via Findings – Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons – NYTimes.com.

£400 million ($668 million) will be spend on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in the homes of private citizens. Why? To make sure the kids are doing their homework, going to bed early and eating their vegetables. The scheme has, astonishingly, already been running in 2,000 family homes. The government’s “children’s secretary” Ed Balls is behind the plan, which is aimed at problem, antisocial families. The idea is that, if a child has a more stable home life, he or she will be less likely to stray into crime and drugs

via Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes | Gadget Lab | Wired.com:

via The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real – Anil Dash.

We could just tick off Sprint and call it “Direct Connect”. It’s a lot like the PTT with a group receiving end.

via Facebook | On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.

Let’s see. I’ll put these few words out there on the internets…cool, my friend just saw it. Not so cool, that creep in the next cubicle is making comments about it. Give it back! Give it back!

Oh noooooooo.

via Op-Ed Guest Columnist – Living the Off-Label Life – NYTimes.com.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free. Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Apparently, DIRECTV switched from 1920×1080 resolution HD video to highly compressed 1280×1080 so they can shove a lot more channels on to their service which users not-so-lovingly named “HD Lite“.  As you can see above, the DIRECTV image to the left absolutely stinks compared to the not-so-great sample from Dish on the right.  This apparently angered a lot of DIRECTV customers and one such customer Peter Cohen actually filed a class action lawsuit.

(Via Sam’s Random Musings.)

(Via dangerousmeta.)

“Why take any risk?” they ask. The medical establishment and the culture at large have twisted logic around to the point where any risk, no matter how infinitesimal, is too much. So powerful is this Puritanical impulse that, once a health objection is raised, however irrational the recommended behavior, it’s considered irresponsible to behave any other way.

The most inspiring thing I saw all day. This is why I do what I do:

Captivating and provocative.

(Via The Long Tail.)

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is the most widely read of the five Chinese Classics. The book was traditionally written by the legendary Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi (2953-2838 B.C.). It is possible that the the I Ching originated from a prehistoric divination technique which dates back as far as 5000 B.C. Thus it may be the oldest text at this site. Futher commentaries were added by King Wen and the Duke of Chou in the eleventh century B.C.

Here’s how Burke explained the image, back in 1941:

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

The ability to orient oneself in that sort of free-for-all requires a kind of discursive finesse that probably cannot be certified (let alone quantified). For that matter, there is no particular reason to equate success in this endeavor with reaching a vast audience. For some topics, 15 people is a lot. Just this morning, for example, I saw a blog post that started by asking, “What is the future of phenomenological geography, and why is this question even important?”

Well, it’s a big parlor. It contains multitudes. And even if some administrators fail to grasp the fact, the existence of such a space provides a necessary — if at wildly unregulated — supplement to the standard venues of publication and formal scholarly gathering. Whenever the phenomenological geographers do get together face-to-face, for example, it has to make some difference that they have already had a chance to talk in a forum that is also potentially open to objections from structuralist geographers who don’t wish them well. (Please consider that a hypothetical: I don’t actually know if there is such a rumble now underway.)

Make sure that you scroll down beyond the camera lists to see the charts.

Flickr: Camera Finder

These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

What a wonderful example of doing something interesting with unintended data. They mine the images and use it to create useful information for consumers, and probably producers as well.

I wonder if they sell custom intelligence to the camera makers?

What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.

Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos).  Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.

by way of Scripting News

I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.

So how far does my picture actually travel?

Click here to actually see some detail ;-)

When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud? The only reference that I have is the URL I get back. I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.

Interesting.

8. There is no place to hide.

In the immortal words of nobody I know, “Give me a large enough database, and I can store the world.”

Chris’s Post-Game Analysis

None dare call it: Empire. I was biting my tongue through most of that gab, but I can’t go home without saying that most of it — till Josh Marshall showed up — missed the obvious points (like the Iraq fiasco) as I think most thinking Americans understand them. We have staggered into our own version of Late Rome: absurdly expensive bullying adventures abroad, cruel social division and decadence at home.
…

Pat Buchanan knows what’s happening. Susan Sontag knew, too. And their common-sense analyses from right and left agreed quite precisely, as I blogged last year during Little Caesar’s convention. See: The Issue is Empire.

(Via Open Source.)

The Catholic Insider is a podcast by father Roderick Vonhogen, catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The direct link to the keynote speech is here. Some of you may recognize the under-current of humor. I certainly did.

Interesting site. Like the Praystation Portable

With this podcast, you can turn any portable mediaplayer into a ‘Praystation Portable ‘. When you subscribe to the feed, you’ll be able to download a daily morning and evening prayer that you can take with you on the road. The prayers are taken from the catholic Liturgy of the Hours.

Never was a humble footnote happier than I am to be attached to the record of a cultural revolution — and in my case, to the “word of the year,” which turns out to be: podcast.

Radio for today. Radio for Christine.

Today, the Bush administration has been steered into dangerous waters by veterans of the Nixon/Ford era, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who have pursued a decades-long quest to reassert the glories of the imperial presidency they cherished as young men and then saw shamed and dismantled in the aftermath of Watergate.

Whose voice is it anyway? Last Friday night I posted a modified poster originally created by Albert Dome in 1942 for the U.S. government’s Office of Facts and Figures. The struggle of corporations to come to terms with a printing press at the fingertips of every employee is very interesting to me and as a history enthusiast I decided to express these curiosities through visual imagery from another era, an era of fear that the consequences of any action might be more than any individual would like to bear.

The shift from hits to niches is a rich seam, manifest in all sorts of surprising places. This blog is where I’m going to collect everything I can about it.

10,000 subscribers at 25 cents per week. That would be a reasonably well paid writer.

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