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davidi is here too

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yo!

yo-yo bouncing back atcha

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html

Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant
When the New America Foundation praised a large fine levied on Google, the people behind the statement were exiled.

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https://www.slideshare.net/NicoleMatejic/social-media-pr-and-information-warfare?from_action=save

Social Media, PR and Information Warfare
Information Warfare and the Weaponisation of Social Media: What does this mean for PR Professionals? As presented to the PRIA National Conference in Hobart 201…

@hermanw uploaded a file: Outlook City Logistics and commented: Recent publication Heman Wagter

(Outlook City Logistics)

,

One of the wonderful things of BH is the list of books that are great to read.

One to add: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/05/the-edge-of-the-world-north-sea-michael-pye-review

The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us What We Are by Michael Pye – review
The traffic on a cold grey sea that created the modern world – from fashion to feminism, money to marriage customs. By Tom Holland

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@hermanw uploaded a file: GDPR Directive and commented: GDPR Directive

@dangillmor see the directive

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@hmhgoldstone https://www.metafilter.com/164970/Restart-a-heart-near-you is the post I wrote about public access defibrillators

Restart a heart near you
If someone had a heart attack right next to you, could you get to your nearest automated external defibrillator, grab it, and use it within 3-5 minutes of their collapse? More and more, the...

@mljones http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/25/seeing-like-a-geek/ is the Tom Slee article

Seeing Like a Geek
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered I’ve seen many men, I guess; Some will rob you with a six gun, And some with a GIS. In the state of Tamil Nadu, near the town of Marakkanam, rig…

@mljones -- deeply recommend Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (here's a useful review by Scott Rosenberg http://www.wordyard.com/2010/08/04/perfecting-sound-forever-great-book-on-history-of-recording/ ). I way long ago took a college-level physics class and I suspect know less than the median US-born person my age about pop music of the 20th century. Milner's exposition gave me the background I needed to understand the ways recording and playback technology affected music, and vice versa, without being condescending. I learned even more about Edison's vengefulness, and I now understand a lot more about the influence of World War II on the music tech industry, about racism in the folk music preservation scene, about how we choose codecs for compression, about the loudness wars and dynamic range, about why we revere or despise particular practices or musicians, about the sexist culture of audiophilia, and about how to (or how not to) get people to switch workflows.

“Perfecting Sound Forever”: great book on history of recording
I’ve written a bit here about the curse of over-compression in recorded music: For those of us already unhappy with the music industry’s bungling of the transition to digital distribution, he…

https://appear.in/

appear.in
Video conversations with up to 8 people for free - no login, no downloads. Create a video room. Share the link. Appear together. Try it now at https://appear.in

https://zoom.us/

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
Zoom makes video and web conferencing frictionless. Founded in 2011, Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with a secure, easy platform for video and audio conferencing, messaging, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution for conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Zoom helps businesses and organizations around the world bring their teams together to get more done. Zoom is a private company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

re the disconnect between people who feel safe right now in the US and people who do not: https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/08/23/my-nonviolent-stance-was-met-with-heavily-armed-men/ "If you feel safe now, it’s an illusion born of your relationship to power."

