Archive - Dec 2007
December 4th
Sen Clinton: Fiona is running for President
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/04/2007 - 12:15I hope, forty years from now, an opponent of Fiona’s in a Presidential primary, will look back at this blog post and prepare a press release stating, “AHA! I told you Fiona had been planning to run for President for years!”. Yes, if you ask her, she wants to be President. She would sure do a better job than our current President, and she knows that.
I give a lot of credit to people like Howard Dean, John Edwards, and Barack Obama for returning the role of President to its proper place in the American dream. The Presidency should be an honorable office sought by people hoping to make our country better for everyone.
When Fiona isn’t dreaming of being a President or Congresswoman, she is dreaming of being a paleontologist, a marine biologist or a fashion designer. The dreams of childhood, we need people like John Edwards or Barack Obama to help make the American Dream and the dreams of childhood a little more realistic.
So, when Fiona’s opponent, forty years hence, comes and read this blog post, I hope they read all of it. I hope follow the link to Hillary Clinton’s press release proclaiming that Sen. Obama is rewriting history, by claiming he hadn't been planning a White House run. I hope they read the disgust people have at Sen. Clinton’s word parsing and her inability to distinguish between hopes, aspirations and the hard word of planning and organizing a Presidential campaign. Somehow, Sen. Clinton’s speech sounds a little bit too much like Brutus accusing Caesar of being ambitious. Yes, Obama is ambitious. Ambition can be a great thing, and so perhaps I must play Mark Anthony.
Yes, Sen. Clinton, and whomever channels this sort of attack forty years hence, Fiona is planning on running for President, with all the childlike joy and passion a six year old has. It is a beautiful thing and shame on anyone who would speak ill of such dreams.
My support is with John Edwards, I believe he is the best candidate this time around, but I also have great respect for Barack Obama, and this latest attack by Hillary Clinton only improves my opinion of Barack Obama and lowers my opinion of Hillary Clinton.
(Cross posted at DailyKos)
December 3rd
Teen Task Forces
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 21:23It’s been over three decades since I attended one of those high school parties where I was more concerned about what people were thinking of me and whether or not I would finally find a high school sweetheart than I was about how I would get home safely. It has been over three decades since I listened to announcements on the schools public address system about the death of a classmate in a drunken driving accident. My memories of such events are cloudy, but they still linger with me. Still, issues of teen driving remain with us today, and the solutions seem not to have changed substantially.
Last week, The Hartford Courant had an article about Gov. Rell appointing a task force on teen driving.
The governor, following the accident-related deaths of seven teens over the past four months, today announced formation of a task force that will look for more effective ways to convince teens to drive safer.
Named to co-chair the task force are: Robert M. Ward, commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles, and Dr. J. Robert Galvin, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health.
The comments in forums and mailing lists were not particularly favorable. As I think back to my high school years, I can just imagine how much credibility such a task force would have had with my peers and how dubious I would have been of any of their suggestions. Why don’t they listen to the kids?
I have no beef with Mr. Ward or Dr. Galvin, yet somehow, it seems like they might as well have appointed Paula Schwartz, the infamous superintendent of the Region 10 schools who seems so threatened by teenagers expressing real feelings.
No, if you want to find solutions to problems with teen driving, maybe you should listen to teens. Maybe you need a person like Avery Doninger on the task force, inelegantly pointing out how out of touch too many of us adults are. Perhaps you need more teens pouring out their hearts online about how sad they are, and groups like the ‘RIP myles gosselin we miss you’ group of Facebook.
Perhaps if we adults spent a little more time listening to teenagers, they wouldn’t need to spend as much time doing stupid things like drinking and driving or driving to fast. I guess it seemed that way to me thirty years ago, and it still seems that way to me today.
Postscript: While it seems that some things never change, things do get better. When I was in high school it was only the hardcore nerds that ever touched a computer, which for me consisted of using a Teletype to connect to a computer at a community college a couple towns away. When I was in high school, some of us nerds hung out in the photography clubs dark room trying to make our artistic photographs. Now, with a few clicks of on the cellphone anyone can store their photographs online. I even ended up meeting my high school sweetheart. For me, it only took twenty five years.
