Ti Point Tork

Nine to Noon: 2 July 2009

July 1, 2009 – 12:40 pm
Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site. Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I'm talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops. Links http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/leonardo/overview/overview.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilmDN2e_Flc http://onyas.org.nz/ http://it.usaspending.gov/ http://opengovt.org.nz/ EMOTIONAL ROBOTS Ok, so first thing first: there are plenty of robots around us already. I'm not talking about Jim from Accounting whose only conversational gambit is marginal tax rates, but wires and metal machines. They make our cars, they pack our coffee beans, they sort our kiwifruit. But those are industrial robots. There are also military ...

Posted in New Zealand, Radio, Technology, politics | No Comments »

Nine to Noon: 4 June 2009

June 17, 2009 – 5:03 pm
Listen to my 4 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon show. I spoke about national security and social unrest on the Internets. Links: Guatemala The murdered lawyer National Security GhostNet Guatemala Guate is an unstable country. 36 years of civil war ended in 1996, but the unrest continues. This year has seen something new. My explanation here draws heavily on an article that blogger Xeni Jardin wrote for GOOD magazine, and on her posts for the BoingBoing blog. LAWYER ACCUSES PRESIDENT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE May 10 this year, lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was assassinated. Ordinarily this would be tragic for the family but another of the 6,000 annual murders in Guatemala. But the lawyer left a videotape saying: "If you are watching this message", Rosenberg says on the video, "it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with help from Gustavo Alejos" (Álvaro Colom's private secretary). ...

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Open New Zealand

June 17, 2009 – 4:55 pm
Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand. Glen's built a catalog for open government data, and there's a mailing list on which we're discussing the next project.

Posted in New Zealand, Technology, politics | No Comments »

Nine to Noon: 18 June 2009

June 17, 2009 – 4:50 pm
Listen to my 18 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon show. I spoke about online dating scams, Twitter's role in the Iranian election protests, and would have spoken about Chris Knox but we ran out of time. Here are my notes: Online Dating Scams NZ Herald story What: Websites that let people post their details and look for matches to date. Biggest is match.com. Because it's the web, members are not necessarily in the same country. How: Man introduces self to woman, they become friends, speak on the phone, want to get together in person. He says he'll make a trip. Excitement! Then catastrophe strikes--his passport is held by a Malaysian bureaucrats and he must pay $150 to get it back. Wire the money to Malaysia. Thanks! Oh no, more bribes needed. And on it goes, stringing you out. Common? Very. High ...

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Beetroot

May 9, 2009 – 4:11 pm
I've grown a row of beetroot and now I'm nervously wondering what the hell one does with a row of beetroot. I asked on Twitter, and here are the first 90m or so of responses: @annaraven: http://bit.ly/G77RQ @nzfi: @vexus_nexus similar effect on no# 2s too - tho don't think it is a gene thing (omg can't believe I'm tweeting this). @nzfi: oh & don't forget that the leaves are really yummy too. Chop, Steam, season & drizzle w olive oil. (Can u tell I like beets a lot?!). @nzfi: oh and if you par-boil it whole first then you can just rub the skin off. Easier and less mess with rubber gloves on though. @nzfi: wash, peel and grate it, pop it in a pot with knobs of butter & tbsp of balsamic. Medium heat for about 5-10mins - stir now&then. Yum @Vexus_Nexus: awesome once you know. Not so awesome first time when you forget ...

Posted in New Zealand, Personal | No Comments »

Open the DOC Preliminary Reports

March 29, 2009 – 2:13 pm
I sent this to Minister Worth (in his Internal Affairs role) and Laurence Millar (as Government CIO) today because they both have a desire to see more open government information. Posted FYI, and I'll update with any responses I get. Department of Conservation do a good thing by putting preliminary reports online. However, there's no mention of license and when poked, everything's under Crown Copyright and permission must be sought for use. A critical element of putting things online is clarifying the use that can be made of them and a critical element of open government information is removing the permission request cycle. A contractor to DOC, who writes reports on research, has asked for his report to be released under a Creative Commons license. The DOC lawyers replied, talking about royalties/license fees which are red herrings. DOC does not make money from site fidelity of NZ sea ...

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Nat at Govis, May 2009

March 16, 2009 – 5:01 pm
I'm excited, I'm going to be at the 2009 GOVIS conference on Government and IT. I'm closing the event out on Friday May 22, but also running two workshops before it opens: Work With The Web, Not Against It and Planning for 2012. The conference happens in Wellington, 20-22 May. Ever seen a web site with absolutely hideous URLs? You know the ones I mean--they can't be read by humans, they're longer than one line in email, they have ? in them and so on. These URLs make it hard for people to bookmark, share, and cite your web site. Why would you do that? Work With The Web, Not Against It covers these kind of epic fails in web sites. Five-step registration, miserable mobile experiences, failures building communities, .... I got a million of 'em, and I'll be sharing them at this workshop. In ...

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From Barbie to Renoir: Intellectual Property and Culture

March 8, 2009 – 10:04 am
This talk looks to be interesting: Since intellectual property law's beginning competing interests have stretched the law. Barbie now has more protection against rip-offs than Renoir could have imagined. A mishmash of justifications, including encouraging creativity and developing culture, has shaped the law. Does protection unduly restrict other cultural values? Susy Frankel will discuss the use and misuse of justifications in the law’s development. Susy is current chair of the Copyright Tribunal and professor of law at Victoria University of Wellington. Wellington's going to be quite the place to be on Tuesday, with Shelley Bernstein's lecture just before Susy's. Perhaps someone's heard my wish for intelligent NZ public lectures on copyright.

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Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

February 25, 2009 – 9:39 pm
The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster. I'd love to see something similar in New Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, all with a few tech-literate artists, academics, journalists, etc. telling it how it is.

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »

Teaching Kids to Program

February 15, 2009 – 9:39 pm
My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »