one phone, one is used to make long-distance calls, while the other is for local numbers.</p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1845204018&printer=yes&\">Description</a><span></span></p>\n<div>The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the trans-national family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. <em>The Cell Phone</em> presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone’s role in everyday lives.</div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>Author Bio</div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>Heather A. Horst is Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for New Media, University of California Berkeley. Daniel Miller teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Relevance: This book is helping me understand my own West Indian background as well as provide some clarity regarding mobile technology within a developing country. Regarding technology, I wonder about the extent to which the Internet is used in schools and in the home outside of the urban areas or how common laptops are.</p>\n<div>Technorati Tags: <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/\"> </a><a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/mobile+phone\">mobile+phone</a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/ubicomp\">ubicomp</a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/jamaica\">jamaica</a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/developing+country\">developing+country</a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/culture\">culture</a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/ethnography\">ethnography</a></div>"
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"title" : "Cutting the little guy some slack",
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"content" : "<p>Societies cut small actors some slack. We don’t expect children, visitors, etc. to adhere to the regulations in the same way we expect those who are closer to the core of the community. There are plenty of reasons for this. For example the small actors are so numerous. We license plumbers, but we don’t attempt to regulate home owners who might engage in a bit of weekend remodeling. It’s not just cost, it’s also ethical. We have a lot of sympathy for those on the periphery. We are all on somebody else’s periphery. We have all been young, sick, stupid, etc. We know that the periphery is a source of innovation. We know that small actors are often the only ones who can afford to speak truth to power.</p>\n<p>Where a society draws the line on it’s regulatory frameworks is open to negotiation. My town doesn’t allow home owners to do their own plumbing. I’ve a friend who bought a house from a dentist. The house features numerous repairs done with dental cement. I love that story. It always make me think of home dentistry, or home schooling.</p>\n<p>The line between the well regulated systems in a society and the slack we cut small actors creates interesting market dynamics. Herbalife can outsource it’s criminal advertising to it’s small business partners. Ebay continually struggles with how to regulate it’s vast hordes sellers, some percentage of which are criminal and taint the reputation of the market it owns. UPS can abuse the parking ticket system.</p>\n<p>The parking ticket system is particularly nice because the society negotiates a price for violations of the regulatory system. That price is set, in part, to cut the small actors some slack. When San Francisco sets the price of parking ticket I doubt they were thinking about a fortune 500 firm abusing the system and were more thinking about the typical citizen breaking the rule as they run into pickup some take out the bought from a small business.</p>\n<p>Since these things are negotiable they shift over time and you can shop around for a venue who’s regulatory cut points serve your needs. Firms do that all time. Jane Jacob’s pointed out years ago that as firms mature they become less dependent on the pool of services that an urban venue provide and that in turn enables them to move to lower cost, less regulated, venues. That goes the other way, too. Walmart emerged in a near zero regulated environment. As it has moved into more regulated environments it sometimes adapts, and sometimes it uses it’s market power to renegotiate the rules.</p>\n<p>The internet’s effect our our society is rife with these dynamics!</p>\n<p>It changes fundamentally the cost of keeping an eye on the small actors and their behavior. It’s big-brother’s best friend.</p>\n<p>It has also enabled the aggregation of contributions from huge populations of small actors. Google, ebay, wikipedia, open source, are only a few of the example of new institutions that it has enabled all of which work by plucking value out of the activities of small actors. You could argue that the bot-nets are another example of large actors coopting the hard to regulate small actors.<br>\nThis posting was triggered by another example of a place where you can see a price placed on the license we grant to small actors to push the boundaries of the regulatory frameworks. I.e. <a href=\"http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/archives/internet-radio-copyright-royalty-board-releases-decision-rates-are-going-up-significantly.html\">this posting</a> about how the music copyright holders are trying to tighten up their regulation of the small internet broadcasters. It’s a facinating case, in part, because some of the tiny broadcasters are just like the small businesses that herbalife leverages. Acting in the role of herbalife in this varient are the companies that offer to host the tiny (aka personal) internet radio services. I.e. consider this sentence “The minimum fee is $500 per channel per year. There is no clear definition of what a “channel” is for services that make up individualized play-lists for listeners.”\n</p>"
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"title" : "Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services",
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"content" : "<blockquote>\n<cite><p>(Via <a href=\"http://www.readwriteweb.com/\">Read/Write Web</a>.)</p>\n\n<p>\n<a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/102869973/web_30_when_web_sites_become_web_services.php\">Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services</a>: "</p>\n.....\n<h2>Conclusion</h2>\n\n<p>As more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into\nboth a platform and the database. Yet, such transformations are never smooth. For one,\nscalability is a big issue. And of course legal aspects are never simple.'</p>\n\n<p>But it is not a question of <i>if</i> web sites become web services, but <i>when</i>\nand <i>how</i>. APIs are a more controlled, cleaner and altogether preferred way of\nbecoming a web service. However, when APIs are not avaliable or sufficient, scraping is\nbound to continue and expand. As always, time will be best judge; but in the meanwhile we\nturn to you for feedback and stories about how <i>your</i> businesses are preparing for\n'web 3.0'.</p>\n</cite>\n</blockquote>\n<p>\nWe are hitting a little problem re. Web 3.0 and Web 2.0, naturally :-)\n\nWeb 2.0 is one of several (present and future) <a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/?id=1037\">Dimensions of Web Interaction</a> that turns Web Sites into Web Services Endpoints; <a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/weblog/public/search.vspx?blogid=127&q=web+dimensions\">a point I've made repeatedly</a> [<a href=\"http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/points_of_prese.php\">1</a>] [<a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/?date=2005-10-04\">2</a>] [<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&oldid=11544998\">3</a>] [<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&oldid=11679210\">4</a>] across the blogosphere, in addition to my early futile attempts to make the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2\">Wikipedia's Web 2.0 article</a> meaningful (circa 2005), as per the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Web_2.0/Archive_1\">Wikipedia Web 2.0 Talk Page </a>excerpt below:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <cite><p>Web 2.0 is a web of executable endpoints and well formed content. The executable endpoints and well formed content are accessible via URIs. Put differently, Web 2.0 is a web defined by URIs for invoking Web Services and/or consuming or syndicating well formed content.</p>\n\n<p>Hopefully, someone with more time on their hands will expand on this ( I am kinda busy)</p>.\n\n<p>BTW - Web 2.0 being a platform doesn't distinguish it in anyway from Web 1.0. They are both platforms, the difference comes down to platform focus and mode of experience.</p>\n </cite>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>\n<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0\">Web 3.0</a> is about <a href=\"http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/?id=1030\">Data Spaces</a>: Points of Semantic Web Presence that provide granular access to Data, Information, and Knowledge via <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_schema\">Conceptual Data Model</a> oriented Query Languages and/or APIs.</p>\n\n<p>The common denominator across all the current and future Web Interaction Dimensions is HTTP. While their differences are as follows:</p>\n\n<ul>\nWeb 1.0 - Browser (HTTP + (X)HTML)\n</ul>\n<ul>\nWeb 2.0 - Presence (Web Service Endpoints for REST or SOAP over HTTP)\n</ul>\n<ul>Web 3.0 - Presence (Query Languages, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_model\">Data Models</a>, and HTTP based Query Oriented Web Service Endpoints)\n</ul>\n\n<p>Examples of Web 3.0 Infrastructure:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Query Languages: <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/\">SPARQL</a>, <a href=\"http://code.google.com/apis/base/query-lang-spec.html\">Googlebase Query Language</a>, <a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fql\">Facebook Query Language</a> (FQL), and many others to come</li>\n<li>Query Language aligned Web Services (Query Services): <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/\">SPARQL Protocol</a>, <a href=\"http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/overview.html#About\">GData</a>, or REST style Web services such as<a href=\"http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&method=fql.query\"> Facebook's service for FQ</a>L.</li>\n<li>Data Models: Concrete Conceptual Data Model (which RDF happens to deliver for Web Data)</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Web 3.0 is not purely about Web Sites becoming Web Services endpoints. It is about the "M" (Data Model) taking it's place in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller\">MVC pattern</a> as applied to the Web Platform.</p>\n\n<p>I will repeat myself yet again: </p>\n<blockquote>\n<cite>The Devil is in the Details of the Data Model. Data Models make or break everything. You ignore data at your own peril. No amount of money in the bank will protect you from Data Ignorance! A bad Data Model will bring down any venture or enterprise, the only variable is time (where time is directly related to your increasing need to obtain, analyze, and then act on data, over repetitive operational cycles, that have ever decreasing intervals). </cite>\n</blockquote> <p>This applies to the Real-time enterprise of Information and/or knowledge workers and Real-time Web Users alike.</p>\n<p>BTW -<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/xHWTLA8WecI\"> Data Makes Shifts Happen</a> (spotter: <a href=\"http://www.vecosys.com\">Sam Sethi</a>). </p>"
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"content" : "<p>Dear Logitech:\n\n<p>I'm looking forward to using your \"cordless presenter,\" especially because of its willingness to vibrate in my hand five or ten minutes before my allotted time. I've liked your other pointing devices as well, and over the years have bought dozens of 'em. It's true.\n\n<p>But it's going to take me a while to buy another because you seem so determined to keep me from using them.\n\n<p>I just cut my thumb opening the clear plastic Fortress of Solitude in which you've packed the cordless presenter. The presenter is a wee bit of electronics, not much bigger than, say, my middle finger, but you've got it wrapped in a plastic package that neither scissors nor Xacto can penetrate. You forced me into stabbing your product with a carving knife. Is that really the sort of \"initial user experience\" you were hoping for? And once you have managed to slice it open, the plastic separates into twin sharpened blades designed to un-man intruders.\n\n<p>Here are things that are easier to open than your packaging:\n\n\n<blockquote><p><img src=\"http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/lilbutton.gif\" border=\"0\"> An unripe, fused pistachio shell\n\n<p><img src=\"http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/lilbutton.gif\" border=\"0\"> A coconut on a nude beach\n\n<p><img src=\"http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/lilbutton.gif\" border=\"0\"> A new CD \n\n<p><img src=\"http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/lilbutton.gif\" border=\"0\"> A space-time portal\n\n<p><img src=\"http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/lilbutton.gif\" border=\"0\"> A delicious vegan fast-food place</p></p></p></p></p></blockquote>\n\n<p>Please remove the pitbulls and razor wire from around your products. And if you don't believe me, do us all a favor: Have your CEO try to open one of your packages. (No executive assistants allowed!)\n\n<p>Thank you.\n\n<p>A Bandaged Customer <p><font style=\"font-size:80%\">[Tags:<a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tags/marketing\" rel=\"tag\"> marketing</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tags/packaging\" rel=\"tag\"> packaging</a> <a href=\"http://www.technorati.com/tags/logitech\" rel=\"tag\"> logitech</a>]</font></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.randsinrepose.com/assets/tiger.jpg\" align=\"right\" width=\"240\" height=\"240\" vspace=\"7\" hspace=\"7\" border=\"0\" alt=\"rands quote\">I've had two compliments on my shoes today. They're black and white sneakers and unless I'd asked a friend for help I would've never bought them</p>\n\n<p>Key Rands deficiency: I'm fashion impaired. Always have been. It's not that I don't care what I look like, it's that I have no basic fashion sense. I don't know what pants go with what shirts. I know that one color in my tie should match some other color in my outfit, but I couldn't tell you why that's important. I think a sweater and a sweatshirt are the same thing. Really.</p>\n\n<p>My clothing impairment has followed me into my writing. Stuffed into a tired cardboard box in the garage are two books that you're unlikely to ever read. One is called to <em>To God and Back Again</em> and the other is called <em>The Culpeper Switch</em>. A consistent piece of feedback from female friends who read chapters of these books was, \"So, is your protagonist's girlfriend a stripper?\"</p>\n\n<p>\"No.\"</p>\n\n<p>\"Well, she dresses like one.\"</p>\n\n<p>Fashion escapes me and after more than thirty years of confusion, I know I need help.</p>\n\n<p><b>Fashion Impaired</b></p>\n\n<p>I'm writing a book. Third time is, apparently, the charm.</p>\n\n<p>I should be saying that I'm editing a book because a good chunk of \"Managing Humans\" comes from this very weblog, but therein lies the point of this article. If you write, you need to understand three things:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>the difference between the role of the writer and the editor</li>\n<li>why an editor is essential to your writing, and</li>\n<li>how it's the editor's responsibility to prevent the world from know you're fashion impaired</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>How do I know this? Well, as I mentioned, there are two books gathering dust in the garage right now. When I say \"book\", I do mean 100+ page efforts with a beginning, middle, and end. Yes, with each book I fully intended to find a publisher and inflict my poorly garbed stripper girlfriends on the world. But, here I am, five years after I scribed the last chapter of Culpeper and it never saw a single publisher. This is because neither of these books ever saw an editor.</p>\n\n<p>Writing is a solitary act. Writers' jobs are to sit in front of our computers late at night and struggle to tell a story to someone who is not there. This is a quiet, insular task, which temporarily removes us from the planet. That's what the act of creation is; a silent belief that what you have to say is relevant when you're mostly just throwing your ideas out there and praying. </p>\n\n<p>If your goal is to write for yourself, you can stop right here. Keep on journaling; taking time to write down your thoughts forces you to take another look at the crap in your head and I can't see how that isn't mentally healthy.