Accept no substitutes

Month: April 2007 (Page 2 of 3)

My Tea Bush

After decades of wanting to have my own tea plant, I now have one.

We were out in the Camellia Forest when I noticed a sign pointing toward “Tea.” I remembered then that tea is a camellia, camellia sinensis in fact.

Years ago I tried to find tea plants for sale. The nurseries that I asked looked at [or talked to] me like I was crazy. Who would want a camellia with small flowers? One that was bushy and leafy instead of large flowered — and, they told me, no one wants to grow their own tea. It’s too cheap to just buy it. Still I wanted my own tea plant.

I tried to find the remains of what in the 1970s was the only tea plantation in North America. The Pinehurst Tea Farm in Summerville, South Carolina outside of Charleston was home to award winning oolongs in the early part of the 20th century. But by the 1970s, the Tea Farm has become a highly desirable development — and still is as these listings show. At the time, I tried to speak with the Summerville Chamber of Commerce folks at the Plantation, but they only wanted to talk real estate and to say that the plantation part had failed several times.

Now with a little searching I find that a new tea plantation is open outside of Charleston. The Charleston Tea Plantation was recently bought by Bigelow Teas which not only has the plantation working but sells their American Classic Tea. On May 12, The Charleston Tea Plantation will be celebrating the First Flush of the new leaves on their bushes and trees.

I’ll miss the flushing this year, but it’s nice to know there is still tea being grown commercially in America.

My little bush is out defying deer now and will be there for a couple of years before I get more than maybe a cup. But I’ve been trying since the 70s, so what’s another year or two?

Dedication of Love House

Love House
Off this morning to the dedication of the Love House, the new home of the Center for the Study of the American South. (Yes, double entendres abound here).
It’s a beautiful spring day in Carolina. Henry Louis Gates will be giving the dedication speech. BBQ and other delights await.
The House is of special historic interest in many ways. This move to a historic house and a notable home says a lot about how the South is constructed in our minds and in our experiences. Having Dr. Gates are the speaker indicates a nuance of that construction a kind of recognition of rooms left unvisited even in small house.

Theremin-less Night

Okay so I over committed last night.

I did make it to the W3C talk put on the the local folks interested in XML, RDF, OWL and the Semantic Web at Duke in the noisy Nasher Museum. I did learn quite a bit about international and local activities in the W3C/Semanitc Web and meet a lot of folks involved — thanks Jane Greenberg and John Madden.

I did get to the DigCCurr2007 conference, an international symposium on Digital Curation, to talk with some old and new friends from Virginia, MIT, Duke, UCSD and Edinburgh amongst others and to swap a lot of stories about digitization and about people we know working in digital humanities and digital libraries.

But I finally gave out and headed home rather than drive back to Duke again. My age is showing — and I had some pretty important commitments scheduled for the next day (today, Friday). So no theremin music for me. Steve, I’ll have to catch you another night. Do let me know next time you’re playing out.

Arthur Lipper – “Royalties, the better way to finance and invest”

Arthur Lipper III

What: “Royalties, the better way to finance and invest in companies and projects,”
Who: Arthur Lipper III
When: 3 pm Friday April 20
Where: Pleasants Room of the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill

World-renowned authority in venture financing, securities expert, author, lecturer, entrepreneur, management consultant and winner of numerous awards, Arthur Lipper III, will be on campus for a special presentation hosted by the School of Information and Library Science.

Lipper is currently the Chairman of the British Far East Holdings Ltd. in Del Mar, California, and has been affiliated with the international financial community since 1954. He is involved with many educational institutions including the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise of the Kenan-Flagler Business School here at UNC at Chapel Hill.

news from ourselves

Doc Searls posts a great stanza from “Song of Myself” which you will remember is a poem by a newpaper writer turned poet.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…
nor feed on the spectres in books.
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me.
You shall listen to all sides and filter them for yourself.

