The Great Global Warming Swindle?
So there’s a documentary by the British Channel Four which argues that human/CO2 caused Global Warming is a pile of steaming bollocks (smells better than excrement). It can grow to become a kind of counter-Inconvenient Truth, and contribute to reversing the progress the Global Warming movements have so far achieved.
While there are plenty of sites who dispute the science in this documentary (see here, here and here) I would like to take some time to address the ad hominem remarks made in the film. It provides a great deal of focus on what an industry the Global Warming hype is; scientists who support the dominant theory because of the money and jobs it gets them. There is an argument made that the movement is part of a plot to inhibit the development of Third World countries, and that there is a lot of political power to go around in advancing the Global Warming story.
Regarding the argument that supposedly scientists are in it for the money, I’ve made a screenshot of a selection I made on exxonsecrets.org of most of the scientists appearing in the documentary who are making a buck out of being GW deniers (Click to enlarge):
I get that there is a lot of greed to go around. The point seems moot however. Both GW deniers and GW alarmists have plenty of opportunity to make a buck. Somewhere between those two, there must be some proper science. So far, the documentary comes across as far too smeary and self satisfied.
Why is this relevant? I used an interactive visualization to attack one of the pillar arguments of the GGWS documentary. Of course, one must realize that my screenshot itself is an ad hominem argument; simply by associating these scientists with Exxon-Mobile funded institutions implies that these scientists are lying through their teeth for big dollars. In the end, my effort does nothing to discredit their actual scientific arguments. The difference between the documentary and me is that I recognize ad hominem tricks for what they are :p
I thought I’d just try it, see what happens to myself when I don’t post for a while on my own blog. Although it isn’t that interesting for the readers of a blog, you should definitely try it. Because when a blog becomes a McLuhanesque fixed charge in your life, the only way to see what has changed is to disconnect from it. As you can see, it didn’t last that long before I just couldn’t resist to get back to my blog and write down my thoughts and experiences in this post.
(click map to enlarge)
Lately I’ve been living mostly in the Flickr/Last FM area and on the Blogipelago but I am a vivid traveler. I have day passes to del.icio.us and Wikipedia and I always enjoy a good swim in the Sea of Culture and the Ocean of Subculture.
Original source: xkcd
Recommended related reading by danah boyd:
Which evil nation state are you? (similes for Microsoft, Yahoo and Google)
So I was browsing around YouTube and stumbled upon this video of McLuhan on the Today Show:
I think presidential debates are indeed exemplary of the adage “The Medium is the Message”. It’s refreshing to see media theory from 1976 still being fully applicable today. I especially love how he claims that what the candidates say is completely irrelevant :)
No longer just a metaphor for how we consumers fall for anything, the Whatever Button is now available as a Firefox add-on (Great big thanks to Erik, who coded it).
More about the button below.
While Viacom is sueing YouTube for $1 Billion for “massive intentional copyright infringement” the Dutch public broadcasting company VPRO is embracing YouTube. After entering the Digital TV market it now sees YouTube as a new distribution channel. The VPRO is going to broadcast on four different YouTube channels.Read the whole story by Erwin Blom (head of the VPRO Digital department) at: VPRO begint 4 kanalen op YouTube (the making of) & Waarom op You Tube? Vervolg …
Or visit one of the four channels:
For your info:
What: Second Open-Search Workshop
When: Saturday April 28, 2007, 13.00h CET, 11.00h GMT, 06.00h EST, 4.00h EET, 01.00h HST, 04.00h MSTDuration: official program will be 4 hours
Where (physical): CREA, room 204, Turfdraagsterpad 17, 1012 XT Amsterdam (route: http://www.crea.uva.nl/contact/zoomplattegrond.html)
Where (virtual): http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshop
Cost: free attendance, free drinks
More info: http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshopIf you can hold a keyboard, you should be at this workshop! (more…)
I was originally going to write about smart spam but recent spam led me to write about stupid spam.
Spammers are constantly improving their methods to get through spamfilters. They increasingly use random names and academic, computer and web related words to make spamfilters believe it is a valid message. However poetic these messages may seem they mean nothing to humans:
Firefox use in Europe is up to 24%, but use here in the Netherlands is at 14%.
