Writing between the lines

A great piece of public health reporting, which I have come across in the book The China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfeld. I rather like the book which is a good starter for anyone interested in the intersection of public policy/human rights, the public health infrastructure, and epidemiology. It could, however, have a different title, as the lessons can be generalized outside of China. And there was another book or movie by that name, about some lose Chinese nukes or some such nonsense.

At the intersection of science, freedom of the press and political power a lot of very interesting things happen, and it is enlightening to see how people resolve their competing allegiances. A similar dynamic is now playing out in the reporting of global warming, with some saying, basically “Global Warming is only a rumor,” and others showing some evidence, which is being largely ignored by Bush & Co. (Another example of Convergence?)

The book is about the SARS epidemic, with a special focus on how it got started and and personalities involved. In this case, a reporter in China who is aware his work will be censored, still manages to get out all the essential information. This is one of the very first stories about what would later be named SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and the reporter does an excellent job, being caught between the reality of government censors and his responsibility to provide information about a matter of overwhelming public iimportance:

From the Heyuan Daily:

Blogs I like: picdit

Here’s an interesting post, with some great lamps. I need the alien abduction lamp.

http://picdit.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/10-lamps-i-want-in-my-house/

Yes, and no

John Robb notes that the US has given up on Nation building in Iraq, has set its sights much lower, and is concentrating on letting militas that sprout up flourish.

This is sensible, but it hardly constitutes the U.S. military embracing open source war, what’s happening is they they are just standing out of the way, and not getting involved in local issues.  Of course that would have been a wise course of action in the first place, and never invade Iraq at all:

Library thing is really cool

As noted earlier, Librarything is a handy place to post books and an example of new media working together with, rather than competing with, old media. Which is why I am rather frustrated that wordpress is doing some kind of censoring of Librarything widgets in the borders of blogs hosted on wordpress.com. Why do they do that?

The Unsecured Country (rule of law edition)

It seems that the sub-prime mess will have even more fallout than I’d thought back in this post in April. I’d thought about the global connections but there are a few things happening that could make this a really sticky wicket, and the fallout could well be much larger than anyone’s allowing right now.

It has come out that one of the largest mortgage lenders had pressured the appraisal firm to use appraisers who had a track record of over-valuing houses. The next logical step is an accusation of fraud from those who securitised these mortgages, and then from those who bought the securities backed by these mortgages. It is a small step from that point for consumers to begin to repudiate these loans, saying they were fraudulently duped into taking out a larger loan, and therefore seek damages. And they would simply be: right, if the lender put pressure on the appraiser. And it seems they did.

And from a recent legal decision regarding the enforceability of these securitized loans, there is a special bonus, one of those great quotes from a judge who actually upholds the law, and didn’t get (or didn’t read) the memo that the American legal system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mega Corp, Inc:

The plaintiff’s argument that “‘Judge, you just don’t understand how things work,’” the judge wrote, “reveals a condescending mindset and quasi-monopolistic system where financial institutions have traditionally controlled, and still control, the foreclosure process.

Now we know the Mall owners are scared, really scared, of new competition (revised 15 November 2007)

Here’s an interesting and important legal decision that will have some very real urban design/architectural implications. It’s yet another example of small, local and very particularized developments eclipsing centralized, consolidated, and homogenized ones.

It’s also interesting from another point of view: what information we get from this lawsuit. Lawsuits are actually very efficient ways of distributing information, as each lawsuit reveals things through the adversarial process that wouldn’t always come out. In this case the information is clear: Caruso’s development model is such a threat that his competition thought the legal risk they placed themselves in was worth it. That gives an insight as to how dangerous they thought this competition is, and what means they have to counter it. They think this competition is dangerous, and they don’t have a clear way of adapting to this threat.

And we see the theme of competition between things of different scales that was discussed here. The quote from Schumpeter (I’ll get to it in just a bit) that I just love also talks about changing scales. (I hadn’t noticed that before! How could I miss that?)

