Meddling teenagers

It was just ridiculous. It really was. That's why I had to pull a "Gran Torino" and disable story comments on the article about the 22 kids arrested (yes, in the strictest sense of the word, these kids were arrested; they weren't dragged away in 'cuffs and thrown in the slammer, but they were arrested) for possession of alcohol last Friday.

The final count stands at 287. There'd be quite a few more, but I made it a point to go through the comments with a fine tooth comb and delete the most objectionable (I hope). Seriously: I spent the majority of my work day yesterday at the task, and then devoted a fair amount of time after I got home at 9 p.m. It was clear the comments had been hijacked by some of the teens named in the article, or their peers, and the little scamps were moderately creative in finding ways around our naughty word filter. Sadly, it seems many who identified themselves as adults emulated some of those word variations.

The article serves as a jumping off point for so many discussions it's almost mind boggling. To keep this post on focus, I'll stick to the issue of story comments.

If it was up to me, I wouldn't allow them. Anywhere on the Internet. This story illustrates why. The idea, I suppose, is to generate discussion among a readership. Unfortunately, discussion is rarely the result. Instead, the "dialogue" quickly — if not immediately — devolves into a heated exchange of insults and retaliations that don't advance any form of thoughtful debate. It just becomes a safe, anonymous forum to attack other people and their ideas with poorly articulated, grammatically atrocious, inflammatory sentences.

In many cases, and this specific one is no different, people DO manage to make good points. Unfortunately, more often than not it's still couched in profane language that, again, serves to undermine civil debate.

I'm more than happy to cut the teens a little bit of slack on this (but that doesn't mean I'm going to allow those comments to remain on the site). It's a shame how easily they seemed to draw some of the adults down to the same level (or how many adults seem to love making inflammatory statements just for the shock value. I'm looking at you, "Tom Alciere").

I'm really not a prude. When angry, frustrated or annoyed, I love seeing how many curse words I can lovingly string together into a fine tapestry of vulgarity. Most of the time it just becomes a lot of variations of the F-word, one after the other. However, I happen to feel those words have a different potency in print and should be reserved for maximum impact.

But I digress.

Over the years I've found reading through comments a good reminder of why I rarely leave any of my own on anything I read online, except maybe for friends' blogs. When I was in my early teens, everyone was still using dial-up to connect, and AOL and Prodigy were duking it out for top spot as household ISP provider. Social networking as we know it was years away; chat rooms and bulletin boards were the name of the game. Those forums taught me how fruitless and pointless it is to argue with people online. Frankly, it's lame. There's an old saying, summed up by the image at left, that we all ought to keep in mind. (Believe me, I mean no disprespect to the developmentally disabled population.)

When it comes to readers' comments, the promise of the Internet to democratize information and allow everyone a voice is false. I realize this statement might be overblown, but I stand by my conviction in it: All these comments do is undermine real conversation and debate and lower the bar of what is acceptable as legitimate discourse. It sets all of us back.

We should all challenge ourselves to bring more to the table, and not turn these forums into pointless contests of imaginary one-ups-manship with the same crap rhetoric.

Attack of the clones

Another treat from the newsroom mail bag:

Dear news@saratogian.com,

Your friend galabs2000@gmail.com thought you might be interested in this link:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Entertainment/life+this+Spirit/1111544/story.html

They also left you these comments:

