BBC News Farmers advised to destroy GM crops
"The government has advised farmers who accidentally planted GM crops to destroy them or dispose of them after they have been harvested."

"Advanta disclosed last week that some of its conventional rape-seed "sold and sown" in the UK during the past two years actually contained genetically-modified seed."

"One farmer, who sowed GM contaminated seed and stands to lose up to £10,000 because of the mix-up, said he was too frightened to identify himself for fear of being targeted by environmentalists.''

The Sunday Times GM crops 'planted for years by mistake'
"FARMERS in Britain may have been unwittingly planting a range of genetically modified crops for several years, according to a seed-testing laboratory in the United States.

Genetics ID, based in Fairfield, Iowa, screens agricultural produce for genetic modifications, including seeds exported to Europe. Its latest tests show that more than half of 20 random samples of what are supposed to be conventional seeds contain some level of GM produce. "

The Third Culture An Open Letter to Prince Charles
"The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture - all agriculture - is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago."

"The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature."

HMS Beagle Genetically Modified Foods
[requires 'free' registration]
"The use of molecular engineering to manipulate the qualities of food crops is one of our most volatile public issues. The controversy over agricultural biotechnology, as it is commonly known, has motivated protesters to destroy fields of engineered plants and to demonstrate peacefully at international meetings. It has moved nations and groups of nations to pass laws and adopt policies, multinational corporations to alter their way of doing business, and scientists and advocates the world over to sign petitions, hurl accusations, and declare that it's time for researchers to become more like the activists who challenge them.

What is the best existing scientific evidence that documents any effects, related to either environmental alterations or food safety, from genetically modified (GM) foods? How does society most stand to benefit from GM foods? Which of these effects represent new or increased risks, over and beyond those risks presented by foods that are derived through conventional technologies and agronomic practices?"

Business 2.0 Relationships Rule
"Business Webs are changing the rules of traditional marketing. When customers participate in a B-Web, everybody communicates — in multiple directions — and marketers can no longer control customer perceptions. The brand is no longer an image established through print and broadcast media; it functions as a measure of relationship capital. Customers gain new power. Dynamic pricing challenges fixed prices, and buyers — not just sellers — establish prices. Rather than tout products, marketers must build relationship capital via comprehensive communications strategies."

redux [04.12.00]
The Standard From Selling Goods to Commodifying Relationships
"Instead of thinking of products as fixed items with set features and a one-time sales value, companies now think of them as "platforms" for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services. In the Age of Access services and upgrades are what count. The platform is merely the vessel to which these services are added.

In a sense, the product becomes more of a cost of doing business than an item in itself. The idea is to use the platform as a beachhead, as a way of establishing a physical presence in the customer's home or place of business. That presence allows the vendor to begin an ongoing "relationship" with the customer."

redux [03.30.00]
BusinessWeek Weblining
"You may think that getting graded A, B, or C ended with graduate school. Try getting Sanwa Bank to waive its $20 fee on your bounced check. Customer reps are trained to treat everyone politely. But your luck will depend on a little letter that pops up on a screen as soon as your name is punched into a computer, or when your e-mail arrives at Sanwa's server. If that letter is a ''C,'' customer reps don't exactly hustle on your behalf. That's because machines whirring at Net-speed have lumped you--often in seconds flat--with other customers whose accounts don't make much money for the bank. But if you score an ''A,'' you're right up there with the cream: Customers who generate hefty profits get bounced-check waivers, no questions asked. And B's? They're harder calls. They actually get to negotiate with the rep before their case is decided."

"Scientific or not, high-powered computing increases the incentive for businesses to Webline customers by making human behavior appear predictable. Visa International, for example, is using neural networks to build up elaborate behavioral profiles. Over months, these systems--which emulate the learning power of the brain--track a person's behavior online and off, then match it against models of similar personality and behavior types to predict how people will act in the future. The initial incentive was to recognize and thwart fraud. Now Visa is testing the software with 12 member banks in an effort to anticipate loan defaults. ''This gives us smarter data, and with Web-based technology, we can get that to our member banks in real time,'' says Martin Izenson, a director in Visa's risk management and security group."

PRIVACY Forum Digest Cogit.com: Making DoubleClick Look Good?
"No matter how far you dig into a cesspool, it's not always easy to tell when you've reached bottom. In the case of Internet technologies that many persons consider invasive, we may be dealing with a bottomless pit of slime, a veritable cornucopia of crassness that is breathtaking to behold."

"Cogit apparently purchases masses of information about your purchasing habits, magazine subscriptions, and all sorts of other nifty data regarding your behavior. This is data that many firms consider to be their treasure-trove to exploit as they see fit. Once Cogit has managed to pick up your identity from a customer site (e.g., presumably from an online registration or online purchase), they then can link your activities on those sites to the external data sources. Once this linkage is made, the name/address/etc. information is apparently deleted.

