tech – Page 12 – Composite

Bilingual creative writing prof job announcement

November 7, 2006 Liz

University of Texas at El Paso
Creative Writing, 500 West University Ave Liberal Arts Room 415, El Paso, TX 79968
http://www.utep.edu/
Tenure-track Assistant Professorship in Creative Writing [803]
University of Texas El Paso

Dept. of Creative Writing

Tenure-track Assistant Professorship in creative writing. Specialty open: fiction, poetry, playwriting and/or screenwriting beginning September 1, 2007. Translation and non-fiction also of interest as secondary specialties. The candidate must be bilingual, Spanish/English, and able to deliver instruction in both languages. At the graduate and undergraduate levels teach workshops and literature courses. Successful applicant will also teach one online course each year in our new Online MFA. Salary competitive. MFA or PhD required.

Interviews for this position will be conducted at the Modern Language Association convention. Preference given to applications received by November 17, 2006, but position will remain open until filled.

The Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas El Paso is the only such program in the United States to offer fully bilingual study. It currently has 35 full-time graduate students and the undergraduate major has 170 students and is growing rapidly. We offer a broad-gauged curriculum that trains students in Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, Playwriting and Screenwriting, as well as literary theory and the history of form. Our MFA student body is international and cosmopolitan. We produce the Rio Grande Review, a bilingual publication with a strong international dimension. Our highly productive faculty has a distinct presence on the national literary scene. Our website is www.utep.edu/cw

Please send cover letter, résumé, and the name, address and telephone of three references to: Johnny Payne, Chair, Dept. of Creative Writing, Liberal Arts 415, 500 W. University Ave., El Paso TX, 79968.

The University of Texas at El Paso does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veterans status or sexual orientation in employment or in the provision of services.
Rosa Alcalá, Assistant Professor Bilingual MFA
University of Texas at El Paso
PMB 670500 W. University Ave.
El Paso, TX 79968-9991
www.utep.edu/cw
Office: Liberal Arts, 212
915-747-7020

A slick site for book-buying

October 30, 2006 Liz

I don’t usually read email spam, but this one for Booksprice was really good. I tried the site and liked the slick, clean interface. It basically does what it says it does: searches across a lot of different book sites & shows you comparisons of the prices. I tried Gotz & Meyer by David Albahari, a book I just bought for 15 bucks at the translation conference. I loved the book and was thinking of buying it for a couple of people I know. The most interesting feature of Booksprice is the ability to compare prices on multiple items. I stuck 5 books in my basket: Gotz & Meyer, Kalila and Dimna, Le Guin’s translations of Gabriela Mistral, “Unmentionables: A Brief History of Underwear”, and Naciste Pintada. I got a choice of two different ways to buy all those books, one significantly cheaper than the other. The idea is that if you can get all the books from the same source, shipping charges will be much cheaper. (Or will they?)

I took out the book in Spanish and tried again. The results ranged from all the books+ shipping for $44.35 (all new) to $136.85 if I bought them all individually from little stores on abebooks.com. (I often use abebooks for books in Spanish, actually – I’m not dissing them.)

The site seems to operate from cookies – it tracked my recent searches, but never asked me to create an account. It has another cool feature – you can look up amazon wishlists from within Booksprice.

Their spam offered me a free copy of Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name is Red” or “Snow” – books I’ve been wanting to read anyway — whether I blogged about them or not.

A nice deal & a good way to treat potential customers. Though… of course… who are they, and why are they? What business? Perhaps they’re really a branch of Amazon. Or maybe they get a referral commission on books you buy through them?

An apology and a resolution

October 20, 2006 Liz

I talk a lot about the exposure of process, and about the risk of making mistakes. For the 3rd issue of “Composite: Multiple Translations” I worked with a guest editor, Sholeh Wolpé, who curated the translations of a poem by Forough Farrokhzad. Unfortunately, in our process, I made some crucial mistakes, and so distributed perhaps 10 or 20 copies of the issue that have errors in Sholeh’s translation on pages 12 and 13. At her request (and with great contrition and embarrassment) I withdraw that issue, and as soon as possible will correct the error (in the breaks between stanzas, and the loss of italics) and will reprint the issue.

What I learned here is that, having often acted as a maverick publisher, I had insufficient collaborative process. I proofread, edited, did layout, corrected typos, etc., putting in a lot of hard work. However, with a guest editor (and maybe, too, with all the poets in an issue) I should send proofs before I print, rather than rushing to print with my usual impulse towards quick execution, instant gratification, efficiency, and a short attention span.

As a seat-of-the-pants xerox zine, again, I’m not used to operating with that level of formalism. However, I find now, of course, that that’s no excuse.

If I gave/sold you a copy of this zine, please email me your name and snail mail address, and I’ll send you a new, correct version! (Destroy the old one.)

So, one problem appears to have been in file formats between computers and computer software.

But the other problem was in my lack of collaborative process. I’ll try to be better about that.

The impulse to be minor

October 1, 2006 Liz

When I’m editing a wiki, even privately, I have the impulse to click “This is a minor edit,” even when I’ve made significant changes. It seems presumptious to have an implied “major edit” be the default. I don’t want to contribute too much noise to the signal of the wiki’s Recent Changes page.

Part of the impulse to label all my edits “minor” is because I twiddle and save frequently; I’ll edit a few words out of a sentence here and there, save, and go right back to that paragraph. I blog that way too, screwing up everyone’s RSS feeds, publishing carelessly as an idea comes, and then fiddling with the entry over the next hour as I realize my phrasing was clumsy or a new idea, related, strikes me.

