Links for 23 November 2008 through 24 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 November 2008 through 24 November 2008, gathered with spite and a little too much nasal mucosa:

  • Mapping the World’s Fastest Supercomputers | NYTimes.com: Nice map. Why are there no Australian computers here?
  • Journalists warned of two years of carnage ahead | The Australian: The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) report Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism warns that the Western media industry faces "two years of carnage", squeezed by the global economic meltdown and the unravelling of traditional economic models. I supposedly have an essay in it.
  • Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time and Attention | SlideShare: A fascinating presentation from Merlin Mann of 43folders.com which has been updated with text so it works without the presenter being present. Much food for thought.
  • WordCamp Australia 2008 | WordCamp Association: Apparrently there's a WordCamp on in Sydney this weekend which I only just found out about.
  • Charles Fogden: An entire page about my great great grandfather Charles Fogden who in 1838, with is wife Sophia (nee Slater) their two baby girls, secured selection by Mr H Watson (South Australia’s colonisation commissioners’ agent at Chichester) as suitable assisted immigrants for the new province of South Australia. They left England on 12 September on board the 500-ton barque Prince George. About a thousand miles from Australia Mary Emma was tragically burned to death. She was buried at sea on the 8th December. The Prince George reached Holdfast Bay, Glenelg, at 11pm on 26 December 1838. The story includes bushrangers, fraud and a controversial marriage to a “coloured” man.
  • TheShipsList: Passengers, Ships, Shipwrecks: Ships’ passenger lists from the 1700s through 1900s, plus immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck information, ship pictures, ship descriptions, shipping-line fleet lists and more, as well as hundreds of passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia and even some for South Africa.
  • Rudd will need a stiff upper lip | PerthNow: I never thought I'd agree with Glenn Milne on many things, but apart from any personal or ideological flaws he IS a canny political analyst. This piece on Internet censorship makes some good points. It even portrays EFA, which Senator Conroy and Clive Hamilton would have us believe is an “extreme libertarian” organisation, as “an independent industry watchdog”.
  • Can Labor implement “clean feed” without legislation? | Defending Scoundrels: Dale Clapperton has analysed the Australian government’s plan to censor the Internet from a legislative point of view. Currently to pass new laws the Rudd goverment needs either the support of the Liberal-National Coalition in the Senate, or the support of the Greens plus Family First Senator Steve Fielding plus independent Senator Nick Xenophon. Given The Greens’ opposition, and the Liberals’ stated opposition, Clapperton;s analysis shows that it probably couldn’t be done.
  • Australian Government Mandatory ISP Internet Filtering / Censorship Plan 2008 | Libertus.net: Irene Graham’s updated, concise and clearly-written guide to the Rudd government’s Internet censorship plans which clearly highlight the, erm, ambiguities and inaccuracies in Senator Stephen Conroy’s accounts. She links to references. Conroy just accuse you of supporting child pornography.
  • Seven Revolutions | Global Strategy Institute: “A project led by the Global Strategy Institute at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to identify and analyze the key policy challenges that policymakers, business figures, and other leaders will face out to the year 2025. It is an effort to promote strategic thinking on the long-term trends that too few leaders take the time to consider.”
  • Societies worse off “when they have God on their side” | Times Online: “Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.”
  • South Korea’s Madagascar land lease: it gets worse — much worse | Global Dashboard: South Korean company Daewoo has managed to lease half of Madagascar’s arable land for 99 years, and all Madagascar gets in return is an opportunity to work on the farms.
  • Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns | BLDGBLOG: A delightful riff off one statistic: that there are now more World of Warcraft players in the US than farmers, yet mainstream political coverage insists on making sure we know what farmers think about an issue — but not WoW players. Of course some WoW players are farmers, and all demographics overlap. But what tags are relevant in choosing a political candidate? Are we looking at the right ones?
  • Mandatory ISP filtering mind map | Somebody Think Of The Children: This mind map is actually from Jay’s fingerpuppetmafia.com but the linkage was nicely arranged here. It’s a work in progress, so feel free to offer suggestions.
  • With a public intellectual like this, who needs barbarians? | Somebody Think Of The Children: Jon Seymour’s guest post rips apart Clive Hamilton’s Crikey article in far more detail than anyone else’s so far.
  • Fears over Australia’s £55m plan to censor the internet | The Guardian: A view from the UK: This summary for a British readership points out that Australia’s Internet censorship plan is mandatory and ill-defined. The lead is that it’s the usual “protect the children” appeal to emotion.
  • Live Piracy Map | ICC Computer Crime Services: A map showing all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008, updated as new reports come in. This is the real kind of piracy, about boarding ships, not copyright infringement.
  • The end of the story – as we know it | The Guardian: Another version of Jeff Jarvis’ notion that in online journalism the “article” is replaced as the unit of reportage by the “topic”.

Bring on the olive oil, Patty!

While my Predictions for 2008 were mostly full of FAIL, there is one bonus. I did correctly predict Barack Obama as the next US President. Which means I won a bet!

