herestomwiththeweather

Rick Martin Memorial

2011-03-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

This is Gilbert Perreault and Rene Robert remembering Rick Martin yesterday.

The French Connection line is why I've been a hockey fan since I first saw a hockey game on TV. Even on warm days, I wore my Sabres jacket to elementary school and I played hockey at the Ice Haus in Houston before it was demolished to build the Town and Country Mall. C'est la vie.

Practical Ethics and the Internet

2010-07-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

In a recent post about Facebook, I linked to RFC 1087: Ethics and the Internet. Although my point was clear that people were leaving Facebook on ethical grounds, I didn't go into more detail about RFC 1087.

Heres what RFC 1087 says.

The IAB strongly endorses the view of the Division Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Division of Network, Communications Research and Infrastructure which, in paraphrase, characterized as unethical and unacceptable any activity which purposely: ...(e) compromises the privacy of users.

EFF explained how Facebook compromised the privacy of its users.

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

So why should we care about the ethics of privacy? Why did the Internet Activities Board think this is important?

If you agree with Zuckerberg, privacy doesn't matter. If he's right, then we shouldn't mind if uninvited strangers read our email, right? For some people, Facebook's bait and switch may have allowed that.

A common option when you lose the password to your web email service is to either have a password reset link emailed to you or you can answer a security question that you have previously answered. For instance, one popular web email service presents "what was your favorite childhood book?" as a choice. Maybe you really loved "Winnie the Pooh." If you are using this particular web email service and chose that question and answer and you also listed the book in your Facebook interests, then it would be very easy for a stranger to gain access to your email (when he could not previously). You don't have anything in your email you would like to keep secret, right?

Update 7/15: Eben Moglen

To Kill a Mockingbird's 50th Anniversary

2010-07-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

Maybe 20 years ago, a friend let me borrow a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The 50th anniversary reminds me that I need to return it. It's no surprise that this book has come under criticism. It tells a kind of story that is not often heard.

It is when Jem is allowed to have a rifle that we learn the meaning of the title. Atticus says

I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

In I Remember Atticus, Jim Perdue explains this reference.

Blue jays are viewed as the bullies of the bird world. They're loud, territorial, and aggressive.

These blue jays are not people but institutions and their functionaries. The social construction of reality is composed of stories these loud blue jays construct to legitimize their place in the world. The loud blue jay overwhelms any evidence that is contrary to its story.

In the Wall Street Journal, the loudest blue jay of them all, Allen Barra explains why we must shoot the Mockingbird.

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained.

From the blue jay's perspective, there's two types of stories: the story told by the blue jay or stories that are controversial. Any other stories, like To Kill a Mockingbird, are unacceptable.

Who was the Atticus Finch where I grew up? It was the head high school football coach, Oscar Cripps. Like Atticus, Oscar Cripps is the man we all wish we were. He inspired us to be better people. "There is no I in team." For all of us who have been blessed by his sacrifice and integrity, there is no controversy. I noticed this recent reference to an effort to honor him.

SBISD should defer to campus leadership when it comes to allowing schools to maintain and build on its traditions. When a school overwhelmingly wants to honor a former teacher with the naming of a new campus facility, it is absurdly bad management for SBISD to prevent that from happening. It is typical bureaucratic government thinking to substitute a bunch of top-down regulations and Board politics for the common sense of the people who know best about what is right for the school. When a school board overrules local desires, it creates separation from a community that wants to be supportive. No community affairs expert would ever have advised SBISD to oppose the tsunami of support for naming a stadium for a community legend like Oscar Cripps. But SBISD seems incapable of understanding, or even caring, about what locals want.

What is this about? From the same online publication, an earlier article explained what was going on.

Kellner said she understood from the dozens of e-mails and calls she and other trustees received supporting Cripps that he was an outstanding coach. But she said the district has a thick file on Cripps containing evidence that made it difficult for her to support the naming.

"We need to adhere to the highest standards, we need to avoid additional controversy," Kellner said.

Really? Thank you Spring Branch Independent School district for the living example of the relevance of To Kill a Mockingbird on its 50th anniversary.

Update: Somehow I overlooked this post with a number of comments earlier today. The comment by Bob King was particularly interesting and is a must read. Another comment is found here: "The beautiful thing is that Oscar Cripps doesn’t need this (the facility naming)," he said. "He couldn’t care less. There are thousands of people who would run through fire for this man."

Facebook: Breaking up is Hard to Do

2010-05-27T21:24:00.000-07:00

I mentioned my admiration for Danah Boyd's work in a previous post almost three years ago:

I usually don't say much about online social networks since Danah Boyd pretty much says everything that needs to be said.

With the extraordinary recent blowback against Facebook and her SXSW talk, I was curious to see if she had blogged about people quitting facebook, and indeed, she has: Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not was a worthwhile read and I found myself agreeing with her for the most part.

However, consistent with pretty much everyone else I've seen explaining their decision to stay with Facebook, she unnecessarily creates imaginary straw men: people who are leaving just because they're unhappy. I don't know anyone who is leaving just because they're unhappy. I do know people departing because of Facebook behaving unethically.

Let's cut to the chase and get to the part where Facebook is the abusive boyfriend that everyone has to stand by. Boyd explains that we have to stand by Facebook because it has put its users in a vulnerable position:

I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.

This is an honorable position that lets us preclude leaving facebook from having any meaning unless it changes the behavior of Facebook. However, many people are leaving exactly because they have learned that Facebook holds all the chips in the relationship and will not change. If they and people they care about can leave Facebook without damage, that is meaningful for them regardless of its effects on Facebook's behavior. Can you say cult?

If all this sounds strangely familiar, it is. Again, we have a case of a corporation privatizing profits while socializing costs (our time) and by sticking with facebook (and falling for a "bunch of mistakes" - predators do not mind being thought incompetent), we're bailing them out. Good luck with that.

Assuming Facebook won't change, the only answer for a problem like this is for people to leave. It's a world wide web last time I checked and this is a trainwreck we've been watching in slow-motion for four years that demands more and more of people's time. Time that people don't have to deal with this nonsense anymore. It's time to get radical about protecting our time.

Maia Oden Performs at Cafe Caffeine 12/27

2008-12-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

Maia Oden will be returning to Texas in a week and she's going to make a trip to Austin to play at Cafe Caffeine the evening of December 27. This is great news!

After attending college near her hometown in Texas, she found her way to Boulder and Taos for many years. It is just recently that she started to record music. Some of the songs are on her MySpace page. The name of the band is Laughter's Fountain.

I don't keep up with too many people from college. But I've kept up with Maia and also with my friend Lewis as Lewis and I frequently enjoy the live music at the Continental club. Lewis and I saw Maia perform a couple of short gigs in college. It will be great to see her sing again!

Austin Co-op Music Festival

2008-10-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm really looking forward to the Austin Co-op Music Festival tonight at the French Legation Museum. A new crop of sustainable businesses (Black Star Beer Co-op, South Austin Food Co-op...) are emerging in Austin and this seems like a great place to talk to like-minded people.

802 San Marcos St. (Google Map)
Austin, TX
When: Friday Oct 24
6-10PM

No Bush Bailout Protests in Austin

2008-09-26T09:47:00.001-07:00

Update 9/28 - Barry Ritholtz shares a bailout comparison graphic buried in the Sunday NYT.

Dozens of protesters along 6th street in front of the offices of JP Morgan and Senator John Cornyn yesterday evening.

An Austin man questions the sanity of giving handouts to the same people who created the financial crisis...

Another protester shares his thoughts...

One Web Day

2008-09-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

Today is One Web Day, Earth Day for the Internet. Cafe Caffeine is hosting Austin's OWD today (Live video feed here). If you want to hear how this interview of Bernard relates to One Web Day, tune in this evening at 5:30.

Update (1:15pm central): Douglas Rushkoff is guest blogging on boingboing today. His book Get Back in the Box introduced me to Bernard in January '06.

Update 9/23: Rushkoff blogs at boingboing today on open currency.

Update 9/23 #2: "It is time we use the inspiration and power of this technology, this community, this dream, to fix what is broken in this real world. It is time the virtual gets used to fix the real...But the fact is things are this dark, and we have been given that tool. And we must use it to learn again how citizens govern." - Lessig on One Web Day.

OpenID on Insoshi on Rails 2.1

2008-09-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

It's late Sunday night and I'm fixing spaghetti with picante sauce while doing laundry. Who is up for some technical blogging?
Update 10/16 - OpenID support is now in the master branch of Insoshi. If you install Insoshi, you've got it.

Update 1/17/09 - updated Austin on Rails pointer which changed.

Insoshi is open source software built with Ruby on Rails. It lets anyone create their own social networking website. Insoshi is a work in progress but since it is open source, it can be improved by anyone. On August 23, there was a request for OpenID on the Insoshi google group. Tonight I'm going to describe the steps I took to get OpenID working with Insoshi. If you want to try it out, just clone my fork of Insoshi on github, do a git submodule init & update, and follow the installation instructions. Of course, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Insoshi is available under the AGPL. As the Insoshi site explains, the AGPL is like the GNU GPL but fixes the loophole for web applications.

Insoshi uses the restful_authentication plugin, so I decided to use the open_id_authentication plugin since plenty of people have already described their experiences using these two together. Currently, the open_id_authentication plugin on github does not work with Rails 2.1 as it is dependent on changes made in edge rails, so I forked my own copy (including it as a git submodule) and made two changes to get it working with 2.1 again. The first change for 2.1 compatibility was unfixing OpenIdAuthentication module's requested_url method to go back to using the deprecated (for edge rails presumably) request.relative_url_root. The second fix was similarly easy to fix. For this one, I lazily borrowed the solution from another fork instead of writing my own. Fields that are posted by the client when she posts her OpenID need to be plumbed through to the OpenID server so that they are available after redirecting to the OpenID server. What was happening here was that the authenticity token posted from the client was getting lost. We fix this by passing the token to the OpenID server. The authenticity token is what prevents cross site request forgeries (which I described at Austin on Rails last year)

Update 9/15: Josh fixed #1 five minutes ago.

Now that the openid plugin is compatible with Rails 2.1, let's start using it within the existing restful_authentication generated files. For the basics, I'm using the railscast episode approach. First, make sure you have the ruby-openid gem installed.

If you're familiar with restful_authentication, you know it generates a sessions controller and a users controller. Insoshi renames the latter the people controller. Note that in the Railscast, it refers to a login instance variable of User. I have changed this instance variable to name (of Person) to work with Insoshi. For old school logins, the client identifies himself with an email parameter instead of a login parameter and for OpenID, the nickname from the OpenID server is assigned to name instead of login. You can see these basic changes here. Also note that for OpenID logins, I've bypassed the validations associated with passwords in the Person model by changing the password_required? method in the Person model.

Update 9/15: We also need to gracefully prohibit an email login for an account that has an OpenID associated with it. So, we change the lookup in Person.authenticate to

u = find_by_email_and_identity_url(email.downcase.strip,nil)

I like the way slicehost's OpenID login lets you toggle between OpenID and old school so I'm doing it that way too. The javascript I checked in differs from slicehost in that I clear out the openid_url field when the old school form is chosen. This way, when the old school credentials are passed, I can easily detect it is not an OpenID login. (I use slicehost for all my deployments)

So, what if the required fields (email & nickname) provided by the OpenID server do not validate? We need to provide the client the opportunity to manually populate those fields. In this checkin, I save a verified_url cookie variable so that when the required fields are manually submitted, we also have an openid to create the new Person.

Before I cover the "remember me" function, I should mention the demo mode you can put Insoshi into. If you log into Insoshi as admin, you click a checkbox for demo mode. I did this as it prints a nice message "This is a demonstration site. Data may be modified or removed without warning." (You can see this message on Insoshi's demo site) After I did this, I got an IM from Rich telling me he was editing my profile. I proceeded to get very paranoid wondering how I had screwed up. It soon became apparent that demo mode makes person id 2 the demo account which everyone can automatically log into. Of course, I was person #2 (admin is #1).

Rails 2.0 introduced cookie-based sessions by default. This requires a secret key to generate hashes for session variables stored in cookies. Because Insoshi is an open source rails application, another thing to keep in mind is that Insoshi could not simply use the rails app generator to generate a secret key. Each installation will generate its own secret key. Since you will be keeping your keys in the home directory, you will need to create a symbolic link in your deploy.rb to your shared directory so they don't get blown away when you deploy. Obviously, you won't be checking them in to your repository (Btw, you will also need to do this for your public/photos directory for your attachment_fu profile photos or they will also disappear when you deploy.)

The "remember me" check box is delegated to the OpenID server, so for OpenID login, the checkbox on the relying party website should not exist. For instance, when the client logs into a website and he's redirected to his OpenID server, the client will be presented with a checkbox that says, for instance, "Skip this step next time I sign in to openidconsumerxyz.com." If the client checks that box, then subsequent accesses to openidconsumerxyz.com will allow the client to proceed immediately without seeing anything from the OpenID server. This will happen if the OpenID server is sent a checkid_immediate mode request. However, the open_id_authentication plugin does not support checkid_immediate. Also, if we modify the plugin to send the checkid_immediate and the client didn't click "skip this step" then the server will send SETUP_NEEDED and the plugin will try to access a setup_url instance variable of the response in complete_open_id_authentication(). First, this is a private variable so it will throw an exception. Second, the setup url is no longer supported in the OpenID 2.0 specification. So, in the next update we'll work around that.

