Passing Comments

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
by Emily Dickinson

For fans old or new of Emily Dickinson, a new biography is just out. Titled “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” it’s by Brenda Wineapple and it’s getting high praise from critics.

You can find one recent review here from The New York Sun (”The Activist and the Recluse” by Eric Ormsby, Aug 6, 2008).

And if you want to read an excerpt from Wineapple’s book itself, there’s one here on the publisher’s website (Random House/Knopf).

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be rock stars*

Who knew that being a rock star is such a terrible thing? (President Bruce Springsteen has kind of a nice ring to it, don’t you think?)

But, apparently, Republican Party nominee McCain is calculating that American voters think poorly of the rock deities, because he’s been accusing Obama of the dark sin of being just such a super-celebrity at home and abroad.

• To see an example of Obama as rock star, watch this New York Time’s video overview of the candidate’s Berlin visit (”Reporter’s Notebook: Obama in Berlin” by Nicholas Kulish, July 24, 2008).

• To see an example of how McCain is trying to use the rock star label as a weapon against Obama, see this report and a video of a McCain campaign ad on Politico.com (”McCain contrasts celeb Obama with average Americans,” Jonathan Martin blog, Aug 8, 2008).

The blonde bites back

What do (beautiful blonde) women want? A little respect, maybe. That’s something Republican Party nominee McCain discovered recently when he took the proverbial low road in a television campaign ad in July that compared Obama to blonde popstar Britney and blonde celebrity Paris Hilton. The latter blonde instantly took aim, fired back and scored a bullseye.

Hilton posted her own video in which she called McCain a “wrinkly whitehaired guy.” And, according to the media reports I read, Hilton was widely declared the victor in the video shootout. See McCain’s video here, and the Hilton video here.

How to play “Playing the Race Card”

It was never a question that race eventually would become an issue in the current Presidential campaign, it was just a question of how “it would rear its ugly head,” according to Elvin Lim, an Asst. Professor of Government at Wesleyan University.

Pointing out that “the minority candidate is always accused of playing the minority card” (in this case the race card), Lim analyzes the strategy Republican nominee McCain is using to attack Obama on this front.

See Lim’s article here (Aug 4, 2008) on the Oxford University Press blog (blog.oup.com).

If money really talks

Then it must have quite a bit more to declare about Obama in this campaign than it does about McCain. In July, the Obama campaign reported raising $51 million, compared to the McCain campaign’s report of taking in only $27 million for the same period (”Obama Campaign Raises Over $51 Million In July” by Beth Fouhy, AP, Aug 16, 2008). See article here.

If the news media’s reporting of poll results drives you crazy?

A possible antidote is the website fivethirtyeight.com. The site offers ongoing analysis of the major U.S. political polls, and is the creation of Nate Silver, a highly reputable sports statistics analyst.

See a Newsweek article here on Silver (”Making His Pitches” by Andrew Romano, Jun 16, 2008). In a crucial primary for Hillary Clinton earlier this year, Silver’s projections were more on target than those of all the established pollsters, according to Newsweek. The article also details how Silver goes about achieving his high level of accuracy for projections in both sports and political events.

The number five-thirty-eight, according to Silver, is a reference to the number of electors in the Electoral College — the U.S. Constitutional process that plays the key role in determining who will win the presidency.

Is it truth, lies, or just politics?

In political campaigns, the practice of smears and mudslinging are favorite activities more often than not. To find out if these accusations are true or false, one of the best go-to websites is factcheck.org.

From the website’s About page:

The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

If wishes were horses and rock stars could be president…

Bruce Springsteen performing “This Land Is Your Land” at the Memorial Coliseum in LA on September 30, 1985:

(see here for previous round-up)

Video from the website of the Italian magazine Focus.

Intro translation:

It’s cold!
In search of the animals of the Arctic Circle

Video link here.

If I were king of the world or ruler of China — neither of which I have any chance of ever becoming and I’m okay with that — I would send a limo to the home of that little seven-year-old Chinese girl with the killer voice (who got shoved behind the curtains because she reportedly failed the cuteness test) and I would bring her to the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Then I would put her on center stage and cue the orchestra.

I’m willing to bet a pair of favorite old flip-flops that a fair share of the world’s population would tune in and hum along as she sang her heart out. And in the process, Chinese leaders would win more points with public opinion than all the Olympic athletes of all time.