On a related but different level, I believe that it is important to expose the process of thought, the evolution of intellect, the muddled waters where research and inspiration meet and ideas coalesce. Many people don’t know how to think; they don’t think they think; they can’t see themselves thinking, because they only have seen “finished products” and never the intermediate stages. Uncertainty is forbidden. It is private. It’s personal. It’s weak and vulnerable. That is a limitation I see as unnecessary. It is often useful, but not always. It’s a barrier to collaboration and to learning.

But then I wonder if both these behaviors in myself, the constant “minor editing” of blog and wiki, might signify an asymptotic process-focus, where I regard nothing as done, nothing as major, nothing achieved. My poems remain in their notebooks and rough drafts indefinitely. I consider even my master’s thesis as a “draft”. It pains me to refer to it as finished.

Gender plays into this. Women underplay their acheivements & work. I do it too. I don’t want to bring attention, or be under fire. I rarely feel any work is done, good enough; I might change my mind. Everything could be improved. I can think of someone who has done part of that, or expressed the idea, more neatly, more professionally. And yet I consider myself bold! What baggage, what damage, we carry.

A good friend and I were discussing this the other day as we rushed to deprecate ourselves and our collaborative work on our own private wiki. “I haven’t done enough.” “No, I haven’t done enough!” Then we realized what we were doing. The conversation led to our discussing how we compare our own work to the best in our field, come up short, and feel we are impostors. As I contemplated this impulse in myself I realized I compare my own thesis, as a work in progress (seriously, it’s not really *done* done, no matter what the diploma says!) to writing by women 30 years older than myself who are on their 10th book. We are not comparing ourselves to our peers, but to the best we see — and worse than that, to the best we can imagine. On some level I am proud of this impulse, and think it will help me to keep improving my work for my entire lifetime. However, this strange combination of arrogance and humility can be a huge obstacle; when it blocks me, I have to try to break myself of the mental habit of “being minor.”

As a generalist who is constructing anthologies, I also put a lot of pressure on myself, and feel pressure from outside, to have depth of knowledge as well as range. I cannot be as much of an expert on each poet, or each country, as women who (again) are usually far older than myself and further along in their careers and who have focused down in a narrow area.

Despite all these things, I am becoming more and more comfortable claiming authority. I credit technology and the control over the means of production that it’s brought me with part of my own intellectual evolution. Without the freedom to publish and edit, publish and edit, in a cyclical pattern, exposing “drafts” — unlike the publication of a book that would have to start out more perfect that I could imagine, and that would never be fixable — I would not have had the confidence to step into a public forum of ideas. My notebooks, essays, poems, and all that would have stayed, like so many other women’s over history, in diaries and personal letters.

Technorati Tags: anxieties, literature, techie tools, writing

Focus resolution; geek love

September 17, 2006 Liz

Looking back on this blog – I realize I should focus a bit more. Liveblogging should probably not go here, but somewhere else, and I can link to it from here.

I could also go back through every post to add tags. Cleaning up my other blogs seems impossible because they’re too huge already, but this one’s not so bad.

Why this blog? I thought it could help me to have a public non-pseudonymous presence. I have these essays on poetics from a few years ago, which I should post here and be done with it. I have feelings that my thoughts and visions about literature and blogging and my approach to the Internet have roots in common. Whatever that unity is, I have not yet found a way to explain it, even thought the feeling’s still strong.

Since my first encounter with computers and even the thought of AI, I have felt that computers in relation to humans are beautiful. Part of the love I feel is twined with feminism; the Cyborg Manifesto expresses this very well. Now, I had not read the Cyborg Manifesto when I was 10 and pounding away on the keys of my neighbors Apple II or Kaypro to make it write poetry. And yet felt so deeply sitting there that I was in love in an science-fiction-loving way, with the future, with a key, a key to liberation or unity of something broken in myself and in society. Before my contact with the net, I loved the idea of it. In front of the fuzzy glowing green letters on the black screen my mind was taking off to imagine infinite things; my own robotic arms extending into space in a mining colony, or the beautiful moment when the computer talked back. When you meet a tool like that, that is not quite a tool, that is an artistic medium but more than that, it’s an important moment. While all machines have beauty to me, I don’t feel the same about a xerox machine or even a typewriter, though maybe about certain architecture or performances or cities. Complexity, constructedness, potential and space – space as in room; an organic work of art that invites participation in its own construction. It makes the human imagination bigger. Some vast imaginariness collective unconscious reservoir of potential opens up!

This is nonsense and mysticism, but I still want to talk about it.

Feminism and blogs

August 29, 2006 Liz

There’s a panel on November 14, Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance, at Barnard:

Of the internet’s viability as a tool for political change, we ask, is there a better example than the blog? Young and youthfully minded feminists have learned that blogging allows them to carve out personal and political spaces where their lives, their issues, their analyses of the world can come into sharp focus. Outside the confines of mainstream media, where women are addressed (usually exclusively) as consumers, feminist bloggers have become the cultural producers blazing some of the most radical and rousing paths toward revolutionary social change.

In celebration of the publication of this fall’s issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, guest editors Gwendolyn Beetham and Jessica Valenti come together with select contributors to discuss how feminists are fulfilling the promise of creating a cybercommunity dedicated to securing a more just and peaceful world. Panelists include Lauren Spees and Michelle Riblett, BC ’05 (Hollaback), Liza Sabater (Culture Kitchen), among others. Join us for a spirited discussion of feminism in the 21st century.

