Reflexivity

I need a new hosting service that supports Movable Type. I also need to upgrade (my version, 3.15, is behind the times). What is web hosting?
pair networks has a refugee special that sounds like me!
2mhost also includes the option of a domain transfer, which is appealing.
Nexcess provides a detailed tutorial, that might be helpful once I get everything actually transferred (by someone besides me!)
AQHost has video tutorials and a website builder (which might only work with PCs, not Macs?)
LivingDot includes consulting; something I’ve been seeking for awhile.

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Steve sent this a while back (I’m behind the times) about the cyberattack on Estonia, Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in Estonia.
Reading this now (six weeks after the event) coincides with a student-selected reading on Deception, Betrayal, and Aggression by John Stewart and Carole Logan, p 415-427 (8th Edition, Bridges Not Walls).
A recent story (ten days ago), relates how the EU is responding to the attack: Attack on Estonia puts cyber security on EU agenda. Interestingly, just over one year prior to the attacks, an initiative on internet security was announced: “Launch of CERT Estonia will increase internet security.” Sometimes you gotta wonder if human relations just comes down to a game of chicken.

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I almost always tip street musicians. At least, I have since beginning to travel in Europe where one encounters them fairly frequently. I give more to those I truly enjoy, but I tip everyone because I like the idea. I wish it happened in the States more often. In fact, I was thrilled last fall when a guy was outside Puru’s favorite burrito joint (Bueno y Sano) playing a 12-string guitar (I think that’s what it was). You bet I tipped him! Sure, sometimes I can’t or don’t linger, but it is the idea: art-between-the-moments, squeezed into rush hour, a reminder that pleasure is possible, a reprieve from the cacophony of traffic, cellphonechatter, and silent stares.
I would have loved to have wandered past Joshua Bell during this experiment by The Washington Post.

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The Association of Internet Researchers had a brief exchange over this BBC story, Fake professor in Wikipedia storm.
The question is whether wikipedia is inherently weak in structure or simply fated to be exploited like any organization by overzealous and/or unscrupulous persons. There is a public/private angle here too, and I’m curious about Kevin’s comment about the wikipedia community’s attempt to redress the situation.
Homero Gil de Zuniga: Once again Wikipedia raises controversy by the weakness of its very structure. Although I guess that it is the same structure that makes it an attractive global encyclopedia.
Kevin Guidry of mistaken goal: “I would humbly suggest that humans [were] (a) lying and deceiving one another and (b) making poor choices long before Wikipedia or the Internet were invented. The very public manner in which this has been discovered and dealt with is, in my mind, a strength of the system. There are definitely weaknesses and flaws in the system but I’m not sure it’s fair to lay them at the feet of Wikipedia as a whole or suggest (without evidence) that this is inherent in or endemic to the system.
But it sure is interesting to watch the community react and attempt
to change the system in response to this challenge!”
Michael Zimmer: “I don’t see this as a fundamental flaw with Wikipedia’s structure – faked credentials (and improper vetting of them) can plague almost any organization or community:
* Michael Brown at FEMA: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/
0,8599,1103003,00.html
* George O’Leary (football coach): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
George_O%27Leary#Notre_Dame_Controversy
* “Security consultant” posing as Fed Agent to stalk “Brangelina”:
http://www.tmz.com/2006/09/14/fake-fed-wanted-to-get-near-brangelina/
And, of course, it was the New Yorker (who has greater resources for
fact-checking) who got fooled here just as much as the Wikipedia
community….”"

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This five minute video by Professor Michael Wesch is superb: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.
Posted by Clifford to the aoir-listserv.

