US Attorney for the district of Massachusetts. (more)

A cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America, traditionally on horseback, and often performs a multitude of other ranch-related tasks. The historic American cowboy of the late 19th century arose from the vaquero traditions of northern Mexico and became a figure of special significance and legend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy (more)

Recent events caused me to sketch a design for a Breaking News interface.

In his book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, Walter Russell Mead categories foreign policy beliefs into 4 groups, summarized here by current-practitioners and typical values: (more)

Rob Curley's weekly "702.tv" (Video) program for the Las Vegas Sun Newspaper site was shut down. Eventually, people will watch Web videos on their home television (TV) sets and mobile devices. In theory, newspaper companies should invest now to develop video skills and earn a reputation for quality video Journalism. But the equipment, training and staffing are expensive. And while video pre-roll advertising typically commands a high rate, it's difficult to produce enough video to break even. So when the economy tanks and newspaper revenues plummet, video is seen as expendable. Some videographers at other newspapers complain privately about cutbacks that result in fewer videographers, more of an emphasis on short, Breaking News videos at the expense of longer, narrative pieces, and being required to shoot still photos for the paper. Hmm, I'm dubious about the fit of long pieces developed with expensive Digital Video Camera-s, vs guerilla Flip Video users.

Jay Rosen's Studio20 NYU class has been working with The Atlantic's Quartz site on a model Crowd Sourcing Journalism ("the networked beat"). When the users know more than the journalists (Sources Go Direct), what are good journalists supposed to do?.. We think there are brand opportunities for Quartz in making its own: Intelligent filters, Preferred sources, River Of News (Another Dave Winer concept) (RSS Republisher). (more)

Bob Frankston on re-FramIng Municipal Wifi as OpenNet. We must be careful to avoid the notion of the city being the exclusive provider and instead, in the spirit of the Internet it can and must come from the edge with each of us contributing to create the whole... I'm enthusiastic about wireless connectivity but believe we can do far better by taking control from the edges of the network rather than modeling as a service in the style of Broad Band and the earlier digital phone networks. We already have abundant connectivity - at least potentially. But we have it locked down into exclusive "broadband pipes". Rather than building another service delivery system we should take control of what we already have. It's shameful we have no ownership to our basic Infrastructure. It's owned by carriers so who use it to sell us services... Rather than framing municipal connectivity as just another exclusive service delivery platform we have to make existing capacity available and add to it. I was once an enthusiastic supporter of municipal connectivity but now I fear it. The basic dynamic of the Internet is one of taking advantage of opportunities and discovering what's possible and this can lead to conflicts with the model of the city as a service provider. The cities have an important role as a contributor rather than exclusive provider... Today's access points are problematic because they can expose internal network traffic. But we can address that problem by improved NAT software which partitions segregates internal traffic and perhaps gives it a preference. VPN technology allows mobile users to maintain safe and stable connections to the rest of the Internet without depending upon meshes or other centralized implementations... Note that I said "plan to" - the actual implementations of these projects tend to be difficult because cities tend to be process heavy - to say it nicely. This alone would be reason enough to be skeptical even if there were no other issues... We then need to ask why - what is the purpose of MWF? It's certainly not for people Walking around browsing on their Lap Top-s looking at web pages... Why spend a lot of money to build an entirely new infrastructure when we already have existing "broadband" infrastructure that we've paid for? It makes a lot more sense (and dollars) to simply share an access point (HotSpot) among nearby houses and even not so near if we have a relay... Unless we provide abundant connectivity we can easily find ourselves trying to prevent "abuse" (and, worse, defining abuse) in order to keep explicit or implicit promises... Perhaps the most important step the city can take is to drop the word "WireLess" (as in the DD (Digital Divide) example above). It doesn't really matter how we provide connectivity. Wireless is just part of the mix. Public Housing should be connected as a matter of course. In fact future Housing Code-s (Zoning) should presume connectivity... We have trouble imagining how much capacity there really is and the importance of sharing a single infrastructure. If you've got firefighters (Fire Department) working in a basement they must be able to take advantage of any available connectivity. Better improve all streets than create a parallel network of streets for each purpose... We should assume that we have abundant common infrastructure funded as a commons rather than as billable services and then work to transition to this model.