StartupCampAustin

2008-08-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here's Brandon Wiley welcoming everyone to StartupCampAustin. Agenda here.

In the first session in the Quadrangle room, the tables were arranged facing the podium but there was no speaker because sessions were topic-driven, not speaker-driven. We decided to scrap our expectations from previous barcamps and we rearranged the tables in a circle, campfire-style.

This first session was on scaling. A facilitator was chosen and we were off! But something wasn't quite right with the topic. The topic seemed somehow inappropriate (even though we voted for it), maybe because of the many different circumstances that scaling refers to or maybe something else. By the end of the session, there seemed to be a rough consensus that a startup generally shouldn't be wasting time thinking about scaling their technology solution. It seems that often times scalability problems result from failing to practice the principle of subsidiary function. "But we're too big to fail!"

The next session I attended was the cooperative solution. For me, this was the most educational. Donald Jackson facilitated this one. The main contentious claim by a few participants was that, sure, a cooperative might be good for some things (outdoor sports equipment, credit unions, food, etc), but worker-owned cooperatives are not a good solution for a technology outfit. My response to this was that, although a collective might not deliver growth associated with well-known powerhouses like Google, there seem to be several advantages for independent freelancers to form a small collective. Often times, a cooperative can provide better service to customers with better availability and skill sets than one person can provide. How would a cooperative be any better than an S-Corp, LLC, etc?

Speaking of which, the last session I attended was on the well-known business entities. Scott Allen advised that sometimes an entity is not the right path as a contract arrangement for joint work may be a lot simpler. Scott, Joshua McClure and Jennifer Navarrete and others shared lots of great advice. The campfire style was perfect for this topic.

At the end, people were invited to give 3 minute pitches of their products. This was a great idea because I've seen 30 minute pitches suck the life out of barcamps. The pitches were fun this way.

Brandon and Joey Lopez did a great job un-organizing startup camp. At the end, several people expressed the desire to have startup camps once every 3 or 4 months.

StartupCampAustin - August 2nd

2008-07-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight at Tech Night at MonkeyWrench Books, there was a conversation about Twitter which drifted into a conversation about the more decentralized open-source identi.ca done by Evan Prodromou. My mis-pronounciation of Evan's name sounded familiar enough to Brandon Wiley, the original coder of Freenet, that he recognized him from the early days of Freenet. A funny story about their first meeting which was at the O'Reilly P2P Conference was followed by an interesting conversation started by Donald about a decentralized urban farm in San Francisco called myFarm.

After the meeting, Brandon reminded us about Startup Camp Austin and I asked Brandon if I could get him to do a PSA for the event and he agreed.

Brandon, who is a regular at Austin Jelly, has a new startup called Ringlight. Brandon introduced StartupCampAustin at his blog a week ago.

This is high drama

2008-07-13T15:35:00.000-07:00

So says Charlie Rose in his recent interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in regards to what has been called the Bear Stearns bailout. Bear Stearns did not get bailed out. Bear Stearns was given to JP Morgan Chase by American taxpayers. Senator Christopher Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, made this clear in this All Things Considered interview at NPR.

This is an unprecedented action. For the first time ever, taxpayer dollars of this magnitude were paid at risk without a huge guarantee that we're going to be protected as taxpayers.

In the spirit of the shock doctrine, JP Morgan has acquired the fifth largest investment bank with taxpayers footing the bill if it doesn't work out. Dodd also wonders about what seems to be a conflict of interest:

I have great respect for Jamie Dimon who is the head of JP Morgan. He also sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve in New York...and so the question is here: having decisions be made over the weekend with an institution where its leader is also a member of that board raises some serious issues that ought to be addressed...I've had some people over the last several days say that we're creating a model for future events. If that's the case, then I'm deeply worried about it. I'm willing to accept that this was a one time-event. We were under a clock and decisions had to be made but the idea that we are creating a permanent model for future events like this is troubling to me because of the idea that the American taxpayer is being put on the hook.

However, there was no mention of the conflict of interest by Dodd in the senate hearings on April 4.

Later this week the Netroots Nation conference will be here in Austin. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be giving a keynote on Saturday. Part of that is taking questions from the highest rated questions at Ask the Speaker. I have submitted a question here. If you agree, please vote it up.

Of course, I'll be twittering live from the conference too.

Update 7/14 - Ellen Brown who helped me craft the question has a new post on globalresearch.ca:

Rather than bailing out bankrupt banks and sending them on their merry way, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) needs to take a close look at the banks’ books and put any banks found to be insolvent into receivership. The FDIC (unlike the Federal Reserve) is actually a federal agency, and it has the option of taking a bank’s stock in return for bailing it out, effectively nationalizing it. This is done in Europe with bankrupt banks, and it was done in the United States with Continental Illinois, the country’s fourth largest bank, when it went bankrupt in the 1990s.

A system of truly "national" banks could issue "the full faith and credit of the United States" for public purposes, including funding infrastructure, sustainable energy development and health care. Publicly-issued credit could also be used to relieve the subprime crisis. Local governments could use it to buy up mortgages in default, compensating the MBS investors and freeing the real estate for public disposal. The properties could then be rented back to their occupants at reasonable rates, leaving people in their homes without the windfall of acquiring a house without paying for it.

Coffeehouse 2.0

2008-06-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing happened on Friday. I showed up for the weekly Jelly at 10. The wireless router was on its last legs. I twittered a heads up. At 10:25, I decided I would be more productive at my client's site. It wasn't a wasted trip as I got to talk shop with a few people before I left.

Back at Cafe Caffeine, Jelly was still happening but without wi-fi and wi-fi is the sine qua non. So, after weighing alternatives, Stephen Gutknecht and Sarah Vela chose a plan of action. Since the manager of the coffeehouse was away, Stephen assumed the risk of the purchase of an Airport Extreme which Sarah picked up from the nearby Apple Store at Barton Creek. By noon, Jelly had wi-fi.

Soon afterwards, the manager arrived and Stephen emphasized that it was his choice to do it and wasn't looking to force them into buying a particularly expensive router. Management appreciated the grassroots energy and reimbursed Stephen for the router.

Chalk up another win for local independent coffee.

The 5x5 meme

2008-06-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

...tagged by Ashley.

What was I doing five years ago?-- As this week is, it was another week with Friday the 13th. On Thursday, June 12th, 2003, I took some time off work to make my annual pilgrimage to Seattle for SIFF 2003. On Friday, I saw Dirty Pretty Things and PTU. On Sunday, Kopps, Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers and Yes Nurse, No Nurse. Two weeks later, on June 26, Auz sent me an email titled "YABI #1." It began

(Yet Another Bad Idea)

Working Title: gnuFlix

Essentially: physical P2P network as backend to Netflix type system

Five Snacks I Enjoy-- 1) a ziplock bag of cookies, pineapple, cantaloupe and carrots 2) junior mints 3) chocolate brownie cliff bar 4) tortilla chips 5) leftover takeout.

Five things I would do if I had a billion dollars-- 1) build a proper stadium for the Ice Bats 2) a pedestrian bridge from my apartment to the other side of Congress 3) twitter from the moon 4) liberate the muppets from disney 5) ashtray, paddle game, remote control and the lamp.

Five places I have lived-- Seattle, Silicon Valley, Houston, Austin, and Oz.

Five Jobs I Have Had-- See here for four of them. I also can install hardwood floors.

I won't tag anyone.

Austin Creative Commons Salon

2008-03-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Creative Commons Salon is back at Cafe Caffeine tomorrow. With 16 in attendance at last month's initial meeting, stories were shared about how Creative Commons was being put into use here in Austin. If you have questions about Creative Commons, this is the place to be. There were several people last month who really knew their stuff, including people I recognized from That Other Paper and Barcamp Austin.

David Neff will talk about how the American Cancer Society is using creative commons on Sharinghope.TV. David was recently interviewed about SharingHope by Connie Reece. If you're looking for music, Jamendo and CCMixter will be reviewed. I've spent many futile hours trying to find good creative commons music so I'm looking forward to this. Of course, Trent Reznor just released Ghosts I-IV under creative commons license and has seeded bittorrent sites himself with the first nine songs.

Update 3/30 - Recaps from Gloria and Alexandre on Wednesday's salon.

Six Word Memoir

2008-03-15T17:20:00.000-07:00

Nobody has to think too much.

I was tagged by Ashley to write a six word memoir.

Here are the rules:
1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post.
4. Tag more blogs with links.

Tagging: the facebook blog

Barcamp Austin 3

2008-03-09T23:36:00.001-07:00

Barcamp was seriously good. Lots of rooms. Lots of choice. Chip has a good writeup. Free beer was provided by Independence Brewery.

It was standing-room only for David Neff's morning presentation about Sharinghope TV. RSnake packed as much web application security as humanly possible in half an hour. Rich Vázquez facilitated a conversation about Creative Commons. We needed more time but he mentioned the monthly Austin Creative Commons salon. There was a very high energy conversation on Social Media, Community Media and Social Justice and once again, we needed more time. No worries, though because after that, David James gave a demo on his CommunityGoals project. After that, I snuck out to Dorkbot for an hour and came back to hear Joel Greenberg talk about the future of hydrogen.

Revelations 2:26:08- The Book of Bill- A Bill Hicks Tribute

2008-02-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

Feb 26, 2008 will mark the 14th anniversary of Bill's passing. To honor his memory, the Bill Hicks Foundation teams up with Cafe Caffeine on their monthly "Popcorn Night" to present a special screening of the Hicks classic "Revelations"- featuring some of Bill's most memorable bits and biting social commentaries. Come have a cup of joe and pay homage to one of the greatest social wits to grace us for 32 short years. And yes- there will be free popcorn!

Tuesday Feb 26, 2008 7:30pm Cafe Caffeine 909 W. Mary, 512-447-9473. This is a donate what you wish at the door event with all proceeds to benefit the Bill Hicks Foundation for Wildlife Rehabilitation. For More Information: 512-461-2355 or visit www.billhicks.org, or www.cafecaffeine.com

The Bill Hicks Foundation for Wildlife- is a A Not for Profit Texas Corp which aids in the rescue, rehabilitation and release of orphaned, ill and injured Central Texas Wildlife. In 2007 alone the foundation's team of licensed rehabbers assisted over 500 animals and continued their care and placement of 8 Wolfdogs.

For more information, please visit our website at billhicks.org or the wildlife page of www.billhicks.com or call foundation director Lynn Raridon @ 461-2355

" Until you can name all of the animals, shut up and go back to the garden" -Bill Hicks

Barcamp Austin III

2008-02-19T14:32:00.001-08:00

Barcamp Austin III (sign up here) will be held March 7th and 8th (twittering, too). Whurley and Giovanni did a great job last year. If the logo is any indication, this year will be crazy.

Ever since the Barcamp Texas at Elysium, I've been surprised how meaningful and fun these events are. At the first Barcamp Texas, I remember unwisely thinking that Matt Mullenweg was making a stretch advocating Wordpress as a lightweight CMS. Well, that's exactly what I found myself doing this past weekend using this handy guide.

I was a lurker that first time but have given talks at the four I have attended since then. I've learned to talk less and converse more. Everyone gets more out of it that way. With slideshare's synchronized audio, I'm not even sure what good showing slides live are anymore unless they're just an aid to a conversation rather than the main focus.

See you at Barcamp!

Hazel Henderson to keynote unMoney Convergence

2008-02-10T19:02:00.000-08:00

More info here.

Complementary Currency for Insomniacs

2008-02-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

I added a synchronized audio track to the slideshare presentation.

| View | Upload your own

Barcamp Texas in Bryan, TX

2008-01-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

Update 2/4: slideshows from Barcamp Texas.

The last time I was in Bryan, it was 2005 and I was hanging out with my friend Maia at Revolutions. The fact that a place like Revolutions even exists should have been a revealing datapoint that Bryan was changing...I ran into fellow lonestarrubyconf volunteer Ben Burkert at the co-working space and was surprised to learn that he was part of their Downtown Cartel. I've been using their hashtags.org and learned it was written in Django/Python. Hashtags lets you browse keywords used in Twitter. For instance, here's the hashtag for barcamptexas.

The venue was changed last minute due to some regulations. Cody and the gang did good work improvising. In addition to the official venue, there was a lot of activity in the Creative Space co-working space next door. It was a great place to reconnect with folks so I missed most of the presentations. There were good quality presentations. Chip Rosenthal told me I missed a good talk by Tom Peck from AppEngines on Google Gears. Anyway, throughout the day, I heard a clear preference for smaller more interactive birds of a feather type rooms/conversations over the standard dual track presentations.

Silona interviewed several people using a new video service called seesmic. The interviews were informal but turned out really well.

Bonuses: The pizza at Mr. G's was great. The t-shirts were great. The wireless was great.

Social Networking Sites are the Diseases of the Internet

2007-11-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

Update: 11/27

I usually don't say much about online social networks since Danah Boyd pretty much says everything that needs to be said. The exception to this rule seems to be matters of privacy policy and even here I've learned the futility of my speech.

However, today's spot on article by Cory Doctorow How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook finally gave me the motivation to talk again about online social networks.

