Curiouser and Curiouser!

What on earth are you listening to?

 ¡Ay caramba! Clear Channel goes latino

In an insightful and scary article on Salon.com, Eric Boehlert recently discussed a plan now before the FCC to dominate the US Latino airwaves. The proposed merger is one between the Hispanic Broadcasting Company (HBC), the leading Spanish-language radio network in the United States with 63 stations, and Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language television broadcast company and a major Latino music label. The combined company would control almost 70% of the Spanish language advertising in the United States. Since Hispanics represent 14% of the US population and growing, you do the math.

[Oligopoly Watch]

Good grief! Does anybody still turn the Radio on in America?  How can you bear it?  I got used to taking a whole bunch of CD's whenever I was there.

Whose screwing who..?

Ben Shiller.

"Nothing makes someone more unlikable than their unawareness of what makes them unlikable. That's the main reason why people don't like Los Angeles. It's not surprising, then, that Hollywood's answer to the advent of DVD burners and Internet piracy is a clueless public service announcement in which Ben Affleck, Lucy Liu, and 'Titanic' director James Cameron ask you not to steal from them. Next they'll produce a PSA about how small trailers can cause claustrophobia.

In May, Affleck's 1-minute-12-second plea will unspool on movie screens nationwide; it'll be the Will Rogers Institute can-rattle of our time. But this appeal is for the fair treatment of movie stars, not the compassionate support of sick kids -- or sick horses, or sick kids who ride horses....

But Affleck's point, on second viewing, wasn't that he's Benny from the Block and in need of scratch. It's that the less well-paid are in jeopardy if piracy blunts studios' profits. 'The movie you're about to see is the work of hundreds of people,' says Affleck in the PSA. 'Not just the stars you see on screen,' but writers, cameramen, costumers, and countless others. Apparently, there is a world in which the proletariat includes the guy who penned 'Point Break....'

Also, I can't figure out why they would show this PSA to people who've just paid full price for admission, instead of shoving it at the front end of a DVD, where actual criminals might see it, since the only people Internet pirates truly put out of business are the in-theater camcorder crooks.

When I asked Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti whether the director of the highest-grossing movie of all time was the ideal spokesperson against petty theft, he tap-danced. 'I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs,' said Valenti of the PSA, 'the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that,' he said, vastly overestimating the U.S. poverty level and what I get paid for this column. I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home....

I'll still rent DVDs and see movies in theaters. But I'll download them too. And after watching that PSA, I'm especially going to steal Affleck flicks. As soon as he makes one worth stealing." [Entertainment Weekly, available to subscribers only]

[The Shifted Librarian]

LOL

Of course Valenti doesn't seem to appreciate the irony that it is he and his buddies that ensure that the "working stiffs" make only $75-$100K of the vast fortunes that get made from these movies.  The words "That's not much to live on" should choke him but like all these poisonous bastards he is immune.  Probably Afflecks too busy being rich & famous to worry about that either.

Remind me again, Whose screwing who..?

Can knowledge be captured?

Thinking about capturing knowledge.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Matt - Does your well thought through and elegant  diagram suggest that knowledge can be "captured" by some system?

If so I prefer the BP approach where they reject some form of "capture" and see instead that knowledge is most deep and useful in tacit form embedded in a person. So instead of capturing knowledge, BP make it easy to find the person who has the know how.

For instance in my case as a novice blogger, Critt Jarvis has kindly given me the code to set up a category section and a blogroll. Now Richard Gayle is helping me automate the blogroll. This quite different fro  say a FAQ which would be the knowledge in "capture" form. For me the novice, being mentored by a person is 10 times better than reading about the technique.

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Interest points Robert.  I would have to say that my opinion is not well-formed right now.  I guess I do believe that knowledge (at least some knowledge) can be captured.

Let me turn it around a second and ask this:  For BP to be able to "find" the person who knows something don't you have to know:

• what it is they know
• who they are

aren't these kinds of knowledge?  And doesn't making them available in a system mean capturing them first?

Semantic arguments

Is there any agreed way to define & measure the semantic distance between two words?

I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces

Plan to Protect USA Patriot Act. Interesting view, by Andrew Glass of The Hill, on Ashcroft's politically astute plan to keep USA Patriot alive, hidden, and safe from exposure. Hill says Ashcroft, sensing a real problem with his heavy-handed use of USA Patriot, did the following (some background on Sensenbrenner):

Ashcroft has been in Congress and politics a long time. He's a sneaky SOB, grown adept at hiding his political motives and actions from his constituents, and he now has the benefit of an unelected position with no answerability to voters. If Ashcroft gets his way and the (already marginal) sunset provisions of Patriot are killed we are in for a long, sad period in US history.

thehill.com - We're watching you: national security and privacy issues.

[...] Last summer, Sensenbrenner and committee's ranking Democrat, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, asked the department for basic statistical data about how it was using its powerful new surveillance tools.

The department stalled for so long that Sensenbrenner threatened to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and to oppose renewing the act.

Sensenbrenner reported to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had told Ashcroft: "If you want to play I've got a secret, good luck getting the PATRIOT Act extended. Because if you've got bipartisan anger in the Congress, the sunset will come and go and the PATRIOT Act disappears."

Beating a tactical retreat, Ashcroft thereupon launched a three-pronged damage-control effort.

[Privacy Digest]

[b.cognosco]

If you guys know what's good for you, you'll keep a watchful eye on John Ashcroft and his henchgoons and keep lobbying your representatives to end the Patriot Act as soon as possible.

You mean I'm not an enigma?

I was reading something today about how bloggers quite often don't offer the reader any information about themselves at all.  I guess it's true, although I don't hide my biases it's probably hard to judge what sort of person I am.  So i've added a little bit of biography via the "About Me" button in my right hand link panel.  It's a work in progress but hopefully gives more of the flavour (I won't ask which one).