Anarchist Bookfair 2009

LONDON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR 2009

Saturday, 24th October 2009, from 10am to 7pm

Books – Meetings – Workshops – Food – Films – Creche … and More!

As capitalism collapses around us in the market of ideas the anarchist pound is bouyant and the 28th London Anarchist Bookfair is back at Queen Mary College in London’s East End. A big thank you to everyone who helped make last year’s bookfair run smoothly and to you all for respecting the space.  Last year we have 38 meetings, 90 stalls, an all day cabaret starring assorted ranters, poets, singers and comics; all day film showings and, two kids spaces. We are planning more of the same in 2009.

Stalls will again be split between the Great Hall and the Octagon room, which means that there will be more space and the whole bookfair will be wheelchair accessible. Please contact the info stall for wheelchair lift passes if you need one. If you have any other access requirements, please let us know in advance if possible so we can meet your needs. If you are Deaf and require BSL interpreting and/or speech-to-text provision, please give us as much notice as possible and we will do our best to organise these.

To discuss any specific access needs, please contact us at: mail@anarchistbookfair.org. At the bookfair please go to the info stall for further details.

Next to the Octagon room will be an all day tea, coffee and snack stall (until 6pm).

The creche will be signposted, and the ‘older kids room’ is also in the basement below the Octagon Room.

We have loads going on – see the rest of the website, for a run down of the meetings and other events. More will be added as we get nearer to October.

Please don’t forget this is all organised by a small collective – so any help would be very much appreciated. This year, more than ever, we need your donations to break even – the room and table hire have gone up and we may be over a grand down again. So, any donations or funds from benefit gigs would come in very handy.

Getting to the venue: The venue for this year’s London Anarchist Bookfair, for the 3rd year running, is Queen Mary & Westfield College, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS.

If you are coming by public transport the following buses stop near the college on Mile End Road: 25; 205; 339.

If you are coming by tube the two nearest stations are Mile End (central line / Hammersmith & City line or District line) or Stepney Green (Hammersmith & City line or District line). From Mile End tube come out of station and turn left. Walk along Mile End Road until you get to Harford Street and entrance to venue is opposite Harford Road. From Stepney Green tube come out of station and turn left. Walk along Mile End Road and venue entrance is on your left opposite Harford Road.

Further details: http://www.anarchistbookfair.org

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Victor Rikowski, The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

I’ve lived in Southern Idaho my entire life and I’ve never seen adversity to wolves like it is now.

Reportedly, 14,000 wolf-hunting permits have been sold in Idaho and 8,800 have been sold in Montana.

There are huge stock populations in these areas. It’s amazing to me that Wyoming doesn’t have more of a problem.

A Salt Lake Tribune columnist, Ken Fischman, reported that the Feds have estimated that there are 846 wolves in Idaho, 497 in Montana and 302 in Wyoming.

There are many energy and highway paths in Wyoming. What happens when energy corridors run through the rest of the remaining wilderness? I’d like to see human beings and wolves stay out of contact then.

Wyoming, at least, still has legal protection for wolves.

During 2009, when I introduced blogging to the teachers in the eBest ICT Cluster (where I am the facilitator) I set their blogs up in Edublogs. At the beginning of 2009 I decided to change to another host. There were several reasons – Edublogs lack of stability at the time:constant resetting of passwords and the difficulty getting new passwords. The final decision was reached when Edublogs decreased their free space from 100mb to 20mb. To get 5gb you needed to be a ’supporter’. As I work with 90 teachers who use a blog with their students (i.e. as part of their job) I don’t think it should cost them anything.
So the question was ‘where to now’? The two main contenders were Blogger and WordPress. I chose WordPress and haven’t regretted it even though Blogger is neat too. My reasons were:
1. WordPress is the format used by Edublogs, so my teachers were familiar with the tabs and layout
2. Teachers could import all their posts from Edublogs into the new WordPress blog (An earlier post shows how to do this)
3. 3gb free space vs 1gb in Blogger (Doesn’t that make Edublogs 20mb look sad?!)
4. WordPress had a photo gallery function. Photos have to go into posts singly in Blogger
5. WordPress allows pages to be added to the blog, Blogger does not.

