Congress Shutting Down MySpace Access from Schools, Libraries!

Please pass this on to everyone you know who lives part-time on the Internet.

The US Congress (average age = old and clueless) has voted to ban access from all "social networking," likely including MySpace, Amazon.com and even Wikipedia from public schools and libraries in the United States. They'd do worse if they could, but doesn't it grind your gears that these know-nothings can shut down your Internet access in libraries and schools? News Link!

Those of us who "get" social networking and not only use it now, but understand its amazing potential for good in the future, need to get up off our butts and do something about this. We need to stand up and speak out about this. See info below. They want to spend tax dollars to shut us away from the Internet!

Now that the Congress has passed this bill, it also has to be passed by the US Senate. We can STOP that! Senators only have to run for re-election every 6 years, so they don't have to answer to their clueless, in some cases bigoted against the modern world, constituencies. They can even take the time to learn something new - except for perhaps Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Let's make it even tougher for the Senate to pass this STUPID rule. Many of us are voters, too, or if you are not, you probably will be one of these years - maybe the next time *your* senator needs to get re-elected (or runs for president) you can vote for them (or not).

Meanwhile you can make your voice heard. Take just a minute or two so find out who the senator for your state is, and send him/her a message. This website contains easy to use contact information and functionality.

The folks behind this are some of the same folks who want to move the Internet away from neutrality, also. (Will they ever get it, or will they die ignorant? Probably the latter.)

Ciao, baby. Have a great weekend!

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How Do You Get Your News?
Current mood: tired
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Here's my latest column, before my editor makes it read a whole lot better:

How do you get the news?

Up until very recently, I read five or more news papers each day. I would stop on the way home after work and purchase the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, and the New York Times. I already would have the Michigan Daily, because there is free distribution of it in the lobby of our building. And the Ann Arbor News is waiting for me by the mailbox when I get home.

Now I'm down to only the Ann Arbor News and the Sunday New York Times. Why is that? Has my reading speed slowed? No. Can I no longer afford to buy so many papers? No. (Although, my wife is happy that I don't spend that money.) Am I just too busy in the evenings doing housework? Absolutely not!

Maybe you've guessed by now that "Why is that" is a trick question? Actually, the language of the factual set-up to the question is misleading. Here's how . . . .

|||

I no longer read those news papers, but I still read (or listen, NPR) the news. I've successfully converted to "reading" most of my news on line. In fact, if it weren't that having the Sunday Times and the daily Ann Arbor News lying around is a positive influence on the rest of my family, most of whom would not read much news at all if not for that, I would convert completely to online reading. (and, as a result, have much cleaner fingers at dinner time.)

The conversion was slow at first. It began ten years ago when I became the editor of "SCUP Email News," one of the very oldest continuously-published emailed newsletters (Since 1987; planners really do think ahead!) on any topic. (It was originally, "SCUP Bitnet News.") There's only one older such newsletter that I know of within higher education, the monthly Electronic AIR, which predates "SCUP Email News" by a few weeks. I don't know of anything older outside of higher education.

One of my tasks is finding, describing, and linking to a number of higher education planning-related news items or resources. The "SCUP Links" portion of "SCUP Email News tends more toward substantial resources or magazine or journal articles than to newspaper-type articles, but in my monthly, then weekly search, I began to notice how much news was becoming available on line from sources not often found in newspaper racks in southeastern Michigan. For example, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and so forth. Those weren't replacing my newspaper reading, they were adding to it.

Early on in the life of the World Wide Web, I was always in search of topical "meta-pages," which, in the end, became so commonplace that they're now sort of dead, unless the publishing organization can claim to have captured the topical realm and be comprehensive. Even then, the more sophisticated search engines are superior for everyday news purposes. More about that later.

Then, the whole idea of email newsletters got "hot" and even just within higher education some quite topically-focused newsletters became available to join the handful that were already in place, like the "Electronic AIR," "SCUP Email News," and "Edupage." The Campus great "stable" of Technology newsletters is a prime example. Eventually, daily newsletters began to overflow my inbox, such as the "Daily Report" from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the "Daily News" from Academic Impressions, Inside Higher Ed's "Daily Update," and the "UB Daily" from University Business.

Then I was hired by then-Syllabus and now Campus Technology magazine to write these weekly articles and collect and annotate a set of weekly news items for "IT Trends". That forced me to gear up a bit in terms of organizing my weekly search. Boy, was I ever happy when I discovered - it seems like yesterday, but really was over two years ago, I think, Google Alerts. I now have dozens of those alerts engaged and my email client happily files them into folders by topic.

