Chrome Web App demos – Engadget Galleries
I love a lot of what Google does. I’m a daily customer. But come on — between this and the new Google eBookstore we have a failure of creativity.
WikiLeaks arrest: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested – latimes.com
Reporting from London — Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, was arrested here Tuesday and ordered to remain in custody until a hearing next week on his possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women.
Frustrating day for Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman for many reasons, but mostly because Henry Chu worked the word “lickspittle” into the piece, and that’s enough to get your hackles up on its own.
Stephens has denounced Sweden as “one of the lickspittle states” that have kowtowed to American demands in the past, particularly by assisting in the controversial practice of “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects.
Facebook: We’re Not Kicking Wikileaks Off Our Site
Facebook’s response, from Andrew Noyes, the company’s D.C. based Manager of Public Policy Communications: “The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.”
Fascinating.
Dwight Silverman on “Consumer Reports: AT&T is the worst carrier”
These results have got to sting for AT&T, which has spent billions of dollars in the last few years beefing up its network. As far as Consumer Reports’ readers go, they’re apparently seeing the company’s network get worse, not better.
Yesh. That’s… ummm… telling? Yes, yes I think “telling” is the word I’m looking for here. And in response, from AT&T:
We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent – the equivalent of just one call in a thousand – of the industry leader.
Translation:
“Yes. Yes we are scared shitless about Verizon getting the damned iPhone.”
[sloshes tumbler of Courvoisier clumsily, stumbles over ottoman, lodges foot in open mouth of bearskin rug]
“See? We can be honest. We can cryyyy. What do you think of us now, bitches?”
In terms of handsets, Samsung’s Galaxy S series cleaned up… behind iPhone, that is, which Consumer Reports still refuses to recommend.
Columbia University Walks Back Anti-WikiLeaks Advice
In an email to students last week, SIPA’s Office of Career Services warned students that tweeting or posting about WikiLeaks on Facebook could endanger their job prospects with the federal government, according to an alumnus working at the U.S. State Department.
Generally, probably a good idea to vet phonecalls from an alum before promoting their message to the general alumni body. Just saying. But the response from Dean Coatsworth was good:
December 6, 2010
Dear SIPA Community,
Last Tuesday, SIPA’s Office of Career Services received a call from a former student currently employed by the U.S. Department of State who pointed out that the U.S. government documents released during the past few months through WikiLeaks are still considered classified. The caller suggested that students who will be applying for federal jobs that require background checks avoid posting links to these documents or making comments about them on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.
OCS emailed this cautionary suggestion to students, as it has done many times with other information that could be helpful in seeking employment after graduation. We know that many students today share a great deal about their lives online and that employers may use that information when evaluating their candidacy. Subsequent news stories have indicated that the Department of State has issued guidelines for its own employees, but has not issued any guidelines for prospective employees.
Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.
Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately.
Sincerely,
John H. Coatsworth
Dean
So, the response is fine. That a place like SIPA would instinctively send out a post telling students to watch what they post online implying potential government reprisals in the hiring process is tantamount to implying government reprisals elsewhere as well. It’s about as dangerous a precedent a university could set and is a terrific and leading indicator for public understanding of these complex issues.
“That seems really dark…”
“No, no, no… it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me, bro.”
You can discover and buy new ebooks from the Google eBookstore or get them from one of our independent bookseller partners: Powell’s, Alibris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them.
Looks big. I’m not crazy about the online reading experience in the browser — it’s very Google, but as soon as I start bitching about that I realize that this is not something I can do with iBookstore, and is pretty clumsy with the Kindle reader on my laptop, too. Selection is strong, and the web reader does actually support ragged-right, even if the default font (Georgia) is a bit grating. Weirdly, I’m not sure I care about that on the laptop — I can’t yet envision reading a book on it. Looks like, for most titles, you can download PDF or ePub versions for offline reading so Stanza is back in the game. So far the iOS app isn’t available for me but it’ll be interesting to see how they handle typography.
Bubbloy on Twitter censorship of #Wikileaks
It might well be that #Wikileaks is failing to trend simply because of the algorithm failing to pick it up for whatever reason. However, I must say, that would imply that Twitter has written perhaps one of the most abysmal Trend Identification algorithms it could have possibly written. If the goal of the algorithm was to pick up events of importance, popularity or any other meaningful social metric, Twitter would have failed miserably in this aim, and would truly start looking into developing a new one.
