|
« April 2004 | Main | June 2004 » May 31, 2004how will the military vote?Although i uninstalled Shrook, Newsweek kept coming during finals. Thus, i read all about the prison crises. While the soldiers were saying that they followed orders, those in charge were passing the blame or saying that it was just a few people operating inappropriately. Stanley Milgram, anyone? Waking up, my roommate reminded me that it was Memorial Day and we got to talking about different wars. I started thinking about how the military always follows orders and is always a pillar of conservative ideas. They're the most likely population to vote Republican. I wonder how much they feel betrayed right now. I mean, their Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defense betrayed their trust and then refused to take responsibility for what happened. Even McNamara knew that those at the top were always responsible. Newsweek had all of these write-ups about military folks who were embarassed by the prison scandel. Do you think that they'll vote for Bush in Round II? Where do their allegiences lie? Category: politics Posted by zephoria at 4:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) blogging and assumptions about classWe've all heard the rhetoric about how blogging is an equal-access opportunity for publication because many services are free. Yet, embedded in the creation of those services are a lot of assumptions about money and time and how people spend these precious items. Nothing made me more pleased after re-installing Shrook than seeing Quinn calling folks out on these assumptions, particularly as services begin to charge and the pundits start heckling people for bitching about the cost. Just think... $60 will pay for a full year of education for a student via the Goma Student Fund. Money is *very* relative. Category: Posted by zephoria at 1:47 PM | TrackBack (0) waving to Dana H. Boyd
Of course, there's a reason that Google thinks we're one... folks keep referencing me using his name. My first name really does have an 'h' at the end of it (not a middle initial). Removing that 'h' means that you're referencing him, not me. Also, the reason that 'h' is there is because it balances the 'd' - there really are no capital letters in my name. Really. Yet, while the capitalization bugs me, the loss of an 'h' just feels disrespectful, as though it's calling someone else into being other than me. At least it's good to know that person and to know that he's a good one. ::wave:: Category: Posted by zephoria at 12:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) May 30, 2004Lakoff and the language of politics
He opened by being adorable, noting that he's a professor and teaches seminars - 15 people sitting around a table discussing not huge scary lecture halls, let alone churches full of an attentive paying audience. He notes that if this many people showed up to hear a linguistics professor talk, he has more confidence in November 2 than he thought. He next talks about how the Republicans spend some billion dollars on think tanks each year - 43 think tanks, one created about each year, all started in 1970 by one of Nixon's people. Large amounts of research go into linguistics and how we use language. They train Republicans to use language as a powerful tool. Democrats don't do this. He then talks about intro cog-sci. Don't think of an elephant. Of course, you think of an elephant. You need to realize the frame to negate it. This can be powerful when framing the words of politics. Framing is key because it makes it harder to discuss things. Tax relief. Who can be against a concept so beneficial as tax relief? Well, taxes are put to good use. But by framing it through the pain of the people rather than the use value, Republicans have been able to make it hard to discuss. Are you for or against the President's tax relief plan? Hard to get at the issues from that framing. Progressives like to eschew values, saying that there aren't progressive values. Bullshit. Furthermore, people vote their values, their connections and their identity, not what is best for them. This helps to explain why poor mid-Westerners vote in favor of Republicans who continue to make them poorer and poorer and poorer.... The Republicans know this. Democrats think that they need to be more moderate to win votes; Republicans aren't that stupid. Lakoff introduced a whole framework about how the nation can be viewed as a family and how there are two different models of families - the strict father family and the nurturing parent family. He then shared a compelling amount of information on this topic that is really hard to summarize, but Metaphor, Morality and Politics is Lakoff's written version of this. Anyhow, there was so much more, so much sublety. And of course, the talk definitely motivated me to buy his new book: Moral Politics. I have to admit that it's nice to be in yet-another-school where the linguistics department is getting hyper political and speaking to the public. And, just like at Chomsky's talks, there were plenty of annoying attendees who decided to pester the speaker in a screaming, not discussing