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The Writing Program has developed a statement on using technology for teaching which encourages us to “teach with technology in considered ways.” So explained the illustrious Donna to an auditorium of returning ENG112 Teachers eager to tackle the second semester. The Writing Program has put together an exceptional package of resources for students and teachers, which includes mycomplab, an online supplement to the Penguin Handbook containing loads more info and resources plus some neat features that folks might want to use, such as a built-in “exchange” for peer reviews, a “research navigator” to help direct one to useful resources, several model papers, and (for instructors only), some tips on teaching English as a Second Language. It’s good stuff and students are paying for four years of access when they buy the custom Penguin edition for UMass (which, by the way, is half the price it would otherwise be).
Any teacher can get a WebCT/Blackboard/Spark(?) course set up to complement in-class instruction – this is a university-wide offering, as is the new Udrive system. A tutorial guides one through the process of loading and sharing files (another option for peer review), establishing groups, and even drafting webpages before they go public.
All of these are great and I’m definitely going to ask my students to play with them: I’m really curious if they have preferences for one or another.
Meanwhile, I’d like to keep using the umasswiki format (to the extent that students are willing) because, quite simply, it exists “outside” the bureaucratic “container” of “the university.” I’m uneasy with the degree to which a public university education (in general) is geared toward certain modes of conformity, hence I am leary of uniformity in practices and tools. Let me clear, the Writing Program explicitly does not insist on extreme conformity except to the core of a common curriculum and overarching program goals. How individual teachers accomplish these goals and deliver this curriculum is – largely – up to each teacher.
I think this offers a rich palette of opportunities for undergraduates, not just in terms of becoming familiar with different kinds of technology (which is crucial), but also in the debates opened up about the public sphere, privacy rights (which differ by context), and the power of writing as a form of/forum for critical public thinking. Speaking of which, the integration of text with visual images is an increasingly powerful mode. Check out what the media scholars website, In Media Res, is up to:

Pirates
This would be awesomely cool to project onto the big screen in the rooms with built-in projection equipment! Get your key from the Provost’s Office, connect your laptop, select .mov at the mediacommons website, bingo. Contact AIMS on campus for assistance if necessary. (They have saved my hiney on more than one occasion.)
Meanwhile, some internet scholars have posted a teaching case on wikipedia, whose objectives are
1) To show the delicate balance between issues of authority, expertise, community consensus and norms of behavior in a distributed setting, and
2) To discuss success and failure modes in online communities.

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What would you do if your reality was suddenly altered? Would you have the presence of mind to stay calm, to assess the situation, to act strategically while facing pain and the knowledge of your own upcoming death? The Jacket presents a model in the character of Jack Starks, who also manages to act kindly even as he pursues his own preservation. “Don’t act like I don’t know what’s real!” Starks asserts to (mad scientist) Dr. Becker. Later, he clarifies to the good Dr. Lorenson as she tries to calmly describe his court-diagnosed delusional state: “The real events that have happened to me have been f*cked up, not my mind!”
The elements of consciousness and time are interwoven to generate a metaphor for the individual human life here on earth. In certain ways, we are all “trapped” in a jacket, prone on a slab, closed within a morgue drawer. Society dictates the boundaries: if we err in our interpersonal or professional relations punishment ensues. Similarly, we encounter strangeness and surprise. Sometimes unspeakable, the horrors of what can be done to us and of what we may participate in doing to others form the backdrop of everyday tasks and routines.
The test of our humanity is the degree to which we develop our perception and awareness of always having a choice of response, no matter what the provocation. Jack’s life as “Everyman” – as anyone – is stark, laid bare by events and circumstances beyond his control. Instead of resisting the evidence of his perception, Jack accepts it – he trusts what he knows. Not only does he waste no time, he works within it, generating conditions for his own and others’ survival.

