The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: technology

  • Ethics and Economics in Journalism

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    mongreldogs
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    Via Ezra Klein, a well-argued piece by Timothy Lee on the recent flap over the forced resignation of Dave Weigel from The Washington Post.  If none of those names mean anything to you, then this is unlikely to be very interesting…  Lee’s thesis is that reportorial objectivity is more a function of the economies of…

  • The impact of sharing, a case study

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    mongreldogs
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    This is an excellent TED talk about what intellectual property people can learn from the fashion industry. In essence, there is no IP protection in fashion (except for trademark), and yet its economic impact dwarfs highly-protected fields like music or film. икони

  • Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy

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    mongreldogs
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    This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.

  • Facebook’s vanishing privacy

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    mongreldogs
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    The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook.  It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense.  These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over…

  • The rising threat to music of the home taping phenomenon

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    mongreldogs
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    This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY&feature=player_embedded) is a hilarious take-down of the music publishing industry’s allegation that personal filesharing is “killing” music.  Part of the fun is figuring out the early 1980s references.  Also, I would totally buy a flag that had that cassette-and-crossbones logo… Also, remember that according to former MPAA chief Jack Valenti, [T]he VCR is…

  • Knowing is Half the Battle

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    mongreldogs
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    I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?”  The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal…

  • Throwing Out the Textbook (Part II)

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    mongreldogs
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    (Part I gives the background.) Since the date to order a textbook has long since passed, I’m pretty committed to not going with one for “Space Science & Astrophysics”. I’ve taken the plunge. The problem is, I don’t know exactly what the course should look like now. Most especially, I don’t know of a good…

  • Throwing out the Textbook (Part I)

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    mongreldogs
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    (You can skip to Part II.) Some of you might remember that this is nominally a blog about education. It’s time again to shunt aside all the personal and political things I like to blog about, and to instead post about my classes. I do this in part because school starts soon and I am…

  • Dishonest or just dumb?

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    mongreldogs
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    An article in today’s NY Times caught my eye: “FCC Planning Rules to Open Cable Market” says that the FCC has laid the legal groundwork to re-regulate the cable industry. It struck me because this is quite atypical for the FCC and for the Bush administration in general. Apparently, in the Cable Communications Act of…

  • Hidden meanings?

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    mongreldogs
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    I don’t know what this means, but I’ve discovered something weird with the iTunes Music Store. I wanted to find a particular song by Bob Dylan called “Dignity”. But the search box won’t find it for me, instead returning an error: “We could not complete your iTunes store request. The iTunes Store is temporarily unavailable.…