kind of way. One had to be hauled off after he refused to let Lakoff talk. Another had to be engaged by one of the audience members who took the bullet for the rest of us. Of course, Lakoff joked about this all: remember, Berkeley is the home of the Free Speech movement. ::laugh:: Category: politics Posted by zephoria at 9:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2) relaxation and chillnessIt has been a most wonderfully relaxing and chill week. My mom came into town and we wandered north to land of spas and wine and olive oil. It was true mother/daughter bonding time in a way that neither of us ever remembered doing before. If anyone ever needs a break from the chaos of the city, northern California is wonderful. Of course, we ended our little journey by spooking ourselves out at Bodega Bay where The Birds was filmed. ::gulp:: Gotta love Hitchcock! I've also been on a hiking and dancing kick - making up for the laziness of months spent in front of a computer. It feels *so* good to get out, bounce around, relax, be goofy and chill out before admitting to summer responsibilities and intellectual challenges. Oh, and i actually read a book! One that had (almost) nothing to do with work. I read Pattern Recognition because everyone kept telling me about the apophenia. I love the idea of being allergic to brands and i'm so sad that she lost that at the end. And i saw a movie! I saw Super Size Me. I have to admit that i ended up craving McDs afterwards which made me feel *super* guilty. This is why i want brand allergies. I understand intellectually how badly i treat my body, but i really am a sucker for the blazing colors, fake smells and immediate feedback of cravings appeased. Ah yes, my weaknesses... Category: Posted by zephoria at 8:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1) May 29, 2004Ronald Burt, structural holes and creativityBurt's theories on structural holes were immensely influentual when i was writing "Faceted Id/entity." Thus, i was stoked to read a discussion of his work in the NYTimes: Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal It Outside Your Group. The article concerns his current research on creativity and how creative people are often noted to be bridges between diverse groups. They are taking material that is not valuable to one community and making use of it elsewhere where it is exceptionally valuable. [Note to the operationally minded: Read the logical ordering of the above statements again. Burt's research concerns tracking creative people. This does not necessarily mean that one becomes creative by positioning oneself as bridges. Logical ordering matters.] "Think Tank" [Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist, says: "Creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game."] Got a good idea? Now think for a moment where you got it. A sudden spark of inspiration? A memory? A dream? Most likely, says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, it came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it. "The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act," Mr. Burt said. "But creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game." Mr. Burt has spent most of his career studying how creative, competitive people relate to the rest of the world, and how ideas move from place to place. Often the value of a good idea, he has found, is not in its origin but in its delivery. His observation will undoubtedly resonate with overlooked novelists, garage inventors and forgotten geniuses who pride themselves on their new ideas but aren't successful in getting them noticed. "Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it's largely irrelevant," Mr. Burt said. "The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it." Mr. Burt, whose latest findings will appear in the American Journal of Sociology this fall, studied managers in the supply chain of Raytheon, the large electronics company and military contractor based in Waltham, Mass., where he worked until last year. Mr. Burt asked managers to write down their best ideas about how to improve business operations and then had two executives at the company rate their quality. It turned out that the highest-ranked ideas came from managers who had contacts outside their immediate work group. The reason, Mr. Burt said, is that their contacts span what he calls "structural holes," the gaps between discrete groups of people. "People who live in the intersection of social worlds," Mr. Burt writes, "are at higher risk of having good ideas." People with cohesive social networks, whether offices, cliques or industries, tend to think and act the same, he explains. In the long run, this homogeneity deadens creativity. As Mr. Burt's research has repeatedly shown, people who reach outside their social network not only are often the first to learn about new and useful information, but they are also able to see how different kinds of groups solve similar problems. Mr. Burt began developing his idea about "structural holes" — the notion that people can find opportunities for creative thinking where there is no social structure — as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970's. A student of the eminent sociologist James Coleman, he was assigned to study patterns of exchange between companies using a technique called block modeling, which classifies individuals and organizations according to a large amount of data on what they buy, who they know and more. Structural holes between companies was a theme in his 1977 dissertation and became a focus in his 1992 book, "Structural Holes," which applied it to individual behavior. In 2000 Mr. Burt took the idea of structural holes to Raytheon, where he was hired to help integrate a group of recent acquisitions. What he discovered was that many potentially good ideas died at the hands of those who brought them. Raytheon managers had a wide gap between coming up with good ideas and making them happen. "Although managers with discussion partners in other groups were positioned to spread good ideas across business units," he writes, "the people they cited for idea discussion were overwhelmingly colleagues already close in their informal discussion network." The result was that the ideas were not developed. Instead, he says, they should have had discussions outside their typical contacts, particularly with what calls an informal boss, a person with enough power to be an ally but not an actual supervisor. Wayne Baker, a professor of management and organization at the University of Michigan Business School, said the structural holes approach reminds people to continually open up their networks, which naturally drift toward closure. Mr. Burt's theory may offer some caution for people who have been trying to enlarge their social networks on the Web by using "social software" at sites like Friendster, Ryze and MySpace. The idea underlying these computer hookups is that the better connected you are, the more valuable social capital you will have. But Mr. Burt's work suggests the opposite: expanding your network may fill in the structural holes, eliminating their creative benefits. By linking everyone together indiscriminately, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach outside your regular contacts and surprise anyone with a new idea. "My M.B.A. students tell me all the time: `Don't disseminate this. This should be our little secret,' " Mr. Burt said. But he tells them there are more than enough structural holes to go around. The reason? Laziness, mostly. "Often people are like sheep eating grass," Mr. Burt said. "They're so focused on what's right in front of them, they don't look for the whole." Mr. Baker, who has evaluated thousands of personal social networks with a Web-based tool (www.humaxnetworks.com), argues that neither model offers a formula for success, though. "If there is a rule of thumb in practice," he said, "it is to have a hybrid network that has features of closure and structural holes." Mr. Burt offers somewhat different advice: "The easiest way to feel creative is to find people who are more ignorant than yourself." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, Arts & Ideas, of May 22, 2004. Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 11:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) May 25, 2004blog/author limits and MTTo answer Mena's question about blog/author limits and the new licensing scheme: I have an installation of MT that i use to help non-profits and/or small groups maintain blogs. They aren't technical enough to run their own blogs and, at the time, other services didn't provide the necessary functions. I also have a friend who used his MT installation to pull friends off of Blogger and LiveJournal so that they could have trackbacks, comments and RSS amongst them. Finally, for the class that i was TAing this semester, we had all students get on MT to blog assignments. We created an installation that hosts 40+ students. I realize that there's an undiscussed educational license, but the hassle of going through that probably would've mean that i wouldn't have chosen MT for the class. And getting a school stricken with Schwarzenegger syndrome to pay for software for a class is nowhere near easy. All of the groups that i'm involved in would be completely screwed by the new scheme. My friend and i would be seen as sysadmins or service providers, even though what we are doing is simply supporting our friends/students who are not technical enough, not motivated enough to do this on their own. The folks we are supporting aren't really bloggers, not in the sense that we normally talk about. Getting many of them to engage in this process has been difficult. There's no way that they will pay for a service and there's no way that i could afford ramping up to the next pricing level to continue supporting them. I also feel terrible because i can't volunteer to continue helping people start out blogging. For now, we're just not upgrading while we consider what should be done. But i will definitely say that this pricing scheme does not make sense when trying to get the new/non-technical folks blogging. Furthermore, i'm a bit saddened that there's no non-profit status in the license because this screws me in a different