| Vitruvian Mind |
| The Man will burn! |
|
Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Consumer Products, Science & Technology, Arts & Literature.
The Chilean Library of Congress just released all of their content under Creative Commons. The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work.
The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. Very important stuff for all of us bloggers, as it dictates what we can use and how we can use it.
All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of what Creative Commons considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. In the words of Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and former Chairman of the Board, it is “a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”. Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.
The project leader of CC Chile, Claudio Ruiz Gallardo, speaking to the Creative Commons community mailing list, proudly stated that the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional del Chile is now available to all through the virtual world, bringing new freedoms to the citizens. Sounds good to me.
Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Myk.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Consumer Products, Business & Finance.
An article from PSFK informs us that Facebook has dropped the “is” from its status bar. Why is this relevant, you might ask? Well, because it’s another example of crowdsourcing that we talked about in Breasts are the New Unicef. Essentially, companies old and new are learning that the internet has empowered consumers and that listening to customers is probably a good idea. Here’s the majority of PSFK’s post:
To be or not to be…. the question of the ages has been answered–by Facebook. The social network is dropping the word “is” from that status bar, making you not “to be” anymore. Now before you have an existential dilemma, realize that you can always add “is” when you fill out your status (i.e. “is reading PSFK”). The change came after a group called “Petition to Get Rid of “is” from Facebook Status Update” caught their attention when it amassed over 170,000 members. We bet there was a good deal of cross-pollination with the group “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar.” Members were likely having meltdowns when statuses like “Allison is is happy” or “Piers is hates his iPhone” popped up in their newsfeeds. Now the grammarians have prevailed!
Facebook groups are the perfect medium for “Crowd Clout” wherein buyers, not sellers, are calling the shots. Some sites like Eventful, Sellaband and Threadless are built on this principle. You want Ron Paul to speak at your school? Want a band to get signed? Want that t-shirt with a punked out rooster? You got it (if enough other people do to). In China, there is the tuangou (‘team purchase’) phenomenon, which adds a flashmob layer to crowd commerce. Sites like TeamBuy, Taobao and Liba let people organize online around a certain product or service, then descend on the retailer at a given time to negotiate a group discount.
This concept was pioneered by sites like moveon.org and is finding its groove in Facebook. Its audience wants to beef up their profiles with their personal causes and interests. Meanwhile, these beliefs are affecting real change (beyond points of grammar). Cadbury recently brought back its Wispa candy bar thanks to a facebook group, for example.
Indeed, companies that are successful listen to the wisdom of crowds. This is a working business model for many a web start-ups: They ask their users what they want, then build it. What better formula is there? More traditional companies are catching on, relying more on customer feedback to build better products (instead of just playing defense against the bad ones). They are even using new product review engines like Relevant Mind and PowerReviews to aggregate these online opinions (check out this recent article in the New York Times on the topic).
Posted on November 25th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Media & Entertainment, Science & Technology, Humor & Pop Culture.
MTV planted its flag on the moon on August 1, 1981, and the channel quickly came to define what being young and hip was all about. The quick-cut style of music videos set the pace of an era, and helped launch countless careers. In addition to being the unofficial soundtrack of youth culture, the network discovered up-and-coming talent like animator Mike Judge, pioneered reality television with The Real World, and, with its televised town halls, helped send Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992.
That was then, this is now. These days MTV pretty much sucks. Their reality shows are played out, TV commercials break more new bands than they do, and the spirit of the network feels generally uninspired. The network’s 2006 Video Music Awards were the lowest rated in 10 years. As an arbiter of cool, MTV has lost its clout.
One contributor to the network’s demise has been the internet. Since the advent of Napster, MP3 blogs, and YouTube, kids have learned about new music by going online. They watch, buy, stream, swap, and steal music online. They list their favorite tracks and debate which band is coolest online. The Internet killed the video star.
Now MTV execs are scrambling to catch up. They believe their best shot is a now tiny unit within the network called Leapfrog. Its mission: Don’t try to compete directly with today’s top destinations. Instead, find the next big thing so MTV can, yes, leapfrog the competition once social networking sites start to seem so five minutes ago. At least they’ve realized that they missed one boat, and are searching for the next one instead of being the last person to the party.
Leapfrog is forging a path into online virtual worlds, and betting that 3-D environments like Virtual Laguna Beach are the next logical step beyond the classical model of 2-D social networking sites. The ability to actively participate, build a social network, and express yourself by adding your own content is now a minimum requirement for any web-based property that wants to capture youth. And virtual worlds like Second Life push this sort of online socializing a step further. There, your interactions unfold in real time and take the form of a 3-D avatar that is more expressive than any flat Web site could ever be. Explorable 3-D versions of MTV’s shows may not be enough to give the network the cultural cachet it had in the Reagan era, but the trend is clear: Kids will do more and more of their networking and socializing in 3-D spaces like VLB and There.com.
“All you could do on MySpace is leave comments and emails,” says one teen user. “This is the virtual world. You can walk, talk, play games, meet people instead of searching for them. Like any other community, you have cliques, people you trust, people you dislike. It’s pretty much the same as real life, I would say.” I’d say that’s a sad commentary on this poor girl’s concept of real life, but nonetheless, I wish MTV the best of luck in their endeavors. Maybe they can be cool again by the time I have teenage kids.
Posted on November 23rd, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Philosophy & Spirituality.
I’m a big fan of welcoming all, of the “more the merrier” school of thought. Radical inclusion some might call it, for all those ready to participate. That said, there are some things that are best done in smaller groups. I’d have to say marriage is one of them. Don’t get me wrong, threesomes are great, and the odd orgy never killed anyone, but having 70 wives I’m not too sure about.
Enter Warren Jeffs, recently debunked former head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Jeffs, who is reputed to have 70 wives, took over the leadership of the FLDS church after his father, Rulon, died in 2002. Members believe a man must marry at least three wives in order to ascend to heaven. Women are taught that their path to heaven depends on being subservient to their husband. The FLDS sect split from the Mormon Church after it renounced polygamy, and the 10,000-strong sect now dominates the towns of Colorado City, in Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, less than a mile away.
Well, Warren seems to have had a good thing going, but all good things must come to an end. The self-proclaimed prophet was recently sentenced to five years to life in jail as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her cousin. Jeffs went into hiding after being charged in Arizona with being an accomplice to incest and sexual misconduct for allegedly arranging marriages between minors and older men. He then spent 15 months on the run before his arrest in August 2006. At the time of his arrest he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
A jury convicted Jeffs of orchestrating the girl’s marriage to her 19-year-old cousin in 2001 and encouraging her to have sex by telling her she would go to hell if she did not. What a sweetheart. Just the kind of religious leadership America’s fundamentalist sects are famous for.
Polygamy is illegal in the US, but the authorities have reportedly been reluctant to confront the FLDS for fear of sparking a tragedy similar to the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, which led to the deaths of about 80 members. An estimated 40,000 people in the US still believe in polygamy. That’s about one out of every 7,500.
Posted on November 20th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: History & Politics, Business & Finance.
Our good friends in Washington have given us seven years of political policy that seem to have been inspired by a fraternity rush week binge, but the party is almost over. The hot girls have all left, people are puking in the bathroom, and the whole place smells. Tomorrow’s cleanup job is gonna suck.
This week the Federal Reserve cut its forecast for growth in 2008. Central bank officials emphasized that the housing downturn, credit crunch and possibility of slower consumer and business spending posed risks to the outlook. The Fed also released minutes of its Oct. 31 meeting, indicating that its decision to cut its target for a key short-term interest rate was in part to provide “additional insurance against an unexpectedly severe weakening in economic activity”. They noted that unemployment is expected to rise, as is inflation. Sounds awesome.
Many expert economists clearly state that the economy is devolving into recession, and the signs are everywhere. The dollar is at its weakest in ages, the price of oil is sky high, gold and other precious metals are at all time highs, and the housing market is taking a dump.
Stunning Wall Street with a $2 billion quarterly loss, Freddie Mac, one of the nation’s leading mortgage lenders, warned on Tuesday that the worst is yet to come. The company blamed eroding credit quality and falling home prices, which have caused more homeowners to fall behind on their loans. In many parts of the country, builders are axing construction plans, and construction of single-family homes has slumped to the lowest point in 16 years. Many cities in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada have seen double-digit drops in sales and prices and a spike in foreclosures.
The Bush Administration ‘Fiesta for the Rich and Powerful’ is nearing an end, so I recommend you take a couple aspirin, down a bottle of water, and hope that the hangover isn’t too painful.
Posted on November 15th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Travel & Leisure, Science & Technology.
Want to go into space but can’t drop $20 million to have the Russians fly you up? Well for a meager half mil or so, there may be a solution for you soon. The Swedish government has announced an agreement with suborbital space-tourism company Virgin Galactic that Swedish officials believe will lead to midsummer and mid-winter flights of Virgin’s SpaceshipTwo vehicle to observe the Aurora Borealis from Sweden.
The agreement, signed at the proposed future launch site in Kiruna, Sweden, calls for no exchange of funds. Swedish officials say the Kiruna facility, already known for launching suborbital sounding rockets and atmospheric balloons, has sufficient infrastructure to accommodate Virgin Galactic and that no new investment is needed.