</p>\n\n<p>If your goal is to create and write for others, you need to understand that once the initial creative act of writing is complete, you need to ask someone for help.</p>\n\n<p>You need an editor.</p>\n\n<p><b>Here's Why</b></p>\n\n<p><b>They are distinctly not you. </b> Writers operate under the assumption that these words we string together silently while sitting in the coffee shop are relevant. We need this assumption, otherwise nothing would ever be written down. But the simple fact is: our writing might be crap. </p>\n\n<p>Your editor has no such addiction to your words and your ideas. They are a neutral party.</p>\n\n<p><b>They remind you that your writing is not fragile.</b> Perhaps my biggest early psychological hang-up regarding my writing was the idea that the words that came out of my fingers were perfect. There was a reason they showed up in the way that they did and messing with the original structure was tantamount to saying, \"If you can't get it right the first time, why write at all?\" I'd like to think this was an attitude of youth, but looking back at early Rands articles it's clear I was still under the impression that the first draft was the only draft. </p>\n\n<p>A good editor will perform major reconstructive surgery on your writing. The first time you experience this, you'll freak because, like me, you'll be unable to separate yourself from the writing and it will feel like mental surgery. Breath deeply. Keep the first draft of your piece and constantly compare it to the current draft. See how your idea is becoming clearer? That's your editor doing two things. First, they can throw away greatness because they don't get hung up on a word or a phrase. Second, they can reveal greatness by throwing away all the crap and extraneous detail that's burying it. </p>\n\n<p>Your editor's neutral perspective regarding your entire piece allows them to see the greatness of the whole.</p>\n\n<p><b>They see your intent.</b> This neutral perspective allows them to ignore what you think are essential parts of your writing. There's your three-page preamble where you explain to the reader why you're qualified to write on whatever topic you're writing about. There's your four-page irrelevant background, which you think helps make your point, but really just says the same thing twice. This article has two beginnings, by the way, and I can hear my editor telling me, \"When are you going to get to the point?\"</p>\n\n<p>Editors can't hear your inner dialog, but they can see when your dialog is spilling all over the pages and getting in the way of what you're trying to say. </p>\n\n<p><b>They inform you of the rules, but allow you to enforce them.</b> There was a lot of experimentation going on in the early Rands pieces, what with the endless... ellipses... and FunkyUpperCamelCasing. As I've edited pieces into the book, my editor has provided insight into when creativity is art and when creativity is just plain annoying. The end result has been chapters that, I believe, stay true to the Rands tone, but will appeal to a broader set of people.</p>\n\n<p>I'm a fan of riffing on language, grammar, and punctuation, but my advice is that of my editor: is your bleeding edge creativity getting in the way of what you're saying? The rules were developed for a reason. An editor can teach you the art of a semicolon and the bliss of a properly applied em dash because breaking rules when you know them is more elegant and readable.</p>\n\n<p><b>It Begins with a Hard Request</b></p>\n\n<p>I don't know how you're impaired. </p>\n\n<p>What I need out of an editor is likely different than what you need, but I'll say the same thing I say to my engineering teams. Each set of eyeballs that stare at an idea increase the value of the idea. Finding someone who is willing to impartially read your writing, discern your intent, provide constructive information, and remind you of the rules is hard, but finding this person means you've chosen not to write for yourself, but for everyone else. </p>\n\n<p>Finding an editor and figuring out whether sneakers go with slacks starts the same way as a request of someone you trust, and the request is, \"I need help\". These people are few and far between. You're going to need to try many different editors on to see which one fits, because I believe the relationship between a writer and an editor is as important as the relationship between a writer and his words. <br>\n</p>"
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"title" : "Urban Infrastructure",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/07104\">strategy+business</a> writes: \"The world’s urban infrastructure needs a $40 trillion makeover. Here’s how to reinvigorate our electricity, water, and transportation systems by integrating finance, governance, technology, and design.\"<br>\n<blockquote><br>\nCairo, Los Angeles, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Tokyo, Washington, Sao Paulo: Each major city has its own story of electricity, transportation, or water systems in crisis. Although the circumstances vary from one urban area to the next, they all have one thing in common: The critical infrastructure that is taken for granted by both their citizens and their government leaders is technologically outdated, woefully inadequate, increasingly fragile, or all of the above. In some cities, the quality of water, power, and transportation infrastructure is noticeably declining. In others, it was never very good to begin with. And few cities have enough of it to meet future needs.</blockquote></p>\n\n<p>An estimate developed by Booz Allen Hamilton suggests the magnitude of the problem. Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of the world will require approximately $40 trillion — a figure roughly equivalent to the 2006 market capitalization of all shares held in all stock markets in the world. <br>\n</p>"
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"title" : "An Army of Martha Mitchells",
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"content" : "<a href=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rff4J5bbblI/AAAAAAAAADI/TkhDbmiJRSI/s1600-h/martha_mitchell.jpg\"><img style=\"FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0pt 10px 10px 0pt\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://bp3.blogger.com/_7gV4Wr6Pczs/Rff4J5bbblI/AAAAAAAAADI/TkhDbmiJRSI/s400/martha_mitchell.jpg\" border=\"0\"></a>Some bloggers just don't understand how journalism works. Back in mid-January <a href=\"http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002329.php\">TPM Muckraker</a> an offshoot of Joshua Micah Marshall's <a href=\"http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/013019.php\">Talking Points Memo</a> began writing that U. S. attorneys were being fired by the Bush Administration and tried to make a big deal out of it. Although most journalists paid no attention to the hysteria the bloggers were trying to whip up about what Attorney General Alberto <a href=\"http://themoderatevoice.com/media/blogging/alberto-gonzales-and-hewas-on-the-list-for-supreme-court/\">Gonzalez</a> would later call an \"<a href=\"http://volokh.com/posts/1173809592.shtml\">overblown</a> personnel matter,\" <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Time</span> magazine's Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Jay Carney took time out of his busy day to patiently mock Marshall.<br><br>\"Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!\" Carney <a href=\"http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/running_massacre.html\">wrote</a>. \"Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist.\" Though <a href=\"http://mediamatters.org/items/200703030005\">Carney</a> admitted, \"It's all very suspicious sounding,\" he pointed out that Marshall had no proof. Marshall was basing his claims on the <a href=\"http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070112-9999-1n12lam.html\">complaints</a> of one disgruntled district attorney, Carol Lam, who claimed her firing jeopardized investigations into the Duke Cunningham scandal, and the vague charges of Senator Dianne Feinstein who is clearly a partisan. Besides nothing about the story had appeared in the <a href=\"http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/012991.php\">Drudge Report</a> and journalists are bound by the rules of journalistic ethics to ignore rumors unless they appear there first.<br><br>Of course, journalists don't have the time or resources to investigate every suspicious rumor. If they did that, they wouldn't have time to report the news. And if their confidential sources in the <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301839.html\">White House</a> thought that journalists were looking into something that might make them look bad, they would stop leaking to journalists, which would make reporting the news impossible.<br><br>But Marshall and his reporters, who apparently don't have anything better to do and may be slightly unstable, kept pushing this story until another U.S. Attorney, David Iglesias, went public with his suspicions about why he was fired. But even then Carney remained <a href=\"http://www.mahablog.com/2007/03/13/five-stages/\">steadfast</a>, <a href=\"http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/03/note_from_underground_1.html\">writing</a> skeptically, \"If Iglesias names names, and others tell similar stories, I will take my hat off to Marshall and others in the blogosphere and congratulate them for having been right in their suspicions about this story from the beginning.\" Of course, he still wasn't prepared to waste his valuable time looking into the matter himself and he couldn't resist getting in a little dig at bloggers, pointing out that \"Suspicions aren't facts,\" which bloggers apparently don't realize because they didn't go to journalism school.<br><br>Now <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11sun1.html\">Gonzalez</a> has been forced to <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/washington/13attorneys.html\">admit</a> that \"<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/14/AR2007031400519.html\">mistakes</a> were made\" although he didn't <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/12/AR2007031201818.html\">know</a> anything about them. He pointed out that there are 110,000 people <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301509.html\">working</a> in the Justice Department and he can't possibly know what they are all up to. Unlike bloggers, Attorneys General and Time correspondents have real <a href=\"http://blog.reidreport.com/2007/03/why-is-this-man-still-in-his-job.html\">jobs</a> and they can't be <a href=\"http://www.blah3.com/article.php?story=20070303140359650\">expected</a> to know everything.<br><br>Nevertheless, Carney made good on his promise to take his hat off to Marshall, no doubt relieved that he didn't say that he would <a href=\"http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/hats-off-in-swamp-by-digby-jay-carney.html\">eat his hat</a>. Just in case anyone thought that Carney just sat on his hands and let bloggers do all the work, he also <a href=\"http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/03/where_credit_is_due.html\">revealed</a> that he actually made a few calls. \"I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were 'concerned,' but this was not a priority.\" Without the cover of being able to report that Democrats were suspicious and looking into the allegations, Carney knew that he couldn't take the risk of looking into them himself so he was forced to publicly doubt they were true so that <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">Time</span>'s reputation wouldn't be damaged. \"The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire,\" Carney admitted magnanimously.<br><br>Now because of one blog and despite the determined <a href=\"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/03/us_attorney_firing_scandal/\">efforts</a> of Jay Carney and other mainstream journalists, the <a href=\"http://hypnocrites.blogspot.com/2007/03/department-of-just-us.html\">Justice</a> Department is in <a href=\"http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/009383.php\">disarray</a>. I don't need to tell you how <a href=\"http://parentheticalremarks.blogspot.com/2007/03/world-turned-upside-down.html\">dangerous</a> it is to have resources diverted to <a href=\"http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/2007/03/07/when-the-marquis-de-gonzalez-attacks/\">defending</a> the <a href=\"http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/11/schumer-gonzales/\">embattled</a> Attorney General and away from fighting terrorists. I hope that Marshall and other bloggers will realize how <a href=\"http://patterico.com/2007/03/14/5953/la-times-tries-to-make-a-mountain-out-of-the-molehill-of-e-mails-on-the-us-attorney-firings/\">reckless</a> their actions have been and will learn some valuable lessons from this episode. They need to learn how journalism really works and to understand what drives modern journalism you have to go all the way back to the Watergate scandal, which many bloggers are too young to remember.<br><br>After Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, he told <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs80eBGYlM\">David Frost</a> in an interview, \"If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate.\" <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Beall_Mitchell\">Martha Mitchell</a> was the wife of Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell. Before the Watergate scandal broke, she began calling reporters late at night and telling them that her husband was engaged in illegal activities. Reporters, of course, didn't believe anything she said and tried to help her by telling her husband what she was doing. He had her locked away and leaked a story to the press that she had a \"drinking problem.\" The character of Martha Logan in the television series <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">24</span> is based on her so you can see why no one believed her and why she was so dangerous.<br><br>Although some blame for Watergate must also go to Mark Felt, the disgruntled FBI employee who has since been revealed as Woodward and Bernstein's source Deep Throat, it was Mitchell's indiscretions that first put the poisonous idea in the heads of reporters that our own government can't be trusted, which ultimately weakened our country. Just as people working for Gonzalez tried to stop U.S. attorneys from talking to reporters by threatening to release damaging information about them, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Mitchell\">John Mitchell</a> tried to stop T<span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">he Washington Post</span> from writing about Watergate by warning, \"[Post Publisher] Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published.\"<br><br>Regrettably, <span style=\"FONT-STYLE:italic\">The Washington Post</span> went ahead with the story anyway. In the wake of Watergate laws were passed limiting what the government could do. Because of these laws government officials were barred from using all of the resources necessary to protect our country. So Mitchell was partly responsible not only for damaging the credibility and the power of the U.S. government for years to come but possibly even 9/11. It has taken years of painstaking work by the Bush Administration to restore some of the credibility and power the government lost after Watergate through laws like the Patriot Act. If one delusional, alcoholic woman, who just happened to be right in this one instance, can do so much damage despite the concerted effort of many reporters not to believe her, think what damage an army of Martha Mitchells could do. To journalists that's what bloggers are--an army of Martha Mitchells.<br><br>The idea of an army of Martha Mitchells is terrifying to reporters. Sure, Josh Marshall and other bloggers happened to be right on this one story, just as Martha Mitchell turned out to be correct despite the fact that she was a delusional drunken gossip. But that shouldn't tempt the Jay Carneys of the world to pick up the phone the next time one of these Martha Mitchells calls and tries to put subversive ideas in their heads. I think Carney and other reporters realize the damage Watergate did to this country and they are trying to undo it by returning journalism back to where it was before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ruined it. Unfortunately, there is an army of Martha Mitchells out there constantly ringing up journalists in the middle of the night, waking them up when they are trying to sleep.