Good! We need more discussions like this. We need to be documenting our feminism, compiling references, making solid, lasting interconnections. The Scholar and Feminist Online seems like a good step.

We’ve had one feminist think tank discussion in chat since the Wiscon “Feminist think tank” panel, and other projects spawned from it, like the stuff at feministsf.net – a group blog, a wiki, a carnival of feminism in SF, and more.

I still think that Wikipedia’s dearth of information on feminism needs to be addressed and fixed, but we also need new tools.

Barcamp presentation on Celestia

August 27, 2006 Liz

barcamp stanford
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

A few slow moments, but impressive and cool as hell. In the application, Celestia, you can fly around to planets and stars, see orbits, etc. And each star or planet or whatever has a ton of information. Rod lectured us on luminosity. Galen let us know that Viga is the coolest moon of Neptune.

This presentation generated the best quote from barcamp stanford:

Audience: Hey Rod, what are those green lines?
5 year old kid: Those green lines? Those are curved space-time.

I could only lie there on the ground and whimper, that was so cool.

and the next best quote:

Galen: Can we see Uranus?

flickr video generator

August 27, 2006 Liz

This thing is extremely clever. From the command line or with a little cgi interface you can put in a keyword and number of images. The application fetches that number of tagged images from flicker and puts them into a quicktime video format. hey presto, instant slide show/video thingie.

I think someone wrote it this afternoon. (That’s why I’m not linking to it. I’m sure some version of it will be public soon enough.)

I could take all the photos from Milo’s stop motion animation projects, put them on Flickr with a unique tag, then generate a bloggable video way faster than i could on iMovie.

Now we need the streaming audio to go with it!

Barcamp Stanford – Notes from Day Two (rough)

August 27, 2006 Liz

BarCamp Stanford – Sunday Aug. 27, 2006

It’s nice to be in the English building at Stanford. I think of all the times I’ve been here for literary readings (or job interviews). Now… how odd to be here for a computer conference.

*** first session ***
Guy talking about mashups. He’s from the stanford hci group.

henry ford museum. toy thing. little houses, magnetic. close circuit on a map. you can move them around. and it hooks up to google earth for a flythrough.

[Horribly… my first thought is that it has a direct military application as you could make your little models of the war front especially urban, flyable in simulator]

he has a slideshow. Their whiteboard has its own flickr account. big red staples “easy” button, camera in ithe ceiling takes a photo of the whiteboard, sent to python scripts, then you can safely erase the whiteboard.

other guy – can you actually read it?

mashup guy – yes.

Adina – do you have a recipe for it?

speaker – yes , here it is (shows diagram)

mashup guy – shows how they made it a sketch/animated thing.

example #4 – color field cam. like the flickr color picker mashup. but in the real world. point at a color, and you get flickr images that match the avg colo

question – how offten are you updating

mashup guy – not that fast… ilt is cached…

mashpits… start witout a

hci human computer interface. venn diagrams.

– things that live online (green
– live in interface physical space (red
things that live on computer. (blue

the intersections need the glue! most mashups are in the green section of “things that live online”. what goes in the other areas of the venn diagram?

….
liza loop: kids, younger?

mashup guy – lego mindstorms, other ones.

[i’m thinking of nintendogs and tamagochi ]

Back to glue.
green + blue = flickr, python api
red + green – shared phidgets, sensor nets?
red + blue: d.tools

Hotglue. a surface adhesive. duct tape. (screen scrape, poke)
dovetail joints – precise fitting, beautiful, parts know about each other. deep integration (public api)

http://mashup-tools wiki. password is design

easiest ways is not thru keyboard interface
but to arcade controller people… they are these 20 dollar boards…

Kent brewster – new developer network. was a hobbyist.
showing spiffy!search.

myweb at yahoo. tagging stuff.
picocricket….

brewster’s field guide to web 2.666 — kentbrewster.com/spiffysearch

okay, that’s spiffy. search that come s up with popup menu style list of stuff and you click on the side doohickey to get a popup window for you to tag it. works with delicious

Hell yeah, this looks handy. Then I could import it straight onto my blog with rss. my tags I wonder what it will look like using delicious. (is this link going to work… i think not. fix it later.)

Chris Messina – doing tech and flow.

sunday sessions. ID 2.0
tech a nd policy.
Online problem solving, politics and conflict res
Astronomy sim
co-working
mashups lighting talks @ lunch

****

me and a dude from microsoft… Nima… wearing laughing squid tshirt. I demo kent brewster’s thing… he tries it…

I whine that flock has not given me a pony yet. their search yahoo toolbar thing does not have a function for me. kent’s thing is better.

me and tantek talk abut information absorbtion speed and reading and habits. it needs to be fast like a video game. that is what we grew up with. keystrokes. I can play nethack or use vi without thinking. I want to browse, search, and read blogs that way, with fast muscle memory ingrained. tantek says the myweb thing is nifty but like many such tools it assumes way too slow an information stream and that you will maybe look at 10, 20 things… not 300- 500 a day. we need batch tagging.

I need to turn on a bunch of tags so that everything i do in a space is tagged with something.. like if everything i noted today till 5pm was tagged barcamp stanford techie, that would be useful for me & then I could toggle it off again . (again i am thinking of nethack or emacs or something. screw clicking.