First, an online social network is not the same thing as online social networking. Online social networks need not be about online social networking. LinkedIn, MySpace and Friendster are online social networking sites because the main point is to grow the network like a virus (one might argue that linkedin is mainly about getting business done but i don't think that's the main point).

The fax network is given as an example of Metcalfe's law. Cory hints at the difference but does not make it clear. Let's make it clear. The fax network has a main purpose beyond spreading like a virus.

These social networking sites have a security flaw. They work too well. They are epidemics and they are not where we find collective intelligence (although Twitter may be the exception - but unlike the 3 named, it has a main point besides growth - plus, it can't spread like a virus because it breaks almost every day)

The reality we are seeing is distorted due to survivorship bias. We generally only see the online social networks that succeeded through having no point and spreading virally: the social networking sites. We talk about them because that's where so many people are squandering their time. And because of the survivorship bias we make unnecessary assumptions: friends lists must be shared. Well, guess what? You can have a social network without sharing your friends list. That may inhibit the growth of the site, but it also doesn't create conditions for futile existence either and it forces the question of having a main point. Of course, I'm not saying sharing your friends list is always bad, but keeping it private does eliminate all of the problems Cory identifies:

It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites

Somebody once said "I already belong to a social network. It's called the Internet." (I'm sure it's googleable)

Science

2007-11-16T03:43:00.001-08:00

Blog Readability Test

2007-11-09T23:14:00.000-08:00

Here are the levels of education required to understand the blogs on my blogroll (and my own blog) according to this site:

Genius:
A Denser Parlance
Open Source Currency

College:
Beyond Money
Educated Guesswork
Kaliya Hamlin
Austin Time Exchange

High School:
Worldchanging Austin

Junior High School:
Weblogsky
Duck and Gather
Evolution of Money

Elementary School:
Full Circle
Ashley #2
Strand3
HeresTomWithTheWeather

(via: Concurring Opinions)

Second Life at Cafe Caffeine on Monday

2007-10-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

The American Cancer Society raised $117,985.03 in their 2007 Second Life Relay for Life event. David Neff, the Director of Online Communications, and Jerry Markham, Manager of eCommerce-High Plains Division, American Cancer Society, Austin Corporate Office will be bringing Second Life to Cafe Caffeine Monday evening at 7pm. I caught this presentation at 501 Tech Club last month and it is definitely worth checking out. Today's New York Times article Free the Avatars mentions plans for interoperable virtual worlds lead by Linden Labs and IBM.

Check out this sweet ride that fetched $2000 in an auction. Worldchanging covered Second Life Relay for Life when they were just getting started.

Barcamp BFE

2007-10-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

This was going to be one of those "planting seeds" events although the venue had barcamp written all over it (I won't mention that ten miles after missing the exit, I wondered out loud "Have we already passed San Marcos?" and required the help line to guide us to Gordo's) For the next barcampsanmarcos, those of us in Austin and San Antonio need to remember to make a carpool section on the wiki so that, for instance, Silona and I don't have to ask around (thanks Rich).

In the morning, Jennifer had mentioned that her San Antonio neighbor Michael Verdi wanted to make it later (he was in flight) but since we had to be out of the building at 5pm, it wasn't practical. In between sessions at Barcamp Texas, Michael shared his impressive video blogging-fu and showed off his cool Sanyo Xacti. (Update: Giovanni just posted Michael's talk at Barcamp Texas.)

During lunch at the Root Cellar, I expressed how backwards Facebook is to Shaine Mata only to discover later in the day that he had blogged "How To Kill Facebook" two months ago. I guess some things go without saying. (Update 10/9: the facebook honeymoon is over) As a result of Shaine's blogging during an election, he became a legislative aide for Texas state representative Aaron Peña (I'm linking directly to his post of a Bollywood meets Texas ghost town meets Thriller video). The main theme our end of the table during lunch seemed to be carving out was how the constructive part of blogging (evolving, organizing, etc.) and its momentum can suffer from self-imposed censorship due to job obligations or disruptions due to having to blog through personal problems.

Erica described some kind of startup camp she went to in Toronto where the organizers demanded NDAs to be signed at the door. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued. More interesting were Erica's experiences with Startup Weekend in Boulder and Houston. Although the idea of cranking out a software application over a weekend is cliche (but when it's open source, it's genius), I haven't heard of people coming together to create a company over a weekend. In a way it makes barcamp look like a booger, but in another, it looks like more chest beating.

Speaking of chest beating, "Identity: OpenID, oauth and community currency" was the talk I did. Since everybody seemed to be using twitter, I used giving twitterfeed.com access to my twitter account to automate notification of new blog posts as an example of how oauth will be used in the future so that you don't need to give total access to one application when it only needs access to one resource from another ("valet key for the web").

Barcamp Houston and Creative Spaces

2007-08-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

I often describe the quality of barcamp talks as what you would get at open-mike nite. Rough stuff, but who cares? No matter what the conference or unconference is, it's generally what's in between the talks that turns out being the good stuff. Barcamp Houston was like the last Barcamp Austin in that there was a big room and a small room: much more interactivity going on in the smaller room than the big room. For both barcamps, the big room was more "formal" with the much larger, anonymous audience, professional video camera, etc. In the smaller room (and also in the coffee room this time), there were interesting conversations going on. The presenter was less a speaker than a catalyst.

However, I'm kicking myself for missing Steven Evatt's SEO talk in the big room. We were in a few electrical engineering classes together at Texas A&M way back when. Maybe a podcast of Steven's talk will turn up.

Speaking of A&M, Cody Marx Bailey (who I met at Barcamp Austin) told me about their co-working space in downtown Bryan. This rocks. Cody also told me about whurley's recent presentation there which started with a blank document and only took form after asking the audience what he was going to talk about. Initial skepticism ("The nerve of this guy. He didn't even prepare.") vanished as whurley covered any open source question that came up.

Thanks Erica and the gang for another great barcamp.

Rushkoff on the Secret

2007-06-29T02:56:00.000-07:00

Until the inevitable South Park spoof, Rushkoff weighs in on the Secret:

What we're really looking at here is a get-rich-quick scheme. What the Secret is is the logic underlying the religious grandiosity of Amway or Mary Kay or any of the pyramid schemes. They all rely on a kind of bootstrapping that comes from nowhere. And it is true that maybe in a purely capitalist era when we're no longer selling each other things of value but we're really just selling each other symbols of value that something like the Secret works because it's really a matter of whose got the most charisma in order to sell his worthless beans to someone else so that they then think now that they've got that piece of value. So, where all value is phantom, then phantom systems for the creation of value start to make sense again. But it's a very cynical place to go especially when so many people in the real world are starving.

Rushkoff also comments on Jim Henson's The Cube and his upcoming book Corporatized. His last comment in the interview is something I've been thinking about lately:

We really are living in something of a cult. It's like we're all doing the Secret or something.

Lessig

2007-06-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

Lessig is shifting focus. He's going to address how money corrupts policy decision process. Awesome.

Update: Nearly three months ago...

Synchronicity, Rinse and Repeat

2007-05-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

The last week or so has been wierd. Lots of coincidences. Here's the latest example. I'm listening to concert songs on YouTube for background music while reading. Not 15 seconds after thinking I should pull out a recording of a show taped with my trusty DAT recorder (damn right - old school), YouTube presents a video of that show (1998). What are the odds?

Update: And soon after posting, I get email from ACLFest announcing the lineup. Bob is ubiquitous.

Social Engineering

2007-05-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

KGSR is playing Coldplay's Yellow. In my head, the music is accompanied by the video for the song. We are Web 2.0 now and what's in my head isn't Coldplay.

Maybe Joe Rogan was right

2007-04-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, Joe Rogan said we're 3 seasons away from the Running Man. Maybe he was in the ballpark.

Open Document Formats Bill (HB1794) is Good for the Local Economy

2007-03-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Chip Rosenthal has been doing a good job getting the word out about the Open Document Formats Bill (HB1794).

Complaining about apathy and ignorance about politics is second nature, but it is obvious that things are changing and this would be a catalyst for a new renaissance of participation.

Open document formats is also a smart business decision. Locking our government into proprietary formats often means that Texas tax money will not be going to Texas businesses.

According to Intellectual Property Watch...

Since free software allows local businesses to adapt software to local needs, and does not require the payment of royalties to the original author, it allows local businesses to provide “deep support” which is of higher value than the “shallow support” provided for proprietary software. When problems arise with proprietary software they can only be fixed by the proprietor, limiting the role of local small businesses. With free software on the other hand, a local business is limited only by its skill levels, not by access to the code or the right to change it. Not only can much more value be generated locally, it can also lead to wider recognition for local innovators since improvements can be fed back to the global market.

I can't think of any reasons why not to do this.

Barcamp Austin II

2007-03-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

Rich Vázquez and I presented "Open Source Currency" (slides) at Barcamp Austin last night. Rich is the technical lead for the Austin Time Exchange (photo by Giovanni Gallucci).

Update: Rich's first post to Open Source Currency.

Wordpress Gets OpenID

2007-03-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

Johannes informs us that Wordpress does OpenID. You may recall that I asked Matt Mullenweg about this last August during his presentation at whurley's Barcamp here in Austin:

during his talk, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, acknowledged the near impossibility of integrating applications because each uses a different authentication system. I asked what he thinks about decentralized identity solutions like OpenID. He said that it seems like there's not enough incentive for players (like Wordpress) to cooperate.

Yesterday, jonl noted that a venue has been chosen for Barcamp Austin II.

Berkshares on ABC News

2007-03-04T16:44:00.000-08:00

New England's New Currency

Anatol Rapoport Dies at 95

2007-02-04T02:21:00.000-08:00

Is this a game or is it real? Like many others, I learned about Anatol Rapoport through the Evolution of Cooperation. My friend Sam lent me his copy back in '97 or '98. It was the first book that helped me understand human behavior and now I can't imagine understanding things or even how to play poker without Rapoport's insight. Here's the notice in The Michigan Daily and here's a nice blog post and one from Crooked Timber.

Last Worker

2007-01-28T19:58:00.000-08:00

is here.

Updated link: Last Worker - Holonation

Beale Street Blues

2007-01-25T03:54:00.000-08:00

updated link

Firefox 3 and OpenID

2007-01-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

I first found out from Andy Payne and it's also being rejoiced elsewhere around the net. It seems Web 2.0 will arrive with Firefox 3.

Identifiers as a Data Compression Problem

2007-01-10T23:43:00.000-08:00

Ashley and Madame X's comments about identity persistence got me to thinking about Bob Wyman's recent post which proposes an enhancement to Zooko's Triangle for naming. The elegance of Zooko's idea that you can only achieve 2 out of the three design goals (uniqueness, memorable, decentralized) has been praised by many in the identity conversation.

A triangle that expresses the tradeoff that one of three must always be sacrificed has been around for a long time in the data compression community:

1. uniqueness ==> quality
2. memorable ==>low bitrate
3. decentralized ==> computational cost (this relation requires more imagination than the first two: scalability)

I remember Jerry Gibson sharing with us the data compression tradeoff model shortly before the Internet boom.

Open Source Deep Blue

2007-01-09T17:16:00.000-08:00

Make Magazine is calling for everyone to collectively request access from IBM, an Open Source advocate, to the Deep Blue source code:

About 9 years ago the humans lost the chess battle to Deep Blue "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" is definitely worth seeing if you're interested in that sort of epic...

IBM is really active in the open source community, perhaps we could collectively request access to the Deep Blue source to not only see how it beat our best human chess player at the time, but to run our own versions of Deep Blue (it could run on a modern computer for sure by now). It might also clear up a lot of questions on how exactly IBM beat Kasparov too.

I reviewed the documentary here.

Austin OpenID Mashpit

2007-01-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

In Episode #47 of the Story of Digital Identity (seek to the 30 minute mark), Chris Messina says

What I would love to see at these events is a semi-coordinated effort to actually build and implement demo-applications that start to actually tease out the faults in the system.

In Episode #47, the question was posed more than once "Is OpenID ready for E-Commerce?" Maybe the answer is "Who cares?"

In preparation for the mashpit at Cafe Caffeine, I've spent the past week meeting up with security developers around town who have been asking really good questions. Although Chris is especially interested in user experience issues, these conversations have been more related to web services built on top of the OpenID libraries. Those conversations and the sharing of some cool projects will continue at the mashpit.

MashPitOpenIDAustin

...the i-names thread

2007-01-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

If you're a character in Before Sunrise, you've just spent a magically romantic day in Vienna with someone you just met on a train. Instead of exchanging phone numbers, you agree to meet at a rendezvous spot six months from this day. This isn't like meeting someone in town for coffee. This is a test of commitment. This is also a prisoner's dillema. If the other person doesn't show, besides the loss of what could have been, you get to eat an expensive plane ticket.

What does this have to do with i-names?

Phone numbers and email addresses and URLs are unique but they're not as easy to remember as Jesse and Celine. I can imagine a dystopian future where our characters would introduce themselves to each other as =texasjessek and =greencelinefr. Even if they never consciously exchanged information, they could easily hook up again. The penalty outcome has been substantially reduced: If either Jesse or Celine doesn't show up, he or she can be hunted down by the loser of prisoner's dillema game.

Yesterday, Kaliya presented more value propositions for i-names. Her post was thought provoking. For instance, it has allowed me to consider how many people might prefer an i-name. However, for the time being, none of the cases or reasons made me any more enthusiastic about i-names as a whole.