My “Nonviolent” Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men
A post from Logan Rimel, parish administrator at University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley (CA). Logan traveled to Charlottesville during the weekend of August 5 to bear witness with his friends at Charis Community Cville.
Some thoughts on nonviolence post-Charlottesville:
TLDR: White Christians, if you aren’t willing to personally take a bat to the head, shut up about antifa.
My FB feed, podcast feed, workplace conversations, and church chit chat are circling around Charlottesville, antifa, violence/nonviolence, white folks quoting Dr. King, white supremacy, neo-Nazis…It’s hard to get away from it. There’s part of me that doesn’t want to, that wants to keep refreshing the feed, taking in more, trying to read the next thing and the next thing. Maybe if I keep myself submerged here, what I saw will make sense.
Since coming back from Charlottesville I have been physically disconnected, emotionally disabled, and spiritually chaotic. I’m told this is normal, and I’m not judging myself for it. (Well, that’s not quite true – impostor syndrome is real, even in times like this. Who am I to be affected by what I saw, heard, and felt, when others “deserve” their reactions so much more authentically?) I wake up and remember what happened, and it settles heavily in my chest, pressing on my throat. But I get up, I go to work, I show up at meetings, get a beer with a friend. My cat is fed and my laundry is put away and yesterday I successfully talked myself out of eating an entire pie, so…yeah, I’d say things are looking up.
I’m ok. I really am. I’m gonna be able to get back to normal; I have so many resources and so much love surrounding me. Thank you to everyone who’s reached out, given me a massage, let me talk at them, prayed with and for me, given me a ride, sent their love, and sat in quiet to keep me company.
One disquieting aspect of this experience has been how I think about pacifism and nonviolence. I’ve always considered myself a pacifist, though I recognized that it was an untested, hypothetical kind of pacifism. Weak sauce, really. In Charlottesville, my “nonviolent” stance was met with heavily armed men. They came with bats, clubs, plywood shields painted with swastikas, brass knuckles, tear gas canisters, and wooden sticks. Not to mention the guns. The heavily armed militia were everywhere. They liked that they made you feel nervous. It was fun for them.
They came to hurt people, and they did.
Let me take a moment to be clear – I do not advocate for violence. I trust, however pig-headedly, that all of creation – including all people – is both capable and worthy of salvation. That there is no such thing as a lost cause with God. I cannot explain this trust; it is a part of me deeper than rational faculty. To commit violence against another human being is to commit violence against the image of God in them. To me, it is a sin. I do not believe God requires us to sin. But it seems apparent to me that the world sometimes does.
I never felt safer than when I was near antifa. They came to defend people, to put their bodies between these armed white supremacists and those of us who could not or would not fight. They protected a lot of people that day, including groups of clergy. My safety (and safety is relative in these situations) was dependent upon their willingness to commit violence. In effect, I outsourced the sin of my violence to them. I asked them to get their hands dirty so I could keep mine clean. Do you understand? They took that up for me, for the clergy they shielded, for those of us in danger. We cannot claim to be pacifists or nonviolent when our safety requires another to commit violence, and we ask for that safety.
And so I come to this – white liberal Christian friends, I’m talking to you. I’ve seen a lot of condemnation of “violent response,” lots of selective quoting Dr. King, lots of disparagement of antifa and the so-called “alt-left,” a moral equivalency from the depths of Hell if I ever saw one. You want to be nonviolent? That is good and noble. I think…I think I do, too. But I want you to understand what you’re asking of the people who take this necessary stance against white supremacy, the people who go to look evil in the face. You’re asking them to be beaten with brass knuckles, with bats, with fists. To be pounded into the ground, stomped on, and smashed. You’re asking them to bleed on the pavement and the grass. Some of them are going to die. And you’re asking them to do that without defending themselves.
Are you willing to do that? Are you going to to go out when the Nazis come here, to the Bay Area, next week? Are you going to offer your body to them? No? Are you willing to take a bat to the head? To be surrounded by angry young men who want nothing more than to beat you unconscious, like they did Deandre Harris? Are you going to rely upon a different type of violence – that imposed by the state – to protect you – even knowing it is a danger to your neighbors? To outsource the violence your safety requires to someone else? Or are you just not going to show up, at the rally or afterward? To choose passivity over pacifism – because let’s be clear, nonviolence is still about showing up.
If you are unwilling to risk your bodily integrity to stand against literal Nazis, but you are willing to criticize the people out there who are taking this grave threat seriously but not in a way of which you approve….I just don’t know what to say to you. Truly. Your moral authority is bankrupt and you’re not helping. You’re a hypocrite.
Everyone wants to feel safe. You are not safe. Your Muslim neighbors are not safe. Your immigrant neighbors are not safe. Your black neighbors are not safe. Your disabled neighbors are not safe. Your indigenous neighbors are not safe. Your Jewish neighbors are not safe. Your transgender neighbors are not safe. If you feel safe now, it’s an illusion born of your relationship to power. But make no mistake – you may not be the canary, but we’re all in the same coal mine. These people have been “community organizing” for DECADES. They are base-building and they have the White House. They have infiltrated law enforcement. They are in every legislative body and on every school board. You are not safe.
How can the sleeping white church, of which I am a part, mobilize the church militant? How can we spiritually prepare and discipline the followers of Christ to put their bodies on the line? It’s an earnest question; I don’t know the answer. We don’t have a lot of time to equivocate, though. It’s time to move.
“The issue is not, “What must I do in order to secure my salvation?” but rather, “What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?” It is not, “How can I be virtuous?” But, “How can I participate in the struggle of the oppressed for a more just world?” Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on the self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.”—Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Logan is a white, transgender, genderfluid man currently living in the Bay Area. He is a stress baker, podcast fiend, snarky cross-stitcher, and reluctant Episcopalian. He works as the parish administrator at University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley.

on the need for public interest technologists: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2017/0215.html

Here's a little overview of the Mississippi Freedom Schools project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Schools

Freedom Schools
Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and economic equality in the United States. The most prominent example of Freedom Schools was in Mississippi during the summer of 1964.