[at the end of section 2]

Is Whitman’s call for direct experience a visionary call what citizen media and citizen journalism?

Events upcoming – DigCCurr2007, HASTAC, Open Access, BarCampSignal

Starting this evening, DigCCurr2007, an international symposium on Digital Curation, April 18-20, 2007 here at UNC.

At almost the same time, HASTAC’s snappily named “Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface” conference begins at Duke, April 19 – 21. Most importantly with a 9:00 p.m. – Reception in Nasher Museum Atrium. Music by Steve Burnett, thereminist.

Next Wednesday:

WHAT: Publishing choices: Know your rights and expand your impact!
WHO: Heather Joseph, Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition)
WHEN: Wednesday April 25, 2:30-4:00 pm
WHERE: Room 527, Health Sciences Library UNC-Chapel Hill
MORE INFO: http://www.hsl.unc.edu/Collections/ScholCom/sparctalk.cfm

On Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at UNC Chapel Hill BarCampSignal will be held in conjunction with Signalfest, the Southeastern Electronic Music Festival. We are attempting something completely new with music conference workshops. We want to blend the standard Q&A process with the collaborative magic of Bar Camp. You have say as an Artist/Producer, Promoter, or a Fan on how we put this festival and future festivals together.

Power is mostly back

Our family was only without power for most of Tuesday. We were lucky. No giant trees blocked us into our neighborhood. They only made it inconvenient to get around town. Or even to get to the next town as I found out when I tried to get to Hillsborough last night. We got power back fairly quickly — after only about 8 hours. Others (see Ruby writing in Orange Politics) were still looking for electricity this evening. And even today there was still clean up of trees and broken power poles underway on Franklin Street.

Two Nice Things about NCSU

Chapel Hill is experiencing wide power outages and trees across various roads. I’m thinking good thoughts about NCSU for two reasons:

1) This year is the 40th anniversary of the NCSU Computer Science Department. I entered NCSU and CS there in 1968 so’s I wasn’t there the first year, but the second year. Here’s the link to the 40th Celebration pages.

2) SlashDot is reporting that NCSU Director of Student Legal Services, Pam Gerace, has advised students to remain anonymous, and has indicated her office’s willingness to challenge the RIAA’s subpoenas (23 John Does sent to NCSU).

3) The Technician, the NCSU student paper, urges students to work with the Legal Services in an article beginning:

OUR OPINION: Student Legal Services is willing to battle in the trenches for students slapped with RIAA lawsuits regarding music piracy, and those students should take full advantage of this resource to beat the charges.

SignalFest BarCamp – April 28

Uzi writes to alert us of an electronic music BarCamp, BarCampSignal, to coincide with Signal Fest. BarCampSignal will happen on April 28 beginning at 10 am at UNC. Signal Fest 2007 will happen from Thursday, April 26 through Saturday, April 28.

Uzi says:

Some of you folks may have heard about Signal (www.signalfest.com), the electronic festival that is happening in two weeks in Chapel Hill. What you may not have known is that we are trying to break new ground when it comes to music conference workshops. Seriously.

We’re mixing Bar Camp (barcamp.org) with a music conference. As someone who has attended the “industry” workshops in the past, I think that it’s worth a shot to do something different. I just like the idea that someone could say, “You know, that topic you’ve offered doesn’t impress me. I’m going to vote for Abelton Live class tutorial”. So BarCampSignal was created.

So far, we have Mark Hosler (negativland.com) and Black Milk (http://www.myspace.com/blackmk) along with some local producers participating at this year’s Bar Camp. What I would love to encourage is anyone who has any interesting is music to sign up and participate.

I would also love to help out with a audio production class with open source tools or even a laptop jockey tutorial session (maybe with mixxx? or some other tool–I’m not picky).