<br><br><b>Share This Post</b><br><br><a title=\"blinkbits\" href=\"http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&title=\"><img alt=\"blinkbits\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinkbits.png\"></a> <a title=\"BlinkList\" href=\"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&Title=\"><img alt=\"BlinkList\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/blinklist.png\"></a> <a title=\"del.icio.us\" href=\"http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&title=\"><img alt=\"del.icio.us\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/delicious.png\"></a> <a 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href=\"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&title=\"><img alt=\"Spurl\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/spurl.png\"></a> <a title=\"TailRank\" href=\"http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&title=\"><img alt=\"TailRank\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/tailrank.png\"></a> <a title=\"YahooMyWeb\" href=\"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html&=\"><img alt=\"YahooMyWeb\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/yahoomyweb.png\"></a> <a href=\"http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?turl=http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/03/army-of-martha-mitchells.html\"><img title=\"RawSugar\" height=\"20\" src=\"http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d156/jonswift/btn_small-rawsugar.png\" width=\"20\" border=\"0\"></a><br><br>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jon+Swift\" rel=\"tag\">Jon Swift</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Alberto+Gonzalez\" rel=\"tag\">Alberto Gonzalez</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Joshua+Micah+Marshall\" rel=\"tag\">Joshua Micah Marshall</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Talking+Points+Memo\" rel=\"tag\">Talking Points Memo</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/TPM+Muckraker\" rel=\"tag\">TPM Muckraker</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Jay+Carney\" rel=\"tag\">Jay Carney</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Time+Magazine\" rel=\"tag\">Time Magazine</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Justice+Department\" rel=\"tag\">Justice Department</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Terrorism\" rel=\"tag\">Terrorism</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Bush\" rel=\"tag\">Bush</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Nixon\" rel=\"tag\">Nixon</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Martha+Mitchell\" rel=\"tag\">Martha Mitchell</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Washington+Post\" rel=\"tag\">Washington Post</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Politics\" rel=\"tag\">Politics</a><div>Fair and balanced commentary from a modest and reasonable conservative.</div>"
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"content" : "<p><img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/adequatebiscuits_danlockton.jpg\" alt=\"Sainsbury's Basics Nice biscuits, well, adequate anyway\"></p>\n<p>Both <a href=\"http://www.idiolect.org.uk/notes/\">Dr Tom Stafford</a> (co-author of the fantastic <em><a href=\"http://mindhacks.com/\">Mind Hacks</a></em> book & blog) and <a href=\"http://www.dotgrex.com/\">Gregor Hochmuth</a> (creator of <a href=\"http://www.zoo-m.com/\">FlickrStorm</a>, an improved Flickr search system) have been in touch suggesting <strong>packaging/portion sizes</strong> as a significant everyday architecture of control, (or at least an aspect of design which has a major impact on consumers’ behaviour, and can be used to change it), and pointing to articles on the work of <a href=\"http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_content/wansink.htm\">Professor Brian Wansink</a>, of Cornell University’s Food & Brand Lab.</p>\n<p>From the <em><a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/dining/11snac.html?ei=5090&en=6db47e82fe1ce6e2&ex=1318219200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print\">New York Times</a></em>:</p>\n<blockquote><p>Dr. Wansink… probably knows more about why we put things in our mouths than anybody else. His experiments examine the cues that make us eat the way we do. The size of an ice cream scoop, the way something is packaged and whom we sit next to all influence how much we eat. His research doesn’t pave a clear path out of the obesity epidemic, but it does show the significant effect one’s eating environment has on slow and steady weight gain.</p>\n<p>In an eight-seat lab designed to look like a cozy kitchen, Dr. Wansink offers free lunches in exchange for hard data… His research on how package size accelerates consumption led, in a roundabout way, to the popular 100-calorie bags of versions of Wheat Thins and Oreos, which are promoted for weight management. Although food companies have long used packaging and marketing techniques to get people to buy <strong>more food</strong>, Dr. Wansink predicts companies will increasingly use some of his research to help people <strong>eat less</strong> or eat better, even if it means not selling as much food. He reasons that companies will make up the difference by charging more for new packaging that might slow down consumption or that put seemingly healthful twists on existing brands. And they get to wear a halo for appearing to do their part to prevent obesity.</p></blockquote>\n<p>This bit is especially interesting to me (as an improvised-gadget kind of guy):</p>\n<blockquote><p>Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness. People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. </p></blockquote>\n<p>More on that <a href=\"http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/full/13/1/93\">here</a>, though sadly no pictures.</p>\n<p>The British Psychological Society’s <em><a href=\"http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/01/mindless-eating-food-decisions-we-dont.html\">Digest</a></em>, mentioning Wansink’s work, focuses further on the ‘visual cues’ aspect: it appears that even when the serving is larger than normal in plain sight (as opposed to a deceptive bowl), the size of the portion still does not cause people to stop when they think they’ve had enough rather than when the bowl or plate ‘tells them’ they’re finished:</p>\n<blockquote><p>In four field studies, the researchers measured the amount eaten by 379 participants, half of whom were served with a particularly large bowl or plate of food. <strong>The participants given the extra-large servings ate an average of 31 per cent more food than the control participants</strong>. But crucially, just 8 per cent of them said afterwards that they thought they’d eaten any more than they would usually do. When told they’d been given an extra-large portion, 21 per cent continued to deny they’d eaten any more than usual, and of those who accepted they had eaten more than usual, only 4 per cent attributed this to the large plate or bowl their food had come in, with most others saying they’d eaten so much because they were hungry.</p>\n<p>“This hesitancy to acknowledge one being influenced by an external cue is common and has even been found when people are presented with tangible evidence of their bias”, the researchers said… “Altering one’s immediate environment to make it less conducive to overeating can help us lose weight in a way that does not necessitate the discipline of dieting or the governance of another person”.</p></blockquote>\n<p>Of course, there are some other aspects to consider. There is certainly a tendency to eat what’s put in front of you because it’s perceived as bad manners not to, and there’s the extra tendency to try to ‘please’ the person running the experiment, but both of those assume that the participant <em>realises</em> there is more food than he or she would normally eat. Yet the above findings suggest that people <em>genuinely don’t know how much they’ve eaten</em> (relative to a ‘normal’ serving).</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/fruittins.jpg\" alt=\"Morrisons Peaches and Sainsbury's Mango Puree\"></p>\n<p><strong>Implications for designers</strong></p>\n<p>The simplistic implication is that people will eat what they’re given. If you make the packet size 20% larger, people will (probably) eat 20% more in one sitting. If Burtons made <a href=\"http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/biscuits/previous.php3?item=64\">Wagon Wheels a little smaller</a> each year (that’s a <a href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A244919\">UK reference</a>, but I’m sure there are equally well-known versions of the idea worldwide), it will take a while before anyone notices that the portion is smaller. </p>\n<p>But there are clearly limits to this, or at least a point where the consumer consciously thinks either “hang on, I’d better not eat all that in one go,” or “that wasn’t enough - I’ll have another one.” We all know this experience. Looking at the photo above, I’d happily eat two of those little tins of peaches in one go, but I’ve never got round to opening that big tin of mango purée as I can’t see that I’d eat it all in one go (if I were with someone else, I might share it). </p>\n<p>Between those upper and lower bounds, though (which of course will differ from culture to culture, and person to person), there must be a size range within which changes are either not noticed by the consumer, or not cared about enough to cause any change in behaviour:</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/packaging-sizes_01.png\" alt=\"Number of portions required to feel full versus portion size\"><br><em>I’ve no real evidence for this, of course, other than my own perceptions and a general inspiration by the Wansink quotes above, but the central section of the graph, at least, seems fairly clear. For smaller and larger portions, the amount a consumer would eat at a sitting (to feel ‘full’) could either also be constant (over another interval) or have some proportionality to size, depending on the context. For example, if the package/portions in question were something easily re-sealable, or easy to store, a consumer might eat from it proportionally to size, perhaps opening it again at different times, but if the package pretty much has to be eaten all in one go, or shared, to avoid spoilage, then the relationship might be a constant.</em></p>\n<p>So, if this model holds, a packaging/portion size reduction from the upper bound of the central interval to the lower bound may actually not affect the consumer’s behaviour. If he or she is used to eating the whole packet in one go, he or she will still eat the whole packet in one go, and still feel ‘full’ to the same extent. <strong>Thus, reducing packaging/portion sizes within a certain range (the most common sizes, probably) is a sensible way of gradually, subtly, reducing people’s food intake</strong> (equally, raising them within the range would have the opposite effect, again without consumers noticing so much). </p>\n<p>This is not too dissimilar from the phenomenon of <a href=\"http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01738.x\">unit bias</a>, of course - “<a href=\"http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2006/06/power-of-one-why-larger-portions-cause.html\">Consumption norms promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a single unit is the proper portion</a>“, but it’s important to remember the ‘within a certain range’ qualification. A tiny bowl of soup, despite being a ‘unit’, will not fool anyone.</p>\n<p>One question which does arise from thinking about packaging and portion sizes is to what extent established sizes (weights, volumes) have affected consumers’ habits. Is it coincidence that, say, a typical bag of crisps (potato chips) in the UK used to be 1 oz (around 28g), and that that’s about the portion that most people ate in one go? In the last ten years though, cheaper brands have reduced to 25g or less, and premium brands escalated up to 38g or 45g - and yet still people eat one packet at a time, even when it may be almost double the weight of another. When the default size of spirit measures in pubs has gradually risen from 25 ml (down from 1 fl oz previously?) up to 35 ml or even doubles (50 ml) unless the customer specifies otherwise, this must have an effect on consumers’ behaviour. Most people do not spend double the time drinking a 50 ml measure that they do a 25 ml measure. They drink it in perhaps a few seconds longer, yet have imbibed double the amount of alcohol. (Equally, <a href=\"http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2006/01/beware-short-wide-glasses.html\">the shape of glasses affects perceptions of liquid quantity</a> - more of Prof Wansink’s research.)</p>\n<p>Hence, this <strong>choice of default</strong> can have a major effect on behaviour, and is surely a powerful control technique in itself, as <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/11/09/design-approaches-for-shaping-behaviour-sticks-and-carrots/#comment-15827\">an anonymous commenter on a previous post explained very well</a>.</p>\n<p><img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/digestives_2.jpg\" alt=\"McVitie's Digestives forcing function\" height=\"202 px\" width=\"225 px\"> <img src=\"http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/images/digestives_3.jpg\" alt=\"McVitie's Digestives forcing function\" height=\"202 px\" width=\"225\"></p>\n<p>We’ve looked in some detail before at <strong><a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/07/09/forcing-functions-designed-to-increase-product-consumption/\">packaging designed to increase consumption of the product</a></strong>, such as (perhaps) the McVitie’s packet shown above, where in practice the first five biscuits will often be eaten by the person who opens the packet, since the tear-strip is positioned so far down. Odd sized portions were a significant point of comment here - <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/07/09/forcing-functions-designed-to-increase-product-consumption/#comment-1888\">dishwasher & washing machine tablets</a>, <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/07/09/forcing-functions-designed-to-increase-product-consumption/#comment-2079\">increase in standard wine glass sizes</a>, <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/07/09/forcing-functions-designed-to-increase-product-consumption/#comment-8601\">Actimel bottles and large yoghourt pots</a> were all mentioned as being in this category.</p>\n<p>To some extent, then, the sizing of packaging and portions ought to be considered a <a href=\"http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/?page_id=6#forcing\"><strong>forcing function</strong></a> alongside more obvious physical behaviour-shaping constraints. It could, in fact, be a very important way of promoting (forcing?) healthier eating.</p>\n<p>(Incidentally, there’s a fascinating discussion <a href=\"http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2006/11/26/brian-wansink-on-research-design/\">here</a> between Prof. Wansink and Berkeley’s Prof. Seth Roberts on ‘cool data’, i.e. designing and planning experiments and studies to attract maximum attention and interest whilst still being scientifically worthwhile. Wansink seems to have mastered that without descending into <a href=\"http://www.badscience.net/?cat=67\">pseudoscience</a>.)</p>\n<p>(P.S. My apologies to both Tom and Gregor for the delay in posting about this)\n</p>"
