
[Technorati tags: mark federman | russ and daughters | lower east side]
"I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think." - Marshall McLuhan
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." - Alfred North Whitehead
An Open Letter to Fellow Ontarians:
Is the idea of fundamental democratic reform so frightening that Ontario’s major media are afraid to cover the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform? Your guess is as good as ours, but the headline above summarizes their apparent attitude. The unfortunate result is that most Ontarians remain unaware of an unprecedented and historic opportunity to dramatically reform Ontario’s political system.
What’s the Big Deal With the Citizens’ Assembly?
The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, composed of 103 randomly chosen voters, has been empowered by the Government of Ontario to study and recommend a new provincial voting system. Their recommendation will be put to Ontarians in a referendum to be held next fall.
What’s At Stake?
Political power. The future direction of our province. Legislation on issues like health care, education, the environment. The voting system matters. It matters a lot, because the voting system allocates political power, creates parliaments and determines who forms governments. That in turn determines who calls the shots on issues that affect our families, our communities, our society and the environment.
How Bad is the Current System?
It’s intolerable. Ontarians (and all Canadians) suffer the effects of using the world’s worst electoral system – first-past-the post. Typically, a party gets about 40 percent of the votes, wins 60 percent or more of the seats and then wields 100 percent of the power, as though it had a majority mandate. Meanwhile opposition voices are diminished and other minority voice are completely shut out of the political process. In each election, millions of Ontarians cast wasted votes that elect no one. Results are so distorted the last time we elected a legitimate majority government – one actually put in place by a majority of votes cast – was in 1937.
Are There Better Ways to Vote?
Yes. Almost all major Western democracies scrapped first-past-the-post voting last century, and adopted voting systems designed to treat all voters equally and give fair and proportional election results. More than 80 democracies now use these fair voting systems. Each has developed a version to fit its own distinctive political culture and geography. Ontario can do likewise.
What Are the Key Dates for Our Democracy Revolution?
The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform will issue its final report by May 15. If the Assembly recommends a new voting system, Ontario will have a referendum on that recommendation on October 4 in conjunction with the next provincial election. The Citizens’ Assembly members have invited Ontarians to tell them what electoral values and principles matter most to you and/or what type of voting system you would like to have. Between now and January 31, citizens can make their views known through online submissions or by attending and speaking at one of the Assembly’s public consultation meetings.
What Can You Do To Make It Happen?
Fair Vote Canada, through our Fair Vote Ontario campaign, is leading the fight to encourage the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly to recommend a fair voting system based on proportional representation. When the Assembly does, we will then lead the Yes campaign for the October 4, 2007 referendum.
Here is what you can do between now and January 31:
- Most important: forward this email to friends and other email lists!
- Check the Ontario Citizens' Assembly website. Review their public consultation guide.
- If the Assembly is holding a public meeting in your community, plan to attend, take your friends, and speak up.
- If you cannot attend a meeting, submit your comments on the Assembly’s web site, encouraging Assembly members to scrap first-past-the-post and recommend a new, fair voting system.
- Visit the Fair Vote Canada and Fair Vote Ontario websites. Learn more about the issues and our campaign.
- Volunteer to help the Fair Vote Ontario campaign and help win the October 4 referendum.
Democratic reform is a do-it-yourself project for citizens. We cannot depend on the media or those in positions of power to lead the democracy revolution. It’s up to us! Let’s do it!
Yours for a strong democracy,
Larry Gordon
Executive Director
Fair Vote Canada
26 Maryland Blvd.
Toronto, ON M4C 5C9
Voice: 416-410-4034
Fax: 416-686-4929
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.But, of course, prominent world events - and their complex, interlocking relationships - are all about human input.
It seems to me that ‘networked morality’, like many things on the Web, occurs at a much more dramatic pace than we have been traditionally used to. The network effect with word of mouth and now user created content, can create a new social norm within months, weeks or even days. Something that might have been ok in the past, gets rejected in no uncertain terms as the network discloses, discusses, debates and determines what the new norm will be.Her pondering struck a resonant chord for me and prompted me to post this response:
How will business change to adapt to this or even can they?
