b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Tyler, TX -- An Indifference to Life
Winter in Atlanta
High Court Dumps Eldred
Where's the Deal on Copyright?
Send It To The EFF
Blog Channels Equal Discussion Groups
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Paige Davis -- the Hottie Hostess
Saturday nights at my house are pretty dull. We only have one TV, so I get to sit around and watch three consecutive episodes of Trading Spaces on The Learning Channel. But it's not all bad. At least there's Paige Davis...
GraphicBrain.com Vertical Search Engine
Interesting idea -- a vertical industry search engine for the graphic arts. There may be similar tools in other industries but this is the first I've come across.I couldn't find a complete list of sources anywhere on the site, and a couple of quick query results showed a lot of repetition within relatively few sources. But the service does have some nice features, including the ability to save queries, define agents to update queries, sort results, and specify types of content for constraining the search. Registration is required for full access. I didn't see any mention of fees for registering to use the search engine.
I'd be more skeptical (downright cynical, actually) if this were an American venture, but it's run by VIGC, a private initiative backed by the Flemish government and the European Regional Development Fund. VIGC has about a dozen Euro graphic arts mfgs as members, but appears to be mostly trying to sell consulting services.
GraphicBrain.com adds daily updated overview of articles with links[...] GraphicBrain.com visits over 30 news sites on a daily basis, all dedicated to the industry. The overview is freely accessible to all users.
"This is of course a major improvement of our service", says Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com. Until recently, most of the information in GraphicBrain.com came from vendor websites and from on-line magazines. The GraphicBrain.com 'web spiders' visit vendor sites on a monthly basis and on-line magazine on a weekly basis. So it could take some time before information on new products was retrievable via the GraphicBrain.com search engine. With the addition of this 'news' section, new information is added to its database every day." [...] [WhatTheyThink]
Tyler, TX -- An Indifference to Life
A sad, gruesome tale of carelessness and greed from my home town. About once a decade Tyler makes national headlines for some bit of corruption, crime, or avarice. Usually it's about drugs, this time it's for being home to "...one of the most dangerous employers in America," according to a nine-month examination by The New York Times, the PBS television program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.You have to have lived in Tyler to understand it. It's a weird, self-important little town -- 85,000 people and all the grocery stores (save one) are owned by the same company. Not one Kroger, Publix, Winn-Dixie, Piggly-Wiggly, or Aldi. Smith County -- Tyler is the only city in the county -- is dry, but they have high-speed, 4-lane expressways to the nearest county line with liquor, and the road is so packed on Friday afternoons it looks like the 405 out of LA.
Tyler has three country clubs, but they all have the same members. The biggest industries are hospitals and Baptist churches. It's one of the most class-conscious cities in America, with only two classes -- doctors/lawyers/oilmen, and everyone else. Like I said -- weird.
Frank Boosman does a good job of capturing the strange cultural dichotomy that is Tyler, TX. But I remember when Tyler Pipe was a community asset -- a genuine blue collar jewel in the cheap pewter crown of a cloistered, 2nd-generation oil money community. I don't think the foundry was unionized until the late '80s. They paid really well, had great benefits, and I knew a lot of people whose parents made a good living and retired from there. This story is really sad. If you can't get to the article on the NYT site let me know and I'll e-mail it to you.
Less downtime that way. Frank Boosman writes about the recent New York Times/Frontline/CBC series on the dangerous Tyler Pipe and McWane plants. One of the NYT stories is At a Texas Foundry, an Indifference to Life. It?s much more grisly than the discussion I heard on Talk of the Nation with one of the reporters and the head of OSHA. The kind of thing you got in the appropriate part of Fast Food Nation.
[...] Less downtime that way, the men said. Now it was about 4 a.m., and Mr. Hoskin was alone in the cramped, dark pit. The din was deafening, the footing treacherous under heavy drifts of black sand.He was found on his knees. His left arm had been crushed first, the skin torn off. His head had been pulled between belt and rollers. [...]
Remember the danger of focusing on one metric Joel Spolsky writes about?
Throughout the plant, in supervisors? offices and on bulletin boards, next to production charts and union memos, is posted in big orange letters: REDUCE MAN HOURS PER TON. [markpasc.org]
Winter in Atlanta
It's cold here -- 15 degrees F last night.