I'm the kind of person who got excited when the New York Times changed its online format and introduced TimesSelect. Not because I now had to pay to read the editorials and columnists, but because that meant that its everyday articles are now free of the "free registration" requirement and I can link to them.

My first item of business each day is to get my email downloading and then scan through the Drudge Report, then CNN, then USA Today, then the New York Times, then the Christian Science Monitor, while I read, sort, forward, and reply to overnight incoming email messages. During the day I make sure I get to InsideHigherEd and the Chronicle on line. Lately, I've been adding a variety of blogs to my daily scanning schedule, but I'm not organized enough with them yet to be able to share them here.

What's next? I may never get to podcasting, because without the serendipity of whatever comes up next on NPR, I'm not the kind of person who gets into intentionally listening to something either on the radio or on line. I think the short, 3-minute-or-less streaming video or podcasts might work for me, but I despise television; don't watch it and don't own a television set, so maybe not.

On the other hand, someone on the excellent DIG-REF list just posted a link to an interview with Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales from Friday's (5/26) FLOSS Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Chris DiBona. I may well be listening to that as soon as I send this column off.

For some reason, I have not yet been captivated by RSS feeds and I wonder if they're as much of a soon-to-be-a-from-the-past way of receiving news as publishing documents on CDs turned out to be. I'm very interested in reader-contributed, slightly organized news websites like Fark.com, which is the most recent addition to my daily scan, thanks to my colleague, John Ferry. I just wish that particular one wasn't so very few clicks away from stuff that I'd just as soon not accidentally look at.

Today, on UWEBD, the College and University Web Developer's list, a thread was started up about the potential for Wiki-based news pages. So far, I am the only respondent, but my response - formed as I wrote it - coalesced some things I have been sort of noticing about Wikipedia. One is that I use it more and more. Another is that, as I wrote, "Some of the articles in Wikipedia are so frequently updated they are analogous to constantly-updated news stories." Hmm.

So, then I asked the list to share the various cool and unusual ways they are seeing the news done. Only a couple of responses to that so far, but they're interesting. My favorite news-related page of the day - and one I think I am now reintroduced to - is "FRESH Headlines" at Frustrated.Cities.com. That site compares the current offerings from a political spectrum of online news sources.

The left-hand column is the Village Voice. The next is the New York Times. The next might be the BBC or the Irish Times, then on the right is Fox News. I think that the utterly poisonous World Net Daily should be a fifth column, to the right of Fox News, but then I don't know how to code that kind of page.

Personally, I show no signs of the Balkanization of news reading that some pundits have worried about. I look at many conservative, some radically-conservative: AnnCoulter, Limbaugh, Hal Lindsey; heck, I even visit Jerry Falwell sometimes and was delighted recently to learn from the site on which he sells special protein shakes that Pat Robertson can leg press 2,000 pounds. And I am a "Capital El" Liberal.

To balance that: Check out Daily Kos and the Huffington Post.

I just want to know what everyone thinks.

What would really be cool is to be able to tap into the National Security Agency's varied eavesdroppings, but those probably won't be available to the average person without good cracking skills until about 2010. Unless a senior administration official needs to leak something.

Currently listening : Taking The Long Way By Dixie Chicks Release date: 23 May, 2006

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Disney - My Way
Current mood: soaked
Category: soaked Life

Walt is spinning so fast in his grave, he will soon replace the black hole in the center of the galaxy.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/travel/story/0,,1784408,00.html

Currently reading : Rogue Berserker (The Berserker) By Fred Saberhagen Release date: 04 January, 2005

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Rant About Cycling Safely
Current mood: annoyed
Category: Sports

I'm told the following will be a special guest editorial in the Sunday edition of this week's Ann Arbor News:

---

I, too, silently - and sometimes not-so-silently - honor a particular fallen cyclist, daily. There are memories that do not depart and which return often.

Twenty-three-year-old Matthew Young, from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio was a Coast Guard Academy graduate, a University of Michigan graduate student in chemical engineering, a parachutist, a scuba diver, and a bicyclist, who was killed when he ran a red light at Hubbard Road and Huron Parkway about ten years ago. Had I yelled at Matthew for not wearing a helmet and for running a red light, he may have told me it was none of my business. As it turns out it was my business. I got to watch him start to die.

