Wired writer Evan Ratcliff decided to see how difficult it would be to disappear in a networked world. His account of his month on the run is absolutely riveting.
Many thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
Wired writer Evan Ratcliff decided to see how difficult it would be to disappear in a networked world. His account of his month on the run is absolutely riveting.
Many thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
A few days ago I sat next to a fundamentalist Christian at dinner. She asked me at one point what my religion was. I replied that, having been brought up in Ireland, I had been thoroughly inoculated against that kind of nonsense.
Yesterday, the report of the Murphy Commission into child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin was published. The report shows, in graphic detail, that what lies at the heart of the Catholic Church in Ireland is a profound and widespread corruption, perpetrated by liars, child sex abusers and those senior clerics at the very top — including at least one cardinal — who covered up their crimes. The full text of the report is on the Web, and I’ve only read Part One (and I’m not sure I have the stomach to tackle Part Two), but for a quick and insightful commentary you could do worse than read Mary Raftery’s column in today’s Irish Times. This is how it begins:
THERE IS one searing, indelible image to be found in the pages of the Dublin diocesan report on clerical child abuse. It is of Fr Noel Reynolds, who admitted sexually abusing dozens of children, towering over a small girl as he brutally inserts an object into her vagina and then her back passage.
That object is his crucifix.
Nobody who grew up in 1950s Ireland will be surprised by the Murphy report — or by the earlier Ryan Report into abuse of children by Catholic religious orders throughout Ireland. To say that the Ireland of my youth was a priest-ridden society is the grossest of understatements. The deference shown by the State to the Catholic church was total. But the interesting thing about the new report is that it has been investigating a much more recent period in Irish history from the 1970s onwards — when the country was supposedly beginning its long march towards Celtic tigerhood. Now we find that the power of the church to protect its interests and to ignore its duty of care to the children of its credulous flock was as untramelled in that period as it had been in the 1950s.
What’s becoming clear is that the entire history of post-independence Ireland needs to be rewritten. The child abuse inquiries have revealed how corrupt was the religious institution that purported to provide moral guidance to the citizens of the fledgling state. And the various tribunals that have inquired into political corruption, together with what the banking meltdown has revealed about the pervasive corruption and criminality in Irish government, banking and construction, suggest that all the propaganda about a modern European democracy was just so much hooey. In truth, post-Imperial Ireland was more like Sicily with heavy rainfall than a modern secular state.
John Barrow, the Cambridge mathematician (and one of my fellow patrons of the Cambridge Science Festival) has a lovely paper in arXiv. It solves a problem that has always bedevilled competitive rowing — the fact that in an apparently perfectly-balanced coxless boat one still gets a ‘wiggle’ which reduces the efficiency of the team. The Abstract reads:
We consider the optimal positioning of an even number of crew members in a coxless racing boat in order to avoid the presence of a sideways wiggle as the boat is propelled forwards through the water. We show that the traditional (alternate port and starboard) rig of racing boats always possesses an oscillating non-zero transverse moment and associated wiggling motion. We show that the problem of finding the zero-moment rigs is related to a special case of the Subset Sum problem. We find the one (known) zero-moment rig for a racing Four and show there are four possible such rigs for a racing Eight, of which only two (the so called ‘Italian’ and ‘German’ rigs) appear to be already known. We also give the 29 zero-moment solutions for racing Twelves but refrain from explicitly listing the 263 Sixteens and 2724 Twenties which have zero transverse moments. We show that only balanced boats with crew numbers that are divisible by four can have the zero-moment property. We also discuss some aspects of unbalanced boats, in which the number of port and starboard oars are unequal.
Isn’t mathematics wonderful? When I was a graduate student, one of my mathematician friends spent three days figuring out the fluid dynamics behind the swirl patterns in his morning coffee. I’m reminded of G.H. Hardy’s lovely book, A Mathematician’s Apology and his famous observation that he had “never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”
As you might expect, he was wrong; according to Wikipedia, some of his mathematical work found its way into ‘useful’ applications — e.g. in physics to find quantum partition functions of atomic nuclei (first used by Niels Bohr) and to derive thermodynamic functions of non-interacting Bose-Einstein systems.
Unless you’ve been vacationing on Mars you will know that Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to ban Google from indexing News Corporation websites. This proposition seems so bizarre that it’s had people wondering whether the Digger might be losing his marbles. There are (as I’ve observed before) two schools of thought:
1. He is losing his marbles.
2. He knows something that the rest of us don’t. Support for this view comes from people’s respect for his track record of making bold, risky decisions which have paid off handsomely. On the other hand, his record isn’t entirely unblemished when it comes to Cyberspace. This will be his third foray into Cyberspace, and his first two were not exactly unqualified successes. And even his purchase of MySpace, once hailed as an act of genius, is beginning to look tarnished in the light of Facebook’s rise. So let’s not get carried away by delusions of the Digger’s omniscience.
