Microblog

The Economist wonders about the future of history in the age of bit rot:

PICTURE yourself as a historian in 2035, trying to make sense of this year’s American election campaign. Many of the websites and blogs now abuzz with news and comment will have long since perished. Data stored electronically decays. Many floppy disks from the early digital age are already unreadable. If you are lucky, copies of campaign material, and of e-mails and other materials (including declassified official documents), will be available in public libraries.

But will you be able to read them?

We have a long way to go before we can safely say we have solved this issue.

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In 1999 Paulina Borsook lamented the changes happening in her home town of San Francisco in the wake of dot-com entrepreneurs :

Now in late-’90s San Francisco, you can have all the Manhattan greed-is-good bull-economy moments you like. Freed, Teller and Freed, the oldest coffee and tea seller in the city (established 1899, its handcrank cash register in use until the end) survived all — earthquakes, the Depression, Starbucks — but it couldn’t survive the Internetting of San Francisco: It closed Oct. 15, its building to become condos. You can stand on Sixth Street smack in the middle of SOMA (where Wired got its start) and the flow of traffic now evokes Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Parking is bad all over the city, the gratuitous kindness from strangers and service personnel I always so pleasantly contrasted with New York is fading fast, and it’s beginning to be all too clear that people have no slack in their lives.

Another story filed away as “relevant to the dissertation.”

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Australia has found that loosening copyright restrictions has an overall affect of improving the economy:

A new study from Australia presents the latest evidence that loosening copyright restrictions not only enables free speech, but can improve an economy as well. The study, published by the Australian Digital Alliance, indicated that if Australia expanded copyright exceptions like fair use, along with strengthening safe harbor provisions, the country could potentially add an extra $600 million to their economy.

In addition, the report details how vital copyright exceptions are to the Australian economy as a whole. As ADA’s executive officer and copyright advisor Ellen Broad told EFF, “Australia’s sectors relying on copyright exceptions currently contribute 14% of our GDP, around $182 billion and they’re growing rapidly. It’s essential that Australia’s copyright policy framework adequately support innovation and growth of these sectors in the digital environment.”

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Wired covers the construction of a top-secret National Security Agency building in Utah that will analyze digital communication:

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Filed away under “Relevant to dissertation research.” Government and computers have a long history in the American West.

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Regular expressions (or regex) can be an incredibly powerful tool for both developers and writers. They are a set of symbols and characters used to match and parse patterns of text. Steve Ramsay’s guide to regular expressions is a great resource to keep on hand for when you need to use regex.

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Ryan Cordell has put together a great collection of resources for graduate students entering or contemplating the job market.

Later today I’ll join a workshop for graduate students in Northeastern University’s English Graduate Program who are making (or considering) a run on the job market. As a recent survivor of the market I hope I can offer some insight into its quirks and vicissitudes. To that end—and with the help of several colleagues on Twitter—I’ve compiled a list of useful articles for students embarking on the academic job search.

Great set of resources.

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Today is my birthday! I had a pretty good year: I passed comprehensive exams, I’m doing a job that I greatly enjoy, I started and completed many projects around the house, made some new friends, built a basic iOS application, read a lot of books, joined the Gradhacker team. All in all, a good year, and I look forward to the next one.

I’ll sign off today with this: I have an idea for a new project relating to data, visualizations, and the humanities. Stay tuned.