****
tech and policy discussion

john pete nima todd tim adina tracy silona christine (mit limewire) tantek liz

Adina – 1) tech policy 2) partisan electoral politics 3) Deliberative. figuring out consensus building etc.

***

bill in congress right now passed house july 26 410-15 vote. DOPA now anything with social network is illegal in libraries and schools.

liz – all libraries or just kids room

pete – just kids room i think

pete – is lookign it up. if you have contact info on it… then it’s too much. blogger comments might be illegal.

adina – it’s not law yet. it’s passed the house it’s in the senate commerce committee. The next step here is to contact the members of the senate commerce committee. senator boxer from CA is on the committee. Contact her office. let’s look for creative ways to get web 2.0 people to communicate with the people on that committee.

nima – a lot of big companies like google, microsoft, yahoo, are affected

pete reads to us from wikipedia entry for dopa. forum, chat room, im, email…

liza – thats like outlawing cell phones
pete – it’s like outlawing http.

adina – they are going on parents who are worried… socially conservative suburban family votes, going into election season.

Adina talks about the stuff they did in Texas. It worked – they affected policy.
there was a billin the tX state legislature favored by the telecom industry , make it illegal for cities and towns to provide wifi and broadband service for that city.

Adina talks about that groups’ specific strategies. blog, mailing list, private wiki. collaboratively wrote the documents and position papers. this was all basically free, using ffree tech and our existing skills.

***
kid break.
Rod (5 years old) is drawing on a white board in a room for Milo & Galen. He made an outline and a diagram and was lecturing them!

***

another kid break – i go up and down 6 flights of stairs several times – they are in the basement on the couches under the stairwell. there is a dungeon.

***

best practices – no unified place..
liza suggests doing a lot of tagging…
silona – yah tagging
liz – but then we’ll just be talking to each other, learning curve for tagging, practice of it… mobilizing mommybloggers
adina – constituency building
liz – cause widget. have easy widgets, meme thingies, with political issues, with un-dopa…
adina – events. time senstivive
todd- freepress.org
liz – countdown. upcoming.org events, a checklist
sliona – a feed
adina – email isn’t useful for us anymore we need rss
liz – a todo list or a checklist sort of approach so on upcoming i do the action
tracy- there coudl be a way to add new suggested actions to the countdown/political action need
liz – and i do the action and i check it off and it’s visible that i’ve done it , a declaration, so you see “3000 other people have done this…”
adina- a calendar/action widget

lack of structure and formal hierarchy. freaks out washington. they like to pick the most famous person in the room nad pick them to give a speech from a very high podium.

todd – it is a west coast east c
oast thing.

adina – this is a good fodder for the hacking mashup doit session. before that do we want a … upstream

tim – is there a microformat use case for activism, issues, etc.

tantek – the closest thing is you could use todo vocabulary from icalendar. todo items that don’t have a defined person who’s supposed to do them.

liz – a social todo list. collective todo list. important to track how many people ahve done it

pete – or how many intend to do it. 100,000 people have noted to themselves to vote you out of office.

tantek – markup… cut and paste in blog post – integrated tools that m ake it trivial for someone to integrate into blog post – in wordpress, moveable type.

43 things site – public todo lists – existing human behavior – so why not put this on your own blog.

liz – repeats what pete said about 100K people vote you out of office

adina – would be interesting for a codeblue tool….

pete – can you subscribe tot he feed of people who subscribe to skydiving…

tantek – hmmm the list of people who have “vote” on their todo.

oooo!

pete – digg thing of a flash visual of what’s being paid attention to. on 43things they are doing something similar but it’s todo items.

liz – imagine the realtime poll thingie in newspapers tracking what people are paying attention to

todd – site called ….? dopa… campaigns wikia

tantek – i’s on wikipedia

tim – voter information guide, getting past partisan yelling, there’s a growing community on that. get a page up on there on DOPA.

silona – he just put a polling piece on there.

adina – the eff page is a good resource for it.

Adina – so, campaigns is different from neutral point of view.

Tim –
Adina – I have no interest in a neutral point of view on DOPA.

Adina – discussion of wikipedia article – it lacks a description of the unintended effects. Let’s flesh that out.

Todd – CPSR, Leage of Technical Voters, EFF – that’s the place for it but Wikipedia isn’t necessarily.

Adina – once you’re up to the point of doing pro and con that means the issue has been framed for you already.

tantek: if the battle ground has been defined you might have already lost.

adina – exactly. for or against is too late in a way, there is rethinking needed of what are you trying to.

todd – talks about campaigns wikia

pete – we could use dopa as the test case for these ideas
***

tim – a wiki edit is hard. we need something that will be like digg-ing.

who is editing. some low number of people, 1700, make 75% of edits…

tim – getting past the yelling…

Adina – taking off my nonpartisan hat. this will ruin your day. here is a map of saudi oil production. this number has been flat. the plateau starts. number of oil rigs. they start to order rig after rig trying to get more oil out of the ground. there are a # of potential explanations. they can’t make any more and they are desp. trying to put in new wells in the ground. timeframe for slope. the panic drilling starts in spring 04. and then jumps up in 05. continues to accelerate now. their producction has been flat. this is peak oil.

tantek – read up on peak oil

adina – theoildrum.com

liz – that coudl be investment banks overoptimistic about investing in exploration and drilling.

tracy -o and keeping prodution flat on purpose …

tantek- a big problem

adina – this could have a huge impact on civilization
tantek – oh it’s so much worse than that. you cant even pick it apart. it’s not even partisan… swap out political party

[I agree with Tantek]

adina – i disagree with you …and i’ll explain why over lunch

tantek – peak oil, read up on it

pete – gigantic value web

tantek – the layout of towns. roads, infrastructure
pete – the way food is grown and distributed

***

lunch

talking about activism
truthiness, wikipedia politics, la times attempt to talk about israel/lebanon, best practices for wiki discussions etc., todd talks about juan cole/al franken – talk page (on wikipedia) – see also timeline 2006 israel-lebanon conflict
todd – they say inaccuracies are corrected quickly but… this one is not
pete – the word “provocation ” – contentious –

history & diff
tracking turbulence on wikipedia
making movie of changes to wikipedia articles.
then you could tag up segments of the movie and note “here is the meta analysis of what was happening”

more intense disc. with adina and silona about social software apps for political action memes. msg to your cell phone or todo list, your five friends all voted on x issue.. you should too… (i.e. blog-based/political dodgeball) using xfn . what if your technorati favorites (or however you tag your blog feeds) had xfn and you used that for your action todo list.

*****
Starting up again.

Adina – what about having a barcamp-style political/tech meeting.
Liz – What about the cpsr conference as a forum for that? a track to the conference?
… is it election week?
Tim – every weekend there’s something going on
Silona – oct. 13 is the code-a-thon
Adina – technopolitics – hey chris, is it possible to call it a barcamp? is there a rule?
Chris: huh? oh… Are you going to charge?
Adina : no. does it matter?
chris: no.
liz : hey chris, are there any rules?
chris: No.
liz: not that i care if there are. hahaah.

***

kid oakland – bloggers united. local bloggers political bloggers…

***
3:00
dopa timescale? senate commerce – after labor day
what can we do right now

right now today
– EFF action alert
– post to your blog the DOPA widget from : http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net/?p=73

– fix to wikipedia entry. it is missing some information. about the scope of the bill

this week:
– 2-3 phone calls to boxer’s staffer, the guy at Public Knowledge who’s working on this, is there useful in-person stuff to do?
– things we can think of??? building a widget or a badge

action: email or call the ALA
adina : public knowledge and boxer staffer

facebook: give them a variant of the badge?
liz: who wants to edit the wikipedia page on dopa? john? You would be good at that.
John: Oh. Um. Actually I’m doing it now.
Liz: Oh. Of course you are.

***

Here’s the badge, from Bump on a Blog

Tracy’s to-do list on 43things, very cool: stop dopa

I signed up on 43things just to see how it works and it’s nifty.

Barcamp Stanford – Notes (cleaned up)

August 26, 2006 Liz

Barcamp Stanford – August 26 2006

Rah! It’s BarCamp! At Stanford!

Why am I here? People keep asking… rather suspiciously. Next time I will answer that I am a benevolent gazillionaire that loves to give money to Web 2.0 startups and quirky bloggers. Instead of saying I’m a housewife ex-programmer and poet who’s been out of work for 5 years. Lucky for me people talk to me anyway and are not hacker-snobby.

****

“Attention” discussion:

I came in quite late. People are talking about: root.net and Touchstone – an attention management engine. Both sound interesting.

Someone talks about 2 kinds of consumer. The smart direct consumer who knows how to get exactly to the thing they want (the source of the mortg4ge refi). Companies will/should pay for access to their attention. As opposed to the dumb consumer who goes through expensive-to-the-end-company intermediaries, lots of clicks, form filling out, which added up, costs the company 350 bucks. So the smart consumer is saving them 350 bucks. And they should be paying (someone? the smart consumer?) for that attention.

Lifestyle data – trading that private data P2P.

One dude’s friend who is a “star dieter”. She gets paid 30-50 K by Weight Watchers for her story. They sell it for 1.5 million to glossies. (?!!) Then it’s sold again for 4-5 bucks a pop to millions of people. What if that were more p2p. [I think this was James talking, the health/life/something guy)

Ryan: That’s 15-20 years out. Recording automatic data. “Oh, ryan ate an apple. Recorded.”

me: why 15-20 years out!?

James: some of it is near & some far, a lot of it will happen sooner

(Keywords, ads. Some people are taking the stance that “ads are bad”. [or… Ads are so yesterday.] But on the other hand, contextual ads are the proven way to go at the moment)

“word wide” tshirt dude: Gesturebank. Looking to track specific gestures. Sign/signifier question. [I lose what he’s talking about]

Ryan: Keywords are very small info. 1.5 words average in a search. But your clickstream is huge amt of info compared to one search.

[Totally.. have I not been saying this for a zillion years… the ways that people are information! and we have to look at people as data as many ways as possible and open access for them to their own data!]

[I am thinking of the aol data exposed and how it is likely being mined this very minute,…. obviously very valuable!]

[Also, I like the idea of making easy ways to toggle your openness levels. Not just a one-time thing. You know when you’re in your house, you’re private. You know when you go outside that you’re not. Make that difference clear in browsers or other tools. How often I want to use Anonymouse or something like that… just build it in and educate people about what it means.]

More discussion of ads.

word wide guy: invited Adina to continue what she was trying to say before she was interrupted

Adina: Sort of demurs

word wide guy: Pertinent information at that particular moment. It changes. … Say for example a person looking to tell their breast cancer survivor story. And the perosn looking for that story. Aren’t those the same thing? We don’t have to call it an ad or not an ad.