Then, using cookies and Web bugs (the latter of which are almost impossible to disable in any normal sense for most Web users) your movements can be tracked through the related sites, controlling the content displayed based on the perceived view of what you're all about."

CNN GPS to do wonders for wireless browsing
"Previously, the GPS feed was comparatively imprecise and could be off by 100 yards or more. The unscrambled GPS signal can pinpoint whether a person wandering Times Square is about to enter the Disney Store or the Flashdancers down the block. "

""It's a bit of a marketer's wet dream," says Kyle Shannon, cofounder of Agency.com, an Internet marketing consulting firm. The idea, Shannon says, is that "someone who uses a [wireless] data network is going to respond to an ad that gives him a coupon to buy a Coke from a machine as he walks by it."

redux [05.01.00]
First Monday The COMsumer Manifesto: Empowering Communities of Consumers through the Internet
"The Internet is changing business models and empowering consumers to create new communities that combine the power to aggregate rich sources of individually personalized data in real-time activities. Large-scale data aggregators are emerging to navigate and mediate info markets. While information records are proliferating, new standards for content capture and management are appearing. Most companies continue to hope they will control their customers' information assets. However, what if this is not true or becomes impossible? What if consumers decide to band together and control their own personal information? Are you ready to freely give your customers their data records? Are you prepared to live up to the COMsumer Manifesto?

This article offers a disruptive antidote to the hierarchical, closed, supply-system, explicit, knowledge-driven, "We Know What You Want" data mine world where many customers feel powerless. This is a world well beyond 1999's "Net Worth" and 2000's "The Cluetrain Manifesto". Infomediaries are not just trustworthy agents which sit between the vendor and the customer, and markets are not just conversations. In this new world, communities sense needs, desires, and wishes for the future and create new data markets - to which organizations must respond or die! We are closing in on the "tipping point" where COMsumers take complete control of their destiny by collectively owning their personal information assets."

Slashdot At Last And At Length: Lars Speaks
"We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give. We believe that there is a major, major difference between the old -- obviously one of the scenarios we hear a lot ... 'How is it different from home taping?' I guess is really the question. You know, home taping 10 or 15 years ago really was about, you had vinyl records, and you had the neighbor down the street with you know, his Iron Maiden records, that you wanted to make a tape of so you can play in your car. ...We're talking about a network that includes millions and millions of people, and tens and tens of millions of songs that these millions of people have, they can trade. So the old 'home taping is killing music,' well, OK, so you borrow your neighbor's Iron Maiden record, blah blah blah, you know, some guy down at school. There is a long way from that to what's going on right now with perfect first-generation digital copies of music that's available to millions of poeple all over the world."

redux [03.25.00]
Salon Artists to Napster: Drop dead!
" Ask singer-songwriter Aimee Mann what she thinks of Napster, the ingeniously simple and wildly popular tool for exchanging MP3 music files, and you get a very concise response: "Artists should get paid for their work." It's a time-honored notion, but one that seems to be getting lost amid the Napster buzz."

redux [04.17.00]
News.com Can Napster be stopped? No!
"The obvious question is, Can anything be done to stop the free trade of music on the Internet? To the amazement of many, the answer is likely to be no.

The first reason for this is that the cat is out of the bag. Every multimedia PC in existence is capable of converting a music CD to a digital MP3 file. This means that more than 100 million encoding devices already exist that can convert the more than 50 billion CDs floating around the world into digital files. It's unlikely that we will recall either the PCs or the CDs. Could we produce new CDs that are "un-rippable"? This is unlikely if you want them to work in the more than 200 million CD players that already are on the market."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt. "

The New York Times What Do You Mean, 'It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "

"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''

"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.' "

redux [04.21.00]
The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

The Freedom Forum Ananova's virtual-newscast debut: We'll wait for 2.0
"The British creators of Ananova, the world’s first virtual newscaster, say she will revolutionize the way all of us get our news."

"Cybercaster Ananova’s first words, on April 19, were interesting enough: “Hello, world. Here is the news — and this time it’s personal.”"

"I found that I didn’t object to the idea of you, [Ananova], — the idea of a computer reading me the news — probably in the same way that people did not object a generation ago to Reuters' bringing them stock quotes on a special desktop machine. That machine was clunky, too. But it got better. Much better. And so, I believe, will you."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

USA Today Denver may track workers by satellite
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.

After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."

"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."

redux [04.11.00]
Salon Japanese firm developing tool to track stray grannies
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"

Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""

"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."

Applied Digital Solutions What is Digital Angel?
"The Digital Angel™ transceiver can be implanted just under the skin or hidden inconspicuously on or within valuable personal belongings and priceless works of art. When implanted within the human body, the transceiver is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles. It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility."

Zero Knowledge IBM and ZeroKnowledge Partner
"IBM and Zero-Knowledge Systems today announced an agreement to provide the hardware platform for Zero-Knowledge's cryptographically assured global privacy infrastructure, the Freedom® Network."

