Chris Boese's Weblog

Hilarious picture of the day

Link: The Mod Squad: Rummy, Jerry & Dick's '70s Style - Wonkette.

On a completely unrelated note, I just have to say, post-holiday bad leftovers food poisoning REALLY SUCKS!

A Bluestem Prairie: Book meme

Link: A Bluestem Prairie: Book meme.

Playing Tag

OK, Ollie Ox wants me to tell what's on page 123 of a book I'm reading right now. Here's the prompt:

Book meme

Book meme (tagged by The Great and Powerful Santa Wege at Norwegianity).

  1. Grab the book closest to you.
   2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
   3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
   4. Name of the book and the author
   5. Tag three people

It just so happens I'm packing my books these days, and donating many to the local library. Here is one I'm donating that it pains me greatly to let go of:

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Jonathan Kozol.

"The point is often made that, even with a genuine equality of schooling for poor children, other forces still would militate against their school performance. Cultural and economic factors and the flight of middle-income blacks from inner cities would still have their consequences in the heightened concentration of the poorest children in the poorest neighborhoods. Teen-age pregnancy, drug use and other problems still would render many families in these neighborhoods all but dysfunctional."

Let's see, who should I tag?

Tim Boese, Sherry Heyl, and Meg at Sugar Pains.

Old FBI memo: "It's a Wonderful Life" is commie propaganda

Since I'm watching the movie right now, I couldn't resist this wonderful Boing Boing link.

In what parallel universe could "It's a Wonderful Life" be communist propaganda? (Don't fall in the swimming pool, George!)

I always got the biggest kick out of Michael J. Fox's "Back to the Future," because its alternative future is clearly "Potterville" for modern times. And it always freaks me out a little too, because I remember places that looked like that, in the 1980s. Like maybe even, NYC's Times Square. Wasn't that a great place to visit, back then?

But really, the only universe that this film could be "communist" (Capra's socialist/populist/progressive inclinations notwithstanding) is a universe that finds anything that ISN'T Potterville an affront, an insult to to any values worth having, right? Just ask Mr. Potter.

And when the Soviet Union fell, what was made in in its place? Potterville on STEROIDS. An utter nightmare of Potterville. Gee, I really want to live there. Maybe some University of Chicago economists can build me my own Potterville somewhere. It must be hard, tho, with Pinochet dead and all, to keep the pure-hearted spirit of Potterville alive and safe from all those evil communists.

Link: Boing Boing: Old FBI memo: "It's a Wonderful Life" is commie propaganda.

Old FBI memo: "It's a Wonderful Life" is commie propaganda

FBI documents from 1947 show that government officials once believed the Christmas movie classic "It's a Wonderful Life" was Communist propaganda. About the FBI memo titled "COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY," Blogger Will Chen writes,

I love It's a Wonderful Life  because it teaches us that family, friendship, and virtue are the true definitions of wealth.

In 1947, however, the FBI considered this anti-consumerist message as subversive Communist propaganda (read original FBI memo). 

According to Professor John Noakes  of Franklin and Marshall College, the FBI thought Life smeared American values such as wealth and free enterprise while glorifying anti-American values such as the triumph of the common man.

Link. 1947 was the same year in which the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigating suspected Communist influence in Hollywood. This led to the blacklisting of many directors, writers, and other talent. More background on that: Link.

Storming the gates to get women in science and engineering

Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times

I just love reading articles like these, and given that so many are having amnesia about the 1970s and the feminist movement, I'm SO GLAD conferences like these below are being held.

Storm the gates, indeed. Replace sexist gatekeepers! Make visible the invisible extra criteria women have to meet, the extra arses they have to kiss, and the glass ceilings. Women are excelling at university like no other time, outnumbering men as male students fall behind with the general falling literacy levels and anti-intellectualism of our current times.

It feels like dark ages, to see the overall decline in critical and creative and analytic skills not just at university, but across the board. So WHAT DOES IT MEAN if society is losing its marbles wholesale, while women are excelling academically at their highest rate ever, YET WOMEN STILL CANNOT COMPETE in spite of the declining intellectual standards?