Atlas Virtual Capital sets up fund to explore CentralGrid
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 14:51Saturday in Second Life, Atlas Virtual Capital (AVC) announced the formation of a Grid Exploration Fund. This fund is intended to raise L$ 500,000 to help AVC “enter the virtual worlds via Central Grid's new virtual grid to establish AVC as a pioneer in this new community.”
Central Grid is one of many efforts to use open source grids. It will be based on OpenSim, but unlike some of the other emerging OpenSim based grids, it is intending to fully support inworld currency. Efforts will be made to connect with currency exchanges so Linden Dollars will be exchangeable with CentralGrid dollars, or whatever they end up being called there.
December 2nd
TGNaNoWriMoIO
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/02/2007 - 19:21Thanks God, National Novel Writing Month is Over. Yup. That’s the party Kim and I went to this afternoon. We sat in a room with about twenty other NaNoWriters and their significant others and talked about what worked and what didn’t in our novel writing experiences. We ate Mexican food, joked about “quotation” marks and misused apostrophe’s. We glanced at the omnipresent televisions in the background and our choice of watching The Nutcracker on Ice, with the great Mice on Ice section, he-man carrying cars and kegs in some bizarre strong-man competition, or wiry men arm wrestling on what must have been the Arm Wresting Sports Network.
Meanwhile, the ice was starting to form on the roads at home. Our ride home was tense, with more slipping and sliding than I would have liked to have seen, yet we got home safely. Now, we need to tune into WFSB and see if Darren Sweeney will declare a “snow day”.
There is a stereotype of novelists as being slightly eccentric and the lunch, at least for me helped reinforce that stereotype. Between the jokes, you could here potential themes for more novels than novelists at the table. It was great fun and inspirations for next year’s novel writing. I hope some of you consider giving NaNoWriMo a try next year.
Accreditation, Participation, and Reputation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/02/2007 - 09:51This coming Saturday, I will be attending a symposium sponsored by Yale Law School’s Information Society Project on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. As part of preparing for this, I thought I would explore how reputations in cyberspace reflect to my planned attendance.
Last January, I attended a Journalism That Matters conversation in Memphis, where I met Eddan Katz. Eddan is the executive director of the Information Society Project, and we had a great discussion. So, the reputation first person I’ve interacted with from the symposium wasn’t established in cyberspace, but was established offline. However, it was through relationships established online that I ended up at the Journalism That Matters conversation in the first place.
When we moved to Woodbridge, the next town over from Yale’s campus in New Haven, I got in touch with Eddan and let him know I was in the neighborhood as well and communicated a little bit with him, online, about Avery Doninger’s case. It was through this that I found out about the symposium.
I RSVPed to the symposium’s event in Facebook and my wife added the event to our family calendar. Yesterday, like everyone else that RSVPed on Facebook that they would be attending the event, I receive a message asking me to register for the conference.
After I registered, I checked the list of attendees on Facebook. Who, amongst my friends on Facebook, were attending the symposium? Who was attending that I knew, but hadn’t added as a friend? Upon reflection, I think this is interesting. I checked the attendees before I checked the list of speakers. This ties, I believe, to Dan Gillmor’s comments about his audience knowing more about what he writes about than he does. I suspect there are going to be some very bright people in the audience. It was only after this that I looked at the panels; their topics and speakers.
The first panel is entitled, “Making your name online!” and will focus on “the transition from accreditation to participatory, community-based modes of reputation management.” I found this interesting in light of the registration process. I have registered as a member of the press. It is always interesting to see what groups recognize bloggers as members of the press. On the registration form for members of the press, it notes, “Certification required”. Is this certification something from an accredited institution or can the certification be based on some “participatory, community-based mode of reputation management”?
I glanced at the list of names of the panelists. None of them jumped out at me, although I suspect that if I were more involved in more of the academic discourse, the names would mean much more to me. The majority of the speakers were identified in terms of their involvement with accredited higher education institutions.
Yes, we may be moving from a reputation model based on accreditation to one based on participation, but the lines are blurry. Accreditation is based on participation and provides a useful shortcut. There are plenty of other issues such as privacy, quality of the reputation systems, and portability of reputations that will also be discussed. It looks like it will be a very interesting symposium. If you can make it, please do, and drop me a message on Facebook.
