Il segreto dell'attrazione secondo una ricerca britannica sta nella chiarezza

Bisogna far capire a chi si vuole conquistare che ci piace e dirglielo

LONDRA - Aspetto fisico? Scontato. Sguardo ammaliatore? Sopravvalutato. Tattica? Spesso inaffidabile. Il segreto per fare innamorare una persona è molto più semplice di quello che non ci si potrebbe aspettare da secoli di poesia, musica, psicologia. Ovvero dichiararsi. Se ci si è invaghiti di qualcuno, il modo migliore per avere una chance di conquistare il suo cuore è dirglielo o farglielo capire.

Suona banale? Eppure spesso le soluzioni più a portata di mano si rivelano le migliori. Ne sono convinti i ricercatori dell'Università di Aberdeen, giunti alla conclusione che alcuni indicatori sociali - come gli sforzi che si fanno per fare sì che l'oggetto del desiderio si accorga di noi, senza vergogna o timidezze inutili - giochino un ruolo vitale nello sviluppo di una storia d'amore.

In un esperimento condotto su 230 persone, uomini e donne, i cui risultati sono riferiti dagli studiosi su Psychological Science, ad ognuno dei volontari venivano mostrate quattro immagini con diverse espressioni del viso. Una mostrava una persona che cercava di stabilire un contatto con gli occhi ma non sorrideva, un'altra sorrideva ma non cercava lo sguardo degli altri, un'altra non cercava un contatto con gli occhi né sorrideva, l'ultima invece cercava un contatto con lo sguardo e sorrideva.

La preferenza è stata schiacciante in favore dell'immagine più accattivante, che guardava dritta negli occhi e sorrideva. "Questi indicatori sociali, che suggeriscono quanto si piace a qualcuno, si rivelano fondamentali nei meccanismi dell'attrazione", spiega il dottor Ben Jones, uno degli autori dello studio, all'Independent. Un po' di faccia tosta e persistenza, quindi, sono molto più efficaci di messaggini segreti o corteggiamenti anonimi. Parola di scienziato.
]]> http://theconnective.wordpress.com/?p=146 Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:52:10 +0000 Eyal Sivan http://theconnective.org/2008/09/08/fearing-digital-literacy/ The July/August 2008 edition of the Atlantic magazine featured a very provocative cover story. Using the infamous colour scheme of the world's most popular search engine, the headline asks: Is Google Making Us Stoopid? The article, written by IT pundit Nicholas Carr, argues that yes, in a sense, the Internet is making us stupid. The truth is, he's just plain scared.

In the article, Carr clearly demonstrates an intimate and well-researched understanding of technology and media, and his conclusion is clear. The Internet, he claims, is "chipping away our capacity for concentration and contemplation," serving to "scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration." To be fair, he acknowledges that he may be wrong, stating that "you should be skeptical of [his] skepticism;" that we may be on the cusp of a "golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom."

After its publication, the article triggered a veritable barrage of opinions from amateurs and experts alike (mostly at Edge.org and the Britannica Blog). Some of the heavyweights agreed with Carr's position, while others disagreed, all with varying degrees of passion, and all with appropriate eloquence and regard.

Summarizing and responding to each position would take far too long, so here is my analysis in the form of a simple diagram:

Please note that the above is a glib interpretation of the authors' positions, and in no way mathematical, or accurately representative of their whole arguments. It is intended as a general (and hopefully humorous) summary. If anyone takes issue with their positioning, I would be happy to move them. The point is that the argument has been generally framed in terms of extremes.

With a nod to Carr's article, the New York Times joined the fray on July 27 with an impressively neutral piece entitled Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? Early on, it clearly defines the extremes: critics of reading online say it "diminishes literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books;" while proponents say "the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount."

The article goes on to mention international assessment tests for gauging children's digital literacy, a fascinating term. Really, that's what much of the debate seems to be about: whether digital literacy is a bad thing, eroding our ability to sustain deep thought, or a good thing, re-wiring our brains for the digital world ahead.

This post is not intended to argue for one side over the other, but to examine the heated and sometimes surprisingly fearful nature of the debate itself.

In searching for the aforementioned New York Times article, I accidentally came across another article that made a similar point, with one big difference: it was published well over one hundred years ago, on December 17, 1881. The following is a long quote (made possible by the outstanding archive facility at nytimes.com):

"It has been asserted that everybody nowadays is too much given to newspaper reading, and that there is imminent danger that book reading will fall into disuse... Still, book-making increases and book-sellers thrive. At the same time, and with greater rapidity than the number of book-buyers increases, the number of newspaper readers is multiplied. With education the newspaper reader demands constantly improving journals of information - fuller details about Governments, men and things - and with greater accuracy in detail than ever before. In answer to this demand the newspaper publisher must strain every nerve to supply the readers of his newspaper with the amplest and most trustworthy information obtainable, and that not only about events, but about the discoveries of scientific men, the results of exploration, the most recent thought in philosophy, the latest tendencies to Church and State, and even the argument in the latest opera or the cream of the latest novel."

Now re-read the above paragraph, but replace newspaper with blog. What you'll find is an almost perfect reconstruction of today's best arguments in defense of digital literacy. Frankly, its disappointing that such self-evident truths need to be proven over and over again, that we are seemingly so incapable of learning from our past. Yet the same old and obvious arguments ensue.

Some of the arguments centre around absolute definitions of good reading and bad reading, but even elementary philosophy tells us this is a dead-end. Tolstoy may be wonderful for some (like Larry Sanger) and terribly boring for others (like Clay Shirky). The heart of the matter is that there is no one right answer. Tolstoy is not always great, and he is not always boring. Like all art (some would say like all knowledge), what Tolstoy is or isn't is in the eye of the beholder, it's subjective. If you prefer RSS feeds to War and Peace, go to it.

Other criticisms have to do with the immaturity of the tools, but this is simply a matter of time. Prior to blogs, wikis and podcasts (which was not so long ago), the Internet was not even especially good at engendering opinion, something even Carr's supporters admit it excels at today. Eventually and inevitably, there will be ways to "let the pearls rise and the worst of the noxious toxins go away," as David Brin desires in his excellent response.

There is no question that the Internet is changing how we think, but it is myopic in the extreme to label the result as stupidity. It also betrays an implicit fear of digital literacy.

Fear of new media is not unique to this age. Socrates feared the written word. Religious leaders feared the printing press. As the above quote demonstrates, literati of the day feared the newspaper. Today, the film, television, radio and music industries openly quake in the shadow of the Internet. From the original Luddites to the Unabomber, new technologies have often bred fear.

Some would say that the dissidents were right, that they were prescient in their warnings, as many of the technologies they feared have led to stratification, inequality, corruption and death. In every case, however, even with the blood on the wall, there was no turning back. Reverting, or even just stopping technological progress is contrary to our evolutionary, temporal nature. Technology marches forward because we march forward.

The concern should not be about technology per se, but about the damage it often causes. In my opinion, much of the suffering brought about by new technologies may well have been avoided if there had been more concerted and public efforts to understand its implications. These efforts must first and foremost work from the premise that there is no going back. As soon as one says, "No! We were better off without it, " that's just plain fear.

One answer to this perspective comes from Marshall McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964:

"Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of file or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condescension to 'pop kulch' and 'mass entertainment.' It was in this spirit of bulldog opacity that the Scholastic philosophers failed to meet the challenge of the printed book in the sixteenth century. The vested interest of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been bypassed and engulfed by new media."

New media subsumes the old. It does not exist beside the old media, like a second option. It wraps around the old media, enveloping it, so that the new can do everything the old could do, but more. As a result, we tend to cast new media in roles we understand, so the Internet becomes a telephone and a radio and a television and of course, a book. The new media is always capable of much more than fulfilling these old roles. The problem lies in that we have no conception of what this more could possibly be, as we have no context for it yet.

Furthermore, this shift is inevitable. Technology does not go backwards, or as Clay Shirky puts it in his response: "the one strategy pretty much guaranteed not to improve anything is hoping that we’ll somehow turn the clock back. This will fail, while neither resuscitating the past nor improving the future."

I think this inevitability scares some people. It is difficult for them to accept the validity of digital literacy, let alone imagining that it could completely subsume our immortal love of the written word. In order to deal with this fear, they hide behind McLuhan's "bulldog opacity," and trumpet the achievements of days long past, yearning for simpler times while simultaneously riding the current of their age.

The debate is not about smart versus stupid, or contemplative versus scattered, or deep vs. shallow, or long-form versus short-form, or screen vs. page. It is about us conceding that there is new way on the horizon, which is neither better nor worse, but new. This new way threatens the old way, a way which we may know and understand, which allows us to form nicely-bounded definitions of stupid and smart, but a way which must evolve all the same.

The diagram below illustrates this point. As time moves forward and technology develops, what the two end-points represent will change, and we most certainly can and should direct that change, but the battle between the familiar and the unfamiliar is never-ending:

Time is against us, always and unyielding. We can either turn our backs and pretend this new way isn't coming, or we can face it head on and try and understand what it means for us, what it says about us.

Deep contemplative thinking is not necessarily the absolute best way to think. Nor is thin-slicing an absolute good. But the former is a well worn path, with many established and revered landmarks, while the latter is wild jungle waiting to be explored.

We cannot afford to be afraid, for it is that very fear that will lead to the the dumbing-down of society for which all sides share concern. Google may or may not make you stupid by today's definition, but not Googling will almost definitely make you stupid by tomorrow's definition.

Kevin Kelly, in one of his responses to Carr, put it beautifully:

"We are about to make the next big switch. Billions of people on earth will stampede to join. Something will certainly be lost. It would serve us all better if that lost was better defined, and it was paired with a better defined sense of what we gain."

Fear of the unknown is a peculiar but common condition. We have all been in some situation facing the precipice at the edge of the familiar, hearts beating faster, mouths dry. We experience this fear as a society too: fear of terrorism, fear of immigration, fear of gay marriage. All these can induce fear because they represent the great unknown. The Internet is no exception.

Faced with such a challenge, it must be remembered that this is neither the first nor the last time our global culture will suffer from the peculiar plight that is the fear of the unknown. Although the context is very different, the immortal words of Franklin Roosevelt seem strangely fitting:

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

It is grossly unfair to compare the cultural artifacts of the written word, which has ruled us for millenia, to the cultural artifacts of the digital world, which has existed for barely the blink of an eye.

