Rogers Cadenhead reports on a Wikipedia editor who deliberately lied about his background on his bio page, and then convinced the New Yorker that the lies were the truth. (The magazine wound up having to print a correction.) He then admitted to the lie and was hired by Jimbo Wales at Wikia anyway. When I look at some of the people who run Wikipedia (like its founder), I am more amazed than ever at its success and level of quality. ...
One former US soldier says that in the absence of clear guidelines from their superiors, military interrogators looked to TV and movies for ideas on how to get information from prisoners. For my money, Greg Beato’s piece on TV and movies contributing to police violence is the best there is on this general subject. I quote: According to the activist group October 22nd, “the number and rate of people killed by law enforcement agents have jumped alarmingly in this new political climate of increased ‘homeland security’ and repressive laws.” The group publishes a book called Stolen Lives and is now working on a third edition of it. In the 2nd edition of the book, it documented “over 2000 cases of people killed by law enforcement agents in the 1990s.” (In contrast, it appears that around 60 to 80 law enforcement officers were deliberately killed in 2002, with a total of 135 duty deaths for the year.) ...
Just a few items that have caught my eye in the past few days: Twelve year old boy dies after a tooth abscess spreads to his brain. Not only is the child dead, but his total medical bill wound up at $250,000. Extracting the tooth would have cost $80. One study estimates that 750,000 Americans are living on the streets. Severe poverty in America is at a 32 year high. 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.
I thought I was the only person who randomly clicked around on web pages while they read. Turns out, there’s a whole slew of us.
greatfirewallofchina.org uses a server in China to test which Web sites the Chinese government is blocking. rc3.org is available to Chinese users, I’m sure they’re happy about that.
His description of how CIOs responded to his talk: I’m still musing over an eye-opening experience a few months ago when I spoke at CIO Magazine’s annual conference. You might have expected, as I had, that most Chief Information Officers wanted to know about the latest trends in technology so they could keep ahead of the curve. Nothing of the sort. CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible. ...
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise explains why turned down the opportunity to work for the John Edwards campaign: And aside from the risks to the campaign, I wasn’t sure this arrangement would be healthy for my blog. With this responsibility weighing on my mind, how could I continue to deliver the independent perspective that my readers value? If I were suddenly on a candidate’s payroll, yet still posting my own “independent” thoughts on Majikthise, what would my longtime readers think? Would they still trust me? Should they? Full disclosure wasn’t going to solve the problem of divided loyalties. ...
Yesterday I explained my one simple rule for finding good guilds in online games – join guilds with girls. I’d say that the rule works elsewhere as well. Diverse teams make better teams. Today I thought I’d take a stab at explaining why I think that is the case. When people are surrounded with people they consider to be like themselves based on stereotypes (rather than actually knowing all of the people present somewhat intimately), they form a false sense of security that enables them to be more insensitive to others. Chances are in a group of any size there will be a great diversity of opinion, but if everyone in the group looks the same, people in the group will underestimate that diversity of opinion. ...
Anil Dash has a good post on why it’s a good idea to explicitly seek out female speakers for tech conferences. I don’t go to many tech conferences, but I have my own point to add on the subject of the value of diversity. I have been playing online games for many years, and in those games, I’ve been in many guilds (organized associations of players who band together to just hang out or to achieve common goals). I’ve been in guilds that have a lengthy and complex application process, and guilds where I’ve been invited a minute or two after inquiring about the guild. In my experience, there is one simple indicator of whether a guild is good or bad, and that’s whether or not it has female members. ...
A jury awarded over $1.5 billion dollars to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft over the MP3 audio format. Microsoft had previously licensed rights to use MP3 from Fraunhofer/Thompson, but the jury ruled that Alcatel-Lucent also holds patents which apply to MP3 and must be paid license fees as well. Needless to say, this poses a big problem for the other licensees, as anyone who hasn’t paid Alcatel-Lucent is exposed in the same way as Microsoft. ...