Eugene Roman

Eugene Roman, the Group President of Bell Canada Systems & Technology, came to talk to a Communication Studies class about The Digitization of Everything: The MODern Era. In his talk and conversations after he asked us to look up and think about Holons. He asked us to think in the inverse – ie. not to ask how to make a better Google, but what an anti-Google would be like. He also talked about viral thinking and how to “infect” others. When we got talking about wireless (and he sees it all going wireless) he made the interesting observation that a barcode is a form of wireless communication, even if the distance is not great. What will we be able to do with barcodes if taking a picture of a barcode with a wireless camera-phone can trigger things?

Too Much to Read: Science and City

McMaster has a great lecture series supported by the Hamilton Spector called “Science in the City”. Yesterday I gave one of the talks on “Too Much To Read: Using Computers to Cope With Information Overload” (see the Spectator article beforehand, Spectator interviews Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell.) It was encouraging how many people are interested in a topic like this. There really is broad interest in questions around information, reading, and the Internet. The questions at the end ranged from “should I switch to Firefox?” to “how can I use a concordancer on the information I have?”

Declassification in Reverse

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Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program is a page edited by Matthew M. Aid that discusses the extraordinary reclassification program by the U.S. intelligence community. Previously declassified (public) documents are being withdrawn from public view in addition to the exploding amount of information that is not being reviewed and declassified in the first place.

The National Security Archive is a non governmental non-profit institution that documents and advocates for freedom of information.

DFC Intelligence on Online Games

DFC Intelligence is a game industry research company that produces reports for sale. They have some articles online for free like Monthly Briefing on “Who will benefit from the growth of online game subscription revenue?” (March 7, 2006). This briefing article makes some interesting points, including, “Most notably, over 50% of online game subscription revenue in 2005 came from Asian countries outside Japan, most notably South Korea, China and Taiwan.”

A welcome caveat in the article,

The online game market has supposedly been on the cusp of booming for 20 years or so. There has been a great deal of trial and error in getting the market to where it is today. Many of the success stories have seemingly come out of nowhere. Future growth will require companies to take some significant risky investments. Most companies that have invested with a conscious goal of growing their online game business have not been successful. Right now there is even a question of whether traditional publishers need online games for growth over the next several years.

Xich Lo (Cyclo)

Xich lo (1995) by Vietnamese/French director Anh Hung Tran is unlike the other two features he directed (see
my earlier entry). The photographic cinematography is there, but the style is urban and violent. In Cyclo a poor and naive brother and sister enter a cycle of underworld prostitution and gang violence, almost losing their innocent lives. The treatment of the random violence in post-war Vietnam is unlike the methodical American lyrical violence. It is the random cutting of street life. The director puts it well in this Film Scouts Interview.

That’s why I hope you felt another kind of violence here, a moral violence. I often hear people say that in American films violence is gratuitous, I don’t agree. It’s always justified, meaning the hero’s wife gets killed early on, so he retaliates, therefore it’s justified. That’s mechanical violence. In Quentin Tarantino’s films, on the other hand, the violence is playful, jubilant.

When you deal with violence, you must avoid the playful, the jubilant, the laughter, and the justification. It’s easy satisfaction. When Cyclo’s bicycle is stolen, there’s no need for the young robbers to hit him. Yet they do, and I show it, to give you the feeling of how unfair it is. I even make the scene a tad longer, so as to make the unfairness of it all, and the violence it entails, even more unbearable, and you can’t desire it. As opposed to “Reservoir Dogs” where, after the guy has had his ear chopped off, you’re frustrated because he’s not burnt to ashes.

That’s why I’ve never been comfortable with Tarantino’s taste for blood.
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Kottke: the first professional blogger

According to the Jason Wikipedia article, Jason Kottke of kottke.org was the first to try to make a living from blogging through a PBS-like micropatrons approach where he had a 3 week “fund drive” which raised enough for him to blog for a year.

After a year he reflected on the experience in Oh, what a year. felixsalmon was not impressed.

This story, which was big news at the time, is old now, I know. Thanks to Matt for alerting me to it (back when it was news.)