Fear and Loathing in Alaska

Dumbass Wulf Blitzer asked Sarah Palin to explain the economics of the recovery. Then I muted her.

She stook there squinting into the camera spouting her soccer-mom-brand passive-aggressive fear and hate.

Which reminds me that with the centerists becomming less tolerant of creepy attitudes, the nutcases are feeling the pressure of marginalization more than ever before.

Sarah Palin is their representative-in-chief.

The Summer Job Market Looks Grim

The Summer Job Market Looks Grim for people in Broward County where Fort Lauderdale is located.

This morning, May 28, 2009, the Channel Ten news anchors announced a job fair giving the location, time, and the names of several participating companies.

The outlook is indeed grim if the news report is indicative. We can work for:

Avon
Family Dollar Stores
The Check Cashing Store

A multilevel marketing company that makes money from economic incest, the lowest priced retailer in the universe, or a company that charges outrageous fees for cashing paychecks, taking advantage of ignorance.

Mirable dictu! Horribili visu!

When to Use a Different Search Engine

On May 21st Deep Web Technologies announced browser plugins for searching the data they have helped make available using federation technique that finds, merges, and presents things Google et al don't give you. What they do involved taking lots of time to understand how data is stored at many different locations and creating a way to reorganize ontologies into a common format in order that *apples can be compared with apples* so to speak.

It's easy to use. Instructions:

Users can easily add any of these portals to their browser's search engine box by going to http://www.deepwebtech.com/open-search.html and clicking on a portal to automatically add it to their search box.

This post however is about *how* and *when* you make the choice.

The browser plugin makes a huge step forward in usability because it brings federated search into one click range for the user.

Unfortunately ALL search choices are conscious while searches tend to make unconscious assumptions. Changing these unconscious assumptions is a process of education and I wonder which markets outside of academic research will have penetration first. Deep Web Technologies obviously has an idea and a plan but users do unexpected things so this will be exciting to watch. If you like watching NASCAR for a week straight.

Break out the beer!

Conservative Pundits and Cognitive Dissonance

Although every nation has ratified Children Rights as recommended by the United Naitons, only the U. S. and Somalia haven't. That's the background.

Here's the rhetoric: Rep. Hoekstra on the O'Reilly Factor.

Evidently Hoekstra and O'Reilly are proud of the following bit of mental gymnasitcs:

The basis of conservative insistence on stopping abortion is the rights of the community protecting members who are voiceless. Community rights versus individual rights. Period.

Strangely, the basis of the United Nations push to grant rights to children in law is the same.

So what's the difference? In one case Hoekstra and O'Reilly like community rights and in the other, they like individual rights better.

I don't understand and I suspect, neither do they.

Google Squared

When you see Google Squared in a couple of weeks or months and you love spreadsheets, you will love the juicy goodness of a search arrayed in splendor and ordered in columns and rows. Or rows and columns if you prefer.

An if, as a spreadsheet user, you enjoy surrounding yourself with stacks of building blocks, you will again be content.

But if you think Google will extract structure out of the disorder, you will only be fooling yourself. I may be wrong. I have only seen a brief demonstration.

But it seems as though Google Squared is like looking at the world and seeing intelligent design. And yes, I believe the lead up was worth the punch line.

Don't Like Open Journal Publishing?

If you think there is something about the Internet that pollutes the purity of journal publishing, think again.

The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous. Any industry with global revenues of $600bn can afford to buy quite a lot of adverts, and pharmaceutical companies also buy glossy expensive "reprints" of the trials it feels flattered by. As we noted in this column two months ago, there is evidence that all this money distorts editorial decisions.

This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.

Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. "This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place," he said.

As you see, there is ample reason to suspect that this kind of thing is not rare as hen's teeth but rather a bit more common. In fact it might not be newsworthy if a journal publisher hadn't been the one to print it. Consider that if you will.

It isn't so different from whipping up a think tank is it? You want opinion, you buy it.

Using Ontologies to Change Government

The Knight Commission on the Information needs of Communities has a survey on how you find and use news. Fine and good, but at the end they ask about how government should change delivery to facilitate public engagement.

I suggested they discuss how an ontology could be developed that would give several levels of summary and detail. This sort of data structure would allow most trained data people to mash up and deliver useful information. For instance you could give contributors filtered by standard industry group (SIG) against politicians votes and agenda items filtered by SIG in a Gapminder display.

So far so good.

But this kind of ontology has the potential to replace current bill tracking methods used in house by governmental entities. After a bill passes or a court case is settled, the record would be an adequate way of archiving records for all types issues at law.

Past Facebook a Hyper-Social Format?

If social media are driven primarily by their ability to facilitate social contact, then we should be moving in the direction of an open social format.

My students like Twitter (speed), Facebook (friends), Myspace (fandom), Digg & Make (interests), Twine and blogging (sharing created content.) Not to mention Geo-location.

I don't see why we couldn't start with a desktop app like Adium to mash it in some way and then move to a cloud app. Then we will be able to see over the walls. Wish list: A sliding indicator for geo-location going from "exactly here" to "nowhere" would be nice.

The move would be invisible to your friends who prefer to stay in a particular comfort zone, yet visible to friends who are shall we say, more adventurous.

It's the heritage of Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Orlando. The concept of the destination resort with an escape hatch.

Quite a few years ago, a retired judge from Atlantic City gave a talk about the way the city had changed in the wake of casinos. I believe he was trying to warn us that promises of increased tourism from gambling resorts were not reliable. The casinos had captured their tourists and were definitely not sharing them with the rest of the city.

Social Issues and Online Addiction Among Teens

Sun-Sentinel's Education reporter Andrew Tran did a story on students and technology adaptation. Some of my students are quoted here.

The interview ran an hour and a half with a return trip for video a week later. I discovered some new things about my kids and put some more into new contexts.

There are a few things we need to address separately.

Number one, after viewing the Frontline piece on Korea, I think we can say that addictive behavior is probably limited to less than ten percent (between 5.5 and 10) of highly wired individuals. Let's let that problem plop into the laps of the psychologists. *plop* Now we can move on and not worry about the other ninety percent.

Number two, the remaining ninety percent have to deal with adaptation. Adaptation includes the temptation of addictive behavior. This is a real issue that should be dealt with explicitly. Although they don't end up with addictive behavior, they *are* the actual environment the addicts live in. The addictive behavior is socially immersive. But adaptation is much more than simply avoiding temptation.

The stories my students provided Andrew were about adaptation. It is about how to immerse yourself without drowning.

It seems that this, like every other part of adolescence is about learning. Maybe we can figure out how to help them learn rather than standing to one side screaming.

Observations on Florida's high school graduation rate

That's misleading. It's really an observation on child abuse by state versus graduation rate and prison population. Gapminder US View of HIgh School Graduation rate, child abuse, number of prisoners.

Observation of other states shows much lower rates of child abuse that *aren't* regionally associated. High school graduation rates *are* regionally associated.