parker higgins

I’ve just gone on something of a spree adding reviews of the last few books I’ve read to Goodreads.

• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe’s – Aug. 23, 2010 A (reportedly) rare look at Trader Joe’s, grocery darling. It’s owned by Aldi Nord, which is a story in itself. “Trader” Joe Coulombe “doesn’t remember” how much he sold the chain for in 1979.
• Michael Zimmer.org » Blog Archive » Facebook Places Privacy Falls Short, Part 2: Opting-Out Michael Zimmer details the steps of opting out of Facebook Places, as his wife struggles with the process. Until you’ve opted out, you can be checked into locations by your friends, and those check-ins remain even after opting out unless you manually delete them.
• The Future of Internet Search – Project Syndicate Esther Dyson discusses the future of search as more action-oriented and vertical. I know that’s been the future for at least five years now, but I still believe. Great Bill Gates quote: “The future of search is verbs.” Bing!
• Common as Air – By Lewis Hyde – NYTimes.com Robert Darnton reviews Lewis Hyde’s new book about considering intellectual property from a constitutional perspective. Sounds good!
• The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama : The New Yorker Charles and David Koch are multi-billionaire Obama opponents and shadowy Tea Party supporters. They’re responsible for huge amounts of environmental damage, and funding bad science to cover that up. If they were from anywhere other than Wichita, they’d almost certainly be Bond villains.

• Amid ongoing budget woes, LA unveils nation’s most expensive school with $578M price tag – latimes.com There are so many goofball facts in this piece about the country’s most expensive school (named after RFK) being built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. The talking benches line killed me, and the fact that Trump wanted to put the world’s tallest building on the site is hilarious.

• [Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos

  TorrentFreak](http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-failure-takes-down-creative-commons-video-100812/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)) An apparent case of copyright being used incorrectly and explicitly for censorship, where an anti-piracy group issued takedown notices to political videos over which it had no rights. The embedded video, “Du bist Terrorist” (“You are a terrorist”, includes English subtitles) is a good example of the strong anti-surveillance and pro-privacy sentiment in Germany; it was one of those taken down.

• Copycats vs. Copyrights – Newsweek There are a couple of nitpciky points I’d make here — teachers advocate copying all the time, that’s how we learn; the “incentive” justification for copyright and patents is primarily associates with common law countries and isn’t universal — but all in all this is a pretty good mainstream analysis of the fashion copyright proposals. Brings common sense to the table, which is always welcome.
• From the Desk of David Pogue – Three Unknown Features of the iPhone 4 – NYTimes.com Pogue points out that the new iPhone, as a (slightly) more general purpose computer than the Kindle, can do text-to-speech with its iBooks. Exactly the same feature Amazon got sued over. No mention of this yet by the Author’s Guild.
• Samsung Blu-ray players won’t play Warner, Universal movies after firmware update, require a rollback — Engadget Updates to Samsung Blu-ray players, which like all Blu-ray players require constant updates to play new movies, broke playback of Warner and Universal movies. Ladies and gentlemen, DRM!

• Germany to roll out ID cards with embedded RFID – International Business Times Germany’s ID cards will have mandatory RFID chips beginning November 1. This is a bad idea.
• The Imbroglio Over the Ground-Zero Mosque — New York Magazine A really thoughtful article addressing the proposed Muslim community center two and a half blocks from Ground Zero. There has been a lot of ink spilled about it, but this article is really good.
• The 72-Hour Expert A really funny and insightful article from P.J. O’Rourke about spending a few days in Afghanistan. Obviously I don’t agree with Mr. O’Rourke on everything, but his descriptions and interviews seem to be on point.
• YouTube – RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment A really interesting presentation, in that animation style I love, about what enlightenment might mean in the 21st century.
• The Volokh Conspiracy » The High Cost of Copyright: An explanation of the real costs of copyright, by way of a recent example. A treasure trove of amazing original jazz recordings has surfaced, but will likely never be released for copyright reasons.
• The most isolated man on the planet. – By Monte Reel – Slate Magazine An incredibly interesting story of the last member of an uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. He’s been given 31 square miles to live in, but shot the last person who attempted contact in the chest with an arrow.

Over the last four days, the SoundCloud blog has posted a series of interviews with Creative Commons users on the site. I think they’re all interesting, and not just because I conducted three of the four of them. I was really floored, though, by the last one we ran, interviewing the musician and sample maker Stretta. Stretta really gets it.

Last week at Drumbeat Berlin, I had the pleasure of seeing Gabriel Shalom present on a project called Junto. We discussed the project that evening and the next day, and agreed that we should each post our ideas on the new perspectives the Drumbeat audience provided. He put together a video blog post about it, and my (long) post is below.

I’m very proud to have been involved with SoundCloud’s major feature release today, which includes (among other awesome things, like a track tag explore page) deeper integration and support for Creative Commons licenses. Among the changes were the addition of prominent CC badges to track players, the development of a CC landing page, and the long-awaited introduction of advanced search–including, naturally, search-by-license-type.

Der Spiegel has posted on their website an official English version of that article that I translated last week. Interesting to compare and contrast: the official translation is more confident (i.e. more willing to deviate from the original structures and phrases in order to improve flow) and consistent with tenses, but there aren’t any significant differences in meaning.

There’s been a lot of slowed-down action on the web in the past few days after a particularly hilarious slowed-down version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” generated over half a million plays on SoundCloud yesterday. Shamantis, the artist behind the recording, pulled off the hitherto considered impossible feat of making Bieber sound like Sigur Rós. The program Shamantis used is called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch–it’s a powerful (if not particularly multi-faceted) program that is capable of real-time playback of songs stretched to one million times their original length without affecting the pitch, effectively making an audio texture out of any track, clip, or sound.

If you’re in Berlin and interested in the open web, tonight’s Drumbeat event at Betahaus is not to be missed. The conversation kicks off at 7:30. Hope to see everybody there!