The 2007 Boston Ma bomb scare occurred on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 after both the Boston Police Department and Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards resembling the Mooninite characters of the Cartoon Network show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IED-s)... Authorities responded with what the Boston Globe described as "[an] army of emergency vehicles" at the scene, including police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances, and the Boston Police Department bomb squad. Also present were live TV crews with helicopters circling overhead and a large crowd of onlookers... Some devices had been up in the cities listed for two weeks before the Boston incident occurred, although no permits were ever secured for the devices' installation... The slender, placemat-sized items had dozens of colored lights, exposed wires and circuitry, and were powered by a row of D batteries wrapped in black tape. In other words, they looked like an upscale version of Hasbro's Lite Brite, a toy for artistic grade-schoolers... On February 27, 2007, just a month after the incident, the Boston police bomb squad responded again and detonated another object that they believed to be a bomb, but turned out to be a city-owned traffic counter... On May 11, 2007, the prosecutors decided not to pursue criminal charges in exchange for community service and a public apology. (more)

Stowe Boyd wonders whether the CIO, CTO, and CMO will end up reporting to the CDO (Chief Digital Officer). (more)

co-founder Apple Computer (more)

University Of California at Berkeley

Retail business that combines physical stores (Bricks And Mortar) with E Commerce. "IntegratedRetail" (more)

here's a handy list http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/learning+theories (more)

some overlapping ideas/options (Book Publishing, Writing A Book) (more)

the really crazy Korea (more)

Jeff Atwood has formed a new Start Up named Civilized Discourse Construction Kit (Discourse). They've built a new Discussion Forum app (Ruby On Rails, PostgreSQL) that's Open Source, and apparently they'll make money by hosting it. Some nice features. Very JavaScript driven (SEO problems?), using EmberJs Javascript Client Framework. (more)

Bruce Feiler's latest book is The SecretsOfHappyFamilies ISBN:0061778745. Among other things it suggests applying Agile Software Development tactics and Mission statements and other Culture tools. (cf Lean Family)

John Hagel compares Passion and Obsession. People said I was passionate about chemistry, but they were wrong – I was obsessed. I was using chemistry as an escape from a very difficult childhood. It was a survival mechanism, not a means to achieve my full potential. (more)

Virginia Postrel reviews David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom. Before he gets to images, Fischer turns to etymology, establishing a contrast between liberty, whose Latin roots suggest release from bondage, and freedom, which shares Northern European origins with friend. ''The original meanings of freedom and liberty,'' he writes, ''were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.'' He makes much of this distinction throughout the book, favoring ''freedom'' and often disparaging ''liberty'' (associating it, for instance, with Southern Racism). Yet he also declares that the creative tension between the two concepts has given English-speaking people ''a distinctive dynamism in their thought about liberty and freedom.''... (His earlier book noted) New England Puritans pursued ''ordered liberty,'' or community self-government, which could impose substantial restrictions on Individual Freedom of action or conscience. Southern cavaliers believed in ''hegemonic liberty,'' a status system in which liberty was a jealously guarded aristocratic privilege that entitled some men to rule the lives of others. By contrast, Delaware Valley Quakers subscribed to ''reciprocal liberty,'' in which every person was recognized as a fellow child of God, entitled to Self Determination and freedom of conscience. Finally, the largest group of immigrants, the borderlanders often called Scotch-Irish, adhered to ''natural liberty,'' a visceral, sometimes violent defense of self and clan. In foreign policy, Fischer's ''natural liberty'' maps directly to the ''Jacksonian America'' outlined by the political scientist Walter Russell Mead - isolationist by preference but relentlessly violent when attacked... Fischer's antipathy for Milton Friedman, whom he doesn't name but whose department at the University Of Chicago he refers to as ''dogmatic'' twice in as many sentences, may stem less from Friedman's Libertarian popular works than from his influential monetary scholarship, which contradicts Fischer's own eccentric - to put it mildly - theories of inflation... He seems to resent all these contentious people (except for consensus civil rights heroes) who insist on disturbing established institutions and ideas with their demands for liberty and freedom. Indeed, he implies that they're downright dangerous. ''If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom,'' he concludes. But not, of course, his own.

More-honest name for what gets talked about as the Sharing Economy - where there's actual money changing hands - Uber, AirBnb, etc.