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"content" : "<p><i>Intro: I was part of a group of people asked by Beth Noveck to advise the <a href=\"http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/\">Community Patent review project</a> about the design of a reputation and ranking system, to allow the widest possible input while keeping system gaming to a minimum. This was my reply, edited slightly for posting here.</i></p>\n\n<p>We’ve all gone to school on the moderation and reputation systems of Slashdot and eBay. In those cases, their growing popularity in the period after their respective launches led to a tragedy of the commons, where open access plus incentives led to nearly constant attack by people wanting to game the system, whether to gain attention for themselves or their point of view in the case of Slashdot, or to defraud other users, as with eBay.</p>\n\n<p>The traditional response to these problems would have been to hire editors or other functionaries to police the system for abuse, in order to stem the damage and to assure ordinary users you were working on their behalf. That strategy, however, would fail at the scale and degree of openness at which those services function. The Slashdot <span>FAQ </span>tells the story of trying to police the comments with moderators chosen from among the userbase, first 25 of them and later 400. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade, however, even hundreds of committed individuals were just cannon fodder, given the size of the problem. The very presence of effective moderators made the problem worse over time. In a process analogous to more roads creating more traffic, the improved moderation saved the site from drowning in noise, so more users joined, but this increase actually made policing the site harder, eventually breaking the very system that made the growth possible in the first place.</p>\n\n<p>EBay faced similar, ugly feedback loops; any linear expenditure of energy required for policing, however small the increment, would ultimately make the service unsustainable. As a result, the only opportunity for low-cost policing of such systems is to make them largely self-policing. From these examples and others we can surmise that large social systems will need ways to highlight good behavior or suppress negative behavior or both. If the guardians are to guard themselves, oversight must be largely replaced by something we might call intrasight, designed in such a way that imbalances become self-correcting. </p>\n\n<p>The obvious conclusion to draw is that, when contemplating the a new service with these characteristics, the need for some user-harnessed reputation or ranking system can be regarded as a foregone conclusion, and that these systems should be carefully planned so that tragedy of the commons problems can be avoided from launch. I believe that this conclusion is wrong, and that where it is acted on, its effects are likely to be at least harmful, if not fatal, to the service adopting them.</p>\n\n<p>There is an alternate reading of the Slashdot and eBay stories, one that I believe better describes those successes, and better places Community Patent to take advantage of similar processes. That reading concentrates not on outcome but process; the history of Slashdot’s reputation system should teach us not “End as they began — build your reputation system in advance” but rather “Begin as they began — ship with a simple set of features, watch and learn, and implement reputation and ranking only after you understand the problems you are taking on.” In this telling, constituting users’ relations as a set of bargains developed incrementally and post hoc is more predictive of eventual success than simply adopting any residue from previous successes. </p>\n\n<p>As David Weinberger noted in his talk <em>The Unspoken of Groups</em>, clarity is violence in social settings. You don’t get 1789 without living through 1788; successful constitutions, which necessarily create clarity, are typically ratified only after a group has come to a degree of informal cohesion, and is thus able to absorb some of the violence of clarity, in order to get its benefits. The desire to participate in a system that constrains freedom of action in support of group goals typically requires that the participants have at least seen, and possibly lived through, the difficulties of unfettered systems, while at the same time building up their sense of membership or shared goals in the group as a whole. Otherwise, adoption of a system whose goal is precisely to constrain its participants can seem too onerous to be worthwhile. (Again, contrast the US Constitution with the Articles of Confederation.)</p>\n\n<p>Most current reputation systems have been fit to their situation only after that situation has moved from theoretical to actual; both eBay and Slashdot moved from a high degree of uncertainty to largely stable systems after a period of early experimentation. Perhaps surprisingly, this has not committed them to continual redesign. In those cases, systems designed after launch, but early in the process of user adoption, have survived to this day with only relatively minor subsequent adjustments. </p>\n\n<p>Digg is the important counter-example, the most successful service to date to design a reputation system in advance. Digg differs from the community patent review process in that the designers of Digg had an enormous amount of prior art directly in its domain (Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Metafilter, et al), and still ended up with serious re-design issues. More speculatively, Digg seems to have suffered more from both system gaming and public concern over its methods, possibly because the lack of organic growth of its methods prevented it from becoming legitimized over time in the eyes of its users. Instead, they were asked to take it or leave it (never a choice users have been know to relish.) </p>\n\n<p>Though more reputation design work may become Digg-like over time, in that designers can launch with systems more complete than eBay or Slashdot did, the ability to survey significantly similar prior art, and the ability to adopt a fairly high-handed attitude towards users who dislike the service, are not luxuries the community patent review process currently enjoys.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The Argument in Two Pictures</strong></p>\n\n<p>The argument I’m advancing can be illustrated with two imaginary graphs. The first concerns plasticity, the ease with which any piece of software can be modified.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://shirky.com/plasticity.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Plasticity generally decays with time. It is highest at the in the early parts of the design phase, when a project is in its most formative stages. It is easier to change a list of potential features than a set of partially implemented features, and it is easier to change partially implemented features than fully implemented features. Especially significant is the drop in plasticity at launch; even for web-based services, which exist only in a single instantiation and can be updated frequently and for all users at once, the addition of users creates both inertia, in the direction of not breaking their mental model of the service, and caution in upgrading, so as not to introduce bugs or create downtime in a working service. As the userbase grows, the expectations of the early adopters harden still further, while the expectations of new users follows the norms set up by those adopters; this is particularly true of any service with a social component. </p>\n\n<p>An obvious concern with reputation systems is that, as with any feature, they are easier to implement when plasticity is high. Other things being equal, one would prefer to design the system as early as possible, and certainly before launch. In the current case, however, other things are not equal. In particular, the specificity of information the designers have about the service and how it behaves in the hands of real users moves counter to plasticity over time.</p>\n\n<p><img src=\"http://shirky.com/specificity.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>When you are working to understand the ideal design for a particular piece of software, the specificity of your knowledge increases with time. During the design phase, the increasing concreteness of the work provides concomitant gains in specificity, but nothing like launch. No software, however perfect, survives first contact with the users unscathed, and given the unparalleled opportunities with web-based services to observe user behavior — individually and in bulk, in the moment and over time — the period after launch increases specificity enormously, after which it continues to rise, albeit at a less torrid pace. </p>\n\n<p>There is a tension between knowing and doing; in the absence of the ideal scenario where you know just what needs to be done while enjoying complete freedom to do it (and a pony), the essential tradeoff is in understanding which features benefit most from increased specificity of knowledge. Two characteristics that will tend to push the ideal implementation window to post-launch are when a set of possible features is very large, but the set of those features that will ultimately be required is small; and when culling the small number of required features from the set of all possible features can only be done by observing actual users. I believe that both conditions apply <em>a fortiori</em> to reputation and ranking.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Costs of Acting In Advance of Knowing</strong></p>\n\n<p>Consider the costs of designing a reputation system in advance. In addition to the well-known problems of feature-creep (“Let’s make it possible to rank reputation rankings!”) and Theory of Everything technologies (“Let’s make it Semantic Web-compliant!”), reputation systems create an astonishing perimeter defense problem. The number of possible threats you can imagine in advance is typically much larger than the number that manifest themselves in functioning communities. Even worse, however large the list of imagined threats, it will not be complete. Social systems are degenerate, which is to say that there are multiple alternate paths to similar goals — someone who wants to act out and is thwarted along one path can readily find others.</p>\n\n<p>As you will not know which of these ills you will face, the perimeter you will end up defending will be very large and, critically, hard to maintain. The likeliest outcome from such an a priori design effort is inertness; a system designed in advance to prevent all negative behavior will typically have as a side effect deflecting almost all behavior, period, as users simply turn away from adoption. </p>\n\n<p>Working social systems are both complex and homeostatic; as a result, any given strategy for mediating social relations can only be analyzed in the context of the other strategies in use, including strategies adopted by the users themselves. Since the user strategies cannot, by definition, be perfectly predicted in advance, and since the only ungameable social system is the one that doesn’t ship, every social system will have some weakness. A system designed in advance is likely to be overdefended while still having a serious weaknesses unknown the designer, because the discovery and exploitation of that class of weakness can only occur in working, which is to say user-populated, systems. (As with many observations about the design of social systems, these are precedents first illustrated in Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat, in the sections “Don’t Trust Anybody” and “Detailed Central Planning Is Impossible, Don’t Even Try”.) </p>\n\n<p>The worst outcome of such a system would be collapse (the Communitree scenario), but even the best outcome would still require post hoc design to fix the system with regard to observed user behavior. You could save effort while improving the possibility of success by letting yourself not know what you don’t know, and then learning as you go. </p>\n\n<p><strong>In Favor of Instrumentation Plus Attention</strong></p>\n\n<p>The N-squared problem is only a problem when N is large; in most social systems the users are the most important N, and the userbase only grows large gradually, even for successful systems. (Indeed, this scaling up only over time typically provides the ability for a core group, once they have self-identified, to inculcate new users a bit at a time, using moral suasion as their principal tool.) As a result, in the early days of a system, the designers occupy a valuable point of transition, after user behavior is observable, but before scale and culture defeat significant intervention. </p>\n\n<p>To take advantage of this designable moment, I believe that what Community Patent needs, at launch, is only this: metadata, instrumentation, and attention.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Metadata</strong>: There are, I believe, three primitive types of metadata required for Community Patent — people, patents, and interjections. Each of these will need some namespace to exist in — identity for the people, and named data for the patents themselves and for various forms of interjection, from simple annotation to complex conversation. In addition, two abstract types are needed — links and labels. A link is any unique pair of primitives — this user made that comment, this comment is attached to that conversation, this conversation is about those patents. All links should be readily observable and extractable from the system, even if they are not exposed in the interface the user sees. Finally, following Schachter’s intuition from del.icio.us, all links should be labelable. (Another way to view the same problem is to see labels as another type of interjection, attached to links.) I believe that this will be enough, at launch, to maximize the specificity of observation while minimizing the loss of plasticity.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Instrumentation</strong>: As we know from collaborative filtering algorithms from Ringo to PageRank, it is not necessary to ask users to rank things in order to derive their rankings. The second necessary element will be the automated delivery of as many possible reports to the system designers as can be productively imagined, and, at least as essential, a good system for quickly running ad hoc queries, and automating their production should they prove fruitful. This will help identify both the kinds of productive interactions on the site that need to be defended and the kinds of unproductive interactions they need to be defended from.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Designer Attention</strong>: This is the key — it will be far better to invest in smart people watching the social aspects of the system at launch than in smart algorithms guiding those aspects. If we imagine the moment when the system has grown to an average of 10 unique examiners per patent and 10 comments per examiner, then a system with even a thousand patents will be relatively observable without complex ranking or reputation systems, as both the users and the comments will almost certainly exhibit power-law distributions. In a system with as few as ten thousand users and a hundred thousand comments, it will still be fairly apparent where the action is, allowing you the time between Patent #1 and Patent #1000 to work out what sorts of reputation and ranking systems need to be put in place. </p>\n\n<p>This is a simplification, of course, as each of the categories listed above presents its own challenges — how should people record their identity? What’s the right balance between closed and open lists of labels? And so on. I do not mean to minimize those challenges. I do however mean to say that the central design challenge of user governance — self-correcting systems that do not raise crushing participation burdens on the users or crushing policing barriers on the hosts — are so hard to design in advance that, provided you have the system primitives right, the Boyd Strategy of <span>OODA </span>— Orient, Observe, Decide, Act — will be superior to any amount of advance design work.</p>\n\n<p><strong>[We’ve been experiencing continuing problems with our MT-powered commenting system. 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"content" : "Mark Cuban doesn’t understand television. He holds a belief, common to connoisseurs the world over, that quality trumps everything else. The current object of his faith in Qualität Über Alles is <span>HDTV. </span><a href=\"http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/24/how-the-broadcast-networks-are-missing-the-hdtv-opportunity/\">Says Cuban</a>:<br>\n<blockquote><span>HDTV </span>is the Internet video killer. Deal with it. Internet bandwidth to the home places a cap on the quality and simplicity of video delivery to the home, and to <span>HDTV</span>s in particular. Not only does internet capacity create an issue, but the complexity of moving <span>HDTV </span>streams around the home and to the <span>HDTV </span>is pretty much a deal killer itself.</blockquote>\n\n<p>“HDTV is the Internet video killer.” Th appeal of this argument — whoever provides the highest quality controls the market — is obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s been used before. By audiophiles.