] Anarchists' Convention Debates Whether Voting Makes You a
] Bad Anarchist

does anyone else see the humor in this that I do?

[ Oh yeah. "Anarchists" are traditionally a rich source of absurdity. Not that there aren't some who get it, but by and large it's a high school sophmore's viewpoint. -k]

Anarchists' Convention Debates Voting

[ "She needs the rock to rule."

Good message. Jesus. -k]

Wow.

] Time abuse is a symptom of a problem, not the problem
] itself. It is therefore impossible to cure a person of
] time abuse by actually managing his time. Instead, you
] must understand your time abuser's need for control and
] fear of evaluations.

[ *very* interesting article. i see a good deal of myself in the last type... worth a deeper analysis. -k]

The Time Abusers

] "I think that bloggers have put the issue of
] professionalism under attack," said Thomas McPhail,
] professor of media studies at the University of
] Missouri-St. Louis, who argues that journalists should be
] professionally credentialed. "They have no pretense to
] objectivity. They don't cover both sides."

[ Bullshit. Fox, CNN, Gannett, The Times, The Post, and all the rest of the traditional (read: corporate) media have put professionalism under attack for years, particularly the last 5 or so. Mr. McPhail isn't wrong about the blogs being biased, and often less than attentive to opposing viewpoints. However, he seems to have founded his statement on the assumption that "professional" journalists, or the corporate filters they're forced to shovel their work through, DO produce balanced and objective work. They don't. By a large margin they don't. Every so often a gem is produced in which someone rediscovers the seed of Journalism and does their job, and we usually get it here on Memestreams as people find such highlights.

The assumption that professional "journalists" are doing their jobs, or being allowed to do their jobs, is about as dangerous as it gets. It's blind faith, and has no place here. The professionals may have the "pretense to objectivity," but it seems like all too often that's all it is, a pretense, a shield, belying the skew just beneath the surface. -k]

The New York Times - The Internet: Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps

[ I note that the original posting of this story pulls from the press release of the guy being charged. Not always, but sometimes, people are biased when they are the target of a legal action.

Still, I completely agree that the FBI need not have been involved at all, and that the application of PATRIOT provisions is probably a whole bunch of out of line. The destruction of his equipment is a shame and also really should not be considered appropriate... it's almost got to be punitive - any moron could open a computer without demolishing it... this should especially be true for people whose job it is to take apart computers and do forensics.

Now, the guy is almost certainly guilty of infringment, having apparently hosted episodes of the show on the site, but as others have noted, all of it could've been handled in a civil (and i mean that in every possible connotation) manner, without going jackboots all over the guys life. The MPAA is trying to pull off a RIAA-style fear campaign, but i think they've gone way past reasonable.

I'll be interested to hear more... the details on wether C&D's were sent properly or if adequate efforts were taken to resolve this issue without the FBI are still pretty hazy. -k]

Stargate Information Archive - Federal Charges Filed Against SG-1 Archive

Too many universities have become professionalized information-transmission systems, when teaching should instead be this sort of relationship between the experienced and the young, on whom little now is lost.

[ A short but intresting article apropo of the recent spate of articles building an educational philosophy meme. It draws similar conclusions to Papert, and while it offers no proposals in the limited space available, it compels an evaluation of the goals educators ought to set. -k]

Learning to Think, and Live

Ordering a pizza in a surveillance society.

[ Well played. -k]

ACLU - Pizza Flash

What I am suggesting here is a program of idea work for educators. Of course it is harder to think about ideas than to bring a programming language into a classroom. You have to mess with actual ideas. But this is the kind of hard that will make teaching more interesting, just as idea work will do this for learning.

An article by Semour Papert published in a special issue of the IBM Systems Journal about the MIT Media Laboratory.

[ A very interesting, perhaps very important, article about the nature of our educational systems. A lot of this resonates with me, having experienced some dissonance with the particulars of education. I was a decent student, particularly pre-college, but always found creative assignments, those which de-emphasised the memorization and reapplication of facts, much less difficult. At the time, I, probably like most people, thought of it as an expression of innate aptitude. I'm simply not good at math or history. I see implications in this article for a concept that i've been considering roughly for some time... that school is often backwards... presenting fact and isolated example, which will lead to a later synthesis... when the student has absorbed enough examples, facts and skills, the conceptual understanding will come, an epiphany. I've had reservations about this method, and without having the intellectual devotion to come up with a solution, have felt that one must exist... that it's probably possible to start with an idea, and let the applications fall out of it.

I probably haven't fully absorbed this, but it's worth applying some time to, i think... -k]

What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

] Most Instant Messenger users broadcast when they sign on,
] sign off, go idle, and flag themselves as away. This
] presence information is typically innocuous, useful for
] knowing if your buddies are available to chat. But when
] monitored continuously, over long time periods, those few
] signals tell a lot. This website lets you record and
] analyze anybody's IM activity.

Somebody is watching you... for someone else.

[ Not suprising... still kinda scary. -k]

IM Watching.net

"TORONTO -- A man caught driving naked from the waist down while watching kiddie porn on his laptop computer has become the first man in Toronto charged with allegedly stealing an Internet connection. Toronto police laid a theft of communications charge after busting a man driving the wrong way down a one-way street, downloading child porn using stolen wireless Internet signals"

[ Wow. Just, wow. -k]

Winnipeg Sun: NEWS - Man takes wrong turn