Kaliya included a snippet from Phil Windley's blog. The main point was that if the different types of addresses (blog, voice, rss, etc) his i-name pointed to changed, people could always find his new addresses through his i-name (http://xri.net/=windley) which stays relatively static.

The problem with this is that XRI, as it is similar to DNS, seems to introduce another single point of failure through a limited set of root nodes. That doesn't seem like a good thing.

OpenID Providers and Externalities

2006-12-29T00:34:00.000-08:00

This year, I had the fortune of waking up to the ring of my cellphone several dozen mornings. Each time the conversation was the same:

Hello?

May I speak to Jennifer Such and Such? This is the Acme Corporation.

Nobody named Jennifer lives here. You called yesterday and I asked to have this number taken out of your database.

Are you sure?

Yes, I've had this number for many years and I can assure you that no one by that name has ever had this number. Please remove my number from your list.

The calls went on for a few weeks and then, like weatherman Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, I finally woke up one morning without a wakeup call from the Acme Corporation.

But, then they came back for another week. The exact same conversation each time.

The relying party (Acme Corporation) trusted that the phone number was correct even though the identity provider never validated the number. The cost to the relying party and the identity provider was negligible. Apparently, it was cheaper for them to call me for weeks on end than to delete the nonvalidated erroneous data.

What does this have to do with OpenID?

If an identity provider doesn't validate an email address, some sucker like me is going to be getting Jennifer Such and Such's emails from the Acme Corporation. I presumably can't complain to the identity provider because that's Jennifer's data, after all. I can't go to the relying party to fix the problem, either. Unless the relying party knows that Jennifer's identity provider doesn't validate email addresses and requires the validation itself, I'm going to be receiving these emails for the rest of my life.

So, if Jennifer signs up to a website that doesn't possess this special knowledge of her identity provider and take corrective action, guess what? Yeah. Rise and shine, campers, and don't forget your booties!

It turns out that a month ago, the draft OpenID Assertion Quality Extension was published. Among other things, this

provides means for a Relying Party to request additional information about the specifics by which a user enrolled

In particular, there is the enroll.verified.email property.

This is the feature I thought out loud about yesterday in the comments of my previous post:

it's something i would be willing to do if there was an easy way for me to query the provider for the integrity level of the data (in this case, was the email address validated? the provider would have the option to say "don't trust this email address." of course, if he didn't say that, the data could still be invalid, but such an option would let the website know that it needed to do the validation itself.)

OpenID Podcast

2006-12-15T07:03:00.000-08:00

Two and a half weeks ago at the Triumph Cafe, some friends from Bootstrap Austin gathered to talk about OpenID. Pics (thanks to jonl) here. Quite a bit has happened since then, OpenID was slashdotted, there was the Identity Workshop, and the era of Who 2.0 was announced.

Also since then, I moved Stuffopolis beyond using OpenID just for comments and went hog wild with full OpenID login and registration for the main site and also added it to the Stuffopolis wordpress blog (using the OpenID plugin for Wordpress). Bijoy and Kevin and I also worked together to get the Bootstrap Austin wiki OpenID enabled. Evan Prodromou's mediawiki OpenID extension is excellent and I borrowed some ideas from it when I enabled Stuffopolis. The mediawiki extension allows a website to specify which identity providers it trusts. As a website that enables OpenID logins, you can't trust any old identity provider. For instance, an identity provider might not validate a person's email address. That's an identity provider that shouldn't be trusted.

I took the one hour and ten minutes of audio from our meeting and edited it down to 25 minutes (you can cut it to near 18 minutes if you increase the play speed on windows media player). Here is the mp3 (complete audio can be found here) and here is the outline I prepared for it.

Here's what I learned enabling the sites with OpenID.

The Good: OpenID registration is a beautiful thing. The legacy registration page on Stuffopolis can be scrapped. Once that happens, validating email addresses, requiring passwords and lost password security questions for new members will be forever outsourced to the OpenID providers (those that your website trusts).

The Bad: When introducing OpenID, it is a breeze for new members coming to the site, but it can be a little confusing for existing members who registered with the legacy credentials. When those existing members find out about the OpenID option, instead of logging in with the legacy credentials to add the OpenID to their account, they often log in with their new OpenID instead. This log-in will attempt to create a new account by fetching simple registration data from their identity provider. If their email address (sent by their identity provider) matches the one already registered with their legacy account, they can be given some instructions, but sometimes it doesn't match and now we have a problem because if they go back and log in with the legacy credentials, they can't associate their new OpenID to it because another account (the one they accidentally created) now has that OpenID.

Update 12/17: What I need to do is when a member goes to his profile page and attempts to modify his OpenID, after a successful OpenID authentication, if the site detects that there is another account with the same OpenID, then the site will ask the member to confirm that he wants the other account deleted, making sure there is only one account with that OpenID.

The Ugly: Now that some popular open source packages (wordpress, mediawiki, phpBB) support OpenID, the software should honor each other's OpenID sessions so that someone who logs into mediawiki with his OpenID doesn't get presented with an OpenID login form when he visits phpBB, for instance. Although this isn't a huge problem, it is a little ugly and it seems it will require a standard way of registering OpenID apps on a system so that an OpenID session state change in one app will inform the others.

In a nutshell: OpenID is still immature, but it has an extraordinarily committed community behind it and when it comes to software, that's what counts.

Worldchanging at BookPeople on Wednesday

2006-11-28T13:48:00.000-08:00

I spotted Alex Steffen at Docs Motorworks on South Congress last night. Last year, I blogged that Alex's conversation with Bruce Sterling was the highlight of SXSW Interactive 2005 for me. The book is currently #312 on Amazon. The event at BookPeople starts tomorrow night at 7pm.

Pulled Up From The Comments

2006-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

The April 3rd post on the ridiculously slanted media coverage of the firing of Coach Rudy Rios received a comment today from a new blogger identified as Rudy Rios:

Let's always get both sides of the story before we judge others.

Thanks for visiting my blog, Rudy! I agree that the media is in the business of casting judgment, not to mention that school superintendents and their underlings seem to carry playbooks that send the local media on the scapegoat-a-coach route.

For example, consider the job the Houston Chronicle did on Oscar Cripps. The Chronicle willfully assisted in the scapegoating of Cripps, perhaps the most unassuming, unselfish and successful high school football head coach Texas has ever had.

School systems weed out a lot of nice folks whose biggest flaw seems to be bringing out the best in people. Carpe Diem.

Update 11/18: I've replaced the link to the Chronicle article with the one in the Google cache. This is because Google search assumes links express trust and that was obviously not my intention (I don't want people performing a search to be directed to a hatchet job by the Chronicle). When will there be a way to express distrust in a link?

Trickle Down

2006-11-09T01:27:00.000-08:00

David Byrne:

I sense this culture every day, on the streets and in the media. Every time a cop car from my local precinct runs a red light or speeds down a one way street the wrong way (just because they can, no other reason) and every time an SUV with darkened windows muscles other cars, bikers, old ladies and kids out of way — sometimes narrowly missing pedestrians as they run a red light — well, it’s all been sanctioned by Bush and Cheney and the senators and congressmen who allied themselves with these bastards. They reflect and encourage one another. Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor.

I'm not sure what to make of these little yet not so subtle changes. It reminds me of the scene in High Fidelity where the store owner shows off how easily he can manipulate the crowd's purchasing behavior by what songs he plays over the store's system.

Another Reason To Like OpenID

2006-11-03T02:07:00.000-08:00

If you register an OpenID from Verisign, for example, you'll see that under the Activity tab you can audit every login made with your OpenID.

Woody

2006-10-20T03:12:00.000-07:00

Issues of torture to the side...

2006-10-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

...Glenn Greenwald finds himself saying. Greenwald quotes Jefferson:

I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution

Jefferson considered this right more fundamental to a democratic republic than the right to vote. Greenwald references a NYT editorial which says the bill just approved

would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them

7 years ago, the NYT said the consensus of legal thought considers the most significant legal case of the millennium to be the 1670 London trial of William Penn:

jurors, starved and jailed by judge for refusing to convict Penn and co-defendant of illegally preaching Quakerism, won first ever writ of habeas corpus

When the NYT recognized the millenial choice, did they think to choose a Runner-Up in case of disqualification?

My Favorite Long Tail Bits and Pieces

2006-09-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Let's take a trip down the long tail of long tail resources.

For only $15, fans can see Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson speak at the New York Public Library this Thursday. (This is cheaper than the convenience fee on a ticket to the Rolling Stones)

A little further down the tail is a neat article in this month's Wired about Netflix Presents. Netflix is distributing new films (like The Puffy Chair) that would otherwise not reach their audience. In Convergence Culture, the chapter Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars brings deeper and more complex Long Tail issues alive when considering the emancipation of amateur film. I was struck by Elizabeth Durack's criticism of controlling fan works:

It has been observed by many writers that Star Wars (based purposely on the recurring themes of mythology by creator George Lucas) and other popular media creations take the place in modern America that culture myths like those of the Greeks or Native Americans did for earlier peoples. Holding modern myths hostage by way of corporate legal wrangling seems somehow contrary to nature.

Chris Anderson's LT article was published in October 2004. We've had a few years to digest the article and even a best selling book. I see three particularly important effects.

First, the LT is important as a meme so that we can collectively discuss the transformation that is happening.

Second, LT forces are recreating the gift economy, although I don't believe Anderson's book explicitly acknowledges this until the very last of his 9 rules (Understand the power of free) on the very last page of his book:

Ultimately, in abundant markets with loads of competition, prices tend to follow costs. And thanks to the power of digital economics, costs just get lower.

Third, it exposes how increasing inventory size reveals the dirty little secret of survivorship bias and self-serving attribution bias of major media. Making it on a store shelf is like passing a school admissions test. Admissions officials of top schools often wrongly conclude that since those who were admitted were successful after school, the admissions criteria were good indicators. However, in How We Know What Isn't So, The Fallibility of Human Reasoning in Everyday Life (1991), Thomas Gilovich writes

information about how well the rejected group would have performed is absent, so there is no baseline against which to evaluate the effectiveness of the selection criterion. In addition, the competitive advantage that stems from being in the accepted group serves to artificially raise each person's score on the outcome criterion.

Gilovich notes that this reasoning can make a completely worthless selection criterion appear to have some value.

Gary Hoover's What Happens After All the Categories Are Killed? (1996) gives a much deeper history of pre-web LT retailing. Hoover founded BOOKSTOP in 1982 in Austin, TX. After initially opening with 20,000 live titles, within a few years Bookstop stores carried 35 to 40,000. Compare this to his predecessors B. Dalton which was lucky to have 12 to 15,000 live titles and Waldenbooks in the ballpark of 8 to 10,000. In 1989, Hoover sold BOOKSTOP to Barnes & Noble for $41 million which benefitted from Hoover's Long Tail insight that the other bookstores were not carrying the right books and they would never know because they never tried carrying them. BOOKSTOP and then Amazon learned what really sells by offering more. Post-filter versus pre-filter.

Finally, don't miss Peter Savich's insightful and entertaining Long Tail Rising essay and podcasts (April 2006). Savich reveals that the long tail of producers is community and the power of free among many other insights.

They Must Really Need Revenue Down in Louisiana

2006-09-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

Willie Nelson cited for pot, mushrooms

Willie is 73 years old.

Update 9/22:Bill Maher

Texas 52 Rice 7

2006-09-17T04:21:00.000-07:00

...and a Sesame Street clip that reveals the recruiting process at Rice and Texas.

Web 2.0 is Free

2006-09-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

OpenID for Review Comments

2006-09-11T22:02:00.000-07:00

In Amazon still doesn't get links, Adina Levin writes

One of the persistently frustrating things about Amazon's reader reviews is that they don't have permalinks. Reviewers can't respond to other reviews, or even bring in references to reviews of other books. This prevents people from talking to each other. It prevents flamewars, and it prevents community.

Bingo! What would also be cool is if people could leave comments without registering for the site but with an open identity! An open id is a cross-web site identity which doesn't lock you into one provider who gets to watch you login into every site. OpenID is pretty simple to set up. I have an OpenID for herestomwiththeweather.blogspot.com. I like that my blog is my ID. If you would like to do the same, check out OpenID is Just Too Easy. You can make it any of your URLs you like.

Adina's review comments suggestion (with OpenID) is available on Stuffopolis now. Here's my review of the Long Tail by Wired's Chris Anderson and the nifty OpenID login through which non-registered guests can leave comments!

9/11 Times 13 Equals Torture

2006-09-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

9/11 was invoked 13 times today, by my count, to promote the torture initiative. Marty Lederman says:

we shouldn't pretend that we're not engaged in such cruelty and torture, and we shouldn't engage in the fiction that we are in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. The decision to authorize such horrifying techniques, and to thereby be the first nation to adopt breach of Geneva as official state policy, is a solemn one, and it should be treated with the seriousness that it deserves -- without euphemism or obfuscation.

Triumph Cafe

2006-09-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

jonl took some pictures of our web discussion on Monday. Four of the 9 people were named David. That's David Bluestein on my left and David James on my right.

