The Guardian (back in April) took a peek at the Librie EBR-1000EP which costs c. 220 pounds (only available in Japan at the moment) and sports a 6in screen with a resolution of 600×800 dots at 170dpi, (better than the 70-90dpi of a regular computer display). It’s using the microcapsule display technology pioneered by “E Ink”:http://www.eink.com/ working with Sony and others.

It’s potentially a very exciting development – it’s a pity that according to “a recent review in Fortune magazine”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/peterlewis/0,15704,685443-1,00.html Sony predictably enough married this potentially revolutionary technology to a boneheaded copy protection scheme.

Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link

Remember my hard disk crashed? Well, I’ve been kicking myself ever since for a stupid thing I did early on in the recovery process. I managed to boot from my backup disk and found I could access the original. ‘Great!’ I said to myself, ‘I’d better copy across all my most valuable files quickly in case the disk stops being accessable again!’ Did I copy them into new directories? Nooo… I copied them over the earlier backup files. Well the files looked fine and I did check some of them before copying. But it turned out several of the email folders I hadn’t checked were in fact corrupted. And even when the mailboxes looked fine (the ‘overview’ showed the right names and subject lines) the contents were corrupted as well. Ten years of email gone!

So remember if you get files back from a disk that has been giving you trouble, make sure to preserve your old backup files just in case!

P.S. In the wake of this catastrophe I was thinking of moving my emailing to my gmail account but gmail still doesn’t support basic things like email groups so I guess I’ll have to hope that the hard disk doctors I gave my disk to can get the files off.
P.P.S. And yes, it is a little embarrassing that I wrote a book about good email practice but managed nonetheless to mess up!

JD Lasica “suggests”:http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php that because blogs like “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.com/ are linked to more often than many websites of many ‘old media’ organizations, this means bloggers are starting to trust other bloggers more than the mainstream media.

While “Technorati’s chart of in-links”:http://ojr.org/ojr/uploads/1092273094.jpg (and “pubsub’s”:http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php) comparing ‘old media’ properties and blogs are interesting to see, they under-state the importance of the mainstream media to set the agenda because a very substantial proportion of the posts to blogs that are linked to are in turn derived directly from those same old media sites. A better (but more difficult to do) analysis would be to try to measure how many of the posts most linked to add significant facts or thought out opinions (more than just ‘I agree’) to existing debates in the press.

Moreover, it is absurd to extrapolate from the readership habits of bloggers to the readership habits of the wider public. Bloggers are in no way representative – we are much more likely to read other people’s weblogs than the broader Internet population (see “the analysis I did earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/001206.html) and of course most of us are geekier (Slashdot is the most popular weblog cited – QED).

The Living Room Candidate is a fascinating site which archives campaign commercials from 1952 to the present including “‘independent’ ads”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/shadow.php from interest groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/player/index.php?ad_id=1152 one which disgracefully tries to call Kerry’s war record into question. It even includes a “Desktop Candidate”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/index.php section which links to various Internet-based ads.

P.S. To track the veracity of claims made in campaign ads on both sides of this year’s race, check out “Factcheck.org”:http://www.factcheck.org/ which has done a thorough analysis of that “controversial swift boat ad”:http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231.

Giving away most of his $45m fortune was not enough for Zell Kravinsky – he gave away one of his kidneys too, to a black woman who was a stranger to him and who would probably otherwise have died. His was one of only ‘several dozen’ nondirected kidney donations made each year in the US. The more I read this New Yorker article about Kravinsky the more admiration I feel for him and the more it saddens me that he seems to be painted largely as a crank. He seems to have been inspired by Peter Singer whose influential essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality pointed out (to my mind convincingly) that there is no moral difference between failing to save a child who is drowning in a shallow pond right in front of you and failing to give money to charity that would help to save a child’s life in Bangladesh. Moreover it is hard to establish a moral difference between one’s responsibility to one’s family and friends and the same responsibility to any other person in need. (I am not at all persuaded incidentally by Singer’s next step which is to suggest that All Animals are Equal and therefore, ‘ that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species’).

I do believe (uncomfortably) that I should really be living at a minimum comfort level and the rest of my money should be going to those who need it in the third world. Like most people however I would have great difficulty living according to that principle and accordingly I put it to the back of my mind and try to do what I can within the limits of ‘normal’ behaviour. That makes me all the more filled with admiration for one of the few people who seems to be making a serious, conscientious attempt to live according to those principles (albeit imperfectly – he and his family are not living a millionaire lifestyle but neither are they ‘living poor’).

More coverage of his story from The Daily Telegraph.

Back and forth the pendulum of history swings. First the Aborigines in Australia were savages to be pitied, then they were victims who were pitilessly killed by white colonists – then 18 months ago Keith Windschuttle, a conservative historian wrote a stinging rebuke to those historians who strove to uncover the dark side of Australia’s history, claiming that they appear to have exaggerated or made up the evidence of those crimes. Not surprisingly, it has touched off “a furore”:http://www.sydneyline.com/.

The Australian brings us “up to date with the controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10205639%255E28737,00.html in a manner rather sympathetic to Windschuttle. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong but the Australian historical establishment’s seeming desire to circle the wagons and attack the man and the media rather than his allegations is un-edifying. It seems to be having the unfortunate effect of turning him into a “martyr among conservative bloggers”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=sydneyline.com.

I hope someone from the Australian historical establishment will come by and make a good case for why things are not as they have been painted by the media and Windschuttle himself…

If the “description of Cybergypsies I gave earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_arts_reviews.html#001171 piqued your curiosity there is an interview with the author of Cybergypsies, Indra Singha on “The Well”:http://well.com in a part of it that is open to the public – “inkwell”:http://engaged.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue where lots of author interviews take place (his is number 52). It turns out that the promotional website he created for the book has been (incompletely) captured via the “Internet Archive”:http://web.archive.org/web/20010610025144/www.wiseserpent.com/cybergypsies/menu.html and what do you know – the multi-user dungeon he spent much of his time in is “still running”:http://games.world.co.uk/shades/!

Microsoft Watch has created a Web ranking tool which brings together various publicly-available ways of assessing the popularity of a given page – Google’s PageRank, Alexa’s traffic rank and a count of total external backlinks from Yahoo (which reports these much better than Google apparently).

None of these are very precise measures but they are the only ones available for sites that are not big enough to turn up in commercial surveys of web popularity as far as I know – anyone got any better ones? Come to that are there any easy ways to get at some of the site popularity data produced by people like “Comscore”:http://www.comscore.com/ without paying them commercial rates?

“Chris Bertram”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ posts on Crooked Timber about the “UN’s Human Development Report 2004”:http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/ which has produced (inter alia) a “human poverty index”. Predictably the fact that the UK, Ireland and the US are numbers 15, 16 and 17 among developed countries on that index has been remarked upon and just as predictably the low placement of the Anglo-Saxon countries is blamed by some on fiddling of statistics. If you are interested in inequality (as I am) you could do worse than read the long thread of mostly thoughtful comments after the Crooked Timber posting.