I haven't seen details of Google's 'newsrank' patents, but am pretty sure that Moreover's 'source rank' which does pretty much the same thing, by the sound of it, and which has been made public to clients since 2001, would constitute prior art.

BetaNews | Google Plans to Rank News By Quality:

"Patents recently filed by search giant Google reveal that it plans to soon rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source, rather than just by date or relevance as it currently does in its searches."

We've added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr's badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover.

You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text.

To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on 'publish on your site', next to the XML icon.

Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan's highline, which were unveiled at Monday's opening at MOMA.

Manhattan's highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park.

It's a terrible idea.

Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern.
The problem is that linear parks don’t really ever function as parks, a place to hang around and enjoy nature, they are often built (like the highline) in a place that does not lend itself to mature plant [oops - plant originally spelled as 'planet'] growth and the spaces themselves are not 'static' - in short they become expensive, fancy, shrub lined, bike lanes.

The double whammy for the Highline project is that it is a raised linear park, with all of the problems that separating pedestrian flow from the ground produced in large urbanism projects in the 50's and 60's.

The biggest problem the Highway has is that it is built on a Victorian cast-iron structure [update - it was actually built as late as 1930, still feels like Victorian engineering IMHO] that creates really nasty urban spaces beneath it - the challenge of this project is not so much the park but what is done to renovate it underneath.

Diller, Scofidio and now Renfro may do a better job here than most, if enough money is poured in to do something interesting and quirky, but over time whatever they do will decay and return to the inevitable character that 19th century iron structures seem to have.

Given the challenges of creating a park where the benefits of it being on a raised deck outweigh the negative aspects of the potentially dank, dreary space beneath, there is another option for the highline, which doesn't result in pretty drawings -

Tear it down

And free up another small piece of Manhattan from its curse - shadow.

Marc Canter had it absolutely right when he cautioned about the fuss over Ajax.

Perhaps Ajax is a meme more than a 'thing', and like all good meme's something that is spreading because the environment is ready for it.

When I first used Gopher or WAIS and then downloaded Mosaic I was impressed by the architectural simplicity of Internet applications, so much so that I stopped being an architect and started working on web stuff.

Here was something in computing that was seemingly a retrograde step - one window instead of many. I spent most of my day at the time in front of a twin screen CAD application that had several hundred palettes. But because that one window opened onto a world of other computers, like a unix terminal, it was so much more elegant. (My favorite new experience with UI has been finally using VI, a text editor with Zen-like elegance that has evolved over 30 years while maintaining simplicity).

In fact the one window paradigm has persisted in an almost inevitable way, as the parasites of the web have driven people to use pop-up blockers, thus keeping it from becoming more like windowS, plural, apps.

The chunkiness of the web continued when forms were introduced, and people started to create applications, but with the new restrictions of statelessness and non event-driven UI.

Restrictions are sometimes held up as the mother of elegance and the web had all of them: bandwidth restrictions, browser compatibility restrictions, restrictions maintaining state, procedural user interface restrictions and the one window paradigm.

From this, the web has, in my opinion, improved the quality of software design.

But the web now exists in an environment where some of those restrictions are easing and perhaps the time is right for event driven UI (which as Marc pointed out, has been available for years with Flash, but just within the wrong community) so perhaps Ajax is, like better bandwidth, a natural evolution.

And, unlike the poorly thought out attempts at useability standardization, Ajax is an elegant way to lay down some specifics for richer web apps - even if there is absolutely nothing really new in it.

Ancient rivers and sedimentary rocks on Mars.

A gravity warmed sea beneath Europa's crust.

Microbe like structures in a Martian meteorite.

Planets around distant stars.

And now: Cassini Finds Hydrocarbons on Titan

The last few years have dramatically changed the notion that life on Earth is unique. With a sample of one, there is way way to be sure, but each new discovery points in the same direction.
I would hazard a guess that the universe is indeed teeming with life, as a natural, emergent phenomenon.

That seems like a wonderful, awe inspiring thought, and yet we are still arguing as to how life evolved on our own planet. Arguing about evolution itself.

There are those who would have the universe be billions of times smaller, thousands of times younger, and with no diversity. Is that more wonderful, more spiritual?

Dana Blankenhorn graciously apologizes for his piece saying that Evan should resign from blogger. Well done Dana.

After the Fall: Corante > Moore's Lore >

Tabloids are big in the UK, and its always been a mystery to me why in a country like the US, which is the king of popular culture, there is no real-news tabloid.

I like tabloids cos they are funny and I like Sploid even more because it is like Slashdot meets the Onion, edited by Richard Dawkins.

