Adam Norwood

Tag: politics

  • Putting the Public Service back in PBS

    Enjoyed this post on O’Reilly Radar advocating that PBS should realign with their original educational and public discourse mission. As local affiliates drop their secondary cable channels in favor of multiple over-the-air digital broadcasts, it’d be great to see at least one of those OTA channels used for stronger educational programming:

    Our nation’s founders recognized that an educated public was crucial to the sustainability of American democracy, which led to public funding of education. Today, education happens in the media as well as in school. It is important that we use the media of television, in combination with new media, to support educational goals. There is even greater opportunity to combine a public broadcasting network and the interactive capabilities of the Internet to create a new hybrid framework for lifelong education.

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  • Computational Legal Studies
    Visit the source: computationallegalstudies.com

    A blog featuring infographics pertaining to legal and political science research.

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  • Heres a Toast to Alan Turing Born in Harsher

    here’s a toast to Alan Turing
    born in harsher, darker times
    who thought outside the container
    and loved outside the lines
    and so the code-breaker was broken
    and we’re sorry
    yes now the s-word has been spoken
    the official conscience woken
    – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
    and the story does suggest
    a part 2 to the Turing Test:
    1. can machines behave like humans?
    2. can we?

    Alan Turing by poet Matt Harvey, on the occasion of British prime minister Gordon Brown’s official posthumous apology to the mathematician and computer theorist. Originally read/published on the BBC Radio 4 broadcast Saturday Live, 12/9/2009.

    (Via Language Log, from a mostly unrelated post on the language of homophobia in Jamaican culture, which is itself worth reading – depressing, but worthwhile)

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  • New TOR Clients from Iranian IP Space

    From “Dramatic Increase in the Number of TOR Clients from Iran”, an O’Reilly Radar interview with the executive director of the TOR anonymizing onion router, software definitely made for times like these. Hopefully the new users know to keep their transmissions encrypted, especially given the likelihood that their government is keeping an eye on all outbound Internet traffic.

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  • Above All Anonymity That Shield of All

    [A]bove all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality, would have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext of protecting the honest critic, who warned the public, against the resentment of the author and his friends. But where there is one case of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who cannot stand by what he has said […]. Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows will show, and what literary trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they are safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recommend a general Anti-criticism, a universal medicine or panacea, to put a stop to all anonymous reviewing, whether it praises the bad or blames the good: Rascal! your name! For a man to wrap himself up and draw his hat over his face, and then fall upon people who are walking about without any disguise—this is not the part of a gentleman, it is the part of a scoundrel and a knave. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, chapter 23. Quote entirely lifted from a good discussion about online anonymity and accountability on Brian Leiter’s law school blog after the outing of a psuedononymous critic by a National Review blogger. (Note: I personally lean towards anonymity and privacy as fundamentally good things, but Schopenhauer’s quote seems remarkably prescient in these days of message board trolling)
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  • An Italian vision of a scientific Utopia
    Visit the source: www.nature.com

    The science journal Nature reviews the new book Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism by Christine Poggi. The review itself is a decent synopsis of the Futurist movement in art and literature and the role that modern technology played in shaping European political thought in the early 20th Century. (Note: the Italian Futurist utopian dream devolved rapidly into the very frightening march of fascism, and would eventually become our model for Blade Runner-style sci-fi dystopia…not something to idealize, but worth learning a lesson from)

    The Futurists imagined a world governed by electricity. Their electrical fantasies, writes Poggi, take a Utopian turn in their vision and evolve into an orgy of violence. They saw Italy as being “fertilized” by electricity, banishing hunger, poverty, disease and work. Air temperature and ventilation would be controlled automatically, telephones would be wireless, and crops and forests would spring up at speed. But in this world of ease and plenty, fierce competition would arise over superabundant industrial production. War would break out, fought by “small mechanics” whose flesh resembled steel. Deploying “steel elephants” and battery-powered trains from afar, they would wage a thrilling interplanetary war.

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