It tells me that a reverse merit system has become the norm, an old boys network that isn't just smarmy and clubby, but one which overtly rejects merit on principle across the board, but especially if there's a female gender attached to it.

In other words, women will still get promoted, but they will be carefully chosen women, chosen for how well they level DOWN to the current standards, how well they learn the suck-up system, how well they carefully reveal only a lack of cleverness that won't threaten a promotion system based on de-merit.

Both women and men will have to stand up for scientific standards in these times, times when grants mean results that favor the grant-giver, when government studies have to get their results cleared through the White House before they're announced, when it seems that interested parties not only want their interests conveyed through the lens of corrupted scientific methods, the rich patrons also want to keep their own private alchemists from publishing any results that might advance science, in the name of keeping them "proprietary," patentable, trademarked, and OUT of the public domain.

Which throws verification of results out the window. Not that there's a whole lot of that going around anyway. Can't get the hot grant your university or institute demands to plow the same field someone else already went over.

So this is about women in science and engineering, to be sure, but it's also about the integrity of the intellectual products of our century, and, dare I say it? It's even about Enlightenment values, because those values recognize proven merit, instead of smarmy clubs and insider scams. The value of weighing and proving things, just as one might weigh qualifications and prove a woman might be the best person to get a grant or be promoted.

When contracts go to insiders with no-bid contracts, tunnels collapse, people take kick-backs, the science of our construction doesn't work. When science is corrupted by creeping standards of private alchemy, by the government dictating results as if it were the Inquisition, it means the power of analysis has been overthrown, proof discarded, measurement meaningless.

In that world, the proof of one's qualifications and credentials mean far far less than what you did to buy your favors behind the scenes.

I think it's one step away from one of the more notorious aspects of the Dark Ages, when those who held the greatest power, many princes and rulers, could not read or write themselves, and didn't need to. Every court had a scribe to do it for him, and it wasn't that important a position anyway. The language of power did not speak with the written word.

Contrast that to the time of the Greek democracy at Athens, where the teachers of speaking and writing, the Sophists, were among the highest paid folks around, and they got filthy rich selling their services, because a participatory democracy demanded it.

Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times.

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: December 19, 2006

HOUSTON — Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.

Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.

For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, “and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits,” an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.

So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it. The Association for Women in Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council are among the groups tackling these issues. In just the past two months, conferences have been held at Columbia University and the City University of New York graduate center. Harvard has a yearlong lecture series on “Women, Science and Society.”

This fall, female  scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science.

“The reality is there are barriers that women face,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meeting’s opening dinner. “There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.”

Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.

Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good — that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.

They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.

And they obsess about what they call “the two body problem,” the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family — especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.

Just having a chance to talk about these issues with others who face them lifts some of the burden, said Marla Geha, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who attended the Rice meeting. “It’s even just knowing there’s someone else out there going through the same things.”

[...]

One issue is negotiating skills, said Daniel R. Ames, a psychologist who teaches at Columbia University’s business school and who spoke last month at a university-sponsored symposium, “The Science of Diversity.” Dr. Ames said that when he asks people what worries them about navigating the workplace, men and women give the same answer: How hard should I push? How aggressive should I be? Too little seems ineffective, but too much comes across as brash or unpleasant.

Answering the aggressiveness question correctly can be a key to obtaining the financial resources (like laboratory space or stipends for graduate students) and the social capital (like collaboration and sharing) that are essential for success in science, he said. But, he told his mostly female audience, “the band of acceptable behavior for women is narrower than it is for men.”

Women who assert themselves “may be derogated,” he said, and, possibly as a result, women are less likely to recognize negotiating opportunities, and may beapprehensive about negotiating for resources when opportunities arise. That is a problem, he said, because even small differences in resources can “accumulate over a career to lead to significant differences in outcomes.”

For example, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said.

[...]

And because science is still widely viewed as “a male arena,” she said, a woman who succeeds may be viewed as “selfish, manipulative, bitter, untrustworthy, conniving and cold.”

