Lots of things from the blogosphere today that are noteworthy (in the order I read them):<\/p>\n
Boing Boing<\/a> posted about a study about free Wi-Fi<\/a>, confirming what I had suspected, which is that free Wi-Fi leads to more business, and pay Wi-Fi leads to less business. When I lived in Palo Alto over the summer, I used to go to La Crème de Café on Loma Verde and Middlefield Ave. because they had free Wi-Fi (and also pay Wi-Fi, which made no sense). Had they not had it, I would have gone there significantly less.<\/p>\n Next up is from the People-Are-Stupid department. Wanna win some free music from the Pepsi-iTunes giveaway? Check out this analog hack<\/a> (as Dan Gillmor<\/a> calls it) showing you how to check to see if your Pepsi bottle is a winner, without even opening the bottle!<\/p>\n And as Payam Mirrashidi<\/a> points out, this Slate article<\/a> tears apart this recent NYT story<\/a> about mixing up Arabs, Muslims, Iranians, and even Pakistanis. <\/p>\n Paragraph 12 attempts to rein in the confusion, noting that “Arab-Americans are not a monolithic group.” Yes, that’s something we can all agree on. But then Wayne goes wild, writing, “The term [Arab] is used generally to refer to people from Arab countries, but they may have diverse religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, like Lebanese and other Arab Christians or Muslims from Egypt and Pakistan.”<\/p>\n Pakistan? Since when are Pakistanis Arabs, either in specific or general? Having added Pakistanis to the Arab mix, Wayne complicates this soup by introducing Arab Christians—who could be Arab-Americans but obviously not Muslims. And so the yo-yo go-gos: We meet another Iranian donor, then an Arab-American Institute leader, George Salem (religion not noted), then a Lebanese Christian, and then a first-generation Palestinian-American (religion not noted, either), and then we’re introduced to a Pakistani who is very much a Muslim.<\/p>\n In the Venn diagram traced by the story, Wayne never overtly introduces the reader to a single Arab-American Muslim who has given to Bush. The story ends at the 1,300-word mark, for which we should be grateful. Had it run any longer, I’m sure that Wayne would have classified a black Nigerian Muslim Bush donor living in Terre Haute, Ind., as an Arab-American.<\/i><\/p>\n Two more, we’re almost done, I swear.<\/p>\n Aaaron Swartz<\/a> has a though-provoking piece on media bias and objectivity.<\/p>\n And finally, from the WTF? department comes a link on K5<\/a> about an Whites-Only Scholarship<\/a> at a private university in Rhode And when o when will the OCF be back up?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lots of things from the blogosphere today that are noteworthy (in the order I read them): Boing Boing posted about a study about free Wi-Fi, confirming what I had suspected, which is that free Wi-Fi leads to more business, and pay Wi-Fi leads to less business. When I lived in Palo Alto over the summer, I used to go to La Crème de Café on Loma Verde and Middlefield Ave. because they had free Wi-Fi (and also pay Wi-Fi, which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-general","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIsland.<\/p>\n