Participatroy Video

http://deepdishwavesofchange.blogspot.com/2010/05/interview-with-pv-sateesh-participatory.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12956925/Philip-Pocock-Collaborative-Documentary-Datatecture-1980

http://documentation.leisa.info/tools/guides.html

Jeg vil med det samme sige, at det er svært at finde teknikker af seriøs karakter. Så snart de specefikke teknikker bliver formuleret, bliver det nemt at se hvor det kan gå galt. Teknikker kan ikke redde os og er aldrig uden farer. Men sådan er det nu engang.

Gode internet skribenter.

Egentlig bare en huskeseddel til mig selv.
1. Dahr Jamail
2. Amy Worthington
3. Michel Chossudovsky
4. Webster Tarpley
5. Joe Vialls
6. Dave MacGowan
7. Chris Floyd
8. Mark Morford
9. Christopher Bollyn
10. Xymphora

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Et interview med den mærkelige helt Daniel Ellsberg. http://vimeo.com/8129340

Shirley Jackson og wikipedia.

Dette er et plot summary fra Wikipedia af bogen 'we have always lived in castles', tror jeg. Der er vist en diskusion, en akademisk diskusion (i den dobbelte betydning af både virkelig at være akademisk og ligegyldig.) der handler om wikipedias unøjagtighed og måske mere generelt om nettets tendenser til at udflade, bl.a. fakta. Som sagt er diskusionen ligegyldig. Der sker hvad der sker og hvis man vil have noget at sige der til, må man skabe noget. Man skaber noget ved at være bagrstræberisk, men det har visse tendser til at afmontere sig selv igen, det man har skabt.
Nå men der er i hvert fald et punkt hvor Wikipedia nogen gange er mange gange mere suverænt end et hvilket som helst opslagsværk, det være et leksikon, eller mere specefikke bøger om forskellige emner og det er i plot opsurmeringer. Wikipedia er den perfekte blanding af saglighed og lidenskab. Der er i nogle af dem en sjælden evne til at kondensere ikke bare handlingens ydre træk, men også handlingens kondeseren af sig selv. Denne opsumering(nedenfor) er et eksempel. Den formår på ret godt tid, at skrue de forskellige elementer ind i hinanden, på en måde så den faktisk også opsurmere historiens bevægelse og ikke bare dens elementer. Det lyder fint, er sikkert ret ligegyldigt, men en vældig nydelse at læse ikke desto mindre.

Plot summary

The people in the village have always hated us.

The novel, narrated in first-person by 18-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, tells the story of the Blackwood family. A careful reading of the opening paragraphs reveals that the majority of this novel is a flashback.

Merricat, her elder sister Constance, and their ailing uncle Julian live in isolation from the nearby village. Constance has not left their home in six years, going no farther than her large garden and seeing only a select few family friends. Uncle Julian, slightly demented and confined to a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for an autobiography, while Constance cares for him. Through Uncle Julian's ramblings the reader begins to understand what has happened to the remainder of the Blackwood family: six years ago, both the Blackwood parents, an aunt (Julian's wife), and a younger brother were murdered — poisoned with arsenic, mixed into the family sugar and sprinkled onto blackberries at dinner. Julian, though poisoned, survived; Merricat, having been sent to bed without dinner as a punishment for an unspecified misdeed, avoided the arsenic, and Constance, who did not put sugar on her berries, was arrested for and eventually acquitted of the crime. The people of the village believe that Constance has gotten away with murder (her first action on learning of the family's illnesses was to scrub the sugar bowl), and the family is ostracized, leading Constance to become something of an agoraphobe. Nevertheless, the three Blackwoods have grown accustomed to their isolation, and lead a quiet, happy existence. Merricat is the family's sole contact with the outside world, walking into the village twice a week and carrying home groceries and library books, often followed by groups of the village children, who taunt her with a singsong chant:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Merricat is a strange young woman, fiercely protective of her sister, prone to daydreaming and a fierce believer in sympathetic magic. As the major action unfolds, she begins to feel that a dangerous change is approaching; her response is to reassure herself of the various magical safeguards she has placed around their home, including a box of silver dollars buried near the creek and a book nailed to a tree. After discovering that the book has fallen down, Merricat becomes convinced that danger is imminent. Before she can warn Constance, a long-absent cousin, Charles, appears for a visit.