The decision was quite difficult though because Blogger has some really neat features and gadgets that WordPress doesn’t have. Of course there’s nothing to stop teachers using both hosts and linking the blogs.

Here is a table which compares Blogger and WordPress.

Longing to be whole....and so are you.

You know what I have noticed recently? There is a growing number of individuals (or perhaps, the phenomenon has been “the elephant in the room” all along) that are leading two lives (or more).  My hypothesis, based on my observation/experiences/informal research is that many of these cases spawn from folks who:

• Do not openly express  wants and needs.
• Do not believe that their own happiness is important (for themselves or to others).
• Are afraid that parents, spouse, friends, employer, etc would not approve of or accept actions.
• Have financial concerns – For example: “I hate working here but I need the paycheck”, “I am unhappy with this relationship however; I do not make enough on my own to handle the bills”, “My apartment is in a terrible neighborhood but I can’t afford to move”.
• Are afraid of failing?
• Are concerned about what others think.

If those close to you don’t know much about “the real you”  then you are likely living two lives to one extreme or another. There is one life which is believed to be acceptable by all and another which is kept on the “down-low”.  One keeps everyone other than you in a safe, happy, naive bubble and the other becomes your “free space”…the place to be yourself. You either lead two lives or you spend a ridiculous amount of time repressing your innermost desires, hiding your frustrations, ignoring you urges until one day…..you can’t anymore, and you explode .

Your happiness is important…..what YOU want is important….how YOU feel is important….or at least it should be to those who claim to care about you and to love you unconditionally.  Hmmmmm, “Unconditional love”…can humans achieve it?” Consider these questions:

Will your “love” allow you to let go and wish your spouse happiness when they tell you that they no longer want the relationship?”

“Will you love and support your child when they announce that they are homosexual?”

“Will you still love your brother, even when you find out that he has committed a heinous crime?”

“Will you still accept a loved one when they announce that they have chosen a religion that you don’t approve of?”

Or, would you rather your child/spouse/parent/friend/sibling/(and the list goes on) live an alternate life that does not include you?

The key differentiator between SAN’s is often speed which is critical but it isn’t everything. When designing a SAN for a facility you don’t just need speed but also some way of managing the SAN, and this is a critical element for prospective SAN owners to think about. Similar to buying a V8 engine and popping onto the back of a billy cart (or soap box racer for our American friends), no control, no management, just a whole lot of pain on the way.

DVS have spent a great deal of their research and development resources to this specific area due to their knowledge of the mid to higher end SAN environments with a key range of tools that address content management, SAN management and Defragmentation tools.

The DVS SAN management tool offers a graphical representation of the SAN to show your storage, fibre switching, HBA’s, and even down to your send and receive rates on individual SFP’s in your SAN. With a GUI to represent the volume status and bandwidth performance, really a sensible addition that few vendors have taken on. Other SAN’s can provide similar functions with the addition of a third party package, DVS however offer this in a single package.

The second part of the DVS package that adds another feather to it cap is Spycer. Spycer is a brilliant tool that that is best described as Complete Content Management. It features an asset database that is searchable with custom search functions, proxy generation of assets, sharing of assets across multiple clients via SpycerNet and high speed copy with DVS appliances make this simple interfaced product a powerful addition to the DVS Range.

But the last and most formidable feature to its opponents is the DVS Defragmentation Tool nick named ‘Mephisto’. Fragmentation has not necessarily been an issue in most post houses until now. With the accessibility of DI tools and file formats like DPX TIFF’s TGA’s coming to the forefront, in a very short time the adoption of image sequences for example has been very quick. Unlike self contained Quick-times or MXF files, DPX strings can reach into the tens of thousands of files spread across disks on your SAN eventually creating a nightmare when you need to relay these sequences out in a contiguous file alignment. The DVS Defrag tool Mephisto does several different things, all of which are more than just value adds, they start to show the ROI in a very short amount of time.

On your run of the mill SNFS SAN the defragmentation process is a function that is performed somewhat crudely by initiating a copy or a move to a different volume or workspace which then lays the data into single string. Possible yes, but the bandwidth and the disk space required means that it becomes an expensive endeavor.

Mephisto not only scans and defragments the volume whilst you are operating, but it lays the file sequences down in a continuos file sequence again, WITHOUT the requirement for additional storage and copying EVERYTHING over to perform a defrag process.

