So here's Flurb #4, kicking off a second year of Flurb's world dominance of literary and unclassifiable SF-related webzines ... another fat and juicy issue for which the contributors are receiving no money at all.

And now for a rundown:

... a witty, warped, flowing, political, sfictional, satirical gem about life in Tennessee ... a mind-bending riff on body-mods ... a supremely sinister and satirical Cthulhu piece ... pixel-level steganographic signatures ... something like On the Road compressed into a six-hundred-and-sixty-six word cyberpunk haiku. With a happy ending, no less.

FLURB, a Webzine of Astonishing Tales

SIENA is a program for the statistical analysis of network data, with the focus on social networks.

The main approach used by SIENA for modeling dynamics of network (or of networks and behavior) is an actor-oriented model, in which it is assumed that the social actors who are represented by the nodes in the network play a crucial role in changing their ties to other actors; in the case of associated behavior dynamics, also in changing their behavior. As an alternative, tie-oriented models are also available. All of these models are Markov chain models; such models are more applicable to relations and behavioral variables that can be regarded as states than to relations or behavior that are more adequately regarded as non-enduring events.

SIENA: Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis

StOCNET is an open software system for the statistical analysis of social networks using advanced statistical models. StOCNET provides a platform to make a number of statistical methods, that previously were privately owned, available to a wider audience. The distinguishing feature of the methods included in the StOCNET system is that they are based on explicit probability models for networks.

StOCNET

Talking to my daughter about search engines and the necessity for a 10-year-old to question texts online led me to think that computer literacy programs that left out critical thinking were missing an important point. But I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority. At that point, I saw education - the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time - as diverging from schooling.

See also these posts from the archive:

If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Milton Friedman world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk. Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways.

Don't use the word "fun" to describe what will go on in the Game School, a proposed New York City public school that will use "game design and game-inspired methods" to educate sixth through 12th graders.

The school day should be split in two. The first half is what you might call a required, common curriculum, taught by schools. The second half is an individual curriculum in which many outside organizations take part -- work organizations, community organizations. These activities may be organized by the school, but they may or may not take place in school. The school becomes a kind of broker for learning.

"We must allow our students to ask why, not just keep on telling them how."

Homeland security efforts through magnet safe haven programs are a significant part of our Nation's effort to achieve victory in the war on terror and help to ensure equal martyrdom opportunities for all terrorists.

The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab. Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language." "The school's built around the marketplace that surrounds the defense industry, but the program's not involved in war or peace. Still, there are some realities about good guys and bad guys that will surely be discussed."

Howard Rheingold, on schooling

I mentioned this last week, but I figure that if the Economist writes about it, it's worth another mention.

The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

This leads to two recent threads about music: Radiohead's new album, and Britney's recent performance.

Hidden charms

No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free.

KING ALGORITHM; An Oracle Part Man, Part Machine

Consider this a follow-up to the thread about Alex Ross's new book.

‘Isn’t the East Village sort of like Beauty and the Beast in the summer?” Nico Muhly exclaims. “You know, ‘Bonjour, good day, how is your family, how is your wife…’” It’s our first outing of several together, and we are walking at typical Nico pace—an excitable, bouncier version of the New York Walk. In the span of three blocks, we have passed four people he knows, including a member of the indie rock band Ratatat, and soon we will be picking up a score from composer Philip Glass, Muhly’s de facto boss, who’s eating dinner at the vegetarian kosher Indian joint Madras.

In Muhly’s world, Houston Street as Disney movie makes sense. His life is an odd fairy tale in which he inhabits several characters at all times. There is, first and foremost, Nico the Composer, who has since age 18 assisted Glass, conducting and editing his film scores, and has also emerged as a star in his own right, with an album of his own work, Speaks Volumes; Nico the Helper to Famous Singers, who “enables” the likes of Björk, Antony, and Rufus Wainwright; and Nico Himself, the sweet, gleeful downtown kid, the 26-year-old Columbia and Juilliard graduate in perpetual motion. That last Nico lives in a Chinatown loft (above a sweatshop–cum–mah-jongg parlor), with his cats Duane and Reade and a roommate, Liz, whom he’s known since they were kids.

The Happy Little Minimalist

What really happened to classical music in the 20th century?

Don't be put off just because you don't much listen to classical music. The malaise in 'popular' music has deeper roots. Artistic development relies on the avant-garde ...