The network routes encrypted data through an untraceable path in real-time, assuring privacy for a variety of applications, including online consumer privacy protection."

redux [04.30.00]
Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference 2000 Audio Transcripts: Neal Stephenson Dinner Speach

The Sunday Times MI5 builds new centre to read e-mails on the net
"MI5 is building a new £25m e-mail surveillance centre that will have the power to monitor all e-mails and internet messages sent and received in Britain. The government is to require internet service providers, such as Freeserve and AOL, to have "hardwire" links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced across the internet.

The security service and the police will still need Home Office permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they can apply for general warrants that would enable them to intercept communications for a company or an organisation.

The new computer centre, codenamed GTAC - government technical assistance centre - which will be up and running by the end of the year inside MI5's London headquarters, has provoked concern among civil liberties groups. "With this facility, the government can track every website that a person visits, without a warrant, giving rise to a culture of suspicion by association," said Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research."

The New York Times 4 Giants Set to Embrace Electronic Publishing
[requires 'free' registration]
"In signs of an intensifying digital rush in the American book industry, three trade publishing giants and Microsoft are poised to plunge deeper into the emerging electronic literary market."

""The large conglomerates realize now that they better learn by doing rather than to continue to observe not one, not 5, not 50, but hundreds of startup.coms that are entering this market," said Robert E. Baensch, a former publishing executive and director of New York University's Center for Publishing, who predicts that a mass market for electronic books is two to three years away.

But until then, the mainstream publishers that dominate the business appear unwilling to wait -- even if it is not clear yet how protected the electronic titles are from hackers. It took about two days before Mr. King's novella was successfully hacked and posted online."

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."

redux [04.07.00]
O'Reilly Network Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It
"I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public.

And the reason that they dislike it [interactivity] so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. These companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.

You really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. It reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

ZDNet Linux leaders: Beware of Napster
"Leaders of the "open source" software movement have a message that some of their followers may not want to hear: Beware of Napster."

""Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter. "Of course you should be able to sue over copyrights. The one good lawsuit in the whole Napster case is the one by Metallica: a suit by the actual authors. While it's probably motivated mostly by money, I can still at least hope that there is a strong feeling of morals there, too."

Larry Wall, developer of the Perl language, has a similar perspective. "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily," he says. "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

The New York Times Report Proposes Update of Copyright Act
[requires 'free' registration]
"The law meant to protect intellectual property on the Internet needs to be updated, a Democratic research center says in a report to be released on Monday. The report proposes outlawing technologies like the controversial Napster software that enables Internet users to trade music files with little regard to copyrights. "

Washington Post e-power to the people
"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

The New York Times Oil Industry Balks at Priceline Gasoline Offer
[requires 'free' registration]
"Drivers in the U.S. may be looking forward to some relief from this year's higher gasoline prices by clicking onto Priceline.com 's new "name-your-own-price" program, but the lack of interest from oil companies may make its launch this summer bumpy. "

"But a number of oil companies say the idea, while an obvious boon for drivers, doesn't adequately benefit the oil industry.

"Unlike airline seats or hotel rooms which represent a loss when they aren't used, gasoline doesn't disappear when its not bought," said one oil company spokesman.

"We don't have to bargain away gasoline. The benefit would be brand loyalty, but there are a lot of effective ways to build that.""

redux [02.25.00]
Priceline Name Your Own Price For Gasoline On The Internet, Then Get Your Price At A Local Gas Station
"Starting May 20th, Priceline WebHouse Club, a licensed affiliate of priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN), will launch a new service that makes it possible for drivers to simply ignore the price at the pump. Instead, they can go to priceline.com on the Internet and name their own price for up to 50 gallons of gas a month. "

""This is the perfect time for consumers to do something about the high cost of gas. It's the battle of the titans -- the global Internet vs. global gas prices. OPEC was a force to increase the cost of gas. Now, the Internet is the new counter-force to lower it.""

PC World My Agent Will Call Your Agent
""This world that we are moving into of agent-mediated commerce is going to fundamentally change interactions between buyers and sellers," says Jeff Kephart, manager of the Agents and Emergent Phenomena Group at [IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center]. "I don't think it's more than a couple of years off.""

Salon DEN, Boo: R.I.P.
"This week Boo.com, the high-profile, British-based purveyor of luxury sporting goods, and DEN, the high-profile, Hollywood-based purveyor of Net-based entertainment, both crashed and burned."

When a pair of prominent Net companies flame out within days of each other, you can just smell the trend stories cooking in the media oven: Dot-Com Death Rattle! E-Extinction! Net Nada!

But just the slightest attention to these companies' sites and products offers a different view. The Net business may or may not be in trouble, but the failures of these companies don't offer much of a weather vane for this industry. Their problems stem not from general market conditions but from some very specific mistakes that more successful Web sites learned to avoid years ago."

Infoworld The best loyalty program for your Web site may be better customer service
"Honestly, how much distinguishes Amazon from its competitors? So why is Amazon a market leader? Certainly, coming to the game early counts for something. But that alone isn't the answer.

No, Amazon is Amazon because it provides things such as customer service just a little bit better than its competitors. Not always great, just a little bit better. And it's the little differences that pay off big-time with customers. "

News.com Dot-coms learn a lesson from Boo.com
"This first major dot-com collapse came the day after U.K. electronic auction company QXL and Germany's Ricardo agreed to a merger valued initially at $937 million.

These two events are consistent with Gartner's prediction last November that there would be dot-com failures and dot-com mergers in 2000. Gartner's hype cycle indicates that "e" hype would diminish by the first quarter, primarily due to deficient business strategies, poor implementations and the use of the wrong technology.

Unfortunately, Boo.com failed in all respects--most noticeably in its almost unusable, avatar-based system that demanded high-speed access. When coupled with poor business management and an uncontrolled cost base, the result was inevitable. "

Online Journalism Review The Wire That Wouldn't Die
"Today, the pathetic shell of UPI announced Helen Thomas' resignation."

"Other than the heartbreak of watching UPI repeatedly rolled into the morgue, this latest (and, I hope, final) death is a horrifying lesson on how to ruin a news operation in the New Era."

"I know most reporters think they could run a news operation better than management, but in the case of UPI it's actually true. With the mid-1999 staff, a $20 Internet account and one sales rep -- and none of the waterhead managers who shuffled around the H Street headquarters without a single clue -- the wire could have kept and expanded its portal accounts, offered lowball prices to small publishers, and most importantly, offer an alternative to the Associated Press, which has become the Tass of America.

During the dot-com fervor of last year, a vaguely promising UPI...could have done an IPO and been flush with cash and talent. And a whole generation of otherwise-bland little content providers would have had the chance to work for a legendary news wire. It is often said that a month at UPI provided more education than years of silly journalism school.

No longer. The shabby remains of United Press are now in the hands of the Moonies, and nobody who claims to be a journalist will come anywhere near it."

redux [04.20.00]
Editor and Publisher Online Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'
"An online news site is more akin to a wire service than a printed publication, because it can (and should) publish news on around-the-clock basis. While the notion of "editions" still prevails at many news sites, the trend is more toward a constant publishing cycle, where news is published whenever it breaks.

Newspaper Web sites are in a period of transition, as more and more of them move into publishing news throughout the day instead of posting stories at specified times. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule."

The Round Table Group Young Adults Most Often Get Info From Net - Study
"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television."

Nando Times AOL offers free service to schools
"America Online Inc. will offer a free service to schools that company officials say will make it easier for students and teachers to use the Internet in the classroom.

Critics said the venture could be a cash cow in the future because it will help build brand loyalty and perhaps create a generation of future AOL customers.

AOL@School, being launched Wednesday, will have separate portals for elementary, middle and high school students that will help pupils reach the best educational Web sites, officials said.

Students will see no ads - other than the AOL logo - will not be able to purchase goods online and will be blocked from accessing pornography or other offensive material, officials said. Students will be able to send e-mail and instant messages to encourage group online activities or to establish pen pals in faraway schools."

redux [02.23.00]
Wired News AOL Ups German Access Ante
"AOL Europe announced Tuesday that it plans to give all German primary and secondary schools and 900,000 German schoolteachers free access to the Internet."

"It can never be too early to start communicating the necessary skills," [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder said."

Netfuture On Constructivism in Education
"..."student-centered, active, and experiential" is all too often taken to mean that we can just turn students over to their own devices and somehow they will learn everything that needs learning. In particular, the constructivist focus on the child is assumed to imply a de-emphasis of the teacher's role, as if the two stood in opposition.

But this is to miss the heart of the matter, which is that learning grows out of relationship. If you really understand that learning is not primarily a matter of content shoveled into a container, then you must also recognize that what the student learns most decisively is a set of human gestures, a strengthening of certain inner movements, a way of grasping (and being grasped by) the world.

In other words, education is not primarily a matter of learning subjects. What the student learns is the teacher. If you can recall a teacher who changed your life in a memorable way, what you remember will almost certainly not be a particular body of information he passed along; it will, rather, be the kind of person he was. You learned a way of standing in the world. The reason we need to approach ever new subjects is that we need to learn what it means to be a human being facing ever new aspects of the world."

Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

Feed Daily
"PUT YOURSELF in Microsoft's place. After battling the DOJ lawsuit and the ILOVEYOU virus, and beating down sixteen-year-olds for setting up Web sites with names like www.windowslover.com, the company's public image has deteriorated to the point that even a TV ad blitz featuring a sweater-clad Bill Gates can't overcome rising distrust. What would you do? Sic lawyers on a popular, grass-roots Web site? Probably not, but that's the latest gambit from Redmond. The conflict that is brewing between Microsoft and the "News for Nerds" site Slashdot is more than just another David-and-Goliath story -- the resolution could altogether delete the idea of on-line anonymity."

