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2011

  • 1 min read

Nation Building

Here's a topic I have never written about before… Nation Building. I just want to point you to a great article I read in the Globe yesterday that puts some meat on the question of "Nation Building," when has it happened before? How long does it take? What is really happening? How does it start and how does it finish?

Here's the crux of the argument in "How to build a nation" - The Boston Globe

“Identities are chosen strategically, they evolve over time, and people make decisions about what identities to prioritize,” said Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at Stanford University who studies ethnic politics and democratic transition in Africa. “This suggests there is room for fluidity and change.”

The lesson of history, it appears, is that tribal division isn’t a permanent condition: It’s just the default when people don’t yet have a nation they have a good reason to identify with. As it turns out, there are examples to follow. And it does not take centuries — or even more than a generation — to build a sense of citizenship. In fact, what we know about forging national identities actually makes the situation in the Middle East seem less dire than it would first appear. (from"How to build a nation" - The Boston Globe)

An excellent article.

  • 3 min read

Update on Spotify II

I have become a total Spotify addict. I have almost totally stopped downloading MP3s and am gradually locating all my favorite music on Spotify. I posed a couple of semi-sceptical notes when I first started using Spotify and so I am due for an update, right?

So what has happened since? I find that I am using Spotify on my iPhone and on my computer, all the time. Occasionally I will dip back into my large iTunes collection to remind me of artists that I want to listen to. But I promptly go onto Spotify, and search for the artist and grab all their albums not just the one or two I had in iTunes.

It turns out that for me, not 'owning' the mp3s is not a big deal at all. I am almost always online when I am playing music, either on a computer or an iPhone. And when I am not actually online (on a plane for example) it is easy to make selected play lists available on my iPhone as long as I thought of it ahead of time.

Comparing it to Rhapsody, they are very similar services. They cost the same and seem to have similar sized catalogs. At least, most of the music I want I can find on either one. Still somehow I found that I am using Spotify much more often than I used Rhapsody. Rhapsody does not have a 'real' mac application so you have to have it running in a browser window which can be a nuisance. Also the Spotify UI experience is a little more streamlined (although it misses some really important features that Rhapsody has.)

Comparing it to Pandora, the clear difference is that on Spotify you can play the specific album and/or track you want, over and over again if you want. On Pandora you can just ask for music that 'sounds like' another track. And while it does a decent job, you often want to listen specifically to Madeleine Peyroux and no one else.

Comparing it to iTunes, the clear difference is that I don't own any music. And if tomorrow Spotify goes out of business or I decide to stop subscribing, my whole 'collection' disappears. What I own is the list of music that I like, and presumably I would be able to move the list over to the next service. Also I am constantly discovering new music and so my iTunes collection has lots of stuff that I don't listen to anymore. On the other hand, lots of stuff, like NPR interviews, Technical podcasts, lecture series and other material is only available as mp3 and so I will keep using iTunes for that, I am sure.

What about the new integration with Facebook? Not sure yet. What music I listen to is no secret. But it is a little weird that people in my network can watch my listening habits, play by play as it were, and I listen to a lot of music. As soon as I wake up the music goes on.

Anyway, all in all, Spotify is great and is now my primary music service.

  • 1 min read

I've been looking into changing up the primary (and only) disk in my 2 year old Mac Pro to a Solid State Disk (SSD). Based on what I've seen on the new Mac Airs I think it will boost performance a lot more than adding more memory would.

The problem is that these beasts are pretty expensive, so I am not going to replace my 400G Hard Disk with a 400G SSD. Instead I will have a much smaller SSD to boot from and run from, and leave the larger 400G to carry the load of large files that I don't use a lot.

Here are a bunch of useful links that I have gathered in case you are thinking of doing the same:

Enjoy.

  • 1 min read

Check out CityPockets

I've been using various Groupon-ish web sites to great advantage. Whether it's Groupon itself, or LivingSocial, OpenTable and others, I send all their offers to an email folder and scan the 10-15 offers I get a day in one glance (2 seconds) to see if anything jumps out. I end up buying a coupon from one of them about once a month.

