My favorite hip-hop duo from Seattle will be rockin’ the mic this Thursday at Pier 23 in a FREE show that starts at 9 pm! I will *so* be there.
Come meet me! (Did I mention that it’s free?)
Earlier today I wrote about how Google had added Street View, a really awesome new feature that allows for street-level photos in major metro areas, including the Bay Area.
I was able to check out my own house here in Oakland, and saw my Toyota Corolla parked smartly in front.
Man, this is so freakin’ sweet.
Man, these stories just keep getting better:
The Stanford Daily:
Kim — the 18-year-old from Fullerton, Calif. who was revealed by The Daily last Thursday to have been squatting in Stanford dorms since September despite not being affiliated with the University — duped ROTC officials into thinking she was an honor-roll Stanford student for eight months. She took classes on Army tactics and history, received military equipment worth more than $1,000 and even earned official military awards for her top grades at Stanford.
The Stanford Daily:
After The Daily first reported the story on Friday, officials drafted a letter informing the woman that she has been barred from campus while the police conduct an investigation. According to University spokesperson Kate Chesley, Department of Public Safety officials attempted to find her over the weekend so they could hand deliver the letter.
Since 2003, Okazaki has made herself at home in the physics building. She attended graduate physics seminars and used the offices reserved for doctoral and post-doctoral physics students.
I just found out that MC Solaar’s seventh album will be coming out next month. Appropriately, as has been the case for the last few albums with their numerological titles, it’ll be called “Chapitre 7.” It’s been four years since the last one — I can’t wait.
Pretty much all that’s known about the first single is that it’s called: “Da Vinci Claude,” after the “Da Vinci Code” and Solaar’s real name, Claude M’Barali.
That friendly junior college down on the Peninsula has just caught a girl who was squatting in a dorm, faking the fact that she was a student for the better part of an entire school year.
But better than that, points out SFist, is that there’s another fake student afoot:
And this is the best part of the whole story! There’s another fake student at Stanford! Apparently a woman’s been squatting in one of the theoretical physics labs. For four years. And — get this — none of the physics people can figure out what to do about it. Don’t some of these folks have Nobel prizes?
So while driving home from last night’s Nous Non Plus show at Café du Nord at around 12:30 am last night, I was pleased to see that the I-580 connector was reopened — I drove across it en route home.
C.C. Myers sounds like a helluva guy, as in this previous anecdote about his getting part of I-10 in LA done on time in 1994.
He rode his crews hard, praising, goading and yelling in equal measure. When he had trouble getting steel delivered from Texas, he hired a train — at a cost of $119,000 — to haul it. When concrete didn’t come fast enough, he called the head of the company at home and demanded more.
Four hundred men and women worked around the clock. Payroll hit $1 million a week. When workers complained about the grueling pace, Myers offered bonuses, donated money to their kids’ Little League teams and handed out $30,000 worth of restaurant gift certificates. Whatever it took.
It’s safe to assume he pulled the same trick here.
Slate:
Cyberwar I: What the attacks on Estonia have taught us about online combat.
By Cyrus Farivar
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007, at 12:14 PM ET
In Estonia, you can pay for your parking meter via cell phone, access free Wi-Fi at every gas station, and, as of two months ago, vote in national elections from your PC. The small, wired country can now add another item to this list of technological achievements: It’s the first government to get targeted for large-scale cyberwarfare.
Since late April, the Web sites of various Estonian government entities, banks, and media outlets have been barraged with extraordinary amounts of Web traffic (100 times more than usual), making them very slow and even unusable. The Estonian government has identified as-yet-unknown rogue Russian hackers and the Kremlin as participants in these denial-of-service attacks. Russia has firmly denied these charges.
After the attacks, officials from NATO and the European Union converged on Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, to analyze what had transpired. All the Estonians can point to as tangible evidence of these attacks are gigabytes of server logs. Most of the targeted Web sites, which for a brief time were accessible only to traffic from within Estonia, are now accessible to the vast majority of the world’s Internet users once again. It’s almost as if nothing ever happened. (Indeed, Estonian newspaper Postimees reported that 49.48 percent of those surveyed were not at all affected by the attacks.)
There’s a fantastic piece in today’s Times about the sad, sorry state of universities in Africa, and particularly, Senegal:
Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.
The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.
Having attended one such African university, the Université Gaston Berger, which was repeatedly touted as the “best in West Africa,” I can attest to the fact that the conditions are not great. We didn’t have the same overcrowding problems that Lydia Polgreen reports are going on at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, although there were reports of a shortage of rooms. That said, there’s terrible mismanagement, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t have a roommate (remember I said there were room shortages) for the bulk of the year — in a room designed for two.
But I think one aspect that the article doesn’t articulate at all is the fact that African universities, from my experience, doesn’t facilitate critical thinking at all. All of my classes were taught by rote — the professor would lecture, and we’d copy, verbatim, what he said. The exam? An oral exam where we’d have to basically spit back what he’d said. I still have no idea what my grades were from my Senegal days. There was no discussion, no dialogue, no real learning of any kind.
I still can’t tell you one bit of information I recall that I got in a Senegalese lecture hall — but I learned a heckuva lot while being there.
I realize that I’m probably the only person among my peer group who watches/listens to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer even on a semi-occasional basis. Basically, my radio is either tuned to KQED or KALX, or I’m listening to music via CD/iPod.