What could possibly top such a closing act and the restoration of good sense and fairmindedness it would represent? The only possible thing would have been if Yang Peiyi had been standing there in a pretty red dress in the opening ceremonies singing her heart out. But that’s a bell that can’t be unrung, so there it is.

For a humorous, compassionate and informative take on what happened to Yang Peiyi, I highly highly recommend Gail Collins’ column in yesterday’s New York Times (”I’m Singin’ in Beijing” Aug 13, 2008). Collins is a former editor of the Times editorial page, and was the first woman ever in that particular top job.

In her columns, Collins often approaches subjects with an emphasis on the informed perspective. Yesterday, for example, she pointed out that the China leadership is not at all alone in the world in its favoring of show over substance.

In this quote from the Yang Peiyi column, Collins frames the overall issue with her usual wit:

Now this is an Olympic crisis everybody can get into. While your heart goes out to the athletes suffering the agony of defeat, very few of us can internalize the trauma. Really, you have to be able to imagine yourself getting onto the balance beam before you can relate to the pain of falling off.

The chance that the Chinese leaders will right this particular wrong done to a child, not to mention the human heart, is pretty slim, I think. Reading Collins’ piece on it and her quotes from various experts at least offers the comfort that this was a slight felt round the world.

Earlier this week on a major American news show on CBS, the host and veteran newsman Bob Schieffer interviewed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who’s been mentioned often in U.S. media as a top contender to be chosen as Obama’s vice presidential running mate.

Schieffer’s opening question to Kaine referred to the recent fighting between Russia and Georgia:

This morning’s headlines tell it all. American presidents, as we look at this situation going on in Russia, have to deal with problems that sometimes don’t come up at all in campaigns, so I guess my question this morning, Governor, is when we see what’s happening today, doesn’t that, won’t that bolster John McCain’s argument that the Presidency needs someone with experience dealing with issues like these?

What interested me most about Schieffer’s question was how much it reflected a perception — or rather misperception — that was analyzed recently in an article by Harvard University professor and foreign policy analyst Samantha Power (”The Democrats & National Security” by Samantha Power, The New York Review of Books, Aug 14, 2008).

In the essay, Power takes a close look at some of the factors that, according to her, have led American voters generally to regard the Republican Party to be much better on national security issues than the Democratic Party.

Power writes:

“This faith in Republican toughness has had profound electoral consequences. Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm.”

Power, who formerly served on Obama’s campaign as his foreign policy advisor, examines some of the origins of this faith in GOP toughness, and also questions its justification. She lays out some specific suggestions for how Obama and the Democratic Party leadership can reverse this crucial trend in voter thinking. Read full article here.

If Roger Doiron has his way, future U.S. Presidents won’t just fill their days walking the world’s corridors of power. They also will be able to step just outside the Oval Office doors to check on how their very own beans and Brussels sprouts are growing.

The project, which Doiron launched earlier this year is Eat the View. It is a campaign advocating that vegetable gardens be planted in visible public spaces around the US, including the most highly visible of all, the White House lawn.

Doiron is the founder of Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI). The group’s mission, according to its website:

…is to empower individuals, families, and communities to achieve greater levels of food self-reliance through the promotion of kitchen gardening, home-cooking, and sustainable local food systems. In doing so, KGI seeks to connect, serve, and expand the global community of people who grow some of their own food.

An article earlier this year in the New York Times described the non-profit KGI as “a virtual community of 5,200 gardeners from 96 countries.” (”Out of the Yard and Onto the Fork” by Anne Raver, April 17, 2008)

In his newly posted video (below), Doiron shows why it is a good idea for the White House to have its own vegetable garden, and offers a hands-on, how-to guide for the next American President — whoever that might be:

(I found the link to KGI in the True Blue Liberal article here — “Slow Food Nation Gains Momentum” by Shepherd Bliss, Aug 5, 2008)

This latest video from The Green Children Foundation features some students in Bangladesh who are benefiting from a microcredit program there. The loan program is one of the activities of The Grameen Bank. From the Green Children partners page:

Grameen Bank is owned by the seven million poor borrowers it currently serves, 97 percent of whom are women. It does not require any collateral against its micro–loans, and repayment responsibility rests solely on each individual borrower. The bank has a loan recovery rate of almost 99 percent.