It is easy to make a great wordpress theme

Ok, another new theme, another chance lost.

All that I would like is a theme that is:

1. NOT fixed width
2. Can have light letters on a dark backround
3. Not be really weird or unusual.

It would be really nice, but not necessary, for the theme to have a customizable header.

Chris Castle makes 3–no wait–2 points

Responding to my comments, Chris Castle wants to make three points:

First, I’d probably pay more attention to you, whoever you are, if you would sign a real name to just one of your various posts.

Second, you take the point out of context–the parasitic behavior is the trading of illegal copies. I’ve never had a problem with the technology, just the behavior. If what you’re doing is legal, then you can explain yourself to your ISP and you should be able to continue using your account although you may have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth. If you don’t like paying for your bandwidth usage, I’m sure there will be some ISPs in the short run who will cater to those being shut off. In the long run, if you don’t like paying for bandwidth, thank the millions of people who are ripping off the creative community. I–for one–will not shed a single tear for you. Fortunately for you, our society is taking a very long time to impose the negative externalities of illegal file bartering in the places they belong.

Third, I don’t debate with cowards, just those who stand behind their own names and take responsibility for what they say.

First, you may or may pay attention to me, after all I have generally ignored you–except for a couple of times when IP Central has published links to your rants. As of yet, I will decide when or not to post anonymously. But I am in pretty good company with everyone else who has chosen to use a pen name, e.g. Mark Twain and George Orwell.

Second, I am not taking any point out of context–it is you who are trying to conflate illegal file sharing with using P2P technology. Someone can use IM infrastructure to trade illegal copies, or just a plain old website, too. Comcast broke a protocol, not illegal file sharing. They also committed fraud, because they told their companies that they could use bit torrent. And exactly why should I have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth, rather than the same rate everyone else pays?

Third, see my response to your First comment.

SuSE Live Cd’s - now they are official, and issued

Hat Tip: Distrowatch

Well SuSE has joined the band wagon, and has issued Live CD’s with a click to install option. This is great because you can test out if SuSE works with your hardware, and if you are happy, just install. There is a Gnome and a KDE version available here:

ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.3/iso/cd

Hate speech of the far right (Chris Castle edition)

Chris Castle has a long rant about Comcast’s blocking the Bit Torrent protocol, or to be more precise he has a long rant about the many who are criticizing Comcast; it seems he is a little upset that many have objections to Comcast’s actions, and that a consensus exists that committing fraud in the name of some secret agenda might actually be *wrong.* Corporate misbehavior is doing much to further the cause of net neutrality; one prominent commentator has changed his mind and come out in favor of some form of net neutrality, as pointed out over at Freedom to Tinker.

Chris never mentions that Comcast lied to its own customers in its FAQS and thereby committed fraud. They also interfered with their subscriber’s freedom of association. Those are minor sins, or perhaps even virtues, in Chris’s book. First, he starts out with some generalizations, and is so mad he gets his words all mixed up, which was my clue that this was really some kind of hate speech, not rational argument:

My general thesis there is that at a high level of abstraction (a) there are two essentially classes of traffic on the Internet, one legal and one illegal, and (b) if an ISP is not going to have the spine to shut off illegal file bartering on its network, the least they could do is make it very, very unpleasant for the illegal file bartering and substantially illegal social networking systems to operate.

Here we have an insatiable demand for simplicity: there can apparently be only two categories of anything, and the idea of a nuance like ‘legal file sharing’ or ‘immoral disruption of networking protocols’ can’t even begin to enter into the debate.

The use of an adverb as a adjective is unique, though: “there are two essentially classes” beats even some of W’s hilarious mis-speaks.

Then, there is the sweeping accusation that social networking systems are “substantially illegal” which he never explains. But he doesn’t have to: this is anti-net neutrality hate speech, and he gets his thoughts as right as his grammar, and his logic as twisted as his emotions.

But this speech has plenty of antecedents, particularly over at IP Central, which seems to be about the only place that actually likes Chris Castle’s writing. He goes on: