Honey, I swear I bought the archive just for the articles…

… is the headline on GMSV’s report of the forthcoming digital version of Playboy

Playboy magazine, which for more than 50 years has celebrated the pleasures of the analog world in its own special way, is now planning to enshrine that history in digital form. The Wall Street Journal reports that beginning in the fall, Playboy will release what will eventually be a six-DVD set of archives, into which all 115,880 pages from 636 editions will be scanned and text-searchable. Each disc will retail for $100, including a 200-page book. While scanned pages may seem a crude sort of way to present content digitally, magazine founder Hugh Hefner wanted to preserve the zeitgeist of the decades. “Part of the great charm of revisiting the magazine,” said Hefner, “is the combination of the words, the pictures and the advertising, the entire sense of the pop culture of any particular era. People remember these issues at a particular point in time; it’s like a part of coming of age.” Oh, and if the magazine is reproduced in original form, Playboy believes, no additional payments are due the writers and artists. This interpretation, as you might imagine, is subject to some disagreement. Images from the discs will be printable but not transferable, at least for those few days before a hack appears. Playboy hopes the set becomes a collector’s item and adds to what Hefner insists is the brand’s return to hipness. “Something remarkable has happened to the Playboy brand in the past few years,” said Hefner. “It is hot again. We have a hit TV show; we just opened up the Playboy Club casino in Vegas; and the brand is very hot in clothing. … It all connects to the future and the retro-cool phenomenon.”

Er, sure. There’s nothing like old print ads to get one going.

Wikipedia: “an addressable knowledge base”

Thoughtful post by Lorcan Dempsey…

I was looking at an announcement on the University of Edinburgh’s site about The British Academy Warton Lecture on Poetry, to be given this year on Yeats by his biographer Roy Foster. A distinguished event! I was interested looking to the bottom of the page to see links to the Wikipedia pages for both Yeats and Warton.

This seemed to me to show Wikipedia’s growing role as an addressable knowledge base. It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and background. As in this case, context, or condensed background, about Warton and Yeats is available for linking, relieving the developers of having to provide it themselves.

Condensed background is a phrase used by Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, and author of the Burn the catalog piece of some years back. I was rereading Burn the catalog earlier and was interested to come across his blog discussion of Wikipedia.

“I’m using Wikipedia this semester where it seems appropriate: to provide quick, condensed background on a historical subject as preparation for a more general discussion. Next week, for example, the students are having a quick look at the Malthus entry as part of a broader discussion of critiques of progress in the Enlightenment.”

And he goes on to comment on the Middlebury decision which is discussed in my post of the other day.

“Big deal. The folks at Middlebury are perfectly correct to say that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia as an evidentiary source in research papers. That’s got nothing to do with Wikipedia’s “unreliability”, or the fact that it’s on the web, or anything else of that sort. It’s because you don’t cite an encyclopedia article as a source when you’re writing an undergraduate paper in a history course at a selective liberal-arts college. Any encyclopedia is just a starting place, a locator, a navigational beacon. I’d be just as distressed at reading a long research paper in my course that used the Encylopedia Britannica extensively. As a starting place, Wikipedia has an advantage over Brittanica, though: it covers more topics, is easier to access and use, and frankly often has a fairly good set of suggestions about where to look next.”

He uses Wikitedium in the title of the post, and I thought how apt an expression this was to characterize the periodic library discussions about Wikipedia which pitch authority against editorial permissiveness.

Wikipedia is a collection. Some entries are excellent, some less so. One cannot summarily judge its value in the way that one might have done when deciding whether or not to buy or recommend a reference book. Judgements about ‘authority’ and utility have to be made at the article level, and who has the time and expertise to flag individual articles in this way? Rather than continuing a tedious Wikipedia good/Wikipedia bad conversation, we should recognize the attraction it has as an addressable knowledge base, understand the variety of uses to which it is put, and remind folks of the judgments they need to make depending on those uses.

Harvard gets a Faustian bargain?

Well, here’s what the Huffington Post claims.

According to multiple sources blabbing to the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe, Harvard is expected to appoint its first female president this weekend: Drew Gilpin Faust, current dean of Radcliffe. Faust, 59, a top Civil War historian, would succeed former president Lawrence Summers, who resigned in June after much conflict with the faculty, not to mention his controversial and widely decried comments speculating that innate intellectual disparities between men and women accounted for the dearth of women in high-ranking positions in science, based in part on how his twin daughters played with trucks. Following the outcry sparked by those comments, Faust, who does not have a degree from Harvard, was appointed by Summers to oversee two faculty task forces that examined gender diversity at Harvard…

Boris talks turkey

This is the best piece published today. Boris Johnson rides to the rescue of Bernard Matthews, the firm which has just been obliged to slaughter 160,000 prime turkeys in an attempt to stamp out bird flu.

As soon as I arrived at work this morning I told the troops their duty. This is it, I said. The Russians have banned our turkey. The pathetic Japanese have slapped an embargo on any poultry emanating from this country. South Korea, Hong Kong and South Africa are all equally chicken about our chicken.

We are the second largest poultry exporters in Europe, I reminded them, with a £300 million business at stake. Here we are, in the cockpit of the nation, and the people expect us to show a lead. It is a time for greatness, a time for calm, a time for reassurance – and we are going to show all three.