"Last week, administrators at AndoverNet, the owners of Slashdot, received a lawyerly letter from a J. K. Weston of Microsoft, demanding that Slashdot remove or censor some of the thousands of daily, anonymous posts to the site, posts that contained "unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work." The letter invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DCMA) and stated that as an ISP, Slashdot was responsible for the content on their servers and potentially liable for damages, even if the text was placed there by shadowy Mister Nobodies."

The New York Times Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live
[requires 'free' registration]
""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

WebReview The Value of Gnutella and Freenet
"Notice how much bad press has fallen recently on the networking technologies Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster? I think some of the public alarm over genetic crop modification has cross-pollenated over to software. Suffering from legitimate fears over far-reaching technologies like genetic modification, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and nuclear waste disposal, the press and the public are ready to listen to anything bad said about anything new—even a clean, open, noninvasive technology like distributed computing.

If you check my biography, you will see that I make my living selling content. I do not extend knee-jerk sympathy to systems publicized as ways to circumvent copyright enforcement. But investigating Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that they're intriguing innovations in the best tradition of the Internet pioneers. While it's important to talk about their potential for the distribution of illegal content, we have to look at their larger goals and the promise they offer."

The Wall Street Journal Despite Lawsuit, Napster Offers A Model for Music Distribution
"...the record companies just don't get it. Like most entrenched interests facing a revolutionary business innovation, they are reacting to it purely as a threat, not as an opportunity. Even the few music companies that plan this year to put some name-brand music online are thinking of charging prohibitive amounts, like $2.50 a song, and building in all sorts of restrictions on usage.

Amazon.com, the biggest Web CD retailer, and RealNetworks, the biggest digital audio company, have told me in recent days that they stand ready to help the industry construct and manage an official version of Napster. Both are in Seattle. If I were a music executive, I'd be on the next plane there."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt. "

Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
"The RIAA mentality is one and the same as that of the Russians of yesteryear: a desire to stop the flow of information through the network. The answer to the Russians is one and the same as the answer to the RIAA: a completely distributed system. If every client on the network was connected to a handful of other clients, each of which in turn connected to others like some apocalyptically enormous online incarnation of Amway, then every person could have some connection to every other person through a chain of mutual acquaintances. It's Six Degrees of Freedom."

"This is a "virtual Internet" of sorts in which links are not physical (a wire from you to me) but logical (I know you). Data flows through this "web of friendship" in such a way that it looks like you are only talking with your friends, when really you are talking to your friends' friends, and so forth."

ZDNet Think Napster -- only for movies
"If you think online music-sharing software like Napster and MP3 are causing a fuss, wait about six months. The World War of digital rights is welling up on the Internet. There's a new, easy way for pirates to trade illegally copied movies -- and black market film trading is flourishing."

News.Com Researchers find Web divided into 4 regions
"A study by researchers from Compaq Computer, Web portal AltaVista and IBM concluded that the Web has distinct regions, including some that are inaccessible to one another. The layout, researchers said, resembles a bow tie with four sections: a "strongly connected core," "origination" pages, "termination" pages and "disconnected" pages.

Within the core, the knot of the bow tie, Web surfers can travel smoothly between sites through hyperlinks. One side of the bow contains origination pages that allow surfers to reach the central knot. The other side of consists of termination pages that can be accessed from the core but are not linked back to it.

The final region consists of disconnected pages, which are cut off from the core but are connected to other areas peripherally.

"Webmasters and people doing e-commerce need to understand how to position their sites," said Andrei Broder, vice president of research for AltaVista. "If you want to have more international traffic, you need to be in a better connectivity position. It's always better to be in the center of the town than far out.""

IBM Almaden Research Center Graph structure in the web
"The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale. "

"In a sense the web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure in a microscopic scale looks very regular like a biological cell, but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structure (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure. Therefore, while it might be tempting to draw conclusions about the structure of the web graph from a local picture of it, such conclusions may be misleading."

Mappa.Mundi A Shared Reality
" In the beginning, maps were fiction. We perceived our world as myths defined by belief not geography. Maps of these imagined worlds came in many shapes and sizes, but they all mixed the unreal with snippets of the real world. The process of mapping the real world was one of going from geographies of ideas to maps of real geography. On the Internet, we will pursue a reverse path: maps of the Internet will progress from our current maps of network topologies to maps of virtual worlds that we build, maps of ideas and thoughts."