Patty wrote:

If he wins, I will spank you with a feather duster and call you blinky all night long while rubbing your body with Four Seasons jam and olive oil. We must be playing Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach in the background.

You’ll have to bring the feather duster, Patty, but the olive oil is a’warming…

How were my predictions for 2008?

The Christmas decorations are in the shops, people are having Christmas parties, the current affairs programs are off TV, so the year has ended, right? What do you mean, your calendar has something called “December”? Bah! This is the 21st Century! One-twelfth of the year is just thrown away!

Back in January I made some Predictions for 2008. Since 2008 has already ended, let’s see how I went.

Continue reading “How were my predictions for 2008?”

Links for 21 November 2008 through 22 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 21 November 2008 through 22 November 2008, after being tickled with a feather duster:

  • Danger Room Debrief: How to do Defense, When the Money’s Gone | Danger Room from Wired.com: “The current global economic and financial meltdown may yet become something worse: a protracted global depression. As with the last century’s Depression, which spawned fascism and WWII, it could recast the world at a fundamental level. As such, it may soon represent our biggest security challenge in over 50 years.”
  • The Power of Nightmares | YouTube: The 2.5-minute introduction to The Power of Nightmares, to give you a flavour of the full 3-hour documentary series.
  • The Power Of Nightmares (DVD) | Internet Archive: This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today: “Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.” The full DVD image is free to download.
  • Irrelevant Al Qaeda | Jon Taplin’s Blog: Is it time to declare Al Qaeda irrelevant and downgrade the War on Terror a police action that’s just mopping up the stragglers?
  • Mother Earth Mother Board | Wired 4.12: A massive 1993 feature article in which Neal Stephenson toured six countries following the roll-out of fibre optic cables. It introduced me to his writing and it remains an excellent read today.
  • The End | Flickr: A collection of classic “The End” title cards from a wide variety of films.
  • Fiscal Conservative vs. Tax & Spend Liberal | Be the signal: Another variation of an infographic pointing out that the Republicans don’t have the best track record for the US economy.
  • Opinion graph | Junk Charts: On average, the US stock market does much better under Democrat Presidents than Republicans, as this graph shows.
  • How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign | Advertising Age: A groundswell of opinion on Twitter caused Johnson & Johnson to pull an adverting campaign.
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress | DIY Themes: A high-quality but not-free theme framework for WordPress. While I currently use the free Tarski theme for my website maybe this is worth a look at some point.
  • NSW Parliamentary Research: Mandatory ISP filtering is not what it seems | Internet Industry Association: Research by the NSW Parliamentary Library shows that Senator Conroy’s claims about other nations’ compulsory Internet censorship regimes are wrong.
  • Kerr's curse | ABC Unleashed: If nothing else, I love this essay for the phrase “cardboard cutout think tanks”. But there are many other reasons to like it.
  • Internet Censorship and the Irukandji Jellyfish | First Dog on the Moon: Only First Dog on the Moon could successfully combine Senator Conroy’s Internet censorship plan and jellyfish in one cartoon.
  • PG Nation | ABC Unleashed: An interesting essay about the neo-wowserism of the Rudd government.
  • Europa Film Treasures: An archive of European cinematographic treasures. It looks like there’s a lot of material here.
  • The Trojan Horse | Business Spectator: “The current government policy of forcing ISPs to offer their customers a so-called ‘clean feed’ has the overt intention of helping parents to protect their kids while surfing the Internet. It is, we are told, all about child protection. However, the use of content filtering to make the Internet ‘safer’ for kids is already available, to the extent that any statistically significant real demand exists to solve it.”
  • Failing hard drive sounds | Datacent: A collection of the sounds made by dying hard disc drives. Yes, they can be used in music provided you contact these guys first.
  • 19-year-old Commits Suicide on Justin.tv | NewTeeVee: Abraham K Biggs committed suicide on Wednesday while broadcasting himself on video site Justin.tv. Apparently the 19yo Floridian was egged on by commenters on Justin.tv and forum users on bodybuilding.com. The article canvasses some of the legal and ethical issues.

Clive Hamilton doesn’t quite win “Cnut of the Week”

Photograph of jet airliner tail with Qantas logo and Cnut of the Week title

I’m surprised. I thought that given Senator Conroy’s three-in-a-row victory as “Cnut of the week”, this week’s winner would be Clive Hamilton for his irrational rant in favour of Internet censorship in Crikey yesterday. But no.

Hamilton is certainly Cnutworthy, trying to hold back two strong tides of change: the change of the Internet, which will deliver whatever people want to send down its pipes, whether you try to block it or not; and the tide of rationality which increasingly renders shrill fear-mongering and name-calling irrelevant. But no.

The winner was Qantas for continuing to resist a tide of public opinion which clearly shows their reputation slipping thanks to unreliable service — which appears in turn to be the result of cuts to maintenance processes.

Last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live is online for your viewing pleasure, though it’s not the same without the live chat.

But Clive Hamilton… Two hints, Clive.

Continue reading “Clive Hamilton doesn’t quite win “Cnut of the Week””