While I attempted first aid Matthew shuddered several times and went into a coma. He died the next day at the university hospital. Not a day goes by that I do not think of Matthew, and I have gained 60 pounds because I couldn't get up the courage to get back out in serious traffic. (Im trying again this year, but its scary.) No doubt the Huron High School student who hit him still has nightmares of Matthews face smashing onto his windshield.

I see in the photograph on B1 for Thursday, May 18, 2006, that the cyclists pictured were all wearing helmets. Good. Matthew and the other young man who died in the same month in Ann Arbor (this one running a stop sign) were not. I surely hope that those cyclists who are quoted in the article as wanting respect also stop at stop signs and do not run red lights. Its kind of hard for me to believe that they do, because there are more cyclists in that one photograph than I can count in a single year that I see actually stopping at a stop sign or light (unless traffic makes it impossible). I have seen moms and dads with kids in the little follow-behind carts riding in traffic and running stop lights or stop signs. That's child abuse.

So, it because it is my business, too, that I am that guy who yells (Never with an obscenity!) at cyclists who run red lights downtown. Just two weeks ago I yelled at a cyclist on Liberty Street who was about to run the red light. He stopped, looked angrily at me, and then his face changed and he said "Thank you," as a car raced through where he would have been on Division Street, had I not yelled at him (It was his lack of respect for motorists and traffic laws, not the motorist's, that would have caused that injury or death).

Yes, many motorists exhibit a lack of understanding about cyclists. Heck, they exhibit a lack of understanding about driving cars. I drive a car, too. Most cyclists do. I was driving my car to work on the day that Matthew was struck, because my wrist had been fractured the week before when I was hit from behind, on a sunny morning, with an orange flag waving from the back of my bike, while I was in the proper place, on an almost empty dirt road. Had I not been an acrobat as a child and thus learned how to take a fall I would have been hurt worse; had I not been wearing my helmet I might have died.

Riding home from work just last week, the first day in a long time I have done that, I was almost hit twice by people pulling out of driveways on a portion of my route which is on the sidewalk, and then was told to Get off the street you ***hole by an unskilled pickup truck driver later on during the same trip. Every time my wife goes out on long, 20-mile rides I worry constantly until she returns home. And my heart aches when I read about the deaths of people like Charlotte Marcotte and Todd Schoenheide.

Yes, it would be wonderful to have (a) better bike routes and (b) respect from motorists, as well as (c) cyclists who obey the laws and respect motorists. Q: Guess which one is most under the control of cyclists? A: (c).

There is no clearer disrespect for motorists and for other cyclists - than passing a line of 8 cars waiting for a red light downtown, and then cruising on through the light while they continue to wait. And its pretty stupid, too, because when the light changes, then they pass you again and this time theyre mad, doh! Cyclists should start their work at home, with their own behaviors. Try actually stopping at stop signs and stop lights all the time, not just when traffic forces you to. I do, which means that you can. Then educate other cyclists to wear helmets and NOT to run red lights and stop signs, even if it means yelling at them. I do that, too. I wish you would.

As for motorists in general, well, good luck. I bet that if you could measure their brain waves, most of the patterns would look exactly the same while driving on a highway as while watching Desperate Housewives. Thats not a windshield, you know, its actually a television screen, and nothing out there is really real. How else can you explain serious tailgating at 70 mph?

Were not going to change them. They wont even pay attention to their own safety. We can change their habits by education as effectively as we can make it stop raining by wishing for it. Some of them will regret it, when they kill someone, or their child does. After all, before their children can take a few drivers education classes, theyve been learning how to drive by watching their parents for 15 years.

Safety starts with your own behavior on a bike or driving a car. Then, if we get lucky with voting and taxes, by intelligent design of traffic routes to more safely include bicycles. Motorists may as well be a force of nature. And you dont want to go out of your way to annoy Mother Nature.
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Currently reading : Broken Prey (Lucas Davenport Mysteries) By John Sandford Release date: 02 May, 2006

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Founding Fathers Not 'Good' Christians?
Current mood: busy
Category: News and Politics

In case you are as tired as I am of all that crap from the religious right about how the founding fathers were such intense Christians and all, here's an advance look at an article coming next weekend in the Sunday NYT. Just a couple of "fair use" paragraphs - it's a review of several new books about the founding fathers:

