This is Steven Pinker in TNR.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much.

PNSFW, particularly if you read the web through software for text to speech synthesis, and you are not wearing headphones, despite the fact that the 4-ft high walls of your cubicle do nothing to block the noise from disturbing your co-workers.

The Bono episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public.

Meanwhile, the FCC focuses on What Really Matters:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

What the F***?

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments ["The Great Good Place", 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished. In "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam brings forth, in riveting and well-documented detail, reams of evidence that American society has all but lost its third places. Over the last 25 years, Americans "belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often." [2000] For too many people, life consists of going to work, then going home and watching TV. Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep. It seems to me that the phenomenon is far more acute among software developers, especially in places like Silicon Valley and the suburbs of Seattle. People graduate from college, move across country to a new place where they don't know anyone, and end up working 12 hour days basically out of loneliness.

Building Communities with Software

This month ACM Queue speaks with two Sun engineers who are bringing file systems into the 21st century. Jeff Bonwick, CTO for storage at Sun, led development of the ZFS file system, which is now part of Solaris. Bonwick and his co-lead, Sun Distinguished Engineer Bill Moore, developed ZFS to address many of the problems they saw with current file systems, such as data integrity, scalability, and administration. In our discussion this month, Bonwick and Moore elaborate on these points and what makes ZFS such a big leap forward.

Also in the conversation is Pawel Jakub Dawidek, a FreeBSD developer who successfully ported ZFS to FreeBSD. Ports to other operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Linux, and NetBSD are already under way, and his experience could pave the way for even wider adoption of ZFS.

The future of file systems: a Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore

This is a hierarchical organiser for tasks, notes, lists, weblinks and RSS feeds. You can categorise items, drag and drop stuff, share branches of your tree and more.

Treedolist

This site is about a GIMP plugin called Liquid Rescale.

It is a free, open source implementation of the algorithm described in this paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

It aims at resizing pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts.

It supports manual feature selection, and can also be used to remove portions of the picture in a consistent way.

Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin

This is a cross-cultural, critical history of social life on the Internet. It captures technical, cultural, and political events that influenced the evolution of computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net. Acknowledging the role of grassroots movements, this history does not solely focus on mainstream culture with all its mergers, acquisitions, sales and markets, and the (mostly male) geeks, engineers, scientists, and garage entrepreneurs who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. This is a critical history as it traces the changing nature of labor and typologies of those who create value online as much as it searches for changing approaches toward control, privacy, and intellectual property.

A History of the Social Web

Nearly three decades ago, he pioneered 24-hour news. Now he’s trying to save the world—and make money doing it. In this week’s Seven Questions, entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner talks about the United Nations, the death of newspapers, and why climate change offers “the greatest business opportunity that has ever come along.”

Ted Turner on the Future of the Planet

Our instinct is to fix bugs when we come across them, but sometimes that can cause more harm than good.

Henry Petroski put it best when he said we should beware the lure of success and listen to the lessons of failure. In software security, perhaps we should ignore them both sometimes.

With an example about OpenSSL.

Sit back and do nothing

If the networks turn their backs on iTunes altogether, Apple could also retaliate by moving to a service-based approach. The company has already released a networked set-top device called the AppleTV that allows users to stream photos, music, and video content from computers to a television set. Thus far, response to the AppleTV has been lukewarm, but Apple could change this with a single, simple move: Introduce DVR capabilities.

By letting people record any television content they please and load it into iTunes and their iPods with one-click ease, Apple could avoid having to cut deals with anyone. The company could even sweeten the pot by leveraging its online services and allowing users to save any recorded show to their .Mac accounts, making their favorite television broadcasts accessible from anywhere. Would Apple take such aggressive action against the networks? That's hard to predict, both because Steve Jobs sits on the board of the Walt Disney Co. and because such an approach could damage Apple's ongoing relationship with each network's affiliated music labels. But from an audience perspective, this would be a fantastic outcome, and one that would go a long way toward restoring Apple's flagging reputation as a champion of consumer interests. Networks take note: Whether they sell your content or give it away, Apple's not going away.

Apple vs. Everyone

Precise, accurate spatial information linked to social and behavioral data is revolutionizing social science by opening new questions for investigation and improving understanding of human behavior in its environmental context. At the same time, precise spatial data make it more likely that individuals can be identified, breaching the promise of confidentiality made when the data were collected. Because norms of science and government agencies favor open access to all scientific data, the tension between the benefits of open access and the risks associated with potential breach of confidentiality pose significant challenges to researchers, research sponsors, scientific institutions, and data archivists. Putting People on the Map finds that several technical approaches for making data available while limiting risk have potential, but none is adequate on its own or in combination. This book offers recommendations for education, training, research, and practice to researchers, professional societies, federal agencies, institutional review boards, and data stewards.

This seems relevant, given this and this and this.

Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data