The founder of the Grameen Bank is Professor Muhammad Yunus. The economist was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in recognition of his economic and social development work for poor people.

In their own words

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both gave interviews in July that the respective publications published verbatim in a Q&A format.

• John McCain spoke to New York Times reporters here (”The Times Interviews John McCain” with Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper, July 13, 2008).
• Barack Obama spoke to a reporter for The Jerusalem Post in Israel on July 24 here (”Obama on Iran, Syria, and Jerusalem” by David Horovitz, July 26, 2008).

Wars and winners

But no one really wins a war, according to WW II veteran, historian and Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, who wrote an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe recently scolding Obama and McCain for fueling their campaigns with way too much war talk. (”Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war” July 17, 2008).

Some polls more interesting than others…

An AP-Yahoo News poll has been tracking the responses of the same 2000 people since last November in surveys focused on measuring how they feel about what’s happening in politics, according to the news outlets. A recent finding: one candidate (guess who?) is generating more loyalty and enthusiasm from his supporters than the other (”Poll: McCain’s backers less fired up than Obama’s” by Alan Fram, AP, July 2008).

And some fall prey to the whims of editors

Who knows why, but editors at two major news outlets in the U.S. manipulated the reporting of a recent poll they conducted “withholding from their first release results favorable to Sen. Barack Obama,” according to the watchdog organization Media Matters (”ABC News/Wash. Post withheld results of poll favorable to Obama” July 17, 2008).

Did they really think we wouldn’t find out? And I wonder, Still I wonder — … (lyrics here):

Fascinating peek back in time

Want to hear what Obama had to say before he was the Presidential candidate he is today? For Obama-watchers, it may be intriguing to read this in-depth interview he gave to Men’s Vogue way back in 2006 (”The Path to Power” by Jacob Weisberg, Sept 2006).

Countdowns…

Days until the 2008 Democratic National Convention — 24. Days until the Republican National Convention — 30.

(See here for previous round-up)

Finally, some promising numbers for U.S. newspapers, according to Nielsen Online, as reported this week in Editor & Publisher. The online audience rose more than 12 percent in the most recent quarter, compared to the same period last year, E&P reports (”Newspaper Sites Gain Audience in Q2″ by Jennifer Saba, July 29, 2008).

More here.

The legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon performed Tuesday night at the Cavea Auditorium in Rome. Photos here on Kataweb.it. Related review (in Italian) here.

Video below is of Simon singing “Slip Slidin’ Away” from his session last year for Live From Abbey Road. Lyrics here.

As of yesterday, the guardian.co.uk website has a new video series  titled “In The Director’s Chair” and the first interviewee is Gurinder Chadha. The director of the popular “Bend It Like Beckham” talks about her own career path, what she tries to achieve in her work, and why she chooses to make commercial films.

Chadha’s new film is a comedy, “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.” And as in “Beckham,” the story  focuses on the world of teenage girls.

The trailer:

In a concise piece in The Nation online this week, journalism professor Eric Alterman, lists the series of mistakes some “clueless media moguls” are making that, rather than slowing the rapid slide of newspapers into extinction, are ensuring that the demise will happen (”I Read the News Today… Oh Boy” July 16, 2008).

Alterman names some of the bigger villains by name and itemizes errors.

Overall the picture Alterman paints isn’t pretty. Especially depressing is his conclusion that any good ideas to rescue newspapers so far haven’t appeared.

Sure makes me want to believe in that old saw, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

It’s far more than merely interesting to consider that while all the noisy, so often violent events of life are flooding our attention each day, also somewhere, somehow on this earth a person such as the poet Kay Ryan is quietly living her life, quietly, persistently, day by day by day achieving an enduring and nourishing creation to share with her fellow humans.

As a writer for Salon wrote in a review of her work: “With aplomb and wit, Ryan sallies forth against quandaries as immense as the nature of nothingness and as petite as the mechanics of dewdrops rolling off a leaf.”

In an interview in 2004 with The Christian Science Monitor, Ryan is quoted: “‘I’ve tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy,’ she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be.” (”Poet Kay Ryan: A profile” by Elizabeth Lund, August 25, 2004)

Here are the closing lines of her short poem “Paired Things”: (PoetryFoundation.org)

So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?

Today Kay Ryan is being named as the new Poet Laureate of the U.S. You can read a sampling of her poems here (”Selected Poems by Kay Ryan” New York Times, July 17, 2008).