I’m stealing a page from Profhacker and talking about digital distractions. One of my favorite distractions is podcasts. I love them. They’re part of my commute, they’re part of my leisure time, and they’re part of my work time. It’s rare to see me without headphones, catching up on my favorite shows. Using Downcast for iPhone has made it even easier for me to download the latest episodes of the podcasts I love.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Back to Work, 5by5
  Hosted by Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann on the 5by5 network, the topic is generally about getting your work done, removing barriers, and Mann is a genuinely entertaining individual, so the show contains plenty of comedy bits in addition to being super helpful about thinking about your work.
• Roderick on the Line
  Hosted by John Roderick (of The Long Winters) and Merlin Mann, ROTL took me a while to get in to, in part because it can be inscrutable, but it’s now it’s a can’t-miss show. It’s definitely NSFW and can be offensive, but it’s often quite funny. Think of it as though you’re listening in on a phone call between Mann and Roderick (which is, essentially, what the show does). A few of my favorite episodes are Your Hands Would Be Your Passport and We Can All Agree On Cheese.
• You Look Nice Today
  Hosted by Scott Simpson, Adam Lisagor, and Merlin Mann (if you haven’t noticed, I’m a big Merlin Mann fan), YLNT is a comedy troupe that’s been on and off for the last few years. YLNT comes out every month and is fairly short, usually between 30 and 45 minutes. It’s an incredibly entertaining and well-produced show. Check out the YLNT starter pack if you want to know where to dive in.
• Build and Analyze, 5by5
  Hosted by Dan Benjamin and Marco Arment, the founder of Instapaper, B&A discusses the world of Apple programming, and development. I find the discussions between Benjamin and Arment about current technology to be quite insightful and entertaining.
• Enough, 70Decibels
  Hosted by Patrick Rhone and Myke Hurley, Enough seeks to find where technology becomes enough to get your work done. I’m a big fan of Rhone and his work, and find his ideas and discussion on Enough a good way to think about the role of technology in my life.
• CMD+SPACE, 70Decibels
  Hosted by Myke Hurley, CMD+SPACE has quickly become one of my favorite interview podcasts. Hurley recently launched the show in the last month and has interviewed some people I greatly admire, including Merlin Mann, Jason Snell, Shawn Blanc, and Marco Arment.
• Hypercritical, 5by5
  Hosted by Dan Benjamin and John Siracusa, this show fulfills all of my hyper-geekiness: video games, Apple, technology, filesystems. Siracusa has a reputation as being a fierce tech critic (hence the show’s name) while being entertaining in his delivery. He is perhaps most famous for his impressive and thorough Mac OS X reviews.

(It should be pretty clear by now that I’m a big fan of 5by5 and the work Dan Benjamin is doing with it. 5by5 has, I believe, rightfully been called the “NPR for Geeks.”)

• Radiolab, NPR
  Not all of my podcasts are strictly technology related. Radiolab covers ideas, technology, science, and philosophy and its intersections with the human experience. I love and am endlessly fascinated by science, and Radiolab lets me geek out about science and the modern world.
• Digital Campus
  Hosted by Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, Amanda French, and Mills Kelly, Digital Campus is an additional way I keep up with how technology intersects with teaching, learning, and scholarship in higher education. Graduate students, faculty, administration, and staff in higher education should be listening to this podcast.
• The Gradhacker Podcast
  The newly launched Gradhacker Podcast hosted by Alex Galarza and Andrea Zellner nicely parallels Digital Campus but approaches education, productivity, teaching, and learning from the perspective of graduate students.
• On the Media, NPR
  Hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, On the Media covers journalism and the changing nature of the media. The show is a great look at the previous week’s big news items, examines freedom of information and expression, and analyzes the way media, especially news media, is made.

I have a variety of other podcasts that I more selectively catch: Amplified, Home Work, The Ihnatko Almanac, The Tech Guy, This Week in Google, In Beta, Buddhist Geeks, The Nickel, The Incomparable, Latest in Paleo, Systematic, The Incomparable.

Kyle Baxter reflects on the passing of Neil Armstrong:

And that is what we must do. Let’s lay awake at night, dreaming up great things, things that could only be dreams now, and let’s build them. It need not be related to space; it could be related to an important advancement with renewable energy, or even with something as comparably small as re-creating education for this new century. But it must be something truly new, groundbreaking and meaningful, something that leaves you with the sheer joy of childhood excitement. Something that will make us better as a people. Let’s dream it, and let’s build it.

I hope one of those things will be a mission to Mars. I hope to see it one day, but let’s make it one of many great projects. Let’s add many more giant leaps to Neil’s.

This is an excellent piece reflecting on Neil Armstrong and the desire to do great things. I highly recommend checking it out.

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Sebastian Anthony writes about the technical specifications that underly the Mars rover:

In Curiosity’s case, the CPU is a PowerPC 750 (PowerPC G3 in Mac nomenclature) clocked at around 200MHz — which might seem slow, but it’s still hundreds of times faster than, say, the Apollo Guidance Computer used in the first Moon landings. Also on the motherboard are 256MB of DRAM, and 2GB of flash storage — which will be used to store video and scientific data before transmission to Earth. […]

On the software side of things, NASA again stuck to tried-and-tested solutions, opting for the 27-year-old VxWorks operating system. VxWorks, developed by Wind River Systems (which was acquired by Intel), is a real-time operating system used in a huge number of embedded systems. The previous Mars rovers (Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft all use VxWorks. VxWorks also powers BMW iDrive, the Apache Longbow helicopter, and the Apple Airport Extreme and Linksys WRT54G routers (really).

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