30 Jun 2010 - permalink
Paul Greenberg writes for The New York Times about the declining population of Tuna:
But appetites continued to outstrip supply. Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China.
Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.
We seriously need to reconsider what we eat or there will be none.
30 Jun 2010 - permalink
Astute analysis by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz of the psychology in Farmville (yet another social game I’ll never play) and why we need time to think:
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
29 Jun 2010 - permalink
Everyone should read this. There’s a real risk of finding oneself in a sick relationship or employment at some point in life – or knowing someone who is:
Make sure there’s never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there’s never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.
24 Jun 2010 - permalink
On May 2 the investment advisory firm Cumberland commented on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no “good” here.
One and a half month later, the oil is still spewing into the ocean and at a much higher rate than previously thought. Up from 600.000 liters to 7-10 million liters every day. That’s 1/3 of Denmark’s daily oil consumption! and Exxon-Valdez every four days
There’s more on popularlogistics.
UPDATE: 60 Minutes recently did a report on a trial in Ecuador against Chevron, claiming they dumped 68 billion liters of toxic oil waste in the Ecuador rainforest. In Nigeria, it’s not news either. I still shocks me to see the extent to which we have no respect for human life and the environment. Our way of life turns us all into horrible parasites.
24 Jun 2010 - permalink
It’s a two-year old article, but It’s surely as relevant today. In 2008 Engadget linked to two videos by 60 Minutes and CurrentTV about how electronic waste is shipped to China to end up in massive dumps.
17 Jun 2010 - permalink
IBM has spent the last three years building a fantastic question-answering machine called Watson. Much like Deep Blue beat the grandmasters of chess, Watson will attempt at beating the best players of Jeopardy!, a much harder task as it involves complex language parsing and spans enormous knowledge areas. New York Times has a fascinating article on how they approached the challenge and just how far they’ve come:
Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample “Jeopardy!” clue: “He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.” In the first pass, the algorithms came up with “Nixon.” To evaluate whether “Nixon” was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase — “Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974” — and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported “Nixon” as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result “Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,” a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make “Nixon” the top-ranked solution.)
10 Jun 2010 - permalink
CommonDreams.org asks where the Haiti money is going:
Of the U.S. money, 40 cents on every dollar goes to the U.S. military, according to sources gathered from USAID and the U.N. and compiled by the Associated Press. Less than one cent goes to the Haitian government. U.S. government contracts, paid for by citizen’s tax dollars, are being given out to private U.S. corporations for post-earthquake work including damage assessments, security guards, military “mission support,” shipping of supplies, clean-up, construction, long-term planning, “monitoring food security,” and much more.
That does not sound very humanitarian
15 May 2010 - permalink
The Guardian’s Andrew Brown on Facebook and privacy:
This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren’t customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook’s users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren’t customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.
15 May 2010 - permalink
Mick Jagger on living as a musician:
But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.
7 May 2010 - permalink
Ben Ward reminds us what it’s all about:
Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.
Brilliant!