Nothing new here, Leigh. Marshall McLuhan was writing about these effects in 1964. The rest of us have woken up at varying times between then and now - now, of course, the effects of a UCaPP society are obvious and all around us.That is (one of the reasons) why I'm doing what I'm doing. In my view, we - business-folk, politicians, many activists, and capitalists, socialists and anarchists alike - collectively have been far too "results oriented," with results being defined in a very narrow context. The world has always been interconnected and complex, with the events in one place effecting changes elsewhere. For most of human history, the speed with which those effects traverse the face of the planet and the realm of humankind has been almost undetectably slow. We are now living at a time in which the complex interactions of this finite, closed system that we jointly inhabit are observable, often in real time, and most certainly well within an individual lifetime. As McLuhan spoke about a global village in which what happens there affects me here, because there is no longer a there, everywhere is here - it is long past time that we collectively question the fundamental assumptions of the prior era, the mechanical, industrial era. It is time for our grasp to at least approach our reach.
For me, the question is not how will they adapt, or can they adapt. I think the issue is far more profound than adapting, since adaptation suggests keeping fundamental assumptions about the (prior) world while being assimilated by the new. For me the key question is, when will businesses (meaning managers and professors of business) truly realize that the changes of the past 50 (and I would argue, 162) years represent such a profound change to an industrial age mentality that the foundational assumptions, vocabulary, and premises of business must be carefully reconsidered, reframed, and reoriented? For me, it is only incidentally a question of morality if you're into value judgements.
We experience far more than we can understand; our reach (influence) always far exceeds our grasp (understanding). It is long past time that we collectively start to think of the totality of effects as the primary focus of business, rather than results.
Rather than participating in anything that resembles true discussion and collaborative knowledge creation, students effectively state their own opinion for the benefit of the instructor (not to mention the benefit of their marks that are assigned by the instructor), without drawing from the collective knowledge and views of their cyber-classmates, as would happen in face-to-face engagement in a physical classroom. Thomas (2002) sums up these observations by stating:Instead, I advocate for a move away from the dominance of a threaded-forum style cyber-education to a form that would be an instantiation of pedagogical praxis that might inform the selection of technology and specific implementation design for a cyber-education environment that is consistent with adult education principles. Thomas observes:There was little on-going development and exchange of ideas in any of the discussion themes. Rather, the disjointed and fragmented individual contributions were abstracted in space and time from other students’ contributions. … This incoherent structure of the discussion threads is not compatible with a truly conversational mode of learning. From this analysis it is evident that the virtual learning space of the online discussion forum does not promote the interactive dialogue of conversation, but rather leads students towards poorly interrelated monologues. (Thomas, 2002, p. 360-361; emphasis added)
As Klemm observes, this is a situation circumscribed by the technology itself:Threaded-topic design typically requires the cumbersome process of opening and closing many messages. There is no way for students to create in-context links from within a given message or to insert text or multimedia into any jointly prepared document, because there are no jointly prepared documents. … Indeed, "discussion" is probably the wrong word to use for this activity, because posted messages are more like monologues. (Klemm, 2002)
The challenge is for interface design which promotes a more coherent structure and true many-to–many interaction in the virtual learning space. … The online discussion forum has become a ubiquitous element of Internet-supported flexible delivery of education, it is apparent that it might not be the best technology to support the interactive and collaborative processes essential to a conversational model of learning. These new developments must involve the redesign of both the technological support tools and curriculum structures to support collaborative learning processes. Accordingly, such innovation would emphasise the implementation of learning tasks that promote collaborative engagement towards knowledge development and problem solving. It is perhaps this route that may prove to be the most productive means of realising truly conversational modes of learning, given the inherent problems involved in traditional online discussion. (Thomas, 2002, p. 364)Over the next semester, I'll be analyzing the postings for the cyber-education course we ran in the fall on the History and Theory of Organization Development. The course was architected in a wiki environment and necessitated a very different mindset for the participants - some of whom were able to adapt, and some, apparently, were not. In addition, I'll have the opportunity to help out in configuring the technological environment for another cyber-education course (an action learning practium course) involving both wikis and blogs during the winter semester. Watch for the full paper late in the spring.