A short video here of Ryan reading and talking about her poems (from the Academy of American Poets):

Who’s running the campaign?

They’re helping Obama make the day-to-day decisions about his campaign, they’re the team known as his brain trust. They’re all profiled in another long, informative Rolling Stone article offering a close-up look inside the Democratic Party Presidential nominee’s campaign (”Obama’s Brain Trust” by Tim Dickinson, July 10, 2008)

Talking about Iran and a couple of other things

Last week when Iran officials sent out saber-rattling photos of test launches of their missiles, the U.S. media immediately asked Obama for his reaction. See summary and seven-minute video of Obama’s response here (”Obama’s Iran TV Show Tour: More Diplomacy” The Huffington Post, July 9, 2008).

What is “outrage activism” and why is it so popular now?

Activist and Presidential race blogger Al Giordano harshly criticizes the “outrage activism” now so popular in the U.S. (”The Sky Didn’t Fall” The Field, July 10, 2008).

Getting out of Iraq

In yesterday’s New York Times, Obama wrote an op-ed about his proposed timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq (”My Plan for Iraq” by Barack Obama, July 14, 2008).

You can please some of the people…*

In the past couple of weeks, Obama drew a lot of criticism from supporters and critics alike for some recent policy decisions. In this commentary piece from the Oxford University Press blog, a political science scholar offers his views on Obama’s new “flip flopping” (”The Anti-Intellectual Candidates” by Elvin Lim, July 14, 2008).

English only not a good thing

We should have every child speaking more than one language, Obama said during a campaign speech last week.

“It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here. They all speak English, they speak French, they speak German, and then we go over to Europe and all we can say is Merci beaucoup.”

The Democratic Party nominee won a laugh but he was serious. Watch short short video here.

“Yes We Can” global style

Featuring one hundred people, and twenty-three languages, this video below offers tribute to Obama’s famous Yes We Can speech and to the original, megahit tribute video by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas:

(See here for previous round-up)

A new citizen journalism website is now fully online, and it’s one of the most interesting and ambitious such ventures that I’ve seen. Allvoices.com describes itself as the “first true people’s media.”

Excerpt from its mission statement:

It’s a place where individuals from all over the world can share what is happening where they are (location) at a particular point in time. Allvoices then brings together multiple voices or points of view via news stories, videos, images and blogs from the Internet, to provide context and build momentum. The platform provides the community with the ability to search and navigate a news event by location and category, to share and to have a discussion around it, to emotionally connect with each other’s perspectives and complete the human story.

Especially fascinating and helpful, I think, is an interactive world map displayed across the top of the home page. Posted with hyperlinked circles and stars in various locations on the map, it allows the viewer, if interested, to click and easily review what’s currently being posted.

How does it work?

Allvoices is an open, unedited and unmediated site. Every voice (contribution) is automatically checked for spam and relevance to the news event. A contribution is not edited and is posted as is as long as it is relevant to the news event. The relevance is checked by our algorithms and technology - not humans.

The whole idea behind adding a voice to an existing news event is to get the discussion going. It can be as simple as sharing an emotion or a comment.

The team behind Allvoices is impressive. It includes business, communications and IT professionals, and also some Computer Science professors from Northwestern University.

Summing up its mission, the Allvoices website states:

Allvoices was started by passionate people who believe that everyone has a story worth telling, sharing that story can be the first step in changing lives. Allvoices redefines the voice of people through the global community for sharing current news events and issues from multiple points of view, providing an emotional connection to each other’s perspectives.

At it’s core, Allvoices is about democracy. About giving power to people. About their voices having the effect that makes a difference.

(I came across the link to Allvoices on the Editors Weblog site.)

This Allvoices video below powerfully demonstrates once again that a picture can be worth a thousand words:

UPDATE: Questo post in italiano

Barack Obama continues to raise money for his U.S. Presidential campaign in ever-astounding, record-busting, supersized numbers. How exactly he does this and, just as important, how the techies and entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley are playing the key role in helping him are topics explored in an article last month in The Atlantic magazine (”The Amazing Money Machine” by Joshua Green, June, 2008).

What is the exact amount of the money that Obama and his team of supporters are bringing in from donors? For the month of last February alone, the figure reached was “the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day,” according to the article.