Anyone want to speculate why this is? Of the stereotypes I’m aware of, the one that best fits this figure is apparent in the phrase “doe gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg”, which translates to something like “don’t do anything outrageous, ‘normal’ is crazy enough as it is”.
More seriously, though, what kind of firefox ‘marketing campaign’ would work at a local level? It’s worth noting that there is just one local version of spreadfirefox.com (a Japanese, ‘beta’ version). Perhaps the national level is irrelevant here, and one should start by getting firefox on all of the computers at one’s university?
full report and/or /. thread
While writing a piece about the Ubiscribe event on my own blog I went to Blogger’s website. Blogger automatically localizes me based on my IP-address and welcomes me in my own language. Google does the same thing when I go to Google.com it automatically redirects me to Google.nl. Even though I can see the advantages of this I strongly dislike this automatic localizing because I go to the Google.com domain for a reason! Searching something on the Google.com or Google.nl domain gives you different search results and when I look for something that is not Dutch I rather use the Google.com domain.
There are two ways to reach the google.com domain instead of the google.nl domain:
- After automatic redirection to Google.nl follow the “Google.com in English link” (which is actually pretty funny because apparently you are on Google.com in Dutch instead of Google.nl.
- Run your search on Google.nl and then change http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=ubiscribe&meta= to http://www.google.nl/search?hl=en&q=ubiscribe&meta= (change nl for en or any other language.) This will give you the same search results as when you are on the Google.com domain.
Here are some screenshots of the different search results Google.com, Google.nl in English and Google.nl produce (the first two produce the same results).
Blogger, that has been bought by Google, also localizes me based on my IP-address but does not automatically redirect me from Blogger.com to Blogger.nl for example. I stay on the Blogger.com domain but I am welcomed in Dutch. I can see the advantage of this but I wonder if I can also “return” to the “original” English version. Blogger offers me a Taal/Language link that allows me to toggle the language of the page. More screenshots of this localizing process:
I can see the advantages of localizing (I want Google to localize me when I visit Google Maps for example. An interesting note is that maps.google.com does not automatically redirect to maps.google.nl.) but sometimes I just want to shout “Please stop localizing me!”
What are your thoughts on this automatic localizing and the localized web?
This is just a nice coincidence that deserves sharing. The top post at Slashdot right now explains that
The Tamil Tigers Liberation Front […] has moved up from routine sea piracy to a space-based one […] They have been been accused of illegally using Intelsat satellites
while the bottom post informs us that
the Department of Defense plans to launch in the first quarter of 2009 a satellite-based router to deliver military communications. Satellite operator Intelsat will manage the three-year Internet Routing In Space (IRIS) project
Perhaps the DoD made their decision just a few minutes too soon?
I’m getting rather tired of people ranting on about the inferiority of text-based conversation such as MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! messenger, G-talk and IRC. The prevailing opinion seems to be
that face to face communication is hands down superior to online text conversations, because face to face includes body language, intonation, facial expressions, physical contact and so on. The story goes that consequently there is a huge information loss during online communication because of the aforementioned features lacking in text-based conversation. Efforts to bridge this gap, like the usage of emoticons in text-based conversation, merely constitute a poor substitute.
Another notion going hand in hand with this view is the belief that it is ‘better’ that a person spends time outside of the house, meeting people face to face at bars, clubs, fraternities, sports teams and so on. I think this trend has been going on ever since television addiction became a social issue, of people ‘wasting their time’ on their own as opposed to being socially active. It is the reigning (conservative) way of viewing human contact, to a point that everyone can’t feel but a little guilty or ashamed that, when asked where you were last saturday night, you have to answer “behind the computer”.
I was kind of amazed to see this real-time visualization of the a selected portion of the blogosphere. It is ‘marketed’ as a screensaver, but has much more potential than just a screenfiller when you’re away from your screen. It is available for free to download at the site of the Swedish Primelab developers.
We have officially opened a Masters of Media store at Cafepress.
You are welcome to visit us and buy one of our wonderful t-shirts.
