Until this morning, wandering through a beautiful little pine-wood, I had no idea what pine cones looked like in their formative phase.
And then I came on this.
When we disturbed the branch, a dense cloud of very fine pollen wafted into the air.
Flickr version here.
Flickr version here.
New Yorker editor, David Remnick, on the vexed question of paywalls.
“I was going to be damned if I was going to train 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, that this is like water that comes out of the sink,” he said, about The New Yorker.
Mr. Remnick was speaking at a breakfast for advertisers and some reporters in the Condé Nast Executive Dining Rooml last Tuesday morning. He said that if you want expensive reporting, then you’ll have to pay for it. Let’s just say that Mr. Remnick probably isn’t going to get a lunch with Jeff Jarvis or Arianna Huffington anytime soon and talk Web religion.
“There have been many stages of Web evangelical thinking. You must do this! You have to do that! Or you are clueless,” clucked Mr. Remnick.
“Remember the days of information wants to be free?” he continued. “So therefore the only thing that anyone with any brains could do with a magazine like The New Yorker is to put the whole thing online and give it away. Give it away! And if you were against that in some way or you said, ‘Wait a minute,’ you were–wait for it–clueless.
“I opted for clueless,” he said.
Mr. Remnick spoke about the magazine's digital edition (which is its own animal, accessible for a $39.95 fee for people who don’t subscribe to the print edition) and how some content is still free on the web. He's figuring it out, just like everyone else. He’s not in a rush. But when he does figure it out, you will be paying. Two weeks ago, Mr. Remnick told the London-based Arabic paper Asharq Al-Awsat that there are “millions” of people who will willingly pay for the news.
Well, I’d be willing to pay for the New Yorker . In fact, I already do — through the nose for the print edition. But it’s surprising that his magazine’s legendary fact-checkers didn’t pick him up on one point — tapwater isn’t free. We pay water rates or water charges for it.
Hmmm… This from TechEye.
It is official: Steve Jobs no longer thinks that PCs are going to be that important.
Speaking at the D8 conference, the Apple supremo said the day is coming when only one out of "every few people" will need a traditional computer.
For evidence he said that when the US was an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms.
"Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular," he said.
He thinks that PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around… but only "one out of x people will need them."
Of course x is an unknown figure so Jobs is hedging his bets a bit. He could mean that only one in ten people will need one or one in two. It is a moot point if very many people need one now, but whether or not they own one is another matter.
Jobs claimed that advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work.
He said that the move will make many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long way."
"We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.
Needless to say, Ray Ozzie doesn’t agree.
Stephen Hsu posted this image on his blog under the heading “BP advertisement from 1999”. The date (1999) seems improbable, in that BP didn’t enter the US market until 1998 (when it merged with Amoco) and the logo wasn’t launched until the company rebranded itself as BP plc in 2001. That doesn’t mean that the image of the ad is faked, only that the date attributed to it is wrong. Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s clever.
LATER: Mystery solved. Dermot Casey tweets that it’s from a t-shirt made by Despair Inc..
“The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.”
P.G. Wodehouse, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere
This is both creepy and fascinating — from The Register.
ENF [electrical network frequency] analysis relies on frequency variations in the electricity supplied by the National Grid. Digital devices such as CCTV recorders, telephone recorders and camcorders that are plugged in to or located near the mains pick up these deviations in the power supply, which are caused by peaks and troughs in demand. Battery-powered devices are not immune to to ENF analysis, as grid frequency variations can be induced in their recordings from a distance.
At the Metropolitan Police's digital forensics lab in Penge, south London, scientists have created a database that has recorded these deviations once every one and a half seconds for the last five years. Over a short period they form a unique signature of the electrical frequency at that time, which research has shown is the same in London as it is in Glasgow.
On receipt of recordings made by the police or public, the scientists are able to detect the variations in mains electricity occuring at the time the recording was made. This signature is extracted and automatically matched against their ENF database, which indicates when it was made.
The technique can also uncover covert editing – or rule it out, as in the recent murder trial – because a spliced recording will register more than one ENF match.
The Met emphasised that ENF analysis is in its infancy as a practical tool, having been used in only around five cases to date. Proponents are optimistic about its uses in counter-terrorism investigations, for example to establish when suspects made reconnaissance videos of their targets, or to uncover editing in propaganda videos.
Dr Alan Cooper, the leader of the Met’s ENF project, said the technique is proving invaluable in serious cases, where audio and video evidence and its authenticity is often questioned.
Further to my musings about the new definition of ‘courage’ as the willingness to inflict financial pain on others, here’s an interesting NYT column by Paul Krugman.
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.
Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?
The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”
Interesting story in today’s NYT.
After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge.
Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the company.
T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.
Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp have given individuals a global platform on which to air their grievances with companies. But legal experts say the soaring popularity of such sites has also given rise to more cases like Mr. Kurtz’s, in which a business sues an individual for posting critical comments online.
The towing company’s lawyer said that it was justified in removing Mr. Kurtz’s car because the permit was not visible, and that the Facebook page was costing it business and had unfairly damaged its reputation.
Some First Amendment lawyers see the case differently. They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.
The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when faced with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.
I was wondering how long it would take before this kind of thing started to happen. What it highlights is the need for pro bono lawyers who are willing to provide the initial cover that will prevent legal intimidation from having the desired effect.
