Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Fact-Checkers and Certified Public Logicians

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 04:29 PM PST

It's fantastic that so much written knowledge is becoming generally accessible and cross-linked these days, but this is just an intermediate stage-- a universal library on the way to becoming a universal brain. The missing piece is encoding the underlying meaning of the stored text, the deep-structure logic behind it. It's one of the oldest challenges in Computer Science, and there has been lots of progress and companies dedicated to doing this. Powerset, for example, has software that has parsed and can answer questions from all of Wikipedia.

The thing is, you really still need a person to get it most reliably right, because people understand the way the world works. Luckily, we already have people whose job is very close to doing this already-- they're called fact-checkers or researchers, and they work for every reputable publication.

I don't think the fact-checking process is very well understood by the public-- it's hidden from view and uncredited (which is lame), and I didn't understand it myself until I began working with magazines. Basically, someone combs through a piece of text and makes sure every fact is verified. They look things up in established references, they call people on the phone, they call their friends who have experience in some area, or whatever else it takes. If they're doing it on paper, they start with a printout of the article, and then when they're done every word, every clause, and every spelling of every proper name, has a pencil mark through it.

I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn't gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There's a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the "Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)" seal on someone's independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys.

Now, what if these fact-checkers didn't just vet and correct the text? While they dig into the logic and accuracy of everything, as usual, they could also use some simple application to diagram the sentences and disambiguate the semantics into a machine-friendly representation. Just a little extra clicking, and they could bind all the pronouns to their antecedents, and select from a dropdown box to specify whether an instance of the string "Prince" refers to the musician Prince or to Erik Prince-- the president of XE, the company formerly known as Blackwater-- within an article that for whatever reason mentions both of them.

Then you would really have something. The text wouldn't just be fact-checked; its underlying meaning could be added into a shared pool of human knowledge, chained through, verified or denied, and used in other ways by any technology that may now exist or may exist in the future.

Many of big ideas that computer visionary Douglas Engelbart came up with in the 1960's have come true, but a couple of them haven't yet. One of these is his notion of the "Certified Public Logician." Engelbart predicted that a new class of knowledge worker would act as front-ends to the machine-enabled collective intelligence. Part logician, part notary, these "Certified Public Logicians" would review texts for logical consistency and then tag them up with appropriate envelope information and enter them into the machine. It's a great idea, and I think we could promote all of our fact-checkers into Certified Public Logicians pretty easily.

Zombie song name-checks Boing Boing

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:55 PM PST

Alexander Malloy from Golden Robot Army sez, "Golden Robot Army is a rock and roll band in Seattle that gives away its music for free and writes songs about schadenfreude guilt and homeless drunks and zombies. The band will be touring and filming a short film in Japan in March of 2010 (Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya)."

Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservation

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:52 PM PST

Matija Strlic and colleagues write in the ACS's Analytical Chemistry about "material degradomics," a techniques by which the odors emanating from old books are noninvasively analyzed to figure out which books are rotting and need preservation:
Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.

The new technique, called "material degradomics," analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves.

'Smell of Old Books' Offers Clues to Help Preserve Them

(Image: Books of the Past, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lin Pernille ♥ Photography's photostream)

Previously:


Are terms-of-service enforceable?

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:47 PM PST

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable:
In other words, it's not merely clicking the "I Agree" button that creates the legal contract. The issue turns on reasonable notice and opportunity to review--whether the placement of the terms and click-button afforded the user a reasonable opportunity to find and read the terms without much effort. In practice, the enforceability of each TOS implementation often falls on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of notice it provides the user. At one end, presentations that require the user, before clicking, to scroll to the bottom of a set of terms, or through an adjacent scroll box, guarantees the entirety of the TOS appears at least once, even if the user chooses to ignore it, and has been held to be enforceable. At the other end, by contrast, if a user must click on a hyperlink, or series of hyperlinks, to view the terms, the significance of clicking "I Agree" as showing assent diminishes, depending on the difficulty in actually finding the terms and whether a reasonable Internet User would have done so. Finally, in addition to the placement of terms, courts also consider the inclusion of conspicuous statements on websites that instruct users to read the TOS and inform them of the consequence of clicking "I Agree."...

