Global supply chain

... But the luumu are already ripe, and cost 1.49 e at the Tokmanni checkout.

Bean review notes

hairysquid.net has suggested substituting Bean for the (crash-prone) Word component of MS Office 2011 for drafting text. Over the next two weeks, I will be writing a manuscript using Bean "A word processor for OS X": http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

These are my ongoing notes.

1. Split view being a menu option rather than a UI pulldown is awkward, but minimizes clutter.

I had hoped that the "Move to Separate Window"/"Move to Grouped Window" option would provide multiple windows with different views of the same document (this would be killer for big/long/complex documents), but it just breaks the document's tab free from the others.


2. File format fun:

Apparently, Bean saves Microsoft Word .doc files as .rtf files instead.

This might go badly for .doc files that have interactive features, such as form controls and headings. The Bean website notes that "Bean has some limitations: it doesn't do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats. Also, it allows in-line graphics, but not floating graphics."


3. Styles? We don't need styles!
 Paragraph styles from the original Word document:

Paragraph styles after opening and saving the file with Bean, and opening with Word:

The detail to note is that Bean apparently ate all of the styles in the Word document when saving to RTF, so that when it's reopened, Word supplies the default styles.

(Left: styles in the original document. Right: styles after Bean.)

4. Links, tables, images
Here are some before/after shots.

This first shot shows mangled hyperlinks.

This second shot shows a mangled image.

Here's a de-formatted table.

Here we've lost some paragraph formatting (note dots on the original document on the left)

Finally, note that all the headers have been missing, but one copy survives at the foot of the Bean document. 

Headers and footers work as expected within Bean, despite documentation to the contrary about older versions of Bean that only allowed selecting from a list of pre-formatted headers and footers. Bean's headers and footers just don't work with Word's headers and footers.

 

To be fair, Bean shows you that it mangles the headers and formatting...

... and graphics and tables, but Bean provides no warnings when saving over a carefully formatted Word document.

These formatting concerns wouldn't be an concern if Bean didn't advertise itself as a word processor:

More discoveries to come as I continue to use Bean as a text editor that is pretty, rather than a word processor.

5. Document tabs lack context menus

The bauble closes the tab (it becomes an 'x' when hovered). There is no easy way to rearrange tabs. Breaking a tab off requires a trip through the topline menu or cmd+D, and documents broken off the main window must be free-floating, they cannot be grouped into another tabbed window.

Also, tabs cannot be dragged to reorder documents within the main document window, nor dragged off the window into a new window.

6. Crash recovery

Bean just displays any files that were open but not saved at the time it unexpectedly quit. (I had planned to force-quit Bean after the 1.0 minute autosave interval, but Chrome decided to soak up all the free space on my root volume through the pagefile, which made the computer unusable, forcing a hard reboot.)

7. Horizontal scroll bar

I find your lack of horizontal scroll bar disturbing...

8. Highlights

Most highlighting is fully justified regardless of the text justification for lines that wrap. Except for some highlighting. The highlight toolbar item is a bit clumsy, requiring a trip through the drop-down menu to remove a highlight, rather than working as a toggle:




9. Search and replace

Bean enables search and replace without losing the split view. More importantly, it's possible to copy and paste into the search box, without wrecking document text at the current cursor position.


Concluding remarks [July 18, 2012]

Having used Bean for two weeks to draft and revise a 10-page manuscript, I will gladly use it again for drafting. Printing from Bean is uneventful. Headers, margins, etc. just work. As is evident from the screenshots above, I've tried several toolbar configurations, landing on show invisibles, highlighting, and 'Inspector' which is basically the omnibus text formatting palette.

 

Bean's toolbar lacks a zoom widget (this is useful for changing text size on screen when changing one's viewing distance from the monitor), but a zoom widget is available directly in the 'view' menu, and it works far more intuitively than the one in Word's menu.



Having drafted many manuscripts in BBEdit, emacs, vi, gedit, Bluefish, Windows Notepad, InDesign, and a 200-page document in LaTeX (never again), I find Bean to be an unobtrusive text editor with limited word processing features. I get to spend more of my time thinking and writing with Bean, rather than fighting the interface and the stream of unending and noisy auto-format gimmickry in Word.

Unfortunately, Bean's inability to do document styles required me to finish the final formatting in Word, which reminded me of Word's search and replace clumsiness above. Bean's inability to do document styles also meant that once my text was in Word, using Bean and then getting it back into Word would require re-styling copied and pasted text.

