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Anivar Aravind | 1 Jan 2005 10:34
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Earthquake: Coincidence or a Corporate Oil Tragedy?

Earthquake: Coincidence or a Corporate Oil Tragedy?
December 28, 2004
By: Andrew Limburg
Independent Media TV
http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=3D10211&fcategory_desc=
=3DEnvironment

Now I don't claim to be an expert on seismic activity, but there has
been a series of events which led up to the 9.0 earthquake of the
coast of Indonesia which can not be ignored. This all could be an
enormous coincidence, but one must look at the information and choose
for themselves whether there is anything to it.
On November 28th, one month ago, Reuters reported that during a 3 day
span 169 whales and dolphins beached themselves in Tasmania, an island
of the southern coast of mainland Australia and in New Zealand. The
cause for these beachings is not known, but Bob Brown, a senator in
the Australian parliament, said "sound bombing" or seismic tests of
ocean floors to test for oil and gas had been carried out near the
sites of the Tasmanian beachings recently.

According to Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, Seismic
surveys utilizing airguns have been taking place in mineral-rich areas
of the world's oceans since 1968. Among the areas that have
experienced the most intense survey activity are the North Sea, the
Beaufort Sea (off Alaska's North Slope), and the Gulf of Mexico; areas
around Australia and South America are also current hot-spots of
activity.

The impulses created by the release of air from arrays of up to 24
airguns create low frequency sound waves powerful enough to penetrate
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Michael Gurstein | 1 Jan 2005 10:37
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Southeast Asia Tsunami and the Effective Use of Community ICTs

I guess like everyone else I've been watching the tragic events unfold
on television with a sense of sadness and powerlessness.  Not much that
one can do from so far away except at this point to make a donation and
to make the kinds of noises that get governments to move away from
inactivity.  

Fortunately my family and I weren't personally impacted so far as we
know, but the events took on a very direct force when we saw what seemed
to be video from a resort in Thailand where we had stayed 3 years ago
and which indicated that the bungalow where we were staying would have
been completely inundated by the wave.

And thinking of it and scanning the Net for information and for stories
I'm struck by a couple of things concerning the role (and lack of role)
of the Net in these events.  The Net appears to be playing a very
significant part in responding to the needs of those at a distance--the
on-lookers for information, stories, ways of contributing and so on;
families and friends of those possibly impacted with attempts at
creating listings of the found and the lost and for those on the ground
to manage the concerns and queries of those farther away; and one
expects that behind the scenes much of the co-ordination and planning
that is being done by aid organizations is being done in ways that are
pushing the boundaries of Computer Mediated Communication and managing
at a distance.

But I guess I'm a bit surprised that the Net wasn't able (yet?) to
bridge the information divides between those who had some idea about
what might be coming (the scientists and those immediately impacted) and
those who might have been able to make some use of that information in
the places where the impact took appreciable time to be realized.
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kanarinka | 1 Jan 2005 18:13

Re: Questioning the Frame

I too have followed this post on different lists with much interest as
I am currently writing a thesis and a journal article for Cartographic
Perspectives on intersections between cartography/art. While I agree
that Coco raises important questions about "categories of embodied
difference", I find the lack of specific examples in her essay very
disappointing. She discusses "new media mantras", "new media culture"
and "new media theory" without giving us specific information on what
these terms mean to her, who uses these terms and for what purpose. The
essay accuses, but it isn't clear who, specifically, is implicated.

The definition of maps as purely spatial presentations of an inherently
panoptic and omniscient point of view ignores a whole field of projects
that are engaging with geographical location in a way that privileges
duration, embodiment, and particularity over the panopticism of
traditional "maps". As these projects are shifting the borders and
boundaries of art, they are also participating in redefining what
constitutes a map and what constitutes a "mapping practice". Many of
them critique traditional mapmaking just as Coco does (e.g. what is
left off of the map? is a truly important question that many projects
_do_ address). These projects are becoming known as Critical
Cartography. What is at stake in most of these projects is performance
and difference, not representation and identity.

These projects use Deleuze's idea of a map as an abstract machine
rather than the traditional panoptic, representational map --
"What can we call such a new informal dimension? On one occasion,
Foucault gives it its most precise name: it is a 'diagram', that is to
say a 'functioning, abstracted from any obstacle =85 or friction and
which must be detached from any specific use'. The diagram is no =
longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is
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John Young | 2 Jan 2005 02:02
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Re: Southeast Asia Tsunami and the Effective ...