</p>\n\n<blockquote>As January 1, 2000 approaches, and the <span>MP3 </span>whirlpool continues to swirl, one simple fact has made me feel as if I’m stuck at the starting line of the entire download controversy: The sound quality of <span>MP3 </span>has yet to improve above that of the average radio broadcast. Until that changes, I’m merely curious—as opposed to being in the I-want-to-know-it-all-now frenzy that is my usual m.o. when to comes to anything that promises music you can’t get anywhere else. <a href=\"http://www.stereophile.com/thinkpieces/158/\">Robert Baird, October, 1999 </a></blockquote>\n\n<p><span>MP3</span>s won’t catch on, because they are lower quality than CDs. And this was true, wasn’t it? People cared about audio quality so much that despite other advantages of <span>MP3</span>s (price, shareability, better integration with PCs), they’ve stayed true to the CD all these years. The commercial firms that make CDs, and therefore continue to control the music market, thank these customers daily for their loyalty.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile,<a href=\"http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070102/wr_nm/digital_dc_2\">back in the real world of the recording business, the news isn’t so rosy</a>…</p>\n\n<p>Cuban doesn’t understand that television has been cut in half. The idea that there should be a formal link between the tele- part and the vision part has ended. Now, and from now on, the form of a video can be handled separately from it’s method of delivery. And since they can be handled separately, they will be, because users prefer it that way.</p>\n\n<p>But Cuban goes further. He doesn’t just believe that, other things being equal, quality will win; he believes quality is so important to consumers that they will accept enormous inconvenience to get that higher-quality playback. When Cuban’s list of advantages of <span>HDTV </span>includes <em>an inability to watch your own video on it</em> (“the complexity of moving <span>HDTV </span>streams around the home and to the <span>HDTV</span>”), you have to wonder what he thinks a disadvantage would look like.</p>\n\n<p>This is the season of the <a href=\"http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/30/millions-miffed-at-poor-quality-from-holiday-hdtv-purchase/\"><span>HDTV </span>gotcha</a>. After Christmas, people are starting to understand that they didn’t buy a nicer <span>TV, </span>they bought only one part of a Total Controlled Content Delivery Package. Got an <span>HDTV </span>monitor and a new computer for Christmas? You might as well have gotten a Fabergé Egg and a framing hammer for all the useful ways you can combine the two presents.</p>\n\n<p>Media is a triathlon event. People like to watch, but they also like to create, and to share. Doubling down on the watching part while making it harder for the users to play their own stuff or share with their friends makes a medium worse in the users eyes. By contrast, the last 50 years have been terrible for user creativity and for sharing, so even moderate improvements in either of those abilities make the public go wild.</p>\n\n<p>When it comes to media quality, people don’t optimize, they <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing\">satisfice</a>. Once the medium, whether audio or video or whatever, crosses a minimum threshold, users accept it and move on to caring about other attributes. The change in internet video quality from 1996 to 2006 was the big jump, and YouTube is the proof. After this, firms that offer higher social value for video will have an edge over firms that offer higher production values while reducing social value. </p>\n\n<p>And because the audience for internet video will grow much faster than the audience for <span>HDTV </span>(and will be less pissed, because YouTube doesn’t rely on a ‘bait and switch’ walled garden play) the premium for making internet video better will grow with it. As Richard Gabriel said of <a href=\"http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html\">programming languages</a> years ago “[E]ven though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.” That’s where video is today. <span>HDTV </span>provides a better viewing experience than internet video, but many more people care about making internet video better than making <span>HDTV </span>better. </p>\n\n<p>YouTube is the <span>HDTV </span>killer. Deal with it.</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Many-to-many?a=qOcnAJ\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/Many-to-many?i=qOcnAJ\" border=\"0\"></a></p>\n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Many-to-many?a=X8buJVAR\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Many-to-many?i=X8buJVAR\" border=\"0\"></a></div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Many-to-many/~4/70291795\">"
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"title" : "Simplifying Mobile Testing",
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"content" : "<p>By Nikolaj Nyholm</p>\n <p>Two major challenges abound in the mobile app world; flat-rate data and handset incompatibility. </p>\n\n<p>While roll-out flat-rate plans is slowly gathering speed across most of the world (go figure why the US will overtake the #2 position soon if European carriers don't get their act together), device incompatability is still the single-biggest problem of the mobile app hacker. <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS\">Symbian</a> (including incompatible <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_platform\">S60</a> versions 1, 2, and 3), <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for_Wireless\">Brew</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J2me\">J2ME</a>, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_Flash_Lite\">Flash Lite</a>; lots of fancy attempts to get at a more universal mobile app development stack. <br>\nEven the most wide-spread of these, J2ME, has widely different implementations across manufacturers with regards to core functionality and access to phone APIs like data, SMS, bluetooth or camera. The result is that the lowest common denominators across carriers and handsets, sound (calls and ringtones) and text (SMS), abound.</p>\n\n<p>While newly relaunched <a href=\"http://www.DeviceAnywhere.com\">DeviceAnywhere</a> hasn't solved the compatibility issues, they have taken a formidable stab at providing an easy and cost-effective way to test across a wide number of devices. In short, they provide an online interface for testing different live phones across multiple networks (<a href=\"http://www.deviceanywhere.com/DeviceAnywhere/DeviceAnywhereDemo.htm\">demo here</a>). <br>\nOne company I know currently spends thousands of dollars each month on buying new phones simply for testing -- DeviceAnywhere should cut that to a fraction, and hopefully allow for a wider rollout of real mobile services that go beyond the current cacophony. Were it not for the Windows-only environment this would be my clear vote for late-'06 mobile revelation.</p>\n \n \n \n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?a=INbZXx7D\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?i=INbZXx7D\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?a=wpGEWeXs\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?i=wpGEWeXs\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?a=osShyTYO\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?i=osShyTYO\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?a=cWrGkaDo\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/oreilly/radar/atom?i=cWrGkaDo\" border=\"0\"></a></div><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/oreilly/radar/atom/~4/62525903\">"
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"title" : "In Search of Stupidity, 2nd Edition",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590597214/sawdust08-20\"><img border=\"0\" width=\"240\" height=\"240\" src=\"http://software.ericsink.com/entries/1642_image001.jpg\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"12\"></a><i>Rick Chapman's book, <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590597214/sawdust08-20\">In Search\nof Stupidity</a>, is now available in its second edition. It is both fun and\ninsightful. Highly recommended.</i></p>\n\n<p><i>I was honored that Rick and Apress asked me to write the\nforeword for this edition. The text of my foreword appears below.</i></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>I love this book. In telling stories about some of the\nfinest fiascos in our industry, the author adds unique insight and humor. The\nresult is a book that is both readable and worth reading. That's a powerful\ncombination that I find increasingly uncommon. I was a fan of the first\nedition of "Stupidity," and I am honored to be writing this foreword for the\nsecond edition.</p>\n\n<p>I am particularly fond of the title of this book. Taken\ncompletely out of context, it suggests that if you want to find stupidity in\nour industry, you have to search for it. I envision a typical person who\nwanders accidentally into the software and computers section at his local\nbookstore. He sees this book on the shelf and believes that stupidity in\nhigh-tech is difficult to find.</p>\n\n<p>Aw, never mind that. People are not so easily fooled. \nAnybody who reads the newspaper can easily look at our industry and see that\nstupidity is like beer at an NFL football game: Half the people have got\nplenty of it and they keep spilling it on the other half.</p>\n\n<p>As of August 2006, here is what the average person knows\nabout the world of high tech products:</p>\n\n<ol style=\"margin-top:0in\">\n <li>The FBI just spent 170 million dollars on a software\n project that completely failed and delivered nothing useful. Most of us\n would have been willing to deliver them nothing useful for a mere 85\n million or so.<br>\n <br>\n </li>\n <li>We each get 50 emails a week from eBay, none of which\n actually came from eBay. So we find somebody who knows about computers\n and ask why, and he starts spewing stuff that sounds like Star Trek\n technobabble.<br>\n <br>\n </li>\n <li>The movie industry wants us to buy all our DVDs again so\n we can see them in "high definition", but they can't decide which new\n format they want. Either way, this comes in the nick of time, because as\n we all know, the central problem with DVD technology is the atrocious\n picture quality.<br>\n <br>\n </li>\n <li>The time between the initial release of Windows XP and\n Windows Vista is roughly the life span of a dog, and apparently the main\n new feature is that it will be harder to use digital music and video\n content. Oh yeah, and it looks prettier.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>The world of high-tech is fouled up beyond <i>all</i>\nrecognition, and everybody knows it.</p>\n\n<p>But everybody loves reading about it. When it comes to failed\nsoftware projects or dumb marketing mistakes, the mainstream news media is\neager to print anything they can get their hands on. Nobody writes stories\nabout software projects or marketing efforts that succeed.</p>\n\n<p>The funny part is that most of the stupidity never makes it\ninto print. Those of us inside the industry know that things are actually even\nstupider than the perspective in the press. For example, most people know that\nwhenever Microsoft announces a new product they give it a really boring name that\nnobody can remember. But those of us inside the industry know that the boring\nname was immediately preceded by a "code name" which was memorable or even\nclever. It's almost like Microsoft has a department whose mission is to make\nsure their public image always looks lame and pedestrian compared to Apple.</p>\n\n<p>And let's not forget that stupidity can show up in success\nas well as failure. Do you know the inside story of the Motorola RAZR? In the\noriginal plan, the powers-that-be at Motorola were convinced that the RAZR\nwould be a "boutique phone", a niche product that would appeal to only a small\nsegment of the market. They ordered enough components to make 50,000 of them. \nIn the first quarter of production, the wireless companies placed orders for\nover a million units. Motorola had the most popular cell phone on the market,\nand they were completely unprepared for it. It took them a year to get\nproduction capacity up to meet the demand. Today, Motorola is shipping RAZR\nphones at a pace that is equivalent to selling 50,000 of them every morning\nbefore lunch.</p>\n\n<p>In the news media, on the message boards, and here in this\nbook, stories about product disasters in our industry are a lot of fun to read.</p>\n\n<p>That's why the first edition of this book was great, and this\none is even better. I applaud the author for the changes he has made in the\nsecond revision, giving more specific attention to the matter of learning from\nthe marketing mistakes made by others. I imagine there are lots of people who\nwill enjoy that kind of thing.</p>\n\n<p>But truth be told, not all of us aspire to such a high and\nnoble station.</p>\n\n<p>If you are like me, you probably lied to yourself about why\nyou wanted to read this book. You told yourself how great it would be to learn\nfrom the mistakes of others. In reality, we don't want to learn -- we want to gloat. \nWe like to watch things crash and burn. This book is the marketing equivalent\nof the car chase scene from Terminator 3.</p>\n\n<p>Wielders of clichés would say that misery loves company. \nCall it what you will, but let's just admit it together: We like to read about\nproducts and marketing efforts that exploded in a ball of flame. It helps us\nfeel better about our own stupidity.</p>\n\n<p>And in my opinion, that's okay. In the vast constellation\nof unhealthy vices and guilty pleasures, this book isn't really all that\nharmful.</p>\n\n<p></p>"
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"title" : "Thinking in English: Locally Productive Knowledge, I",
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"content" : "<p>One of the frequent questions I get asked roaming <a href=\"http://dictionary.kasahorow.com/search/node/aburokyire\" title=\"Aburokyire\">Aburokyire</a> is whether I am going to stay or \"go back home\". The assumption behind the question is that, \"look here you are with all these things you know--you could be useful to your motherland or something so why not go back\". (OK, for the record, Ghana is not short of people with all sorts of qualifications and experiences more interesting than mine.) But for the most part, I think, my knowledge and skills are not \"locally productive\" (relative to Ghana). That is, my abilities are not really usable in Ghana, and hard as it is for me to admit it, I'm actually more productive outside Ghana (or when inside Ghana only in an environment that is akin to a glass tower of privilege) than inside it.<br> <br> This is very frustrating for me--here I am, a modestly successful at my exploits in Aburokyire. I land in the motherland, and am praised with all sorts of appellations. (It is an exhilarating experience to return to Ghana as fairly regular activities conducted in Aburokyire count as achievements in Takoradi.) Given that I am certainly not the first Takoradi boy to have had an Aburokyire experience, I would imagine I can make some limited generalizations over my own experience.<br> <br> The reality (as made evident by the performances of those, who were like us, who have gone before) is that in fact we are actually very unfit (practically speaking) for doing anything in the fatherland. Indeed the most transferable of our experiences is perhaps our outside-looking-in perspective. Almost without exception foreign-educated women and men have performed poorly at their jobs in Ghana the longer they have been at it. This can be explained by the hypothesis that the circumstances of Ghana are so local (naturally) that being unprepared for it, their lack of preparation has always shown through after sufficient time has passed. Most frequently, the excuse I have heard (and previously believed) for non-performance is that "the facilities are not available", availability being measured relative to what one would have were they to be working wherever they were trained in Aburokyire. This reason sounds so obvious that those who have been the primary victims of our collective local incompetence proffer it without our encouragement. Indeed, it is perhaps because they need us to be heros, and heros must have been hampered by extenuating <span style=\"FONT-WEIGHT:bold\">external</span> circumstances whenever they fail. Their failure then has nothing to do with their heroic nature.<br> <br> But perhaps this pattern of failure is to be expected for after all our Aburokyire experience trains us to be productive in Aburokyire, not Ghana. Indeed, so does going to school in Ghana. A 100% Ghana-trained professional also makes the same excuse that \"there are no facilities\" using the same Aburokyire referent, real or imagined, for the same reason that a Ghana education is so far removed from local reality. I judge the net worth of such an education to be negative to Ghana since it prepares us to be more useful in Aburokyire than in Ghana itself (and mind you, the current form of our education is definitely more relevant to Ghana than it has ever been thanks to a series of educational reforms undertaken by several governments before and after independence). But unfortunately still, Ghana education rewards you more for knowing as little as possible about Ghana, encouraging us to generalize about Ghana from the outside in (we try to measure \"GDP\" when our economy is not as monetized as that of Adam Smith's making it much harder to measure value in monetary terms) instead of generalizing about the world from inside out (trying to understand the world with the languages that we express our first emotions in). Unfortunate, because, the evidence suggests that it is easier to generalize from the inside out--take for example Kwame Despite's PeaceFM. It soundly defeated JoyFM on all the relevant metrics (listenership, profitability) in fewer years of operation, prompting JoyFM's parent company to start AdomFM just to compete.<br> <br> I have been trying to understand this pattern for the longest time, and I now have some sort of one-sentence summary for what I am trying to understand: what makes knowledge (of which we have plenty certificates claiming such) productive in a particular location (Ghana)?<br></p>\n<p><a href=\"http://ghanaconscious.ghanathink.org/node/334\">read more</a></p>"