Whereas courts have been willing to give clickwraps their blessing, attempts to legally bind users with browsewrap agreements have been more controversial. Unlike clickwrap agreements, browsewraps do not require a user to engage in any affirmative conduct, like clicking on a box, in order to show that they agree to a set of terms. Instead, websites with browsewrap agreements often purport to bind their users by passive conduct, unrelated to the TOS itself, like continuing to use the website or proceeding past its homepage.

The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users "Agree" to Online Terms of Service
Previously:


Woman jailed, charged with felony camcordering after recording 4 mins of sister's birthday party in a movie theater

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:41 PM PST

A woman who tried out her new pocket camera by video-recording a few minutes of her sister's surprise birthday party at a showing of "New Moon" has been charged with a felony -- "camcordering" a movie.

Penalties for camcordering have been ratcheting higher and higher (and have been introduced in international treaty negotiations, as well as in bilateral trade agreements with the US, which demands that its trading partners imprison people operating video recorders in cinemas). But the actual incidence of camcordered pirate DVDs is declining relative to "screeners" and other leaks from the industry itself.

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures -- blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing "Happy Birthday" at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry's pitch to us remains, "Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don't stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence."

Charged With Felony After Taping 4 Minutes Of "New Moon" (Thanks, Blaire!)

(Image: Camcordering, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from kowitz's photostream )

Previously:


Stormtrooper ballerina

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:56 PM PST

Map of Wikipedia article-density by nation

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:25 PM PST


Here's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write.

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

Previously:


Apple buys LaLA, is a cloud-based version of iTunes on the way?

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 09:02 PM PST

Rumors of Apple buying cloud-based music service LaLa have circulated for some time. Tonight, news that the deal is all but done. NYT, Bloomberg. Make way for a downloadless iTunes?

Oprah falls for a 4chan troll

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 08:56 PM PST

Good thing Oprah quit that show, because 4Chan pwned it. I think this happened a couple years ago, but I'm just now seeing the video. Sorry, I'm lame and slow. "His group has over nine thousand penises, and they're all raping children." (thanks, Sean Bonner!)

Update: Among the many remixes this spawned, Pedobear techno.

Tom Geisler's Inventions

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 05:54 PM PST

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco.

geisler-clip I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.

Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent.

Brazil lawmaker moves to outlaw "offensive video games"

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 05:32 PM PST

From the slippery slope department: A Brazilian senator has drafted a bill to criminalize the "import or distribution of offensive video games." The senator says he wants to "curb the manufacture, distribution, importation, trading, custody, and storage of video games that affect the customs and traditions of the people, their worship, creeds, religions, and symbols." (thanks, Guido!)

Italian jurors convict U.S. student of murder

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 05:43 PM PST

American student Amanda Knox was found guilty of murder in Italy today, despite prosecutorial shenanigans and the lack of forensic evidence in a case where one would expect it to be abundant. If you're surprised, you may labor under a misapprehension or two about how things work in the land of my fathers.

Despite its wealth and nominal status, Italy's counterparts in Europe look at it with derision and dismay for the circuses of which the Knox case is but one more. Public life in Italy often evinces these pious but oddly inscrutable outcomes, produced with alarming regularity by legal and political institutions that are like cargo-cult copies of those possessed by other nations.

This example, however, may be easier to understand than most. The jurors wore Italian flags while the judge read their verdict.

Why is the FDA holding up delivery of an Apple computer?

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:48 PM PST

200912041511-1

The Food and Drug Administration is holding up the delivery of MG Siegler's iMac because they apparently think it is an apple, not an Apple.