The presentation program PowerPoint is probably the most used tool in the schools, high schools and universities of today. The use of this program, however, comes at a cost, because it is not just a different and neutral way of teaching. Like the use of any technology, PowerPoint affects not only the way we present and teach, but also the way we think, learn and understand. The program carries an inherent tendency to crate fragmentation of thought and cognitive overload. In order to avoid this we should stop thinking in terms of technology and begin to think rhetorically. What we need is media rhetoracy: the ability to communicate persuasively and appropriately.This is an academic presentation, so it deals with, among other things, PowerPoint in pedagogy, but the lessons are quite transferable to other contexts as well - including the business world for which PowerPoint was originally designed. One of my favourite lines from the essay is this one:
“If you’ve got nothing to say”, starts a maxim from the advertising world, “then sing it”. Perhaps we could say much the same about PowerPoint: “If you’ve nothing to say, PowerPoint can help you say it loudly and clearly”.Also quoted, of course, is Edward Tufte, whose critique of PowerPoint set off a firestorm of controversy. Tufte maintains that PowerPoint slides
“make audiences ignorant and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the presenter. Thin visual content prompts suspicions: ”What are they leaving out? Is that all they know? Does the speaker think we’re stupid?” ”What are they hiding?”Of course, Tufte's critique might well be the reason for the program's popularity, even among teachers.
Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face. "Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity...It seems to me that Microsoft can't really be that clueless. They have always known their market pretty well. So my guess is that the impetus for the Zune came from the music industry themselves, whose attitude is pretty well summed up by Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music:
The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. ... Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one. ... Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question [of what users want and Apple doesn't provide in the iPod] and put the music industry in its place. Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.
"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. "So it's time to get paid for it." Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?Of course not. And neither does Microsoft, who implements just what the industry ordered, simply to shut them up. Why else would a company make a music player that is incompatible with their own existing (Windows Media) Player? Why else would Microsoft make a player that cannot play music that had previously been bought from them, forcing you to repurchase all the music that you already own (or, as they might put it, force you to relicense all the music that you already have rented)? Why else would they design a marketplace that doesn't even take real money?
MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.The "about" page is certainly worthwhile reading for anyone contemplating a new journal, and in particular, those who are thinking about media tropes.
Microsoft's official position is that Vista's DRM capabilities serve users by providing access to high-quality content that rights holders would otherwise serve only at degraded quality levels, if they chose to serve them at all. "In order to achieve that content flow, appropriate content-protection measures must be in place that create incentives for content owners while providing consumers the experiences they want and have grown to expect," said Jonathan Usher, a director in the Consumer Media Technology Group within Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division. "We expect that the improvements in Windows Vista will attract new content to the PC, which is exactly what consumers want."Yes, but. It is obvious that consumers want access to new content - they always have, all the way back to piano rolls. But just as each new innovation that was thought (by the content industry) to kill their business models has, in fact, created new markets, each an order of magnitude greater than the last, consumers overwhelmingly do not want third parties to tell them what they can, and cannot, do with their equipment. This is especially true when an unrelated party (say the RIAA, MPAA, or CRIA) mandates a limitation on content that is in no way related to them. Further, no consumer wants what is their legitimate and legal consumer right arbitrarily restricted by a technology company that is, in effect, defying the law through technological restrictions.
"It remains up to the market to determine the equilibrium that drives any free-enterprise system. Consumers are the final arbiters because they can vote with their wallets," Usher added. "This is as it should be in any well-functioning market, and we believe the improvements in Windows Vista play to this strength."Again, yes, but. If there was a truly open, free and competitive market, this would be true. However, for the overwhelming majority of consumers who acquire their operating systems without choice, bundled with the computer they pick up at the local electronics store, there is no practical way to vote with their wallet. Few are able to install and configure an alternative operating system. Microsoft's smug appeal to market dynamics is buoyed by their de facto monopoly over the computer desktop. Here's a little gedankenexperiment for Microsoft: If you offered Windows Vista both with and without the TPM that gives remote third parties the ability to turn off content that the user has acquired legally, that also gives Microsoft the ability to turn off YOUR access to YOUR documents (that's right folks, documents you create are now at risk under Vista TPM architecture), how many would buy the TPMed version? Do you really think that Hollywood would not release its latest blockbuster movie for the vast market that would - if it could - tell Microsoft to deep six its TPM?