I hope these notes have been helpful. Please let me know what you think.

Scary movie

Industrial Food Machine of the Day: Automated Lamb Boner

The lack of human narration in the accompanying video is both surreal and fitting. In other 'how it's made' videos, the narrator explains not only what is happening, but also why the manufacturing is done in a particular way.

Here, we watch eviscerated lamb carcasses (shortly after they've been mounted to a conveyor) being mindlessly disassembled into optimal pieces calculated with precision, without understanding why the cuts are being made. Through every 'whrrrr' of a saw cutting through cartilage and bone, the automated system tells the same story whether it's on screen or not. For the machine and its long red eyes, every cut is the same. Some parts fall to a secondary conveyor and go one way, others are shoved off in the other direction.

And then there's the tool at 4:40 that jabs itself into the hindquarters, roots around a bit, parts the pieces, and then sends the tailbone off with a love tap.

All of this is overseen by one human operator, who presumably also gets to debug this production line should some flesh or cartilage break unexpectedly, or in case one of the dozens of blades hits a tumor or pocket of pus or liquid or something.

(Also, it's apparently easier to get an X-ray for a lamb carcass than for a human...)

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-06/industrial-animal-processing-video-o-day-automated-lamb-boning

Smaksatt kvarg

Smaksatt kvarg (roughly flavored curd) is a slightly fluffier version of the cream cheese layer of cheesecake, but still almost as rich. It's sold here in 200 ml containers as a breakfast item alongside yoghurt.

After digging in assuming that it was just a variety of yoghurt, I discovered that four teaspoons of the stuff nicely flavored two slices of bread.

I don't think I'd want to consume half a pound of light cream cheese in one sitting on a regular basis. This container's waxpaper lid is designed to be less re-sealable than those on tubs of yoghurt, which suggests that I am breaking with tradition by saving the rest for later.

(There's at least one holiday each month during which major retail shops close. A day or two before that, perishables with expiry dates are sold at 30 or 50% discounts. Valio smaksatt kvarg citron is regularly priced at (e)0.80, but I purchased this one a day before the midsummer holiday.)

Sardines in tomato sauce, like the cans

The Next Graduate: Progress

We met in the afternoon to discuss editing and comments about his methods section. Before lunch, I emailed a scanned copy of the chapter with my comments. The student was concerned that much of what he had written would need to be discarded. In reality, we consolidated two redundant sentences with their neighbours, and my substances questions generated replacement sentences of approximately the same length. (The student is being evaluated on the word length of the thesis in his home country.)

As we worked through the text, on several occasions we strayed far from my suggested edits since the student had made good suggestions when I pointed out the issues. This is good. (I had forgotten the usual "this catches my attention, please address it in some way, but not necessarily in the way I have suggested" that I inherited from my previous supervisor.)

We worked on singular/plural agreement, in/definite articles, it[']s (he was taught they were the same, but was himself looking for the distinction), shorter/clearer sentences, and formal and informal writing. (We also covered some technical details of writing about equipment and terminology from the field. I pointed out that he would have to learn some of that from the literature and from his proper supervisor. Even though I studied in the same discipline as the student years ago, our specializations do not overlap enough that I would catch everything specific to his specialization.) I pointed out that some of of his sentences ordered clauses in ways that followed the taught rules of English and would have been commonplace perhaps a few centuries ago, but which we don't deploy presently.

He showed me his notes (in his own language) taken while reading papers since our last meeting. He says that note-taking helps him connect and remember ideas among papers! This is good. He is now distinguishing between writing text from notes about literature for this thesis, and saving writing and notes that would be relevant for his next phase of research.

The student reports success taking notes about important passages (from English texts) in one of his other languages, and then successfully paraphrasing from those notes into English. He would like to do an all English process. I will need to devise or Google some possible techniques to help him with this.

As a start, we worked on some composition. Since our last meeting, he learned some more details about a potential source of experimental error. I had him write (first on paper and then on the computer) a sentence connecting the observation, inference, and consequence of the potential error. (I'm ramping up to the formal warrant argumentation structure.)

We repeated the exercise for a tricky part of the procedure that I did not fully comprehend (he explained in person that the experiment branched). His revised text made more sense to both of us, and was shorter! Hopefully some of those idea to writing skills will help him with paraphrasing. I think that asking/teaching him to take good notes in English will complete the circuit.