[It’s a connection possibility. But I would add that it’s either monetized by someone or it’s not, and if it is, who is it benefitting? This is an important, important political question.]

Ryan: But to a company it matters. To those people it doesn’t b/c they don’t make a profit… etc

[I flip and say imprudent things probably not responding in proper register/context]

Me: Hey! Content producers also want to and should make money off their story… why treat it like they are free labor for people to make money off!! Why is the model that the breast cancer survivor does not make a cent off it. As a content producer myself I think it is vile.

Ryan: name calling . . . i’m not vile… hey now…

Me: sorry, not you… didn’t mean to call you vile… but… ack. The idea.

Ryan: … (he explains but I kind of missed it from general embarrassment. Lord knows he is probably someone Important and I just was an ass. Did not mean to be rude personally but I stick to the idea. (At least I didn’t say the F-word this time!) Fine, I get it; enough people have told me that The Money is not in “generating content” but rather is in getting a lot of user generated content for free or dirt cheap and you will make a ton of money off it, while implying that if I don’t get on the bandwagon I’m lazy or idealistic or both. Arrrgh. I don’t have to like it.)

Adina from Socialtext: I find it interesting, the phrase “choose to expose”. Someone used that word. Mining someone’s attention seems like it’s free. I was using Last.fm. Broadcasting my music. So, the other day Ihad an earworm for shlocky sentimental music I didn’t want to broadcast to everyone… do I have the opportunity to prune. If I do, how much of an extra overhead does it take for me to prune, in my daily activity. Here’s my browser tabs since just this morning, barcamp. (Laughter. She has a zillion tabs.) Someone mentions a book, a web site, I bring it up. That’s a whole bunch of tabs. Am I going to go back and say which of these things to i want to expose?

word dude: kind of like del.icio.us…..

Adina: Maybe 25% of them I chose to put to delicious. The others are in the log.

word dude: It’s a cost/benefit… you could turn off broadcast… and then turn it back on.

Adina: You wind up with extra filtering tasks you didn’t have before, an extra burden…

James: mash up your tags with … [I missed it]

word dude: You don’t want the world to know when you’re looking at something unsavory… or bad taste…

Adina: Say you’re reading a news article about the London bombing plot with liquid explosives and you go look up liquid explosives, but you’re not at all interested in … Well, I guess someone’s watching you anyway….

word dude: There’s no downside in capturing your own stream for your own uses. So you have a geeky interest in liquid explosives… but that would not be sufficient to tag you as terrorist.

[So says the voice of privilege… As if it isn’t already happening… it’s sufficient if you’re muslim or arab-american. I know what he means though and I want to work for that world and that utopian vision and I am acting as if it is true, even if it isn’t true for me.]

Adina: That’s assuming that intelligence services are intelligent, which….

word dude: But it would become pretty damn obvious this was not the case for you.

[hmm i disagree with that one and again… already happening here and is way more so in some other countries]

Adina: Annoying thing on Amazon. They recommend stuff based on occasional data. I searched for a gift for 2 year old relative. Now my own recommendations have children’s music forevermore…

Me: Opting out of that, there could be a way made easy

Adina: Probably there is a way but not so easy, a 6 step thing…

[I surf a bit. Root.net looks kind of cool!]

word dude: You probably never want to turn you attention recorder off. but you do want to turn off whether it is sent to root.net. Because ultimately I’m looking up those explosives… and my uncle works for the airline industry… and I’m curious… and la
ter on if something is served to me on stumbleupon or delicious… then does THAT get served to someone who might draw the wrong conclusions.

Adina: It’s distracting and interrupting sometimes to have the “related things” in your view and you don’t always want it.

*** end of session ***

Open space – a self organizing interlude

Todd Davies heads it up.

There’s stickies on whiteboard with A B C D E F etc. on them and blank ones. 15 spaces plus blank ones. Various places around the room are labelled A B C etc.

Setting up spaces where people can move easily between discussions.

The Four Principles. (freechild.org) Open space discussion principles.

[it is slightly harder to move between discussions with your laptop open]

Bumblebees and butterflies.

– whoever comes is the right people
– whatever happens is all that could have
– whenever it starts is the right time
– when it’s over it’s over.

The law of two feet. If you are no longer interested then you can leave… it’s your responsibility.

People get up pretty much one by one to claim a block of space and declare a topic.

Topics:

Ajax UI – best/worst (Adina)
Social media v.s influence brokers (Vic)
Browsers. why?
Drupal (Neil)
Open educative systems (Liza)
Scaling data on the cheap (Ryan from Google)
Creativity, think outside box in organization
Brain/machine interfaces. Invasive or non-invasive. egtms (?) etc. (guy with glasses and curly hair)

*****

Adina shows me nifty new socialtext version. I get all excited. It might be perfect for the femsf wiki. Or for my last-century women writers wiki.

****

I still want a social network for all of history.

******

I go to “open education” – What if we assume we don’t have schools? What would we build to education people?

[I come in after it’s started b/c i was dealing with M.]

Jonathan Dugan: 15 profs, sharing info. open? or closed?

[I wonder where these miracle profs are…]

Liza Loop. Loopcenter – palo alto. Take a look at the MIT open courseware. Look at that. Also David Wiley’s open courseware conference at the University of Utah.

group membership – open or closed.

Liza:

what are the roles that schools fulfill?