I reached for my wallet and fished out twenty. “Frances,” I said, “go to the supermarket and buy as many slices of Bernard Matthews as you can find. Someone somewhere has got to show that the great British turkey is safe to eat! And that someone is going to be us.”

In no time she was back, laden with an extraordinary assortment of meat and meat-related produce. As we beheld the bewildering versatility of Mr Matthews’s fowls, I felt a spasm of rage that the people of South Korea – where they eat poodles, for heaven’s sake – should turn their noses up at the favourites of the British people.

It gets better.

We had Bernard Matthews wafer thin turkey ham, 95 per cent fat free. We had a perfectly cylindrical Turkey Breast Roast, serving three or four. Mr Matthews’s chefs had miraculously added water, potato and rice starch (and about 20 nourishing chemicals) to what the front of the packet said was “100 per cent breast meat”. We had delicious golden turkey escalopes, containing as much as 38 per cent turkey.

Not to forget the Matthews product containing

a mixture of turkey skin, pea starch, milk, potassium chloride, sodium nitrite and assorted other life-giving ingredients, boiled up and turned into a sliced roll complete with a beautiful picture of a dinosaur. Look! I held up the Dinosaur, showing how it ran all the way through, like a stick of rock.

Lovely!

Footnote: I have never knowingly eaten anything produced by Bernard Matthews. Indeed, I would cross the street to avoid walking past a shop that stocked his products.

Iran here we come

Is the Bush regime getting ready to attack Iran? Paul Rogers thinks it might be. In April.

Timothy Garton-Ash has also been brooding on this.

f we don’t bomb Iran, Iran is quite likely to get the bomb. If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others in the Middle East will be tempted to follow. The last barriers to nuclear proliferation, already breached by North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, could rapidly break – in the most volatile region in the world. The risk of nuclear war will then be greater than it was in the 1980s, when CND, END and other west European peace movements marched against new US and Soviet missile deployments. The likely scale of the nuclear conflict is much smaller than a superpower nuclear apocalypse, but that in itself makes it more not less probable that an unhinged leader would take the risk.

On the available evidence, the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to edge towards a technological position from which it could, should it choose, rapidly move towards 90% uranium enrichment and the production of nuclear weapons. The best analysis we have suggests that Ayatollah Khameini, the supreme leader of the revolutionary regime, has not made a decision to go for nuclear weapons, and it would take a number of years to get there even if he had. But Iran has been doing a number of things that are not explicable simply by a desire to have the civilian nuclear energy to which it is entitled under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The real question is therefore how, without the use of force, you can stop Iran going down this path…

Loadsamoney 2.0

From ye olde New York Times

Everyone suspected that the investors, founders and early employees of YouTube made tidy sums when it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock late last year.

But until yesterday, few knew just how tidy those sums were. The answer, which Google delivered in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now in: The sums are big enough to spark a new wave of envy across Silicon Valley.

The biggest windfalls went, not surprisingly, to the company’s three founders and to Sequoia Capital, the main financial backer of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site.

A founder and YouTube’s chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google’s closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million.

Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million.

Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund that invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million.

The filing lists a Sequoia Capital XI Principals Fund owning 102,376 shares, valued at more than $48 million, and Sequoia Technology Partners XI with 29,724 shares, valued at nearly $14 million.

Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investor in Google.

The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million.

In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million.

When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had about 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares.

Mute but moving

Every day, for as long as I can remember, there’s been a lone Falun Gong demonstrator outside the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place. Here is this morning’s protestor. It’s an impressive, quiet display — all the more so when you see someone sitting motionless in the freezing cold for hours on end. Meanwhile virtually every UK university and FTSE company is sending people to China, touting for business like tarts on the road from Milan airport. And of course Google China (and Yahoo and MSN) block access to search results for ‘Falun Gong’.

Wearing iPods in public to be outlawed?

From wcbstv.com

First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets.

We all seem to have one — an iPod, a BlackBerry, a cell phone — taking up more and more of our time, but can they make us too distracted to walk safely? Some people think so.

If you use them in the crosswalk, your favorite electronic devices could be in the crosshairs.

Legislation will be introduced in Albany on Wednesday to lay a $100 fine on pedestrians succumbing to what State Sen. Carl Kruger calls iPod oblivion.

“We’re talking about people walking sort of tuned in and in the process of being tuned in, tuned out,” Kruger said. “Tuned out to the world around them. They’re walking into speeding cars. They’re walking into buses. They’re walking into one another and it’s creating a number of fatalities that have been documented right here in the city.”

Pedestrians have been hurt and killed in the manner Kruger describes. Not surprisingly, though, iPod users are less than thrilled with the senator’s proposal…

Hmmm…. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, musing on the way the iPod has redefined the notion of social space.

Joyce and Beckett below par

Hilarious film short imagining James Joyce and Samuel Beckett having (well, actually, not having) a game of golf. Funded by the Irish Film Board (Bórd Scannán na hEireann ) and not for those of delicate sensibilities.

Who was it who defined golf as “a good walk spoiled”?

Later… Just wondering what their respective handicaps would be. Joyce’s would be that he talked too much; Beckett’s that he talked too little.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.