Matthijs Rutten has developed a digital survey for his thesis. It itvolves new media and politics, or in particular the manner in which politicians use digital communication tools in order to get as many votes as possible. In this survey Matthijs tries to find out the manner in which people are influenced by these digital communication tools when they choose the political party they will vote for. So if you understand Dutch (the survey is in Dutch) and you are between 18- 35, please fill out the survey and help a student get data for his thesis! (There are 30 questions, so it only takes a minute)
Message from Matthijs in Dutch:
In verkiezingstijd wordt de kiezer allang niet meer toegesproken vanaf de zeepkist!
Virtueel ontbijten met Marc, een humoristische tekst te downloaden voor de TomTom van Femke of de persoonlijke boodschap van Jan: nieuwe media worden in toenemende mate ingezet om stemmen te winnen. Maar is deze manier van campagnevoeren ook effectief? In welke mate kunnen nieuwe media effectief het stemgedrag van jongeren beïnvloeden? Ben jij tussen de achttien en vijfendertig jaar oud, heb je bij de laatste tweede kamerverkiezingen gestemd en heb jij een paar minuten tijd om dertig vragen in te vullen? De responsies worden discreet behandeld en uitsluitend gebruikt voor de vervaardiging van mijn scriptie. Bij voorbaat heel hartelijk dank.
http://www.zoomerang.com
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Matthijs Rutten
CiteULike is a free service where academics can share, store, and organise academic papers they are reading. You can add papers on the web that interests you with one click button to your personal library. You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. Furthermore, CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so when it comes to writing up your results in a paper, you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography.
Thursday was the day of the Google Geo Day 2007 in Amsterdam. I made a report on it and put it on my personal blog because the layout of the Masters of Media site didn’t want to cooperate! This might be something for you Anne, incompatibility issues within WordPress! Anyway, you can check out the report here: Google Geoday Benelux 2007 Report.
So I’m at my mum’s trying to make some progress on writing my thesis, and she complained about one of the sites she likes to visit – UrukNet – being shunned from Google News.
I asked her for some links regarding this, and apparently there are a number of curious issues surrounding Google and controversal (leftish) websites.
I’m not sure what to think, but I am certainly not surprised…
The newest hype nowadays seems to be Twitter which allows you to share what you are doing with your friends every single second. Are you going to the mall? Is your cat sneezing? Update your Twitter page on the web, or by instant messaging, or send a text message from your phone. Your friends will receive this message on the web/IM or on their phone. This phenomenon has recently been named microblogging because your messages have to be short, 140 characters or less. This is of course caused by the restriction on text messaging which is around 140 characters. I am quite curious how this service became such a hype and so popular in such a short time. Hyves, the Dutch social networking site, already had a quite similar function with Wie, Wat, Waar? (Who, What, When?) which also allows you to share what you are doing and where on your site.
Just a short tip about Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. This website lets you create poems by just selecting buttons, it sure saves some time if you don’t want to cut up your book (which is one of the suggestions of the New Media Reader). Nice stuff if you want to check out the various options.
The following lists consists of several journals, e-zines, blogs and mailinglists to consider submitting your article/book review to. I have also supplied links to the general instructions for submitting an essay. This list is by no means exhaustive, so please help expand it.
We have all heard the question “What is new media?” and we often wonder about it ourselves on this blog and elsewhere. The What’s New Media blog also deals with this issue and has recently started a wiki with the same topic.
Students from DePaul University in Chicago, Stanford and NYU have currently written 132 articles and welcome New Media students, academics, nerds, etc. to participate.
I’ve seen Stanley Kubricks film adaptation of Stephen Kings thriller ‘The Shining’ many times… I even read the book when I was younger… which I didn’t like too much, however, as it turns out I really missed to grasp the essence of the story; I thought it was about insanity caused by isolation… well, just check this clip:
This next thing is an interesting initiative. Make a blogpost and link as many people to disrupt -or maybe you could call it hack- Technorati’s ranking system. Or you could just call it link lovin’ , since everyone sees through their (for example WordPress) blog dashboards who links to them, people will actually see that you posted their name on your blog. Meeting people is easy, right?
On the other hand it’s like the Google bomb for blogs, and why shouldn’t we participate in such an initiative to check out what it does, right? It would be interesting to see what happens if this thing grows big. Web statistics would become less reliable.