– babysitting. social. custonianship iof the kids. and the vry elderly and handicapped. we call it school but what we’re really doing is social care. one funciton.

– another is sorting and selecting. grading.

– recordkeeping.

– educative experience.

– certification.

What if these functions were done independently and optimized.

We could have kids log in wherever they were. They could stay home and be in their parents’ care.

Jonathan Dugan: There’s problems with that… that assumes someone is home…

Liza: Not necessarily. Kids can be anywhere. Bioidentification…

Liz: They could be at work with a parent. Depending on the work.

James – Schools are factories producing a product with qualifications. Subjective tools to get into another institutionalized game. On the web more people can do stuff.

[Yeah James anarchy 4 evah!!!!]

Tim – (citizen think tank on his name tag.) If you start at an open school and then moving to standard one – that is hard.

Liza: Home schoolers do it and they built ways to do it.

Liz – another function of schools ideally is to shelter public intellectuals from market forces. We’re not doing too well at that. It becomes its own market

James – Plus if you want research money for your lab you get bucks from microsoft …

Tim – Schools decide who goes to university and who doesn’t, early.

Liz – yes, tracking starts early and it’s hard to switch tracks up even if it isnt overt.

Tracy Ruggles – how to judge if soeone is competent at a thing?

Liz – that is [what Liza called] certification and what we need is ways of tracking what people produce. And judgements of it. How to avoid it being a popularity/charm contest. However, the current system doesn’t always work so well either ( so flaws shouldn’t stop us from building it. )

[kid bathroom break so I missed a bunch]

James – more about kids’ autonomy

Tim – scarcity in teachers could be eliminated even worldwide.

Liz – decentralize more. Anarchy is good.

Liza: Anarchy??!

James: Anarchy!

Liz: ANARCHY! RAH!

…

Liz – Track attention streams, as we were talking about in the attention talk just now, and if decentralized then there must be ways to track what people do, pay attention to and learn. People are what they are doing and what they pay attention to, who they talk to…

James – That sounds like the openyear project.

[later after I look it up – HOLY CRAP… James is right… right on, openyear people! I will investigate further. Thanks James! A tear springs to my eye! I love a really juicy manifesto. It opens people’s minds. Says it a different way. Allows a shift of vision. This is a good one…. I have been trying to explain this vision… It is *so* important and ties in with what i have been saying about collaboration, idea transmission, crediting people for ideas. Also! This is exactly the sort of thing I was just talking about with Silona!]

Liz – And how to pay people for their expertise or teaching. Schools also exist to pay people for that. [I say, wishing as so many of us wish, that someone would freaking pay.]

Tim – Wikiversity.

[I think of how cutting and snobby academics in the humanities are right now towards Wikipedia b/c they get papers from their students citing it. Giant arguments about trustable sources and judgement. As if being in a book is magic legitimacy? WhatEVER.]

James – It’s a huge political issue…

Tracy – It’s about creating a culture. Kids are self organizing anyway. They are doing it whether we make it happen or not.

Liz – Yah sure, DIY, then we’ll oppress them more b/c it will be scary… and they will be vulnerable and hijackable by corporations like a cultural revolution controlled by corporate world. Oh wait. I forgot, we’re already in that.

Liza – The classroom model exists and we have to deal with it. We don’t have to destroy it.

A guy: Oh I don’t know. Destruction has a place.

Tracy Ruggles – We need to make Barcamp in high school, junior high context, introduce those concepts. Teach them tools for self-organizing.

[Right on!]

Liza: Generational… age… old people who narrow down and only tell one story…

Tracy – This plays into concepts of age, ossification

Liza – age segregation can also be [undermined] by net and open education

Look at gomilpitas.

NASA – showing interest in serious gaming – they want research to back it up – but they are interested.

homeschooling…

[I bumblebee away.]

Drupal – Neal and 2 other people – I have missed it – I don’t ha
ve anything to contribute except “I’m an end user of it at Blogher” and “I’m thinking of poking at it and trying it” (We’ve talked about it for feministsf.net)

[I bumblebee away again.]

***

Influence brokers session

Dude with beard – You! *points* How do YOU get out of the blog ghetto? How do YOU become influential?

Me: Oh blah. Hmmm. Well, by knowing who to talk with. I am more influential if I can talk to the right 2 people and they listen – rather than being popular and 5000 people reading my blog, but not those two.

Scott (wearing high-status-geekitude ancient-looking “The Well” tshirt) – influence is about ideas because you care about them and want them heard

[Yeah!]

Scott – Becoming the ebay of content – is there a scarcity? or not?

Vic – Measuring ROI. Ad in nytimes you can measure. How do we measure influence. The rate sheet for the NY Times. (Vic later gives me a card and his name is “Vic Podcaster”, from Hot From Silicon Valley. Who is this man of mystery? Where is his “about” page? Is he incognito? Why no mask? Wait, why don’t I have a mask? It would solve all my secret identity problems. Or I could just take my glasses on and off.)

Liz – Monetizing vs influence. different.

Scott – Influence of ideas and opinion! that’s what’s important.

Jonathan Dugan – We need accountability so that bloggers if their view matches reality over time then… you get a plus. if not then you get dinged for your bs or your non expertise

Liz – Yeah! Like whuffie but for accountability. You have an idea market. Your bad ideas take away from your rep. Your good ones persist over time and you get credit for them.

Jonathan: Disgusting examples of erasing history to fit current political spin. The NY times takes a line out of a story and acts like it never was written that way.

