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Author Archives: Hamish MacEwan
Keystone Cops too busy bowing to FBI demands
A few isolated incidents or part of an alarming pattern? It’s time we found out. In the Dotcom case, not only have our law enforcement agencies cut corners – or worse – in their excitement at being part of Uncle Sam’s world police team, in so doing they have broken New Zealand laws designed to protect the rights of the people they’ve sworn to uphold.
They’ve also broken our trust. That’s earned them medals from the FBI. We can’t leave it at that.
via nzherald.co.nz
FBI, also bowing to demands, from US film studios.
New Zealand Parliament – 1. Dotcom Case – Actions of Government Communications Security Bureau
Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No. It is important to understand what the ministerial certificate is. The ministerial certificate is essentially a suppression order that was on the basis of an application by Kim Dotcom’s legal team to release the name of the Government Communications Security Bureau’s activity. It is not normal practice for us to do that. So, because the bureau believed it had acted lawfully, it asked the Acting Prime Minister to sign the ministerial certificate, which avoided it having to make that public statement.
via parliament.nz
Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.
I want to drive on the Web, but instead I’m being driven. All of us are. And that’s a problem.
It’s not for lack of trying on the part of websites and services such as search engines. But they don’t make cars. They make stores and utilities that try to be personal, but aren’t, and never can be.
Take, for example, the matter of location. The Internet has no location, and that’s one of its graces. But sites and services want to serve, so many notice what IP address you appear to be arriving from. Then they customize their page for you, based on that location. While that might sound innocent enough, and well-intended, it also fails to know one’s true intentions, which matter far more to each of us than whatever a website guesses about us, especially if the guessing is wrong.
Shopping carts on rails according to a later analogy from Doc. And that’s really sad. I used to compare railways to telcos, their services, their time-table, their price. And the Internet to the personal vehicle. From Doc’s perspective it appears the mass consumer Internet is trending that way.
Finding the next generation of talented video educators with YouTube Next EDU Guru
We believe that inspiring online educators can come from all walks of life, and we want to find the next generation of educational YouTube stars – people with a talent for explaining tough concepts in compelling ways, and the passion and drive to assemble a global classroom of students. YouTube educational channels like Khan Academy, CrashCourse, Veritasium, Numberphile, MinutePhysics and Ted-Ed have grown to millions of views and subscribers – could you be next?
Another incumbency for disruption.
Blossom
Opus Interactive Audio Codec
Overview
Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.
Technology
Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. Supported features are:
- Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s
- Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband)
- Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms
- Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR)
- Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band
- Support for speech and music
- Support for mono and stereo
- Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames)
- Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size
- Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC)
- Floating point and fixed-point implementation
You can read the full specification, including the reference implementation, in RFC 6716. An up-to-date implementation of the Opus standard is also available from the downloads page.
via opus-codec.org
Underdetermination of Scientific Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
[C]ontrastive underdetermination involves the quite different possibility that for any body of evidence confirming a theory, there might well be other theories that are also well confirmed by that very same body of evidence.
Overcoming Bias : How to motivate women to speak up
One problem with asserting that your assertiveness doesn’t indicate bitchiness is that it probably does. If all women know that assertiveness will be perceived as bitchiness then those who are going to be perceived as bitches anyway (due to their actual bitchiness) and those who don’t mind being seen as bitches (and therefore are more likely to be bitches), will be the ones with the lowest costs to speaking up. So mostly the bitches speak, and the stereotype is self-fulfilling.
This model makes it clearer how to proceed. If you want to credibly communicate to the world that women who speak up are not bitches, first you need for the women who speak up to not be bitches. This can happen through any combination of bitches quietening down and non-bitches speaking up. Both are costly for the people involved, so they will need altruism or encouragement from the rest of the anti-stereotype conspiracy. Counterintuitively, not all women should be encouraged to speak more. The removal of such a stereotype should also be somewhat self-fulfilling – as it is reduced, the costs of speaking up decline, and non-bitchy women do it more often.
via overcomingbias.com by Katja Grace
Nancy Baym: "Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media"
Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face?
via cms.mit.edu
“To suggest that music is free and social is sort of sacrilege”
Hamish MacEwan 