"Like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series, insists that "those who founded this nation" were "citizens who had a personal and abiding faith in the God of the Bible." If LaHaye means only to say that religion has played an important role in American history, he is surely correct. But if he is taken literally (as a believer in the inerrancy of the Bible should be), he is decidedly wrong. It is one of the oddities of our history that this very religious country was created by men who, for one brief but significant moment, had serious reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

According to David L. Holmes's "Faiths of the Founding Fathers," none of the first five presidents were conventional Christians. All were influenced to one degree or another by Deism, the once-popular view that God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs. John Adams, a Unitarian, did not accept such Christian basics as "the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, total depravity and predestination." Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted his own Bible. Before he became president, James Madison wrote the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," a classic text in the history of religious liberty. Our fifth president, James Monroe, gave his name to a doctrine, but it had nothing to do with faith; in fact, Monroe may have been the least religious of all our early presidents.

And then there was the first one. "Were George Washington living today," LaHaye has said, "he would freely identify with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity that is having such a positive influence on our nation." Yet as Peter R. Henriques documents in "Realistic Visionary," Washington never referred to Jesus in any of his letters. Not once during his death ordeal did he call for a minister, ask for forgiveness or express belief in an afterlife. Washington "is better understood as a man of honor than as a man of religion," Henriques concludes."

more (probably need password to get into the whole thing)

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Tougher Passwords Are Easier to Forget and Lead to Productivity Loss, Occasional Misery
Current mood: cheerful
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Been to busy to post much. Here's my latest article from my paid-blogging job-on-the-side:

"In the last year, how many hours have you spent trying to remember a password or a user name? How many minutes waiting for unconcerned servers to spit out a reminder email message? How many times could you not access something because your search for a reminder did not succeed? Have you created new and duplicate accounts because it was easier than getting reminded, or remembering?

I know, I know, people who are well-organized probably have every user name and password that belongs to them in their handy printout in their wallet, or encrypted on their handheld device. But what happens when their wallet gets stolen? Or when their handhelds memory gets trashed?

If I look back to 1996, a mere decade ago, and reflect on where I thought we would be in this regard in ten years, well, surprise. It isn't where we are."

Tougher Passwords Are Easier to Forget and Lead to Productivity Loss, Occasional Misery.

Currently reading : Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited (Samuel and Althea Stroum Books) By Doug Kelbaugh Release date: August, 2002

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Tipping Point? Or Just A Nice Spring Day?
Current mood: determined
Category: News and Politics

Every Tuesday, if I walk south from my office building at lunch, toward downtown and away from campus, I pass a dedicated little band of "peace demonstrators" outside the Ann Arbor federal building.

These folks are survivors from the '60s and '70s. Their average age is probably close to 70. They're not loud, I don't think they can be. I don't agree with all of their signs and statements, but they do have the courage to stand there - week after week for years now - and mostly be ignored. Although sometimes the older women get a ticket for trespass if they get tired and sit on a concrete planter.

But something has changed.

Today as I walked by, I determined not to get engaged in conversation, and I didn't. Mainly, although I agree with their purposes on behalf of peace, these people have had idiocentric biases for decades now and I don't want to get caught up in their lifetime of details, just show my support.

So, I said, "Hey, folks, I appreciate you being out here every week." As I did so, I heard a murmur from other pedestrians who were saying the same thing. Wow.

And then, in a row, four cars drive by and honked support with thumbs-up. In the past two years the only car I have seen do that was mine! And those cars were driven by young people! People who a year ago would (I think.) have been mortified by showing public support for a bunch of old peaceniks.

Like I said, maybe this is a tipping point. Or maybe it's just a nice spring day.

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What's stuck up in dogs' noses?
Current mood: peaceful
Category: Pets and Animals

[work-in-progress]

Our dogs know more about us than we know they do. The olfactory sense, their major sense of perception, is a physical one. As I told my children when they were little, actually I still do tell them this, "If you can smell it, that means a tiny little piece of it is stuck up inside your nose." Pleasant, eh? I think it is thought provoking.

Imagine what that's like to a dog? What's stuck up in dogs' noses? We're alarmed by the loss of "personal information" via digital communications, but think about what a wealth of information our pets are about ourselves. Ozzy's turbinates are filled with tiny little pieces of every part of my body.

Do criminals accompanied by dogs now have to worry about DNA analysis of what's in their pets' noses? Is the information about ourselves that is inside our dogs, downloadable?