Probably one of the crucial points to take away from the DVS experience is the ability to not only defrag the volume initially as you can see above, but then also collates all the free space blocks that have been displaced throughout the process and then reclaims every single block of unused data. You can reclaim disk space and keep your SAN in pristine condition.

A very simple and yet brilliant feature is the way DVS have been able to implement these defragmentation processes in schedule. That way you can guarantee that the defrag process will start and continue when the SAN is in downtime, or perhaps merely copying from another destination. Your Sys Admin will be extremely happy as the schedule performs dutifully, without someone clicking a button and watching a progress bar.

But what happens if the SAN is in use 24 hours a day. Not entirely out of the realms of possibility in these times. If there is no chance of having dedicated downtime, then why not throttle the defrag to a certain amount of bandwidth? Now you can. If your SAN can operate 12 Streams of Uncompressed HD and you only need 10 for that day, then you can dedicate the value in bandwidth of those two streams to the defragmentation tool to ensure that your users never get a dropped frame whilst your high end SAN is getting the pristine upkeep it deserves.

Put simply, the product offering by DVS is far and above its competitors not just for speed and elegance, but rather the offering of a turn key Asset Management and SAN management solution without headaches or expensive downtime. Whatever your post house, DI facility, animation house or broadcast facility specializes in, DVS has thought of you and has crafted their tools to match what you need for SAN management. Coupled with their Clipster, Pronto, Venice and Spycer products, there are few other companies that come close to offering the core components that make good facilities…..great.

      set linesize 150
        column tablespace_name format a20 heading 'Tablespace'
     column sumb format 999,999,999
     column extents format 9999
     column bytes format 999,999,999,999
     column largest format 999,999,999,999
     column Tot_Size format 999,999 Heading 'Total| Size(Mb)'
     column Tot_Free format 999,999,999 heading 'Total Free(MB)'
     column Pct_Free format 999.99 heading '% Free'
     column Chunks_Free format 9999 heading 'No Of Ext.'
     column Max_Free format 999,999,999 heading 'Max Free(Kb)'
     set echo off
     PROMPT  FREE SPACE AVAILABLE IN TABLESPACES
     select a.tablespace_name,sum(a.tots/1048576) Tot_Size,
     sum(a.sumb/1048576) Tot_Free,
     sum(a.sumb)*100/sum(a.tots) Pct_Free,
     sum(a.largest/1024) Max_Free,sum(a.chunks) Chunks_Free
     from
     (
     select tablespace_name,0 tots,sum(bytes) sumb,
     max(bytes) largest,count(*) chunks
     from dba_free_space a
     group by tablespace_name
     union
     select tablespace_name,sum(bytes) tots,0,0,0 from
      dba_data_files
     group by tablespace_name) a
     group by a.tablespace_name
order by pct_free;

                         Total
Tablespace            Size(Mb) Total Free(MB)  % Free Max Free(Kb) No Of Ext.
-------------------- --------- -------------- ------- ------------ ----------
SYSTEM                     790              3     .38        3,008          2
SYSAUX                     752             52    6.86       32,768        132
USERS                        5              1   11.25          576          1
MGMT_ECM_DEPOT_TS          100             43   43.25       43,968          2
MGMT_TABLESPACE         13,940          8,388   60.17      155,200       1594
UNDOTBS1                   605            491   81.07      311,360         44
PATROL                       1              1   93.75          960          1

SET LINESIZE  145
SET PAGESIZE  9999
SET VERIFY    off
COLUMN group_name             FORMAT a20           HEAD 'Disk Group|Name'
COLUMN sector_size            FORMAT 99,999        HEAD 'Sector|Size'
COLUMN block_size             FORMAT 99,999        HEAD 'Block|Size'
COLUMN allocation_unit_size   FORMAT 999,999,999   HEAD 'Allocation|Unit Size'
COLUMN state                  FORMAT a11           HEAD 'State'
COLUMN type                   FORMAT a6            HEAD 'Type'
COLUMN total_mb               FORMAT 999,999,999   HEAD 'Total Size (MB)'
COLUMN used_mb                FORMAT 999,999,999   HEAD 'Used Size (MB)'
COLUMN pct_used               FORMAT 999.99        HEAD 'Pct. Used'

break on report on disk_group_name skip 1
compute sum label "Grand Total: " of total_mb used_mb on report

