Archive for 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Are You A Porn Addict?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 19, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, July 19th, 2009If you’re an American male, this is almost a stupid question. But why don’t you take the quiz anyway.
Here’s Some Good Porn |
As a moderately computer-savvy person, I often get calls for help when someone’s computer gets infected with a virus that hijacks their homepage or causes porn site popups. As a joke, when I get a call like this my first question is: “Is there a male between the ages of 13 and 75 in your house“? Because without fail, the caller is either male themselves or is a woman with male children, a husband, a dad, or a boyfriend in the house. Although I have no formal research to back this up, I’d feel comfortable saying (although if you’re a woman, you’ll be uncomfortable hearing) that 3 out of 5 American males have seen more Internet porn than they’d like you to think, and of the other two, one is an asexual ascetic, and the other has seen more than the first three combined but doesn’t care what you think. So is Internet porn bad? Unfortunately, the people that seem to ask this question the most do it out of their own morality-based discomfort with it, rather than a balanced look at how it really impacts current attitudes. Much like substance abuse (or anything else fun in life) studying sexuality in a scientific fashion is beset with a lot of obstacles. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that clinical research, surveys, and direct observation are all problematic. For an example, look at these PBS Frontline survey results and note not only the basic figures, but the fact that the vast majority of respondents are males, 21-30 years old. A classic example of “volunteer bias”. I thought I was alone amongst my more open-minded friends in my perception that Internet porn has been having a serious negative impact on our culture until Read the rest of this entry »
Twittergate – The Biggest Scoop That No-One Cares About
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 18, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, July 18th, 2009The same public that doesn’t care about Twittergate probably doesn’t care about the ethics involved.
 TechCrunch’s Twitter Documents? A Little Bluerbird Told Them |
To me, the most interesting thing about the recent leak and subsequent publishing of secret internal documents from Twitter was not the information revealed about Twitter – we all know they fancy themselves to be in a deathmatch with Google and Facebook – but how TechCrunch’s decision to publish them raises once again a slew of questions about journalistic practices. The death of Walter Cronkite on Friday was a timely sort of metaphor for the kind of questions to which I’m referring; Cronkite’s famous We Are Mired In A Stalemate broadcast during the Vietnam war was a symbol of everything I admire about great journalists, and why, in decades past, I might have actually wanted to be one. TechCrunch’s decision to publish is an excellent 21st century example of 19th century British newspaper and publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe’s statement that “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising“. After pointing out that Twitter is their largest source of outside traffic after Google in June, TechCrunch has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them. Which raises a couple of interesting questions: Are they somehow upholding some value of journalism by informing the public, or are they merely capitalizing on a tremendous traffic generator? And will it backfire? While this is in fact one of the biggest stories no-one cares about (it was barely even a hot topic on Twitter, ironically), it still highlights one of the key problems faced by journalism which is outlined in one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Elements of Journalism
Can Movies Be Made Without Corporate Capitalist Greed?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 17, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Friday, July 17th, 2009Crowdsourcing is one of many popular new buzzwords gaining traction, but will it work for movies?
A few years ago, my friend Terry Osterhout had a great idea: a zombie movie called “Hybrid”, completely produced with user-submitted material. Although a lot of buzz was generated, the submissions never really poured in. I think he was a little ahead of his time; crowdsourcing seems to be the hot new thing now, thanks to the rise of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter. We recently wrote about the crowdsourced video for the the Japanese pop band Sour’s song “Hibi no Neiro”, but there’s much more afoot: after considerable success launching the project “Live Music” (see the clip at left) via Facebook, the project is being backed by Sony and Intel for release this fall. There’s also This Movie is Broken, a movie about the Canadian band Broken Social Scene and (this will turn out well) Star Wars Uncut which slices “Star Wars: A New Hope” into 472 separate 15 second clips, to be filmed by 472 different users. This kind of “socialist filmmaking” can have beautiful results, as when Israeli artist Kutiman Remixed YouTube or when a non-profit assembles a project like Playing for Change. But can this kind of project really shape up without a healthy injection of capitalist greed? The most successful project like this so far has been Live Music, and as this CartoonBrew article points out, it’s heavily funded by corporate sponsorship. I guess there’s always crowdfunding as an alternative. This Mashable article asks if it is in fact the future of journalism. There’s been a lot of talk about Free Stuff lately, and I have to say: few know better than I how little people who like your work will pay you when you don’t directly charge for it.
Take Us To The Moon Obama
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 16, 2009 by admin in Politics
Thursday, July 16th, 2009On the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11, I’m reminded of why I voted for Barack Obama.
72 Words That Changed The World |
Call me a naïve utopian, but I voted for our current president largely for one reason: the hope that he had the ability to deliver a message that would inspire and galvanize our country in the way that Kennedy did with one speech at Rice University, 30 seconds of which is featured in the clip at left. We rarely think about it, but few things have shaped modern life more profoundly than America’s space program. Computer technology, medical technology, agricultural studies from space, telecommunications, television, high-tech materials…the research and resulting technologies that were required to develop the US space program touch virtually every aspect of our life. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, resulting in two men walking on the moon four days later. And the entire decade devoted to the race to the moon might not have happened if Kennedy hadn’t said “we choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win“. Bring us a new challenge, Mr. Obama. We don’t seem to be pulling it together on our own. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft & Music – A Remix We Don’t Need
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on July 15, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Why is Microsoft the last thing I think of when I think of music?
You’re sitting at your computer listening to your favorite song, and suddenly your system freezes, an error box pops up saying that the “Bing Streaming Music Player” is not responding, and the music gets stuck in annoying loop. Which of course, you might not even notice, if you were playing Vanilla Ice’s ripoff of Under Pressure (we would’ve embedded those clips but ASSCAP is suing people for doing that lately). In any case, this is what I imagine happening regularly if Microsoft does in fact launch their streaming music service later this month. Remember how Microsoft’s first big media partner RealPlayer (which has actually won awards for how bad it is) used to not only try to spy on you obsessively, but would always crash while doing so? Remember the Zune launch and all its software problems? Personally, I don’t even use iTunes; I refuse to download a 72MB piece of software just so I can buy some music. I typically buy from Amazon