Category: Misc

8:30 a.m. snorkel trip with Amy on a glass-bottom boat named “Children’s Bread” with pilot shorty. Three miles out to coral reef. Angel fish, long skinny trumpet fish, sargent majors. Brain coral, fan coral, every kind of coral. Water like a bathtub. Amy was a champ, not afraid at all. Stunning in every way except that all the recent storms have left water a bit murkier than usual (which means “only” 40 feet rather than 150).
Continue reading “Children’s Bread”

Early swim, breakfast at Seline’s: ackee and salt fish, calaloo (local leafy green, similar to spinach), dumplings, fried plantain, banana pancakes.

Walk to the west end of town to get cash. Enter “Jamaica time” — Jamaican banks are the slowest – four people in line could means one-hour wait. Snafu – my cards are refused. Why? Must go to “call center” to reach U.S. fraud dept. ($8 phone call) which reports that my cards are fine. Return to bank, wait again, cards go through fine. Took 90 mins to get money. We’d find this kind of thing all over Jamaica – seemingly simple things made frustratingly complex by polite but slow or confused employees. “Yeah mon, no problem.” Everything’s cool. No one has high blood pressure, but it’s tough for Americans to adjust, not have expectations that things will go as planned.
Continue reading “Ants Inna Ya Milk”

Well, not quite, but we’re heading for Jamaica, mon! Two families, two babies, small volcanoes, big waterfalls, expansive coral reefs, endless beaches. Posting will be light for a bit.

Reminder: Tonight we’ll be webcasting Living with the Genie live from Pimental Hall, featuring Ray Kurzweil via videoconference (original plans were to use some sort of state-of-the-art edge tech to bring Kurzweil in as a holographic projection, but doing so proved too expensive). Among other accomplishments, Kurzweil is the author of one of my favorite books, The Age of Spiritual Machines. The “live” panelists – Denise Caruso, Howard Rheingold, Richard Rhodes, and Mark Schapiro are all respected authors and thinkers on the impact and implications of runaway technology.

Update: Kurzweil is shockingly medieval in his take on current copyright issues and his attitude towards cancer treatment and prevention reeks of “blame the victim.” He views regulation in biological research as more of a threat than a necessary safeguard. He was kind of a broken record on several points. Overall, I think some people watched a hero being torn down, the lesser-known panelists eclipsing Kurzweil’s insights. Of course he was at a disadvantage by the fact that he was the only panelist in via teleconference. I don’t mean to tear him down – he had a lot of fascinating things to say; only that some of his viewpoints were… cold and his delivery was kind of redundant.

Dean Schell and the J-School profs are driving a mad events schedule lately, and I’m part of the frenzy, webcasting a ton of good ones in the coming week. Install QuickTime 6 (because we’re using the 3ivx codec now) and tune in. I try to get archives online 24-48 hours after the live cast; yesterday’s Changing World Views of the U.S. is already up. Here are a few of the events I expect to be especially worth checking out:

April 27: Biotech & Nanotech – Remaking Nature in the Image of Technology

April 29: Living With The Genie — On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, with Ray Kurzweil (by videoconference) and others.

April 30: Revisiting Virtual Communities — The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics. With Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and others.

April 30: Disrupting the News Industry – Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. With Dan Gillmor of The San Jose Mercury News, and others.

April 30 and 31: China’s Digital Future — Advancing The Understanding of China’s Information Revolution. With Lawrence Lessig, John Gage, and others.

Webcasting Carolyn Raffensperger on Risk Analysis and the Environment right now. This is a first for us in several respects: First time webcasting via WiFi, first time switching from Sorenson3 to MPEG-4 (actually using 3ivx rather than Apple’s built-in MPEG-4 codec) and first time using a new function I built into the events database that lets staff change the event mode between five states with the click of a button: no webcast, webcast scheduled, webcast in progress, webcast complete come back tomorrow for archive, and archive now online. The state of the switch drops the right QuickTime object code into the page to handle the condition.

Wikis are not new, but I feel my fascination with them being kindled. The usual model of web publishing is that the webmaster locks everything down tight; a few people can publish while the rest of the universe gets read-only access. Wikis turn this assumption on its head, asking the absurd question, “What if we let the entire world add or edit pages in real time, without editorial intermediary? Instead of assuming people will vandalize everything not locked down, what if we assumed that people actually want to do cool things together?”

There are a lot of cool Wikis out there, but the most sterling example is WikiPedia — a collaborative encyclopedia being constructed second-by-second by volunteers from around the world — thousands of people adding to and correcting the analysis of others on every facet of human knowledge. More than a quarter million entries since 2001, and growing. What’s really inspiring is that the information it contains seems to be of such high quality. This makes sense – if someone writes on a topic that you understand better than the original or previous author, you can modify the entry right there on the spot.

Of course the WikiPedia is up-to-date in a way no printed encyclopedia could ever be — yesterday’s successful test flight of Boeing’s Mach 7 aircraft X-43 is already a part of the X-43 entry. Seeing collaborative potential manifest is always inspiring.

Installed PHPWiki last night on a side domain, starting to play with it. We’ll see what comes…