An organic crisis is manifested as a crisis of hegemony, in which the people cease to believe the words of the national leaders, and begin to abandon the traditional parties. The precipitating factor in such a crisis is frequently the failure of the ruling class in some large undertaking, such as war, for which it demanded the consent and sacrifices of the people. The crisis may last a long time, for, as Gramsci wrily observed, "no social form is ever willing to confess that it has been superseded." In combatting the crisis, the intellectuals of the ruling class may resort to all sorts of mystification, blaming the failure of the state on an opposition party or on ethnic and racial minorities, and conducting nationalist campaigns based on irrational appeals to patriotic sentiment. This is a very dangerous moment in civic life, for if the efforts of the mandarins fail, and if the progressive forces still fail to impose their own solution, the old ruling class may seek salvation in a "divine leader." This "Caesar" may give the old order a "breathing spell" by exterminating the opposing elite and terrorizing its mass support. Or the contending forces may destroy each other, leaving a foreign power to preside over the "peace of the graveyard." (from Bates, T. R. (1975). Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36(2), 351-366.)
The visuals were achieved by printing out thousands of film frames (over 65,000 to be exact) and folding them into three-dimensional shapes. The paper-objects were then photographed and composited in After Effects. I can't even imagine the effort it took to mash-up hundreds of live-action films, often times with three to four films in each scene, and make it all work in a narrative context. It's an incredible creative achievement.The narrative makes some sort of sense in a surreal way, and is most certainly worth the thirteen-and-a-half minutes. Much more information is available on the official website.
A WSJ article reports that a John Hopkins study says that 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the war started. That's 2,5% of the population that would have been alive if there were no conflict. Granted, they would have been living under the control of a homicidal dictator who Human Rights Watch estimates killed up to 290,000 people in twenty years. ...Summing up, the U.S. under its so-called Commander-in-Chief has directly or indirectly killed nearly three times the number of Iraqis than did the dictator it deposed, in only a fraction of the time. So much for morality and ethicality. Further, it has made the world a significantly more dangerous place by fertilizing the spawning conditions for trans-national terrorism and encouraging the nuclear ambitions of one of the relatively few remaining madmen that still run countries. (I'm sure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is rubbing his hands with glee). And Hard Workin' George is still smirking, sending two distinct and diametrically opposite messages: that America is safer because they invaded Iraq, and that America is under increased threat because of the ever-present Terr'ists.
and
So, now we see how well the Bush policy on North Korea has worked out. The world is a step-function more insecure, not only because North Korea is a nuclear-tipped loonocracy, but because it well may decide to arm stateless groups that cannot be deterred from nuking us.
Nice going, George.
This is the price you pay for being a stubborn jackass, um, I mean, standing by principles. The principle of not negotiating with bad guys has a pragmatic justification: Negotiating encourages others to adopt bad guy tactics. But, that means the no-negotiating principle is really dependent on the practicalities. Instead, Bush has been overpowered by its macho sound. When it comes to near-nuclear powers who have been begging for direct talks, standing by the principle as if it were an 11th Commandment, and refusing to recognize differences in different cases—"I don't do nuance"—results in criminally stupid policies.
Rebels and outlaws looking to join the Hells Angels had better be prepared to fill out an application form and attach a current photo. It seems even society's quintessential outsiders can't escape the drudgery of paperwork. One such application, or "personal information sheet," submitted by a prospective Hells Angel was entered into evidence at a sentencing hearing in Winnipeg this week. It includes basic questions such as name, age, date of birth, telephone number and social insurance number. But the two-page form also asks whether the applicant owns a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or has a criminal record.But can you imagine the job interview?
Hells Angels paperwork isn't much different from the straight-laced corporate world.
"I had no choice. When he asked me for the coffee, I had to meet him. I was afraid he would say no, deny my case," [refugee claimant] Kim told CTV News. ... In the video, Ellis tells Kim she's as beautiful as a model and offers to find her work: "We have to work hard to get you another job at a hotel or something." ... In the audio recording, Ellis suggests he can approve her application if she has an affair with him, but warned Kim not to tell her boyfriend. "He might try to make trouble and say, `Oh yeah, this guy she fucked was a judge. She fucked him and that's why she is fucking him and that's why he said yes'," Ellis said."If we do this and it's shown I did this for improper purposes, then you are screwed too. We are both screwed. I'm in big trouble and your status is gone," he tells Kim.Ellis is indeed in big trouble. Let's hope Kim's status is secure. People who are willing to take a stand against corruption - especially when they are most vulnerable - are the type of courageous new immigrants this country should welcome.
Ellis, appointed to the board in 2000, would only tell CTV News: "I don't have anything to say right now. Thank you." Kim sent the video to the chairman of the Immigration Appeal Board last week. He immediately suspended Ellis. The matter has been referred to the RCMP.