"Maps help us navigate. On the Internet, finding things has become the big challenge. Death by a thousand clicks is the bane of any net user. The reason? We are attempting to shoe-horn the metaphor of maps–tools for navigating complex spaces–into existing metaphors, such as the infinite book that is the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a network of many metaphors. The core infrastructure supports many protocols, and each protocol adopts a metaphor. Electronic mail uses analogies taken from a postal service. Streaming media started with a radio metaphor before evolving into a unique medium. The World Wide Web is also a metaphor–pages in an infinite book.

What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context.

Metaphors all have limits, and it is important to understand that maps of the Internet, and of virtual worlds built on the Internet, will look and act very different from from the folded static bitmaps we use to navigate the real world"

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

redux [04.21.00]
John M. Lawler Metaphors We Compute By
"I'm going to talk today about metaphors. Everybody here has heard and used the word metaphor plenty in the course of your educational experience (and the amount of educational experience in this room is pretty staggering, so that makes lots of uses of the word). To quote a famous sage, "It's a common word, something you use everyday." It generally gets stored in memory with all the other stuff you learn in literature classes, like simile, plot, characters, rhyme, meter, and so on. And then it gets forgotten, or at least not looked at often, until and unless you do something literary. I'm here today to suggest that in fact there is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than all this would imply."

The Register The world may well be a great big onion, but the Internet is a big bow tie
"Those wacky funsters at AltaVista, Compaq and IBM reckon that the Web is like a bow tie.

Attempting to explain the mysteries of life, the universe and everything, researchers discovered that the Web is Not as Connected as Previously Thought – in fact almost a quarter of web pages can't be accessed by links from other pages."

The New York Times Magazine Does the Smell of Coffee Brewing Remind You of Your Mother?
[requires 'free' registration]
""There is a little window of time when you are young in which to imprint the idea of 'coffee,"' Rapaille said, "and so coffee in Italy is not the same as coffee in Germany." He laughed quietly to himself; this line gets big yuks in Milan. "And very different in America." In Europe, the aroma of coffee can be smelled on nearly every block; in America, the aroma of coffee is almost uniformly experienced indoors.

"It occurs usually around age 2 in America, when your mother is cooking breakfast," Rapaille said. "Your mother loves you. She is going to feed you. You are happy," Rapaille said. "This is the American code for coffee's aroma: 'home."' So when you smell coffee, Rapaille said, your mind summons up childhood sensations of cozy domesticity."

"I told the people at Procter & Gamble, 'Don't care about the taste,"' Rapaille said. "You have to own the aroma. The commercial we designed has a young man in an army uniform arriving home in the early morning. He goes directly to the kitchen and kkssshtt, opens the package. As the aroma goes upstairs, we see the mother open her eyes, smile and what does she say? She says, 'He's home!"'

Rapaille sipped his fresh-brewed coffee.

"Folger's has been using that study for more than 10 years, and it's still working," he said. "So that is what I do. I break the code.""

Digiscents, Inc DIGISCENTS, INC., AND CLONTECH LABORATORIES, INC. DISCOVER NOVEL HUMAN OLFACTORY GENES
"The companies have isolated, cloned and sequenced 126 human olfactory receptor genes. This latest discovery combined with publicly available olfactory research gives DigiScents access to close to half of the estimated 1000 genes that code for human olfactory receptors. Olfactory receptors are expressed in neurons of the olfactory epithelium and allow humans to detect and distinguish between smells ranging from flowers to pizza and chocolate to burning wood.

"This milestone represents a significant development in aromagenomics," states DigiScents' CEO, Joel Bellenson, referring to the application of molecular biology to the field of olfaction. "DigiScents is combining biotechnology, informatics, and sensory research to create a digital index that will revolutionize the world of smell.""

NPR Web-site, Web-sound, Web-smell?
"Host Bob Edwards talks with Eli Fisch, co-founder of Sense-It Technologies, an Israeli company that's developing a device that would allow electronic devices to re-create scents. Fisch believes the new technology will become an indispensable sales tool for e-commerce firms selling products such as perfume, lotions and flowers."

USA Today Survey says: Net reduces isolation
"Far from encouraging social isolation, the Internet enhances communications with friends and families, according to a study released Wednesday.."

"Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the Pew findings help bring balance to the debate on the Internet's social impact. He said the new study confirms his own research that Americans are learning to treat the Internet as a communications tool as fundamental as the telephone.

Fifty-five percent of Internet users say e-mail has improved communications with family and 66% believe contact with friends has increased because of e-mail. Among women, 60% reported better contact with family and 71% with friends. "

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

redux [02.21.00]
Alertbox Does the Internet Make Us Lonely?
"In assessing the impact of the Internet, the question is not whether it replaces (fully or partly) some other forms of communication and social contact. Because the Internet adds its own new forms of communication and social contact. For example, people may well attend fewer meetings and events outside the house and yet feel connected to a community of others who "meet" on a much more regular basis online.

The question is whether the new lifestyle is enjoyable and whether it nourishes humans or causes them damage. There is certainly a risk that some people get overly caught up in chat rooms and role playing, but a different kind of study is needed to assess this problem."