Given time, digital literacy will give us so much more than the written word ever has, or ever could, for better or worse and whether you like it or not. We must learn to confront our fear, and convert retreat into advance.

Our future should not be shaped by the preservation of the old, but by the discovery of the new. Today, change is ever upon us. Rather than driving into the future using only our rearview mirror, as McLuhan observed, we should embrace the new reality to the betterment of all of us and each one of us.

Ce fut aussi bien des journalistes que des "intellectuels" qui s’attelèrent à railler et dénigrer l’encyclopédie libre. Ils ont argumenté en expliquant combien la méthode de rédaction de Wikipédia, à savoir par des anonymes, avait pour résultat une encyclopédie de piètre qualité sans commune mesure avec les illustres et très sérieuses encyclopédies classiques telles que Britannica ou Universalis. A ces critiques, les rédacteurs de l'encyclopédie libre ont inlassablement expliqué que sur Wikipédia, ce n'était pas le diplôme du rédacteur qui comptait, mais bien les sources qui étayaient l'article.

Les encyclopédies classiques sont écrites par des personnes au savoir soi-disant assuré du fait de leurs diplômes. Mais quand deux encyclopédies classiques vantées pour leur sérieux donnent deux informations factuelles différentes, laquelle des deux a raison? Laquelle des deux est plus sérieuse que l'autre ?

Lors de la rédaction de l'article sur Shimon Peres, les anonymes rédacteurs de Wikipedia ont remarqué que, selon les sources, sa date de naissance changeait; dans les sources consultées on retrouvait les très sérieuses Britannica et Universalis.

Tout comme moi, vous vous seriez attendus à ce qu'elles fournissent toutes deux la même date. Et bien non, que nenni, elles fournissent deux dates différentes, à savoir, respectivement, le 16 et le 1er août. On pourrait s'attendre à ce qu'au moins l'une des deux dates soit en accord avec les informations présentes sur les sites gouvernementaux israëliens. Eh bien non, un site du gouvernement israëlien nous informe que M. Peres est né le 2 août. On peut alors se poser une question fort légitime: qui de Britannica, Universalis ou  de Wikipédia a, dans sa démarche de rédaction, le comportement le plus "sérieux" ?

Bien entendu, Britannica et Universalis, tout comme Wikipédia, contiennent des erreurs. La différence est que Wikipédia ne fait pas confiance à un diplôme mais à des faits et cherche donc à sourcer au maximum ses articles,  permettant ainsi au lecteur de vérifier facilement ce qui y est dit. Hélas, en lisant Britannica et Universalis, on se voit obligé de faire confiance au rédacteur.

Il est évident que Wikipédia a des lacunes, possède des articles de culture populaire et comporte des erreurs. Mais c’est également le lot des autres ouvrages encyclopédiques. Les démarches rédactionnelles diffèrent, mais les outils de rédaction également. Chaque démarche à ses forces et ses faiblesses, et il est clair qu’une des grandes forces de Wikipédia est sa possibilité d’être en permanence remise en question et donc corrigée.

La observación más curiosa sobre el particular es la de Dusmel. Apunta que los chistes en latín sobre materias tabú se permitían incluso en publicaciones familiares, y cita en apoyo una ocurrencia de finales del siglo XIX, aparecida en un conocido diario de humor blanco llamado The London Charivari. La ocurrencia se refiere a la muerte, a la temprana edad de diecinueve años, de un joven apellidado Longbottom: Ars longa, vita brevis.

Robert Graves, 'Lars Porsena', or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language

]]> http://healthcaretips4u.wordpress.com/?p=123 Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:21:09 +0000 Martin http://healthcaretips4u.pt.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/fact-about-human-body/ 1.Scientists say the higher your I.Q. The more you dream.

2.The largest cell in the human body is the female egg.

3.The smallest is the male sperm.

4.You use 200 muscles to take one step.

5.The average woman is 5 inches shorter than the average man.

6.Your big toes have two bones each while the rest have three.

7.A pair of human feet contain 250,000 sweat glands.

8. A full bladder is roughly the size of a soft ball.

9. The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razor blades.

10.The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the
Encyclopedia Britannica.

11.It takes the food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your
stomach.

12. The average human dream lasts 2-3 seconds.

13. Men without hair on their chests are more likely to get cirrhosis
of the liver than men with hair..

14. At the moment of conception, you spent about half an hour as a
single cell.

15. There is about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.

16. Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a
gallon of water to a boil.

17.. The enamel in your teeth is the hardest substance in your body.

18.. Your teeth start developing (in your gums) 6 months before you are
born.

19. When you are looking at someone you love, your pupils dilate, they
do the same when you are looking at someone you hate.

20. Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.

21. Your thumb is the same length as your nose.

And just like Wikipedia, and Britannica, it's introducing a few new ways to create content.

There is 'moderated collaboration,' for instance. Which sounds a lot like the concept behind the edit pages of Wikipedia. probably less edit wars, since the author has to approve the changes for them to go live. Brave authors could however permit edits without approval. The really daring ones will be able to link their entries with advertising to earn some income via AdSense. I can see that feature alone quickly tarnish the value of this wiki as marketers rush in.

