Stephen Colbert For President

in Books, Comedy | October 15th, 2007

In yes­ter­day’s New York Times, Stephen Col­bert took over Mau­reen Dowd’s reg­u­lar opin­ion col­umn and made a fun­ny case for why he could be the next US pres­i­dent. Read it here. Also lis­ten to his inter­view last week on NPR’s Fresh Air (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). These appear­ances all fig­ure into a media blitz designed to boost sales of Col­bert’s new­ly-released book I Am Amer­i­ca (And So Can You!), which is already #4 on Ama­zon’s best­seller list. Not bad.

Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance”: A Free, Environment Friendly Copy (Almost)

in Books, Current Affairs, Google | October 15th, 2007

Since the release of An Incon­ve­nient Truth, Al Gore has had quite a run. He first won him­self an Emmy, then an Oscar, and now the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the film rep­re­sents Gore’s most well known work on the envi­ron­ment, it’s hard­ly where his envi­ron­men­tal efforts began. His cam­paign goes back to the late 1970s, when he held con­gres­sion­al hear­ings on cli­mate change and green­house gas­es. And it moves through the 1980s and then the 1990s, when he occu­pied the Vice Pres­i­den­cy. In 1992, while oth­er polit­i­cal lead­ers quib­bled over the pros and cons of NAFTA, Gore put the envi­ron­ment on the nation­al agen­da, real­ly for the first time, when he pub­lished Earth in the Bal­ance: Ecol­o­gy and the Human Spir­it. (The Bush admin­is­tra­tion then took it off the agen­da, regret­tably.) Gore’s book became a nation­al best­seller, and it has since gone through sev­er­al new edi­tions, the lat­est hav­ing been issued just last year. You could buy the book, but the good news is that Google serves up large por­tions of the book online for free. It’s at a price you can’t beat, and it goes easy on the pulp. Have a good look. And also see below Gore’s com­ments upon learn­ing about the Nobel Prize.

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The Future of Collaborative Culture?

in Media, Stanford, Technology | October 12th, 2007

I just heard Jim­my Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak­ing at Stan­ford Law School today. Wales is work­ing on some new projects that he hopes will har­ness the com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven col­lab­o­ra­tion of Wikipedia. He’s already had some suc­cess in branch­ing out from the ency­clo­pe­dia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion on a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent sub­jects (some of the most suc­cess­ful so far relate to video games).

What Wales spoke about today, how­ev­er, is a new col­lab­o­ra­tive search project. The con­cept is still in its ear­ly stages, it seems, but the idea would be to har­ness the intel­li­gence and ded­i­ca­tion of human beings to pro­duce search results sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter than Google’s. This rais­es a few ques­tions:

Is Google bro­ken? It’s amaz­ing what Google pulls up, but maybe we’ve all got­ten so good at work­ing with an imper­fect sys­tem that we just tune out the spam and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions that still crop up.

Is a col­lab­o­ra­tive social mod­el the appro­pri­ate solu­tion to this prob­lem? Peo­ple are good at com­pil­ing ency­clo­pe­dias, but they may not be good at emu­lat­ing search rank algo­rithms. Also, Google is pow­ered by mil­lions of servers in dozens of data cen­ters over the world man­ag­ing petabytes of infor­ma­tion. In oth­er words, this may be a technology+money busi­ness, not a people+transparency busi­ness.

These issues aside, Wikipedia is one of the most amaz­ing things to come out of the whole Inter­net exper­i­ment, so I’m excit­ed to see what Wales comes up with. Has search become a basic ser­vice? Would it work bet­ter as an open-source sys­tem?

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Philosophers and Theorists on YouTube

in Video - Arts & Culture | October 12th, 2007

When we announced last week that UC Berke­ley had launched a new chan­nel on YouTube, we were curt­ly informed by a Euro­pean read­er that Berke­ley was­n’t the first to get into this game. Appar­ent­ly, the Euro­pean Grad­u­ate School (or EGS) has been at it for a while. The school’s YouTube col­lec­tion fea­tures talks by impor­tant con­tem­po­rary the­o­rists and philoso­phers includ­ing Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard, and Judith But­ler. (There are also some film­mak­ers mixed in — take for exam­ple, Peter Green­away and John Waters.) To be frank, much of the con­tent runs counter to what we’re look­ing to do here — to make think­ing less insu­lar and empha­size ideas that speak to a think­ing pub­lic. This is not to dis­miss the cal­iber of the think­ing pre­sent­ed here. It’s sim­ply to com­ment on where it fits (or does­n’t fit) into the kind of project that we’re under­tak­ing. How­ev­er, if the ESG YouTube chan­nel speaks to you, dig in. It’s yours to enjoy.