Wired News Study: Humans Do Many Things
"An obscure university study, but a study nonetheless, reveals that Americans who have dogs spend the time with their dogs instead of said time watching TV, visiting with friends, sleeping, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and doing nothing.

They walk their dogs, play with them, train them, speak gibberish to them, comparison-shop for dog food, and read up on them to the point that it detracts from actually interacting with other human beings, obscure researchers have concluded."

The Standard A Brand Called Stanford
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."

"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."

""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."

Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

NPR Stanford's Own Internet Company
"NPR's Chris Arnold reports that today Stanford University in California is announcing the launch of its own internet company, e-skolar."

New York Times Rivals on Offensive as They Near End of Genome Race
[requires 'free' registration]
"The 10-year project to decode the human genome is entering its end game, but the high goal of unlocking the secrets of human heredity is ending in a fractious exchange of claims and countercharges.

Within a few weeks, both contestants in the genome race plan to declare victory, but in different terms, each already judged imperfect by the rival team.

At stake is academic glory for the genome researchers, an eventual gold mine for the companies that are first to develop useful drugs from the genomic information, and a landmark in scientific history as the foundation for human self-knowledge is put in place."

The Third Culture Design For A Life A Talk With Patrick Bateson
"Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is something that is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the book of life, including an understanding of all human behavior.

Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex.

What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life."

The Nation The Details of Life
" "Peter's dog ate Jefferson's cat," says Mother Martha in a letter I received from the South Bronx.

Mother Martha is the priest of St. Ann's Church in the Mott Haven neighborhood, still the poorest section of the Bronx and, as physicians tell me, one of the most unhealthy places for a child to grow up in this or any other country of the Western world, with pediatric asthma rates and HIV infection rates for females in their older teenage years believed to be the highest in the nation.

Why does this story about Jefferson set off some warning signals for me as a writer? Perhaps simply because I know the fairly hard-nosed attitudes that govern social policy in urban neighborhoods today and can anticipate that this may be perceived as a preposterous distraction from the bottom-line concerns with "discipline" and "rigor" and "job preparation" and "high standards" and what is now known as "high-stakes testing" and the rest of the severe agenda that has recently been put in place for inner-city kids. Burials for cats somehow don't fit into this picture.

Then, too, in the business-minded ethos of our age, any money we may spend on children of poor people must be proven to be economically utilitarian and justifiable in cost-effective terms. But much of what goes on around St. Ann's cannot be justified in terms like these. You could not prove to anyone in Washington that Mother Martha's talk with Jefferson about the possibilities of an afterlife for animals will have "a positive effect" upon his reading scores or make him more employable a decade later."

In These Times ICANN: Secret Government of the Internet?
"Depending on whose description you read, ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - is either an innocuous nonprofit with a narrow technical mandate or the first step in corralling the Internet for commercial and other purposes.

ICANN is a nonprofit corporation that was chartered by the U.S. Commerce Department to oversee a select set of Internet technical management functions previously managed by the federal government.

That all sounds fairly bureaucratic and benign, but there's more - and it has watchdogs like the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and the Markle Foundation really worked up. To understand their suspicion, it's necessary to know a bit about what's called the "root server," and the critical role ICANN plays in overseeing it. "

Feed Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man
""You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you’re not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization."

redux [02.06.00]
The New York Review of Books The Panic of Influence
"This story is the most brilliant dissection I have seen of what Christopher Lasch once called "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness." And there is probably no writer whose work makes a stronger case, twenty years after Lasch wrote the book on it, that we still inhabit a culture of narcissism. Does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both."

San Francisco Bay Guardian Silicon Hell
"According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most recent figures, in 1997 the circuit and chip industries – which provide the brain and nervous system of every computer – released, recycled, or dumped 117,545,550 pounds of hazardous chemicals nationwide.

And those 117.5 million pounds are just the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Department of Commerce reports 2,500 chip, circuit, and monitor plants in operation in the United States that year; only 406 reported their toxic output to the EPA.

Behind the well-paid geeks in cubicles and the sharp-dressed entrepreneurs is an industry that consumes as many resources, uses as many lethal chemicals, and generates as much toxic waste as some of the worst culprits of the pre-Internet age. And both industry workers and the people who live near the plants are feeling the effects: the toxins damage aquatic life in the bay, poison drinking water, and, increasing evidence suggests, kill high-tech industry workers.

While the federal government, local agencies, and hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents and company workers are dealing with the computer industry's mess here in America, the same (or worse) problems are spreading worldwide. As jobs on the digital assembly line become ubiquitous in the developing world and the entire globe gets wired, the same companies that despoiled the valley are busy opening plants in such countries as Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Taiwan, and India – countries not renowned for strong labor or environmental laws."

Wired Valley of the Uninsured
"A grassroots organization in Silicon Valley found that 30 percent of people surveyed in one of the wealthiest places in the country do not have health insurance.