What is disturbing about lack of information from the South Asia tsunami 
is whether allegedly "missing" persons being memoralized by nations of 
origin with candlelights and moments of grieving, are dead, injured, or 
merely unaware they are preceived to be missing and thus do not contact 
those who fear they are dead, or more likely, do not wish to be found and 
placed in yet another official databank.

I know of three such persons who were quite surprised and violated in 
their privacy by obnoxious inquiries from those determined to leave no 
tern unstoned to satisfy purient dread and lascivious certainty that they 
must learn the horrific facts first hand. No matter that their inquiries 
set into motion nasty searches of private lives and deliberately concealed 
tracks and hiddent whereabouts -- this was paradise the lost had been 
seeking, away from the meddlers and watchers and checkers-up-oners.

The three I know about had went to the South Asia for pleasures not all 
together acceptable, or easily acceptable, back in the homelands. This did 
not set well with the pryers into other people's lives who leapt at the 
chance to override the privilege of escapism.

Are the authorities in South Asia doing the missing a favor to claim them 
such, turning a blind eye to customarily invited piccadilloes until the 
sated escapees decide to transform themselves back into upright citizens 
with nothing to hide?

The three I know won't say who they know is missing on purpose, as 
customary when off the grid of violative information. Merely ask that 
don't do it again, come spying and squealing on us.
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jaromil | 3 Jan 2005 15:28
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dyne:bolic 1.4 codename LUMUMBA


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  the complete system is free to download and copy, go on
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     and redempt yourself from closed source software
               ISO CD image of 610Mbytes

:: WHAT IS DYNE:BOLIC ?

   Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux is a live bootable cd, containing a whole
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mez breeze | 4 Jan 2005 00:36
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NEW WRITING: Net response -- Arts culture, tissue culture and autonomy

NEW WRITING: Net response -- Arts culture, tissue culture and autonomy
BY: Molly Hankwitz

http://www.netartreview.net/weeklyFeatures/2004_12_26_archive.html

One of the most promising and exciting aspects of Net art and its networked 
culture is that it, more than other media is continually morphing. It has 
close proximity to technocultural change and is incorporated or exploited or 
extrapolated upon as part of this change. Tools, names, processes and 
knowledge evolve with new media technologies like painting does with oil 
paint, or film and sculpture with celluloid or clay. The artistic will to 
improve, manipulate and expand upon "materials" is found all the time in net 
art. It is simply an electronic art form, carrying with it all the materials 
and mythologies bound up with being electronic. The artists push and create 
the net; many might argue that definitions of net art must be expanded to 
include communications law activists, programmers, and software engineers.

But artists produce culture, which is distinguished as ‘art’, and which is 
separated by judgement from commercial and industrial art forms. Yet it is 
also a net art history to acknowledge that between the product and the 
cultural manifestation of artwork is multidirectional collaboration that 
goes into producing the work. New media art work, net art and networked 
culture has a long history of such creative effort that has been discussed 
widely and whole areas of electronic art publication and production are 
devoted to fostering collaboration between scientists and artists or 
engineers and artists; dancers, musicians, sound artists and computer hacks. 
The net, thus is a widely inscribed, shape-shifting, responsive architecture 
in which artists intentionally play with its flexing characteristics and 
abundant aesthetics reinventing them through many means such as 'community' 
'continuity' and 'distribution.'
(Continue reading)

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rasmus fleischer | 4 Jan 2005 22:43
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What's the meaning of "non-commercial"?


In a recent book published by Creative Commons in France (scroll down for 
URL), there is a text titled "What's the meaning of non-commercial?", 
written by a lawyer working with the Swedish Creative Commons. The 
starting point is a question that was raised in a blog post of mine: Can 
we really divide the world into two spheres, one "commercial" and one 
"non-commercial"? Examples range from RSS flows and web advertising to 
public education and television.

Personally, I'm astonished that so many people (including a large part of 
the net's "copyfighters", and many nettimers too) by default put 
NonCommercial-licenses on every line of text they produce -- seemingly 
without a thought on what consequenses such that license may bring.