Anyway, go to the website. Add your name to the attendees’ list. Do cool stuff. Go to the meet ‘n greet afterwards and make connections with other people who acknowledge that music is an addiction. And
most importantly, have fun…

The BarCampSignal sign-up page

When: Saturday, April 28th 10am
Where: Frank Porter Graham Student Union, UNC Chapel Hill

Security and Liberty Forum

This is a live blog of the Security and Liberty Forum at UNC. The final agenda looks like this.

PT Wright of Homeland Security has canceled.

Christian Stalberg of NC-CLU, one of the organizers welcomes us. (Joey is taping the Forum for ibiblio). Don’t drink the water or wash your hands — lead (and I saw gravel literally) in the water).

State Senator Janet Cowell (D-Wake), co-Chair of the Information Tech Committee.

Katherine Bryant, consumer advocate for ChoicePoint on consumer rights – she explains Choicepoint and about their 2005 social engineering break-in. Lists Choicepoint’s consumer’s rights list. (slides will be online? think so). Fair Credit Reporting Act. 30 states have their own fair credit statues in addition. Gramm-Leach-Biley Act about sharing personal info about individuals). Family’s Educational Right to Privacy Act. Children’s Online Right to Privacy Protection Act. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

How to get your Choicepoint file: call 1-888-395-0012

Next up is Jim Harper director of Information Policy Studies at Cato Institute on Data Mining, Sharing and Brokering, the Author of Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, and blogger of Privacilla.

Someone was stopped because of photographing the interior of a Metro station in DC yesterday. He sees this one as a failed analysis of pattern recognition behavior yielding a false positive.

He next disses datamining to try to detect terrorists as bad use of datamining. Not enough examples of terrorists planning to help mine. You will only get false positives which costs too much and impinges on our liberties — dissing Total Info Awareness in this respect. Instead link analysis would have yielded better and more accurate results including 9/11 terrorist. He demands transparency (ala Choicepoint).

Barry Steinhardt of ACLU – Directory of ACLU on Technology and Liberty. On Real ID (ACLU site – RealNightmare.org) – a federalized driver’s license with consistant data but would yield a national id card managed by Homeland Security. As you might expect, Barry and ACLU don’t like Read ID.
A bit about the Surveillance Industrial Complex.
(hope to have these slides later too).

Terrell wants me to write down “The Billy Bob Problem” in Georgia over an attempt to inact an early version of Read ID there. “William Robert” or “Billy Bob”. A clip from ACLU.tv to hit YouTube next week now about Real ID and a Chicago Fireman.

[Break]

Melissa Ngo of EPIC on RFID issues identified by EPIC. Also she points us to Spy Chips . com.

Bruce Schneier’s flight was delayed he will be here we hope at 4:30

Gene Spafford of Purdue and the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on “Government surveillance and propensity profiling”

Annie Anton of NCSU and The Privacy Place where they have done an analysis of the Choicepoint breach – “The ChoicePoint Dilemma: How Data Brokers Should Handle the Privacy of Personal Information” (March 14, 2007) [PDF]

Annie on transparency and privacy statements. privacy def from Hunton.com Good luck finding the Def, I couldn’t. Now on jetBlue breach in February 04 in IEEE Security and Privacy. Now on her Choicepoint paper (above). A bit about Julie Earp and her paper on privacy policy (Requirements Engineering Journal 2004).

Additional papers reviewed. Great bit on auditing airline privacy policies – Best was Alaska and the worst was United (called ended up in India and with the answerer shouting into the phone).

Also points to Nimity.com.

[break]

Bruce Schneier is in the building — and up next, talking on the Future of Privacy. NorthWest was his airline and he spent 3 hours in the Detroit airport.

Stirring talk which Joey is capturing for later…

In the meantime, here’s Bruce getting the EFF Pioneer Award at eTech

How much privacy would you give up for security? Bruce says that this is a false statement. Privacy is about identity. Security can be about door locks for example. The debate is liberty vs control. Government should be transparent — this reduces power and changed the imbalance of power.