As is pointed out, however, in the last sentence of this paragraph from the report, another theme of Obama’s campaign is equally revolutionary:

In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Goren­berg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”

UPDATE: Questo post in italiano

When it comes to non-verbal communication — in contrast to the verbal versions — it may be that nothing is lost in translation, according to a NewScientist online article about a recent study by linguists on how we use hand gestures (”Charades reveals a universal sentence structure” by Ewen Callaway, June 30, 2008).

• Audition

Michelle Obama debuts on popular US daytime talk show (”‘The View’: Michelle Obama on Hillary Clinton, sexism and the vice presidency” by Sheigh Crabtree,  Los Angeles Times,  June 18, 2008).

Full 24-minute version here.

• Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes*

Brief analysis of some recent policy choices by Obama (”Will ‘Experience’ Hurt Obama?” by Jay Newton-Small, TIME magazine, June 24, 2008).

• Cover story

Q&A and 97 photos (”A Conversation With Barack Obama” by Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone, July 10, 2008).

• A rose by any other name…*

New ways against old smears (”Obama Supporters Take His Middle Name as Their Own”by Jodi Kantor, New York Times, June 29, 2008).

(See here for previous round-up)

It’s not difficult to find a lot of discussion online and elsewhere these days about the current rapid decline of newspapers in the U.S. and elsewhere. It’s also not too difficult to find a lot of blame being tossed around at times in those discussions about who or what is at fault.

Writing recently in his regular column for L’espresso, however, Umberto Eco says it’s not anyone’s fault, no more than the hole in the ozone is. The decline of newspapers is a result of our technological development, according to Eco, and it’s just a fact. But, he adds, it’s an embarrassing one (”Parlare in ritardo” La Bustina di Minerva, April 17, 2008). Note - in Italian only.

Describing what the newspaper has become these days, Eco writes:

Così il giornale diventa come una serata in famiglia, dove il nonno ripete per la milionesima volta la storia di quando aveva subito i bombardamenti, il babbo snocciola i suoi luoghi comuni sulla situazione economica, poi si parla un po’ male del vicino notoriamente cornuto, o si commenta la trasmissione televisiva appena vista. Niente di male, anzi bellissima situazione di socializzazione, ma non era questa, all’inizio degli inizi, la funzione delle gazzette, finestre che di colpo e inopinatamente si spalancavano ogni mattina sull’imprevisto.

(Translation, roughly: Just so the newspaper becomes like spending an evening with the family, where the grandfather repeats for the umpteenth time the story of when he was caught under a bombing attack, the father rattles off his usual opinions on the economic situation, then there is some mildly unkind talk about a neighbor who is notoriously being cheated on, or comments about a television program that was just watched. Nothing bad, on the contrary, a wonderful social situation but this wasn’t, at the very beginning, the function of the newspapers (which were) windows suddenly and unexpectedly thrown open each morning on the unforeseen.)

If this excerpt whets your appetite to read more Eco, I also found this reprint of an interview (in English) he gave to a reporter in New York last December (Interview with Umberto Eco, “The Armani of Italian literature,” Umberto Eco talks to Ben Naparstek, Dec 8, 2007, The Sydney Morning Herald).

UPDATE: Questo post in italiano (parziale)

• Smackdown?

One day after becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee, Senator Obama reportedly read the riot act (wild applause!) to one wayward Senator in particular (”Obama Confronts Lieberman On McCain Advocacy, Tone, on Senate Floor” ABC News, June 05, 2008), read here:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the self-described “Independent Democrat” who caucuses with the Democratic party in the Senate even though he has endorsed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, got some tough talk from Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, yesterday…

More on this, plus some, from DailyKos here.

• Losing the press

Article about how Senator Obama and Senator Clinton eluded press corps and photographers in getting together for their first, post-primaries meeting (”Two Rivals Sneak Away to Meet, and the Hunt Is On” The New York Times, June 7, 2008). As a first, major indicator of changin’ times, note the beginning words of the third line of this paragraph:

Finally, as Mr. Obama was headed back to Chicago on a private plane and Mrs. Clinton had returned to her home, another rarity took place. A joint statement was issued by representatives of the two senators, but sent out by Mr. Obama’s staff. Those words, perhaps, were the first cooperative undertaking since the presidential race began six seasons ago.

