Jason Wilson picks up on the Burchell attack piece on bloggers I wrote about earlier today, and asks some pertinent questions. He also points to comments at Public Opinion:
He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.
Posted by: dj | June 23, 2008 10:33 AM
“He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.”
True. Baiting bloggers is the new tactic for attention seekers.
Posted by: Lyn | June 23, 2008 10:45 AM
Coincidentally, there’s a new post by danah boyd at apophenia about the diffusion of troll-like behaviour outside the intertubes:
Continue reading ‘Trolling, not just for the intertubes any more’
Sometime around 2018 all our news will be based on the idea of probability, offered up by a giant near sentient super computer able to calculate billions of computations per second. With the full contents of the worlds history in it’s archives and having all current human activity (including mums e-mail of that curry recipe to aunt Kylie) fed into it daily, it will project the daily news based on precise self created mathematical algorithms.
Digg like betting markets will be created around these projections and billions will be won or lost by a new kind of master of the universe, the alcopops fuelled sixteen year old news junkie. Rupert the super computer will be fed daily with an engineered paste created from the remains of all living editors, sub editors, columnists, journalists and bloggers. Unfortunately this masterful human creation will go completely bonkers when accidentally fed a tube of Bolt. All news will end, and as we know, no news is good news so the world will celebrate it’s new found freedom from media tyranny.
Continue reading ‘An improbable future? Absolutely!’
Nuclear energy is off the public agenda in Australia for now, and likely won’t reappear for a little while at least. But there are reasons to think it might come back at some time in the medium-term future. The key question as to whether we see it appear back on the public agenda is the shape of the emissions trading scheme. How steep will the cuts required be - or, alternatively, how high will the carbon price go? At $20 per tonne, nuclear probably doesn’t look all that attractive. At $50 per tonne, it starts to look much more interesting. A second question is whether the new low-emission technologies - my picks are solar thermal and geothermal, because they’re potentially reasonably cheap and supply power when it’s needed - actually start to work out in practice. The third area of uncertainty is the progress of carbon capture and storage technology. As many LP commenters have noted, progress has been far slower than its numerous proponents have expected. The final question is that of natural gas prices. Natural gas is going to be exported from the Australian east coast, so any new gas-fired electrical generation will have to pay the world market price for the stuff; and that’s pretty damn dear. At current US natural gas prices, the fuel to run a gas-fired generator will cost roughly $85 per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. If you have a look at the NEMMCO Australian electricity market data, that’s roughly double the average wholesale price of electricity in most Australian states. If natural gas stays at these prices, it’s no longer going to be a low-cost replacement for coal, and that makes nuclear look pretty appealing.
But, in any case, whether nuclear power will happen in Australia is a question that can wait for another day. Today, a round-up of some things that are happening around the world with nuclear.
Continue reading ‘Nuclear power stuff’
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
As for me, I’m over-writing “Lazy Sunday” as it’s anything but for me. I expect to be up to the early am hours tomorrow getting the first draft of my thesis into a shape I’m happy to submit to my supervisor. So while everyone else is more than welcome to post on their weekend doings, I thought I’d share some photographic insights for the benefit of any other research students out there - Mark’s tips on how to finish a PhD dissertation!
#1: Use the tried and true yellow post-it note method for the citations and references you need.
#2: The dietetics of thesis completion are as important as the dialectics. Stock up on a nutritionally varied range of stimulants.
#3: While prayer and/or meditation may be important aids to writing, ensure that candles are not lit next to piles of books but remain symbols only.
Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday! How to finish a phd thesis draft’
Much and all as their antediluvian internet access policy is annoying, if you want to be kept informed about important issues you pretty much have to read the Fin. Today, for instance, there was a report (brief summary here) indicating the difficulties the states and the federal government were having in implementing e-health. Apparently, plans to introduce universal electronic medical records - that is, storing your entire medical history in a centralized electronic database - have been delayed until 2012. 2012? 2009? I wasn’t even aware that a formal plan to introduce such a thing exists, let alone by 2009.
As previously noted here, there are very serious privacy and security concerns about such systems, as well as great potential advantages. If they get it wrong, there’s considerable potential for it to blow up in the government’s face.
