How I became a Wikipedian

Posted on October 8th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

I had forgotten the long essay I wrote about this transition here on my blog… or rather, on my first law school blog, when blogs.law was new and cuddly.  My transition to the current wordpress skin made it more visible, new-found visibility online made it a repeated spam target, and I rediscovered it today.  So spam has done something good for me.  Thanks, spam king!  

For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

1 comment.

Posted on September 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

Daniel goes to Ethiopia.  Elana is digitizing some of her reels of footage this weekend, so expect some fantastic video from Mongolia and elsewhere soon.

0 comments.

Saving the world from destruction, 5E-44 sec at a time

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang, indescribable, international.

I hope you’ve all seen this by now.  Thank goodness for perpetually-compounded world-saving.

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frightmotif: deleveraging and the veil of illusion

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, fly-by-wire, international, metrics, poetic justice.

Our interconnected global economy is built on the illusion of trust.  Gautama himself would be impressed by how far we have advanced the texture of societal illusion.  While there are certainly many non-illusory sources of trust, the trust most modern men have in our financial instruments and currencies is based on a blind association of “interest rates”, “inflation”, “market valuation” and similar concepts with a hazy set of economic laws, as though they were fundamental laws in the sense that one discoveres Mathematical or Physical Laws.   Not social norms that could change on short notice; not starting rules of nomic games of risk and manipulation; not Massively Multilayered Online Resource-Permuting Guidelines, hundreds of indirections removed from the original social norm of personal credit and unenforcable on any large scale.  They are perceived instead as Laws, discoverable and immutable.  Not quite.

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

  • Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
  • Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
  • Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
  • Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
  • Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
  • Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
  • Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam’s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
  • Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold. (more…)

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XO Wikireader : compressed joy

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international, poetic justice.

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

  • a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates
  • scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

0 comments.

Country music

Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.

Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.

If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…

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Story Jam New York - Storytelling for all

Posted on March 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, fly-by-wire, international.

Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun.  We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon.  I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.

Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.

0 comments.

Posted on December 24th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

My friend Zdenek is creating a local gallery of knowledge and photographs of documents and buildings from his hometown of Češnovice. The result is a lovely collection of local history that any city would be proud to have.

It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.

At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?

Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.

0 comments.

OLPC : How to repair an XO before soccer practice

Posted on August 15th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

Sophie and Philip from Quebec learn how to repair an XO. Joel Stanley, working at OLPC over the summer, showed them how to take one apart; when it was put back together, the keyboard wasn’t working… they took it apart again on their own and managed to reseat it.

Joel managed to catch some neat montage footage, mainly from the first time around, and asked them to introduce themselves in English and French. With a little help from Jamendo, the video was spliced into a cute short… enjoy.

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Intel and OLPC trade noogies for neckrubs

Posted on July 13th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, international, popular demand.

Intel’s Will Swope joined AMD’s Arenas and others on OLPC’s board last night. Designs of our Gen-1 machines won’t change, though this gives them input, along with our other members, on future designs. Intel will also continue making and marketing Classmates… though the comparisons between the devices are likely to become more helpful and less marketing. This is not the first rivalry set aside on the board; my cynical side is always delighted to see companies which are rivals in other arenas able to come together around our educational goals.

We have an Intel group working just one floor above us in Kendall Square; it will be interesting to see what they think.

bv and bh

Gizmodo sez: “Hell freezes over“, with a delightful jesus diaz illustration (above). But I’d say it only got momentarily cool down there; Intel has been working with open source communities and on education projects for some time. Keep your eyes on the fiery gates, however. My acronymic archnemesis may start open sourcing his platforms one day… See also: slashdot.

1 comment.

Getting Africa Wired

Posted on September 27th, 2006 by .
Categories: international.

Ethan Zuckerman and Eric Osiakwan updated us about the situation in
Africa regarding Internet access. Very fascinating. Growth will be very
steady and larger than other global areas during the next few years.
Wireless use in some areas is extremely important. Many people connect
to the Internet via satellite.  j
provides some notes.

Getting Africa Wired …

1 comment.

Posted a few long rants on wikipedia lists today

Posted on September 22nd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

I’ll add direct links here later.  Comment on the mailing listgs for now, if you’re interested. 

2 comments.

Revolt in Thailand : is it a coup?

Posted on September 19th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

There’s a revolt underway in Bangkok.

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/topics/breaking-news/

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1800992,00050001.htm

BBC’s world have your say has live audio:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldhaveyoursay/

TV screenshots:
http://www.kwanzoku.com/index.php/archives/2006/09/were-ok-for-now/

Steady updates:
http://cowboycaleb.liquidblade.com/index.php/archives/2006/09/19/state-of-emergency-declared-in-thailand/

More:

  • http://www.thaiphotoblogs.com/
  • http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?p=72394
  • http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11198
  • http://www.thailandvoice.com/
  • http://www.2bangkok.com/highemer.shtml
  • http://www.thai-blogs.com/
  • http://www.sgtowns.com/
  • http://bangkok.metblogs.com/

(links via global voices)

Revolt in Thailand : is it a coup? …

0 comments.

At the Crossroads

Posted on September 2nd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

An insightful and cutting essay by Aaron Swartz, candidate in the current Wikimedia Board elections, about the challenges facing Wikimedia.  It’s great to hear a fresh voice tackle some of these long-standing problems, from the perspective of someone who has been around for many years and paying close attention, if rarely jumping into the fray.

At the Crossroads …

1 comment.

Wikimania update

Posted on May 17th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

Registration for Wikimania 2006 is now open.  There’s no better way to spend August 4-6 … (defcon?  I mean really.)  You can swing into Boston early and pick up another hacker conference as well; either Hacking Days or SIGGRAPH.

Wikimania update …

0 comments.

Representing a diversity of perspectives across language divides

Posted on May 11th, 2006 by j.
Categories: indescribable, international.

Ethan, one of my favorite sparring partners in discussions about
most anything under the sun, carved out an hour the other week to
discuss language issues and equitable representation of the world’s
multitude of perspectives. We had an excellent discussion of the
subject, which became heated for a moment when it seemed we were
veering off into philosophy rather than a practical discussion of how
to improve the world’s current defaults.

He wrote a lovely blog post about the discussion here, and followed up with a quick evaluation of a metric we had discussed. (How can one not admire
a person who dashes off two new metrics before breakfast?)  But there are a few points where I would like to differ.

(editor’s note : where’d the rest of this post go? –2/2008)

1 comment.

Bloggership ; Wikimania volunteering

Posted on April 28th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: international.

Two things:

Bloggership is going on right now; the web of scholarship, libel on blogs, and the predominance of blog discourse in shaping legal and other discussions.

And we’re having a pizza-laden Wikimania presentation today at 5pm at Berkman; come get a sneak peek of the new conference site and banners, and find out about the list of open tasks for the summer.

Bloggership ; Wikimania volunteering …

0 comments.

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