“Women in science are in a double bind,” Dr. Heilman said. “When not clearly successful, they are presumed to be incompetent. When they are successful, they are not liked.”

Women do better, she said, in environments where they are judged on grants obtained, prizes won, findings cited by other experts, or other explicit criteria, rather than on whether they are, say, “cutting edge.” “There has to be very little room for ambiguity,” Dr. Heilman said. “Otherwise, expectations swoop in to fill the vacuum.”

[...]

All talking at once? I remember asking this same question about chat rooms... in 1995

Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .

This goes along with the TIME magazine pick of "You" as Person (People) of the Year."

I approve of the choice, if not all the Web 2.0 hype (I really don't want to relive the crash again, if it's OK with you hypsters out there).

Brian Williams has the best rated of all the TV anchor blogs (so says TV Newser. I have to believe Brian Stelter at TV Newser, because the old media newspaper site requires a registration to get into its walled garden, and I refuse to do it). (BTW, doesn't anybody suspect some of those TV "celebrity" blogs are ghost-written?)

I'd venture it's because Williams is the best writer of the group, and maybe the smartest. Disclaimer: I used to be an English teacher. Rent a clue. The best blogs are facilitated by the best writers. Now go take another English class, you blogger-wanna bees, and start lobbying to pay English teachers more too. Ever since the start of the blog movement, people have dismissed it as mere solipsism, naval-gazing. But that's old media smoke screen, because the good writers and thinkers are out there, and that's what this is ALL about. YOU.

Blogs are like having the fun part of your English composition class never end, with a real audience, instead of grades. Those of you who secretly or not-so-secretly loved that class, you know who you are. You loved it because you were good at it, and the class gave you the freedom to flex and stretch your writing muscles, for some people, for the very first time time in their lives.

And you should also know that in the Blogosphere, YOU RULE!

So Williams says below that at some point the returns start to diminish, because everybody's talking, but there's not enough listening going on.

Yeah, people said the same thing when first venturing into chat rooms and text-based VR space in the 1990s too. All kinds of wild claims, pro and con, about synchronous speech, because some people could only see it as a "horseless carriage," something that can only fit into a previously-existing concept of model of thinking.

But would the many talkers exist if no one were listening? Are all these blogs merely trees falling in a forest far away? No. That's why the term "USER" in UGC (user-generated content) is ridiculous. This is about INTERACTIVITY and online COMMUNITY. This is SOCIALLY-GENERATED CONTENT.

Starving artists and writers have affected the isolated garret mentality since forever. Now they can do it without getting consumption.

There were always voices that no one listened to. Some of those voices even turned out to be... oh, I don't know, EMILY DICKINSON? And some of those solipsistic self-publishers turned out to be... WALT WHITMAN? How about that? How on Earth did that ever happen?

And there was a reason online fans of the show Xena: Warrior Princess started cranking out novels and stories for an avid audience of other fans, creating a system of writers and readers feeding each other until... WOW, this nearly invisible little community started generating millions of hits, and new story installments started crashing servers, and even more impressive, the best of those fan-novelists graduated from that Xena "writing school" and published their original print novels, with a built-in fan base that some mid-list literary writers (and a goodly number of mid-list genre writers as well) would kill for.

Hey Brian, this isn't about an exploding cacophony of sound. This is about a SYSTEM, a feedback loop with its own thermostat. Let the system find its level, just like chat rooms did, before you pronounce it a Neo-Luddite horror (and Brian isn't doing that, btw, he's just being provocative and raising the issue, something smart people do, and I respect him for that).

Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .

NBC's Brian Williams From the Magazine | Person of the Year

Enough About You

We've made the media more democratic, but at what cost to our democracy?

By BRIAN WILLIAMS

Posted Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006

While the mainstream media were having lunch, members of the audience made other plans. They scattered and are still on the move, part of a massive migration. The dynamic driving it? It's all about you. Me. And all the various forms of the First Person Singular.

Americans have decided the most important person in their lives is ... them, and our culture is now built upon that idea. It's the User-Generated Generation.