So here’s my little question. Before we get to the stage of spending billions - rather than the $150-million odd already spent around the country on such projects - it would be nice if the privacy and security issues were thrashed out. At the very least, it might save a lot of money in redesigns after media pressure forces hasty changes. Are we going to have a public discussion of these issues, or are we going to get another departmental omnibus program that, like the Access Card, is going to be so flawed that the only thing to do once it’s announced to fight is kill it off? Maybe a discussion paper or two to kick things off the discussion, perhaps?
We’re a bit late to this party, for a number of reasons (no doubt including modesty, but more of that later). Trevor Cook reported last month on some research conducted by Dr Colin McLeod and presented to the MEAA’s Public Affairs Convention. The answer, according to McLeod, is yes. Over at gatewatching, Jason Wilson linked to Cook’s post with this commentary:
I seem to recall that last year that we copped a bit of stick for suggesting that Larvatus Prodeo was an influential blog. This was, of course, partly premised on Axel’s issuecrawler analysis of issue networks in the Australian blogosphere. The value of this analysis was disputed at the time, by other influential bloggers.
We’re certainly not universally popular in the blogosphere as this post indicates. But to forestall the anticipated flood of loud condemnations, it’s worth pausing to examine the nature of the claim being made in McLeod’s and Axel Bruns’ research, and what sort of “influence” they’re measuring, which I’ll do over the fold. I imagine that won’t actually forefend the loud condemnations, because there are a few folks out there who are obsessed with their big swinging hits. No names, no packdrill. They can out themselves by linking here.
I’ll also take the chance to update folks on our advertising performance and site stats for May, which was something of a bumper month for both.
Continue reading ‘Is Larvatus Prodeo Australia’s most influential political blog?’
There’s an interesting piece by Dana Goldstein in The New Republic on the fractures in the American “A-List” Democratic blogosphere around the primaries. I very rarely read Kos or MyDD, and this seems to me to express why:
The Netroots has always had a hostile streak, and it’s natural that as the Democratic Party and the Netroots themselves began to wield more power, some of that hostility would be directed inwards. Its denizens are also a relatively homogeneous bunch–largely male, middle-aged, college-educated, and upper middle class. The Democratic Party is a diverse coalition reliant on African Americans, single women, union members, and Latinos. Compound that demographic gap with the impersonality and frequent anonymity of the online world, and it seems inevitable that feelings would be hurt, and that some progressives would feel unwelcome in the clubhouse.
According to academics Kath Albury, Catherine Lumby and Alan McKee, that’s the term preferred by police investigating the production and dissemination of images of children in sexual contexts online. In an article in New Matilda today they discuss the evidence related to this disturbing phenomenon - and the evidence runs counter to a lot of popular conceptions. Particularly in light of the spate of arrests announced this week - essential reading.
This is a couple of weeks old now, but significant - a proposal to build Australia’s first “clean coal” power plant at Kwinana, in the far south of the Perth suburban sprawl :
A London-based spokesman at BP, David Nicholas, said on Monday that the proposed reservoir was not understood “as fully as other formations”. “Particularly considering this would be one of the first projects of its kind, we would want some very high level of certainty of the long-term storage of carbon dioxide,” he said.
Mr Cobban said Hydrogen Energy, based in Weybridge, England, would still work on projects in California and Abu Dhabi.
Marn must be very disappointed…
In this piece about a new book on the Death of the [literary] Critic, Salon’s sub-editor is doing what sub-editors do, I guess, posing questions which are more loaded than the ones its writers choose to answer:
In the age of blogging, great critics appear to be on life support. Salon’s book reviewers discuss snobbery, how to make criticism fun and the need for cultural gatekeepers.
Has the role of the professional critic become obsolete in an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and blogs?
And Salon’s own critics - Louis Bayard and Laura Miller - dispose of the blogosphere question in quick order:
The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you’re a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving — “Hey, that’s my job!” — and yes, elitist — “Don’t try this at home, guys.” I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.
Speaking personally, I’ve really enjoyed the recent book threads on LP, and I don’t think anyone writing them or on them thinks we’re trying to usurp the professional skills of criticism or trying to act as “cultural gatekeepers”.