SELECT
    name                                     group_name
  , sector_size                              sector_size
  , block_size                               block_size
  , allocation_unit_size                     allocation_unit_size
  , state                                    state
  , type                                     type
  , total_mb                                 total_mb
  , (total_mb - free_mb)                     used_mb
  , ROUND((1- (free_mb / total_mb))*100, 2)  pct_used
FROM
    v$asm_diskgroup
ORDER BY
    name
/

Apple’s Disk Utility can wipe whole disks and free space. One thing it apparently does not do, however, is wipe file slack.

File systems are divided into finite block sizes. File slack is the space after the data in a file ends and until the file systems block finishes. On an average hard drive, file slack frequently constitutes more than a gigabyte of information – information that is not wiped when wiping free space.

Unlike the Windows utility Eraser, for example, Disk Utility does not include file slack when wiping, so in fact it is not a complete wipe of free space. Forensic investigators frequently find interesting information in slack space, so a wipe of free space that does not include slack is in fact incomplete.

There is, however, a way to wipe free space on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6, including slack space. Jetico’s BCWipe. The program has to be run from the command line, and the process is somewhat complicated if you haven’t done that sort of thing before.

That’s why this tutorial was made. 

Be warned that playing with these commands unless you understand what you’re doing and typing precisely, could accidentally wipe important data. Consider backing up your data first.

First, you have to download, compile and install BCWipe.

1. Download the software from http://www.jetico.com/
You want the BCWipe-1.9-3.tar.gz file, under the heading “BCWipe for UNIX versions”

2. Unpack it by double clicking on it in the download directory

3. It has to be compiled and installed. You need to download and install the Developer Tools from Apple to be able to compile software. To do that, go here http://developer.apple.com/mac/ and register an account, log in, download the Xcode Tools disk image, and install it. Then compile and install BCWipe by opening Terminal in Applications/Utilities, and run the following commands.

$ cd ~/Downloads/bcwipe-1.9-3/
$ sudo ./configure
$ sudo make install

5. Congratulations, you just installed BCWipe. It can now be run from the command-line by typing bcwipe. To read the instructions for using it, type “man bcwipe” (very useful)

Our recommended command to wipe file slack is
$ sudo bcwipe -ISrvm1 /

Two useful scripts for Mac OS X
To save you some time, we have made two useful scripts, one to clear logs and cache, and one to wipe free space, including file slack

To make the scripts

$ sudo nano clear_logs_cache.sh

(or the name of your choice followed by .sh to designate it as a shell script)
(paste or type the contents of your choice below into the editor, remember, the commands are case sensitive)

CTRL-X, Y <enter> (to save the file)

Then, add execute permissions to the script to be able to run it

$ sudo chmod a+x clear_logs_cache.sh

Script contents

To delete logs and cache on Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6
bcwipe -Irvwm1 /private/var/log/*
bcwipe -Irvwm1 /Library/Logs/*
bcwipe -Irvwm1 /Library/Caches/*
bcwipe -Irvwm1 /System/Library/Caches/*
bcwipe -Irvwm1 ~/Library/Logs/*
bcwipe -Irvwm1 ~/Library/Caches/*

If you also want to delete the Spotlight database
bcwipe -Irvwm1 /.Spotlight-V100

(It could be useful to add the whole hard drive to the Privacy panel under Spotlight in System Preferences afterwards)

To delete file slack and free space
bcwipe -ISrvwm1 /
bcwipe -IFrvwm1 /
rm -rf /bcwipe-wiping_free_space-??????
rm -rf /bcwipe-wiping_free_space-??????

To run a script
$ sudo ./clear_logs_cache.sh <enter>
(type your password) <enter>

The process usually takes thirty minutes to three hours depending on the size of your disk and what you wipe, whereas wiping cache and logs is done in a minute.

These scripts have been tested on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard as well as 10.4 Tiger on several machines, both PowerPC and Intel, and journaled and non-journaled Mac OS Extended drives, and they caused no problems. All the commands here can safely be run on a live system without problems. If you are using Boot Camp, using bcwipe on / might cause it to treat the Windows partition as well. One way to handle this is simply unmounting the Windows partition in Disk Utility before using bcwipe, and using Eraser, which is Windows native and free, on the Windows partition. It’s also a good idea to unmount any external drives and network volumes before starting.