Maybe this is Google2 -- a move to create a parallel search engine that pretends to be a wiki.

Check the wiki-slayer here.

Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam applications warned that close to 5 million spam "attacks" or "bursts" occurred in June 2002 and that spam has mushroomed 450 percent since June 2001. This pace continued unabated well into the beginning of 2004 when the introduction of spam filters began to take effect. PC World concurs.

Between one half and three quarters of all e-mail messages are spam or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) - unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some spammers hack into unsecured servers - mainly in China and Korea - to relay their missives anonymously.

Starting in 2003, malicious hackers began using spam to install malware - such as viruses, adware, spyware, and Trojans - on the unprotected personal computers of less savvy users. They thus transform these computers into "zombies", organize them into spam-spewing "bots" (networks), and sell access to them to criminals on penumbral boards and forums all over the Net.

Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots - specialized computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages sent.

As spam recipients become more inured, ISPs less tolerant, and both more litigious - spammers multiply their efforts in order to maintain the same response rate. Spam works. It is not universally unwanted - which makes it tricky to outlaw. It elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow ups, depending on the message. Many messages now include HTML, JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble (or actually contain) viruses and Trojans.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted in 2001 that the number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user will double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the number at $4.8 billion in 2003.

More than 2.3-5 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages in 2002. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages this year (2005). An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents.

PC World quotes the European Union as pegging the bandwidth costs of spam worldwide in 2002 at $8-10 billion annually. Other damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost of Internet access.

Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled "Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006", anti-spam revenues were projected to exceed $88 million in 2002 - and more than double by 2006. List blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 25, 2002 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture capital.

ISPs are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims - by expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter simply switch ISPs or sign on with free services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by the day as the costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.

The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in the last five years, as the dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam emanates from c. 80 large operators.

Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISPs and portals are poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"As I first described in my book 'The Road Ahead' in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time."

Subscribers may not be appreciative of the joint ventures between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant ISPs, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with spammers. ISPs rely on the data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business environment.

The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses to ban the sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink" (the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, the implicated ISPs blame the whole affair on rogue employees.

PC World begs to differ:

"Ronnie Scelson, a self-described spammer who signed such a contract with PSInet, (says) that backbone providers are more than happy to do business with bulk e-mailers. 'I've signed up with the biggest 50 carriers two or three times', says Scelson ... The Louisiana-based spammer claims to send 84 million commercial e-mail messages a day over his three 45-megabit-per-second DS3 circuits. 'If you were getting $40,000 a month for each circuit', Scelson asks, 'would you want to shut me down?'"

The line between permission-based or "opt-in" e-mail marketing and spam is getting thinner by the day. Some list resellers guarantee the consensual nature of their wares. According to the Direct Marketing Association's guidelines, quoted by PC World, not responding to an unsolicited e-mail amounts to "opting-in" - a marketing strategy known as "opting out". Most experts, though, strongly urge spam victims not to respond to spammers, lest their e-mail address is confirmed.

But spam is crossing technological boundaries. Japan has just legislated against wireless SMS spam targeted at hapless mobile phone users. Many states in the USA as well as the European parliament have followed suit. Ideas regarding a "do not spam" list akin to the "do not call" list in telemarketing have been floated. Mobile phone users will place their phone numbers on the list to avoid receiving UCE (spam). Email subscribers enjoy the benefits of a similar list under the CAN-Spam Act of 2003.

Expensive and slow connections make mobile phone spam and spim (instant messaging spam) particularly resented. Still, according to Britain's Mobile Channel, a mobile advertising company quoted by "The Economist", SMS advertising - a novelty - attracts a 10-20 percent response rate - compared to direct mail's 1-3 percent.

Net identification systems - like Microsoft's Passport and the one proposed by Liberty Alliance - will make it even easier for marketers to target prospects.

The reaction to spam can be described only as mass hysteria. Reporting someone as a spammer - even when he is not - has become a favorite pastime of vengeful, self-appointed, vigilante "cyber-cops". Perfectly legitimate, opt-in, email marketing businesses and discussion forums often find themselves in one or more black lists - their reputation and business ruined.

In January 2002, CMGI-owned Yesmail was awarded a temporary restraining order against MAPS - Mail Abuse Prevention System - forbidding it to place the reputable e-mail marketer on its Real-time Blackhole list. The case was settled out of court.

Harris Interactive, a large online opinion polling company, sued not only MAPS, but ISPs who blocked its email messages when it found itself included in MAPS' Blackhole. Their CEO accused one of their competitors for the allegations that led to Harris' inclusion in the list.

Coupled with other pernicious phenomena - such as viruses, Trojans, and spyware - the very foundation of the Internet as a fun, relatively safe, mode of communication and data acquisition is at stake.

Spammers, it emerges, have their own organizations. NOIC - the National Organization of Internet Commerce threatened to post to its Web site the e-mail addresses of millions of AOL members. AOL has aggressive anti-spamming policies. "AOL is blocking bulk email because it wants the advertising revenues for itself (by selling pop-up ads)" the president of NOIC, Damien Melle, complained to CNET.