He’s got some interesting data with insights from Student Activist and Twitter. I get that Twitter is all about organic promotion and whatnot, but that #Wikileaks is not trending seems off to me. At some point, We The People need issues like this — particularly if they’re as wildly popular as the graphs seem to indicate in this case — to be “promoted” for broader discussion in the interests of the public good. There’s actually a role for Twitter in this discussion and an algorithm that is ignorant of such a capital-I-Important issue is failing the public good on that count.
But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.
This is a pretty clear case for Amazon, and I buy it, in part. But I have a hard time believing that Amazon AWS, which does not pre-screen customers, just happened to start policing Wikileaks without just a hint of political prodding at work.
How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks | TPMMuckraker
Staffers then, according to the spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, called Amazon to ask about it, and left questions with a press secretary including, “Are there plans to take the site down?”
Amazon called them back this morning to say they had kicked Wikileaks off, Phillips said. Amazon said the site had violated unspecified terms of use.
This is worth reading. As, I’d wager, would be the “unspecified terms of use” which Wikileaks allegedly violated. No one individual in Congress should have the pull to sway a private corporation, but that it was Lieberman really irks me.
Project Magazine | iPad Magazine
Project, alongside other launches, is both a bold new chapter in media, and a blind pitch into a potentially humiliating void. Whether it changes the fortunes of the written word remains to be seen; built into any new launch these days is the largely optimistic hope that people still exist who like reading stuff, and don’t mouth the words as they’re doing so.
The Virgin iPad-only mag appears to be the first of this new breed of publications, the only one that is iPad-only to start. It’s $2.99 per monthly edition, but the app description says content will be updated daily.
This model of pay-per-edition pubs is on its last legs as rumors swell of Apple’s pending launch of in-app subscriptions, paving the way for publishers to offer on-going digital subscriptions. Until this happens, these apps like Wired, The New Yorker, and now Project, are saddled with this clumsy distribution model that seriously hampers their presentation. Still, Project is a beautiful publication — you can tell they’ve put terrific development resources to it — if slightly sluggish.
While the application chrome doesn’t appear to come from Adobe’s publishing tools, navigation certainly does (swipe up and down to view a single article stack, left and right to navigate between articles seems to have become the new norm in digital mag publishing). It’ll be interesting to see if they rolled their own given the similarity to Adobe’s solution; same inability to copy and paste, same content reflow on axis, yet strangely even more finicky behavior. I’ve been tapping all over the damned place to get the menu to come up to take me home, but that only appears to work when you tap the bottom margin, or from every third-odd page. Until it does work. Then it will continue working on every page, until it stops. And, even though Project is strictly digital, each article is adorned with printer’s cut marks, which are weirdly out of place as a design choice if the intent is to push the medium forward. The right margin cut-mark is supposed to take me to Project forums, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me.
Nice use of video throughout, though in some articles it’s overdone. Images just start moving for no reason, which makes me think of the bloated file size these pubs are hitting.
Finally, there’s just a touch too much lame iPad navel-gazing. Vladimir Putin’s iPad app line-up, well, I can see where that would have been clever in an editorial meeting, but it’s not doing anything to amp up the intelligence of the platform. It’s all about the execution, I guess.
Oh, and one note on proofing: I typo all over the place. I even use “typo” as a verb. But I suppose I expect just a little more from my digital pubs. This too about 15 seconds of swiping to discover, from the sub-head of a piece on Kim Sung-il:
The Eternal President, despite dying of a heart attack in 1994. Weird fact: was always photographed from a certain angle, due to baseball-sized limp [sic] on his neck.
I’m just glad I don’t have any limps on my neck.
we’re gonna need a bigger boat Quotes
I tried to fool it. It bested me repeatedly.
15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
To see if their task could help, Miyake recruited 283 men and 116 women who were taking part in the university’s 15-week introductory course to physics. He randomly divided them into two groups. One group picked their most important values from a list and wrote about why these mattered to them. The other group – the controls – picked their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people.
This sort of brain-trickery has always been fascinating to me. If you’re a woman in physics at CU, don’t read this study, cause you’ll blow everything. Otherwise, read on to learn just how critical it is that we strive to not just improve education, but improve the environment in which we provide it.
Lessons In Becoming An Expert – Andrew Sullivan
Just a quick reminder. This one’s worth remembering.
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction – NYTimes.com
He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it. “I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.”
I love hearing stories about educators tackling tomorrow’s challenges with tomorrow’s logic. Refreshing.