So that means if I happen to be listening to KQED between the hours of 3 and 4 pm, I catch part or all of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. On May 8, there was a ridiculous “debate” between Melanie Morgan of Move America Forward and Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org. Fortunately it was all captured on YouTube for posterity.
Soltz: When I was in Kosovo we had 40,000 troops protecting 200,000 Serbs, that’s 1 troop for every 5 civilian. In Iraq, you’ve got 120,000 troops for over 26 million Iraqis, adding 20,000 more is like spitting in the ocean. So it’s a little more complex than in or out. We need to get out of Iraq, but we need to do it with a diplomatic surge and that’s where President Bush has got to step up to the plate and he’s got to negotiate directly with Iran and Syria.
Woodruff: And Melanie Morgan, Move America Forward, what do you want to see happen in Iraq?
Morgan: I want to see victory and apparently the Democrats don’t. Because why would you possibly conceive of funding a war in six-month increments. I would like to see Congressman Rom Emmanuel explain that plan or whatever it is that he’s proposing along with Commander-in-Chief Nancy Pelosi, to our troops, directly, to their face. Tell them that they are failing, that they have a failed, miserable performance. I’d like to see Mr. Soltz say that to our troops as well. I don’t think that you would get that exact same opinion from them, nor from the millions of other Americans who wish for us to succeed to find a strategy that will work, to give it time to work, to be patient, and to win.
At the end of that “debate,” I was appalled to having heard national discourse having been lowered to such a level on the most serious news show in the country. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as people wrote into The NewsHour‘s ombudsman to rightfully complain.
Linda Winslow, Executive Producer, responded this way:
Last night the NewsHour attempted to help our viewers understand why the members of Congress are having so much difficulty arriving at a decision regarding the way forward in Iraq. We believe the intensity of the pressure being exerted on Democrats and Republicans by the “wings” of their respective parties is having an impact on those who are looking for some sort of compromise position. We decided to let representatives of those wings explain their positions, hoping they would participate in a dialogue with us and each other. As our guests demonstrated, however, that was a forlorn hope and the result was a lot of heat, but very little light.
Since neither guest was in the studio with Judy Woodruff, there wasn’t much she could do to prevent them from interrupting one another, short of saying — as she did at least three times — “please let him/her finish his/her point”. The NewsHour style is to ask pointed questions politely; we expect our guests to subscribe to the same rules. Since the program is produced live, we can’t do much to eliminate rude guests from your television screen once the segment has begun; what we can do is guarantee you will never see that person on our program again.
[via Romenesko]
I’d heard some people talk about train links between North and South Korea when I was there last month, and now, it’s finally happened.
For the first time since the Korean War that a train has crossed the DMZ.
Yes, it’s historic and emotional and all that, but really, as Reuters points out, this deal is all about the money:
To entice the North to allow the historic rail crossing, Seoul has offered $80 million in aid for its light industries.
Eventually, South Korea wants to send passengers and cargo via its neighbor into China and Russia and link with the Trans-Siberian railway.
Export-dependent South Korea could see huge savings in moving cargo if North Korea allowed the rail link to develop.
The links it rebuilt are designed to help serve two projects in the North.
One is a mountain resort built by an affiliate of the Hyundai Group where South Koreans can visit. The other is a factory park where companies from the South use cheap North Korean labor and land to make goods.
I just found Paul Wolfowitz’ home address using Google.
The New York Times just published the above picture of Paul Wolfowitz coming out of his Chevy Chase, Md., home. The street address, 7104, is clearly visible.
So, as an experiment, I typed in 7104 chevy chase wolfowitz into Google. My first result came back with this: Report from Paul Wolfowitz demo at his 7104 Pinehurst Pkwy, Chevy Chase home.
Wow.
I’m in a featured article on MediaBistro today — that’s a journalism industry site. The piece is meant as a helpful guide for struggling freelancers (like me), as to how to get published in big, brand-name magazines.
Unfortunately, MediaBistro puts their good stuff behind a paywall ($49/year), so even I can’t get access to this article. I didn’t even know the piece was running today until a Columbia classmate emailed me a copy and asked about it.
Here’s the opening graf:
Pitches That Worked: The Economist
An emailed introduction and an innovative idea helped position this contributor as a writer his editor can count on
By Rebecca L. Fox – May 16, 2007
It’s a hazard for any freelancer: the query email that seems to land in a black hole. Writer Cyrus Farivar wanted in to The Economist, so after his introductory email got devoured by the editor’s spam filter, he didn’t settle for radio silence. A follow-up introduction made it past the virtual gatekeeper, and his pitches got his stories into this respected magazine. Our breakdown of his introductory note and a subsequent, story-landing query walks you through what about his approach worked, so you can enjoy similar success.
What the Writer Did
*Cyrus Farivar:* “If I’m trying to write for a publication I’ve never written before, and it’s somewhere like The Economist and they don’t know me, I try to figure out, who do I know who works there, or who’s written for them? I try to establish a rapport (via email) if I can, and see what they’re looking for.
The article goes on, and includes my initial exchange with my editor Tom Standage at The Economist, de-constructs it, and then includes my pitch for this specific pitch (it was for the exergaming story). Then there’s a series of paragraphs from Tom as to why he liked me and why he liked this pitch specifically, and finally it de-constructs the entire pitch, line-by-line.
Thanks, MediaBistro!
