November 2010
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Name that car
The Kid has been scanning archival family photos and I’ve been uploading them to Flickr (where I have now passed 39,000 shots in that one site alone). Many of these photos are well over a hundred years old. Most are about eighty years old, give or take a decade or two. They’re from the collection… Continue reading
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Public radio still rocks
Lately, thanks to the inexcusably inept firing of Juan Williams by NPR brass, and the acceptance of a $1.8 million grant from George Soros, NPR has tarred its credentials as a genuinely fair and balanced news organization. Which it mostly still is, by the way, no matter how much the right tries to trash it.… Continue reading
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Balk Friday
Yesterday’s paper came late. Guess it was too heavy. The thing weighed about four pounds, most of which was advertising for sales today, Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas Shopping season. Buy Now and Save! Celebrate the birth of the Savior by spending big, in herds. We were at a house with TV… Continue reading
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I was saying…
Two new and worthy posts over at the ProjectVRM blog: Awake at the Wheels and VRM as Agency. Featured are Zeo and MyDex. Continue reading
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Obama’s About page, in a podcast
If you can park your politics (whatever it might be) long enough to listen with an open mind to a one-hour podcast, please dig Reading Obama’s Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils, an interview by Chris Lydon of James T. Kloppenberg, chair of the Department of History at Harvard, author of “A Nation Arguing with Its… Continue reading
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Research assignments
I’m looking for two things here. First is the percentage of advertising devoted to “branding.” I’ve read 90% somewhere, but I need more than hearsay or partial recall. In fact, I’m in the market for any hard numbers on the subject of advertising. This is for a book I’m writing, and my sources need to… Continue reading
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IQ and Caste
Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins, Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with… Continue reading
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The World Live Library
My great uncle Jack Dwyer worked in the shipping and steamship business through the first half of the last century. He also took a lot of pictures, including my favorite family photo of all time. (I’m the kid with the beer.) I was going through a bunch of these on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed… Continue reading
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Bread and Circuits
I lost my Sprint data thing and my smartphone is getting dumber by the second. (In fact, I’m on my way to trade it in.) So the only way I can get online from the road right now is by stopping at a Panera Bread, which has slow but free wi-fi. The kid is with… Continue reading
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Rethinking network neutrality
For whatever reasons, network neutrality has become more of a political football than a technical principle. Lately, however, its advocates have come up with some original new approaches that may de-politicize the matter to some degree, and cause progress (or at least conversation) to occur. One is John Palfrey’s Citizen’s Choice Framework for Net Neutrality.… Continue reading
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Thank what?!? for sharing
If you want to know what data you’re sharing — without (thus far) knowing about it — on Facebook, ISharedWhat.com is the way. You run it as a simulator and what’s what. It was developed by Joe Andrieu, a stalwart contributor of wisdom and code to the VRM community, and has been covered by Read… Continue reading
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A new path
Sitting in the Harvard Law Library, where John Palfrey is about to give what I sense will be a landmark lecture, on the occasion of his chair appointment as Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. So I’m taking notes here. [Later… John’s own notes — the abstract for his talk… Continue reading
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Networds
Live blogging Barbara van Schewick’s talk at Maxwell Dworkin here at Harvard. (That’s the building from which Mark Zuckerberg’s movie character stumbles through the snow in his jammies. Filmed elsewhere, by the way.) All the text is what Barbara says, or as close as I can make it. My remarks are in parentheses. The talk… Continue reading
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e-commerce makes me tired
So my friend Joe tells me to check out a book called Where Good Ideas Come From. I look it up on Google and click on the top result, an Amazon one for Steven Johnson’s book by that title. That goes to an Amazon page for the book, with links and pitches to various other… Continue reading