Facebook exposure is fine if all are exposing. But the power imbalance of say job hiring makes it a problem. Data is the pollution problem of the information society. Overproduced and not managed or controlled. Data controls will be the equiv of pollution controls.

[brief reconfiguration for the panel of all the speakers minus Sen. Cowell]

Spafford – Are you equating a smoker with a terrorist victim? One is an actor and one an innocent bystander.
GS – It’s about risk and not necessarily about action/non-action. We need to evaluate risk and abate fear. Fear/terror itself has a cost.

Harper – I have a friend who was investigated for buying gun powder to reload shells. My friend thought this was appropriate based on pattern matching.
JH – err. maybe not. Is there evidence that folks who buy large amounts of gun powder actually commit crimes greater than those who don’t buy it. He supports a confrontation or visit by police but not a say wire tap.
BS – frames it as is it real pattern or not

Ngo – what direction is legislation likely to go as data trails increase?
MN – specific evils are being addressed — repeal real id say. but she would like to see less specific legislation that protects the person rather than attack the technology.
GS – some folks want to save you from yourself. they want to protect you from hurting your life — of afterlife!

Bryant – what information on sex offenders gives false positives?
KB – goes after the Anton study and says they have less than 1% false positive. (Anton found 70%, but looked at only 11 reports says KB).

BarryS – How has the monetary cost of real id play out in the states? If my state doesn’t participate in Real ID will I be banned from Federal Courts? (BS says No).
BarryS – quadriplegic was held in contempt for not going to a 4th floor court room. Now a riff on Real ID in all states. If the first state says no, the house of cards collapses.

Bruce S – traded a constitutional law credit for another one: Increase of occurences in false positives and the decrease in transparency in government terrorist cases.
BS – when data is collected then false positives are highly contextual. catching the liquid bombers in London (used old school specific police work). old school police work has less false positives than say a data based investigation. it’s cheaper to begin with what JH would say are pattern and association. “no fly” is a list of people who are too dangerous to fly but too innocent to be arrested. and the list completely lacks transparency and correction or inspection.
GS – US-centric review of the bias toward innocent or at least not enough to convict. National fear caused the Japanese interment. Now we put people away who might possibly be terrorist. Fear of disclosure closed the courts and stalls justice.
JH – talks about gov secrecy. Secrecy: The American Experience by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
BarryS – tells of a meeting with Homeland Security about how to do physical searches. So your metal detectors don’t work, when will you be using partical detectors? HS I cannot tell you if a metal detectors detect plastic. BS – no one expects it to detect anything other than metal. HS – that is a secret that i cannot reveal.

Bruce has ended up with all the questions.

BruceS – Can technology protect privacy etc?
BS – not without a corresponding legal framework
GS – those who need it don’t have the skills. we are the ones who protect our freedoms; not techology.

KB – in 2000, choicepoint provided a list of voters with names “like” convicts which disenfranchised a lot of voters. what is choicepoint doing to prevent doing that again.
KB – we were buying the company that did that and we won’t do it again.

BarryS – does the constitution protect our privacy? if not do we need an amendment?
BarryS – no not explicitly. but the 4th has been used. but the new interpretation of the 4th, he says, eviscerated the 4th by an interpretation of what is “public.” he sees hope in the states and cites the state of Washington as a good example.
JH – says that there are many dimensions of privacy and there couldn’t be an amendment crafted to work for you. He rejects government’s attempt
Daniel Solove‘s taxonomy of privacy (at GW)

Various Ass-kicking by Carl Malamud

James Fallows writes on his Atlantic Monthly blog about Carl’s tiffs with CSPAN in the modestly titled article “Another win for Carl Malamud”.

The Hill explains further with a focus on Carl’s call for improved quality of Congressional videos. (“awful. Any kid on YouTube could do better.” says Carl. Not exactly overpraising YouTubers).