I don't want to believe that either UPS or the U.S. Government are so stupid as to think that my Apple computer is actually an apple, but I can't come up with any other explanation (and neither can people on Twitter). On my UPS tracking shipment screen right now all I see is "Exception" followed by a note that my iMac was held up in in Louisville, Kentucky because, "UPS HAS OBTAINED DOCUMENTATION AND SUBMITTED TO FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION AND/OR DEPARTMENT OF AG/PPQ;AWAITING RESPONSE"
Dear FDA, Gimme My iMac

Fit-PC2 gets another network port

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:09 PM PST

Remember the Fit-PC2 we reviewed a while back? It's the only desktop PC smaller than a Mac Mini that's worth buying, and they just upgraded it.

Workshop: Finding medicinal herbs growing in sidewalk cracks

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:05 PM PST

I'm really sorry I'm going to miss this Machine Project workshop on Wednesday, Dec 9th, in Los Angeles.
200912041502An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. More information on Nance can be found at her website.

Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm

How police departs use asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:00 PM PST

Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it "after they mistook Vaughn's co-worker for a prostitute."

From a Detroit News article:

The Wayne County Sheriff's Office, which helps run the prosecutor's forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.
Obama's Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:
It's worth noting that Obama's Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren't obligated to. Though the solicitor general's office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.

Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.

How police departs abuse asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people

Typographic treatments sculpted in paper by Yulia Brodskaya

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 02:43 PM PST

yulia_05.jpg Russia-born illustrator Yulia Brodskaya creates beautiful type treatments in delicately cut and curled three-dimensional paper sculptures. There's a gallery at Illusion360, and a more extensive one on her website. Stunning. (via Chris Watson)

Washington Post disses Flav and Chuck D, then apologizes

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 02:25 PM PST

From the department of "most ridiculous newspaper corrections evah," this from the Washington Post: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number." (Via Quinn)

Just look at this awesome banana bunker.

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 01:44 PM PST

Russia: Blogger arrested for spreading rumors of H1N1 "plague"

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 12:14 PM PST

A 22-year-old medical student and blogger was arrested in Russia this week for "spreading rumors" about swine flu in the city of Saratov. He was charged with disseminating false information related to an act of terrorism. On Wednesday, he and other Russian bloggers discussed possibilities that authorities were concealing the extent of H1N1 fatalities and that the city may soon be quarantined. The next day, he was jailed.

James Lipton in hilarious LG ad campaign: "Before You Text, Give it a Ponder"

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 02:44 PM PST

giveitaponder.jpg These television spots for LG Mobile featuring "Actors Studio" host James Lipton really get the Funny job done. Post with background over at Laughing Squid. The campaign site is here (warning: Flash, auto-load sound). There's an article about the purpose of the campaign here. I'm guessing they were created by the same agency that did "Subservient Chicken" for Burger King? I'm told the agency was Young and Rubicam.

Above, my favorite spot in the "Ponder" campaign, which includes a unicorn reference.

Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 12:08 PM PST

kitteh.jpg Humans love putting stuff on cats. There's stuffonmycat, there are image macros (LOLcats) with text on cats. Now, there's a new book about putting wigs on cats.

The photos in this book are equal parts cute, funny, and creepy (in that "obsessive cat lady" way), and the combination is most enjoyable. The book is well-designed for casual flipthroughs and kitteh-obsessive pageturners alike, with vivid color reproduction with which to faithfully present all those technicolor wigs. I may buy several copies for teenage, female cat-fanciers on my holiday list. Something about the brand of humor here seems particularly fitting for that age group, and I do not say that with the intent to condescend (although, hey, if the wig fits...). It's sweet, ridiculous stuff.

Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs (by Julie Jackson, photographs by Jill Johnson / Amazon)

Here's the project website, with out-takes from the photo shoots and more about the "making of." Oh, and -- they're selling the cat wigs.

Embedded above, a video trailer. (Thanks, Monkey!)

Bulbdial: a clock whose "hands" are shadows cast by LEDs

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST


David sez, "Almost two years ago, I came up with a concept for a 'Bulbdial' clock. Instead of physical hands, it has three shadows cast by a series of rotating lights indicating hours, seconds, and minutes. Nine months ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories developed a working model using three rings of LEDs. Now Bulbdial Clocks are available as a kit from EMSL. They did the hard work on this, coming up with a cool Mantel Clock implementation in various styles. You can get one at their site here."