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The New Stanford Blog Directory: Stem Cells, Philosophy and Beyond

in Uncategorized | October 11th, 2007

Blogs are abound­ing these days, and what’s unfor­tu­nate­ly miss­ing is an effec­tive way to orga­nize this new world of infor­ma­tion and to make it acces­si­ble to oth­ers. Until a good, large-scale solu­tion comes along (I don’t count Tech­no­rati or Google Blog Search as the real answer), some of this will get done the old fash­ioned way, the way Yahoo did it back in 1996 — that is, index­ing by hand.

Last week, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty launched the Stan­ford Blog Direc­to­ry, which hopes to index the col­lec­tive blog­ging wis­dom com­ing out of the uni­ver­si­ty com­mu­ni­ty (fac­ul­ty, staff, alum­ni, etc.). This small list will inevitably grow over time. But it already includes some blogs (in addi­tion to Open Cul­ture) that you may want to peruse. Let’s high­light a few:

Smart Ener­gy Show: 6.6 bil­lion peo­ple live on the earth today. 9.2 bil­lion will be here by 2050. And, as time goes by, ener­gy demand will inevitably push toward a break­ing point. Smart Ener­gy takes a close look at how we can meet “this ris­ing demand with­out inflict­ing per­ma­nent dam­age” on our frag­ile envi­ron­ment. And it explains what sci­ence, gov­ern­ments and indi­vid­u­als can do to meet this chal­lenge. The blog is writ­ten by Mar­got Ger­rit­se­na, pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Ener­gy Resources Engi­neer­ing, and the blog posts are often accom­pa­nied by infor­ma­tive videos.

The Stem Cell Blog: Writ­ten by Christo­pher Thomas Scott, this blog exam­ines the sci­ence, ethics, busi­ness and pol­i­tics of stem cell research. Scott is par­tic­u­lar­ly well posi­tioned to do this. He is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Pro­gram on Stem Cells in Soci­ety and the author of Stem Cell Now: An Intro­duc­tion to the Com­ing Med­ical Rev­o­lu­tion. Plus he has taught a course called Straight Talk About Stem Cells that you can access on iTunes for free.

Phi­los­o­phy Talk: Writ­ten by two Stan­ford phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, Ken Tay­lor and John Per­ry, this blog accom­pa­nies a week­ly radio show (also called “Phi­los­o­phy Talk”) that offers a “down-to-earth and no-non­sense approach” to phi­los­o­phy that’s rel­e­vant to every­day life. Along the way, the blog/show explores phi­los­o­phy that touch­es on our beliefs, rela­tion­ships, pas­sions and the world around us.

For more Stan­ford blogs, enter the Blog Direc­to­ry here. For more Stan­ford con­tent on Open Cul­ture, click here.

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New Radiohead and R.E.M. at a Nice Price

in Music | October 10th, 2007

In case you missed it, Radio­head released today its new album In Rain­bows. What makes the album remark­able, in part, is how it’s being dis­trib­uted. Buy­ers can go straight to the Radio­head web site (it’s not avail­able on iTunes) and down­load the album as DRM-free MP3s. And, what is more, they can decide for them­selves how much they’re will­ing to pay for the album. You can pay as much or as lit­tle as you want. That makes the new album pret­ty much qual­i­fy as a piece of “open cul­ture.” (If you get it, please let us know in the com­ments how much you paid out. We’d be curi­ous to know.)

Next up, REM. They’re releas­ing a live album next week (22 tracks record­ed in album), but you can stream the whole album for free on Rhap­sody right now, and the qual­i­ty is nice and high. Source: Rolling Stone.

For more mp3s see our col­lec­tion of MP3 Music Blogs.