For those times when the 900 digital options awaiting us in our set-top cable box can seem limiting and claustrophobic, there's the Web. Once inside, the doors swing open to a treasure trove of video: adults juggling kittens, ill-fated dance moves at wedding receptions, political rants delivered to camera with venom and volume. All of it exists to fill a perceived need. Media executives— some still not sure what it is — know only that they want it. And they're willing to pay for it.

[Heh, yeah. And there's a sucker born every minute. While there are some interesting innovations in marketing coming about these days, watching big media trying to "buy" authentic communities ought to be a hilarious spectator sport. Do these folks even REMEMBER the foolishness of the business community in the late 1990s?]

[...]

We've raised a generation of Americans on a mantra of love and the importance of self as taught by brightly colored authority figures with names like Barney and Elmo. On the theory that celebrating only the winners means excluding those who place, show or simply show up, parents-turned-coaches started awarding trophies — entire bedrooms full — to all those who compete. Today everyone gets celebrated, in part to put an end to the common cruelties of life that so many of us grew up with.

[Yaddah yaddah yaddah. Ask Emily Dickinson about twisting in your own angst. Talk to Walt Whitman about self-absorption. Ask Henry David Thoreau why his mother brought him groceries while he dove into his naval on Walden pond. Don't you just wish they'd have never done it? That they'd just shut up and gotten a life?

What's so different about people now? The publication? Emily Dickinson said "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man." She wanted her sister to burn all those poems, AFTER SHE DIED. That sure didn't stop her from sewing them up in little booklets and sending them around to all her friends in her avid letter-writing.

Oh, and those Victorians? Kept these amazing diaries and commonplace books. They wrote about and engaged their lives in a way our passive TV generation never had enough self-reflexivity to approach. So the Victorian epistolary tradition is being reborn online. So the commonplace books return, in a different form. And yes, the audiences for many of these is quite small, maybe even as small as the number of people Emily sent all her poems around to, many she never met in person, despite her voluminous correspondence.]

Now the obligatory confession: in an irony of life that I've not yet fully reconciled myself to, I write a daily blog full of intimate details about one of the oldest broadcasts on television. While the media landscape of my youth, with its three television networks, now seems like forced national viewing by comparison, and while I anchor a broadcast that is routinely viewed by an audience of 10 million or more, it's nothing like it used to be. We work every bit as hard as our television-news forebears did at gathering, writing and presenting the day's news but to a smaller audience, from which many have been lured away by a dazzling array of choices and the chance to make their own news.

[If you want to try to wrap your head around the differences in kind between that old media experience and this new media experience, look at how Josh Kucera wrestles with it here.]

[...]

Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once? What if "talking" means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of "media" is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy?

The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge ... because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.

Williams is anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News
From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

Yo Brian! Is this such a BAD thing?

I CELEBRATE myself;    
And what I assume you shall assume;    
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.    

I loafe and invite my Soul;    
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.            

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;    
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;    
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.    

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;    
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;    
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;    
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

[...]

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

TIME magazine says: It's all about YOU!

Personally, I hate the acronym USG. User Generated Content. A complete misnomer for something FAR more powerful and far-reaching. User. Bleh. This is about social media and the power of social organizing, organic grassroots social organizing (as opposed to those astro-turf imitations of it).

So YOU are TIME magazine's Person of the Year. But since this is about collective social effects, maybe we should accept the nomination as TIME magazine's PEOPLE of the Year. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Link: Logic+Emotion: TIME's Are a Changing....

TIME's Are a Changing...

CNN reports on TIME Magazine's person of the year. YOU. TIME has embraced the fact that millions upon millions of people are giving up their evenings watching primetime, and choosing to create, co-create, collaborate, share, and produce original content instead (gotta love the simply innovative cover which reflects your face).

So I guess it's official.  This isn't a trend.

[...]

In essence it's as if they are saying. "Hey--we're a part of this whole thing too!". As a somewhat relevant aside, I took this picture with my phone and wrote the post on it as well, without touching a PC. All in under 10 minutes. Yes, times have changed as TIME suggests.