• How she lost it
  

A fascinating 10-minute video report looking back at “the Democratic primary battle and what went wrong for Hillary Rodham Clinton” from two staffers at The New York Times here (June 4, 2008).

• Obama behind the scenes

A video (below) giving an inside look at a relaxed Senator Obama talking to campaign staffers when he returned home to Chicago on Friday after clinching the nomination.

With a nod to the lyric in an old Carpenters song , yes, it’s a fine, fun thing linkin’ to myself, my own article, for a change. It’s in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor (Artichokes transformed” by Rebecca Helm-Ropelato, June 4, 2008).

My intro:

Ladispoli, Italy - Until recently, artichokes as a vegetable had been a great disappointment to me.

Even has photos and recipes.

One of the most witty, interesting, and accurate of the political blogs tracking the U.S. Presidential race this year is The Field by political organizer and reporter Al Giordano.

Yesterday,  as Senator Barack Obama was crossing the finish line to become the Democratic Party’s nominee, Giordano particularly enjoyed celebrating the triumph. He posted a variety of entertaining commentary and music videos.

One of the posts, “Live Blogging the Clinch,” features a video of Maria Callas singing versions of Carmen´s Habanera:

It’s a rare and up close look at the Congo and its people and their struggles today in the aftermath of the numerous wars there. It was broadcast in early April on the equally rare and remarkable American television program, “Bill Moyers Journal.”

Intro to the two part series:

THE JOURNAL takes viewers on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to follow aid workers and local relief efforts that are bringing hope to a forgotten land. “The aid agencies are almost substituting for a social welfare system that hasn’t operated in these areas for decades,” says Dominic MacSorley, Emergency Director for Concern Worldwide, an international aid organization.

Part I, above (25:30). Part two (18:17) is here.

A full transcript in English of the documentary series accompanies the videos.

The major Internet portal in China, SINA, announced yesterday that its English news site is now online. The recent massive earthquake in the country determined the timing, according to the press release:

It was truly a massive tragedy. We have chosen to launch our English news site now as we would like to provide up-to-minute coverage of the earthquake for overseas people who are concerned about the tragedy and easy access for those who wish to show their love and care or make their contributions.” said Charles Chao, President and CEO of SINA. “Over the longer term, we intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China related information and to have better understanding about modern China.

Content on the SINA site is similar in format to that of Western online newspapers, including video and photos. Read the Guardian story here (”Chinese news site launches in English” by Jemima Kiss, May 19, 2008).

I found the link to this article at The Editors Weblog.org.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article reviewing some new scholarly studies and opinion about why women seem to be avoiding en masse certain science and engineering careers (”The freedom to say ‘no” by Elaine McArdle, May 18, 2008).

Anyone who’s curious about this particular situation probably will find this article of interest. I was especially struck by a finding described in this paragraph midway or so in this longish piece:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

Read the whole piece here. I found the link to this article at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) website.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science want a whole bunch of Good Samaritan type game players to log on to a new website they’ve created so as to give a little assist to their computers. I found out about this free fun zone at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog from a post last week (”Von Ahn’s Gwap” May 16, 2008):

The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. “But that shouldn’t matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun.”

I clicked on to the Gwap site with the firm intention of spending five minutes checking out what was what. An hour and a half later, I broke away. Word to the wise, that’s all.

The Rough Type post has the breakdown of the various games here.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is taking some heat from critics who are accusing him of selling out his principles in making a deal with Microsoft, according to an ars technica article yesterday (”Former security director blasts OLPC, suggests new strategy” by Ryan Paul, May 15, 2008).

The deal, described in an article today in the New York Times, was announced yesterday and provides for Microsoft’s Windows to be offered on all OLPC’s low low cost computers (”Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children” by Steve Lohr, May 16, 2008). In reference to the agreement with Microsoft, Negroponte said, according to the article, that the government officials of the countries whose poor children OLPC is trying to reach “are much more comfortable with Windows” (as an operating system for the computers).

In another piece in ars technica, also today, Negroponte is also speaking for himself about what his primary motive was in forming the alliance with Microsoft (”OLPC and Microsoft will make Windows available on XO” by Ryan Paul, May 16, 2008):

“From the beginning, the goal of OLPC has been to use technology to transform education by bringing connectivity and constructionist learning to the poorest children throughout the world,” said OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte in a statement. “Today’s announcement, coupled with future plans for a dual boot version of the XO laptop, enhances our ability to deliver on this vision.