Spam is a classic "free rider" problem. For any given individual, the cost of blocking a spammer far outweighs the benefits. It is cheaper and easier to hit the "delete" key. Individuals, therefore, prefer to let others do the job and enjoy the outcome - the public good of a spam-free Internet. They cannot be left out of the benefits of such an aftermath - public goods are, by definition, "non-excludable". Nor is a public good diminished by a growing number of "non-rival" users.

Such a situation resembles a market failure and requires government intervention through legislation and enforcement. The FTC - the US Federal Trade Commission - has taken legal action against more than 100 spammers for promoting scams and fraudulent goods and services.

"Project Mailbox" is an anti-spam collaboration between American law enforcement agencies and the private sector. Non government organizations have entered the fray, as have lobbying groups, such as CAUCE - the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

But, a few recent anti-spam and anti-spyware Acts notwithstanding, Congress is curiously reluctant to enact stringent laws against spam. Reasons cited are free speech, limits on state powers to regulate commerce, avoiding unfair restrictions on trade, and the interests of small business. The courts equivocate as well. In some cases - e.g., Missouri vs. American Blast Fax - US courts found "that the provision prohibiting the sending of unsolicited advertisements is unconstitutional".

According to Spamlaws.com,  the 107th Congress, for instance, discussed these laws but never enacted them:

Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001 (H.R. 95), Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act (H.R. 113), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 718), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 1017), Who Is E-Mailing Our Kids Act (H.R. 1846), Protect Children From E-Mail Smut Act of 2001 (H.R.  2472), Netizens Protection Act of 2001 (H.R. 3146), "CAN SPAM" Act of 2001 (S. 630).

Anti-spam laws fared no better in the 106th Congress. Some of the states have picked up the slack. Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The situation is no better across the pond. The European parliament decided in 2001 to allow each member country to enact its own spam laws, thus avoiding a continent-wide directive and directly confronting the communications ministers of the union. Paradoxically, it also decided, in March 2002, to restrict SMS spam. Confusion clearly reigns. Finally, in May 2002, it adopted strong anti-spam provisions as part of a Directive on Data Protection.

Responding to this unfavorable legal environment, spam is relocating to developing countries, such as Malaysia, Nepal, and Nigeria. In a May 2005 report, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) warned that these countries lack the technical know-how and financial resources (let alone the will) to combat spam. Their users, anyhow deprived of bandwidth, endure, as a result, a less reliable service and an intermittent access to the Internet;

"Spam is a much more serious issue in developing countries...as it is a heavy drain on resources that are scarcer and costlier in developing countries than elsewhere" - writes the report's author, Suresh Ramasubramanian, an OECD advisor and postmaster for Outblaze.com.

ISPs, spam monitoring services, and governments in the rich industrialized world react by placing entire countries - such as Macedonia and Costa Rica - on black lists and, thus denying access to their users en bloc.

International collaboration against the looming destruction of the Internet by crime organizations is budding. The FTC had just announced that it will work with its counterparts abroad to cut zombie computers off the network. A welcome step - but about three years late. Spammers the world over are still six steps ahead and are having the upper hand.

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The Internet Cycle

The Internet - A Medium or a Message?

The Solow Paradox

The Internet in Countries in Transition

The Revolt of the Poor - Intellectual Property Rights

How to Write a Business Plan

Decision Support Systems

The Demise of the Dinosaur PTTs

The Professions of the Future

Knowledge and Power

Much speculation exists as to what new science and technology may result from these lines of research. Nanotechnology can be seen as an extension of existing sciences into the nanoscale, or as a recasting of existing sciences using a newer, more modern term. Two main approaches are used in nanotechnology. In the "bottom-up" approach, materials and devices are built from molecular components which assemble themselves chemically by principles of molecular recognition. In the "top-down" approach, nano-objects are constructed from larger entities without atomic-level control. The impetus for nanotechnology comes from a renewed interest in colloidal science, coupled with a new generation of analytical tools such as the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

Combined with refined processes such as electron beam lithography and molecular beam epitaxy, these instruments allow the deliberate manipulation of nanostructures, and led to the observation of novel phenomena.

Examples of nanotechnology in modern use are the manufacture of polymers based on molecular structure, and the design of computer chip layouts based on surface science. Despite the great promise of numerous nanotechnologies such as quantum dots and nanotubes, real commercial applications have mainly used the advantages of colloidal nanoparticles in bulk form, such as suntan lotion, cosmetics, protective coatings, and stain resistant clothing. Modern synthetic chemistry has reached the point where it is possible to prepare small molecules to almost any structure. These methods are used today to produce a wide variety of useful chemicals such as pharmaceuticals or commercial polymers.

This ability raises the question of extending this kind of control to the next-larger level, seeking methods to assemble these single molecules into supramolecular assemblies consisting of many molecules arranged in a well defined manner. These approaches utilize the concepts of molecular self-assembly and/or supramolecular chemistry to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation through a bottom-up approach.

The concept of molecular recognition is especially important: molecules can be designed so that a specific conformation or arrangement is favored due to non-covalent intermolecular forces. The Watson-Crick base-pairing rules are a direct result of this, as is the specificity of an enzyme being targeted to a single substrate, or the specific folding of the protein itself. Thus, two or more components can be designed to be complementary and mutually attractive so that they make a more complex and useful whole.