A Bulbdial Clock (Thanks, David)

Previously:


Astronaut-guided video tour of the International Space Station

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 11:04 AM PST

Astronaut Michael Barratt (Expedition 20 Flight Engineer) walks you through the International Space Station in this 20-minute long HD video, which covers the entire 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules.

Barratts' commentary describes to Mission Control in Houston how equipment and supplies are arranged and stored, and provides engineers with a detailed assessment of each module-to-module hatchway.
NASA ASTRONAUT LEADS TOUR OF SPACE STATION IN HD [YouTube, spotted on ededition.com, via Jennifer Cisney]

Previously:


Foot Fungus Cured With Socks

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:56 AM PST

Self-experimenter Seth Roberts cured his foot fungus when he bought more socks. Anti-fungal medication didn't work. He wrote about this on his blog, and other people are reporting success with his more-socks cure.
I remember reading on your blog about more socks as a cure for Athlete's Foot and I had a fungal infection on my foot from climbing around barefoot outside, I think. I tried using two different antifungal creams. They didn't work. To be honest I didn't use them for the recommended time cuz it's a huge fucking hassle. You have to put it on your feet, let it dry, rub it in blah blah blah. And it's kinda gross to use. So I went to Uniqlo [a Japanese clothing store] and bought like 20 pairs of extra socks and forgot about it. But when I wash socks the washed ones get put in the back of the drawer so the effect is the socks I wear spend like 3-4 days away from my feet every time. Anyway, the infection COMPLETELY disappeared. There is a weird sense of satisfaction from this kind of cure. It feels like just by doing some small things 'right' all these health issues can be fixed.
Foot Fungus Cured With Socks

Cocaine-stuffed chicken smuggled into US by Guatemalan man

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 12:20 PM PST

chicken.jpg

This is your chicken on drugs. Wagner Mauricio Linares Aragon, a 32-year-old citizen of Guatemala, was arrested at Dulles Int'l. Airport when authorities discovered that the cooked chicken he brought with him on a flight from El Salvador was stuffed with about $4,000 worth of cocaine.

Inside the chicken's cavity they found two small, clear bags that contained about 60 grams - about 2.3 ounces - of powder cocaine.
Cavity, hehehhe. The chicken was cooked, not alive, but I like the trippy look in the eyes of the rooster above. [image: "Little Chicken," from the CC-licensed Flickr stream of hdodd/poppy]

Update: In the comments, Boing Boing reader Lobster suggests that this recipe for drug smuggling henceforth be known as "Chicken Cordon Blow." Win.

Documentary about the lives of four babies around the world

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:49 AM PST


I can't wait for this documentary to come out!

Everybody loves... Babies. This visually stunning new movie simultaneously follows four babies around the world - from first breath to first steps. From Mongolia to Namibia to San Francisco to Tokyo, Babies joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.
(Via Ohdeedoh)

Web design project from hell immortalized in cautionary webcomic

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:40 AM PST

Blackwater founder Erik Prince revealed as a CIA spy

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:30 AM PST

Adam Ciralsky's Vanity Fair profile of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater ("a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees") reveals that Prince was a spy for the CIA while he was at the same time raking in over a billion dollars as a government contractor in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.

For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater's C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been helping [the C.I.A.] to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into "denied areas"—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members.

While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts…Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy.

Erik Prince: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy (Via Disinformation)

Previously:


Book about extreme fashion subculture in The Congo

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 10:14 AM PST

Gentlemen of Bacongo by photographer Daniele Tamagni, documents a subculture of slum-dwelling men in the Congo who dress in luxurious handmade suits.
BacongocoverusThe movement, called Le Sape, combines French styles from their colonial roots and the individual's (often flamboyant) style. Le Sapeurs, as they're called, wear pink suits and D&G belts while living in the slums of this coastal African region.

In interviews with some notable sapeurs, Tamagni unearths the complex and varied rules and standards of Le Sape, short for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People. Sapeur Michel comments on the strange combination of poverty and fashion, "A Congolese sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body."


Gentlemen of Bacongo

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