However, this is not a guarantee that they will not cause problems for you. If you play with fire, you might get burnt. Remember that one typing mistake might wipe something essential to the operation of your system, or your important files. So unless, you know what you’re doing, consider not doing it, or having a computer literate friend help you. It might be wise to make a backup and play with these commands before using them in everyday computing.

DISCLAIMER: the author of this tutorial takes no responsibility for damaged data.

It should be sufficient to wipe data once, as no company has yet been able to recover overwritten data. Especially on modern hard drives, once scrub is enough, as there are less traces of previous data on these drives. However, some argue it could be possible to recover overwritten data (in theory) using magnetic force microscopy and image analysis, and that noone knows what technology the military might secretly possess. If you want to be sure it will be very hard to recover data, a 7-pass scrub is recommended. The instructions here are for a one-time scrub of random data without verification, which is a fast and effective method. To change the settings, refer to the BCWipe manual.

BCWipe works for free for 30 days, and then you can purchase a license from Jetico.

Update: Kremlin seems to be selling a product that also wipes free space including file slack on Mac OS X, from looking at their web pages. The author of this tutorial has not tested this tool. BCWipe is a tried and trusted tool with a long history, however, and the author would probably prefer it anyway.

SkyDrive what a Great tool. Here are a few things you’ll find on your shiny new SkyDrive:

25 GB of free online storage
Available in 6 more regions and 13 more languages
Download entire folders as Zip files (limited release)
Gorgeous online slide show for your photos
And much, much more!
Check it out and let us know what you think.

GMail offers now 7Go of free space, who needs such a huge space for mailing ? Some smart guys  decided to use gmail as an external drive, this website porposes an shell extension that adds a GMail drive to your Windows (My Computer) next to your local drives. You can send files directly from you PC by drag and drop. All the files you send appear as mails prefixed with GMAILFS in subjects. You can create a filter to move all messages containing this prefix in archives to avoid inbox overload.

Another guy made an extension for Firefox.

A few months ago I participated in Signtific Lab’s Free Space experiments. These experiments were structured as massively collaborative thought-experiments, brainstorming on the premise that access to space becomes, in the near future as cheap as internet access today. Given widespread access to ‘cube sats’, 1 liter micro-satellites, what happens?

To answer that question, signtific labs created a game, and opened it for play over three rounds, over the course of several weeks. Game design was handled at least in part by Jane McGonigal, whose work over the last several years on collective intelligence and gaming has made for good reading (check out “Why I love Bees”, “The puppet master problem”). Browsing for new papers, I found a link to free space, signed up, played two rounds and skipped the third for class and homework. I’ve been wondering about an aspect of the game’s design since, hoping for a paper discussing design as with ‘I love Bees’. A month later, no paper (only a nice slide show touting this game and others).  Patient, aren’t we…

Hence, I am forsaking our neo-Galilean model of science, and am going to go Socratic on these experiments -  reasoning from within why the design choices were made, and what their effects were. Before we do that, gentle reader, we should look through some background on Free Space.  The game bears much similarity to a message board, but with a scoring system. Starting with the premise of the game, cheap access to space for everyone, players play ‘cards’, 120-character messages that are either ‘positive’ or ‘dark’ imagination cards. Gentle Reader, if you enjoy dark humor, you may also enjoy the non-exclusive nature of those categories. Followup cards can be played on these initial cards in one of four flavors; momentum (“and then…”), adaptation (“and also…”), antagonism (“but…”), or investigation (“what about….”). The resulting structure  looks like typical message boards, with a few exceptions (later), and the addition of a scoring system.

Many message boards give the post count next to each author’s names, but few have a scoring system with an explicit leader-board. For Free Space, this makes sense:  few games are engaging without some feedback based on performance. The score is computed from three components, dependent on the author, the player community, and the moderators of the game (Signtific labs).  Each post accrues minimal points for existence, with subsequent additions based on the number of replies and possible selection as “super interesting” by the lab guides. This balances feedback to players between all parts of the community. It encourages active participation, engagement with the community, and staying on topic.