Neither does Lawrence Liang's recent "Open Content Guide" reflect the 
problematic at all: 
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/lliang/open_content_guide/04- 
chapter_3/

Consider how Freeculture.org, the "student movement for free culture", 
makes the NonCommersial-license the default choice, and mandatory(!) for 
participating in their contest at http://undeadart.org/

For a clear case of how NonCommercial-licensing may turn into pure 
hypocrisy, check these texts (and remember how the Beastie Boys were 
themselves sued for "commercial" sampling): 
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/sample_pr.html 
http://detritus.net/pipermail/rumori/2004-October/001429.html

OK, now the text:
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geert | 5 Jan 2005 01:30
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Bill Thompson: Dump the World Wide Web

From: Open Democracy (via evel@...)

Happy Christmas! (and, by the way: Dump the World Wide Web!)

As 2004 ends www.openDemocracy.net presents a gloriously radical assault 
on the web's lost decade. Bill Thompson argues that the black hole of 
online publishing needs a fresh start, a new model, a revolution that will 
free the networked world from its absurd web prison.

Dump the World Wide Web!
By Bill Thompson
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-10-2277.jsp
23-12-2004

--

Bill Thompson studied computer science, built his first site in 1994, 
attended the first international web conference later that year with Tim 
Berners-Lee, created the Guardian's first website and has worked with 
openDemocracy since its first version. But he has a deep, dark secret. He 
thinks the web sucks. Not just individual sites, but the whole web 
edifice. He explains why he wants to cure the addiction to HTML and do 
online publishing properly.

---

The World Wide Web is dead. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff 
but making it some way out into space before awareness brings gravity back 
into operation, it may continue to dominate our online lives a little 
longer, but its day is over.
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Florian Cramer | 5 Jan 2005 17:52
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Re: Bill Thompson: Dump the World Wide Web


Does this guy work for Microsoft? His proposals sound like they come right 
from MS's Research & Development, including all the braindead 
security-flawed designed.

Fortunately the Web is client-server and not like what Thompson proposes. 
Otherwise we would have to shut it down because I would have turned into 
an unmanageable non-open, insecure, giant distributed spyware application. 
- Tim Berners Lee's greatest achievement, in my opinion, is that he took 
fancy, but not very well-engineered concepts from Nelson and proprietary 
applications like Hypercard and re-implemented them with the virtues of 
Unix, free software and open standards, using a client-server model, an 
open protocol (http) and SGML (=the predecessor of XML)-based file format 
(HTML) and allowing operating system-agnostic communication between 
servers and clients/browsers. For the mess that resulted afterwards, only 
software companies like Netscape, Microsoft, Sun, Macromedia with their 
proprietary file formats and format/protocol extensions have to be blamed. 
There would be nothing wrong with the web today if everyone would follow 
the open W3C standard.

> The decision to make HTTP a
> =93stateless=94 protocol has caused immense trouble. It's rather like b=
> eing served by a waiter with short-term memory loss: you can only order
> one course at a time because he will have forgotten your name, never mind
> your dessert order, by the time you've had your first spoonful of
> gazpacho.

Fortunately HTTP is stateless, otherwise privacy/spying problems would
be even worse than they are today.
(Continue reading)

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Mark Dery | 5 Jan 2005 20:30
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Tissue Culture, Dental Horror, Maxillofacial Whatever: It's all good...

In the best tradition of shameless self-promotion and burnishing Brand
Me to a dull luster, a brief note to Nettimers to announce the launching
of my blog of cultural criticism and personal essays, "The Gilded Hack,"
at www.markdery.com. 

Here's the inaugural post. It's a smug, interminably windy,
self-important rumination on blogging. Naturally. 

The Being John Malkovich Effect 
Media Burn | Published on December 21, 2004 

Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying
dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn?t an ?org? one of those seafaring
enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who
hightailed it to the high seas ?to continue his research into the upper
levels of spiritual awareness and ability,? far from the distracting
attentions of the IRS?) ?Blog? sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy
new fetish, best left undescribed?an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog.
Yeah, I know it?s short for ?weblog,? but who calls journals ?logs,?
anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin
their diary entries with stardates? 

Second, there?s the gnawing fear that anyone who blogs is fated to
become one of those tub-thumping Alpha Wonks who?ve given the medium a
bad name?you know, those self-declared Masters of Their Own Domain whose
poured-concrete prose, cosmic sense of self-importance, and weird
refusal to use contractions makes them sound like the genetically
engineered offspring of Roger Rosenblatt and Galactus (?My journey is
ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all
elemental life! So speaks Galactus!?) So what if Instapundit gets more
(Continue reading)

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Gmane