And it's not only blue-collar families who lack health insurance. The uninsured include low-skilled laborers as well as workers hired on a contract basis at high-tech companies, said Matt Hammer, executive director of PACT.

Hammer said it's high time for the state to step in to provide some security for those being left in the dust of the dramatic changes that Silicon Valley businesses are kicking up.

"My sense is that we all as a society and community need to participate in providing this basic human need to people," he said. "

The New York Times Students Have Few Qualms About Online Music Piracy
[requires 'free' registration]
"Despite record industry efforts to curb the spread of copyrighted music on the Internet, college students are trading so many songs encoded in the popular MP3 audio format that university networks are straining under the traffic. By embracing digital music, the generation that grew up with the Internet is helping to define the way music and other content will be distributed online. And free distribution of copyrighted music, especially over broadband, will likely become more widespread as it becomes more convenient."

""Whenever I'm listening to music, I'm using my MP3 player," said Aaron Silverman, a Yale sophomore. "Even at parties, people hook up computers to big speakers. It's unfair to have this music out there, yet at the same time it's very convenient. It's a little hypocritical, I have to admit. It's a moral dilemma every time I download a song.""

Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt. "

News.com Metallica fingers 335,435 Napster users
"The heavy metal band, which is suing music-swapping company Napster for what the musicians say are massive copyright violations, says it has identified more than 335,000 individuals who were allegedly sharing the band's songs online in violation of copyright laws."

"Attorneys for Metallica say they hired NetPD, an online consulting firm, to monitor the Napster service this past weekend. The firm came up with more than 335,000 individual users who had made the band's content available online, the lawyers said."

News.com Rapper Chuck D throws weight behind Napster
"Rapper Chuck D, who has long been one of the industry's most outspoken proponents of MP3 music, said today that he is hosting a song-writing contest on his Rapstation.com Web site, aimed at highlighting how Napster can help musicians. "We want to draw attention to the positive aspects that Napster has to offer artists," Chuck D said in a statement. "They need to realize that they can benefit infinitely from what it has to offer.""

First Monday The COMsumer Manifesto: Empowering Communities of Consumers through the Internet
"The Internet is changing business models and empowering consumers to create new communities that combine the power to aggregate rich sources of individually personalized data in real-time activities. Large-scale data aggregators are emerging to navigate and mediate info markets. While information records are proliferating, new standards for content capture and management are appearing. Most companies continue to hope they will control their customers' information assets. However, what if this is not true or becomes impossible? What if consumers decide to band together and control their own personal information? Are you ready to freely give your customers their data records? Are you prepared to live up to the COMsumer Manifesto?

This article offers a disruptive antidote to the hierarchical, closed, supply-system, explicit, knowledge-driven, "We Know What You Want" data mine world where many customers feel powerless. This is a world well beyond 1999's "Net Worth" and 2000's "The Cluetrain Manifesto". Infomediaries are not just trustworthy agents which sit between the vendor and the customer, and markets are not just conversations. In this new world, communities sense needs, desires, and wishes for the future and create new data markets - to which organizations must respond or die! We are closing in on the "tipping point" where COMsumers take complete control of their destiny by collectively owning their personal information assets."

redux [04.12.00]
The Standard The Age of Access
"Think of waking up one day only to find that every aspect of your existence has become a purchased affair, that life itself has become the ultimate shopping experience.

The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of material goods and places, is ending with the commodification of human time and duration. E-commerce and networked ways of doing business are giving rise to the "Age of Access," a new economic era as different from industrial capitalism as the latter was from the merchantilist era that preceded it."

The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

The Sunday Times MI5 builds new centre to read e-mails on the net
"MI5 is building a new £25m e-mail surveillance centre that will have the power to monitor all e-mails and internet messages sent and received in Britain. The government is to require internet service providers, such as Freeserve and AOL, to have "hardwire" links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced across the internet.

The security service and the police will still need Home Office permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they can apply for general warrants that would enable them to intercept communications for a company or an organisation.

The new computer centre, codenamed GTAC - government technical assistance centre - which will be up and running by the end of the year inside MI5's London headquarters, has provoked concern among civil liberties groups. "With this facility, the government can track every website that a person visits, without a warrant, giving rise to a culture of suspicion by association," said Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research."

Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Feed Daily
"PRIVACY'S a funny thing. The word itself never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in the Declaration of Independence, and still most Americans believe that, like their other freedoms, the right to privacy is inalienable. And there's something to that belief. Judge Brandeis made the first attempt to codify personal privacy rights in 1890, when he famously wrote that people have "the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone," and juries, journalists, private citizens, and public figures have been wrangling over that notion of privacy the right to be let alone ever since. With Wednesday's release of a videotape documenting the horrors at Columbine High School, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department has, probably unwittingly, reinvigorated this long-running debate."