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August 18, 2006

08.18.06 How to be Invisible; When Computers Were Human; Out-Sourcing Intelligence
August 18, 2006 Edition

"The Best of the Rest of the Web"

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THiS WEEK: Learn how to be invisible; when computing was "women's work; researchers hunt for the origins of the expert mind; considering Hezbollah and the secular radical left; a look at Pentagon-contracted private intelligence firms; why anti-immigrant fervor is more complex than simple ignorance and bigotry; invoking eugenics to oppose same-sex marriage; new RFID-tagged passports incredibly easy to copy; and many more items of humor and delight in this week's long-overdue (but still fresh) version of Media Picks.

This Week's Picks:

  1. AUDIO | How to be Invisible
    If you could have one of two superpowers—invisibility or flight—which would you choose? The "correct" answer, of course, is flight. People who choose flight have nothing to hide; they're selfless, competent, and unashamed. People who choose invisibility are deceitful, voyeuristic, fearful, crouching perverts. I would choose invisibility.

    Jon Ronson | Radio 4
    http://www.saminnes.freeola.net/Jon-Ronson-invisible.mp3


  2. REVIEW | When Computers Were Human
    Long before the dawn of calculators and inexpensive desktop computers, the grinding work of large problems had to be broken up into discrete, simple parts and done by hand. Where scads of numbers needed computing—for astronomical purposes at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, or to establish the metric system at the Bureau du Cadastre in Paris—such work was accomplished factory-style. And in this pre-machine era, computing was thought of as women’s work.

    David Skinner | The New Atlantis
    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/12/skinner.htm


  3. Life Sentences
    From a list of 98 sample sentences used by Department of Homeland Security officials for testing applicants for American citizenship: America is the land of freedom. Many people come to America for freedom. He wanted to find a job. His wife worked in the house.

    Harper's
    http://www.harpers.org/LifeSentences.html


  4. WEBSITE OF NOTE | Save the Internet
    Just what it sounds like. Learn more about net neutrality, find out where various politicians stand on the issue, and join in the good fight for internet freedom.

    http://www.savetheinternet.com/


  5. CARTOON | US Weighing "Final Option" Threat to Iran of a Shorter Bush Vacation

    Don Asmussen | Bad Reporter
    http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2006/08/04/080406-950x316-badreporter.gif


  6. VIDEO | Electronic Lebanon Public Service Announcement
    In the weeks after Israel launched its attack on Lebanon, a team of New York-based artists, designers, and multimedia producers converged on a warehouse location in Brooklyn to create a Public Service Announcement for Electronic Lebanon. The two minute PSA is intended for wide distribution and public viewing.

    ElectronicLebanon.net
    http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5473.shtml


  7. The Expert Mind
    How do "experts" in various fields acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters—and the collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information.

    Philip E. Ross | Scientific American
    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945


  8. AUDIO | Hezbollah and the Left
    How should the left view Hezbollah? Is it a terrorist organization, as the US government claims? Is it the face of anti-imperialism in the Middle East? Or is it more complex than that? Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar and cultural anthropologist Lara Deeb discuss Hezbollah's rise at the expense of the left and the prospects for a renewed secular radical left in the region.

    CS Soong | Against the Grain
    http://www.againstthegrain.org/audio8.09.06.mp3


  9. Out-Sourcing Intelligence
    Private intelligence firms contracting with the Pentagon enjoy ties to Halliburton and millions in contracts doing the dirty work of interrogation and translation while sidelining the existing Pentagon bureaucracy. Experts say the military bureaucracy is—surprise!—too bogged down by careerists and incompetents and their void is filled by paramilitary corporations. Is the next step battalions run by military contractors?

    Pratap Chatterjee | CorpWatch
    http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13993


  10. REVIEW | Not Your Grandfather's History Book
    A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing is a whimsical anthology of short stories and artwork that lampoons our country's most iconic moments, as well as the history books that lionized them.

    Zack Pelta-Heller | AlterNet
    http://www.alternet.org/story/39468/


  11. White Heat
    It's easy to chalk up the nativist frenzy in Tennessee entirely to the usual suspects: gut-level racism, bigotry, ignorance, NIMBYism, right-wing radio hosts. But what's eating Tennesseans, and hundreds of thousands of other Middle American nativists, is also something deeper, subtler—and likely to outlast the current debates over immigration policy. "This is not just about immigrants and immigration," says Devin Burghart. "It's something much greater—the nexus of race, national identity, who we are and who we want to be."

    Bob Moser | The Nation
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/moser


  12. Breeding Injustice
    As recently as 70 years ago, "fitness" ominously referred to hereditary improvement of the “race” through selective breeding. Promotion of fitness in this sense, or “eugenics,” was so widely and casually embraced during the first half of the 20th century that many of its ideas were enshrined in marriage and reproductive law. While today only the most hard-hearted would press for sterilizing the “feeble-minded” or preventing the mentally retarded from marrying, similar arguments are regularly made in favor of banning same-sex marriage.

    Michael J. Amico | The Phoenix
    http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid19860.aspx


  13. Radio (RFID) Tags Full of Security Holes
    At a pair of security conferences, researchers demonstrated that passports equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be cloned with a laptop equipped with a $200 RFID reader and a similarly inexpensive smart card writer.

    Declan McCullagh | News.com / Mostly Water
    http://mostlywater.org/node/9033


  14. Blood For Oil
    An Australian company wants to "harvest" the fat from sheep and cattle to be converted to biodiesel.

    Asa Wahlquist | The Australian
    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20098890-2702,00.html


- Media Picks Contributing Editors: Adam Barker, Justin Park
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin Wiegand and Brian Awehali


Posted by erin at August 18, 2006 04:20 PM