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“This is not the kind of publicity we would ever seek,” said Phil Kent (no relation) about the Cartoon Network’s publicity stunt in Boston yesterday that inspired the headline story: Froth, Fear, and Fury in the Boston Globe.
I wasn’t there, so I cannot attest to the felt experience of the people who were frightened by the advertising or the city officials who rushed to the rescue. It occurs to me, however, that the function of comedy is to show a society its own foibles. Whether intentional or not, this event exposes the skein of our political economy.
While Americans bask in economic plenty (relative to most of the rest of the world’s populations, with indifference toward our own poor), the cost of our national security policies (over decades) begins to infringe on daily peace-of-mind. Hence, marketing-gone-awry. Suspicion lurks, pervasive. We know we are at risk.
Yet, accompanying this knowledge are many choices. We can assess when fear is reasonable or an overreaction. We can decide on limits to escalation and invest in alternative interventions. We can gauge the repressive mechanics of the law against the widening impulses of human cooperation. We can choose to lay tracks to peace or to perpetuate wars in which young people are warped by soldiering and disproportionate percentages of civilians die.
The Boston Globe published a photo of the two ‘masterminds’ giggling at their arraignment. I can imagine they are incredulous at the extreme reaction they have unwittingly invoked. I can imagine their defense: We were just doing our job! Yes. If we’re lucky, perhaps they will end up having done their job so well that stern, legalistic, and patronizing powers-that-be must take a pause.
There is an official apology/disclaimer posted on the Adult Swim website to appease those who didn’t appreciate being scared or inconvenienced. A toonzone blog has a few entries as the event has developed and a reaction article, Aqua Teen Hoaxing Force? How a Cartoon Brought a City to a Halt. As of today at 8:57 EST there are 362 replies to a thread started by nick23: Promotion Sparked Bomb Scare in Boston.
The kids know we have to poke fun at some of this crap because if we keep taking it all so dang seriously we’re never gonna be able to turn this planet around.

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I received many of these photos of daily life in Tehran in an email last fall.
Whatever our political-economic competition, I resist the path to war. Religious difference is an excuse, a justification, mere rationalization cloaked in moral self-righteousness. To alter the apparent inevitability of another war, we – as “a people” – must begin to create new bases for the global economy. It is up to us to shift the PPF from guns to butter.
The Production Possibility Frontier is a graph of the most efficient way an economy can produce goods and provide services. In a recent college classroom, the basic benchline diagram (at the macroecnomic level, such as global and national economies) is plotted between military expenditures (”guns”) and domestic expenditures (”butter”). Interestingly, the links I’m finding with a general google search for “production possibility frontier” on the Internet give the example of two domestic products. What a subtle convenience! Let’s just pretend that only the domestic matters! This is what drives consumerism – if we spend, the economy will grow. However, this is only half the equation, or – more realistically – less than half. “Wine” and “bread” is the (everyday living domestic) part that is currently dependent on the other, on the “guns” and bombs and armored uniforms and tanks and military expenditures generated ad nauseum when the US goes to war.
There are more roads to peace than there are to war. We must find the will to choose them.

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“In his novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the term [actually a name from mythology] Nam-shub to indicate a self-replicating meme.” I am truly enjoying this novel. The plot involves a neurolinguistic virus – language that causes physical changes to brain cells: a radical version of the co-construction of meaning.
At the root of this tale’s “philosophy of language” is binary code (computer programming is all done in 1’s and 0’s). Stephenson plays the mind-as-computer analogy to the extreme, suggesting that the insertion of a certain meme (Enki’s nam-shub) into language altered cognitive functioning. In other words, that this “speech with magical force” (p. 211) introduced a disease into human thinking. Maximizing complexity, the argument Stephenson presents is that religious belief is the carrier of this disease.
So, what is a meme? The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene): “A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to MUTATION, CROSSOVER, and ADAPTATION” (Glossary based on Flake); a “viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop” (adapted from “a broad theoretical model of human communication, which [Weaver] defined as ‘all of the ways by which one mind may affect another’; premised upon Shannon’s foundation of “electronic signal transmission and the quantitative measurement of information flows”; and (originally) “a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); ‘memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’” (Princeton WordNet).
Dawkins’ original definition (focused at the level of the gene) has been expanded to apply to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including a particular use in blogging. I have to challenge the deliberateness of someone “post[ing] memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis” because it implies a guarantee that whatever is posted will be picked up. As I understand Dawkin’s sense, what makes a meme a meme is precisely its operation at a level “below” or “pre” consciousness – at the genetic level. The question might be the extent to which such changes can be (if ever?) intentionally co-constructed through increasing attention to consciousness at the level of, say, the synaptic connections of the brain’s neural net.

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