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"title" : "Stealth Realignment",
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"content" : "<p><a href=\"http://billmon.org/archives/002966.html\">Billmon is perplexed</a>: how did it happen that the Reagan Democrats have started sounding like '70s left-liberals?</p>\n\n<p>I suspect that it's all about betrayal. The Reagan Dems felt betrayed by the left, because it gave them disrespect (and empowered women and minorities while white guys were having status anxiety), because they blamed the Left for \"losing Vietnam\", and because when times weren't good Reagan promised shiny tax cuts without pain (remember the Laffer curve?).</p>\n\n<p>Slow to change, slow to change back, but not stupid. The Reagan Dems are concluding that they've been betrayed (they'd say \"again\"), and they're mad about it. They still don't get respect, this time for having the wrong bank balance instead of the wrong sexual politics. They blame the Right for Iraq, and who wouldn't? Times if anything feel worse, but those tax cuts turned out be worth $50, raises lag medical insurance inflation, and the idea that today's tax cuts for rich folks are tomorrow's tax increases for the rest of us is starting to take hold --the checkbook metaphor is a powerful one for folks who feel economically precarious. </p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile gays turned out not be so scary now that they're out of the closet and are revealed to be real folks, like the neighbor's kid. Throw in the GOP's corruption, and Reagan Democrats need a new home. The DLC is just Reagan Lite, so that's no use. Why <i>not</i> economic populism? The only strange thing about it is having populist leaders willing to argue for their followers' true interests...</p>\n<div><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?a=POsTFvKn\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?i=POsTFvKn\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?a=h0D8owsh\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?i=h0D8owsh\" border=\"0\"></a> <a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?a=mbHLTWOK\"><img src=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/discourse2?i=mbHLTWOK\" border=\"0\"></a></div>"
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"content" : "<p>The problem: take XHTML fragments, parse out all the \"a\" tags, and check to\nsee if their linked resources are of a certain type. If they are, derefence that\ncontent and inline it into the fragment, leaving non matching a tags alone. That\nignores a raft of environmental details, like permssions, link type checking,\nlink availbility, testing on an app server, skinning the deferenced content,\nspeed, and so on. The difficulty: the markup fragment might not be\nwell-formed.</p>\n\n<p>My first rection was to use regexes, which meant <a href=\"http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/08/18/beware_regular_expressions\">I had\ntwo problems</a>. I would have had to split the content into regex groups split\nby the links,process the links, keep a memo of which links are up for expansion,\nwhich are not, dereference the content for the expandables, inline that content,\nstitch it all back together and send on the output. It looked at best,\ncomplicated. My second reaction was a stream parse and intercept of the a tags,\nwriting out embedded content where the links matched the inlinable types. I\ncouldn't find tools in Python that will handle dodgy markup in streaming mode\nand write the content back out cleanly (as TagSoup does for Java). </p>\n\n<p>Why not insist that the content come in well-formed? That would open up the\ntoolchain. But that would also hurt the users, as they want to be able to\npreview in mid-flight, in that case being facistic about well-formedness will\njust makes the application frustrating to use. Well-formed markup is the end,\nnot the means.</p>\n\n<h3>Soup</h3>\n\n<p>I wound up restating the problem - accept that the fragments would be a mess\n- now what? </p>\n\n<p>I ended up using a library called <a href=\"http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/\">BeautifulSoup</a>. BeautifulSoup\nis Python code that will parse junk markup and give you a tree. Really it's\nquite something, it'll take on any old nonsense and create a HTML tree in\nmemory. It also goes a very long way way to get your content into a decent state\nfor Unicode. </p>\n\n<p>It worked. I was eventually able to get inlined content to come out as a\nmicroformat. The lesson I (re)learned was that using BeautifulSoup, and in the\npast Universal Feed Parser and Tidy, makes it clear there's some economic value\nto be had in giving up on well-formedness in a judicious fashion.</p>\n\n<p>[By the way, Effbot has <a href=\"http://effbot.org/zone/element-soup.htm\">announced an ElementSoup\nwrapper</a> for BeautifulSoup.] </p>\n\n<h3>Tolerance</h3>\n\n<p>Engineers have a concept called tolerence. A tolerance specifies the variance\nin dimensions under which which a part or component can be built and still be\nacceptable for production use. There's all kinds of ways to state tolerence, but\nperfect tolerances are neither physically possible nor desirable, they are too\nexpensive. There is a diminishing returns curve for manufacturing cost along how\ntight you make a tolerance. Engineers (real ones, not programmers) use\ntolerances to actively mange cost and risk.</p>\n\n<p>Every major commercial project I have worked on, every one, has had the issue\nof \"data tolerances\" being off, where two or more systems did not line up\nproperly. The result invariably is to fix one end, both ends, or insert a\ncompensating layer - what mechanics call a 'shim' and what programmers call\n\"middleware\". Software projects unfortunately don't have notions of\ntolerance. In software we lean more towad binary and highly discrete positions\non the data -\"wellformed\" v \"illformed\" \"valid\" v \"invalid\", \"pass\" v \"fail\",\n\"your fault\" v \"my fault\". This doesn't just happen before go live -\ninteroperation is subject to entropy and decay - systems will drift apart over\ntime unless they are tended to. <a href=\"http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2004/05/04/reality-is-corrosive.html\">Reality\nis Corrosive</a>.</p>\n\n<p>There's a political dimension to consider. If you accept you might get junk\nevery now and then, and introduce permissible levels of error, you get to\nmitigate the interminable and inevitable blameslinging over who should pick up\nthe tab because two systems data do not line up as predicted. I've seen schedule\nput at risk over such arguments, when the costs could just as easily been been\nshared. </p>\n\n<p>We don't have the tools or metrics just yet for defining data tolerances as\nas acceptable practice, but it might happen if enough of these kinds of parse\nanything libraries come online, that we can come to put a dollar cost on what\nit is involved in insisting on having perfect markup flying about end to end\nversus judiciously giving up on syntactic precision. </p>\n\n<h3>Metasoup</h3>\n\n<p>The code for BeautifulSoup is worth a read, along with <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/\">Tidy</a>, <a href=\"http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/\">TagSoup</a>, and <a href=\"http://feedparser.org/\">Universal Feed Parser</a>. Overall, they read like\nbunch of error correcting codes strangling a parser. </p>\n\n<p>If we assume or allow that most data on the web is syntactic junk and will\nalways be syntactic junk, and in truth <a href=\"http://www.dehora.net/journal/2006/08/93.html\">there's no reason to assume\notherwise</a>, then there is a good argument that says we'll need a layer of\nconvertors whose purpose is to parse content no matter what. My takeway is that\nthe Semantic Web, or anything less grandiose but essentially similar in aims,\nsuch as structured blogging, microformats, or enterprise CMSes and Wikis can\nembrace code like BeautifulSoup, TagSoup and Universal Feed Parser as neccessary\nevils. </p>\n\n<em><p>update via James: Ian Hickson is defining <a href=\"http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1138169545&count=1\">how parsers should deal with invalid HTML</a>. </p></em>\n\n<p>In the semantic web case, I think tag soup parsers are a fundamental layer to\nthat architecture - syntactic convertors that work just like analog-to-digital\nconverters. They set you up for making sense of the data by actually allowing\nyou to load it instead of dropping it on the floor and failing. Without that\nlayer, tools like <a href=\"http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec%22%22\">Grddl</a>, (a\nway of extracting RDF out of XML/XHTML) don't get to execute at all. [by the\nway, there's plenty of prior art in robotics and physical agent systems for\nbuilding these kinds of layered or hybrid architectures.] </p>\n\n<p>Now, some people will find simply entertaining the idea of junk content a\ndeplorable state of affairs, that will inevitably lead to some kind of syntactic\nevent horizon, where the Web collapses under the weight of its own ill\nformedness. On the other hand if you allow for some garbage in and try to do\nsomething with it, you get to ship something useful today, and perhaps build\nsomething more valuable on top tomorrow. Plus we're already in a deplorable\nstate of affairs. I find myself conflicted. </p>\n\n<p>Last word to <a href=\"http://www.annezelenka.com/\">Anne Zelenka, speaking about the feed parser</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\"I wouldn't call it a necessary evil, just necessary. Life is messy :)\"</blockquote>"
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"content" : "<div><p>The three of them are Obatala worshippers. I see the cripple first, dragging his bad leg behind him as he moves from car to car. I have seen him before. His voice is adjusted to make his body seem more frail. It’s an act, not completely invented, but embellished. I don’t like his act and I don’t give him money. Not long afterwards, when I get on the platform, I see the first of the two blind men. His long white stick ends in a tennis ball, and he sweeps it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side. He comes dangerously close to the edge of the platform. I go up to him and ask if I can help. Oh no, he says, oh no, I’m just waiting for my train, thank you. I leave him and walk the length of the platform, towards the exit. It’s confusing to see another blind man there, also with a long white stick that ends in a tennis ball, climbing the stairs. Obatala is the demiurge charged by Olodumare, the supreme deity, with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala was doing well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and became inebriated, he started fashioning damaged human beings: dwarves, cripples, people missing limbs, or felled by illness. This went on until Oduduwa usurped the role and finished the creation of humans. As a result, the people who suffer from physical infirmities identify themselves as worshippers of Obatala. This is an interesting relationship with a god. Not one of affection, or praise, but an antagonistic relationship. They worship Obatala in accusation. They wear white, which is his color, the color of the palm-wine he got drunk on. The long sticks the two men swing on the subway platform are white. The cripple wears dirty white sneakers.</p>\n\n<p>Outside, it is dark. The time is 10 pm, and it is a Sunday night. I enter the bookshop to kill some time before my film starts. I have left behind my friends, and I’ve come to watch the film alone because there’s a compulsion in me to see it tonight, to wait no longer. I have thirty minutes to kill while waiting. The shop is a Barnes and Noble. It reminds me of the internet: it contains many good things, but there’s a lot of rubbish to sort through before the good can be found. This is unlike some of the small independent shops in the city, like Ivy Books on 95th, or Crawford Doyle on Madison, places where the books out front are interesting and of the best quality. These smaller bookshops are curated. Items are placed next to each other for the greatest resonance. I find it impossible to go into such places without making a purchase. It’s a strange effect, one that internet vendors have attempted to replicate by recommending books similar to the ones one is browsing. But nothing can compare to or replicate exactly the quiet environment of a small bookshop, the company of eccentrics, the reprinted classic or new release that catches your eye, and suddenly seems to you the most essential thing in the world. The chain stores are the opposite experience. The mass of magazines, coffee mugs, calendars, glossy-covered thrillers and romances, and other merchandise I have to wade through before getting to the literature section at Barnes and Noble usually leaves me disinclined, as it does tonight, to spend any money on books.</p>\n\n<p>I walk the four blocks to the movie theater. It is a warm night, and I have a vague worry about how relentlessly warm it has been this year, all this way into October. I have rarely enjoyed the cold seasons, but there’s a rightness about them that I now feel uncomfortable about not having. The idea that the weather patterns are changing noticeably bothers me, even if there’s no evidence that this warm Fall isn’t a perfectly normal variation. I’m no longer the global warming skeptic I was some years ago, but I still can’t stand the tendency many people have of jumping to conclusions based on flimsy anecdotal evidence. Global warming exists, but that doesn't mean it explains why today is warm. But the way my thoughts return to the fact that it’s mid-October and I haven’t had occasion to wear my coat yet, makes me wonder if, already, I am one of those people. This is part of a bigger suspicion I have, a feeling that the structures of the society are making people less concerned about the rules of evidence, and more interested in forming opinions and picking sides, as if answers were more important than questions. People can no longer sit with a question. It makes brisk business for those who promise answers, whether they be politicians, scientists or priests of the various religious traditions. It works particularly well for those who want to rally people around a cause. The cause itself doesn't matter.</p>\n\n<p>The crowd at the ticket counter is atypical, but this is expected: the late hour of the film, the fact that it is set in Africa. The ticket buyers are young, many of them black, dressed in hip clothes. There are also some Asians, and some New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background. The last film I saw here, about the Queen of England, had had an audience consisting almost entirely of white-haired white people. There are much fewer of them in attendance tonight. The great cave of the theater. What archetypal image does watching a film alone in a theater evoke? Not alone, exactly, in the company of a hundred others, but all are strangers to me. The lights go down, I am slouched in a plush seat, the dozens of souls around me are silent. A light emanates from the screen ahead. Womblike. And sudden delivery.