 

 

Citizen journalism from the global prostitute community

Link: BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Prostitutes speak of their ordeals.

Go read the BBC comment narratives submitted by prostitutes and escorts from all over the world. What an amazing response has been triggered by the issues raised in the recent Ipswitch murders in England.

This is the kind of thing I'd hoped the citizen journalism movement would foster, not just a kind of citizen journalism "localism" as ordinary people rise up to fill the gaps in coverage left by high-profit-percentage corporate media entities (read "carpet-baggers that syphon ad money out of communities), but also the "localism" of communities of interest and affinity groups.

They unite in cyberspace even as they are often isolated in face-to-face communities. This was one phenomenon I was able to document in my dissertation ethnography of the Xenaverse, and it is interesting to see the diferent ways it still has power and force.

This isn't even something I can excerpt. It must be read in full, to get the richness and diversity of location and experience.

Link: BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Prostitutes speak of their ordeals.

Prostitutes speak of their ordeals

Prostitutes from across the world have been writing to the BBC News website about their lives following the murders of five prostitutes in eastern England.

Here we publish some of their e-mails while protecting their identities. Readers are warned that some of the accounts contain graphic language or details.

                                                                                    

 

Documenting hysterical historical moments in the anals annals of the Internet

Ya ever wonder why the folks who started YouTube did it? How did they think up the seemingly simple but brilliant idea? Wonder no more!

Link: Eat The Press | "This Is Natalie Morales, Reporting From Uranus!" | The Huffington Post.

"This Is Natalie Morales, Reporting From Uranus!"

Clips like this are why YouTube was created:

No, seriously: Clips like this are why YouTube was created. According to YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim,* he was inspired to start YouTube after reading about how the clip of Jon Stewart on Crossfire clip Wired flew around the internet in an article in Wired. The piece, "The Bittorrent Effect" by Clive Thompson, who described how the clip reached approximately 2.5 million people, three times as many as the regular CNN viewing audience. Wrote Thompson, then: "The whole concept of must-see TV changes from being something you stop and watch every Thursday to something you gotta check out right now, dude. Just click here."

Karim said that when he read that, it hit him: "Now to get the biggest audience, maybe online is the way to go, and not television." 

[...]

This, of course, includes bloopers, like Natalie Morales using a rather unfortunate pronunciation of the word "annals"  above or Jane Skinner saying "cock" on FoxNews (twice). Goofy and mostly harmless, but funny nonetheless — and worth sharing. 

*The not-Steve Chen or Chad Hurley one who opted out of the company to go to grad school

Turning the concept of "Push" on its ear

Well, what a can of worms this opens up! Seems to me like, in the world of search engine contextual ads, Google and other search engines would call this "click fraud." But this isn't the world of ad clicks. This artificially inflates measures of page-views, with Nielsen-Netratings.

Nielsen usually bugs me because I think its metrics have overly controlled old media content for too long. I find the research methods short-sighted and potentially shaping the data with limited POV (yeah yeah, I know, all qualitative researchers say this, but it is particularly acute in TV-land). Is this the sort of thing that should be embraced as the ultima thule of Net metrics?

But Nielsen folks caught this slight-of-hand (what search engines would call "fraud"), so kudos to them.

GREAT lead in the story below, btw.

Link: In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them - New York Times.

December 11, 2006

In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them

By PETER EDMONSTON

In late May, more than five million Web users vanished.

The disappearing act came when Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading company in measuring Internet traffic, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial Web site Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million.

Why the change? For millions of Web surfers, Entrepreneur.com visited them — and not the other way around, the measurement company said.

As computer users visited other sites, new browser windows popped up containing articles from Entrepreneur.com, according to Scott Ross, senior product manager for Nielsen/NetRatings.

Pop-up windows appear all over the Internet, including the Web site of The New York Times. But they are typically used as advertising to pitch a product or a service.