Why not just have some system to objectively evaluate the worth of each card? If any such person or system could be devised, there would be no need for the collective collaboration: the motivation behind the game is to generate cards that no person could generate in isolation.

These modes of positive feedback encourage certain modes of behavior. Not all of these contribute to the furthering of ideas-of-cube-sats:

1. Long strings of posts that perhaps not everyone is interested in (curse you, limited embed-ability of wordpress ):

http://lab.signtific.org/node/12017

2. Posts that appeal to popular imagination, if not history or or the current state of engineering:

… any of the many involving a distributed AI in space. (why are computers in space better then computers on earth? there are reasons they are worse…)

3. Cards that play to moderators’ aspirations:

http://lab.signtific.org/node/3757

But Gentle Reader! Your brain is no doubt anow aflame with anger! I have so presumptuously assumed that the only cards of merit are those that build the ivory tower of science a little higher! Not so, and far from it. After all, Free Space is a game,  there are many people playing and each has their own reasons. All of these must be valid criteria for judging success. Here are a few I thought of:

* Creating new ideas relating to cube sats.
* Spreading ideas relating to cube sats.
* Making players happy.
* Experimental exploration of collective intelligence (CI) structures.
* Furthering the professional interests of Signtific Labs.

The idea of an emergent, pervasive intelligence is as old as science fiction and appeals to a wide swath of the population. Thinking about such a being, enshrined above our heads, preforming matchmaking duties based on pheremonal samplings tickles the imagination and makes me smile.  Cards that are less tangential or amusing are critical in the gestalt of the game: engaging players, providing fuel through readings and creative misreadings for directly applicable cards, even as the ’serious’ premise provides a framework for player enjoyment and fuels these ‘extraneous’ writings.

Even if many goals are intertwined, most of my interest in Free Space stems from the aspects relating to collective intelligence. When I signed up, seeing three experiments, I assumed that they would be comparative in nature: testings of different game variations, the gathering of data for future work. This was a very ivory-tower, natural sciences thing to assume. My hopes for a nice data set were not to be: the changes between rounds were fairly minimal, and had the feel of refinements rather then being experimental in nature.

Ah well.  So what’s the interesting set of decisions I’ve alluded to but not actually listed? What were the motivations?

This is how Free Space stores the ideas of the game and their relations.

The game’s structure looks like the ubiquitous  on line message  board. Where message boards aim for transparency in presentation of and access to content, baring the non-linear, highly interlinked (then hyperlinked) structure of the information, Free Space often acts to limit player perspective – forcing linearity on ideas that are anything but. The content created is often concealed: the main page of the experiment presents only a fraction of the ‘imagination’ card played at first site (selected chronologically in early rounds, then randomly in later rounds, if I recall correctly). The “all cards played” rss feed, which now only displays the most recent 25 cards, did during game play show all cards played. However, the cards are listed chronologically, with no hints as to their relations. The “view chain reaction” feature displays only the shortest path back to the root experiment node, even when previous cards have many branches. There is no search function. There are no meta-data features so common to web 2.0.

The urls that point to each card (see above) use the term ‘node’, implying a fundamentally graph-theoretic approach to design. At least one person on the design team was very aware of the cross-linking structure of the game – I bet they all were. These choices were very deliberate. Why were they made?

This is how Free Space presents a chain of ideas for your consideration.

I am reminded of a story my grandfather told me. My grandfather met the man who invented the modern  heart-lung machine, and heard from him the tale of it’s invention. Apparently the to-be-inventor was an unhappy student, and asked a visiting eminent researcher if he could have a job. The eminent researcher said yes, and forgot all about it until six months later, when his secretary entered his office to warn him of the man who had just shown up claiming to have been offered a job. With no projects in line for the young man, the eminent researcher told the to-be-inventor to make a heart-lung machine. He was free to pursue any avenue of research, so long as as he did not read anything on previous unsuccessful attempts to create the device. Through a different and new approach, the invention was a success.

This approach won’t strictly work in such a CI context: isolating players defeats the purpose of collaboration. Even with the above features, within the context of Free-Space I am never isolated. I probably read hundreds, if not thousands of  cards over the course of the game, and those combined with my existing personal knowledge created a frothy stew that I would stir and  dip into for cards. You can see this in my continual harping on radiation, or in the many cards involving twitter, which in it’s current state of exponential growth is forefront in the internet-minded player’s brains. You can also see in influence of current events: the first round has numerous cards relating to ‘junk in space’, no doubt because of a recent satellite collision.