A friend of mine just read Ostrom: https://camilleacey.com/2017/04/02/something-in-commons/

Something in Commons
My summary of Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize lecture.

on emotional labor and unappreciated domestic work as infrastructure: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” ― George Eliot, Middlemarch

^ also...the thing I've been talking to funders, peers, and everyone who will listen about: running meaningfully "diverse" (whatever that means) teams requires a massive investment in emotional labor by leadership, building infrastructure internally for staff to be vulnerable and loving with each other.

on US debt to China: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/that-hysterical-chinese-professor-ad-from-the-2010-election-campaign/ "the ad is right on target actually in its basic claim. American errors and profligacy are the makers’ real targets; it is not ‘Asia-baiting,’ although it may feel that way initially. If it gets Americans to think more seriously about the looming debt crisis and the seriousness of the Chinese challenge, so much the better."

That Hysterical ‘Chinese Professor’ Ad from the 2010 Election Campaign
China’s own Heinrich von Treitschke!

 
This is a great ad. Anyone with an interest in Asian security should see it. Not only is it a great inside joke if you are in this area, it also does a great job capturing the American public’s angst about China’s rise. And quite honestly, it’s basically correct. We are spending our way into oblivion, and the Chinese are (deservedly) laughing as we fall into the abyss of our own making. We are doing this to ourselves – and Chinese elites are studying past hegemonies – so the scenario presented in the ad is, in fact, credible. Plus, it’s nice to see a professor presented in the US media who actually looks serious and authoritative instead of the usual Fox Network tropes that we’re pointy-headed, irrelevant Marxists who have affairs with our students. Now if only that professor image could include Americans…
There is some grumbling that the ad is racist. A friend in the field suggested it replaces the bogus Japanese threat 20 years ago with a Chinese one today. But I don’t really see that myself. The concern of the ad is not the ‘yellow-peril,’ but American foolishness, and the Chinese are presented rather well actually. The students look serious, civil, and healthy, while the prof behaves and talks like he actually knows wth he is talking about. Contrast that with typically condescending or idiotic portraits of academics in the US media – think about the ridiculous professor sequence from last year’s Transformers 2, e.g. At least this guy actually moves and speaks the way we really do in class. Ok, well, maybe he is a little more like Heinrich von Treitschke than most of us are, but still, he looks like a pretty good lecturer. Think of him as the Chinese Leo Strauss or something. LOL. I imagine that his class would be pretty fun to take. Fallows’ treatment of the ad is worth a look too.
More seriously, the ad is right on target actually in its basic claim. American errors and profligacy are the makers’ real targets; it is not ‘Asia-baiting,’ although it may feel that way initially. If it gets Americans to think more seriously about the looming debt crisis and the seriousness of the Chinese challenge, so much the better. Certainly the Tea Party, for all its sturm and drang, has neither the guts nor focus to say anything meaningful about the US response to Asia – another one of its many failures of seriousness. Nor does anyone in official Washington really know how to rein the $1.3 T budget deficit – funded, incidentally, by massive borrowing from China – without huge tax increases and spending cuts. (Quick note: It’s mathematically impossible!, which is why no one has any idea.) So if we must scare Americans into budgetary seriousness by noting that China is breathing down our neck (which they are starting to), then so much the better.
Finally, it is worth noting that China is a much more serious long-term threat than Japan ever was. China is 10 times larger in population (and 4 times larger than the US), and it is not democratic. So while I wouldn’t want yellow-baiting, ads like this that prick America’s unipolar daydream are useful actually.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2031692

Universal Service in China and India: Legitimating the State? by Krishna Jayakar, Chun Liu :: SSRN
This paper examines the contrasting experiences with universal telecommunications service policies in China and India as manifestations of the two states’ diffe

freedom of association and a ton of other rights discussed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements inspired me to make Randomized Dystopia: Are you tired of the same old dystopias? Why not write about tyrannies that deny different rights? https://www.harihareswara.net/dystopia/

Something we talked about at side doors/direct action last night that @jerrym's rant reminded me of is my friend Diana's new Teaching Community Tech handbook: https://www.alliedmedia.org/news/2016/11/16/introducing-%E2%80%9Cteaching-community-technology-handbook%E2%80%9D

Introducing the “Teaching Community Technology Handbook”
The Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) is excited to present the “Teaching Community Technology Handbook”. This 100+ page handbook will take you through the history of popular education while offering a step-by-step guide to developing community rooted technology workshops and curricula.