I suggested that we meet his local supervisor here. He mentioned a name I did not recognise (my fault for not being great with Finnish names...).

The student mentioned differences between writing up his methods section (easier because it's from memory) vs. the literature review (easier because someone else already did the research). I'm glad he recognises some differences there. He expects that his review chapter will get fewer red marks (I used blue!). Of note, the student tried to take notes about English as we reviewed his text. I pointed out and explained the usage notes I had included in my comments ("it's", etc.) so he didn't take that many notes. I might not write in the usage notes details the next time I provide comments, and instead relay them verbally so that he has the opportunity to take notes and learn from doing so.

We used online translation dictionaries several times to ensure that new words that I was suggesting meant what the student had intended. It appears to be a great way to learn new vocabulary. I wish I had thought of that last year.

I've also been thinking about formalities. I recognize that because I will have no role in evaluating this student's thesis, I have the opportunity to be differently critical of the writing and perhaps of the research. I don't know what to do with this yet.

The Next Graduate: International collaboration

Assorted information:

The student has approximately a year left in his program. It is formally split between his university in his home country, and this university in Finland. He is approximately eight months into his research. Although there are other supervisors involved, his primary supervisor is at this university. The student will return to his home country for the summer within the month. Before the student leaves, I would like to have a meeting with him and his supervisor.

The student had asked about paraphrasing. He does that successfully in several other languages. He was frustrated with trying to paraphrase another author's write-up of (basically) a CRC Handbook entry for a compound, and a paragraph from another author's literature review. His approach was to reword texts rather than to rewrite them in his own words. I suggested that he take more/better notes (he acknowledges that he does not remember in detail some articles he read in the fall), and paraphrase from those notes the points that relate to the research and arguments he is reporting. I also pointed out that simply rephrasing a review section could mean that he's missing out on details that the review author did not pick out, because the review was written from a different approach for a different purpose. He will try some different approaches this week.

The student has ambitions to do PhD research after completing this degree. I pointed out that it would be undesirable for him to miss important papers via his shortcut through review. I will possibly show him Booth, Williams and Colomb re: argumentation next week.

I've read and returned the student's methods section. It's good but incomplete. Prepositions are a concern, as is repetition, but the ideas are clear. The student uses a foreign version of Word, which apparently lacks English spell-check. Because the student will complete the writing from a different country, I will have to provide feedback via PDFs with scanned pages of my hand-written comments (we're trying this today), or annotated PDFs from his source files (we'll try this later this week). We should figure out a Skype thing also. Interestingly, at least half my comments are about the science.

The Next Graduate: Facebook as a supervisory tool... Let's see how this works

On my bike ride in this morning, I randomly encountered the student I will be advising on writing. For 3 km of the ride, we talked about work habits and schedules, and foreign language cliques in labs. He showed me a shortcut through a local community (which egresses 300m to the wrong side of campus for me, but I'm appreciative anyway). He asked to meet in the afternoon about using sources, which is fine since my schedule happens to be open today.  We will apparently use Facebook to arrange the meeting. I will adapt to this.

The Next Graduate: Clandestine(?) extra-departmental edition

It is Friday evening. A Master's student in a discipline in which I hold an undergraduate degree has asked me to be his language advisor. English is the student's fifth or sixth language. The student reports that his departmental supervisor lacks sufficient mastery of the English language to guide the him on language matters. The student recognises that his skills with tense and conjugation could be improved. I am to appear as an acknowledgement in the thesis.

I have tentatively agreed to the proposal, and will likely start receiving chapters shortly. The Master's thesis is to be approximately 70 pages (front matter, body, and back matter), to be completed in the next few months. The student and I understand that I will help through teaching by reviewing manuscripts and discussing reasons behind potential edits. Although I have some knowledge in the scientific subject matter, I am not qualified to evaluate the student's new research in this area. At most, I would try to ensure that the argumentation is logical, as I probably do not have time to gain a substantive understanding of the details. I have known the student for four months now in various social contexts. He is a solid individual.

When I meet with the student tomorrow, I will suggest that he or we discuss my role in this with his current supervisor, since this kind of editing/revision will affect the student's timeline. I don't know how the norms for supervision in my own department may be similar or different from the norms in the student's department.
I also do not want the supervisor to be offended by this arrangement. I am undecided as to how I would frame this arrangement for my own department, since we don't have the bureaucracy or accounting to recognize an extra-departmental language advisor role or activity.

I look forward to being able to focus on the finer points of scientific argumentation, rather than on strictly supervisory responsibilities!