You often hear the term 'moral relativism' used pejoratively compared to the continued use of the morality of 2000 years ago.

What this needs is a new term - much like the use of the positive word gay instead of homosexual or pro-life instead of anti-abortion.

Moral relativism means is that your notion of morality changes over time - but like the arrow of time itself it always moves forward - moral relativism means moral progress, as compared with the static and eventually obsolete morality endorsed by all religions.

Quotes by Pope Ratzi:

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. ... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards."

Indeed it is, and moral progress is better by definition.

Dawkins in the Independant

Remember, Dawkins' credentials make Hitchens look like the poseur he is.

Below is the top story on Reuters: it shows a recent trend where Greenspan has had to repeatedly warn against government spending and yet the markets and the party favored by the markets doesn't react...

There was a point when the government and markets would quiver if Greenspan looked like he had got out of bed on the wrong side. Nowadays, idealogy and faith seems to be driving capitalism too - a dangerous thing.

Greenspan Warns Deficits Endanger Economy

"Much of the Fed chairman's testimony echoed prior cautions he has made to Capitol Hill lawmakers. He stressed that steps to fix the problem were essential.

"As the latest projections from the (Bush) administration and the Congressional Budget Office suggest, our budget position is unlikely to improve substantially in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken," the Fed chief said."

Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com

In Why Google Is Faltering on RSS: Corante > Moore's Lore >

Dan Blankenhorn, claims that:

1. Google is falling behind on blogging and RSS,

He provides no argument - like the fact that blogspot is actually the biggest blogging network and that as RSS goes into GMail it will possibly be the biggest RSS aggregator so arguably they are doing ok (and to be honest both RSS and blogging software are not rocket science Google can turn up the heat when they want to).

2. blames it on Blogger management.

He clearly doesn't know or has bothered to investigate how the Google Blogger relationship works.

3. Blames Evan williams in particular proposing he steps down.

Er Evan isn't at Blogger and hasn't been for 6 months.

Ooops.

Ars Technica takes apart a story in the Independant that has spread widely on blogs, which claimed that a huge number of ancient texts by people such as Sophocles were about to be deciphered. The "classical holy grail" or unholy hype?

The Original Story pre-fisking:

"Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world.

Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome...

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod... They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels...Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".
".

Ars Technica:

"as of right now, the rest of the papyrological community is waiting to hear Dirk Obbink at Oxford either back up for disavow the claims made in the article. At the very best, the Independent's reporters are covering some kind of new imaging breakthrough in an extremely hyperbolic fashion. And at the worst, they're trying to make a major story out of 20-year-old news."

Today's Financial Times has a piece announcing the trial of 4 men for the murder of a senior Vatican banker, who had threatened to blow the whistle on corruption linked to the Catholic Church with details he said were enough to provoke 'the third world war'.

This announcement comes more than twenty years after the murder happened - on the exact day that the first election of a new Pope commences.

The Shady Deals of God's Banker

Over twenty years ago, after being arrested on corruption charges involving dissapearance of $1 billion, on a trail that lead to the Vatican, and possible funding of right wing governments in South America, Roberto Calvi was found hanging under a bridge in London. His death was deemed to be suicide but was later deemed to be murder.

Against the backdrop of the Vatican banking scandal, Pope John Paul II was appointed as the first non Italian Pope in over four hundred years. This unusual appointment was possibly to sidestep political wrangling and disagreement amongst factions in the church over things such as corruption.

Now, I am not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories (since because people like to believe mysteries, there will always be a large population of false mysteries and conspiracy theories) but this one stands out for two reasons:

1. there is plenty of evidence.
2. there is plenty of precedent for this kind of corruption in Italy.
3. the evidence comes from reputable sources.
4. the level of 'coincidence' in some of the events surrounding the mystery is very high.

So it seems very odd that the announcement that 4 people will stand trial for Calvi's murder is made on the exact day that the election of a new Pope begins after more than 8,000 days.

If there were a faction in the Catholic Church, involved in corruption that Calvi had threatened to expose, then perhaps the announcement of this trial is a warning to that group not to try and engineer the election of their man to be the Pope.

Home schooling has traditionally been given to kids whose parents are on the extreme fringes of society, hippes on the left and bible bashers on the right.

Because of the growth in religious extremism, there has been a similar growth in home schooling, meaning that some schools have had their budgets cut as they lose pupils and per pupil funding.

To woo pupils back, a school in Oregon is changing its curriculum to include creationism in science classes and biblical texts in English literature classes, leading to a crappy science and boring, one-dimensional art education for everyone.

So for those that do point out that the US is by and large moderate, here is a concrete example of how the passion of a mindless minority over the apathy of the majority leads to an undemocratic situation where the minority view is enforced rather than tolerated.

