I’m half way thru its 1.5 hours and it is worth it to become familiar with the technology and concepts behind it.
More on CMIS and Alfresco at cmis.alfresco.com.
danah boyd On Facebook, Class, Privacy, and Public-ness
danah boyd: “Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms”
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
Related:
Bruce Schneier: “The Eternal Value of Privacy”
Nicholas Carr: Other people’s privacy
NPR on the ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’
NPR.org: Remembering MLK And The ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’:
King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During his last year he was organizing a poor people’s campaign to come to Washington, D.C.
New York Times going with the frequency-model?
I’m cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.
The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the “frequency-model” – more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:
At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.
Read all about it in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”.
Think you have statistical chops? Help predict homicides in Philadelphia
The Analytics X Prize is “to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city”.
Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has posted some of his progress so far using spacial regression.
Techies helping Haiti
CNN: “Techies unite to brainstorm help for Haiti”
Check out CrisisCamp Haiti
Teenager thinking about your future? Be a geek!
Nice Django Forms tutorial
Usware Blog: “Doing things with Django forms”
John Nunemaker has no talent, I agree (and don’t either!)
Love this post by John Nunemaker and programming: “I Have No Talent”:
It is true. I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking about occasionally dabbling in Ruby on the weekends. I am talking about the kind of practice where I beat code that isn’t working into submission (though often times the code wins).
The rise of the journalist-programmer
I’d call it some long-awaited recognition for many. Gawker: Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer.
Hmm… have I qualified as a Programmer-Journalist in the past?