direction. Category: Posted by zephoria at 2:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (3) May 24, 2004ethnography, ethics and the InternetFor the last month, a heated discussion has persisted on the mailing list of the Association of Internet Researchers. This list is comprised of researchers interested in studying internet behavior. The discussion began when someone asked about the ethics of data collection while lurking. There is no universally accepted answer on this one and the result was intense. The discussion is still going on and i'd strongly encourage anyone interested in issues of learning from behavior online (business people as well as researchers) to check out the May Archives. The threads of interest include: "ethnography and ethics", "ethics of recording publicly observed interactions", and "Google is watching !". Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 11:05 AM | TrackBack (1) May 22, 2004* Hallelujah *::wiping sweat off brow:: What a two weeks it has been. Over 100 pages of text have been written: 2 long essays, 1 ethnography write-up, 1 workshop proposal, 1 panel proposal. 30 students x 3 papers each graded. A conference was hosted. And a slew of odds and ends - interviews, edits, and the like. Important lessons learned: Caffeine does not overcome hallucinations. The only thing that remedies hallucinations is sleep. This is quite frustrating when sleep is not really in the deck of cards. Of course, there's something utterly fun about trying to write text when the text you are writing does not stay still, but floats around the screen. Very hypertextual. Meatless chicken patties rock. I once lived on ramen soup for 10 days (the 8 for $1 kind - i had no money). To this day, i cannot eat ramen. This time, i lived on meatless chicken patties and burritos. Much better. A cigarette break is not a celebration. There is nothing more depressing than completing a long essay and having only a cigarette break before moving on to the next one. Celebration is part of the key to relief. Laptops are not the same as cats. Day 4, i decided that there was no reason to shower or leave my bed. I had 17 books piled on the bed and a stack of papers 8 inches deep. I left the bed to urinate, smoke and eat chicken patties. At the end of the night, i ducked under my covers, not removing any of the items on my bed. On Day 5, i woke up hugging and petting my laptop; i must have mistaked it for Marble. I sat back up in bed and began writing again. Marble meowed. Blogs are a bigger distraction than IM. You cannot tell blogs to make you feel guilty for looking at them; you can tell friends to make you go back to work, or, because you are screaching at high pitches, they'll run away. I uninstalled Shrook. Self-reflection is a recursive curse. My advisor foolishly assigned me to write a self-reflective and reflexive write-up. A person analytic by nature should not turn their power inward; it becomes dangerous. I understand how Moby Dick was written. If you start down the path of description, you hit a point of recursion and it's turtles all the way down. Why do you never hear reports of anthropologists going insane? Personal libraries are key. My room looks like the result of a battleground between the Papers and the Books. I'm not sure who won, but there are many casualties. Thank goodness i have a ridiculously sized book collection and a fast internet connection to more references - i never had to leave my room! Intellectual engagement != working. But boy can you justify it as such. Blessed be my friends who came to check in and brought me external stimulii upon which to thrust my spiraling brain. Somehow, the best conversations about philosophy, politics and religion always happen during finals. There's something about feeling like you're thinking intensely so it must be the same as finals to feel refreshed. No qualitative analysis tool meets my needs. I tried every qual analysis/coding tool i could find for the Mac and was sorely disappointed. My mind is too hypertextual to handle the structure of these tools and yet my memory is not good enough to let me store everything internally. Mucho frustration. Mountain Dew loves me: they re-released my beloved Tangerine. Last fall, when i learned that Mountain Dew was going to stop distributing the tangerine stuff (orange MD), i had my corner deli order me a few cases; they ran out before finals. When i went to the grocery store this week, i found out that they re-released the tangerine stuff.. and in 2 litre bottles! Blessed be my mother. My mother is coming in 36 hours to wisk me away to hot tubs, massages, wine and all of the other pleasantries of a spa. For the last two weeks, whenever i felt exhausted and upset, i envisioned my mom arriving for many days of relaxation. Ahhh.... Sleep is not just for the weak. Or else i am weak... because gosh darnit i need it. G'nite. Category: Posted by zephoria at 1:27 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (5) May 11, 2004paying for my sinsFinals are brutal. Particularly when you were as foolish as i was about my semester organization. 