</p>\n\n<p>The film starts with a jaunty credit sequence and good, idiomatic music. The music is from the right time period, but not from the right part of Africa. But I don't mind. I’m prepared to like some things about this, and I expect that some other things will annoy me. A film, last year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, left me feeling frustrated, not because of the plot which, of course, is not far from reality, but because of how closely the film itself hewed to the convention of the good white man in Africa. The convention sickens me, I have seen it too often, it’s no longer interesting or helpful. And so, sitting in this cavernous womb to experience “The Last King of Scotland,” I am prepared to be angry, again, at a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thinks the salvation of Africa is up to him. The King the title refers to is Idi Amin Dada, the murderous dictator of Uganda in the 1970s, whose hobbies included decorating himself with spurious titles. I know Idi Amin well. He was an indelible part of my childhood mythology, and I remember the many hours I spent at my cousins’ watching a gory film called “The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin,” in which no detail was spared to present the callousness, insanity and sheer excitement of the man. I was nine years old, and those images of people being shot and stuffed into car trunks, or decapitated and stored in freezers, have stayed with me. We have nothing to do. Let's watch "The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin" again. And we would. For the most part, “The Last King of Scotland” avoids such images, and concentrates the story, instead, on the relationship between Idi Amin and the briefly-innocent Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, that he presses into service as his personal physician. The film is based on Giles Foden’s excellent novel of the same title from several years ago. As in the book, the film is essentially a vehicle for Idi Amin’s off-kilter psychology. In him, the classic traits of dictatorship are given extreme form: anger, fear, insecurity, charm. Idi Amin murdered three-hundred thousand Ugandans during his rule, he expelled the large community of Ugandan-Indians and destroyed the country’s economy. For a moment, my mind wanders to an uncomfortable meeting I had in an opulent house in Madison, Wisconsin a few years ago. My host that evening was a rich Indian surgeon. He and his family, he told me that night, had been expelled from their homes and lands by Idi Amin. I was taken aback at his undimmed anger, anger which, I couldn't help feeling, was partly directed at me. I was in the presence of a man who had lost all trust in Africans. I don't know why I feel some relief that the film doesn't avoid the expulsion of the Indians. I think part of my host's anger was about how their part of the tragedy had been forgotten.</p>\n\n<p>Idi Amin hosted the most wonderful parties, and spoke eloquently about the need for African self-determination. This nuance in his personality would no doubt bring a bad taste to the mouth of my host in Madison. The actor in this film, Forest Whitaker, is so persuasive as Idi Amin that I forget, several times, that this is an American actor. His face contorts with rage one moment, and becomes docile and needy in the next. His mien is ursine, and almost likeable. His speech is torrential, unhinged and delivered in a faultless East-African accent. It impresses even my finicky African ear. He is present in most of the scenes, and this translates, as I watch the film, into two hours of discomfort, as the character of Idi Amin thickens into the consciousness. Watching Whitaker in the role, I begin to understand how Idi Amin could have assured himself that his murderous spree was all for the best. He (Amin, not Whitaker) is not the fool. He is playing the fool. He is not evil. He is a lovable bear of a man inhabiting the role of evil, just as the actor inhabits the role of the dictator. There is no safe ground.</p>\n\n<p>The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is small, white, good-looking, a stark contrast to Whitaker’s presence. He seems as if he's wandered over from a daytime soap opera. But the power of this film is in showing exactly how an innocent-seeming, fun-loving doctor from Scotland can find himself handmaiden to atrocity. It’s a perfect illustration of another, and more welcome, convention: how spectacularly stupid people can be in unfamiliar environments. The film's mood is schizophrenic. I am still dealing with the violence of one scene, when another starts, full of beautiful African women, Afrobeat music, gorgeous camera work. The village scenes raise my hackles. Some brittle pride in me prefers to see urban Africa, in all its flawed glory, rather than the village Africa of stereotype, the simple-minded Africa that most filmmakers prefer. The city, thrumming and vital, makes me miss Lagos. The music is beautiful and the camera seduces me, even as Dr Nicholas Garrigan is seduced, by the power around him, by the women, by the inchoate desire in him to "make a difference." Like him, I am convinced that there’s a way out of the maze. The bad Africans in the film, Idi Amin’s henchmen, know there is no way out. The good Africans, such as the doctor Garrigan befriends and Idi Amin’s wives, know that things will end badly. I wish to believe that things are not as bad as they are. This is the part of me that wants to be entertained, that wishes not to confront the horror. But that satisfaction doesn’t exist. Things end badly. I wonder, as Coetzee does in “Elizabeth Costello,” what the use is of going into these awful recesses of the human heart. Why show torture? Isn’t it enough to be told, in imprecise detail, that bad things happen? We wish to be spared. A foolish wish as no one is spared. Not even Idi Amin's young son, who is convulsed with epilepsy. Epileptics, too, worship Obatala. The boy is called MacKenzie. His brother is Campbell. Two Scots-Ugandans caught in Idi Amin's nightmare, and in Obatala's carelessness.</p>\n\n<p>Idi Amin is Whitaker. The relationship, for the duration of the film, is that simple. He consumes the role whole. As I watch him, I know that Whitaker will, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, be nominated for an Oscar for this role. He might even win it outright, if the Academy doesn't get caught up in racial politics again. The film itself is strong, a subtle treatment of an unsubtle subject. In several places in the film, I have to keep my anger in check, because I am hypersensitive to bad portrayals of Africa. But, ultimately, I find the work grotesque, appalling and thoroughly fair-minded. Idi Amin’s failure was to overdo what Mobutu, Abacha, and Mugabe all did in less extreme fashion. These men all took the colonial project and, as black men trained by white men, destroyed their nations in the name of saving them. African dictators evoke traditional kingship, which is why some of them are welcomed at the beginning. But what they go on to do is travesty kingship because, at the heart of most African royal systems, the king is not the ultimate arbiter. Tradition is. By granting themselves absolute power, by combining the modern force of arms with a fondness for palatial excess, they parody the thousands of years of stability in African kingdoms. This sleep of reason is only just ending. Some of the monsters are still running loose. Mugabe, for example, is still on his throne. But they are only a part of the story. Something that stays with me from the film is the last act of agency we see in it. It's done by an African, it's ethical, and it's costly.</p>\n\n<p>Midnight. The air is warm. The sun burns even at night. At the subway station, out-of-towners wait for the train. A girl of thirteen sits on the bench next to me. Her ten year-old brother comes to join her. They are out of earshot of their parents. Hey, she says, wassup. She flashes signs with her fingers and, with her brother, starts laughing. Their parents are yards away, in conversation. The little boy wears a toy Chinese peasant’s hat. Are you a gangster? Are you a gangster? They both flash gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I look at them mutely. One part of me too tired to respond, another is simply unable to believe what’s happening in front of me. It’s midnight, and I don’t feel like giving public lectures. He’s black, says the girl, but he’s not dressed like a gangster. I bet he’s a gangster. He's a gangster. Hey mister, are you a gangster? They continue flashing their fingers for another four minutes, until the uptown train arrives and I walk down the platform and enter a distant car.</p></div>"
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"content" : "<div><p>I first became African in the fall of my freshman year. Until that time, the television and newspapers, as well as shared political realities, had given me a sense of being Nigerian and, at home, the daily experience of language, food and customs made me Yoruba. However, when I arived in the US, I became aware of new categories, one of which was that I had things in common with the other African students on campus. That I had been to none of their countries, and spoke none of their native languages, did not matter. We fell in together and, along with other international students, formed our own clique: we dressed a little funny, we generally had less pocket money than our American mates, and our parties were more musically oriented than the binge-drinking sessions happening elsewhere on campus.</p>\n\n<p>I remember one party in particular, in December of that year, at the apartment of my Malian friend Miriam, and her Spanish roommate Marisa. That weekend, Marisa’s boyfriend, who lived in Chicago, had taken the train in. Miriam’s brother Samba was also there: he lived in town, and was often around. A dozen of us were crammed into the tiny common area of the apartment, chatting as we devoured the groundnut stew and rice the girls have made. After everyone had eaten, Samba began to pick at his guitar. Marisa’s boyfriend, whose name I’ve now forgotten, went into her room and brought out a small classical guitar. And he, too, started to play. Neither of the guys spoke English well, and they communicated with each other by nodding and smiling, a Spaniard and a Malian, one of them playing in a Flamenco-inflected style, the other unfolding Manding runs. The most surprising thing was how well the two styles locked together. The Malian music was ornamented in much the same way as were certain Andalusian melodies. Our players were modestly skilled, and there were a lot of starts and stops in the music, but each was strongly connected to a native tradition that had gained much from foreigners. And as they played, and as we clapped along on the faster tempo songs, I had the distinct impression of a pair of trade delegations moving, one in a southerly direction from Europe, the other from northern Mali and across the Sahara, and both gradually converging on a magical spot somewhere around Morocco. That actual Moroccan music sounds different wasn’t the point of that mental image; it was that there was a story of music along that line of longitude, an ancient story of exchanges and assimilations. We were privileged to witness an unplanned reiteration of that story, in a small midwestern college room, on a cold winter’s night.</p>\n\n<p>When Djelimady Tounkara’s first solo album, <em>Sigui</em>, was released about five years ago, I thought again of Samba and Marisa’s boyfriend, and that magical meeting of traditions. Djelimady takes the concept to the nth degree. On <em>Sigui</em>, and in the recently released sequel to it, <em>Solon Kono</em>, there’s a seamless convergence of African, European and American picking styles. The core of the music is Manding, and on these acoustic albums, the heptatonic lines of traditional Mande music, and its cascading melodies, have been effectively transposed from the traditional twenty-one string kora to the modern guitar. These days, a <em>djelimousso</em> (female praise singer) is accompanied by a solitary guitarist just as readily as by a kora player. Djelimady’s earliest formation was as just such a player, performing for money at weddings in Bamako in the 1960s. Exposure to international styles from Cuba and from the Congo, combined with his outrageous natural talent, brought him to attention and, after brief stints in smaller groups, he became the lead guitarist of the Super Rail Band of Bamako, possibly the greatest of the West African dance band in the 1970s. The music they made was a potent brew, full of Cuban son, Ghanaian highlife and, most importantly, the rolling rhythms of Congolese rumba. This catholicity of taste was perhaps also connected to freedom from colonial rule, and the optimism that came with it. Many bands of the time mined this vein, and they were most notable for their spectacular vocal soloists, including the likes of Salif Keita and Mory Kante, both of whom were with the Rail Band (the "Super" came later). But Djelimady, as lead guitarist, was more than their equal. His picking style was, and still is, imperious: spacious at one moment, frightfully rapid at the next, with a gift for ornamentation that would have made a Baroque harpsichordist blush with envy. His reckless approach to improvisation had listeners worried that his solos wouldn't end in time for the downbeat. But his was a virtuosity that always served the groove. Still, listening to his music from those days, it’s hard to understand how he fit such delightfully busy figures into the kind of tightly-governed rhythm necessary for a dance band. </p>\n\n<p>Though the particular style of music favored by bands like the Super Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs fell out of favor in the final quarter of the century, Djelimady’s sheer skill made him one of the rediscovered heroes during the new World Music wave of the 1990s. In fact, Ry Cooder intended to include him on the original <em>Buena Vista Social Club</em> disc, which was intended to bring old-time Cuban musicians together with their African counterparts. It was not meant to be: the Africans ran into visa hassles in Paris, and the album was recorded with the Cubans alone, and rocketed its participants into critical and popular fame. Still, Djelimady has won new listeners, both on the strength of his sparkling recent work with the Super Rail Band, as well as for his compositionally daring acoustic projects, on which he showcases mostly younger singers. In the latter discs, the old influences are all there, the grounding is firmly in traditional music, but there’s a greater confidence about bringing in devices that are lifted directly from jazz and flamenco. In this newer work, the rhythm is unstable, the syncophation more bewildering: a song like "Amary Ndaou," for instance, has the listener struggling in vain to find the beat. The drums are going in one direction, the guitar and <em>ngoni</em> in another. But the beat is not the point. When Djelimady does his thing, I think of the words a friend of mine who, stunned by the sudden sight of a pair of Botticelli paintings in a museum, cried: you see this and you really don’t want to die!</p>\n\n<p>Djelimady still lives in Bamako, performing locally, receiving a stream of international visitors. The famous bluegrass mandolinist Bela Fleck visited recently, in search of lessons. And even his virtuoso fingers were defeated by the figure Djelimady assigned him to play. Earlier on, American guitarist Banning Eyre spent an extended period of time in Mali with Djelimady, and wrote a fine book about the experience, <em>In Griot Time</em>. It was such a powerful encounter that Eyre, a guitarist of no small ability himself, remains the American evangelist-in-chief of the Mande guitar style. Watching Eyre in concert—he’s active on the New York circuit, so I've seen him a few times now—one gets a sense of the student who knows the worth of the master and has paid him almighty attention. The Manding fingerstyle has entered Eyre's sensibility after mighty struggles to "get" it, both technically and on a more intuitive emotional level. According to him, Djelimady is simply the greatest guitarist in the world. BBC world music maven Lucy Duran agrees. And it's not just them: this particular epithet is one that gets flung at Djelimady's direction a great deal, and not without good reason.</p>\n\n<p>When I saw him perform with the reconstituted Super Rail Band in New York three years ago, what I saw was an imposing man, authoritative on stage, and yet one with a mien that was never anything but humble. I knew I was watching a man who occupied a rare peak. His place is among the likes of Casals, Heifetz, Coltrane, Shankar, and his late Malian compatriot Ali Farka Toure. Like them, he goes beyond simple entertainment; through him, the ineffable is given voice. Compared to the astringent, spirit-infused sound of <a href=\"http://modalminority.typepad.com/modalminority/2006/08/the_close_kind.html\">Ali Farka Toure</a>, Djelimady is joyous, capacious, secular. They are two complete masters from neighbouring styles and the world is truly fortunate to have recordings by both. You hear them and you really don't want to die. They are the very bitter-sweetness of life.</p>\n\n<p>One of these days, I'll make my Sahelian journey. It will end, perhaps, with a pilgrimage to Bamako. I will find my way to Djelimady’s family compound, and find the master under his baobab tree, unfolding a torrent of notes from his guitar, and when I get there, I will discover that this world can contain everything, and I’ll be African all over again. </p>\n\n<p>-------------</p>\n\n<p>[Two of my favorite tracks by Djelimady Tounkara are <a href=\"http://modalminority.typepad.com/modalminority/files/02_silanid.mp3\">Silanide</a> , which was a huge hit with the Super Rail Band on their 1996 album <em>Mansa </em>(listen for the blistering electric guitar solo at around the 3.06 mark) and <a href=\"http://modalminority.typepad.com/modalminority/files/06_amary_ndaou.mp3\">Amary Ndaou</a>, a masterclass in acoustic guitar from <em>Sigui</em>. The latter track has the added benefit of being superbly engineered: I used it as a demonstration piece when I was shopping for speakers a few years ago. Djelimady's disciple Banning Eyre plays African guitar music frequently at <a href=\"http://www.barbesbrooklyn.com/calendar.html\">Barbes</a> in Brooklyn, and I see he's got a concert coming up on November 18.]</p></div>"
