This Reuters article details the largest U.S. Internet service providers' efforts to have "broadband" defined conservatively, specifying speeds substantially below that of many other nations.

Needless to say, the ISPs pressing the FCC to apply the more conservative definition would benefit from not having to deliver greater bandwidth.  Some providers argued for a rate far below the U.S.'s already-low rate (ranked 19th worldwide).

Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia, will soon be imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. The new feature is called “flagged revisions”, which means an experienced, albeit volunteer, editor at Wikipedia must approve of any public changes before they can go live. Until a change is approved (flagged), the new content is invisible and visitors are redirected to the earlier version.

The "bike porn" cluster on Flickr and the first few photos in the cluster. There are people in the world who think bikes and their components are sexy, take photos of their bikes and components, and tag them "bike porn." Some people like to combine bikes with the more traditional meaning of porn but for the most part, "bike porn" photos are just pictures of bikes taken by bicycle enthusiasts. "___ porn" isn't limited to bikes, either.

In our first class, Professor Glushko mentioned Nick Carr's 2008 July/August article in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid? For the sake of brevity, Carr's argument was that, thanks to nearly ubiquitous connectivity through WiFi, mobile networks, and our devices, we no longer have to retain and recall information, we can just tap our physical or on-screen keyboards and call up whatever we need to know.

Article

The Kindle Swindle? - NYT (Feb 24, 2009)

Summary

The Authors Guild opposes the inclusion of the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2. The author argues that the $1 billion audio book market may suffer as a result.

Relevance to 202

For those who liked Borges reading, there's also "The Aleph". The Aleph is a point where you can see everything, without distortion. Check the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aleph_(short_story)).

In section, we were talking about some third-party apps that could manage heterogeneous information, but that there was the problem of users (well, we, really) being "too lazy" for the up-front effort of categorizing. Just got a PR pitch about an info organizing product that claims "no learning curve"; I haven't tried it, but I've met the developers and they generally do really good work (same people who make BBEdit): http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/. I'll try to find time to try the demo. But I am pretty lazy.

In section, I mentioned the Quantified Self project (movement?) that I was thinking about while reading "MyLifeBits" and wanted to pass along a couple of links. Here's a Wired story about it, and here's the Quantified Self blog (with this post as a kind of mission statement).

Article

Confusion with names could delay rescuers - Milford and West Walse Mercury, August 22, 2009

Summary

Where the heck is Witches Caludron?  It is Ceibwr Bay, of course.

A colleague at my last gig (Institute for the Future) had the opportunity to interview Gordon Bell for a research project we worked on last year ("Blended Reality") and I mentioned in section that I'd be happy to share the transcript (Word doc attached). The quality of the interview audio was less than stellar at times, so please excuse the frequency of [unintelligible]. We were talking to him specifically about the idea of digital immortality. It seems long but it's a fairly quick read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11naming.html?pagewanted=2&_r=...

It's 202 in the news!  Imagine that!

This article from the New York Times, discusses that while formal taxonomy seems to be dying, research shows that many of us have deep-rooted tendencies to name and categorize things.  For example:

No really, it is! Last year in 202 we kicked off the year with the "202 in the News" assignment as you all will. There was a 202 Blog that lived outside of the course website to support that assignment, but even after the assignment, the blog proliferated as we found more and more 202-related articles/stories and shared them with each other.  The blog became a living, breathing portrayal of 202 in the real world, helping many of us put the lecture material in context and connect even further with it (and each other!).