IT IS NOT A SPAM, but if you received that message second and plus time JUST CLICK DELETE button and have a nice day. Don't feel bad, please understand original Scarlett's family very desperate to shut down that humiliating antichristian "actress" clones line career development. Hello dear Ladies and Gentlemen! I would like inform you that Scarlett Johansson ?actress? actually is a clone from original person Scarlett Galabekian last name, who has nothing with acting career. That clone was created illegally by using stolen biological material. Original person is very nice (not d**n sexy),most important - CHRISTIAN young lady! I'll tell you more,those clones (it's not only one) made in GERMANY - world leader manufacturer of humans clones, it is in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Mr. Helmut Kohl home town. You can not even imaging the scale of the cloning activity. But warning! Helmut Kohl clone staff strictly controlling all their clones (at least they trying) spreading around the world, they are very accurate with that, some of them are still NAZI type disciplined and mind controlled clones, so be careful get close with clones you will be controlled as well. Original person is not happy with those movies, images, video, rumors and etc. spreading on media in that way it would be really nice if we all will try slow down that ''actress'' career development, original Scarlett will really appreciated that. Please remember that original Scarlett's family did not authorize any activity with stolen biological materials, no matter what form it was created in it was stolen and it is stolen. It all need to be delivered to authorize personals control in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Original Scarlett never was engaged, by the way! Her close friend Serge G. P.S. CONTROLLING ACTIVITY OF ANY CLONES IS US MILITARY OPERATION. Check also here: http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2008/10/warning_stolen_biological_mate.html H.R. 534, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003, was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on February 5, 2003. After discussion, it was passed on February 27 by a vote of 241-155. It now moves on to the Senate for consideration. This bill makes it unlawful for any person or entity to perform or participate in human cloning, or to ship or receive embryos produced by human cloning. The penalties are imprisonment of up to 10 years and fines of $1 million or more. These now join other nations as diverse as Norway, Australia, and many other countries, which had already added cloning for any purpose to their criminal code. And in Germany where it carries a penalty of five years imprisonment they know a thing or two about unethical science.

Broken Locke? Interesting talk coming up

I just came across this while copy editing tomorrow's bulletin board. It sounds interesting and I think I'll mark my calendar:

Civil liberties to be discussed

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Empire State College presents “Fixing Locke: Civil Liberties on a Finite Planet,” with Dr. Eric Zencey, as part of the Scholars Across the College series, at 7 p.m. Jan. 29 at Two Union Avenue.

The lecture explores how, from their inception, Western notions of civil liberties have been crucially dependent on two unsustainable premises: That nature can infinitely provide us with wealth, and that nature can infinitely absorb our acts and works. These assumptions are iconically encoded into John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Civil Government.”

Zencey is visiting associate professor of historical and political studies in the Center for Graduate Programs and Center for International Programs at Empire State College. An internationally acclaimed and nationally best-selling novelist, he also is a contributing editor to the North American Review and a contributor to the online Encyclopedia of Earth. He is a recognized expert on environmental and ecological issues. For more information on Empire State College www.esc.edu.

Short circuited

A few things I've meant to post about in the past two weeks. In no particular order, here's the first:

My fiancee and I hit up the Circuit City in Albany last Sunday, the second day of their closeout sale. We thought maybe we'd check out the digital cameras, since we want to purchase a new one for the honeymoon.

The place, as you can imagine, was a zoo. Lines for registers weren't an hour's wait like the day before, as the above article describes. There was still plenty of inventory, but some shelves throughout the store were noticeably diminished if not completely bereft of merchandise. At 20 percent off, DVDs and CDs seemed like a good deal. After repeatedly picking up and replacing several movies I'd thought to add to my library, though, I finally decided I just didn't want to spend the money on such incidental expenses. We're in a recession, after all, and I'd spent enough the day before on vehicle maintenance and some odds and ends.

In fact, after casually browsing the various departments, I wanted nothing more than to escape the masses driven to consume by the false promise of good bargains. I couldn't help but think: "If people had been shopping like this the last several months, perhaps Circuit City wouldn't be the latest victim of the economy." I didn't want to be another person duped into purchasing things I don't really need just because they're on sale. I don't have enough disposable income for that.

Anyhow, the fiancee and I decided 10 percent off a camera costing many hundreds of dollars wasn't worth the drive over, especially since we'd done zero research into what brand and model would be best. She was briefly mesmerized by the GPS units, but I told her I already have one; I just call it a "map." However, we did pick up season three of "Lost," which we'd been meaning to get anyhow and was another reason we went to check out the sale.