So another way (in my opinion) of looking at Negroponte’s decision to go with Microsoft could be that he simply is keeping his eye on the ball — meaning his goal of getting computers into the hands of the millions and millions of poor children across the globe as soon as possible. Whatever it takes.

The inventor of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wants to help its users protect themselves from the lowlifes online who are trying to hide who they really are and what they’re really up to.

To fund this project, he plans to use the money coming to him as one of 16 winners named yesterday of the Knight News Challenge award, according to an article in InformationWeek (”Sir Tim Berners-Lee To Track Origins Of Digital Content” by K.C. Jones, May 14, 2008).

Jones’ intro:

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a technology that will give users more information about the origins and sources of digital content.

As Jones notes, this is one of the biggest challenges of the moment in relation to the Internet. Read more here.

Last month, in an article in the Telegraph on the same subject, Berners-Lee discussed various aspects of the problem of “cyber imposters,” and his hope to find a solution (”Technology could be used to protect youngsters from internet predators,” by Tom Peterkin, April 30, 2008).

Zucchero — from Daily Motion:

A justifiable rage:

You don’t have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west’s chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big - big enough to trump Burma’s cyclone.

Read more here (”As Burma dies, our macho invaders sit on their hands” by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, May 14, 2008).

Kosmopolit is “a blog about politics and culture from a European perspective.” Last week the website posted the trailer for a new TV documentary about the Balkans. (”Return to Europe - A journey of discovery” May 5, 2008).

The documentary takes a look at how the Balkan people are recovering from the recent wars there, and how this European area is becoming a “region of hope.”

Read more about the documentary here.

That this so-named, younger generation has the potential and some very good reasons to solve a lot of problems now ongoing in the U.S. is the possibility posed and discussed by Bob Herbert in his column today in the New York Times (”Here Come the Millennials” by Bob Herbert, May 13, 2008).

Which segment of the American population are they, precisely? As Herbert writes:

The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million.

Reading these stats piqued my curiosity about the size of that other humongous segment of Americans, the baby boomers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, we amount to 78.2 million (as of July 2005).

From Slow Food, a short film — “We are what we lost” (Srdan Mitrovic):

In his keynote speech opening ROFLCon, held late last month at MIT, David Weinberger talks about fame. (For background on ROFLCon, see Guardian article here)

Teaser quotes from video:

Blogging is all about taking off the make-up… perfection is now the enemy of credibility… we are ceasing to believe that which is too perfect…

On a list of best website ideas of all time, I would be surprised if the Internet Archive didn’t rank right up there near the top. It describes itself so:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

The website is particularly wellknown for its feature, The Wayback Machine. It archives versions of websites, thus allowing viewers to see old presentations of sites as well as the current ones. This last week, the website also was in the news after it won a major battle with the FBI over a privacy issue, as reported in The Washington Post here.

Helpful hint: Exploring Internet Archive can take a while. Since its launch in 1996, it already has archived 85 billion web pages (see here).

So an entry into this website can turn quickly into a gargantuan, kaleidoscopic treasure hunt. An example, as I was noodling around through the site, I came across what I consider to be a golden nugget, Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding. The website allows you to view the classic, old movie online, or download it. You also can embed it in a website (see below).

Royal Wedding (1951) starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell (1 hour, 31 minutes)

The missing ingredient in European culture is risk-taking, according to a post yesterday in the InformationWeek blog (”Where Is Europe’s Google?” by Andrew Conry-Murray, May 8, 2008).

The post focuses on a recently published book by Hervé Lebret, “Start-Up: What We Can Learn from Silicon Valley” (Nov 2007).

Summarizing the issue, Conry-Murray writes:

London may be eclipsing Wall Street as the world financial capital, and the euro is trouncing the dollar, but Europe has yet to prove the equal of the United States in technological innovation.

Author and engineer Hervé Lebret thinks he knows why. “There is a risk culture that’s missing. We don’t have an environment to be more ambitious and risk-taking.”

Another place where you can read a discussion with Lebret about his ideas on innovation, and about his book and its primary purpose, is a recent Q&A interview, “Entrepreneurship in Europe: Alumnus brings Silicon Valley culture across the Atlantic,” on Stanford University’s School of Engineering website (April 24, 2008).