Texas A&M #5 in the Nation

2006-08-31T04:04:00.000-07:00

Washington Monthly magazine listed Texas A&M University at No. 5 in its annual rankings of the best universities in the United States. The publication considered several variables in its ratings, including
1. research activity and spending
2. doctorates awarded in engineering and the sciences
3. the biggest TV ;)

SCREEN SIZE: 3,954 square feet (seven times larger than previous setup)
PANELS: 154 (total 590,000 pixels)
STRUCTURE HEIGHT: 110 feet
RIBBON BOARD: 1,130 feet in length

Google Authentication vs. OpenID

2006-08-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

In the last two entries, the usefulness of Edgar Cahn's social operating system analogy was recognized: Money is like a computer program that operates on top of this OS which is composed of family, neighborhood and community. Money is also like a rootkit in that it replaces components of this OS by annexing trust. The evolution of money and its shared dependencies with other code, like religion and law, was described.

Let's consider money and the social operating system. Just like software development, the development of money can be decentralized or centralized. Centralization requires gatekeepers.

Our money became centralized through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. However, we should not forget that the first attempt at centralization failed. Paul Warburg met Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich in 1908. After failure during the Taft administration, Warburg and friends split the Republican vote in 1912 by funding Roosevelt so that Wilson could win. After the original failure, this power play, by necessity, was executed in secrecy.

Now let's switch to the web. As we know, in a similar way, Microsoft clumsily attempted to centralize identity on the web with Passport. They failed because they didn't realize what Google has. If you build a bunch of compelling applications for people to use and tie all of them to a central authentication service, then people will have accepted your scheme by default. Google is making this power play in secrecy. Shel Israel notes this secrecy in his blog and in a comment to Chris Messina's excellent post:

What really bothers me is that I never see anyone from Google joining these discussions.

At Barcamp Texas, during his talk, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, acknowledged the near impossibility of integrating applications because each uses a different authentication system. I asked what he thinks about decentralized identity solutions like OpenID. He said that it seems like there's not enough incentive for players (like Wordpress) to cooperate.

If all the players pursue their own interest, then all of them except one will lose. That one will make the decision for them and will decide how and when applications exchange information.

DLL Hell

2006-08-15T02:04:00.000-07:00

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.

Suppose we take Cahn's analogy to its logical conclusion. Computer programs evolve over time. Before the web, new versions of software were packaged and sent to retailers so lengthy testing before release was important. In the mid-90s, it became typical for software to be distributed online. The cost of releasing a fix was drastically reduced, so software cycle times were reduced to be competitive, but releases were still at discrete intervals. The dawn of web applications saw real time patches to code.

Updates to the code running on top of the social operating system occur much less frequently, but they must still adapt to the environment around them. Just like your Windows desktop programs have had to deal with DLL Hell, so do the programs running on the social operating system. However, these programs (e.g. money) are, as Jacques Le Goff might say, deeply rooted and slowly changing.

Sometimes, when code is updated, it breaks other code. For instance, back in the good old Windows 9x days, DLL Hell was when a program upgrade modified a library it shared with another program. The other program would magically stop working.

The same thing can happen when the code to money is updated. Charging interest on loans was slowly added to the code. Unfortunately, this update broke the religion code which excommunicated members of the social operating system who charged interest. The code had already been shipped, so to speak, so, in the 13th Century, the religion code was patched with an innovation called purgatory.

Related: Google and the Eternal Life Fantasy

Complexity is the Enemy of Social Justice

2006-08-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

Edgar Cahn has a fantastic analogy but he could have taken it a lot further. Cahn says we have a social operating system which consists of family, neighborhood and community. It is the non-market economy upon which the market economy depends. National money is a computer program that runs on this operating system like MS Office runs on your Windows system. We notice there are problems with our system so we create other programs in vain efforts to fix the problems.

If you're a hacker, you know the best way to screw a system is to replace components of the operating system. You install a rootkit. National money is acting like a rootkit, replacing functions that used to be performed by the operating system. You can't restore operating system integrity with more programs. In particular, people tend to trust money instead of each other. Trust leaves a community when money leaves it. So, instead of your Windows 98 crashing, your society crashes.

Any security guy worth his salt uses attack trees. The time during which your attack tree does not represent new threats is called a vulnerability window. The whole point of Windows Update is not to add new features to your Windows system but to minimize vulnerability windows. A case could be made that the window has been about 100 years.

The majority of security incidents are caused by unnecessary complexity in code design. How does this work with the social system? Lessig taught us code is law.

Today's example concerns Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention:

Corn, the Army's former legal expert, said that Common Article 3 was, according to its written history, "left deliberately vague because efforts to define it would invariably lead to wrongdoers identifying 'exceptions,' and because the meaning was plain -- treat people like humans and not animals or objects." Eugene R. Fidell, president of the nonprofit National Institute of Military Justice, said that laws governing military conduct are filled with broadly described prohibitions that are nonetheless enforceable, including "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer."

Retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, the Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000 and now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center, said his view is "don't trust the motives of any lawyer who changes a statutory provision that is short, clear, and to the point and replaces it with something that is much longer, more complicated, and includes exceptions within exceptions."

In Enron's pursuit of profit, computer programs calculated the cost of rewriting regulations to determine which changes would be profitable. These programs were called the Matrix. Perhaps similar ones are suggesting amendments to the War Crimes Act.

Lebanon

2006-08-02T00:10:00.000-07:00

Some gorgeous pictures of Lebanon in this slide show. It seems the beach shown at the beginning of the show (and 50 more miles along the coast) is now home to 15,000 tons of oil slick. As Carlin says...

That man... men...males have pushed the technology that just about has this planet in a stranglehold. Mother Earth raped again, guess who..."hey she was asking for it."

Austin Car Share

2006-07-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

Austin Car Share kicks off at 11am on Monday at the Plaza at Austin City Hall. There is a $10 monthly fee plus $4/hour of use and 44 cents per mile. At first that may sound steep, but it includes gas, insurance and maintenance. Here is KVUE coverage.

Visualize no more trips to the mechanic.

Intentional Economics Day 3

2006-07-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

I was doing okay with the nightly blogging until the last day. I'm going to finish it up today, though. On Monday, I hiked with a couple from Pittsburgh who also stayed an extra day. Later, I walked down the pedestrian mall to a fantastic used bookstore and picked up four books. I slept the entire flight back to Austin arriving at midnight. Lewis picked me up and on the ride back we talked about a remarkable story Bernard told in the last hour about Francisco de Orellana. Lewis spent some time in the jungles of Brazil in January.

If I had picked up the Sunday New York Times on Day 3, this is what I would have read from Ben Stein:

Is this America, where far too many of the rich endlessly loot their stockholders and kick the employees in the teeth, the America that our soldiers in Ramadi and Kirkuk and Anbar Province and Afghanistan are fighting for?...Are we maintaining an America that is not just a financial neighborhood, but also a brotherhood and a sisterhood worth losing your young husband for? Is this still a community of the heart, or a looting opportunity? Will there even be a free America for Mrs. Wroblewski's descendants, or will we be a colony of the people to whom we have sold our soul? Are we keeping the faith with this young widow? That is the question I ask about this beloved and glorious America for which her husband, Lt. John Thomas Wroblewski, died. If we are, we should be proud. If we are not, we'd better change, and soon.

Clearly, we are not keeping the faith, but is Bush to blame? No, Bush is a symptom. Do we need Bush to remind us again that we have to fix the big problems ourselves? Of course, the problems seem impossible using conventional money and conventional economics. The reason? There are two implicit hypotheses in Economics:

1. Money is value neutral
2. Our money system is a given, like the number of planets in the solar system

100% of Economic Theory is built on these two hypotheses. Both of them have been proven wrong.

Bernard describes three different problems and currency solutions which show us redesigning systems is more effective than trying to redress symptoms.

The first problem is "how do you solve the problem of unsustainable short-term corporate thinking and reduce a corporation's risk associated with monetary instability?" He describes the Terra.

The second problem is "how do you increase a country's knowledge capital?" Since the best way to learn something is to teach it, the Saber currency is a time dollar (tax exempt) currency which flows from younger students to older students in a mentorship hierarchy.

The third problem is "how do you provide preventative health care measures?" The traditional system provides what it is paid for: to keep sick people alive. Bernard describes a complementary currency system used in Bellingham, Washington.

Bernard tells us that intentional economics always has a time horizon. The time horizon is the length of time you have to disarm your opposition. What's left will be the sacred cows you have to work around. Conventional economics is just intentional economics with a time horizon of zero.

At the end of the day, there was a reception for Bernard who is finishing his visiting professorship at Naropa. It was an emotional goodbye for the people at Naropa. Good folks there. There seems to be a dignity associated with people who live near the mountains.

Intentional Economics Day 2

2006-07-09T00:25:00.000-07:00

Recall the 68 major money crashes in the last 350 years and they all have the same pattern. The handout we read for Day 2 was extracted from Bernard's book The Mystery of Money. The handout described the pattern of financial manias that result in crashes and how the pattern relates to the hyper-rational Apollo and irrational Dionysus. The four stages of financial crash parallel the four stages of the archetypal story of Apollo and Dionysus and even the words associated with financial crashes like mania (Maenads) and panic (Pan) originate from the story. The four stages:

1. The Build Up: Market pundits = Apollonian hyper-rational prophecies
2. Feeding Frenzy: Lambs move into the market = The child Dionysus is born
3. The Panic: Buying frenzy followed by selling frenzy = Orgiastic frenzy, mature Dionysus dismembered
4. Picking Up the Pieces: Committee of Wise Men investigates = Apollo returns

To be clear, the victims of the Dionysian mania are those who cling to Apollonian hyper-rationality.

The Mystery of Money was published in at least half a dozen languages. Unfortunately, none of them were English. It was sent for publication in New York. After the publisher sat on it for about a year, Bernard was told "This is a problem that doesn't exist in America." Months later, the tech bubble burst.

Bernard explains that no speculative crashes occurred before the 17th century. It's only modern money created by fiat (out of thin air) which allows this mechanism. Bernard says "A currency crash betrays trust, including trust in oneself."

The focus in the morning session is on archetypes. Bernard tells us that James Hillman is the school he is coming from and A Blue Fire is the best synthesis of Hillman's work.

"Why are money questions taboo?" Bernard asks. For example, the biggest taboo between a client and a therapist is not sleeping together. It is the therapist lending the client money.

It's well known that the two emotions of the market are fear of loss and greed. Bernard asked himself, "where do these two collective emotions come from? Are they natural? Why are they the only emotions?" He said nobody talks about them. They are considered natural.

It was at this time he started reading Moore and Gillette. They wrote books which discussed four of the five human archetypes: the Sovereign, the Warrior, the Magician, the Lover. The fifth archetype is the Great Mother. Where did it go? The earliest money systems were associated with the Great Mother archetype. The oldest known currency (3200 BC) is the Sumerian Shekel (Wheat Unit).

It's been repressed. When an archetype is repressed, the archetype splits and the two shadows are linked by fear. For instance, the Sovereign splits into Tyrant and Abdicator(Weakling).

The Great Mother splits into Greed and Scarcity which are the two market emotions. Money questions are taboo because the Great Mother archetype is repressed.

Modern money is the domain of Sovereign, Warrior, Magician and complementary currencies are the domain of Lover, Great Mother. We shouldn't (couldn't?) try to encompass all five archetypes with one currency.

Intentional Economics Day 1

2006-07-07T23:21:00.000-07:00

I'm going to skip the prelude to the first evening. Air transportation is always an adventure. Needless to say, I made it to Naropa University in Boulder for the first evening of the three day conference on Intentional Economics with Bernard Lietaer. All attendees received a pre-publication copy of his new book, Of Human Wealth.

As Bernard was introduced by Dick Wagener, Dick explained that Bernard has been sick for the last 4 days and would need to speak softer than normal. He spoke softly but clearly.

What is intentional economics? Instead of assuming the right money system is in place, we ask "What is our objective?" Then, only after we figure that out do we design the system of money.

It's likely you have never heard of intentional economics. It's new, but the vested interests are not going to acknowledge it either.

Did you know that what's known as the Nobel Prize in Economics was not created by Alfred Nobel. Unlike the other prizes (physics, chemistry, etc.), the prize in economics was created by the Central Bank of Sweden. Bernard noted that Milton Friedman won the so-called "Nobel Prize" despite the fact that he was fantastically wrong when he said that stability would result from floating exchanges and it's probably a safe bet to say that the award would never be given for work on intentional economics. He recalled a conversation with another member when he was at the Bank of International Settlement in Basel (Are these the Gnomes of Basel?) where the other member said that the whole function of the BIS and the Central Banks was to keep the system like it is, not to improve it.

And that is crux of the problem with the world today. For all the humanity of charities and the billions of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they're still only addressing symptoms, not the system. Bernard notes "billions are spent addressing symptoms. We need to address the system." He said addressing the system would cost a small fraction of what it is costing to address the symptoms.

Later Bernard said "Don't expect the fed to solve the problem. You will or no one will."

Bernard made it clear that dollars aren't bad just like a screwdriver isn't bad. A screwdriver works well for one thing but you don't want to paint your car with it.

Bernard began his talk with the four quadrants of integral perspective from the work of Ken Wilber. I won't describe this because this is the first I've heard of it and I'll be hearing much more in the next few days.

Then, Bernard emphasized that "our money system is a projection of our collective unconscious." There will me more on this in the later sessions.