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"title" : "Zana : Chewing Stick",
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"content" : "Continuing our focus on underutilised resources we take a look at the Zana Chewing stick. EthioBlog reports that:<br>The researchers found that Zana, a chewing stick used in Ethiopia, has a good antimicrobial efficacy with minimum inhibitory concentration values ranging from between 0,25 to 4mg/ml -– meaning that it would take a small amount of the concentration to kill bacteria and keep your breath"
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"title" : "'Why are they poor?'",
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"content" : "The US public broadcaster NPR has run <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6213358\">a series of shows</a> this week about development in Africa. In <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6211966a\">this piece</a>, journalist Jason Beaubien wonders 'Why Are They Poor?'<br><br>Other parts of the series explore the symptoms, such as <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6213086\">war</a>'s impact on social progress, <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6226828\">food shortages</a> and <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6243668\">poverty</a>.<br><br>The barriers to development in Africa are fairly well-known. Instability, violence, lack of infrastructure, corruption. The usual ills, if you will. Others point to the lasting legacy of colonialism and how the westerners essentially infantalized Africans (when they weren't outright enslavening or killing them) thus seriously hampering their potential for development into modern societies. They add that western meddling in Africa didn't cease with the end of formal colonialism as bad leaders and murderous rebel groups were propped up by outsiders.<br><br>But what interests me is differences between development in south and southeast Asia and development in sub-Saharan Africa. Both continents were mostly colonized for long periods of time. They were almost entirely decolonized in the two decades following the end of World War II. But while the continents had similiar income levels in the 1960s, Asia as a whole has developed quite a bit since that time while some countries in Africa have actually regressed. What explains the differences?<br><br>I'm not sure I know the answer to that so I'd invite readers to offer their theories. Here are a few of mine.<br><br>Both continents suffered under racist colonialism. Asian territory was actually more affected by World War II. Both have had wars, genocide, hunger and bad leaders. So it seems these variables do not explain the differences.<br><br>Perhaps scale is a difference.<br><br>I once heard an apocraphyal story that went something like this.<br><br>An Asian dictator and an African dictator were chum from their school days. The Asian invited his friend to visit his country. They stood in the presidential palace looking out a big window. The Asian leader pointed out the window and said, \"You see that big eight-lane highway out there\" then he smiled and pointed to his pocket, \"15 percent.\" A few years later, the African leader returned the favor and welcomed his Asian friend. As they were walking around the executive mansion, the African leader pointed out the window to a wild, grassy field, \"You see that highway?\" and then he pointed to his pocket, \"100 percent.\"<br><br><br>While this tale is admittedly crude, perhaps it offers an insight. One of the things I noticed when I lived in Africa is that while there was no shortage of stuff being built, maintenance of infrastructure was virtually non-existent. Health centers and schools were left to decay. Roads weren't kept up (and a poorly maintained paved road is worse than one that was never paved at all). This comes down to leadership. Building things is more popular than maintaining them because a road or school opening can be done with a fancy ceremony with big shot dignataries. Repaving an existing road or patching a hole in the school roof is far less 'sexy' but just as important. <br><br>Perhaps Asian cultures are more conscious about the importance of long-term planning and follow through. I don't know enough to say. But I do know that this doesn't seem to be the strength of many African cultures. This is understandable. If you might killed next week by a bullet or a disease, then what's the point of planning for ten years down the road? First things, first. However, ultimately this perpetuates the cycle of poverty for everyone.<br><br>Some argue that dependency theory is to blame for Africa's woes. Africa has received billions in foreign aid but poverty is still as crushing as it was during the independence years. So maybe aid is creating a culture of dependency that prevents African countries from being forced to develop (sort of in the way colonialism retarded development). <br><br>I think there's a grain of truth here but I'm not sure I buy this completely. Countries like Mauritania, Eritrea and, for the last decade Somalia, have received minimal foreign aid and their standards of living have hardly skyrocketed. <a href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19374\">Some contend</a> that aid itself is the problem. I'm more inclined to think that the way <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5368142.stm\">aid is structured and delivered</a> is the real problem. Foreign aid has a lot strings but usually not the right ones. <br><br>Food aid is a particular problem. Western countries donate surplus food of their own to feed hungry people. As well-intentioned as it may be, it has problems. When free food from abroad is dumped on the local market, it depresses prices for locally produced food thus hurting already poor farmers even further. A better system would be for countries to donate money that would be used to buy food from local producers. This would have several positive effects. First, delivery would be much faster. And local farmers would benefit from the increased demand for their crops. So you'd feed the people who need it while hopefully diminishing the poverty of farmers. As demand for food and agricultural revenue increased, perhaps the farmers could afford to hire some of the previously hungry people to harvest the crops. This would help dent the cycle of poverty rather than perpetuating it with annual bandaids.<br><br>As it stands, aid without fundamental reform in the global trade system (particularly western agricultural subsidies) will do nothing to alleviate structural poverty in Africa. The evidence: the last 30 years. <br><br>Despite billions of dollars in western aid, only one African country has <a href=\"http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=284301&area=/insight/insight__africa/\">left the ranks of the world's least developed countries</a>: diamond-dependent Botswana. However, the case of Botswana demonstrates that natural resources need not be a curse if they are properly managed. It's not a coincidence that Botswana is a stable country with a transparent and democratic government that is more or less respectful of human rights.<br><br>Some contend that the differences are attributable to Asians being industrious and Africans being lazy. In addition to being racist, anyone who's actually spent any time in an African village would realize how patently absurd such a statement is. The typical African villager works harder than 95 percent of Americans. They have to if they want to eat. There is no welfare state to support them. In much of Africa, if you're lazy, you die. If you work hard and are industrious, you live. It's that simple. The problem isn't that most Africans are lazy; the problem is that the system in place does not reward their hard work.<br><br>I'm not really sure what reasons (and I'm sure it's plural) explain the differences in the development paths of Asia and Africa. I'd be happy to hear theories. But clearly many Asian countries have made great strides in development and poverty-reduction. I realize this is bound to be unpopular or at least touchy, but I think one of the reasons is this: both Asia and Africa were deeply ravaged by colonialism. But it seems that without denying the traumatic effects of colonialsm, at some point Asian countries realized they needed to move forward to work together to improve the standards of living for their people. I'm not sure all African countries have made that leap. It's about time they did."
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"title" : "Presentation of Self",
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"content" : "<p>A casual model of identity presumes that it is about self, but it’s not. Identity is about multiple actors. For example, typical usage of identity cards requires three actors, i.e. the card’s holder, issuer, and the reader. All the internet embeded identity protocols follow a similar pattern. PGP keys have the same three players. Those who sign your key fill the role of card issuer.</p>\n\t<p>All of that reminds me of the seventies television detective who would carry an assortment of business cards from which he could pick the identity he wanted to adopt prior to questioning a witness. I can’t help thinking of him each time some spammer offers me yet another 50 free business cards. When I have worked for older companies they always had a business card policy, while these days you can pretty much design your own, which can lead to <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y\">trouble</a>.</p>\n\t<p>At the optometrist the other day another customer was selecting glasses that would make her younger in the evenings and older when she was in front of her students. The optometrist related the story of how he has people come in seeking short term rentals of glasses, say for an interview. So there is a huge subtext of style, fashion, and the like off to one side here. Riding the subway it’s facinating to observe how carefully crafted some people’s presentation of self is.</p>\n\t<p>All of which has gotten me thinking about ways that people present themselves in the internet. I can’t recall when email software first came to support automatically appending a signature file; it certainly goes back a long way. The <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol\">finger/.plan file scheme, according to wikipedia,</a> goes back at least to 1971. I seem to recall something similar on the Dartmouth basic system in the late sixties.</p>\n\t<p>What triggered writing this post was noticing some interesting examples where the identity issuer role is about enabling the shaping of who you are more than authenticating who you are. That’s interesting from the point of view of the business modeling of identity systems since the issuer role is, presumably, the only really profitable role in this industry. Credit card and check printing companies do a bit of this when they let you select which cat picture to put on your card or check.</p>\n\t<p>Web forums do this by allowing users to select the avatar. I’m shocked, at this point, that there doesn’t appear to a number of firms trying to capture forum avatar market. Why, for example, can’t I stick something into my account settings at the model train forum which so that my avatar there is based on my flickr photos of my train set? Or my delicious tag cloud around my train tag?</p>\n\t<p>In point of fact there is a huge amount of this going on. Here are two examples.</p>\n\t<p>It looks to me like <a href=\"http://www.tickerfactory.com/ezticker/ticker_designer.php\">Ticker Factory’s</a> first users were hanging out in child birth forums. What ticker factory lets you do is put a simple chart into your signature showing progress toward a goal. These are very simple, here is one from a weight loss forum.</p>\n\t<p><img src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/images/TickerFactoryWeight1.png\" alt=\"\"></p>\n\t<p>I find it notable that most of the data, the parameters, reveal not the data but information about the person’s style.</p>\n\t<p><img src=\"http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/images/lolita010b.gif\" alt=\"\" align=\"right\">For a while if you typed “doll” on google it would suggest that you’d might have actually meant to type “<a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=dollz\">dollz</a>“, and even today the top hit for “dolls” is not about dolls. When I first stumbled on the dollz movement I thought it was a kind of online paperdoll, which it is. but it’s actually about creating avatars and signatures. It’s discussed at <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollz\">wikipedia</a>, where this provocative sentence appears.<br>\n“<br>\nThe first instances of cartoon dolls showed up in 1995 as avatars made for use on a visual chat client called The Palace by a Palace user named <i>artgrrl</i> (later known as <i>shattered innocents</i>)<br>\n.” Should of listened to her mother I guess. The dollz/avatar business appears to be huge. I wonder how much market concentration has already happened?</p>\n\t<p>Notice that both of these examples have a tiny bit of advertising in the resulting image. Sites like flickr and delicious accumulate quite extensive models of their users and that ought to enable them to offer services like these that are more informed about who the person is. You can inject these <a href=\"http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/aboutgiffy\">feedburner widgets into forums and email signatures</a>.</p>\n\t<p>I guess I don’t know where this posting is going. Maybe I should ramble on about christmas cards next.\n</p>"
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Google Reader was shut down after July 1, 2013, and users were able to use Google Takeout to save their data, including subscriptions and starred, liked, and shared articles until July 15. However, the article lists are JSON files with a custom format for which there weren’t (as far as I know) any user-friendly viewers, so I made one.
Stella (you're looking at it right now!) runs entirely in your modern, standards-compliant, HTML5 FileReader API-supporting Web browser (you are using one, right?) and lets you view any Google Reader article list in JSON format, including your starred, liked, shared, and notes lists, as well as any subscriptions you’ve exported in JSON format (more on that here). All you have to do is click “Select JSON file”, select your file, and start reading! You can also save a static HTML page which you can view offline.
It’s worth noting that Google Reader JSON files do contain the full contents of each article, and Stella does let you view those.
Your JSON files stay on your computer. No data is sent to my server. (I promise. I can't afford the load!)
The source code to Stella is available on
Bitbucket and is released under the X11 License. If you modify the
JavaScript or CSS files, run make to regenerate the
stella.combined.{js,css} files; otherwise, you won’t see your
changes.