Oregon District Aims to Woo Home-Schoolers

Great post by Ryan at 'You Know what Part' that shreds my last post on the US becoming a theocracy. You Know What Part: Religion, politics and my ticket to Hell

Things that Ryan is right about:

1. I did invoke Godwin's law. Godwin's law is useful when ranting.

2. The US is not really becoming a theocracy. In actual fact as the Economist pointed out, most people have centrist, moderate beliefs and politics, but the margins are where elections are won.

3. Progressive circles have their fair share of hypocracy and there is something even more irritating about liberal self-righteousness - because they should know better.

4. As my friend Alex pointed out - as a founder of an Internet genealogy company, I have a vested interest in the Earth being older than Biblical claims.

But... There are a bunch of religious nutters whose voice tipped the margins in an election and who don't exactly refrain from invoking Godwin's law either. And they are trying to mess up what I get to watch on telly.

My main problem with the religious right is not that they are unscientific; it's that they are so inartistic, unspiritual - I can't think of anything less soulful than modern Christian music, and protestant church architecture has reduced cathedral splendor to the monotony of suburban track housing.

The Toronto star carries an edited version of a Financial Times editorial on the threat of Creationism:TheStar.com - Creationism's assault on science

The article points out a valid analogy. There is overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust was real, yet a minority of ideologically driven historians still deny it.

The consensus amongst historians as to the reality of the Holocaust is statistically equivalent to the consensus amongst scientists in support of evolution, yet a particular sect of militant protestant Christianity, which is popular in the US and Brazil is enforcing the irrational belief of the minority on the majority.

Sure, it can be argued that it is part of the scientific process to encourage debate and look at alternate theories, but some theories are better than others. Suspicion should be aroused when theories are in fact hypotheses masking as theories and when those hypotheses are things that are driven not by minds open to alternate theories but minds which are only open to theories that match a particular ideology. There is a point where it doesn't make sense to consider theories with no merit.

That point was reached between Christians and scientists many years ago regarding the earth revolving around the sun, yet the debate was decided by killing people with opposing views to the church. More recently, some people have challenged the evidence regarding the wanton destruction of 6 million lives. Make no mistake, creationism is about lack of debate and closed minds.

To deny the fact of evolution and deprive people an education because of a particular belief not shared by everybody, is equivalent to the shameful historical revisionism by anti-Semites who wish to rewrite history because of their own ideological agenda.

Despite this, for a number of reasons, the views of evangelical Christians are treated with respect, such that the President of a first world democracy is able to state 'the jury is still out on evolution'.

Imagine if that statement had been: 'the jury is still out as to whether the Holocaust happened'.

Eppur si muove.

delicious! on Flickr

Fred Wilson, Howard Morgan, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Peter Gadjokov...

Tagging
Tagging, i.e. on-the-fly user generated keyword categorization looks like it is becoming the standard way to categorize weblog content, replacing things like fixed pre-set categories. In other words items are categorized at the point of posting, at the level of individual posts rather than according to a pre-existing taxonomy.

Linkblogging and bookmarking
In addition it looks like the there is an intersection between bookmarking and weblogging, where ‘link blogging’, the process of creating content that is a link to a site with a short comment, rather than a full length blog post, is possibly better handled through a dedicated bookmarking system such as Del.icio.us or Wists posting to a blog via standard API’s while adding to a shared directory in parallel.

RSS and metadata.
RSS 1.0 and 2.0 extend the notion of the earliest versions of RSS as a means to syndicate simple headlines and links with extensible modules, allowing for any metadata to be syndicated through RSS.

Despite the fact that RSS has been around for nearly 10 years and that extending RSS via modules has been around for 5, there is not a single RSS aggregator that can read a new RSS module or extension, on-the-fly, allow for results to be filtered by this metadata and display it correctly. Although this sounds complicated, it need not be – an example would be addition of a tag called price - allowing a user to show items from product RSS feeds within a specific price range. This is clearly the future of RSS.

On the publisher side, one of the reasons why modules are not cropping up everywhere is that there are no simple tools for people to create RSS modules. At the moment people have to sit down and agree on a module and draft a spec. For example here is one that I worked on that is used for biographical information: http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/

Top down vs bottom up.
RSS itself is a grassroots phenomenon, an example of a standard that has reached widespread adoption from grassroots involvement by the developer community, rather than a standards organization. Tagging is also a grassroots phenomenon, but even more so – it is available to end users rather than developers and so is truly a bottom up system of user community classification. In light of this, perhaps there is something to be done to make the process of adding metadata to RSS a real community driven, bottom up, activity, by placing the right tools in the hands of end users.

