Jeff Jarvis on why consolidated media depends on professionals to uphold the truth whereas decentralized media powered by enough amateurs leads to the truth automatically. There is something reassuring about the democracy of many to many publishing. If you are a capitalist then this is a what you could call a marketplace, if you are socialist then this is power to the people and if you are a libertarian then this is, well, libertarian.
The Democracy Index measures how democratic individual US states are based upon variables such as seats-to-votes ratios. Is there such a measure anywhere for countries? This could be tallied with foreign trade, international aid receipts or donations and local subsidies to quantitatively measure an ‘ally’ (i.e. how much a country puts its money where its mouth is) and create a ‘Global Ally of Democracy’ index. If a country is both highly democratic and favors aid and trade to other countries which are also highly democratic without imposing tariffs or subsidizing domestic production then it would score highly as a Global Ally of Democracy.
“I can imagine the day when RSS-powered email clients are included in the software image on your machine. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the likes of Microsoft and IBM Lotus are not far away from including RSS newsreaders in their email clients. It’s a must-have feature.” InfoWorld TechWatch: Inside baseball: the RSS backlash
Good new business blog on CMS: cms~wire: Content Management Industry News
As an atheist who believes that religion, on balance, creates more evil than good, I was interested in ‘The Brights’. A Bright is defined as someone whose “worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements”, and the word is designed to sound more positive than atheist. I signed up, but now I am having second thoughts. Being an atheist who rejects supernatural religious belief does not answer the fact that the principal crimes of the twentieth century, Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge and Nazism, were secular. What they all have in common with religion is a code based upon belief – ideology. A ‘ brights’ naturalist worldview would reject God and the Tooth Fairy. An anti-ideological, ‘adaptivist’, worldview would reject religious doctrine and Stalinism. I still think a naturalist wordview is also healthy, but I can live with the Tooth Fairy.
Today’s Guardian runs an apologist piece on science and religion. Why is it that people pick a few scientists who are religious and draw the conclusion that this is the norm and that because some scientists are religious this helps the case for religion? 1. Most scientists are not religious. Those that are not “constitute 60% of American scientists, and a stunning 93% of those scientists good enough to be elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences“. 2. This Guardian article argues that the religiousness of scientists adds credibility to religious belief. Therefore, if you buy the article’s premise and look at the facts, the proven lack of religious belief amongst the majority of scientists actually reduces its credibility. 3. An alternative premise is that scientists who are religious don’t help the case for religion one way or another. People are irrational beings with an innate susceptibility to superstition….
Martin Walker suggests that coalition hand-outs over the rebuilding of Iraq will be worthless since it now looks like it will cost more to rebuild than near term oil revenue. Instead, he argues that France will need something else, and that the US will agree to keep quiet over French agricultural subsidies at the upcoming WTO summit in Washington.
Ben Hammersley, writing from Afghanistan, notes that president Karzai’s bodyguards are provided by DynCorp, which was recently acquired by the innocuous sounding Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Reading the solutions tab on the Computer Sciences Corporation website you get the same boring options listed on just about every generic enterprise tech company website: CRM, EAI, Hosting, Knowledge Management, Outsourcing. The difference is that they also: “fly the defoliation missions that are the centerpiece of Plan Colombia…constitute the core of the police force in Bosnia…protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai…[manage] the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon’s weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. DynCorp inventories everything seized by the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in…
Mr. quite contrary, Hitchens, has a go at the 10 commandments: “I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries?” Anil Dash’s quip about the Talabamaban is more economical: ‘protestors decry removal of golden calf monument’. There goes commandment number 2. Oh, and now that some (toothless, banjo-playing?) politicians in Mississipi want the two tons of bad art, I guess that’ll be breaking the last commandment. The Commandments and immorality
“There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” 21st-Century Slaves – National Geographic Magazine via Zeldman
New Scientist has some very nice Hubble pics of Mars. We’ve seen pictures of Mars in similar detail before, however. In fact we’ve had photos of Mars from three feet away because NASA landed cameras on the surface. Not that long ago, I seem to remember it being a shock for scientists to discover ice on Mars. Call me old-fashioned, but wouldn’t the things which look just like large polar ice caps (which are in fact large polar ice caps and not cotton wool or marsh mallow) have been clearly visible from a telescope a century ago? Clearly I am missing something.
If Google, AOL, poss Yahoo and then prob MSN have weblog services, there is a possibility that the weblog space will Balkanize, if the precedent set by the various instant messaging systems is anything to go by. Such an outcome would threaten any standards for weblog API’s and syndication far more than internecine struggles within the existing weblog community ever could. It would also prevent analysis tools or weblog search engines such as Technorati and Feedster from providing comprehensive coverage. Increasingly it is becoming apparent that what makes a publishing system or search/analysis tool a weblog tool is the ability to be part of an open system enabling publishing, syndication and real-time search results. As such, if such Balkanization does occur, then I would suggest that systems that don’t allow this shouldn’t really call themselves weblog services. To enable this means defining publicly what a weblog service is, perhaps now…