Upstate sparks

A few tech-related links to pass along:

1) The first is about an hour west from the area I grew up: A jolt brings Corning back to its research roots.

In an opinion piece in the TU yesterday, Henry Miller, chief operating officer of Goodman Media International and a former director of policy and planning for the New York State Urban Development Corporation, wrote, "The future of the U.S. economy will be closely tied to innovations in science and technology, and the state should increase its efforts to enhance related research and development in and around its major universities. The state has wisely supported the development of a technology corridor, focused heavily on Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, and stretching north and south from there, and it should intensify that effort."

I certainly agree with that, but believe this focus on the "Hudson corridor" shouldn't cause us to lose sight and support for other good things happening in the state. New York as a whole has a rich tech and business history, afterall.

2) The second is homegrown. Saratogian reporter Ann Marie French wrote an article about local companies on the path to develop hybrid electric batteries and and new energy storage technologies. Such efforts are in sync with Gov. David Paterson's idea to develop an upstate research consortium to explore such technologies, as outlined in his state-of-the-state address last week.

A few related asides: I saw on a TV report this morning out of the Detroit Auto Show that Ford expects to have a commercially-viable plug-in car available in showrooms by 2010. Of course, Chevy has been working on their Volt car for sometime, and it seems GM plans to manufacture its own lithion-ion batteries (more can be read here, as well). Even Cadillac is getting into the game, for all the image conscious green Saratogians out there.

Of course, we all know the state of the U.S. auto industry, but still: I can't help but hope the tide is changing. If so, this could bode well for companies such as Electrovaya and Power Plug.

Demotix

Our general "news" e-mail gets a lot of irrelevant-to-Saratoga-County junk pumped into it, but on occasion there's a nugget of general interest. I wanted to pass this along, especially given the voracious appetite for news this community seems to have. This is straight from the bottom of a press release that came in today, touting this service's revamped Web site:

"Demotix is a website for user-generated news, and a citizenwire service. It is most easily described as Flickr or YouTube meets Reuters, with a social conscience. The site is an innovative digital venture that aims to diversify the news sources available to national and international news outlets which are increasingly unable to sustain foreign correspondents based abroad. Currently the site has attracted members from 83 countries."

The service is "image-centric" in that the focus is on photographs and videos. As they say, though, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Demotix sells them to media outlets at varying costs (non-exclusive photos can go for $150 to $1,000; non-exclusive rights to video for $500 to $1,000/minute; exclusive rights for whatever they can get - could be up to $100,000). You get 50 percent of those sales and keep the copyright for the image(s). Click the About Us section to learn more. Like the rest of the Internet, the site purports to develop a community, but in this case, I buy into the concept. More people covering a region/locality means more exposure and, ideally, an increased sense of identity.

The people behind the service don't pull any punches in their motivations for its development. The words are theirs, the emphasis is mine and the sentiments are shared:

"To get that information out to the increasingly emasculated, empty, repetitive, biased and under-funded mainstream media. There are, today, only 4 US newspapers with a foreign desk. And even AP and Reuters fail to cover 40% (!) of the world with a single staffer... At our most globalised, we know increasingly little about the rest of the world."

Amen, brother. Again, I direct you to the About Us section on their Web site for more information. Also, here's a video piece Reuters did on the service:



So all you budding "street journalists" (I must admit, I prefer that term over "citizen journalists" for some reason) get out there and start covering the stories you're constantly chastising us for missing.

Information overload I

I was going to write about my daily struggles with information overload, but I'll save that for a later post because, ironically (appropriately?), my brain feels too scrambled to form coherent paragraphs on the subject.

Instead, I'll point out another irony that crossed my mind when I started a topical excavation of the subject with a quick Google search and a few clicks of the mouse. It's in line with something that came up in conversation with a friend recently: the vicious cycle. We develop technology to make our lives easier, find it only introduces a slew of new complications/inconveniences, develop new technologies to make it easier to deal with those complications/inconveniences, discover the complications those technologies create, et cetera ad nauseum.