Kara Swisher is the latest commentator to attempt to fathom the Digger’s mind. In this post, she offers no fewer than five possible interpretations. Here’s a summary:
1. Murdoch really means it.
the increasing money being made by Google, even as their revenue has suffered, has developed into a growing problem.
Which is simply this: There is a lot more money to be made in searching for content than in making content.
This realization has to shake content czars like Murdoch to the core, but it is indeed the situation they find themselves in.
Murdoch makes a fair point in that journalism costs money to make and it used to have a solid economic system under it until Google and others on the Web disaggregated it wholly.
Thus, online aggregators become “tapeworms,” as The Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson quipped.
2. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Google.
Well, it would not be the first time Murdoch and many others of his ilk have used public sharp elbows and saber-rattling to get what they want.
Except in this case, the algorithm experts over at Google know precisely–down to the tenth decimal–how much linking to News Corp. makes for them.
And it is not much, especially when looking at the vast sea of data Google serves up.
Its money-making is widely dissipated, from searches for vacation information to mapping to car-buying to health. While news-finding definitely is part of the mix, it is not at the center of the Borg.
3. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Microsoft.
4. A deal will be made.
My not-too-surprising prediction is that in the end, News Corp. and others will probably strike some kind of lesser deal with Microsoft – although it will tout the heck out of it – while taking some of its content behind a pay wall and thereby de-indexing it from Google.
5. The truth is out there.
In perhaps his most strident television interview, with his Sky News Australia service (which you can see below–oh, the irony–on Google’s YouTube), Murdoch said about those who use Google to find News Corp. content:
“They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”
That really is the honest truth in all this hubbub: Murdoch and other publishers have to find a way to get a some pool of dedicated online readers to pay enough to be able to then provide them with content that will keep them coming back for more.
That’s a business that Google truly cannot help or hinder, really.
In a nutshell: something will happen but we don’t know what.
Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.
Very interesting IMHO, and one of the pointers to what some kinds of journalism will look like in a networked world.
Well, blow me down! No sooner do I publish a column about suspicions that Facebook was de-linking incoming tweets before converting them into status updates than I find this post by Dave Winer.
I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.
This evening I got an email from the Twitter support person BFF, who explained:
“Your account was suspended because our specialists found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules.”
http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311
It’s true of that account but it’s also true of the NYTimes and many other news oriented Twitter sites.
I suggest they take another look at this.
And it’s a reminder once again that we’re playing in someone else’s ballpark here, and they make the rules. This is not in any way like the Internet.
Yep. Most of the people I follow on Twitter use the service in much the same way. A proportion of their tweets are, of course, ‘personal’ updates. But an awful lot of them are pointers to interesting stuff. For us, Twitter has become a kind of selective RSS feed — and that’s its main attraction. If Twitter declares that use illegal, then we’ll just move on.
Also, Dave is right to point out that this kind of behaviour runs directly counter to the spirit of the Internet — which is a technology that is entirely agnostic about the uses to which it is put. That’s a feature of the system, not a bug: it’s what was designed into the architecture of the network. It’s part of its DNA. If the guys who run Twitter want it to enjoy the same kind of organic growth as the Net and the Web had, then they had better learn the same kind of agnosticism. Otherwise they’re screwed.
There’s another interesting aspect to this also. At the Society of Editors Conference last weekend it was noticeable that almost every ‘innovative’ use of online media by existing newspaper groups is now either built around Twitter or assumes that the service will continue more or less as it is now. If anyone’s betting the ranch on that, then they should think again.
… in 1963, JFK was assassinated,
This morning’s Observer column.
LIKE MANY people in his business, the technology publisher Tim O’Reilly is a heavy user of the Twitter microblogging service. He also has a Facebook account. To save effort, he has arranged things so that his Twitter posts are automatically forwarded to Facebook where they are transformed into ‘status updates’.
So far, so good; many of us do the same. But O’Reilly is a proper techie, which means many of his tweets are links to web pages containing interesting or useful information he has come upon in his daily browsing. One day recently, a friend of his noticed that something strange was happening to those links: when they left Twitter they were clickable links, but when they arrived in Facebook they were just plain text. In other words, they were no longer clickable. To follow them one had to copy and paste them into a browser window.
This led to a brief outbreak of conspiracy theorising…
“We are a frontier country and there are huge areas of rural America that still believe that the solution to everything is to get a bigger gun.”
Novelist John Irving, interviewed in today’s Irish Times.
Reliable information on what’s going on in China is notoriously difficult to come by, but here’s a notable exception. On the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing there’s an air-quality monitoring station which continuously measures PM2.5 particle pollution (i.e the concentration of particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter in the air). These particles are so small they can be detected only with an electron microscope. The station sends out a tweet every hour with the data plus an assessment of overall air quality (AQI) and a one-word verbal summary, as for example here:
It’s been ranging between Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy and Hazardous all day. And since I’ve been following it, most days seem to be like that. So if you were thinking of a nice cosy, tax-free ex-pat posting to the Chinese capital, think again.
Twitter users can follow the service at www.twitter.com/BeijingAir