The Next Graduate: Preface

This series of posts continues in the same spirit as my first series about supervising a Master's student at a research university. It is intended to help me organize my thoughts about supervising, but I also offer it as a potential resource to anyone who might want to conduct research into supervising. My colleagues tell me that such research is desperately needed (rather, knowledge translation between "research" and "how to supervise" seems broken), and this is my attempt to contribute something toward resolving that problem.

Although personality permeates the supervisory experience, personal and identifying details are deliberately obscured because, on the present Internet, their potential harms generalize more easily than their potential benefits.

Note: Unlike the previous Master's student, I am not officially supervising this student. The plan is for me to act as a language advisor with a suitable acknowledgement. The student already has multiple supervisors in different countries, and my department doesn't appear to have a formal accounting device to make this kind of formal inter-departmental supervisory relationship possible (although the paperwork does seem to exist at the doctoral level...). I also lack both the degrees and the up-to-date knowledge of the student's research area that would be required to do the substantial supervision properly.

As always, comments or questions in public or private are most welcome.

"A boost for quantum reality":

http://www.nature.com/news/a-boost-for-quantum-reality-1.10602

If this finding is correct, essentially that the universe is wavefunctions, one consequence would be that we'd have to re-examine what we think of as computing.

Classic computers model the universe as a collection of discreet states that interact in deterministic ways. There is no ambiguity in the parameter values or operations of ADD 1,1, or JNZ. If the universe is comprised of non-deterministic wave functions, we would be able to express both parameter values and operations as functions on input, and only collapse the answer when we needed it. Realizing a computer that works this way has been the dream of quantum computer people for decades, but they've been focused on the micro (sub)atomic level.

Instead of using atoms, what if we instantiated a wavefunction computer out something else that does waves, such as a tank of water like those used for tsunami simulations. The 1+1 operation could easily be expressed as the sum of two standing waves, but would yield values (-1,1), and JNZ would be a feedback into the generator of the functions depending on the depths of water at a given series of moments. 

Execution speed might be somewhat weak to start.

Hacking the PSOAS student housing wait list in Finland

Long story short: Found out in March that the current apartment building will be renovated in May because of sanitary drainage problems (pipes no longer contain sewer gas adequately). Applied in March but found out that the regular wait time for student housing is 2-3 months. Ninjaed myself onto the local student housing committee in late April, chatted up the MD and customer service manager, and then this arrived:

From: PSOAS Asuntotoimisto
[...]
But always at the last five working days, applicant can ask what is left available apartments for the beginning of next month. You have to ask by phone, so this month it starts Tuesday 24th April and at 8 o'clock in the morning.And of course most of the month we offer according to our waiting list , will contact the applicants, but that is your possibility to contact us yourself [Tuesday] 24th April at 8 o'clock by phone.

Note that from abroad, the number is +358 8 317 3110, not (08) 317 3110 as the PSOAS literature indicates.

I have now secured an apartment at 1/3 the rent of my previous accommodation.

The key takeaway is that the wait list can be bypassed, even for studios which notoriously take months or years to get, by phoning up at 8 a.m. EET five working days before the end of the month (the last day in April, April 30 is a Monday this year).

Apologies for the search engine keyword loading. This topic is not well covered in the usual forums. 

Some recent photos

Ethnographer, appreciate thyself

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." If one were to explicitly extend that idea to the community, one would have to question whether CSCW were behaving intelligently.

1. CSCW is (or wants to be) grounded in ethnographic work, in which
a) researchers try to understand people from the point of view of the people,
b) recognizing that although peoples' practices may appear non-sensical, they are rational from the practicioners' perspectives and should be honoured as such,
c) in order that (computer) tools and processes can be better designed to support those practices.

2. CSCW is (or wants to be) a (more) inter-disciplinary field in which learnings from research from different traditions may be mobilized to support work in others. (Note that this does not mean "multi-disciplinary", since CSCW is already great at bringing into the same building diverse people who ignore each other for entire week-long conferences.)

A question at a workshop highlighted the lack of non-trivial "design implications" produced by ethnographers through research. The suggestion, consult _designers_ when writing up so that /they/ can offer input about _design_ implications, is supported in various ways from literatures in communications studies, cross-cultural interaction, consumer marketing, social anthropology, political science, and others. Ethnographers responded:

a) We (ethnographers) can't write with designers. Designers dilute the appreciative part of doing ethnography.
b) We can't consider a different audience. We want to be in the designers' conversations.
c) We don't know any of the details of how those other fields approached the problem, but instead of asking about that, let's criticize them based on our assumptions about what they are about.
d) Those other fields solved this problem with different goals in mind. We can't reuse their knowledge.
e) You (communications person) have not personally convinced us of these alternative approaches. Therefore, those approaches are all wrong.
f) It's easier to find fault with new ideas than to find their merits. Let's focus on the faults and dismiss the merits.
g) You (potential user of ethnography-design research outputs) do not understand ethnography or design, so your input does not matter.
h) Every discipline resists ideas from other disciplines. Ethnographers in CSCW are justified in doing the same.
i) Although everyone concedes that this is one poor example of someone else's approach to the interdisciplinary problem, we must ignore the five other good examples in the list and the approach they support, because we want to invent our own way to be interdisciplinary.

Local reinvention is often useful in the course of adopting new practices. It's understandable that even a discipline (or ring of disciplines) whose premise is to understand and appreciate how and why people do things the way they do, might follow a similar path.

It's interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that ethnographers' main investigative attitude is so difficult to mobilize introspectively. That there is the blindspot of appreciating ethnographic work (and thence designing tools to support ethnographic work) is perhaps a good sign that there is some intelligence here.

Not yet infrastructure, but soon

On a question about my recent Facebook inactivity

(Originally posted via Google+)

I've partitioned my FB and G+ activities for specific reasons.

When I find or post tech/civlib/science/politics stuff on G+, I get to participate in discussions that directly benefit my thinking and my work, and disagreements amplify our mutual awarenesses of the world's many nuances.

When I post anything that breaks from the groupthink on FB, the best realistic outcome is to be ignored immediately. The worst are the weeklong slogs to cut through basic fallacies of logic and reasoning before any new ideas or science I try to bring are summarily dismissed as astroturfing as though I am incapable of forming alternative opinions and beliefs of my own. I'm tired of giving up on such discussions with people I care about, but I don't have the skills or time to do any better right now.

To be fair, this doesn't describe most people on FB, or even a large number of people on FB, but they appear more prominent than those who silently agree or don't care.

For stuff that I read on FB, I usually see the same content posted and discussed on G+ or Reddit or by e-mail hours or days before.

FB is great for organizing shenanigans with my current Uni people and guilds, and for occasional personal stuff, and I continue to use it for those purposes. But for almost everything else, FB feels like high school with cliques formed around preferred distribution models for wealth and power, instead of clothes or binders. In the last few months especially, the fact that a few dozen of my IRL friends have been incesting their way through local politics in competing disrespectful camps gives me some very good reasons to mostly disappear from FB and Twitter.

If FB still had a convenient feature that would allow me to update my FB status by e-mail, I'd use that to automagically syndicate all of my content from G+ and other places to FB. The alternative would be for me to micro-manage posts and friend lists and my own expressed views based on others' potential to be offended, instead of being able to plainly state my views as I can here. I'm not ready to make that personal compromise.

The giving spanning tree

The top-down/bottom-up, and centralized/distributed Internet governance tensions have been brewing in different ways for a few decades now, and especially so since Postel passed away.

Even more interesting than the list of states that seek to heavily regulate the Internet is the much longer list of states that maintain a hands-off approach. While regulations will do little to restrain the raw rate of Internet innovation in any country in particular, previous experience indicates that more resources will be devoted to inventions that circumvent regulation in the New West than in the hinterland.

In particular, this means that the New West's expensive and highly regulated fast parts of the Internet will tend to be equipped with a monoculture of tools and content, while the hives of creative activity will continue to be attracted to the abundant unfilled niches in the rest of the world.

http://kurtiswelch.com/drudge/redirect.aspx?DestinationURL=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f7adc4e-7cb0-11e1-8a27-00144feab49a.html

It is time to stop doing that which is popular, and to start doing that which is right.

If advocates insist on framing "environment" and all its adjuncts ("climate change", sustainability, energy efficiency, etc.) as binary issues to /only/ support or oppose in toto, why would we be surprised that policy has lost all nuance?

Advocates, medias, publics, and politicians must all stop pretending that the most pressing issues of our time (or their potential solutions) can be understood through 30-second soundbites or Tweets.

