Dowbrigade

Wednesday,
China’s new premier, Wen Jiabao, will be speaking at the Harvard
Business School, and my Chinese student Simon will be there to give us a first-hand
report. We expect to see a nice Blog entry after the speech, Simon.

Meanwhile, yesterday the New
York Times had an interesting article
on the visit, noting that China has now replaced Japan as the biggest
purchaser
of US debt (Treasury bonds, mostly, as we discussed in class). As
such, they are in effect financing the current US budget deficit out
of their balance of trade surplus:

So it is no wonder that in addition to lending their billions to the
United States Treasury, the Chinese are suddenly buying big-ticket American
goods, including airplanes, to relieve some of this pressure.

The Chinese, in short, are playing the diplomacy of globalization hard,
knowing it gives them a lot of leverage in the United States. It may
not be clear yet how effective they will be in getting their way with
the Bush team, but it seems safe to say that Prime Minister Wen doesn’t
need to worry about getting any lectures in Washington about globalization,
let alone democracy.

from the
New York Times

Kooshi, a seven-year-old mixed breed shorthair cat, hisses from his perch
on the window ledge, inside his home in Rishon Letzion, Israel, Tuesday,
Dec. 2, 2003. The Israeli cat was banned by a local officials from
circulating freely outside, apparently because its jet black color
was frightening the residents..

from AP
News

(AP photo)

Winner
of the Turner Prize, transvestite potter Grayson Perry, dressed as
his alter ego Claire, famous for his vases depicting images of sex
and child abuse, at Tate Britain in London, Sunday Dec. 7, 2003. The
decision to grant Perry the award marks a rare Turner victory for traditional
arts, as the winner puts his own spin on an ancient decorative form.

The
Turner Prize rewards an artist aged under 50 for an outstanding exhibition
of work over a recent 12-month period. To be eligible, the artist
must either be working in the United Kingdom or British-born.

from Excite
News

(AP photo)

December 6, 2003 — Struggling 2004 Democratic wannabe John Kerry fires
an X-rated attack at President Bush over Iraq and uses the f-word –
highly unusual language for a presidential contender – in a stunning
new interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

article from the
New York Post

full Rolling Stone Interview

Two feet of snow! Reminds me of when I was a boy. Back in the day, Upstate
New York, this kind of storm was the norm.  Why, I remember having
to dig tunnels through the snowdrifts just to get to the sidewalk
so we could walk to school.

Anyway, up at dawn this morning to see what the
storm had wrought. Amazing drifted vistas of wild whiteness, and more
still pouring from the sky.  I reached for my digital camera –
and was already hip deep in the front porch drift before noticing the
camera was abnormally light! 19-year-old able-bodied but unemployed
#2 son had raided the camera batteries for his Diskman!  If he
hadn’t left the house last night at the height of the storm for a blizzard
party I swear I would have done a Homer Simpson strangle on him.

However, the invigorating two mile tramp to the
nearest open convience store did me good.  Reminded me of when
I was a boy. Oh yean, been there.  Said son will be sentenced
to digging out the car when he returns. Here is a shot from my walk.

Two
ex-sales managers say
Abercrombie & Fitch were after
a certain "look" for their sales force, and the less a salesperson
had of this look, the less they worked.
"
I was sick of getting my schedule back every week with lines through
names," says Mandrick. "I can’t look the people that work
for me, that want to be there, in the eye and…lie to them and say
‘Oh, we don’t have hours,’ when, really, it’s because they weren’t
pretty enough."

A group of minorities suing Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t think the
retailer has the right to hire based on a look, a look they say too often
is mostly white. "[The look] is dominated by Caucasian, football-looking,
blond hair, blue-eyed males. Skinny, tall. You don’t see any African
American, Asian Americans," says Jennifer Lu, an Asian who says
she is suing the retailer for firing her and other Asians because management
preferred white males.
Abercrombie & Fitch denies these accusations, but would not speak
on camera to 60 Minutes. But the two former managers say what they saw
was "lookism" rather than racism.

As a "lookisticly-challenged" individual the Dowbrigade can empathize with the plaintiff in this case. It is high time attention was drawn
to the daily indignities, not to mention the illegally limited employment
and
advancement
opportunities
forced
upon those who fail to measure up to society’s standards of "looking
good".

In fact, our attorney has advised us to file a suit against the
Downtown Hyatt in Rochester, New York, who declined to hire him for
a Head Lifeguard position on the ridiculously transparent grounds that he
lacked
Red Cross certification, when the real reason was obviously "Lookism".
Lets see, 34 years of back pay……

from CBS News

It is fascinating to watch Dave
Winer’s personal vision of where blogging
can go as it evolves on Scripting.com. As he implements the dynamic new
capabilities of Channel
Z, his next-generation blogging environment,
we can watch it take form on his own blog. For me, one of the most exciting
aspects of the innovation is that we, the visitors to Dave’s World can
have a say in the form it takes, and the way we want to arrange, view
and interact with the content.

The ability of visitors to arrange content and even form would resolve
one of the questions we had about Dave’s vision of a "seamless environment"
within which original commentary, other blogs, mainline news streams, and
subject
specific RSS feeds can be woven together into an explorable universe
with multiple entrances and exits.

The conundrum we saw was that, at least for the Dowbrigade, the impact
of any particular blog, or any web site for that matter, is dependent in
differing degrees on both content and form. In many blogs Content
is King, and the form is primarily a function of trying to make the content
visible
and accessible. But in other cases the form, graphic design, color schemes
and operable interactivity of the content are what make it distinctive
or relevant to users.

This dichotomy between form and content is also clearly evident in my RSS
aggregator. Dave is not the only one pushing the envelope of the traditional
Blog format; the air is rife with rumors and riffs of experimentation and
paradigm redesign. But you wouldn’t know it from my aggregator. Aggregators
are designed to aggregate content, and pretty much strip the form and formatting
out.

Now, aggregators are indisputably becoming smarter and more versatile.
Some of them (not mine) can handle a variety of attachments, including
sound files. But none of them can replicate the look or feel of a site.
Perhaps the expansion of the blogging functionality that is bursting out
all over will be the impetus for bringing aggregators one step closer to
what they should be: a smaller window into another world, as opposed to
a blog, which is a picture window.

But we feel strongly that to give a true picture of another world, the
view often needs to include more than content. The content needs context.
In our ideal aggregator, each entry would be a recreation of the original
feed including formatting, functionality and even soundtrack.

One of the great things about Channel Z is that it permits and facilitates
the sharing of taxonomy tiers, so that each user can construct their own
personal directory of the Universe, like Borges Library of Babel, borrowing
branches from here and there, sources ancient or prescient, other bloggers
or the
Library
of Congress,
and arranging and interconnecting them according to whim or intuitive genius.
However, does this mandate that all of this knowledge and content need
be delivered and displayed according to a single aesthetic?

Dave’s aesthetic, for example, is clean and clear. Lots of white space,
nothing messy or haphazard, evidence of elegant simplicity and integrated
functionality. However, in many Asian cultures white is the color of death,
roughly analogous to our black, which may imbue Scripting with an unintended
solemnity for certain readers.

Some of the information, knowledge and wisdom fruit we would like hanging
on our taxonomy tree would certainly spoil if separated from its own tree
and hung on ours. Some of the threads we would wish woven into our informational
tapestry could not be stripped of their colors or designs without altering
their meaning and effect.

It could be argued that if you want to get the full impact of another’s
site, just go there, see it in its full and authentic glory, and then click
back
to where you started. This works and is part of what makes cruising
around the ‘sphere so much fun. But the initial impact and sweeping success
of RSS and aggregators shows there is a real desire to grab disparate information
streams and synthesize something new from them. This blending can produce insight on news, finding
unobvious connections. It can produce art, utilizing harmonic echoes and cognitive
dissonance. It can produce literature, in ways we are just beginning to understand.

Yet another of the revolutionary ideas embodied in Channel
Z is its incorporation
of multiple content access and display modes. This can be seen on Scripting
News in a brand new but inconspicuous pull down menu near the top of the
home
page. Its current entries are: nightly email, recent cats, all cats, weblog.com
and on this day in history. Now, nightly email is just a way to sign up
for Scripting News by email, and weblog.com is the main blog hosting site
for Userland, but the other three are distinct ways of looking at the content
Dave has posted to his site over the years.

When we saw that pull down we saw a feature which could empower the visitor
to find and view content in the manner best suited to their needs, tastes
and information acquisition style. On Thursday night Dave asked us what
we would like on a similar pull down designed for Dowbrigade News. After
a bit of thought, here goes:

1) My current layout, reverse chronological order, latest 16 posts
2) Same content in reverse, that is, in chronological order
3) Just today
4) All of my cats, in alphabetic order (switchable at one click to order
of greatest number of posts)
5) The dozen most recently posted-to categories
6) Some kind of graphic representation of the overall taxonomy tree of
the Dowbrigade site
7) My aggregator
8) A search window, allowing search by content, date or category and including
an option where visitors can choose TWO categories from pull down menus
and find items which have been cross-posted to THOSE TWO cats.

As for the this day in history, we don’t have enough history yet to make
that an option.

Someday we would like to allow visitors all these options,
and more. If possible, members at least could select a default layout which
would load every time they visited the site. The Dowbrigade figures if
we want you guys to stay awhile and absorb some of our ideas, we should
strive to make
you
as comfortable
as possible during your visit.

A new
e-mail computer worm appears to be the work of spammers trying to defeat
anti-spam forces. The W32/Mimail-L worm replicates like other worms,
by e-mailing itself to those in an infected computer’s address
book, but it also sends a second message promising delivery of a CD with
pornographic content. The link to supposedly prevent delivery of the CD
in fact sends an e-mail to one of eight anti-spam organizations.

Steve Linford of the Spamhaus Project said his organization is being flooded
with complaints from computer users who believe Spamhaus is responsible
the CDs. In addition, the worm can turn infected computers into drones
that can be used in denial-of-service attacks against the same eight organizations.

from Wired
News

DETROIT
– DaimlerChrysler AG’s sponsorship of a Super Bowl halftime football
game between lingerie-clad women could draw criticism, say experts.
But the Lingerie Bowl is a marketing risk the automaker, which has
become known for its sexually-suggestive ads, says it’s willing to
take.

For 20 minutes during the Super Bowl on Feb. 1, 14 models dressed in lingerie
will participate in a tackle football game. The program will be broadcast live
on a pay-per-view channel for an estimated $20 to $30 viewing fee.

"This is horrendous," said John Antil, professor of marketing
at the University of Delaware. "It is blatantly chauvinistic. You
have the potential of offending a significant amount of people and what
is the message? I am going to
think the car
is sexy or it makes me look more macho. It’s a boneheaded move."

from the
AP

First
weekend since March it looks like the Just Don’t Suck tennis club will
not be meeting. A steady snow has been pelting down since before dawn,
and there is already an eight-inch blanket over Malden, MA. with the
brunt of the storm yet to come. Just in time for what promises to be
a record December blizzard, and following
in
a great local tradition of public service extortions, all 1,100 snow
removal contractors in Massachusetts have been threatening to strike
this week over a new state requirement that they carry tracking devices
in their vehicles while working for the Commonwealth….

The road-sign-yellow units incorporate a high-tech clock and
a microchip that taps into the Defense Department’s global positioning
system satellite network. Highway officials expect to have up-to-the-minute
information about where the state’s 3,000-plus contracted plows are during
storms, so they can redeploy trucks to snow-clogged highways — and make
sure drivers aren’t clearing private lots or munching Dunkin’ Donuts
on state time.

from the
Boston Globe

When
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney visited a public school in small-town
Winchendon which had recently been declared "underperforming" by the
State Board of Ed – he was soundly booed by students. Several held signs.  One
even refused to shake the Gov’s hand. Righteous and respectful Constitutionally
protected political protest, no?

read the
original Thursday Globe report on the protest:

With a nearby banner proclaiming, "Welcome Governor Romney," one
student refused the governor’s handshake, and others toted small, handwritten
signs of protest, including one that read, "I am the underperformer."

"I proudly booed and yelled `phony,’ " junior Sarah Mungeam
said. "He
didn’t come here to help us. He came here to look good for his public
relations."

Today’s
Globe brings the news that the students involved in prosesting
the visit from the Republican budget-cutting, businessman-turned-politician
have been punished with suspensions. Guess they decided Freedom of Speech
doesn’t apply when it disses the Governor.

Jacob Whitney said he was given a three-day suspension for refusing
to shake Romney’s hand, a gesture he said he meant as a joke. Whitney,
18,
said he offered a hand to Romney when the governor met students after
his speech, but pulled it away when Romney extended his own hand.
He said he then patted Romney on his shoulder and said, "Just kidding," and
the two laughed.

from the
Boston Globe