He said Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion. Since 600BC, we have been trained in linear causality instead of mutual causality: at the same time, we both shape and are a product of society. He noted Heraclitus as one of the few philosophers who spoke of mutual causality.

"It's time to make money our servant instead of the other way around."

Bernard noted that there have been 68 major money crashes in the last 350 years and they all have the same pattern.

Bernard recalled the comments of former Fed Chairman Paul Volker from a year and a half ago that there was a 75% chance of a currency crisis in the United States within five years.

Bernard noted that Argentina was the IMF's poster child for following their prescriptions and they got clobbered.

He said that people need to realize that the Information Age means the end of the Industrial Age. When the Industrial Age came, it was France, the master of the Agrarian age that felt it the hardest first. Now, Japan(perennial recession since early 90's) and Germany(Euro-sclerosis), the masters of the Industrial Age, are the first hit. We're in the birth contraction phase and in denial of what's happening.

Bernard explained the difference between money and currency. What a central authority requires in payment of taxes, thereby imposing it as legal tender, is money. Taxes lock us into money. Money is the Yang. It promotes competition and scarcity created through hierarchy. Currency is whatever a community chooses as a medium of exchange, thereby accepting it as common tender. Social currency is the Yin.

Bernard, as he admitted, quickly went through the history of Western money, including the Federal Reserve Act being passed on Christmas Eve and Wilson, who was funded by the bankers, signing it just in time for WWI. And in 1971, "Nixon removes the fig leaf and there was nothing!"

Bernard noted that there's only been 2 radical technological changes in the 5000 year history of money. Paper money and electronic money. Paper money shifted the power of money creation from the sovereigns to the banking system. Will electronic money mean the end of the monopoly of bank debt money?

Bernard noted that while he was President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System, that his computing center had 1/18th of the power that the laptop running his powerpoint slides has. "Anyone can run their own financial system."

Then, Bernard covered material that is in The Future of Money, so I won't repeat that here.

Bernard said that because its market is so thin, gold is one of the easiest markets to manipulate.

Bernard also mentioned the book Short Circuit. He then said that we needed to have the given 28 page handout read for tomorrow morning.

Pancho & Lefty from Austin Pickers 1984

2006-07-03T02:57:00.000-07:00

So continues an unofficial "best of" from YouTube. If you haven't seen Margaret Brown's Be Here To Love Me, it is really good. I agree with the Amazon reviewer: "Disjointed, confusing, confounding and depressing... so why have I watched it ten times?" This video here is not in the film and it seems to have been uploaded (from China) two days ago by the person who produced it.

Late Late Show 5/19/2006

2006-06-27T04:52:00.000-07:00

During his monologue, Craig says for his money, Bill is "the best standup comedian America has ever had."

mp3 (0:42).

Wings, Golf and Big Bend

2006-06-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, I met the boys for wings in Houston. I learned from Dan that Oscar's sons Craig and Keith are head coach of Northbrook High and defensive coordinator of Spring Woods, respectively. Chris brought me the long anticipated cd with pictures from our trip to Big Bend. A few included below. On Monday, we met up for the annual golf tournament. I'm the only one who's not a golfer, but it was fun. It was a scramble, so it was more cooperative than competitive. ;) Speaking of which, I'm going to Boulder to attend a conference on cooperative economics.

Here are some pics...

Direct Deposit Considered Harmful Part 3

2006-06-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Let's wrap this one up!

A hunter who kills a wooly mammoth finds himself with currency. When we (unfortunately) consider currency as a store of value, what matters is interest minus inflation. We have been conditioned to assume positive interest rates with money. So, we're generally satisfied if interest outpaces inflation. However, the hunter notices his mammoth has a high negative interest rate (the mammoth is rapidly decomposing). So, the effect is similar to what would happen in a high inflation environment. His best bet is to gift the mammoth meat before the shelf life of his currency runs out.

Since negative interest rates appear to be good for a community, a little educated guesswork suggests that the Flinstones had it good. Instead of hording money, people can earn social recognition. Think of the social recognition earned by the protagonists in the movies Godfather II (Vito Corleone), Groundhog Day (Phil Connors) and Rushmore (Max Fisher) when they realize that generosity isn't a bad business. It's worth rewatching Godfather II just to see the transaction between Vito and the landlord develop from one which required money to help the evicted widow to a transaction that occurs solely through community reputation.

However, the promise of interest on money creates an incentive for selfishness. School (Rushmore) further conditions us to be selfish and government approved media's main function is to exploit that conditioned selfishness. It's no surprise that we tend to forget about the value of the ancestral gift economy.

In seventh grade, I was fortunate to study the book of Matthew with Jim Killen, the pastor of a small Methodist church. A few days ago, I smiled as I read this from the church website:

I remember the planning meetings we had when we thought through the unique character of the church we were organizing. We decided that we wanted it to be a church that would live in service to the world, not just one that would live to oil its own machinery. We wanted it to be like a small church in which everyone could feel that his or her contributions were important.

One of the parables we read and talked about was the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. What I remember was Dr. Killen's focus on the parables. I remember how genuine these discussions were and that these parables were particularly important. I mention this experience because it was where I was first introduced to this parable, not that I remember any interpretation. What follows is my own relatively shallow understanding of a parable I first learned from a much wiser man.

Before exploring this parable, it is useful to read this article. It is an interview with a 30 year veteran of IBM, Jack Reilly. He talks about using the methods of Fernando Flores for action. Without action, there is no trust. Check out the diagram for the atom of work. When this process is corrupted, when either the customer or the provider attempts to dominate the process in a hierarchical way, we get into trouble. The cycle the diagram represents is a building block to hang our experiences on and assess where our relationships have gone wrong. The cycle is not designed by anyone. It is human nature.

The standard reading of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) doesn't seem to account for context. Without context, the meaning of a story can be completely reversed.

What is the standard reading? The standard reading assumes that the vineyard owner is a God figure. The justification seems to be the introductory verse:

For the kingdom of heavens is like a man, a householder, who went out early in the morning to hire workers for the vineyard.

So, it seems the meaning of the parable (and, to a certain extent, our understanding of who Jesus was) hinges on this one verse.

The phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" is a construction of the author of Matthew. The authors of Luke and Mark use "Kingdom of God" throughout their respective books while Matthew uses "Kingdom of Heaven" in his (perhaps to avoid the use of the divine name). Is it possible that all of this verse is a construction of Matthew? Perhaps the ambiguity of this parable is largely due to the ambiguity of the meaning and origin of this opening verse.

If this first verse is ambiguous and this first verse is the justification for endowing the vineyard owner with Godlike status, then it seems it is worth our time considering the parable without this assumption. There's 15 other verses in the parable. It seems out of order to allow one interpretation of the first 1/16th of the parable (at least partly of which we know is a Matthean construction) to dominate how the other 15/16ths of the parable is interpreted.

The first half of the parable (v2-7) describes the offers made by the vineyard owner. The second half (v8-16) describes the payment. Well, this seems like a good opportunity to apply our friend, the unit of work!

Where is the cycle of work corrupted? The corruption begins during the negotiation phase with the second batch of workers in verse 4:

and to those he said, "You also, go into the vineyard, and whatever is just I will give to you."

The vineyard owner continues to make deals throughout the first half of the parable, skipping the negotiation phase until, finally in verse 7, the owner simply commands "You too go into the vineyard." No matter how you interpret the parable, what is crucial to the plot of the parable is that the owner does the negotiation with the first group of workers but skips the negotiation with the subsequent batches of workers. What subsequent workers earn is not transparent.

In verse 8, the owner is asking for a conflict when he tells his manager to pay wages starting with the last workers first. Since the late workers already conceded the negotiation to the owner, they don't need to be payed anything but this would alienate them. The smart play for the long run is to surprise them by paying them equal to the first group and make an example of anyone in the first group who complains. Only through corrupting the cycle of work can workers be paid for their subservience instead of their output. The owner robs the workers of the gifts they offer.

The money economy is a relatively new invention compared to the tens of thousands of years the gift economy operated. The unit of work is similarly older than the money economy and may be as old as the gift economy. During the negotiation, instead of receiving money, you receive social credibility. In general, people offer good gifts when they anticipate they will be recognized. I don't see anything wrong with that. What's wrong is when you are made to think you have no gifts to offer. What's important is transparency. In particular, the provider needs to know what he is providing in the unit of work transaction. When he doesn't, it's too easy for him to become a cog in an amoral system (see Milgram experiment). Furthermore, if the work in the transaction is transparent to others, then the work can be acknowledged. How can there be any trust if we don't see any action? Perhaps it is the opaqueness of national currencies that tends to subvert communities while the transparent exchanges of complementary currencies and gift exchanges help communities.

Here's an alternative meaning to the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. Don't be intimidated into thinking your gifts are worthless. Remember the quote from Hoover's Vision:

People need to know that their work matters.

Some of the interpretation of the parable is based on writings of William Herzog and thanks to Kevin Koym for introducing me to the work of Fernando Flores.

Direct Deposit Considered Harmful Part 2

2006-05-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

For just a moment, I want to return to the curiosity mentioned last time: a manager goes out of his way to hand-deliver paycheck envelopes to the employees. Because the money has already been direct deposited, there are no paychecks in the envelopes. Hierarchy seems absent while the employee accepts the gift of the hardcopy receipt of the direct deposit.

Managers and employees are not the only ones who participate in this kind of suspension of hierarchy. Chimpanzees do this when they share a feast. Food sharing encourages reciprocal exchanges with unrelated junior chimps and the action testifies to the moral character of the sharer. Status is not achieved by a position on an org chart. A direct deposit removes an opportunity for this exercise. It seems to squander an opportunity to acknowledge a reciprocal relationship between a boss and an employee.

Think of a person who gave you a gift when you were growing up. Do you still have an unusually strong fondness for that person? In elementary school, my friends and I mailed letters to Gale Sayers, Brooks Robinson, Johnny Bench and Magic Johnson. There was nothing more exciting than getting an autographed photo back in the mail. I'll never forget how we thought the players who were charging money for autographs were the biggest jerks. All these years later, those who sent us autographs will always be my favorite.

Here's a few observations:

Sharing, with one type of exception, does not exist down a hierarchy

For instance, an employee generally does not think to ask his boss for a ride to the airport. However, unused perishable items are shared: tickets to a sporting event, obsolete computer equipment, the deli tray left over from the managers' meeting. In a similar way, airlines allow customers to make use of unused seats by earning frequent flyer miles. All of these acts are perks that tend to build goodwill and loyalty and it costs the sharer nothing. It seems odd that, after all these years, my cell phone company has never offered to reward me with more minutes. They must squander billions of unused minutes. The Creative Commons initiative seems to address this blindspot in copyright laws which assume that every work is like Mickey Mouse and has an infinite commercial life. If managers played like the phone companies and copyright lobbyists, employees would never get to snack off the deli tray.

Payments to subordinates in a hierarchy are opaque and for undefined work

When payments are made outside of a hierarchy, they are often transparent. For instance, businesses advertise their prices on the market, anyone can find out how much a house sold for, etc. However, when it comes to salaries, this information is generally hidden. Furthermore, outside of a hierarchy, it is clear to the supplier or seller what he is providing. Within a hierarchy, an employee has a job description but that can change at any time.

If hierarchies are not conducive to sharing, where does sharing happen?

Gift exchanges happen within a community. Communities exist when there are gift exchanges. The Creative Commons is a community. So is the scientific community, the open source community and even bloggers. As Bernard Lietaer notes in The Future of Money, communities are destroyed when their gift exchanges are replaced by nonreciprocal currencies, like national currencies. An interesting example is that Japan continues a special tradition of gift exchange. Lietaer:

Gifts are constantly exchanged not only within the extended family, but between co-workers, esteemed individuals, social and work superiors and elders. It takes often the form of sharing one's talents in art, calligraphy, culture or other social graces...

A quick look at the Statistical Abstract shows that Japan stands alone among industrialized countries in measures like percentage of children raised by two parents, etc.

Turn back the clock 30,000 years ago. When woolly mammoths were hunted with dart throwers, there was too much meat for the hunter(s) to eat, so the mammoth was shared. This was a risky business and it makes sense to wait it out and let somebody else do the work. However, the status acquired due to the success of the kill and the sharing with others seems to be the incentive. An interesting idea is that in a high risk venture such as this, acquiring status is a good hedge when your hunting party doesn't get anything.

Matt Ridley briefly notes in The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation that Glynn Isaac proposed that food sharing occupied a central place in human evolution.

It's getting late, so I'll have to finish up later. This is leading somewhere!

Direct Deposit Considered Harmful Part 1: Microcosm

2006-05-21T17:44:00.000-07:00

My first full-time job out of school was at a large company. A really large company. At such a large company, you show up for your first day orientation on a Monday morning with 30 or 40 other new hires and everyone learns how to set up direct deposit.

However, my boss Jerry had a habit that I didn't fully understand and appreciate until this week. Usually employees with direct deposit pick up their paycheck envelope in their office mailbox but, of course, it is just a receipt. That's the easy way. It's a lot more efficient to have an assistant do this than to waste a manager's time with delivering these apparently useless envelopes to employees. Jerry didn't see it that way. Each payday, he hand-delivered the envelopes to the team. This important ritual ignores for a moment that we work in this huge hierarchy and Jerry takes the time to openly acknowledge the work associated with the payment. It's like when a shopkeeper receives payment from a customer. In this case, the shopkeeper knows he's helping the customer and there is transparency in the exchange. The shopkeeper is not motivated by money and a boss but by the relationship with his customer.

