Month: August 2004

I won’t be filling any aggregators for a while. Back in a while.

Reuters gives the article a less provocative title, but “Gene Blocker Turns Monkeys Into Workaholics – Study” is really about procrastination.

“The gene knockdown triggered a remarkable transformation in the simian work ethic. Like many of us, monkeys normally slack off initially in working toward a distant goal,” he added.

I know we’re 97% the same genetically as chimps, but are they calling me a simian?

Although some employers might take a distinct interest in the work, the NIMH team said they are hoping to understand mental illness.

And people worry about stem-cell research. Can’t anybody stop these mad scientists??!?

After reviewing a political map presented proportionally to electoral votes, I can only think a few thoughts. First, California is so damn big, in so many ways. Second, I do hope that predictions of “blue” victory work out. Third, my vote might “count” for more if it were not in California. Fourth, applying maps to statistics can be an even more compelling way to lie (ref: Benjamin Disraeli).

But I’m not moving, still.

(to the tune of “I want my TV” … think Sting pitching in for Mark Knopfler and the rest of Dire Straits)

Robert Andrews weighs in on the vigorous debate (hope that link works… the online-news mailing list archive is not easily linkable) with his thoughts on registration frustration.

My response? He’s proposing something that goes against corporate and human nature.

Corporations are most often focused on a winner-take-all scenario, which in the media space is increasingly unlikely. By using a centralized registration, the publications which attract the audience lower the barriers to entry for other publications. Yes, the converse is also true, that new audiences may be more likely to jump over the registration hurdle — but the tradeoff is unclear.

On the reader side, I don’t want to trust indiscriminately. Brands/sites do matter. I’ll take the risk of providing information to an individual brand, but I’m not eager to open the kimono, data-wise, where I can’t control the distribution beyond the single source. In the offline world, I don’t have that kind of control, at least here in the United States, and it’s aggravating. In the online world, I believe things are slowly (very slowly) going in the right direction on the privacy front, and helping educate consumers about the offline practices that have remained shadowy to most.

Don’t you think that the TypeKey opposition outside the SixApart world is remarkably similar to that voice about Passport? I’d argue it’s for similar reasons… a market leader proposing a “universal” system where they got to set the rules. Even if the leader bends over backwards to quell concerns about their motives, it’s an uphill battle. Note: SixApart doesn’t have nearly the clout of a Microsoft, despite their joint appearance (as sponsors) in the BlogOn “Business Transparency” panel.

I think the cyber-utopian view that each individual should control their own identity, in a federated system, is certainly the most compelling to readers. I don’t believe that Project Liberty will meet this goal, despite being aimed at the proper problem, because the data is not under the reader’s control at all times, just access to that data. Intellectually, I agree that those could be (should be?) one and the same, but until the US government follows some of the better EU policies on this, I’m not encouraged.

All this discussion and energy, of course, is useful, though. I’d appreciate being alerted to other efforts in this field. Will something grow and spread like HTML or RSS? That’s what we can all hope for.

Testing something… sorry about the nonsense.

…but I’ll hope that my credit cards are not yet among the public. With a name like John Roberts, I’m a ripe enough target for identity theft as it is. Article is at CNET News.com, by Rob Lemos.

Looks like a doozy of a map collection, especially since it needs specialized viewers… GIS is a whole technology subset I know very little about, but the end product is fascinating. The ever-increasing detail in which we think we can represent something is fractal; the deeper you dive, the more you realize you can never know the bottom. Go, Zeno, go.