Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

What does my Ubuntu rig have to do with the future of elections? I’m not sure, but Popular Science feels that the picture I took of my desk (above) was good enough to illustrate their article: The Future of Elections: Startup “Americans Elect” Plans an Internet-Based Third-Party Convention in 2012.

American politicians have been promising to return power to the people for as long as Americans have been voting. But anyone who pays attention knows that the average citizen has very little voice in Washington. Now a new startup that uses an Internet-sourced, social-media-inspired, American Idol-esque approach could be the change we can really believe in.
The new company, Americans Elect, is about to submit 1.6 million signatures required to get on the 2012 California presidential ballot, the beginning salvo of a 50-state effort. The company plans to host an open nominating process to build a viable third party ticket in every state. Thomas Friedman at the New York Times explains their strategy, and how they could remake the future of voting.

Picture licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

SJ Klein of One Laptop per Child and the WikiMedia Foundation has produced a review of the legal actions being taken against Aaron Swartz.  Aaron is someone that I greatly admire, and I am very concerned with the direction of his court case.  I wish him the best of luck.  Here is the opening of SJ’s post:

Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to knowledge, open government, and an informed civil society.  He has worked as a software architect, digital archivist, social analyst, Wikipedia analyst, and political organizer.  Last year he co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the non-profit political advocacy group Demand Progress.

He is also currently charged with computer fraud by the US Attorney’s office, in what appears to be the latest example of “a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction” based on the broad applicability of wire fraud and computer fraud statutes.  An overview: …

The rest of his post is at his blog and you can sign a petition for Aaron over at Demand Progress.

I am, however, twittering.  Catch me @isforinsects if you want to keep up with my minute-to-minute escapades.  Part of the reason I’m dissatisfied with the lawblog is that I can’t embed js/flash widgets to show twitter updates :(.

Hey everybody.  It’s that time of year :S

I have been completely swamped with work, and a little unhappy with the limitations of the MUwordpress here at Harvard.  I’m considering moving my blag back to isforinsects.com or to a l.o address, or something else entirely.

Anyway, just wanted to let you all know that I wont be updating for the next couple weeks.  FYI

Over the past six months I have drastically cut down on my personal posessions.  I moved to Boston in June with a suitcase and a backpack.  Since then I have had two smallish boxes of clothes shipped from back home (it’s getting cold).

And you know what?  I don’t miss hardly anything.

Long-time OLPC contributor Todd Kelsey recently submitted a proposal to the Knight Grant Challenge and has made it through to the second round!  This is great news for Todd and for OLPC, because Todd’s project is about expanding journalism, writing and community around OLPC deployments.

Quoth Todd:

__(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)

I didn’t know that this was a real site.  But blogs.com is real (they do exist!), and they just made an amazing post/update about OLPC.  They covered just about everything that’s been happening lately.

They mentioned the OLPC Blog,  G1G1, the new G1G1 FAQ, Amazon, SWIFT and Google, the manual and (the amazing) Anne Gentle‘s work on the manual.

Crazy stuff.  It’s pretty rare to see something so well researched on the web.

+1 Blogs.com

Nice, we’re finally setting up a blog for OLPC:

We need guest posts!  Please help! (email sj at laptop dot org with posts)

And now David is going to sing us a song…

Actually this is the part where Harvard wont let me EMBED ANYTHING ON THIS BLOG.

1.) Floss Manuals mini-store:

.js was stripped out auto-magically, and could not import .css

2.) Berkman wont let me embed YouTube in my blog.

Ok, a little tacky maybe.  But seriously.  C’mon Harvard!

More images from the Internet Superhighway event.  StarCraft FTW!