In Hoover's Vision, Gary Hoover points out:

People need to know that their work matters. Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea continually pointed out to his copy-shop employees that they were helping people announce birthday parties, spread the word on neighborhood festivals, or find their lost dogs. Herb Kelleher reminds the people of Southwest that they are helping people get to graduations, to weddings, to be at the side of loved ones who are sick.

The problem with corporate management was explained by Peter Drucker. He said that salaries "obey the internal logic of the hierarchical structure." Unlike the money earned by the shopkeeper, salaries do not reflect the work that was actually done (merit) or the market. This may be an obvious point.

Next time, we'll deconstruct what's really going on and we'll see what's happening each time a mega-store displaces local businesses. An unholy web of opaque transactions will replace the transparency the community once enjoyed.

Tony Blair's Big News & U.S. New Deal

2006-05-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

An acknowledgement about oil by Tony Blair in his speech to the CBI:

If we don't take these long-term decisions now we will be committing a serious dereliction of our duty to the future of this country.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the latest Homeland Security Corporate Welfare project to divert public billions to private contractors is to build a wall. Gold is at $700/ounce. Media keeps a straight face.

The wall and all of the associated posturing is a farce. Heavy fines against companies who hire illegals and amnesty for illegals who turn in employers would actually do what the wall will not and would pay for itself.

Truthiness, even unto its innermost parts

2006-05-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

The motto of Brandeis University has been "Truth, even unto its innermost parts." Truth is a scarce resource these days. The school pulled an art exhibit of drawings by Palestinian 12 year olds because they received complaints. Of course, this whole problem could have been avoided if they outlawed crayons.

Astrud Gilberto - The Girl From Ipanema [1964]

2006-05-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Email Spreading Resentment in America

2006-05-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

History has shown over and over again, that when confronted in public with misdeeds, the most successful strategy a criminal can employ is to point a finger at someone else.

I've been sitting on this post for about 3 weeks. It was then when my jaw dropped at a few chain letter emails that were forwarded to me. Three weeks ago, many American citizens all the sudden found it necessary to voice their resentment of immigrants' influence on the economy. I'm still getting this electronic waste in my email, but strangely, I'm not getting any email about the looting of the U.S. treasury.

It's something you can count on. When a country's currency spirals downward, politicians can always count on scapegoating a minority. This is often a non-voting minority.

Congressman Ron Paul (R) of Texas remarks:

The rise in gold prices from $250 per ounce in 2001 to over $600 today has drawn investors and speculators into the precious metals market...Holding gold is protection or insurance against government's proclivity to debase its currency. The purchasing power of gold goes up not because it's a so-called good investment; it goes up in value only because the paper currency goes down in value. In our current situation, that means the dollar...The lack of earned interest on gold is not a problem once people realize the purchasing power of their currency is declining faster than the interest rates they might earn.

It seems that there is no end to this freefall in sight.

The world's been down this road many times. This time, it has email.

Anonymous Blogging Part 3

2006-05-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

Today, anonymous blogger "Juan Non-Volokh" revealed his true identity. Last week, there was a contest to see if anyone could identify him. Note from the comments in the contest that (unlike a non-blogger like Deep Throat) he could be identifed by his writing style.

Also note the presumably tongue-in-cheek comment that acts as a sanity check:

And just how will we know that the person "unmasked" is the real Juan Non-Volokh?

I was asking the same question about Mark Felt. Why should we trust Felt and Woodward?

Anonymous Blogging Part 2: Anonymous Comments

2006-04-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

When reading a blog, it is tempting to underestimate the comments. When writing a blog, this is not the case. Bloggers love comments. Comments are party guests. Our first instinct might be that the more comments, the better. This has been called the blog conversational index. Why blog goodness cannot be measured this way was clearly demonstrated by this post at Weblogsky. First, the dude notes that this encourages comment spam and doesn't measure the thoughtfulness of the responses.

It's like the kegger in Sixteen Candles. You're inviting people to trash your blog. Edward Vielmetti adds that trying to use stats only encourages people to game the stats and that blogging is often just one component in a conversation. People often use email to respond to a blog post. Nancy White notes that we've been down this metric road before with online forums. I should also mention that comments are moderated on Weblogsky which probably has a lot to do with why the comments are so thoughtful. If anonymous comments are not moderated, good luck assembling your own Algonquin Round Table. Its the guests that make your blog.

I began moderating "anonymous" comments recently and I'm glad I did. Today, in response to this post, two "anonymous" comments were created by the same person pretending to be two different people. A year ago, I described how to detect this when I warned that there is no such thing as anonymous blogging.

See for yourself. I've highlighted the ringer.

Post #1:

Okay, for starters I'm having to log in as Anonymous because I tried about 17 times to sign up and your system kept telling me I did something wrong.

So for the record and if anyone cares my name is Rosa. Not that anyone really wants anyone to know who they are on these blog things.

Anyway, I received a postcard on this project about a week ago and I for one am delighted and thought it was real nice of the person building this building to send it.

I'm a widow who lives in this area and I plan on considering one of these condos, getting rid of my 2 story home and the stairs and all the work that goes into keeping it up and finally enjoying life and my grandkids. So that comment about all I'll get is a view is a bunch of malarky. And it DOES get expensive to bring someone in to mow the lawn -- $50 a week! I'm tired of paying that and I can't mow the lawn myself anymore. I want to live somewhere where I can see other people when I get my mail, and play cards with my friends, and enjoy a pool for the first time in my life.

And really, why does everyone have their knickers in a knot about height? There are high buildings all over this part of Austin. They have been popping up here for years and no one asked me if it was okay, I just accepted it. Ausiting is a growing town and this is busy part of town. You don't need a degree in urban development to know that if there is a vacant lot, someone will eventually build something on it. Why not this?

And Miss Jenny, with all due respect to you dear, if you bought your house in the area that I think you are in, with highways on both sides of you and businesses all around you, why is it such a surprise that someone would eventually build on that lot near you?? I've always wondered why anyone would buy a house there!That's all I have for now.
Sincerely,
Rosa

Post #2:

I got a postcard on this building the other day and was impressed. I think this will add to the area and could even increase property values. I welcome it as there have been a lot of nice buildings going up in this area and it's made things better in my opinion.

Personally, I think the developer has both class and balls to let people know what he is doing and to ask for feedback. I actually called him, he answered the phone (shocker!) and he was polite, intelligent, friendly, and seemed to know what he was talking about. You have to give him credit because I know he probably got a lot of opposers harassing him, too. Most developers wouldn't have bothered or would have had an answering machine or even someone else taking the calls.

I just don't get why some folks have their knickers in a knot about "another" high rise in this area. It's not the first. There are already several of them and even a few right across 183. They haven't really changed much about quality of life. Personally, I'd rather have a high rise, especially one with senior citizens living in it, in my "back yard" then a lot of other things.

And, let's face facts, this part of Austin IS another downtown, which is probably why most people choose to live and stay here in the first place. We have everything here: a hospital, hotels, tons of stores and restaurants, bars, movie theaters, lots of dentists and doctors offices. But once people choose to live here they think they can gripe about not wanting anything new built. Flawed logic in my opinion. Change and progress happens and should happen. I'm for it. Heck, I may decide to live there eventually.

Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006

2006-04-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

Jacobs was mentioned in the New York Times a few weeks ago:

"If Jane Jacobs had the tools and technology back when she was fighting Robert Moses' plans to bulldoze Lower Manhattan," said the Times article, quoting blogger Aaron Naparstek, "I bet 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' would have been a blog."

Created Surfaces

2006-04-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

In Designing Bioregional Economies in Response to Globalization, the definition of complementary currency is stretched to include a novel system that has been used in Curitiba, Brazil to finance community projects:

Like most cities Curitiba has a detailed zoning plan which specifies the number of floors that can be built in each zone. In Curitiba however, there are two standards: the normal allowable standard and the maximum level. For instance, a hotel with a ground plan of 10,000 square meters is being built in an area where the normal allowable level is 10 floors and the maximum 15. If the hotel owner wants to build 15 floors he has to "buy 50,000 square meters (5x 10,000 sq. Meters) in the 'sol criado' market." The city itself only plays the role of an intermediary matching demand with supply in that market.

But where is the supply for these sol criado surfaces generated? One source is historical buildings. For instance the "Club Italiano" owns a beautiful historic landmark building called the "Garibaldi House." The property has a total ground surface of 25,000 square meters, but the place needed a serious restoration job. The Club did not have the money to restore the building. But because it is located in an area where up to two floors of new construction could theoretically be built, it sold 50,000 square meters (2 floors x 25,000 square meters) to the highest bidder, for instance, the hotel owner mentioned above. The proceeds belong to the Club to administer, but have to be used to restore the property. Therefore the hotel owner ends up paying for restoring the historic edifice in order to obtain the right to build the extra floors of the hotel, without financial intervention from the city.

Other sources of supply for such "created surfaces" are green areas where trees are protected, and the construction of social housing in other parts of the town. Several of the more recent of the sixteen extensive nature parks, open to the public, have been completely financed in this way. The owner of a large plot of land obtained the right to develop one side of the street on the condition that the other side becomes a public park. The new housing has an extra value because it is located at walking distance from the park; the people of Curitiba have another park for their week-end strolls; and the township does not have to go into debt or raise taxes to obtain all of that. Everybody wins.

What is most interesting from our perspective is that this market for "created surfaces" is another type of specialized complementary currency, which enables Curitiba to obtain public goods for which other cities have to obtain traditional financing.

Anonymous comments to be moderated...

2006-04-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to have so many good comments. However, today I found myself wasting time with someone posting anonymously. May or may not have been a troll but the effect was the same so, following the example of some blogs that I admire, anonymous (or more accurately "non-member") posts will now be moderated before they get published. Lesson learned.

Arboretum Tower

2006-04-19T02:01:00.000-07:00

Austin residents not enthusiastic about efforts to change rules so 12 story condo can be built in their backyard...

What's up with the New York Times?

2006-04-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

Tim Spalding thinks it odd that an idle website (Zunafish) can earn major coverage from the New York Times.

Of course, it's odd. Consider this. How long did it take the New York Times to cover the Wright Brothers flying machine?

Four years.

Zunafish beat man's conquest of flight by four years. Of course, once Zunafish was covered in the NYT, they were everywhere. As far as spreading memes or companies is concerned, bloggers are still no match for the NYT and the social proof they wield.

What is Zunafish? They take a dollar cut of trades that people do with each other. Huh? Taking money out of a transaction when there was no money in the first place? That's the online equivalent of Hazel Henderson's illustration of community decay: "If you want to have breakfast prepared by your Mom, go to McDonald's where she is serving it."

Companies (like Zunafish, Peerflix and Swapthing) whose business plans include siphoning money out of exchanges where money doesn't belong are grotesquely artificial and blueprints for community decay and the subversion of reciprocity. People can set up these exchanges for free. No middle man required.

40 Years Ago: herestom's grandfather

2006-04-15T23:34:00.000-07:00

From the Sunday April 10, 1966 edition of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times:

Labor's New Battlefront Is In Valley
by Bill Walraven
A Corpus Christi labor leader has confirmed that a number of unions are zeroing in for a large-scale effort to organize laborers of all classes in the Rio Grande Valley.

Reports of such a drive have been current in South Texas for some time.

J. Elro Brown of Corpus Christi, international representative of the Oil, Atomic and Chemical Workers in South Texas, is one of the active planners of the campaign. It is being conducted by a number of other unions in cooperation with the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO.

Brown said the Retail-Wholesale-Department Store Union workers probably will be co-operating in the Valley drive in a short time. Organizers have been instructed in the purposes and methods of the Industrial Union Department. Two representatives of the IUD are directing the organizational drive, Brown said.

Other attempts have been made to organize Rio Grande Valley farm laborers, he agreed, but never on such a widespread basis.

Mexican Labor Cooperating
The Confederacion de Trabajadores Mexicanos, the most powerful labor group in Mexico, is cooperating with American labor for the first time to help raise Valley pay scales, Brown said.

Why is a Corpus Christi refinery union official working to organize farm and other unskilled labor?

"There are two reasons," Brown replied. "We are no longer interested in the welfare of union members alone. We are vitally interested in the public welfare in general, and this includes all of our people.

"Secondly, so long as you have this huge reservoir of people willing to work for substandard wages, it will always be a threat to the good wages of oil workers."

In the Valley, he said, work formerly done by oil company employees is being handled on a labor contract basis. "These contract workers receive the minimum of $1.25 an hour instead of the $2.75 an hour paid to yard labor," Brown said.

Brown said, "When you leave Corpus Christi and head south, economically, you're entering a new country. In this area discriminatory wages still prevail and the 'patron system' still exists.

"The only way to break it is to set up an agricultural union and get wages up."

He said the unions and the Industrial Union Department, headed by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, hope "to install a real liason between Mexican and Texas trade unions. Often in Mexico all organizing has to be done away from the working premises."

Brown said Valley laborers have not earned enough money to pay poll taxes, and added, "Maybe there will be a change with the new voter registration, provided they receive the proper assistance."