Entrepreneur.com’s pop-ups were unusual because they contained news content, like articles on how to start a small business, making them hard to distinguish from an intentional visit to Entrepreneur.com’s site. This hailstorm of pop-ups more than tripled Entrepreneur’s reported traffic before it was detected and factored out a month later.

The technique of using pop-ups to gain readers underscores just how important sheer numbers have become in the online media business. Advertisers are shifting their marketing dollars to the Internet, but the rates they pay are low compared with traditional media.

Consequently, publishers who have struggled for years to find a way to make money online are taking aggressive steps to get their Web pages in front of as many eyes as possible.

Entrepreneur.com, owned by Entrepreneur Media in Irvine, Calif., did not return calls seeking comment. But it is not the only online publisher to use pop-ups, according to Benjamin G. Edelman, a Harvard doctoral student who has compiled a large database by installing on his computer many kinds of software, known as adware, that generates pop-ups.

[...]

The concern over pop-up content goes beyond traffic numbers. Many advertisers pay premium prices to reach readers of certain Web sites. Through pop-ups, these advertisers may find their orders are being fulfilled with low-cost page views that users never requested and may never have seen.

This list of sites surprised Scott Symonds, vice president for media at Agency.com, who advises companies on where to spend their online advertising budgets. Pop-ups delivered by adware are usually seen as a “nuisance form of advertising,” and most mainstream publishers avoid them, he said.

[...]

There are legal issues as well. Many sellers of pop-up ads have been sued by regulators and consumers, who say the software to allow pop-ups is often installed without a users’ consent. The adware hitches a ride on another application, like a game or a screen saver, and the pop-up function can be buried in the fine print. Sometimes it is never disclosed.

“You can almost look at it like steroids,” Mr. Ross said of pop-up content, which his firm calls “non-user-requested” traffic. Others in the online media business call it “push traffic,” because Web pages are actively pushed to computer users who do not request them.

Used indiscriminately, push traffic is like printing extra copies of a magazine and tossing them onto doorsteps or, because pop-ups can be intentionally hidden behind other windows, simply dropping them in an alley.

[...]

 

Sarah Palin's inaugural speech sets an interesting tone

You get a sense of honoring historical context here, while also sending a not-so-subtle message to Juneau.

The gubernatorial inauguration was held for the first time ever in Fairbanks, to honor the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the state constitution, where it was ratified, in Squarebanks. Sure, it wasn't Willow (site chosen a a more centrally-located state capital, by popular state initiative). And it wasn't Anchorage (largest city). I suppose they could have picked Seward, which was I think the first capital of the state, one of the earliest thriving cities, but devastated by the tsunami from the Good Friday earthquake of 1964.

So she honored the past, and my mom tells me, spoke movingly about the state and its future. It's like she's giving folks hope, which all politicians would like to do (except Frank Murkowski, who appears to have lost his marbles totally in his last days in office, see below). So is it political lip service? Look at the first article below, at what she's doing with the big three oil companies, who in many ways own the state in the same way Kerr McGee once owned Oklahoma.

Go Sarah! I'm still rooting for you. And I found this old basketball picture from the Anchorage Daily News. Ooh, did we really wear those awful shorts back then?!

Ah, but that's better than that topless beauty pageant shot from the late 1980s, what I found on the Wonkette site. It appears the Washington naughty political talk site has deemed Sarah the "hottest" governor in the U.S., a "hottie," or a "GILF," what the site somewhere calls the "Governix I'd Like to Fornicate." (I'm quoting the Wonkette site. I don't mean myself.)

I just gotta say, this scene with Libby Riddles as Emcee for the inauguration is just classic.

Link: adn.com | alaska : Palin era begins at inauguration.

Palin era begins at inauguration

By KYLE HOPKINS
Anchorage Daily News

Published: December  5, 2006
Last Modified: December  5, 2006 at 02:06 AM

FAIRBANKS -- The applause built for a full minute after Sarah Palin took the oath making her Alaska's new governor Monday. Then, from somewhere high in the seats of the Carlson Center sports arena, the chanting started: "Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!"