As a demonstration of its interest, Esrange authorities have proposed to launch a small sounding rocket in March 2008 into the Aurora Borealis. Equipped with cameras, the flight would serve two purposes. It would give prospective passengers a sense of what they will view from their windows aboard SpaceshipTwo, and it will give SpaceshipTwo designer Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, a sense of what effect, if any, the Northern Lights might have on both the passengers and the electronics gear carried by SpaceshipTwo.
“Apparently this has never been done before, to fly through the Aurora Borealis,” Norberg said. “We have images from above and below, but we have never taken pictures from within.” As Buddha said, it’s always good to look from within.
Posted on November 13th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Consumer Products, Business & Finance, Sports & Health, Humor & Pop Culture.
A recent study has concluded that marijuana is the U.S.’s most valuable crop. The report, “Marijuana Production in the United States,” by marijuana policy researcher Jon Gettman, concludes that despite massive eradication efforts at the hands of the federal government, “marijuana has become a pervasive and ineradicable part of the national economy.” Contrasting government figures for traditional crops like corn and wheat against the study’s projections for marijuana production, the report cites marijuana as the top cash crop in 12 states and among the top three cash crops in 30. The study estimates that marijuana production, at a value of $35.8 billion, exceeds the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion).
In the report, Gettman champions a system of legal regulation and taxation of the plant. To activists for marijuana legalization, the study confirms a position they’ve held for years, and uses government stats to support their claim. “The fact that marijuana is America’s No. 1 cash crop after more than three decades of governmental eradication efforts is the clearest illustration that our present marijuana laws are a complete failure,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington D.C., a group that focuses on removing criminal penalties for marijuana use. Kampia, whose comments were included in the study’s press release, adds, “Our nation’s laws guarantee that 100 percent of the proceeds from marijuana sales go to unregulated criminals rather than to legitimate businesses that pay taxes to support schools, police and roads.”
A 2005 analysis by Harvard visiting professor Jeffrey Miron estimates that if the United States legalized marijuana, the country would save $7.7 billion in law enforcement costs and could generated as much as $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like alcohol or tobacco. Miron’s report on the costs of marijuana prohibition was signed by more than 500 leading economists, most notably the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who served as an economist in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
Perhaps its time for America to wake up and reliaze that the rich, skunky smell in the air is called change.
Posted on November 13th, 2007 by Myk.
Categories: Science & Technology, Humor & Pop Culture.
You know how you’re always asked if you’re right or left brained? And you think to yourself…”well, I’m pretty good at math, but I’m REALLY good at daydreaming…so…hey, which one is right brained again?”
Well check this out. It solves the issue once and for all–follow the silouette of the hot girl and you will finally know if you are right brained or left brained. Quick tutorial on the differences:
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
Posted on November 11th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Consumer Products, Science & Technology, Humor & Pop Culture.
The lonely and timid now have a new toy to play with. It’s time to forget about flashy clothes, a nice car, and all the usual accoutrements of a bachelor on the prowl, and embrace your inner child. Reach back to your youth, and grab a teddy bear. The great minds at Echo Robots are not making a Bluetooth programmable, social networking robot teddy bear. Echo’s technology allows you to program your interests into your bear, so that when you com in contact with other Echo robots, the bears can “play” with one another to determine if their owners have similar interests or could be a potential love match. Makes perfect sense. I mean, nothing helps you make a connection with a lovely lady better than carrying around a teddy bear in public.
Evidently the specific motions of the Echo robot will clue you into as to what you have in common with your neighbor, be it a shared hobby, a work-relation, academic similarities, or a total and complete lack of social skills.
Posted on November 8th, 2007 by Phil.
Categories: Uncategorized, Travel & Leisure, Consumer Products, Humor & Pop Culture.
Alright folks, it’s time for a little retrospective. A look back at fashion as it used to be. If you have any plaid corduroy cowboy pattern shirts in the closet, now is the time to liberate them. Get your groove going, get comfy, and read on.
I’d like to title this posting “8 Ways to Get Your Ass Kicked”.
First up, how to get your ass kicked at school:
This poor kid doesn’t know any better. His parents disregard for his mental well being is hobbling his social life. The hair alone is proof enough. This probably happened to most of you when you were young. Certainly did to me. Please observe a moment of silence in honor of the countless victims.
Exhibit number two – how to get your ass kicked at the office:
The questionable use of color, the stunning patterns, the cut that says, “Yes, Neil Diamond is my hero”. It all adds up to a recipe for success if your goal is pain.
Now to a little couples therapy… and how to get your ass kicked as a couple:
I’m sure there a reason why this pair of outfits were created, I just can’t for the life of me figure it what it was. It’s not really costume attire, not really professional attire, not really something that should be worn in the light of day.
(more…)