Along comes CityPockets. The site solves the problem of how to remember what coupons you have and especially reminds you to use them if you lose track of what you have. It actually can log into each of your groupon-ish accounts and grab whatever new coupons appears there and displays them in one unified list.

Free, useful and saves money too. I recommend CityPockets!

  • 1 min read

My New EXCLUSIVE at Salon: National Security Lab Hacks Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine by Remote Control With $26 in Computer Parts

Continuing my linking to Election related news, check out this post Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine Hacked by Remote Control With $26 in Computer Parts from The BRAD BLOG:

"What makes this hack so troubling -- and different from those which have come before it -- is that it doesn't require any actual changes to, or even knowledge of, the voting system software or its memory card programming. It's not a cyberattack. It's a "Man-in-the-middle" attack where a tiny, $10.50 piece of electronics is inserted into the system between the voter and the main circuit board of the voting system allowing for complete control over the touch-screen system and the entire voting process along with it."

  • 1 min read

Swipely, cool but scary?

So there's this rather cool new service that says they will find and give you special deals to the stores and merchants you use already. The way they do it is to examine your credit card bills and help you find deals. They say:

With Swipely, you can earn automatic cash back rewards at the best local places Boston has to offer. There are no coupons to cut, vouchers to buy or loyalty cards to forget - with Swipely you earn valuable rewards on every purchase with the credit or debit cards you already have, automatically. Best of all, Swipely is free!

Sounds great, but you know how they do it? You have to give them your credit card info and login to the credit card company web site, so they can look at your charges. They say it is very secure:

Swipely downloads transactions to give you rewards via our banking technology partner using a secure, read-only connection trusted by more than 5,000 banks and 26 million consumers. Swipely uses 256-bit SSL EV bank-grade encryption and SAS 70 Type II secure data centers.

I am pretty promiscuous when it comes to this kind of thing (for example, I've been using Mint.com for a while now) but still this one creeps me out just a little bit. What do you say?

  • 1 min read

New Jersey election fraud? Or coverup? Or just human error?

Andrew Appel is one of the best known academics studying and commenting on elections and computer science and technology related to elections. He wrote a really interesting report, "New Jersey Elections Coverup", going into great detail about a specific incident during the June 2011 New Jersey primary election where the reported outcome of a particular race was demonstrated to be incorrect.

It was a small election and so they could literally get affidavits from voters to prove this. Mr. Apple was hired as an expert (apparently he does a lot of this, which for me colors his words to some extent) to help investigate what might have happened. The report tells a compelling story.

If you are one of those who wonders whether election fraud happens or can easily happen, this report will interest you. It also adds weight to the conventional wisdom among security and computer experts a physical paper ballot, marked by the voter, and scanned by a computer is really the best and perhaps only way to ensure fair elections.

  • 2 min read

Google+ – Professional Social Network?

Some people are starting to wonder whether Google+ will continue to grow and become a major social network. Even for Google, it will be quite an achievement to penetrate the already relatively crowded world of social networks and become a major player.

Indeed they have had an excellent start and in my opinion built quite a nice little service. (By the way, do not underestimate how much they must have spent designing, building and now deploying Google+. I call it a 'nice little service' but I know we are talking many millions of dollars.)

Here's what one pundit said as criticism in a recent article:

"In that respect, is it possible that G+, at the moment, is simply a social media step too far? Are there only so many daily destination-and- connection sites a person can invest time and effort overseeing?

As Forbes.com contributor Paul Tassi wrote last month within a column doubling as a eulogy for the service, "The fact is, very few people have room to manage many multiple social networks … since there is only so much time in the day to waste on the Internet. Add in Google+, effectively a duplicate of Facebook, and there just isn't space for it." (from Worse than a Ghosttown)

I am not sure. I use Facebook for personal and family networks, and have relatively few business contacts on it. To date, I've used LinkedIn for my business contacts. But LinkedIn is not a social network in the sense of Facebook.

Maybe that will be Google Plus' niche: the professional social network.