Watch:



IBM announced this technology about six months ago. While it seems way out there to a technological layperson like myself, and perhaps a really useful solution, additional reflection suggested it may just exacerbate the problems it hopes to solve. From the IBM press release:

"Many people encounter situations where you have been introduced to someone but you can't quite recall how you know them. By simply typing the person's name into the device, you can recall when and where you met them, and any related information garnered at that time. You could even browse forwards or backwards in time to find out what events transpired before or after the initial meeting."

Rather than actively and passively absorbing information with your primary device (your brain) in context, this solution requires you intentionally devote the time to assemble individual bits of information using your mobile device. Every person you meet in the course of your workday (or socially), plus whatever details you chose to enter about them, can conceivably be archived into your "second memory." Aside from the time actively spent on this task, how often can you realistically pull this off in a manner that isn't disruptive to the business at hand?

Actually, I'm not sure this specific example solves the problem it describes at all. Humans tend to recognize faces quite easily - we evolved to do so - but names more easily escape us. I know plenty of faces, but am terrible with names. So how would I know what to type in? And it just seems tactless to hold up your mobile device to discreetly capture someone's visage so you can run it in your mobile facial recognition software.

Also from the press release:

"Another use of this technology is in reconstructing and sharing an experience or memory. If enough media-rich data was collected about a particular event, it can be used to build a more complex visual associative representation of the experience.

'This is where the real power of collaboration kicks in,' said Eran Belinsky, research team leader and a specialist in collaboration. 'You can recall the name of the person you met right before you entered a meeting by traversing a timeline of your experiences, or share a business trip with colleagues by creating a mashup that shows a map with an animation of your trail and the pictures you took in every location.'"

Does this mean that you essentially need to capture EVERY tidbit of information that comes your way during the course of your workday? Even if you selectively chose which bits of information to document and record from a particular event (co-ordinating with your co-workers as to who's responsible for capturing what information?), you could drive yourself mad second guessing yourself. "Should I have gotten a voice sample of the woman serving coffee?" "Should Joan have mapped the location of the public restroom where John threw up after drinks?" Who's going to spend their time creating these things? And once those time lines or mash-ups are created, who's going to take the time to access them, and how often?

Anyhow, more on what IBM hopes to do to manage information overload can be found here. Click here to learn about the Information Overload Research Group.

Blogs new and old

Given my lackluster record maintaining this blog on a regular basis, it dawned on me several weeks ago that it would make perfect sense to start another blog. And I need your help.

My proposed blog will be something completely separate from my role at The Saratogian. It will, however, be a project both professional and personal in its scope; a way for me to explore and formulate ideas on a topic that's been of interest to me for quite some time.

Broadly, the topic will be the conflict between science and religion in today's culture. My interest in this comes from several angles: My educational and professional background in anthropology/archaeology; my amateur interest in physics, biology, geology; my own nebulous personal religious/spiritual beliefs; and a certain annoyance at the scapegoating of "religion" as the source of all social/cultural/political ills.

Here's what I'm looking for from you: Suggestions for the name of this blog. I'm looking for something on point with the topic. I've had a few ideas, but I'd like to see if anyone has some good suggestions.

- - - - - - - - -

In line with the above: I named this blog "Tangled in Wires" for a reason. It's how I sometimes feel living in today's world, choked by technology that's both appealing and appalling to me. I freely admit that I'm not the most tech-savvy individual around - partly out of practicality, partly out of a small bank account.

But I've never really explored the themes I wanted to in this space because, well, to be honest, it just struck me as odd to be a "Web editor" discussing my views on the negative impacts of technology.

So here's my new year's resolution, with a disclaimer: To be less reserved with my thoughts and opinion's on the matter. Surely I'll put my foot in my mouth more often than not, express my lack of knowledge, or banish myself to the sixth ditch in the eight circle of Hell (hypocrisy). But, akin to my goal with the blog idea above, it's a jumping off point to explore themes and ideas, generate discussion and learn.