"In short, it's time for a resurrection of the crypto-anarchist / techno-libertarian / cypherpunk movement and it's associated values, activities and aesthetic. Those of us who care about these issues can't just lurk in the shadows and act like nothing is happening. It's time to start telling people about public-key encryption, hosting key-signing parties, developing new technologies for bypassing Internet censorship, developing tools for bypassing State and Corporation controlled messaging channels, and taking a stand for freedom."

"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

"My readers ask me that question more than just about any other. So here's my question back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download).

I've just published a 30,000 word manifesto, totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation. It took a lot to get it to you, and I'm encouraging you to take a few minutes to check it out. After you read it, perhaps you'll write one of your own."

"I highly recommend you spend the next half-hour watching this very interesting and highly informative talk…"

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

"We conclude from these results that mere exposure will not always produce an increase in liking for paintings. This puts pressure on Cutting’s conclusions that canon formation is simply a function of cultural exposure, and that quality is not playing a role in artistic judgement."

"More broadly, a simple dictum such as ‘listen to the experts’ isn’t going to work, precisely because our most powerful methods of generating new knowledge (viz. the sciences) are not so much based on listening to individual experts, as on including these experts (and many others) in broader social systems which expose them continually to the ideas of others and vice-versa. Designing (or – perhaps better- nurturing) such systems is hard to think about and hard to do – but it has to be the way forward."

"Again, I do not know that the bloggers didn’t write the photographers to obtain commercial-use permission. But I doubt it. My judgement is borne from personal experience. I see my images popping up on commercial blogs all the time, and fewer than one in ten asks my permission.

I don’t mean to single out WIRED, either. I’m only picking on them for the recent ant example. In reality, many commercial blog networks show rampant disregard for the rights of artists, photographers, and musicians. They may not have been caught, yet, but they could incur substantial legal liability when a copyright owner decides to seek damages. After all, using an image beyond the bounds of the license is breaking the law.

The bottom line is this: if someone else’s creative work is helping you make money, you have a moral and a legal obligation to reach an agreement with that person about the terms of use. Creative Commons is supposed to make this easier, but it only works if the content consumers treat CC as a contract and not a blanket license for free use. Creative Commons is not public domain."

"In their recent book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write about one of their main goals:  “We hope to persuade economists with real world concerns to take an interest in what anthropologists have discovered about the human economy, and in the kinds of theories we have advanced to understand it” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  However, they also make this point quite clear: “There is not much hope for dialogue with those who define economics exclusively as the application of an individualistic logic of utility maximization to all domains of social life” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  Ultimately, they say, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists” (Hann and Hart 2011:162)."

"Culture is anti-rivalrous. The more people know and sing a song, the more cultural value it has. The more people watch my film Sita Sings the Blues, or read my comic strip Mimi & Eunice, the happier I’ll be, so please go do that now and then come back and read the rest of this paragraph. The more people know a movie or TV show, the more cultural value it has. Monty Python references attest to the cultural value of Monty Python – we even use the word “spam” because of it. Shakespeare‘s works are culturally valuable, and phrases from them live on in the language even apart from the plays (“I think she doth protest to much,” etc.). The more people refer to Monty Python and Shakespeare, the more you just gotta see em, amiright? Or not, it doesn’t matter whether you see them, you’re already speaking them. That all culture is a kind of language, I’ll leave for another discussion."

"Speculation: There’s a critique of the regulators and key decision makers during the crisis that invokes cultural capital and the idea that regulators are socialized with Wall Street in a way that it is difficult for them to exercise any type of power over them, to see their interests in conflict. I wonder if the same is true for the corporate sector. As the firm goes global, and as the white-collar workforce is broken by computerization and globalization, more and more elite corporate positions will be filled by those leaving Wall Street. (Has this already happened? Data/Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucrative revolving door between corporate elites and financial elites. As such, any natural checks to financial sector power coming from the corporate market space is less likely to happen."