Wikipedia is in this position now where it's "educating" people with content that may or may not be correct, consistent, or properly peer reviewed.

At first I used to think, "What harm could the free flow of information do?", well it can do a lot, here's why.

Vandalism: This can be anything, from edits that blank the page or replace it with "penis penis penis penis penis" (those are usually fixed quickly), to hard to spot things, like going in and altering an only mildly popular article with some misleading information, like if you mention in the Fidel Castro article that he once visited Yankee Stadium to watch a game being an avid fan of theirs, or more silly but not as lasting stuff, like editing an infobox about George Washington to proclaim that he was the first man on the moon and came in peace for all mankind, or changing scientific equations that most people won't be able to understand to know they are wrong anyway.

Consensus: This doesn't necessarily mean fact, it's just if I think that my edit is right, and an administrator comes along and changes it, it goes to a review council where other administrators decide who's edit stays, and it won't be mine, but there was consensus.

Edit wars: This happens on contentious articles like "Christianity" or "Homosexuality", where a Christian might come along and radically alter the article to suggest homosexuality as a disease that can be cured, I come along and change it back, we bounce it back and forth, until someone runs to an administrator, and depending on what the administrator believes (not which one of you is correct), one of you will be banned.

NPOV: Neutral point of view, meaning they'll neutralize the input of anyone with a point of view that isn't theirs, honestly, how can you write an article on something you don't have any strong feelings about?

Lack of peer review: If anyone can edit the article on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and some chain smoking hick in Alabama with 14 cats is an administrator, some junk can creep it's way in.

Corporate and government manipulation: Microsoft, Apple, the NSA, Wal-Mart, and ExxonMobile, all with an image problem, are among the many that self edit their own articles to make themselves sound better on Wikipedia.

Unverifiable Credentials: I have a PHD in [insert subject here], it must be so because I put it on my user page....how will you ever know?

Pointless articles: Wikipedia is a dumping ground for useless articles about every variety of Pokemon there's ever been and one time villains from a Super Mario game 20 years ago.

So what good HAS Wikipedia done?

Well, it's spawned Uncyclopedia which was supposedly a parody, but I find to be wildly more accurate than Wikipedia, for example see their article about Wikipedia and then theres the Wiki-Wiki software that is under a free software license for anyone to build a standards compliant website out of, even if they have little or no working knowledge of web markup languages, relegating those horrible WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Fartpage to history.

About Wikipedia though, you can skim it over to get a basic feel for the content, or link to an article that's basically correct, but nothing you see on it is reliable or trustworthy enough to trust your jewels to it for acedemic reports, get Brittanica or Comptons or something.

Businessweek has called it "an early skirmish in what's likely to become a protracted war over how and where media content is published online." Who knows, one day they may involved in one.

The "AP way," as Jeff Jarvis called it, may go down as trying to establish a top-down business approach in a bottom-up world. Or to put it another way, trying to force 'monetization' through the funnel of 'syndication.'

It's an odd time to try to lock down content and charge for it. I recently tried out Encyclopedia Britannica (and interviewed Tom Panelas) and came to the conclusion that instead of trying to set up snipers on the ramparts of the walled garden, Britannica has basically decided to create a new type of walled garden --leaving the keys to the entrance under the mat, so to speak. If a 240-year company can recognize the value in collaboration not confrontation, a 'younger' content repository like AP could surely follow suit.

If they don't want to take a leaf from the page of Britannica, how about this experiment by David Balter of BzzAgent? He's simultaneously selling and giving away (free download) a book called Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.

"Crazy like a fox, that Balter," says Todd Defren, whose blog PR Squared is one of the venues selected to allow those free downloads.

"Protection is no strategy for the future," says Jarvis.

"Content wants to lose the handcuffs," says little old me.

In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this: if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have found no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the refrain.

But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close to deriving subsistence level income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least as much as they are artists.

Economically and rationally, we should expect that the costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.

Consider a publishing house.

A book which costs 20,000 euros to produce with a potential audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like this) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 50 euros to recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby shrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to buy the cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go up prohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potential buyers. The story is different if a book costs 5,000 euros to produce and is priced at 10 euros a copy with a potential readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying) should in this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal phenomenon.

This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. The less the cost of production (brought down by digital technologies) - the fiercer the battle against piracy. The bigger the market - the more pressure is applied to clamp down on samizdat entrepreneurs.

Governments, from China to Macedonia, are introducing intellectual property laws (under pressure from rich world countries) and enforcing them belatedly. But where one factory is closed on shore (as has been the case in mainland China) - two sprout off shore (as is the case in Hong Kong and in Bulgaria).

But this defies logic: the market today is global, the costs of production are lower (with the exception of the music and film industries), the marketing channels more numerous (half of the income of movie studios emanates from video cassette sales), the speedy recouping of the investment virtually guaranteed. Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which the population would anyhow not have paid the legal price. The illegal product is inferior to the legal copy (it comes with no literature, warranties or support). So why should the big manufacturers, publishing houses, record companies, software companies and fashion houses worry?

The answer lurks in history. Intellectual property is a relatively new notion. In the near past, no one considered knowledge or the fruits of creativity (art, design) as "patentable", or as someone's "property". The artist was but a mere channel through which divine grace flowed. Texts, discoveries, inventions, works of art and music, designs - all belonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True, the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarely financially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce their works of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massive the market, the more sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger the financial stakes - the larger loomed the issue of intellectual property. It spread from machinery to designs, processes, books, newspapers, any printed matter, works of art and music, films (which, at their beginning were not considered art), software, software embedded in hardware, processes, business methods, and even unto genetic material.

Intellectual property rights - despite their noble title - are less about the intellect and more about property. This is Big Money: the markets in intellectual property outweigh the total industrial production in the world. The aim is to secure a monopoly on a specific work. This is an especially grave matter in academic publishing where small- circulation magazines do not allow their content to be quoted or published even for non-commercial purposes. The monopolists of knowledge and intellectual products cannot allow competition anywhere in the world - because theirs is a world market. A pirate in Skopje is in direct competition with Bill Gates. When he sells a pirated Microsoft product - he is depriving Microsoft not only of its income, but of a client (=future income), of its monopolistic status (cheap copies can be smuggled into other markets), and of its competition-deterring image (a major monopoly preserving asset). This is a threat which Microsoft cannot tolerate. Hence its efforts to eradicate piracy - successful in China and an utter failure in legally-relaxed Russia.

But what Microsoft fails to understand is that the problem lies with its pricing policy - not with the pirates. When faced with a global marketplace, a company can adopt one of two policies: either to adjust the price of its products to a world average of purchasing power - or to use discretionary differential pricing (as pharmaceutical companies were forced to do in Brazil and South Africa). A Macedonian with an average monthly income of 160 USD clearly cannot afford to buy the Encyclopaedia Encarta Deluxe. In America, 50 USD is the income generated in 4 hours of an average job. In Macedonian terms, therefore, the Encarta is 20 times more expensive. Either the price should be lowered in the Macedonian market - or an average world price should be fixed which will reflect an average global purchasing power.

Something must be done about it not only from the economic point of view. Intellectual products are very price sensitive and highly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated for by a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to explain the pirate industries: evidently, at the right price a lot of people are willing to buy these products. High prices are an implicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich world clientele. This raises a moral issue: are the children of Macedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest in human knowledge and creation?

Two developments threaten the future of intellectual property rights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with the monopolistic practices of professional publications - already publish on the web in big numbers. I published a few book on the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has a computer or a modem. The full text of electronic magazines, trade journals, billboards, professional publications, and thousands of books is available online. Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to download whole software and multimedia products. It is very easy and cheap to publish on the Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Web pages are hosted free of charge, and authoring and publishing software tools are incorporated in most word processors and browser applications. As the Internet acquires more impressive sound and video capabilities it will proceed to threaten the monopoly of the record companies, the movie studios and so on.

The second development is also technological. The oft-vindicated Moore's law predicts the doubling of computer memory capacity every 18 months. But memory is only one aspect of computing power. Another is the rapid simultaneous advance on all technological fronts. Miniaturization and concurrent empowerment by software tools have made it possible for individuals to emulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A single person, sitting at home with 5000 USD worth of equipment can fully compete with the best products of the best printing houses anywhere. CD-ROMs can be written on, stamped and copied in house. A complete music studio with the latest in digital technology has been condensed to the dimensions of a single chip. This will lead to personal publishing, personal music recording, and the to the digitization of plastic art. But this is only one side of the story.

The relative advantage of the intellectual property corporation does not consist exclusively in its technological prowess. Rather it lies in its vast pool of capital, its marketing clout, market positioning, sales organization, and distribution network.

Nowadays, anyone can print a visually impressive book, using the above-mentioned cheap equipment. But in an age of information glut, it is the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution, and the sales that determine the economic outcome.

This advantage, however, is also being eroded.

First, there is a psychological shift, a reaction to the commercialization of intellect and spirit. Creative people are repelled by what they regard as an oligarchic establishment of institutionalized, lowest common denominator art and they are fighting back.

Secondly, the Internet is a huge (200 million people), truly cosmopolitan market, with its own marketing channels freely available to all. Even by default, with a minimum investment, the likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large numbers of consumers is high.

I published one book the traditional way - and another on the Internet. In 50 months, I have received 6500 written responses regarding my electronic book. Well over 500,000 people read it (my Link Exchange meter registered c. 2,000,000 impressions since November 1998). It is a textbook (in psychopathology) - and 500,000 readers is a lot for this kind of publication. I am so satisfied that I am not sure that I will ever consider a traditional publisher again. Indeed, my last book was published in the very same way.

The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantly clear. The old intellectual property industries are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents, trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages in manufacturing and marketing.

But they are faced with three inexorable processes which are likely to render their efforts vain:

The Newspaper Packaging

Print newspapers offer package deals of cheap content subsidized by advertising. In other words, the advertisers pay for content formation and generation and the reader has no choice but be exposed to commercial messages as he or she studies the content.

This model - adopted earlier by radio and television - rules the internet now and will rule the wireless internet in the future. Content will be made available free of all pecuniary charges. The consumer will pay by providing his personal data (demographic data, consumption patterns and preferences and so on) and by being exposed to advertising. Subscription based models are bound to fail.

Thus, content creators will benefit only by sharing in the advertising cake. They will find it increasingly difficult to implement the old models of royalties paid for access or of ownership of intellectual property.

Disintermediation

A lot of ink has been spilt regarding this important trend. The removal of layers of brokering and intermediation - mainly on the manufacturing and marketing levels - is a historic development (though the continuation of a long term trend).

Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet or downloadable MP3 files will render the CD obsolete. The internet also provides a venue for the marketing of niche products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need to engage in costly marketing ("branding") campaigns and manufacturing activities.

This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artist and the commercial exploiters of his product. The very definition of "artist" will expand to include all creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneself and to auction off one's services, ideas, products, designs, experience, etc. This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will vanish and work mobility will increase in a landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration and similar labour market trends.

Market Fragmentation

In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually exclusive market niches, consumer preferences and marketing and sales channels - economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution are meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, mass customization replaces mass production, a network of shifting affiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. The decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late response to these trends. The mega-corporation of the future is more likely to act as a collective of start-ups than as a homogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists, sinister) juggernaut it once was.

Also Read

Contracting for Transition

The Case of the Compressed Image

The Content Downloader's Profile

The Future of Electronic Publishing

The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine

The Internet and the Library

Germany's Copyright Levy

Revolt of the Scholars

The Kidnapping of Content

The Disintermediation of Content

The first volume is titled The Great Conversation and is not a literary classic like the others, but a preface to the series written by the editors. It's very much a critique of modern education, faulting it for neglecting classical literature--and more importantly, good literature--and instead trying to co-opt children into early career paths:

Since the pupil is not committed to the occupation, the proposition that the occupation that are to be studied are those which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at the time is alarming. Between the ages of six and fourteen I wanted, in rapid succession, to be an iceman (a now extinct occupation), a "motorman" on the horse cars (also extinct), a fireman, a postman, a policeman, a professional baseball player, and a missionary. The notion that what my teachers should have done was to offer me study of these occupations as the fancy for each of them took me is so startling (12-13)...

You should see all the sour faces people make and noises they sound when I tell them I study Latin in college. Their response is always, what are you going to use that for? I never know how to answer, and usually apologize. It's as if somehow, to be educated in academia, is a waste of time. I'm sorry, but most of the branches of higher education are nothing more than trade school. This is fine, but not at the extent of marginalizing the liberal arts.

On June 3rd 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica announced their new vision for their online encyclopedia. Though many comments have centered around how Britannica has collapsed under the pressure of WIkipedia's fame, I don't believe this movement towards a more expansive reference tool is equivalent to the Wikipedia model. Taken from their announcement post:

These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they’ll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. The result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors.

One of the main fears, that countless voices echo, is that Wikipedia is unverified drivel created by vandals and impish recluses.  The more immediate truth is that Wikipedia has grown from a volatile collection of obscure popular culture facts to a burgeoning model of how dynamic information creation can be. The community of editors have brokered for more control over substantial articles and have reduced the opportunities for article vandalism to a near minimal concern. But yet many educators pan its possibilities by citing the established comfort of traditional resources. Then this change was introduced.

The interesting thing is that Britannica isn't suggesting that they jettison their core of scholarly knowledge and replace it with "Joe Public's" views on the British monarchy. Instead they are inviting scholars and experts in the field to contribute to their content and supplement the communal resource with their own work. From what I could ascertain from the original announcement, lay users would have contribution rights to a connected aspect of the "core" knowledge base. This means that they most probably wouldn't be able to edit the main entries but would possibly have their own work and commentary be associated with related topics. Though this may not seem like a lucrative endeavor, the ability to have your work be dispersed into the scholarly community could help new authors gain a foothold into their academic endeavors via this new peer review outlet.

The one thing that concerns me is that under the proposed model there is the possibility that each user could be editing existing content, which then becomes a new piece of content separate from the original in some manner. The concept of thousands of slightly altered versions of one piece of information seems rather unnerving to me. Hopefully they can iron out these types of concepts before the full release.

For another model similar to this you may want to check out an earlier posting entitled:

Knol's Fair in Love and Wiki's

Resting on four words, Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy, it's a very different experience. There's an odd but enticing feature --in the area where you expect to see paid ads-- that allows you to add a URL to the search results. Results are not very accurate, but these are early days.

Wikia Search lets you register a "social profile" adding the social network ingredient to search. "Search requires a strong social and community focus," they say, and they are building it through collaboration --much like Wikipedia. Worth watching.

The new policy was announced via a set of two posts in the Britannica blog. The posts make it very clear that Britannica is not embracing the wiki model to any significant degree. The role of the Britannica staff in policing its content will remain: "We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable 'wisdom of the crowds.'" The majority of its content will continue to be generated by experts and subjected to editing. The experts and editors, in Britannica's view, "can make astute judgments that cut through the cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints." This willingness to interject expert judgement is what will ostensibly continue to separate it from Wikipedia, which is accused of settling, "for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a 'neutral point of view.'" (link)