Poverty Spreads Like Dye on Water
Like dye on water, he said, poverty of one area spreads to other areas where conditions are not so bad, tending to lower union wages. The young Latin Americans who are educated are inclined to migrate away from the area.

"They could learn the advantages of being union members and stay," he said. "We are teaching the advantages of unionism in this program whether the organizational program succeeds or not."

Brown said "There is a need for the development of the militancy the American Negro has. Then you would see a change in the Valley. The Latin American leaders have the militancy and the talent, but the people do not. What the IUD is doing is backing up the War on Poverty by trying to raise wages."

Leaders of Latin Americans, however, have shown weakness American labor had a few years ago, he said. "The AFL and CIO spent all of their resources and energies fighting each other and had little left to fight for their rights. The Latin American leadership must organize and work together to forge an efficient voice for their people," he said.

Brown believes that the War on Poverty can bring about a "great social good to the country if only something is done to upgrade housing in poverty areas without forcing people living there to move from their home communities."

A member of the executive committee of the local Community on Youth Education and Job Opportunities, Brown said that all of the programs, if used to complement one another, "could make Corpus Christi a model community in the United States. We might again win a beauty and cleanliness award."

The anti-poverty program probably needs a public relations campaign to acquaint everyone with its projects, he said.

"Disease and poverty go hand and hand," he said. "Poverty cannot afford cleanliness, and this includes more than just soap and water.

"Politically, the AFL-CIO always has supported those who are for social progress," he said, "be it for better schools, Medicare or the War on Poverty."

Generally, he thinks President Johnson has achieved the greatest social progress since the Roosevelt era and that there was a compelling emergency from the depression in the FDR times which is not present with the Johnson administration, he said.

"The only thing labor is critical of is the lack of evident action of the administration in working for the repeal of 14-B (the provision permitting states to enact right-to-work laws) and establishment of guidelines for wage increases wihtout guidelines for profits and the cost of living," he said.

There has been administration "footdragging" on federal standards for unemployment compensation, Brown said. Now the amount of workmen's ocmpensation and the length of time it may be drawn varies in different states.

There has also been "footdragging" on a situs bill, Brown said. This would allow picketing at sites where other unions are involved. Encouraging other unions to support a strike has been ruled to constitute a secondary boycott.

Brown said that labor supports the President in his Vietnam policy as well as in his foreign policies in Europe and Africa. Contrary to what many believe, he said, unions have been successful in combatting communism in the labor movement.

Labor unions and particularly the OACW, are particularly concerned today about job security-even more than about wage increases, Brown said.

"We are now at a point in the petroleum industry where, unless you are talking about a new plant, even the workers with low seniority have at least 10 to 15 years of service. And people with that much of their productive life invested with a given company feel insecure.

"We see companies such as Sinclair Pipeline which used to employ 1,500 people in the Texas area. It now is operated by less than 500. The natural attrition from retirement and death with no replacements has kept pace with automation, but workers are still worried about what will happen if automation accelerates. Many in the petroleum industry with a high seniority have been laid off.

"And it's not all automation. There are metals that do not corrode and do not require much maintenance. Computers can pump wells and operate fractionating units. Microwave radio closes valves 500 miles away.

"Unions will continue to ask for wage increases in view of jumps in the cost of living and excessive profits of industry, but our main energy is turned to the problem of displacement by computers."

Brown, 58, is the son of a Baptist minister. He grew up "all over Texas and Louisiana." He finished high school in Beaumont and attended South Park College (now Lamar Tech), spent one summer at Louisiana College, then attended Louisiana State University before going to work for the Texas Company refinery in Port Arthur in 1933, the same year he was married.

He worked in Port Arthur until 1944 when he went to work for the Oil Workers International union. He had been president of Local 4-23 in Port Arthur and had been made the union's fulltime secretary.

In 1944 he became an international union representative for California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Arizona.

He became a district director in 1946 and was transferred to Chicago in 1950 where he spent some time organizing unions in Canada. In 1951 he became district director of the southern half of Texas. In 1962 the number of union districts was cut from 16 to nine, and Brown once more became an international representative. He transferred to Corpus Christi in 1963 when the Hess Oil and Chemical Co. purchased Delhi Taylor Refinery.

Brown has been active in civic affairs in all of the cities where he lived. He has also been a working Democrat.

He was a delegate to two Democratic National Conventions. In 1952 he was a member of the maverick Texas liberal delegation which was not seated in Chicago. There, however, a number of liberal leaders of the Democratic Party worked to seat the delegation.

"As a result I became well acquainted with Estes Kefauver, G. Mennen Williams, Hubert Humphrey, Averell Harriman and returned home a Jack Kennedy man," he said.

Brown served on the California State Employment Commission under Gov. Earl Warren and was a personal friend of Gov. Adlai Stevenson who appointed him to the Illinois Safety Advisory Committee. In Texas, Gov. Price Daniel appointed Brown to the Southern States Manpower Conference in Miami.

"This conference first produced the idea of a Peace Corps and Head Start," Brown said. "Gen. Gavin proposed the Peace Corps idea as a possibility for people of draft age to get credit for service in the armed forces. I don't know whether he got the idea from John F. Kennedy or Kennedy got it from him."

Brown and his wife live at 518 Atlantic. They have two sons, James Elro Brown Jr., who was graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1957 and who also received a law degree from George Washington University, and Lane Baxter Brown, an employee of Standard Oil Co. of Texas who will receive a law degree in August from the University of Houston.

Elro Jr. is a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard and will be executive officer of the cutter Active, a new ship. The Browns have three grandchildren.

Letters vs. Numbers

2006-04-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

This is Legal Tender in Liberia

2006-04-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

This may be old news to Trekkies but it was news to me when I read it in a book by Bernard Lietaer. I would like to see Chewbacca replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10.

Coach Fired. Used a 4-Letter Word.

2006-04-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Houston Independent School District fired Coach Rudy Rios today:

He was fired as coach because he made copies of a flier put together by students stating that Latinos must stick together during this immigration issue.

"And stay united, and that's why I did the copies. I mean it wasn't anything bad against the school," said Rios.

Making copies, however, was not only against school policy, but the flier also contained a four-letter word.

I don't think it's a secret that coaches use four letter words. What's next? Firing a principal for bad hair? Firing a superintendent for drinking the blood of schoolchildren? A little harsh I think.

It's the Little Things

2006-03-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

What's my favorite new site that adds clear value to my life? feedwhip.com. For all those sites that don't have an RSS feed, it gives you updates when a web page has changed. If you're like me, you spend way too much of your time returning to messageboards, blogs, and schedules (your favorite musician) to check status when there has been no change. For me, that's history. Don't be blogwhipped. Whip that blog!

Update: I was thinking earlier today how cool it would be if you could filter results based on keywords. For instance, suppose you only want to keep track of a few people on a message board or want to filter out an annoying poster. Well...Feedwhip added that feature today.

Government Eavesdropping Part 5

2006-03-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

There's a major underreported story in Seattle and it has nothing to do with a sensational house party massacre. This potential evidence appears as the DOJ responds to Congress that it believes the President is above the law. Where's Barbara Jordan when we need her to spank another President and send him behind the woodshed? This is not a question of privacy or civil liberties. This is a question of whether the people will accept lawlessness of the government.

From U.S. News and World Report:

Justice Department lawyer Anthony Coppolino tried to convince the judge that handing the document to the FBI for safekeeping would in no way compromise it

Safekeeping spying evidence with the spies? That sounds a lot like something out of a movie or Spy vs. Spy from Mad Magazine.

Update: From an older U.S. News article:

The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson's colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, "it was clear the vacuum was not moving." Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson's locked office door, Norling says. Nelson's wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.

Google Maps Meets Stuffopolis

2006-03-22T03:15:00.000-08:00

Bruce Sterling spent a few minutes in last week's talk about the Internet of Things. He quoted Warren Ellis: "There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is." Sterling made up a word (or tag or theory object...) spime in 2004. The objects represented below don't have chips or GPS, so they're not actual spimes yet. Nonetheless, over the last couple of years, this "inventory voodoo" has helped us geeks and friends of geeks keep track of our things.

Here's a snapshot of where my stuff is around the world right now. Each marker is a friend. Click on a marker and you see what stuff they have. Space. If you hover over an item, it says what day the request was made. Time.

Of course, what's shown above is typically private information. To protect the innocent, I asked permission last week from my friends to use this data and I also did the coordinate lookup by zipcode instead of full address. Then, I cut and pasted the HTML from Stuffopolis into this blog entry.

You might notice that many of the items have been out for a year or more (there's survivorship bias here. we don't see items already returned). The beauty is that it doesn't matter. Neither party needs to worry about getting the item back right away. It can always be recalled if necessary, but usually, the item can go on a long sabbatical. Boundaries are collapsing. (Although, the privacy settings on Stuffopolis are strict by default.)

Update: I've had some people ask me whether this is feature is available on Stuffopolis. The answer is Yes.

I Have Been Tagged: 7

2006-03-21T23:41:00.000-08:00

Tagged by Ashley.

7 things to do before I die:
1. Travel: Florence, Galapagos Islands, Cuba, Alaska, India, Brazil, and Montana
2. Break 100,000 on Defender
3. Ice skate in College Station, Texas
4. Liberate the Muppets
5. See Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose and J.R. Richard (i.e. real baseball players) in the Baseball Hall of Fame
6. Be a square on the Hollywood Squares
7. Meet the Gnomes of Basel

7 things I cannot do:
1. Advertise
2. Watch golf, post-1980's men's tennis, NFL, MLB, or NBA
3. Drink dark roasted coffee
4. Use the Force for attack
5. Eat in a restaurant with bad music
6. Eat sausage kolaches on a deep sea fishing expedition
7. Pay attention to a TV weather forecast

7 things I say most often:
1. They barred me for being too good a player.
2. Only if the opportunity cost does not exceed ROI is the proposition sound.
3. Are you going to Hippy Hour?
4. Yeah, I'm bringing the XBox/Halo.
5. We're raging.
6. Let me play devil's advocate.
7. [Insert town] is a Potemkin village.

7 books I love:
1. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
2. The Red Queen
3. Evolution of Cooperation
4. The Future of Money
5. I Remember Atticus
6. The Social Construction of Reality
7. Unix Network Programming

7 movies I can watch over and over again:
(As a twist, I'll do quotes from memory)
1. "Stocks may rise and fall, utilities and transportation systems may collapse."
2. "60% of the time, it works every time."
3. "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up."
4. "It's a wonder you're still alive."
5. "That's like me saying Touchdown here isn't very intelligent because I beat him three games out of five the last time we played chess."
6. "Kermit, does this film have any socially redeeming value?"
7. "Corporate decisions are made by corporate executives."

Sunday Night Happy Fun Armageddon Hour!

2006-03-17T21:03:00.000-08:00

CNN will be going head-to-head Sunday night with the Discovery Channel in visions of armageddon and disaster! While CNN's is a gloomy Peak Oil take on the future, Discovery's is slightly more optimistic with a tornado destroying Dallas. I would tune in just to see that, but as a special bonus, my friend Don's house was the filming location for the Dallas family's house. I will have to hunt down a TV Sunday night and put a call in to the Countdown to Armageddon Whiskey Support Team.

Make No Decision Out of Fear

2006-03-15T00:44:00.000-08:00

mp3 of Bruce Sterling's talk (coverage). On the way out, I overheard some in the crowd who were so buried in denial that they complained that it was negative. Consistent with the reaction is this post. It's like they can no longer distinguish between real life and TV.

I met up with people later that night at the Digital Convergence event for some great conversations and food. I still don't understand what digital convergence is about (Is it like Snow Crash?) but they threw a great party.

Current Events

2006-03-13T23:57:00.000-08:00

If you want to get caught up on current events, I've found no better analysis than here.

SXSWi 2006

2006-03-13T18:23:00.000-08:00

Life is good. I was introduced to Nancy White earlier today. I've been on her mailing list since November. This was right after attending Jimmy Wales interview of Craig Newmark (coverage). Then, after attending about a minute of a panel which I had been tricked into because it had an interesting title, I called an audible and escaped to one which I knew would be of substance, Peter Morville's (author of Ambient Findability). Peter mentioned Podzinger which does speech to text so that you can perform a search on an mp3 file and seek to the position where a phrase is. I haven't tried it yet. I liked Peter's observation that we are "designing the legacy systems of tomorrow." Went home for a bit and then went to the Cedar Door for Bootstrap Austin and then to the EFF-Creative Commons Party where I was happy to meet Craig Newmark and we talked about Rushkoff's new book. Craig got an advance copy. I'm expecting some pretty big parties tomorrrow.

Siskel and Ebert Videos

2006-03-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

There are some funny Siskel and Ebert videos at Bedazzled! (the blog's subtitle is a Snow Crash reference) Especially the one about Protestants and Yuppies. Classic.

The Big Guy: How Tom Delay Stole Congress

2006-03-08T03:59:00.000-08:00

Another promising documentary. DeLay spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty:

I haven't seen it and really don't plan on hanging out with a bunch of liberal activists at a house party in Austin to catch a sneak peak

In other news, Stanhope will be in Austin again at the end of the month (3/26-27 @ Club DeVille). Both should be good fun.

Update: I realize I mispelled 'Buy' in the title but it was not practical for me to fix it...