Winter deals Atlanta a freezing hand. AccessAtlanta Jan 18 2003 7:08AM ET[...] There's a reason lifelong Georgians like Kim Floyd of Smyrna don't waste closet space on thickly insulated coats. As is typical for metro Atlanta, this cold spell isn't expected to last.
"It's usually not this cold and if it is, it's only for a few days," said Floyd, walking downtown Friday afternoon in a basic gray wool overcoat, jeans and a scarf. The forecast calls for temperatures to begin rising slowly on Sunday, reaching highs in the mid-50s by Thursday, according to the weather service. [...] [Moreover - Atlanta news]
Thursday, January 16, 2003
High Court Dumps Eldred
Not how I wanted to start the day. Many thanks to Eric Eldred, Larry Lessig, and the others who took this battle into the breach. Let's move on and focus on preserving Readers' Rights.
Court Deaf to Public-Domain Pleas. The Supreme Court's decisive ruling to uphold a law extending copyrights for 20 years will force public-domain advocates to compete ever more fiercely with the powerful entertainment lobby. Michael Grebb reports from Washington. [Wired News]
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Where's the Deal on Copyright?
This BBC story on copyright negotiations between RIAA reps and tech reps makes no sense. As near as I can tell, the two groups are now more concerned about the possibility that the DMCA will be weakened than they are about arguing among themselves over copy protection voodoo. According to the article, the only thing they've all agreed on is to focus on preventing the legitimate consumer from protecting his investment in legally-purchased property and using it in whatever way he sees fit. That's progress...
Music firms 'reach copyright deal'. BBC Jan 14 2003 8:47AM ET[...] The reported deal means the music industry will now not push the US government to make "locking controls" in devices such as DVD recorders compulsory, while technology firms are now expected to argue against plans to broaden consumers' rights to copy material.
These rights would include consumers making back-up DVDs of discs they have bought, or making digital files of songs to play in portable devices.
The technology companies - which include Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Dell - are also expected to support tougher enforcement against digital pirates. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Send It To The EFF
Assuming we get anything at all -- if the number of claimants causes the per-claimant award to be less than $5 all monies will go to a charitable organization instead of individual refunds -- I'll be happy to do this.I'm not sure anyone that cares is going to read the back of the checks, but I'll be glad to endorse it over to EFF and send it in.
RIAA refund: Send it to the EFF!. You've all applied for your refund from the RIAA, right? Well, SendItToTheEFF is a project to coordinate a big <nelson>haha</nelson> to the music industry by encouraging people to donate their refunds from the cartel to the EFF and make a note to that effect on the the checks. Link (Thanks, Dav!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Blog Channels Equal Discussion Groups
This seems very close to your everyday discussion group or web forum, and likely to suffer the same spam and noise problems. An RSS feeds is easy to listen to precisely because it is "hard" to speak into. Asymmetry is valuable -- it makes the flotsam easy to filter. And a good topical weblog is one with a human author who does much of the filtering for the reader.In a controlled environment -- a corporate intranet, a group k-log, etc. -- there could be value in the aggregated metadata. In a public free-for-all there will need to be design considerations for rendering spam impractical and limiting noise, while balancing the need for enough data to be useful.
Introducing the http://topicexchange.com/">Internet Topic Exchange.Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange (http://topicexchange.com). This is a service that enables anyone to easily create blog channels like Lazyweb.org, Blogpopuli, and KMPings. Once a channel is set up, people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS. To see what it looks like, have a look at the new "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" channel.
"What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards. With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them."This is indeed, I believe, a good way to facilitate group-forming among bloggers. Hopefully, people will set up channels corresponding to interests close to their heart and will subscribe to them. As I have pointed out earlier, this is a sociality-driven way of building what has been called "shared categories", "shared topics", or "distributed metadata".
One way to see it is that this extends the notion of RSS feeds. An ordinary RSS feed is easy to listen to, but "hard" to speak into. Blogchannels correct the asymmetry by making it easy both ways. Phillip has also put up what he calls a vague history of the concept.
["Sebastien Paquet!]Look here... since I have just mentioned it in my last post... apparently there is quite a bit of movement in the name of blogchannels. This is great news... [Sebastian Fiedler]
[Seblogging News]
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