I’m a little late in posting these. I reconnected with Carl last night via email as he write to tell me about Paul Vixie and the Internet Systems Consortium being nominated for a Mellon grant for their continuing work on BIND — what I call the glue that holds the internet together.

If you are reading this, please consider endorsing BIND at the Mellon site.

Gene Spafford added to Security Panel!

That’s tomorrow, April 14, in Chapman Hall!

The Security and Liberty Forum

Program – Confirmed Speakers and Panel Members

1:00-1:10
Christian Stalberg
Welcome
1:10-1:25
Senator Janet Cowell
Opening remarks
1:25-1:45
P. T. Wright
US-VISIT: Safeguarding privacy
1:45-2:05
Jim Harper
Data mining, sharing, and brokering
2:05-2:25
Katherine Bryant
Consumer rights
2:25-2:45
BREAK

2:45-3:05
Barry Steinhardt
Real ID
3:05-3:25
Melissa Ngo
RFID; US-VISIT; Real ID
3:25-3:45
Gene Spafford
Government surveillance and propensity profiling
3:45-4:05
Bruce Schneier
The Future of Privacy
4:05-4:20
BREAK

4:20-5:00
Annie Anton, moderator
PANEL DISCUSSION
5:00
Jeannie Walsh
Door prizes
Thank you and adjourn

Confirmed Speakers and Panel Members

Annie Anton, Director, The Privacy Place

Katherine Bryant, Vice President for Consumer Advocacy at ChoicePoint

Sen. Janet Cowell, State Senator, State of North Carolina

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, the CATO Institute

Melissa Ngo, Staff Counsel and Director of EPIC‘s Identification and Surveillance Project

Bruce Schneier, internationally renowned security technologist and author

Gene Spafford, Executive Director, CERIAS – Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

Barry Steinhardt, Director of the Technology & Liberty Program, American Civil Liberties Union

P. T. Wright, Acting Deputy Director, Department of Homeland Security

Durham County Library Precision Book Cart Drill Team

You have to have WindowsMediaPlayer, but if you do you can see Durham Country Librarians celebrate National Library Workers Day (April 17) a little early this year.

Here in the Durham County Commissioners’ video of their meeting minutes we see the Durham County Library Precision Book Cart Drill Team in action.

Later the Chair of Commissioners reads a proclamation in honor of the workers efforts at keeping knowledge available to all citizens.

Thanks to Samiha Khanna of the News and Observer for pointing this out.

I Caused the Decline of Literature

A literature group that I participate in online — warren wilson alums –had turned into a complaint forum about the overuse of I in writing. This is a perennial complaint of course and often raised as as answer to why writing isn’t worth reading today (during whichever today this complaint is being registered). Where is mythic writing? Asked one member. (or perhaps the discussion started on the mythic as a cue for writing). I confessed thusly:

I Caused the Decline of Literature

Sex with a swan
is decidedly mythic;
sex with a swain
is mere arithmetic.

AMD Servers to power Groklaw.net

ibiblio logoGroklaw logoAMD logo

Part of a press release we’re sending out today (full release here):

The popular Groklaw.net, an Open Source legal news and discussion site, will soon be quicker to access because of a gift from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to ibiblio.org – the public’s library and digital archive located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The two dual-core AMD Opteronâ„¢ servers were presented to ibiblio.org in support of Groklaw.net to improve the speed and reliability of the site. ibiblio.org has hosted Groklaw.net since October, 2003.

[…]

“AMD is delighted to assist in keeping projects like Groklaw available to the open source community,” said Marc Miller, Open Source Relations Manager in the AMD Developer Outreach team. “This is part of our mission to support open standards, freedom of choice in operating systems, and foster the growth of industries important to the success of AMD products.”
The servers are expected to be in production by April 20, 2007.

UPDATE: Here’s how Groklaw announced it and how the readers are commenting.

UPDATE: The ever alert Jon Mills noticed that the story is now on SlashDot.

UPDATE: The Inquirer reports – “AMD bungs Groklaw some servers “

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