Michael Moore’s new movie – Slacker Uprising – is now available.
If you are unfamiliar with Moore’s present project, he is offering the movie at no cost (download) to increase the likelihood young people will vote. It may offend your sensibilities, but it is probably not aimed at you. Whatever you think of his approach or his politics, it is hard to dispute the importance of his mission.
Technorati takes it upon itself to publish a state of the blogosphere report. I pay attention because I like the numbers. This edition looks more detailed than most and is emerging by topic over the course of this week.
Basic Stats
One of the first things I noticed was their break down of bloggers by age. Given the hype regarding the interests of young folks in “new media”, I was very surprised by the low percentage of 18-24 year old bloggers. I am thinking that Technorati does not consider posting to Facebook or MySpace as blogging. The study did not consider individuals who would be in a K-12 settings.
The report also indicates there are more male than female bloggers. For some reason, I thought I had read otherwise. Bloggers tend to be well educated – 74% are college grads and 42% have some graduate school experience.
Only 8% of blogs have been active for 6 years. Hooray for the persistent ones.
Curious about how a hacker was able to access Gov. Palin’s email? The account hacked was a personal Yahoo account. This article from MacWorld explains how it was done.
Yahoo offers a method for users to recover a forgotten password. You may recognize the procedure from your own experience. When creating an account, users are allowed to select from a limited set of questions a question that must be answered before a forgotten password is revealed (in this case before access to change a password is allowed). If you know the answer to the question, you can gain access. If you select a question that is “researchable”, you are vulnerable. In considering some of the questions, it seemed that questions I felt most comfortable predicting I could answer consistently (e.g., mascot of my high school) would be the type of information someone else might be able to locate. I was a Kingsley-Pierson “Panther”.
I investigated my own Yahoo account (I don’t use Yahoo for email, but a Yahoo account is needed for Flickr). I agree with the security assessment – if you know the Yahoo ID and if you selected a question to protect your password requiring information that might be readily available, it would not be that difficult to hack. For example, it might be possible to determine the city in which I was born and it would be more likely if I was a political figure.
As you might guess, I did not use my high school mascot or city of birth as my security question.
You would know that your security had been breached (you might not be able to get back into your account because the password had been changed, you received an email sent to a second account indicating your password had been changed), but by that time any information you were hiding would be available to others.
I have owned a Blackberry for a couple of weeks now and it has changed the way I think about cell phones. I had a TREO before so I am not new to “smart phones”, but the ease of use of the newer equipment has caused me to both use the phone more and to explore more applications.
I am presently interested in the opportunity to send images to Flickr by email. The combination of commonly available camera phones and Flickr capabilities would seem to have some interesting applications.
What appeals to be is the opportunity to establish a Flickr email address for uploads that can be shared with multiple individuals combined with the opportunity to set permissions on uploads so that I or another account owner can review uploads before the images are shared with the world. This seems a practical way to implement classroom projects – a combination of convenient access AND control.
If you are interested, I have generated a more complete description of the process.
EdWeek reports that candidates have commented on education in recent ads and speeches.
“Senator McCain … is interested in empowering families and speaking directly to the educational needs of Americans, as opposed to the system,” said Eugene W. Hickok, a former deputy secretary of education under President Bush who is advising the McCain campaign. “Whereas Obama, beyond his mantra of more money, more money, is really just supporting these traditional approaches to the system.”
My read of this article is that policy comments follow fairly typical party lines. Still, the article offers a nice summary and includes the recent television ads in case you have decided to watch movies until mid November.
While based on “web kit“, underlying code more central to Apple web ventures, Google decided to first release their new browser, Chrome, for the Windows platform. Mac users may be envious of the Google strategy.
Here is a temporary fix. LifeHacker describes how others have already created a port of Chrome for Linux and Mac users.
I gave CrossOver Chromium a try and it is functional, i.e., something to experiment with until Google releases the official version.
I listen to audiobooks or podcasts while I work out. Lately, I have been listening to Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. I can only “listen” while involved in another task that allows me to think so getting through 20+ hours of content will take many trips to the gym.
I really like the way Friedman writes. The content flows easily and his approach combines interesting stories often based in personal experiences and well reasoned arguments supported with specific and annotated facts and statistics. It is the type of approach I can process and find convincing.
I have been thinking about the difference between this approach to persuasion and the present experience of trying to understand the rhetoric of the election – vague comments, spin, sarcasm, and irrelevant concerns. Consider the attention in the past few days to lipstick and pork (but not the undeserved windfall directed toward supporters).
Today, in Intro Psych, I was trying to make the point that trying to understand the work of researchrs can be valuable to those who have no interest in becoming psychologists or taking more psychology courses. What researchers have to do is “operationalize” the concepts they study in ways that allow measurement or manipulation. They cannot hide behind vague terms like motivation or intelligence most of us use in daily conversation, but must determine how they will measure these variables. Everyone could benefit from such a challenge. It is a great exercise in taking the vagueness out of topics. Tax and spend, liberal, etc. would be too imprecise to be useful. What do phrases such as these really mean. Should we really expect that it would be allowable to spend on something like a war and not take responsibility for raising the money to support such an effort. The reality of the present deficit would seem to argue some in power accept spend, but don’t tax. Perhaps sometimes to be responsible you have to tax. Critical thinking requires getting to a clearly defined position that can then be evaluated against well defined standards. Keeping the country in the black represents a possible standard.
I know that Friedman has his critics who contest his logics or his facts. However, in being precise at least you are willing to give your potential critics something specific to address and what is expected is the same level of specificity in counter claims.
Ignorant as we want to be (paraphrase of a Friedman comment). Friedman describes our tendency to find a way to accept a short term, self-serving solution while ignoring long-term and significant problems. Don’t look too closely at the facts or think an immediate solution through to the point of eventual consequences. Perhaps we prefer our politics the same way.
BTW – material related to Hot, flat and crowded is available online. This is serious stuff. Being ignorant, even if you would rather be, is not acceptable.
You must be logged in to post a comment.