Decius wrote:

Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

I don't see why this is so surprising. It's akin to expressing surprise that most telephone calls are not "commercial" (as in delivery of paid content). Or that most email traffic is not copyrighted.

I would be more interested in looking at the overall distribution ... a Long Tail plot.

Unfortunately, it seems like this press coverage is mostly orchestrated to drive traffic to Vidmeter, which is distinctly in the short head business:

Vidmeter gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos.

RE: YouTube’s Favorite Clips Aren't Copyrighted

It's funny when people think of online discourse as different, somehow set apart.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

What's the driver? Why now?

Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.

And this:

Since last October, she has also had to deal with an anonymous blogger who maintains a separate site that parodies her writing ...

... a blog for a limited audience ...

"It makes me feel like I live in Iran."

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs

Thou shalt always covet tasty nuggets of your neighbors pop culture.

YouTube - Dan Le Sac VS Scroobius Pip - 'Thou Shalt always Kill'

You can listen to this entire album with the Rhapsody Free 25.

Quentin Tarantino's soundtrack to his half of the movie works by itself as an amazing road-trip mix tape. Freaky cinematic works by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Pino Donaggio and Jack Nitzche highlight neglected gems by the Coasters, Smith, Joe Tex and April March.

You can also listen to the April March track on YouTube, but there is no video for this song.

Quentin Tarantino's 'Death Proof' on Rhapsody

Code is Law.

The idea of network-centric operations initially was inspired by developments in the IT-industry in the 1990s. But while today’s internet industry is happily nurturing a new boom revolving around Web 2.0, the defense establishment is haplessly managing counterinsurgency and stability operations. Yet a closer look at the two seemingly separate trends brings to light striking similarities. War’s changing character is not only augmented by the emergence of the new media; the way the web and today’s communication devices are used to organize lives also instructs our understanding of how killing is organized. The argument put forward here is that the web’s emerging organizing principles — including a social as well as a technological dimension — increasingly govern the management of violence. The new media consequently offer both a set of new metaphors to understand the character of today’s wars and a socio-technological platform that remodels the architecture of battle.

AJAX is Bad Law.

War 2.0

Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons.

It's about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. Its a big job and we're just getting started.

How is Freebase different than the Wikipedia?

It's an apple versus an orange: each is deliciously different. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with information arranged in the form of articles. Freebase is more of an almanac, organized like a database, and readable by people or software. Wikipedia and Freebase both appeal to people who love to use and organize information. In fact, many of the founding contributors to Freebase are also active in the Wikipedia community. Whenever Freebase and Wikipedia cover the same topic, Freebase will link to the Wikipedia article to make it easy for users to access the best of both sites.

Freebase

House prices in the U.S. from 1890 until 2005, plotted as a roller coaster that you ride from a first person perspective. Here is the data source. Hold on to your hats.

Real Estate Roller Coaster

In short, the farce of federal efforts to create an efficient terrorist profiling system to keep terrorists off airplanes--and the farce of privacy-advocacy organizations' reactions to those efforts--will continue. Before September 11, 2001, the U.S. government's list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel held 16 names. Afterward, every government agency indiscriminately dumped information about every potential suspect from its databases onto the watch lists. By March 2003, when the TSA did early tests of CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II), the watch lists had expanded to 75,000 names--many of them being, notoriously, common ones like Ted Kennedy and Robert Johnson.

In February 2006, sources at the National Counterterrorism Center told the Washington Post that the watch lists had grown to 325,000 names--more than quadruple the 75,000 on the lists in 2003.

... In a December 8, 2006, National Journal article, Chertoff indulged in some minor drollery at the privacy activists' expense:

"I've got a new rule. If I want to keep a secret, I give a speech about it. Because if I make a speech, no one picks it up. But if I put it in a document and I slip it under the table, then it gets the front page."

... Soundex assigns to the name Laden the code L350, as it does Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham. This is, in other words, an algorithm so deficient for identification purposes that it confuses al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and the Sex Pistols' Johnny (Lydon) Rotten. To see for yourself how poorly Soundex performs, go to nofly.s3.com, where S3 Matching Technologies has combined the algorithm with a list of potential-terrorist names recorded in U.S. government databases. "The U.S. government obviously updates its lists every day, so we don't suggest this is up-to-date," says James Moore, a company spokesperson. "But we got the best available data on who'd be on terrorist watch lists from various private intelligence agencies." Using Soundex and S3 Matching Technologies' version of the watch list reveals that the names Jesus Christ and George Bush resemble terrorists' names enough that they're assigned to the no-fly or selectee list.

See also EPIC's page on the Automated Targeting System.

Confusing Osama bin Laden with Johnny Rotten

Connexions is:

a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

* authors create and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
* learners find and explore content

Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities

Baraniuk and Kelly, both professors of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, have developed a camera that doesn't need to compress images. Instead, it uses a single image sensor to collect just enough information to let a novel algorithm reconstruct a high-resolution image.

At the heart of this camera is a new technique called compressive sensing. A camera using the technique needs only a small percentage of the data that today's digital cameras must collect in order to build a comparable picture. Baraniuk and Kelly's algorithm turns visual data into a handful of numbers that it randomly inserts into a giant grid. There are just enough numbers to enable the algorithm to fill in the blanks, as we do when we solve a Sudoku puzzle. When the computer solves this puzzle, it has effectively re-created the complete picture from incomplete information.

See Baraniuk's Google Tech Talk from a year ago. There's also a TED talk from later last year.

See:

D. Takhar, J. Laska, M. B. Wakin, M. F. Duarte, D. Baron, S. Sarvotham, K. F. Kelly and R. G. Baraniuk, A New Compressive Imaging Camera Architecture using Optical-Domain Compression (Proc. of Computational Imaging IV at SPIE Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, Jan. 2006)

Measurements vs. Bits: Compressed Sensing meets Information Theory [PPT]

Compressed sensing is a new framework for acquiring sparse signals based on the revelation that a small number of linear projections (measure- ments) of the signal contain enough information for its reconstruction. The foundation of Compressed sensing is built on the availability of noise-free measurements. However, measurement noise is unavoidable in analog systems and must be accounted for. We demonstrate that measurement noise is the crucial factor that dictates the number of measurements needed for reconstruction. To establish this result, we evaluate the information contained in the measurements by viewing the mea- surement system as an information theoretic channel. Combining the capacity of this channel with the rate- distortion function of the sparse signal, we lower bound the rate-distortion performance of a compressed sensing system. Our approach concisely captures the effect of measurement noise on the performance limits of signal reconstruction, thus enabling to benchmark the perfor- mance of specific reconstruction algorithms.

They have a whole separate site for Compressive Imaging: A New Single Pixel Camera.

Compressive Sensing is an emerging field based on the revelation that a small group of non-adaptive linear projections of a compressible signal or image contains enough information for reconstruction and processing. Our new digital image/video camera directly acquires random projections of a scene without first collecting the pixels/voxels. The camera architecture employs a digital micromirror array to optically calculate linear projections of the scene onto pseudorandom binary patterns. Its key hallmark is its ability to obtain an image or video with a single detection element (the "single pixel") while measuring the scene fewer times than the number of pixels/voxels. Since the camera relies on a single photon detector, it can also be adapted to image at wavelengths where conventional CCD and CMOS imagers are blind.

Digital Imaging, Reimagined | MIT Technology Review's TR10