Historians, not surprisingly, are still sorting out the collapse of the avant-garde, and so most of the new “narratives” of musical modernism have been less descriptive of what was than prescriptive statements defending what the critic happens to consider desirable.

Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, has approached the task in a different way in his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. As he writes in the preface:

Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that have found a broader public. . . . Two distinct repertories have formed, one intellectual and one popular. Here [in this book] they are merged: no language is considered more intrinsically modern than any other.

The result is a volume sharply different in tone from its predecessors—and truer, in my view, to the history of musical modernism.

The book earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Ross leads a whirlwind tour from the Viennese premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome in 1906 to minimalist Steve Reich's downtown Manhattan apartment. The wide-ranging historical material is organized in thematic essays grounded in personalities and places, in a disarmingly comprehensive style reminiscent of historian Otto Friedrich. Thus, composers who led dramatic lives—such as Shostakovich's struggles under the Soviet regime—make for gripping reading, but Ross treats each composer with equal gravitas. The real strength of this study, however, lies in his detailed musical analysis, teasing out—in precise but readily accessible language—the notes that link Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story to Arnold Schoenberg's avant-garde compositions or hint at a connection between Sibelius and John Coltrane. Among the many notable passages, a close reading of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes stands out for its masterful blend of artistic and biographical insight. Readers new to classical music will quickly seek out the recordings Ross recommends, especially the works by less prominent composers, and even avid fans will find themselves hearing familiar favorites with new ears.

The praise flows freely for this book:

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Beyond the Musical Avant-Garde

The social historian and essayist Garry Wills is one of our most lucid public intellectuals, and no one working today writes more clearly or with greater authority on the intersection of religion and public life.

"Head and Heart: American Christianities" is a major contribution to the national debate over separation of church and state and ought to be read by anyone perplexed by the current interplay of religion and politics.

Wills' argument is that American history has been marked by an oscillation between Enlightenment and Evangelism -- between head and heart.

The book earns a starred review from Booklist:

The history of Christianity in the US is a dialectic of the intellect and the emotions, Wills maintains in this big new book, which ought to be the one volume everyone interested in the subject reads -- it is lucid and grandly informative -- and reacts to, thus keeping the conversation alive.

Although intransigently theocratic, the Puritans brought both heart (passion) and head (reason) to their religious practice, passionately persecuting dissidents unto death, reasonably fostering broad tolerance and social justice in the words and deeds of Roger Williams and repentant witch-trial judge and abolitionist pioneer Samuel Sewall. Eighteenth-century Quakers merged head and heart to spread antislavery sentiment. The deist Founding Fathers observed the head-heart conflicts and with the First Amendment opted the new federal government out of them by forbidding a national church. That "disestablishment" has been a godsend because, ever since, head and heart have seesawed in influence.

Although the Puritans and disestablishment occupy the best pages in the book, Wills' traversal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments is full of what will be not only revelations to most Americans but also, they may decide, things they really ought to know.

'Head and Heart: American Christianities,' by Garry Wills

Securing Very Important Data: Your Own

The newest generation of web services is starting to collect and store far more than just the standard suite of identity data — name and address, phone, Social Security or credit-card numbers — that populates the databases of banks and credit-card processors. They increasingly store information, generated by us, that is directly linked to those virtual identities.

And users are loving them.

...

“We’re in a situation where business holds all the cards."

ONE way to change this, he said, is to make people more like organizations.

To this end, Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.

The Limited Liability Persona

Corporations were invented during the age of exploration, when the risk associated with mounting an expedition to foreign lands was so high that no single person - even a rich noble - could underwrite a venture without running the risk of total financial ruin.

The fundamental ideas underlying the corporation are (1) the notion of a legal person distinct from a "natural person", (2) perpetual lifetime, and (3) limited liability.

Limited liability was critical to the idea of the corporation, because it allowed investors to put a strictly limited amount of money into a risky enterprise without having to take the chance of losing everything.

Law of Relational Risk

It’s a simple law, but I believe leads to important conclusions about how relations are structured:

Contribution to the relationship that is not met proportionally by the other participants is a loss to the contributor.

...

Culture, values, and shared beliefs improve parties’ confidence in assessing risks. This is particularly true where the culture practices reciprocity—possibly through status and reputation—in connection with stated values.

The principles also suggest that single sign-on (SSO) efforts are often misguided. In the interest of promoting relational continuity, the more authenticated connections the better—particularly if the user can parlay these authentications into improved reputation. Recognition of participants based on multiple channels of connectivity would be the method for improving identity assurance rather than on a single login event.

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