"Similarly, the suburbanites were asked if the frequently cited justification of “wanting to provide my children with a better life” stood in contrast to working seven days a week to accumulate money. Despite the ever-widening gap between parents and children, and the skyrocketing divorce rate resultant from a lifestyle focused not on family but on careers, all those polled responded, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”"

'…But Arum doesn’t place the blame only on the grads. Based on his research with Josipa Roksa, he concludes that American institutions of higher education are not rigorous enough and have “abandoned responsibility for shaping and developing the attitudes and dispositions necessary for adult success.”

Just what are those attitudes and abilities? Character traits are seen as the most important factors, according the Pew study we’ve reported on this week. For example, 6 of 10 Americans say “a good work ethic” is extremely important. Teamwork and getting along with others is also important, cited by 57%. A college education itself was cited by fewer than half (42%) as a determinant of success.'

"One thing I really would like you to take away from this diary is a basic sense of how the United States, as a self-governing democratic republic, cannot long tolerate oligarchic and aristocratic ideas in its body politic. This is becoming an increasingly urgent issue for us today, because the American conservative movement today is basically a replica of the slavery-defending, anti-free labor, government-hating, insurrection minded, treason-breathing, violently inclined Confederacy. And, I want you to be able to instantly recognize and rebut the false histories that neo-Confederates have created. So, the first material I place before you is an excerpt from an important and emotionally powerful 1995 book, What They Fought For, 1861-1865, a masterful survey and summary of private correspondence from Civil War soldiers and officers, by James M. McPherson."

"A recent post by Seth Godin attempts to define a librarian as something limited by format: print books are bad, digital bits are good. So librarians should become digital wizards, or something. I think the current hip term is "data sherpa who directs and engages conversations," or some other bullshit. And a librarian is bad if she's not continuously evolving and growing toes.

But a good librarian would never exclude a data format from the search results. You ask me for information on turtles and you're getting everything I can find, and that includes printed books. But chances are, you're going to wave your Kindle in my face and say, "I want it here." And regardless of my reply, my eyes will tell you to go fuck yourself.

Sixty percent of the world's people would kill to have a library filled with books. Some countries won't even let you into a library without proper identification. But Americans, on our rapid decent from being a world power toward become the world's bag boy, have lost sight of what has lasting value and moved on to what has recurring monthly fees. In response to Seth's Blog, Bobbi Newman says, "One of the many roles of the public library is to ensure that all people have access to that information."

And that is the fundamental difference with every current view of the library and the real purpose of the library: Libraries are for everyone."

"…For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."

We were all taught to believe in the paradigm of innate intelligence and gene-given talent, "gifts, and no one is going to be convinced otherwise by a few micro-biographical fragments. I go into much greater depth about gene expression and the nuances of the new developmental model of talent (Hint: It doesn't mean we all control our own destiny, or that it all comes down to hard work). Over time, we'll learn to think past the black and white notion of nature vs. nurture. And the world will be a richer place for it.

This was the first annual Data Scientist Summit, and I will no doubt be back. With that said, discussion of technical topics had a bit of an introductory flavor to them, which made the discussion of the technology seem dated. For example, “Vanilla” Hadoop was introduced as a tool for processing vast amounts of data. I would expect that most Data Scientists have worked with Hadoop, or at least know what it is. Hadoop is somewhat old news in terms of “cutting-edge technology.” Tools like Pig, Cascalog, HBase, Hive, Cascading, etc. would have been a better discussion topic. I was also disappointed with how little coverage of tools (except for Hadoop, NoSQL, and enterpise databases) there was. It seemed as if R had gone M.I.A. and I was surprised that there was such little discussion of visualization tools like Tableau, Processing, Gephi, D3, Polymaps, etc.

"The idea part is cheap. Try to think of an idea that’s actually worth something on its own. “I wish I’d thought up the web browser.” Bullshit. The web browser had been thought up at least twenty years before those high-energy frogs coded one up on NeXTstep (c.f. Dynabook, 1968). It was the actual shipping product they wrote that caused the internet revolution, not the idea."