Bearded guy: 911 stories that disappeared…

John Kim: How is this diff from a market. How do we make something that is different from a market, from just not trusting the nytimes anymore and not reading it.

Vic – That’s what blogging is.

Liz – no. they can change it. It isn’t.

Vic – persistence

Jonathan – deep tagging

Vic – a wiki

Scott – content structuring

Liz – identity tracking is important for it

Vic – while writing you can backspace. the tool is editable…

Scott – i can page down and find stuff faster than i can listen to it

bearded dude – i have something better than google

liz – what?

bearded dude – relevancy rating…

Liza – you can learn to hear faster than you can talk

Jonathan – you can watch a video in 40 minutes, it’s great… just speeded up

bearded dude: videotape, streaming… with indexing and random access, the user coproduces, they go back over it and snippet it and stuff

liz- they can tag minute 1:32, or whatever, with a tag

john kim – so you’re just saying make it a composed artifact like text then
bearded guy – neurolinguistic programming and studies of it – visual learners – radio tv split – etc if you read it nixon won if you heard on radio then it was a tie, if you watch on tv then kennedy blew him away.

vic – new media has to be difff formats for same content

jonathan – thent he holographic simulation…

*general hullaballoo as some people say text is more important. some say audio/video is. Simulations. Games.*

scott – some things translate well and some dont. the mcneil lehrer report moment of silence while the names scroll down the page

jonathan – depth to which people wthink for them selves -t he more info you provide the more their brains turn off. there will always be a place wehre text trumps these rich media formats. (jonathan dugan) it’s not as easy to consume. you have to have a readership willing to dig in and think . it’s a more arcane system

Liz – Games!

Jonathan – holograph

Liz – The whole universe simulated in a universe-sized simulation! Cool, we just invented God!

No one appreciates my humor…

…
[I bumblebee away, because I see Silona.]

Conv. with silona on legislation, big collaborative papers. I suggest that the best model for it is consumating-like. Also, all literature could be that way. Each bit separatable and taggable and commentable. And you can rank all the bits and your rankings trace back to you. Instead of you ranking the person who had the whole collection of ideas. Everything2 did not do it so well. Consumating has the right idea, is on the right track as is Flickr. Collaboration! It will make everything better, and ideas better, and synergy, and art, and empowerment! Silona gets a shiver and has an aha moment. We talk about big science collaborations, which I got to experience by watching John work at Fermilab and on the Amanda neutrino detection experiment.

I *heart* Silona.

She is doing a time machine project & also brassiere reclamation cantina at burning man.

We talk about the Code-a-thon. I ask if she called it a lock-in because of the church thing. (Yes. It is a southern baptist thing and was meant to be full of irony, but no one who’s not from the south gets it. Silona did week-long camps where they had low protein, low sleep, and high propaganda, including Led Zeppelin played backwards.) The Code-a-thon sounds fabulous! Coding! Drupal! php! Tranquil loungers with vibrating subwoofers as seen at burning man, fabulous wireless speed at huge lan party space, wide range of levels of programming ability, ui stuff, martini rampage. Stickers for the UI experts, “ask me”… they will wander about to help the programmers.

We talk with Adina. Adina rocks… I fade from reality a bit… my sinuses hurt… my laptop runs out of battery… Adina tells Silona to talk to Eugene (eek) about what we were talking about. Adina asks Kevin what the most interesting thing he’s seen in the last month is… It’s a straw that is a water filter and lasts for a year. No one is sure how cheap it is. Clearly beyond camping use, it could save many lives…

***

Met at giant circuit-board egg on University Ave. Dinner at University Cafe (so-so for the expense but at least it wasn’t too noisy. Talked with Tracy (Galen’s dad) about his taggregator idea. Del.icio.us. Tagging. I am a lazy tagger. Anarchy (We maybe used the word anarchy in a way unusual to Liza.) Austin. Sxswi. Poetry scene in SF. Did i lose his card where he wrote the names of 2 bay area poets? How can I lose something between dinner and getting home? Cooper something, language poetry person… [ah – it is Cooper Renner] and another poet in Oakland. I recommended Writers With Drinks and Edinburgh Castle to him. (He just moved here from Austin.) We talked about attentiontrust.org and the other stuff from the attention talk and the education discussion. Rook talked about voip and (the lack of) open source IM and voice over IM and why there is no application for seeing the IM status of friends of friends. SIP. Then I lost the thread of the conversation.)

Milo and another kid (Galen) played with a Transformer and a Bionicles creature, almost the whole afternoon, running around doing hide & seek & writing about aliens on the whiteboards. It was nice. As we left (to meet them at the restaurant) Milo commen
ted quite shyly to me, “I think that kid whose name is Galen? I think he is
a Friend.” (Rare moment.)

Rook is v. curious about Galen counting in Korean for hide & seek.

Milo wrote “Egghead Egghead Egghead Egghead Egghead” mysteriously over on the paper tablecloth, while Galen created a kid vs. adult menu where all the adult options were like “Calimari Salmon Tofu Flakes” and the kid options were hot dogs for way cheaper. Observant! He did not riff off of our suggestions of worms or other nonsense foods and then I realized he was properly suspicious of mocking adult humor and condescension, but we didn’t mean it that way.

Oh yeah – almost forgot – Tracy told me about FeedLounge which sounds like it does everything I have been wanting from a feed reader – but it is 5 bucks a month. I’m considering it since they promise they allow you to export your feeds with tags.

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