The rest of the discussion is really interesting, and I’d rather you read it than I summarised it, but I do have a couple of observations about transposing these discussions to the Australian scene, and a suggestion.
Continue reading ‘Have blogs killed book reviewing?’
I must confess that I haven’t been following the national innovation debate closely. It does seem to me that there are some in principle incompatibilities between:
(1) Industry policy by another name;
(2) Fostering innovation as a behavioural disposition;
(3) Specific attempts to create either new knowledge or research or create the infrastructure and skills which support these efforts.
The default policy reflex seems to be (1) and (2) is very difficult for governments to do directly. Since a lot of this stuff was pioneered here in the Sunshine Smart State, it’s interesting to see Anna Bligh redirect some of the “big picture” stuff and the industry policy money - signalled by the abolition of the Department of State Development and now by a switch in focus from infrastructure to direct funding for research, scholarships and fellowships. Continue reading ‘Innovation smarts?’
One common trope amongst people interested in energy efficiency is that the modern car is a terribly inefficient device, using 1500 kilograms of metal to move roughly 75 kilograms of human. It sounds like such a waste, doesn’t it? Surely we can make lighter-bodied cars with modern technology, right? The lighter bodies would require smaller, lighter, engines to push them around. Lighter brakes, lighter suspension…and a positive feedback loop would leave us cars that we can pick up and carry into a parking space if necessary. That’s the key idea of the Hypercar concept that’s been pushed by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute for many a year now.
However, actual Hypercars, or anything approximating them, have been rather scarce on the ground. There’s good reason for that. For one thing, the whole concept is predicated on the use of lightweight composite materials - the carbon fibre that’s proliferating in high-end tennis racquets, bicycles and the like. But as anybody who’s bought such composite-laden gadgets knows, they’re really, really expensive. But we may see some actual running, production-viable prototypes over the next few years.
Continue reading ‘The flying Hypercar…’
One of the old canards we’ve had a look at here before is the (typically) generationalist argument that if the kidz aren’t marching in the streets, then politics must have disappeared from contemporary culture. Here, culture is a key term because “68 thought” (to Anglicise a useful if ill-intentioned phrase from conservative French philosophers - representatives of what Dominique Lecourt calls the “mediocracy”) exploded the links between politics and culture, yet arguably dissolved itself into culture. That’s a more complex story than I have time to tell here, but I wanted to have a look at some of the afterlives of the protests against the War on Iraq that happened all across the world on February 15 2003.
It’s often argued that the protests failed to “stop the war”, and thus were fruitless. This, of course, is a rather odd criterion by which to judge them, because I’m unaware of any protests which have actually succeeded in stopping wars… So the second argument we’re normally confronted with is that the protests failed to translate into an ongoing movement. That might again be the wrong yardstick - in that the “peace movement” of the 60s had its conditions of possibility in its antecedents in the anti-nuclear struggles of the Cold War era. Possibly quite wrongly, disarmament and nuclear proliferation are no longer perceived as subjects for mobilisation because 1989 and 1991 dissolved the fear of nuclear holocaust in our social imaginary, a fear sort of displaced onto “terrorism” but largely now absent.
I think you could make an argument, though, that the anti-War concerns of 2003 translated into powerful sources of electoral change - in a number of countries - Spain, Australia being two that spring immediately to mind and now America and Britain, where the bellicose regimes of Bush and Blair/Brown are now in their final stages of dissolution for reasons closely linked to the Iraq War. It would be very interesting to map the influence in all this of what we might call Open Source Protest, and here I’m not just thinking of GetUp!, MoveOn.Org and the “netroots” but the more explicitly cultural aspects of anti-war sentiment.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Protest’
There have been a number of tragedies of late (e.g. the suicides in Bridgend) which supposedly featured the Internet in some capacity or another.
Of course, when such things happen people who didn’t grow up with the Internet put the blame on that relatively new medium for such tragedies.
While such views are misguided, it’s still worth wondering what the role of the Internet is in influencing the decisions made by the people concerned.
It’s also worth considering what the Internet tells us about the way we respond to such tragedies today.
Megan Meier killed herself after being bullied via MySpace
Continue reading ‘Death and the Internet’
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