Conspiracy? Vee don’t need no steenking conspiracy!

After seeing the pentagon conspiracy argument, I was unconvinced. CNN did a pretty unexceptional job of clearing things up with recent security footage released by the government. Why do they zoom out when showing the detail frame of the footage? And how can it be coming in nearly on the ground, at a 45° angle? If they’re trying to seed a conspiracy theory, they’re doing a pretty good job.

Amateur news gathers rights

A judge ruled yesterday that amateur news gatherers now have the same rights as professional journalists. The focus of the case was on freedom of speech issues, but does this ruling mean that access apply to the ever coveted confidentiality of sources? (state-by-state account of confidentiality laws)

This could be the precident for the future legal rights of amateur journalists. How much faster would the Enron scandal have broken if internals or friends of internals could be protected under local shield laws? How about Watergate? The barriers to free information flow will dissappear when everyone has the right to protect confidentiality, but so will the legal system’s ability to garner witnesses. I guess we’ll have to wait until these rights are called into question to find out.

My First Digital Movie Creator

My package came. I opened it, and as expected, out came a matte blue kids video camera. I haven’t been so excited in my life.

If you haven’t heard the Intel Play story, it’s worth a few seconds. Trying to make ground on the interface barrier between kids and technology, the Intel Play division was making some pretty spiffy little products engineered for the kid form factor. At affordable prices (all under $100), they were selling like hotcakes.

Just at the tipping point, their parent organization, the Connected Products Division proved unable to turn a profit, and was terminated. The Play Division, being dependent on core materials from its parent, was also shut down.

That’s just about the point that most of my friends heard about the Digital Movie Creator, a tiny video camera in the Intel Play line. It records 320×200 full motion video at 10 frames/second for 4 minutes. It uses a CMOS instead of a CCD which degrades the quality significantly (more tech specs here). Despite all of these inhibiting qualities, at closeout-reduced rate of $30, it’s the cheapest portable video technology in the world. While supplies last, you can still purchase your own direct from Intel.

The quality is better than what you might expect for web content. Which is to say, had the product continued to market, I’m sure there would have been a fashionable version for slightly older kids (like me), hoping to capture explicitly the weblog audience. Audiovisceral.net is a video weblog run by a fellow Media Lab student that is trying to take advantage of this gadget to produce video content on a regular basis. We’ll see how much of mine actually makes it into public form. At the moment, I’m having a good time just making funny noises and contorting my face. But maybe that’s just the bright blue camera speaking.

Nuclear fusion.. in a pan?

Researchers in Russia and America are close to nuclear fusion in a pan.

“The findings cock a snook at decades of efforts to harness nuclear fusion for energy generation in hugely expensive reactors that create extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. If the claims are verified, the team will have achieved the same processes at a tiny fraction of the cost, using equipment available to almost anyone.”

NewsBlaster

In today’s SearchDay, Chris Sherman introduced a new project from the Columbia Natural Language Processing group called Newsblaster, an automatic content aggregator, which, unlike Blogdex, actually culls similar content into one descriptive passage. Chris noted:

“If such a system were combined with a URL monitoring service, and seeded with a taxonomy of subjects personally interesting to you, it could effectively create your own web “advisory” service, automatically building directories of promising sites annotated with high-level summaries that would spare you the time of manual searching.”

Sounds to me like the coming of personalized news, the underlying goals of which have always left me a little uneasy. Personalized news tends to converge, as one might expect, on your personal interests. If we take this model to the extreme, then would I ever learn anything entirely new? Something revolutionary? What I want is someone else’s personalized news, someone like myself, but different enough that they will lead me in a new direction. That, my friends, is a weblog. And thankfully, there are lots of those.

To be fair, I’m sure Chris is referring to some hybrid of weblog and news content, which is taking all of this into account. I just had to get the ‘personalized news’ rant off my chest. I feel better now, in case anyone is wondering.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I just finished one of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve read quite some time, Jane Jacobs’ indictment of orthodox city planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is one of those books I wish I was forced to read at an early age: insightful, motivating, and connected to so many ideas and disciplines. I’ll write an extended review sometime soon (after SXSW for sure), but in the mean time I need a bit of cathartic mind-dump:

“Statistical people are a fiction for many reasons, one of which is that they are treated as if infinitely interchangeable. Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least.”

This passage cuts to the heart of what makes so many social studies sound like fingernails on chalkboard. Statistics can be a useful tool for parsing large amounts of data, but they are never a substitution for real people.