The Semantic Web.
Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, has long been a champion of the Semantic Web, which he saw as the next major development in the use of the web. The idea of the Semantic Web is that by defining how meaning is encoded within documents and applications on the web, underlying meaning could be extracted automatically by computers linking pieces of meaning together, allowing for all sorts of new uses of the web. At its core this involves defining a data model that defines meaning and links it to things, which on the web are URLs, or more generally URIs. The model for how this information is laid out mirrors everyday language, where sentences consist of subject, predicates and objects – triples. The web is defined as a graph – a spiders web of interconnected points, nodes, with interconnecting relationships, edges. The Semantic Web defines the data model, RDF, for how the web, becomes an edge labeled graph of meaning. This data model is very simple, but beyond the data model, syntaxes needed to be defined as to how to implement it. The most widely known syntax for RDF is in XML and is the on used by the original version of RSS at Netscape and also RSS 1.0. Some of the elements of modularity of RDF are also present in RSS 2.0. The problem is that the XML RDF syntax is tricky and difficult for end users to understand, and so that is an impediment to people creating Semantic Web style metadata extensions to RSS.

The semantic web.
Recently people have been talking about the ‘lower case’ semantic web, where some of the ideas and aims of the semantic web are achieved without dependence on some of the standards that were part of the wider Semantic Web initiative.

Tagging and semantics
When you tag an item with a keyword such as “turkey”. what you are implicitly saying is “category=turkey”. The problem with this is that sometimes “category” is not enough context for a tag. Meaning always requires context. Wists allows you to label the context of a tag with anything (where the default is implicitly “category”). In the above example you could label something as “food=turkey” or “country=turkey”. These groups of tags, “metatags” allow you to indicate the context of a tag and give tags greater meaning and less ambiguity. Popular metatags that people have already created include location= for places and fav= for people’s favorite movies and books etc.

By allowing people to create metatags and attaching these metatags to their own ‘namespace’ you allow for the possibility of formally defining groups of metatags as an RSS module for a specific industry. In theory one can create a marketplace for RSS modules where the people creating the modules need not know or care about the technicalities of what this means. In other words if people involved in apartment rentals start to tags things in the following manner: rooms=3 square_feet=2000 monthly_rent=2000 etc., one has the beginnings of something that could be formalized as a standard module for apartment rentals with elements defined in a standard namespace.

It is possible that these early steps in grass roots classification via tagging could evolve into something more along the lines of what the original aims of the semantic web promised.

Excellent resource listing the various projects underway to create 3d models of Manhattan: VTerrain: New York City

Sin City is a well made adaptation, a blend of digitally enhanced comic art, Sky Captain style, and high contrast silvery tones, Leni Riefenstahl style.

Unfortunately, it is as morally bankrupt as the work of the latter.

Sin City creates baddies that nobody will defend, child killers and child rapists, complete with a nod to catholic priest involvement, and demonizes them to the extent that we are supposed to be entertained by the revenge that is coming to them.

This is nothing new, although it does tend to be the terrain of low-brow film making such as 'Death Wish'. The difference in Sin City, is that having been spurred on by the acceptance of caricature ultra-violence in Kung Fu inspired Tarantino films, Sin City chooses to linger on the elimination of the bad guys.

In other words Sin City shows the bad guys being tortured to death.

So here was I on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by popcorn munching and soda sipping, watching a bad guy having his dick and balls ripped out by hand and his head pummeled into a soft pulp by Bruce Willis - and I couldn't see the justification for this, the message, the irony even, other than a slightly worrying thought that the bad guy looked like the depiction of the bad guys in shots I've seen from a Nazi propaganda film.

Except this wasn't propaganda, this was entertainment, there was no message.

SIN CITY

A leader:

who was not elected democratically, but by a group of unelected barons

who was elected for life with no need for re-election

of a country where :

there is no separation of church and state, where the state is the church

dies.

And most politicians of modern democracies eulogise him, because the idolizing of this leader is such that many citizens of these modern democracies will do whatever this foreign, undemocratically elected leader says, despite the fact that idolitary is forbidden for the followers of this leader.

Because people will naturally worship stars like the Pope and Britney Spears emotions may run wild when we criticise them, but exactly because the Pope was a leader, and particularly because he wasn't democratically elected then his actions should not be above scrutiny or criticism .

The late pope was objectively damn good at what he did, but despite the images of a gentle old man towards the end of his life, he was a tough guy. In fighting communism, he was good, in reinforcing outdated catholic attitudes to the modern world he was bad.

Dawkins on when not to beleive:

"Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding."