newspeak

Newspeak.

Douglas Crockford’s Wrrrld Wide Web.

Inventor of JavaScript, JSON, and probably much else I use every day. And possessed of a sense of humour and insight into human communities. Then there are the games.

McGuinty government’s planned education overhaul will be catastrophic – thestar.com.

What Young People Think About Facebook And Instagram – Business Insider.

I would love to read the entire report. I cannot stand Facebook but find it nevertheless useful–And I find myself oddly agoraphobic in Google+–too much of not enough. So I spend (or waste) time on FB not being there. But my primary gripe with FB is its (crass?) marketing of interrelations as commercial occasions. It effectively seeks to colonize–replace? characterize?–“friendships” (laugh) with, as marketplace exchanges. (Putting my old hat on, and let’s change the name of FB to “Houe of Mirth”: no relation is not always already situated within the market, valued as it can be made valuable.) Do I see FB surviving as such? I see MSFT buying it in a year or so, or perhaps even Apple.

Eventbrite Manages More Republican Events Than Democratic Ones | TechPresident.

How unfortunate.

Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict | Literally Psyched, Scientific American Blog Network.

I came across the study many, many years ago, and reading it anew is refreshing. It’s actually quite important for anyone involved in building collaborative communities to read and understand.

Professional Archiving Solution | OPENARCHIVE.

Big Data is here to stay (though it’s not quite proven itself as useful as imagined) and it analyzing it–making sense of the data that are captured–is only part of the picture. It has to be stored, archived. How this is done is as much of interest as how the data are used (and by whom). And as with other things that are actually socially important, or can be, I’m in favour of commons-based solutions, open standards, open source. The interesting thing about open source and archiving, however, is related in OpenArchive’s Product Page (emphasis mine):

Features and functions of OPENARCHIVE

OPENARCHIVE offers all the functions of ARCHIVEMANAGER, except for two features. There can be no audit compliance according to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (GDPdu and GoBS in Germany) because publishing the  source code would be detrimental to those legal requirements. And, at the present time, no independent software manufacturers (ISV) have yet certified their applications for OPENARCHIVE.

That legal requirement is interesting. And it also flies in the face of my no doubt miserable understanding of the issues. For the security of the data are not compromised by making the code ensuring their security open. Openness relates to the elements making up the machine and even how it is supposed to function, not to the output. It’s worth investigating, I’d think, how Sarbanes-Oxley really intersects with open source issues here.

I get depressed that the futures of millions rests, it seems, on the sentiments of single individuals–Draghi, Merkel, Bernanke–and not on process. It’s not that I fetishize bureaucracy (which is all about process and procedure and not about people) but that I should think the whole point of having the science of economics and the vehicles which deliver the knowledge gained by that science’s application should be so, well, ignored, all in favour of sentiment. It’s not in favour of the irrational, per se, but in favour of personal and idiosyncratic desires. (The irrational means, if we do want to use it, relying on local and personal desires, however logical, when the expectation is for something more general. It only makes sense to me, one could say, but it really does make sense. I guess this means that I tend to believe, I really do, that all persons, barring absolute madness, amenable to rational discourse: they can be persuaded away from their current thinking by the strength of facts well presented.)

Greek Government and Public at Odds Over New Cuts – NYTimes.com.

Daring Fireball: Markdown Basics.

Markdown is very useful and this guide is worth the read—though, absurdly, Markdown is so simple that a guide really is not needed. But still. Read it and use Markdown.

LeftyBlogs.com: Taking Back America… in all fifty states. – LeftyBlogs.com.

Interesting. Would be worth looking to see if there is something like this for other categories, including open source–theory, praxis, policy.