"OK, the governor said cease and desist," said the event's emcee, Libby Riddles, quieting the crowd of thousands.

Riddles was the first woman to win the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and it's no coincidence she was asked to host the swearing-in ceremony of the state's first female governor.

"She was an underdog. She was a risk-taker, kind of an outsider," Palin said in describing Riddles, but also defining her own rise from a small-town mayor and Republican Party maverick to the state's top political job.

[...]

Link: The Seattle Times: Politics: Palin takes Alaska reins.

Palin takes Alaska reins

By MARY PEMBERTON

The Associated Press

Sarah Palin is first governor to be sworn in in Fairbanks.

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Unabashedly promising to defend the interests of all Alaskans as the state increases its energy-production role, Sarah Palin was sworn in Monday as the ninth person to lead the state since Alaska was granted statehood in 1959.

"I will unambiguously, steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state as a mother naturally guards her own," she told an overflowing crowd at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks.

[...]

"We must have reserves and explore for more to energize our homes, our businesses, for new industry to come alive, to heat our economy and allow self sufficiency while gifting our nation with safe domestic supplies," she said.

"Couple this with ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] oil and inexhaustible alternative-energy sources, and Alaska can lead the nation in a much-needed U.S. energy plan," Palin said.

She asked why Alaska couldn't fuel the nation and lead the world.

"America is looking for answers. She's looking for a new direction, the world is looking for a light. It's Governor [Walter] Hickel that reminds me, that light can come from America's great north star; it can come from Alaska," she said.

[...]

She plans to meet today and Wednesday with 12 companies or groups interested in building the pipeline before she moves to the Governor's Mansion in Juneau later this week.

[...]

The meetings will include the three big oil companies that negotiated with Gov. Frank Murkowski on a natural-gas-pipeline contract — ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and BP PLC, the companies that also own the leases to the gas. The Legislature never ratified that contract.

Palin promised that her pipeline-contract negotiations would be open and transparent, and has told the companies any information or documents offered would be public. Murkowski was criticized for negotiating secretly with the oil companies for several years.

Palin is the state's first female governor and, at age 42, also is the youngest person to hold the office. She also is the first not to be sworn in in Juneau, the state capital.

She chose Fairbanks for the ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the Alaska constitution, which was drafted in Fairbanks three years before statehood in 1959.

And then there's this:

Link: adn.com | front : Palin to examine last-hour job blitz.

Palin to examine last-hour job blitz

MURKOWSKI: His ex-staff chief was appointed to a gas pipeline authority he bucked.

By ANNE SUTTON
The Associated Press

Published: December  6, 2006
Last Modified: December  6, 2006 at 07:44 AM

JUNEAU -- Gov. Sarah Palin will revisit 35 appointments made by her predecessor in the hour before he left office this week, especially one she called "bizarre."

The appointment is that of Murkowski's former chief of staff, Jim Clark, to the volunteer seven-member board of the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority.

At least one board member said Clark -- Murkowski's right-hand man in the failed negotiations with oil companies on a $25 billion natural gas pipeline -- has bucked the board's decisions since its inception.

Board member Scott Heyworth questioned Murkowski's motives as well as Clark's support for the authority.

"To do this at the 11th hour and then appoint his chief of staff who's been at odds with ANGDA since Day One, it's amazing," said Heyworth.

Palin's spokesman, Curtis Smith, said he told Palin of the appointment minutes before she took the stage for her swearing-in at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks.

"It's an issue she will revisit when the events of the day settle," Smith said Tuesday as Palin was involved with reopened pipeline negotiations.

Palin has the final word on appointments to any of the state's boards and commissions.

[...]

Murkowski also ended his term as he began it, with the appointment of a family member. He named his son-in-law, Leon Van Whye, to the board of the Alaska Railroad.

Van Whye is married to Murkowski's daughter Eileen.

Frank Murkowski opened his administration in 2002 by naming another daughter, Lisa, to the U.S. Senate seat he vacated after winning the governor's office.

Like I said, Murkowski appears to have gone off the deep end over having to leave office.