6 weeks of travel is brutal on top of 3 intensive classes, TAing (and then grading) 30 students in a fun class about social networking, the bright idea to organize a conference during the weekend between finals and an outstanding CSCW application. ::smacking forehead:: And of course i'm fighting a cruel cold that seems to encourage my body to hold on to jetlag as well. I vow to be unresponsive. I have uninstalled Shrook. This is my last blog post until i'm through. Must get through. Looking forward to wine and massages with my mother. Topics on the brain: critical technical practice (Agre) as it applies to HCI's construction of context; the rhetorical debate between Searle and Derrida over Austin (considerations for interdisciplinary research); ethnographic write-up on negotiating audience; design considerations for digital identity representation. Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 6:55 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0) Shrek 2 is stunning
I love movies and i often see them opening night. When given the opportunity, i love going to movie premiers. Of course, the only movie premiers that i'm ever invited to are the ones with computer graphics in them. This doesn't bother me because i love an audience full of geeks and/or animators. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the geek premier of Shrek 2. I admit, i was a little worried because a sequel is often horrifying. But, omg, i was totally impressed. Not only is the storyline better than the last round (deeper connections to fairie tales, more nuanced relationships, greater opportunity for multiple textual readings), but the graphics just took another leap forward. I've never seen hair look so good, the lighting in particular; it's starting to look actually porous. Speaking of porous, the skin, oh the skin. It's been nine years since the baby in Toy Story scared us all into thinking that CG and humans were not meant to go together. PDI really took that baton and the increased improvement in skin makes all the difference. The subtle details really come through. Take pupil dilation - there's so much information in pupil dilation. This is not to say that it's perfect - there are definitely flaws and room for improvement. But i'm definitely impressed. Of course, i will never forget what Ed Catmull told me when i was starting to work in computer graphics, roughly: "The CG may be great, but without a good storyline, the CG doesn't matter." In Shrek 2, the graphics just fade into the background. Anyhow, definitely go see it opening weekend. (Remember: opening weekend box office receipts are often what determines the duration of the movie and they're a really important indicator of support to the creators.) Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 11:52 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (3) May 8, 2004Friendster's plethora of high school studentsRecently, i've been getting lots of SMS-style emails from people about Friendster. Usually, this means that they're teens. So, i went in and did a search in Friendster for ages 61-71 in California with pictures within 3 degrees. Almost 1000 hits. Doing the same search in Singapore, i found over 600 hits. All teens. They're all underage (and it seems as though the most popular age to choose these days is 69). What surprises me is the emergence of Fakester High Schools (in order to collect all of those from the same HS). I'm stunned that Friendster was so vigilant in going after Fakesters because it was ruining search and they weren't viable customers, but they ignore the Fakesters that could open them up to hefty legal suits. I also got a great report from Singapore that students are creating images of their HS teachers to write testimonials about how horrible they are. Looking at a few of them, interests include things like "Shouting at ppl, Confiscating balls especially soccer balls, Catch students who are late for school." Testimonials include things like "_|_ u sux! may ur dick not be wif u!" A quick perusal of Friendster produced more Fakesters than i saw in the Fakester hayday. I find it utterly ironic - fakesters and teens everywhere and the early adopters are no longer participating. It seems as though their efforts to configure the users didn't work so well. (Of course, today's apathy is easy to explain... the Fakesters and teens aren't nearly as visible to the friends and FoF of those in the Valley as they were 9 months ago.) Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 11:12 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (2) May 6, 2004LJNet: The LiveJournal Social Network Browser
This is an image from Patrick Barry's (CMU) interactive visualization tool for LiveJournal. More fun with pretty social visualizations! (Oh, and if you want to know why i think these tools are at all interesting, check out the paper that Viegas and i wrote on Digital Artifacts.) Category: LiveJournal Posted by zephoria at 7:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2) Erowid(s) bio/historyThe Vaults of Erowid is the quintessential site for understanding everything about psychoactive substances, from their chemical structure to their effects on humans. Run by Earth and Fire Erowid, this site is dedicated to operate as a library of information on psychoactives. I have so much respect for the Erowids, who are constantly fighting trouble to get out information to the masses, to educate. Thus, i was ecstatic to find a bio on the Erowids in in the LA Weekly today. (Simultaneously, i was disheartened to hear that they are running out of money.) Category: altered states Posted by zephoria at 5:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) Genevieve has a profile in the NYTimes
"We thought, there's a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives," Dr. Bell said. "I was fairly certain that wasn't going to be the case. I'm an anthropologist. Culture matters." Category: digitalness Posted by zephoria at 10:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1) Blogging out of contextReflecting on Matt Webb's post on designing social software, Ryan Shaw realized the significance of one of his lines: "Outside the context of [their creation], most of the weblog posts just don't make any sense." He argues that this is a pretty damning criticism of blogging as a serious alternative to journalism. If i think of my own posts, very few are ever written to be used elsewhere. They are set of rambling commentaries based on what's in my head and the only relevant context is me. The information that is useful to others is often the information that is part of an ongoing dialogue. Of course, it's frustrating when you try to collect those thoughts. They require a massive rewrite to be truly valuable long-standing. What is it about this format that doesn't permit us to collect our efforts into a coherent package? I mean, for centuries, professors turned lectures into books. Of course, they required editing too. I don't think of what i'm doing as journalism, but i do recognize the problems with persistence of information. As far as whether or not this is a damning critique.... i wonder if journalism is better off in a dialogue? I wonder if that means it's a different kind of journalism? I mean, as much as i go back and read old newspapers, the information has a social/political context that's really hard to get when you read back. So, even if the text makes sense, that doesn't mean a lot isn't lost. (Ah, Benjamin on translation....) Category: blogging Posted by zephoria at 9:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) May 5, 2004Vizster: beautiful YASNS visualizations
(PS: Vizster is not currently available for download and Jeff is on a well-deserved vacation so don't bug him until June. But definitely check out his other projects) Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 9:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3) communication moodinessI was IMing with a friend this morning when he sent me the following message: you make these announcements every once in a while--"I deleted all my email!" "I threw away your contact information!" "I stopped reading your blog!"--in such a way as to prove that you are an incredibly wired person who really enjoys messing with the wired world. At first, i was like hrmfpt! And then i pouted. All because i knew that there was a grain of truth to that. It made me think through a bit of my own behavior. I've always loved inserting uncertainty into my wired life. When i first got a pager, i made it very clear both through my behavior and my statements that i was not on beck and call. I leave my mobile on vibrate purposely to ignore any calls that might come through when my purse is across the room. I have email auto-check turned off so that i have to manually ask for more email. I like the fact that my spam filter keeps messing up. I love the fact that if you IM me, it might go to my phone or it might go to my computer and i might or might not get it. I have information control issues. Worse, i have information overload guilt issues. After opening up my RSS reader to 1600 unread blogs, i just deleted them. I couldn't deal with the overhead of knowing that i'd never get through all of them. I refuse to check my voice mail because it tells me that there are 14 messages; that's just far too many. I stopped reading messages that went via YASNS 6 months ago because Orkut overloaded me. People often ask me what the best way to contact me is. Inside, i laugh. I don't really want to be easily reachable always. I have communication mood swings. One of my favorite bad habits that most of my friends despise is that i become unwilling to deal with the phone. Thus, when people call me, i answer and hand the phone over to whoever is with me to talk. It's weird. I'm obsessively accountable to certain people. But when i don't feel the internal requirement/responsibility to be accountable to someone, i swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. It's not really flakiness because if i promise that i will respond, i will. It's a peculiar lack of willingness to have my energy controlled externally when it doesn't have to be that way. I used to beg forgiveness and vow that i'd get better about communications. I stopped three years ago when a friend pointed out that i promised the improvement every six months and continued to get worse. He was right. So i stopped thinking that i'd improve and accepted the fact that i wouldn't. Reflecting on my communication quirks makes me realize how much i identify with my cat. [Self-reflective moment brought on by Day 3 of extreme jetlag combined with terrible cold.] Category: Posted by zephoria at 9:43 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0) fake friends and SN etiquetteToo Many Fake Friends by Jim Louderback The Ethics and Etiquette of Social Networks by Stowe Boyd Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 7:44 AM | TrackBack (0) May 4, 2004society problems caused by Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart makes billions of dollars every year. But at such an aweful expense. Check out these statistics (thanks Chloe!!). Here's a sample (but read the full list): $420,750: Annual cost to U.S. taxpayers of a single 200-employee Wal-Mart store, because of support required for underpaid workers -- including subsidized school lunches, food stamps, housing credits, tax credits, energy assistance, and health care Category: Posted by zephoria at 5:44 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (1) May 3, 2004social technology: from MPD to Asperger's?When i first read the cyberculture literature from the late 80s and early 90s, i was left with an impression that early social technology was all based on the assumption that everyone had multiple personality disorder. Worse: if you didn't have it, it was going to give you MPD. There were even references to the idea that everyone was partially MPD. This was all wrapped up in the rhetoric of be whoever you want to be - race, sex, sexuality does not matter. I found it horrifying and my repulsion grounded my demand to separate between digital fragmented identity and the process of maintaining a faceted identity. I have a funny feeling that social technology is back to developing software based on disorders and instigating new ones in people. Only, we've move away from schizophrenia and onto autism. Did you ever get the sneaking suspicion that this new wave of "social software" is not really making social life easier, but permitting the kind of social awkwardness that is recognized in Asperger's? I wonder if this is intentional or a by-product of the tech culture. I've been fascinated to see a strong increase in the publicity of autism and Asberger's lately and an even more noticeable increase in the number of people mocking others' autistic tendencies with respect to the lack of social appropriateness. [also posted to many-to-many] Update: followups from Weinberger and jluster Category: social software Posted by zephoria at 12:53 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (8) Dali quote for the open copyright folks
Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don't have to actually use them myself. It's from an interview where he's being asked about his art, copies and the public. Category: Posted by zephoria at 12:03 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (6) May 2, 2004strange representation of me
I think that there's something very karmic about how i attend conferences, meet interesting people and end up saying silly things in the press right before finals every semester... when i'm unable to respond to any of the email. Anyhow, what a silly looking picture of me. What on earth is happening to my lips? Ah, fuzz... Category: Posted by zephoria at 11:46 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) i'm back....Ah, it's so good to be home. There's internet and a kitty cat and loving roommates. I will say that there's nothing like traveling abroad to make me appreciate all of the goodness in my life. I even found myself singing Grand Canyon on the way home. i love my country Running away for a bit makes me turn back and see all of the myopia and screwups of this country from a different perspective. I get to remember that i love the land, that i love (many of) the people... i could do without the government and without a certain self-centered element. But, by and large, going away lets me remember the good parts. I've been on the road for a month - three different countries, many different cities. Oh, and CHI was ... interesting. So many good people and that it was definitely worth the adventure. It just took me a day without Internet to remember that nothing mattered but the people. And i got to see a few museums and go shopping in London. This kind of reprieve always does feel good even if the guilt of work hangs over my head. I did make up for it all by meeting with another blogging researcher in London and then managing to attend a "dinner" (where dinner==pub) of all bloggers - that was a hoot. Anyhow, i'm back to the internet. Just in time for finals and extended chaos. Must make it to summer... must make it to summer... Category: Posted by zephoria at 10:21 PM | TrackBack (0) |
Please digitally wave to 
I forgot to blog about this amazing talk i went to last week. I've been desperately wanting to take a class with 
In London, i went to the 
Apparently,