[/work-in-progress]

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A Stealth Creationist Kicking Up a Fuss
Current mood: bored
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Just a few days ago, Matt Drudge did his usual 'thing' and misleadingly titled a link through to an interesting news article about a professor at the Universiy of Texas being accused of looking forward to, perhaps even thinking about helping to make happen a 90 percent die-off of the human species.

Apparently, a widely-published "amateur scientist" named Forrest Mims III attended a conference and heard professor Eric Pianka speak. Mims says that professor Pianka seemed to enjoy his prophecies about extreme overpopulation too much. He says it is likely that as many as 90 percent of humans will someday die from a virulent disease. His first choice is Ebola.

Professor Pianka's career is in studying population and disease and he teaches in class the same views and research that outraged Mims. It seems impossible to find any students who will complain about his classes or ideas, and his student evaluations are at the highest possible levels. As well, his campus and disciplinary colleagues think highly of him.

I was willing to give some of Mims' issues enough credence to keep an open mind, but for some reason I got curious about that title: "amateur scientist." It turns out that Mims is a prolific and very good writer about science, especially technical or engineering science. In 1990 he was within moments of being hired by Scientific American to write its "Amateur Scientist" column. During the final interview, Mims mentioned some of his writings for Christian magazines.

You couldnt tell by reading any of the recent news stories, but it turns out that Mims is an ardent devotee and proselytyzer of Creationism. Scientific American was confident that having Mims on its staff would be an embarassment at best. Worst case scenarios ranged from anger and revolt among SA's customer base of professional scientists to a concern that a Creationist could not possibly write appropriately about modern biology, to concern that such a prestigious position at SA would lend credibility to his proselytization.

I suspect that there is a lot in the teaching and theorizing by professor Pianka which annoys Mims' religious sensibilities. I think it's reprehensible for Mims to misrepresent someone's work and put them in the kind of erroneous negative spotlight that has shone on professor Pianka.

And it's getting worse. Professor Pianka has an appointment coming up with the FBI. It seems that someone has made a complaint that Professor Pianka is a terrorist.

Now, what could possible go wrong from here? Look how close to being in trouble with the authorities professor Pianka is merely because his work conflicts with someone else's religious beliefs.If this was Pakistan or Afhganistan in the months after 9/11, someone who disagreed with Biankas research due to religious beliefs could have told American solders that he was a terrorist to get rid of him. And Bianka would be sitting in Guantanamo Bay right now.

Instead, Biankas got a date with the FBI and a lot of threatening calls and email messages. Mims is apparently one of those people I consider to have Old Testamentatis. They call themselves Christians, but they act as though there is no New Testament. (They fail to understand the illogic of it, since the Christ part of Christian is only in the New Testament.

But you see, its okay to be punitive and deceptive if you take the Old Testament as your guide. Did you ever ask yourself what happened to the thousands of inhabitants of Jericho after the walls came tumblin down? Wonder  no more: The inhabitants were completely destroyed after rape and torture which included gutting the bellies of pregnant women. By the good guys.

You could ask an Old Testamentist What would Jesus do? and the likely response would be, as I recently received from an attendant at a gas station store, We dont care too much for the New Testament.

I wonder which major new outlet, if any, will pick up on Mims background and prejudices and if theyll publish if it they do?

Currently reading : The Crack in Space : A Novel (Vintage) By Philip K. Dick Release date: 08 March, 2005

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The Transition from IT as Infrastructure to IT as Ecosystem
Current mood: calm
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Here's this week's "blog-for-pay" opinion piece: The Transition from IT as Infrastructure to IT as Ecosystem

"As anyone who reads my column regularly knows, I am constantly trying to find the connection between IT and environmental sustainability. Not just the implications of upstream and downstream waste in the production of hardware and its abandonment, or the use of electrical power to operate machines, but in a larger context.

A lot of the wonderful things happening in the world of sustainability came out of both systems thinking and the application of computing power to defining and solving environmental problems. So I was delighted to read an article titled, "Managing the Digital Ecosystem." It doesnt make the kind of connection I was looking for, but it does take a big look at the evolution of our computing and networking tools into their own digital ecosystem.

The article is from Issues Online in Science and Technology and was written by Carnegie Mellon University CIO Joel M. Smith and President Jared L. Cohon. They write in the context of looking for leadership strategies that work in the increasingly complex system of higher education IT."

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