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Goethe (and Shakespeare) on Google

in Books, Google | October 10th, 2007

Mark­ing the start of the Frank­furt Book Fair, Google Book Search has launched a “microsite” ded­i­cat­ed to Ger­many’s most cel­e­brat­ed writer — Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe. There, you can learn about his life and trav­els and, even bet­ter, get access to free dig­i­tal ver­sions of his writ­ings. That’s right, you get to read Faust online for free. The poten­tial rub is that you’ll need to speak Ger­man to gen­er­al­ly avail your­self of this site, although there are some mate­ri­als in Eng­lish. To get more infor­ma­tion on the new Goethe site, check out the Google Book Search blog.

Also be sure to see Google’s oth­er microsite ded­i­cat­ed to Shake­speare.

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A Photographer’s Chronicle of the War in Iraq

in Books, Current Affairs | October 10th, 2007

Aus­tralian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ash­ley Gilbert­son doc­u­ment­ed for The New York Times the US inva­sion of Iraq, cap­tur­ing the light­ning fast over­throw of Sad­dam’s regime and then the slow lapse into civ­il war. His new book, Whiskey Tan­go Fox­trot: A Pho­tog­ra­pher’s Chron­i­cle of the Iraq War, col­lects some of his best work. Com­bined, the print­ed pho­tographs offer what he calls a visu­al “tes­ta­ment to what war actu­al­ly is.” They let you see how deci­sions made by the Pen­ta­gon have real human costs on the ground in Iraq; or, put a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, the pho­tos illus­trate in stark detail “what for­eign pol­i­cy looks like from the ground up.” Below, you can watch a video that fea­tures an intel­li­gent inter­view with Gilbert­son and offers a good glimpse into his pho­to­graph­ic work. Def­i­nite­ly give it some of your time.

Spe­cial Note: Sup­port an Inde­pen­dent Press

We all know that an inde­pen­dent press is absolute­ly essen­tial to pre­serv­ing a demo­c­ra­t­ic and open cul­ture. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, more than 80 per­cent of peo­ple live in coun­tries with­out a free press. That means more than 5 bil­lion peo­ple can’t trust what they read in the news­pa­per, hear on the radio or see on TV. Here is a very tan­gi­ble way to empow­er inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists. Con­tribut­ing $100 to the Media Devel­op­ment Loan Fund will pro­vide inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists with print­ing press­es and broad­cast­ing equip­ment, tools that are essen­tial to over­com­ing cen­sor­ship and giv­ing a voice to the unheard. Click here to get more infor­ma­tion.

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“One of The Supreme Creations of Documentary Filmmaking” Airs Tonight

in Film | October 9th, 2007

A.O. Scott (The New York Times) calls it “One of the most remark­able exper­i­ments in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.” Roger Ebert says it “is on my list of the ten great­est films of all time.” The film is 49 UP, and it airs tonight on PBS.

The film is the sev­enth film in a long-run­ning series of doc­u­men­taries that has traced the lives of 14 Brits, start­ing when they were 7 years old in 1964. The direc­tor, Michael Apt­ed, has revis­it­ed these chil­dren every sev­en years (they are now 49 years old), watch­ing how their lives have changed over the years. Talk about ambi­tious. You can watch a trail­er for the film here, and lis­ten to an inter­view with the direc­tor here.

P.S. The quote in the title comes from Salon.

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David Foster Wallace: Deciderization 2007 Online

in Books | October 9th, 2007

Read­ing David Fos­ter Wal­lace (author of Infi­nite Jest and A Sup­pos­ed­ly Fun Thing I’ll Nev­er Do Again) is always a plea­sure. And per­haps even more plea­sur­able is read­ing him for free.

Tomor­row, The Best Amer­i­can Essays 2007 hits the streets. Wal­lace edit­ed the col­lec­tion and kicked it off with a fiery essay of his own. Houghton Mif­flin was good enough (or, rather, mar­ket­ing-savvy enough) to post the essay, The Decider­iza­tion 2007‑A Spe­cial Report, online for free. And some unknown char­ac­ter did us all a favor by cre­at­ing a PDF ver­sion that’s con­sid­er­ably more leg­i­ble and print­er friend­ly. Read away.

For good mea­sure, we’re also throw­ing your way some more dig­i­tal David Fos­ter Wal­lace. Here we have him read­ing his essay “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (the text of which you can also read here), plus the author appear­ing on The Char­lie Rose Show here and here. (In both cas­es, his appear­ances come lat­er in the show.) Ciao.

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