This is how I might understand (consciously or not) the relations of ideas leading into a new card.

The designers cannot isolate players from each other completely. However, the opposite, encouraging consideration all the subtleties, relations and ideas of the above during card writing would be fruitless. Such an overarching perspective would encourage overarching statements. Such statements are easy to make, always wrong, and contribute little to brainstorms. It would take a long time to acknowledge every card that influenced a particular idea, slowing game play and lengthening the all-important feedback cycles between players. The designers have hence simplified the context of each new card. This in interesting: further  down the road of many, simple interacting entities lie Cellular Automata and the ideas of a resident of my hometown. The differences are obvious and glaring, the simile weak, but perhaps there is insight here. Cellular automata (CA) are very simple entities that when grouped together can create patterns of startling complexity and beauty. They are among the best examples of emergent behavior: the whole entirely transcending the sum of the parts.

This is the goal of collective intelligence: generating ideas or solutions that no member could have thought of alone. People have specialized their knowledge for centuries: Free Space seeks to gently guide these blocks of thought into an assembly for constructive interference. It provides the illusion of simple narrative lines that are easy to respond to and comfortable to fit inside.

As an aside, I bet a Marxist would be appalled: “first we abstract labor, now entire persons?!”

The weaknesses of CA systems stem directly from the strength: they are simple. As much as S. Wolfram would like to explain natural phenomena using CA systems, that have so far proved too blunt and lacking in subtlety for direct application. In the same way, Free Space’s model demands simplicity, dispenses with nuance. This is reinforced with the card size: 120 characters, a few sentences if you keep them short. This helps keeps the conversation away from pissing contests ala usenet. It also means that many cards are just permutations of hot buzzwords.

In the end, is Free Space a successful framework for CI? based on subjective experience, I think so. I thought of ideas that I never would have in isolation. From a wider perspective? Not completely. By later rounds, the designers were asking for specific topics for super-interest. These included:

* Climate change applications
* Food/agriculture innovation
* Chemical/materials research
* Bio/life sciences research
* Oceanographic research
* Tracking and protecting all living things (migration patterns, etc)

I did not see an overwhelming response. Few of the responses I saw in these areas didn’t set off some level of internal bullshit-detector, whether deserved or not. All most all the climate change cards end up being ambiguous: the topic is so convoluted that I do not feel comfortable judging worth of ideas in it, and I doubt (with all due respect) that any of the lab guides are qualified. The debate on ‘experts’ and ‘laymen’ in science is long, but the deficit of cards in these areas may be the result of the player makeup: presented at internet and technology conferences, the players knew tech, not ecology. The guides asked for cards specific to player knowledge even as they asked for the above categories. Given a different population, perhaps more natural science cards would have come up. Perhaps too the three legged feedback system would be up the task of judging ideas. Of course, it may be that 120 characters of card and a single bit for super-interesting-ness is not enough bandwidth for meaningful discourse on these topics.

This raises a question long nascent: can collective intelligence be applied to science research? Science, and much of engineering, have long been the domains of dedicated people who amass, over the course of years, disgusting heaps of specialist knowledge. While Free Space’s model seems to work very well for open ended pie-in-the-blue-sky brainstorming, I don’t think it would for the bulk of research. Journal papers are the closest analog to cards in the current discourse. Papers are often long, complicated, opaque to non-specialists  and defined as nuanced.

At the same time, vibrant collaborations exist within the scientific community and communication is recognized as critical across disciplines. Every university or institution I have come into contact in the last several years has pushed these relationships. Is it possible to expand these collaborations into massive structures? What resemblances would such structures bear to Free Space’s? Would they be worth anything? To encourage collaborations several institutes (notably MIT) have turned towards building real-world spaces for meeting and interaction, instead of virtual. Does this trend indicate poor outcomes for network-predicated collaborations? Would Free-Space models be used best in synergy with current modes of investigation?