The generation occupying positions of corporate and public power, along with the slightly younger cohort that advises ministers and VPs, were the same generations who supposedly received the most school education about "the environment". Simple knowledge and practice nuggets like the Three R's, conservation, CFC avoidance--instilled by Captain Planet, the Smoggies, and countless doe-eyed fresh schoolteachers--were supposed to be the keys to "saving the planet".

Despite such sustained and widespread supply-side efforts, the group now in power is the one to oversee mankind's broadest and most adverse actions to the lifeforms, objects, and peoples in our surroundings. One wonders how bad practical realities might be, had no push been made to educate. The current simple practice, to think and act locally without rational regard to how the pieces connect, can only result in piecemeal policies that are correctly derided as conceptually and practically insufficient, but by critics who also share the same quality.

Think, for a moment, why you were (probably) taught that recycling cans is no different than recycling bottles or tetra-paks, all reinforced by policy to collect deposits at the cash register. You know all about recycling beverage and food containers, despite the fact that the three materials and energy economics are all different. Sand is one of the most abundant inert materials known to mankind, and requires just as little energy to melt as bottles. Metal is one of the rarest and most reactive materials known to mankind, and smelting is exceedingly expensive energetically. Plastic/paper/metal drink containers rely on petro-chemical, agricultural, and metal production supply chains, and are used in that combination in drink containers because the combination resists natural and human attempts at degradation. Yet, the parts in lesser combination are a substrate for all kinds of chemical and biological activities.

Landfill bulk is a wholly inadequate policy or scientific lens through which to simultaneously view all three phenomena, yet that remains the basis of our political, personal, and public discussions.

We must strive to hold and accept conversations that are at least as sophisticated as the subjects we hope to discuss.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328585.900-how-canadas-green-credentials-fell-apart.html

Salmon and tomato... soup

The great taste of canned sardines in spicy tomato sauce, without the spicy, and in soup form, on a plate!

Quite possibly the northernmost Maneki Neko in the world

This Maneki Neko watches over a roadside cabin resort bar a few km from the Norwegian border. It closes at 7 p.m.

Long drink: 5.20e. Still a better deal than at many urban bars in North America.

The north: omnibus update edition

February:

I am reminded that knowledge management is hard. The last group I embedded with before leaving for my current post has been asking for help with a project. This is one of the few situations in which a raw data dump provides value.

I wrote a book chapter in one week while at a conference. I am extremely thankful for the last-minute weekend comments from some good people who enabled me to improve the chapter greatly. The edited volume is scheduled to be published in April.

I learned that assembling a new data set that: caught the attention of journalists in four countries, used as university course teaching material at least once, and spawned a three week public discussion, doesn't count for anything in academia because the outcomes are not measurable via an impact factor.

Also, ice holes are cold.

March:

Some of my responses to inquiries this month:

• No, I'm not (yet) familiar with the recent reforms to government media policies in that country due to Internet viral videos over the past seven years.
  
  
• I'm presenting /what/ at a workshop of senior people in two weeks? Does that mean I have to write something?
  
  
• Sure, I could write up an abstract based on a four word topic for a fall conference.
  
  
• Could we please get the coordinates of that data repository before university IT Borgs it?
  
  
• During those two hours on Monday, should I attend one of the two mandatory course by the graduate studies faculty, the mandatory research methods course by the department, the department meeting about immediate changes to our departments IT infrastructure, or that workshop at which I am to present?
  
  
• 'Intriguing' is not the word I would have selected to describe the task to distill 30 years of (a large team of talented people's) work into five tweet-sized responses.

Winter

The local bus stop.

Market square ice fort and art installation.

The drainage canal doesn't completely freeze over.

Snow on tree.

Fighting for Internet freedoms is hard, part 1131

As much as I find most forms of public protest to be ineffective as policy-making or policy analysis tools, the public should be trusted to make such decisions.

House Passes Bill That Will Make Protesting Illegal at Secret Service Covered Events: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/02/houses-passes-new-bill-that-would-make.html

Although the text was public and listed on the usual open democracy and open government sites (e.g., http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h347/text), none of the usual civil liberties organizations appears to have said a thing about it (not that it's their fault for lacking adequate operational or theoretical tools to have intervened here).

The growing erosion of liberties concurrent with the growing number and scale of computer-based democratic movements in the last three decades suggests that we're not going to simply code, publish, or 'open', our way out of this problem.

Could we at least admit that the current approaches to rebuffing a broken system are themselves ineffective, so that such approaches might be more open to criticism and refinement?

Salmon and rice... casserole?

with berry sauce and hot pink salad.