I don’t know. It’d be cool to find out, and I hope someone tries soon. It sounds like something singapore would try. <\plug>

Oh yeah. and if anyone reading this knows good tools for scrubbing html for data (someone will read all this?), I think there is cool knowledge on how ideas develop through time ready to be extracted from Free Space. Unfortunately, access to cards is difficult (see above).

Ever have a clien that complains about running out of space on their Hard drive?  Instead of spending all that time going through directories and finding out where the junk is, check out Spacemonger.  This tool will scan hard drives on your PC and display it in a nice graphical fashion.  As you can see in the screenshot, I took a quick scan of the recovery drive on my laptop.

Spacemonger comes in 2 versions, the Paid and free version.  Personally I like the free version better.  Its small and does everything I need it to.  As an added bonus, it dosnt require an install, so I can take it along with me on a USB key or leave it up on the tools shared drive at the dealership.

Heres the Product link http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

You may have to do some digging around for the download link.  Its on the download page, under free software at the bottom of the list.

Need more computer space? Consider dropbox. Availble on windows, mac, and linux!

I love dropbox. Its absolutely amazing. Its software that syncs your files on your local computer to their dropbox server. That basically means you see the files on your desktop, but they really are somewhere else in their server and when you change your file on your desktop, it changes at the server too.

I have a dropbox account, and I am inviting others to get more space. You’d get more space too!

Get an extra 250 MB for free!

So basically:

A) You save 2 GB

B) You can get these files from any computer

C) Files sync so you don’t have to worry if you emailed yourself a wrong version of a document

There’s even a public folder with dropbox. So lets say you want to share a folder but you’re too lazy to upload it to imageshack or tinypic or whatever.

Just drag your picture into your public folder. Right click on it and get a public link out of it!

So you can share items so much easier  and faster. You have a 2 GB limit so you can share bigger files more easily too.

I store all my documents and pictures in dropbox now Also all the pictures here in this post yay for saving space!

Some of us are changing our blogs from Edublogs to WordPress to get more free storage. It’s hard to leave previous posts and comments behind … however, there’s a solution! You can import these from your Edublogs blog into your new WordPress one!! Follow these steps:
1. In Edublogs, go to your dashboard (in site admin)
2. Click on ‘Tools’ and then ‘Export’
3. Click on ‘Download Export File’. Save the file to your desktop.
4. Set up your WordPress blog (if you haven’t already). http://www.wordpress.com Tip: Use your name for the user name if you’re joining
5. Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on ‘Tools’ on the left navigation.
6. Click ‘Import’
7. Click on the last option – ‘WordPress’
8. Browse for your file (remember, it’s on the desktop!!) and then click ‘Upload file and Import’
9. You will know you’ve been successful when you see a list of your post titles and the words ‘Have Fun!’
10. Unfortunately you can’t import your cluster map (your new blog has a different URL) and you’ll have to make a new one http://www.clustermaps.com
11. Write a final post on your old blog telling your readers about the move and giving them your new blog address and you’re all set.

The WordPress format is the same as Edublogs so you’ll easily find the settings you need and the theme you want. Remember to choose a theme with ‘custom header’,so you can put your own photo with your blog title

yikes!

The title is completely condescending. Not that I don’t love D.C., I absolutely do! However, not when you wake up and walk out to your car at 6:45 AM and find your side mirror completely gone. The last thing you want to do is go on in to work.  Who do you curse out in that situation? I mean you have just been officially placed on an episode of Punk’d and wondering when the hell Ashton is going to pop out. Thank goodness, I have a sense of humor. It’s not a laughing matter when you pull up besides a Washingtonian police officer who is just itching to give out a ticket. I dodged the interaction by looking complete embarrassed and limiting my eye contact.

This frustrating event reminded me that you have to deal with unexpected mishaps. But it also made me think of accountability. Who was accountable for my side mirror? I know I’m taking this whole topic to the extreme but it really did have me on some philosophical evaluation of life. If I had been the car that ran into the mirror, would have I left a note? Would I have given out my contact information? The answer to both questions leaned toward the answer no. Therefore, I definitely had the audacity to be mad at the person who left me a crumpled mirror lying on the other side of the street as their apology. 

At the end of the day, I was accountable for my side mirror. I had to call the unhelpful service workers at Mazda. I had to pay for the new mirror. And now I make sure that I push them in when I park my car on the lovely streets of D.C.