It is immediately apparent to the reader that Charles is pursuing the Blackwood fortune, which is locked in a safe in the house. Charles quickly befriends the vulnerable Constance. Merricat perceives Charles as a demon, and tries various magical means to exorcise him from their lives. Tension grows as Charles is increasingly rude to Merricat and impatient of Julian's foibles, ignoring or dismissing the old man rather than treating him with the gentle courtesy Constance has always shown. In an angry outburst between Charles and Julian, the level of the old man's dementia is revealed when he claims he has only one living niece: Mary Katherine, he believes, "died in an orphanage, of neglect" during Constance's trial.

In the course of her efforts to drive Charles away, Merricat breaks things and fills his bed with dirt and dead leaves. When Charles insists she be punished, Merricat demands, "Punish me?... You mean, send me to bed without my dinner?" She flees to an abandoned summerhouse on the property and loses herself in a fantasy in which all her deceased family members obey her every whim. She returns for dinner, but when Constance sends her upstairs to wash her hands, Merricat pushes Charles' still-lit pipe into a wastebasket filled with newspapers. The pipe sets fire to the family home, destroying much of the upper portion of the house. The villagers arrive to put out the fire, but, in a wave of long-repressed hatred for the Blackwoods, break into the remaining rooms and destroy them, chanting their children's taunting rhyme. In the course of the fire, Julian dies of what is implied to be a heart attack, and Charles shows his true colors, attempting to take the family safe (unsuccessfully, as is revealed later). Merricat and Constance flee for safety into the woods. Constance confesses for the first time that she always knew Merricat poisoned the family; Merricat readily admits to the deed, saying that she put the poison in the sugar bowl because she knew Constance would not take sugar.

Upon returning to their ruined home, Constance and Merricat proceed to salvage what is left of their belongings, close off those rooms too damaged to use, and start their lives anew in the little space left to them: hardly more than the kitchen and cellar. The house, now without a roof, resembles a castle "turreted and open to the sky". Merricat tells Constance they are now living "on the moon." The villagers, awakening at last to a sense of guilt, begin to treat the two sisters as mysterious creatures to be placated with offerings of food left on their doorstep. The story ends with Merricat observing, "Oh, Constance...we are so happy."

Gladwell og andre 'vigtige tænkere'

Det her er fra en liste over vigtige tænkere og jeg kan ikke huske hvem der har lavet den. Gladwell har skrevet nogle ganske gode bøger, bl.a. Blink. Det vigtigeste for mig at se er, at han insistere på at journalismen skal være inventiv og dermed skriver han mærkeligt nok visionære bøger... det er ganske befriende. Således hører han til vores genre af cunmen, pragmatister og undersøgende journalister... de andre er bare med for sjov.
19. Malcolm Gladwell

for rethinking how we think about thinkers.

journalist | New Yorker | New York

With a mind as unorthodox as his hairdo, Gladwell is a genre-originating journalist: a specialist in translating counterintuitive research for the lay reader on subjects as diverse as Enron, the full-court press in basketball, ketchup, and racial bias. Most recently, he attacked the notion of genius in 2009's Outliers, which argues that circumstance and practice (10,000 hours of practice, to be precise) mean as much as gray matter and natural talent. The brilliance of a Bill Gates or a Mozart is not a freak phenomenon, he writes, but the product of extraordinary amounts of effort at precisely the right moment. By making surprising arguments seem obvious, Gladwell has added a serious dose of empiricism to long-form journalism and changed how we think about thought itself.

Gladwell's favorite thinkers:

* Richard Thaler (No. 7). Thaler is one of the very best of the behavioral economists -- the economists who understand that human beings don't behave according to the arid logic of supply and demand curves. His paper "The Loser's Curse" is perhaps the single smartest thing I've ever read about professional football, and Nudge, the book he co-wrote with Cass Sunstein, is superb.
* Gary Klein. I've been enormously influenced by Klein because he's a psychologist who studies real-world decision-making, as opposed to the way people behave in laboratories. And the worlds he looks at -- firefighters, marines, intensive care nurses -- offer extraordinary insights as to how experts behave in high-pressure situations. His first book, Sources of Power, remains one of my favorites.
* Richard Nisbett. No thinker has had as much influence on my work as Nisbett. Where to begin? He's an environmentalist -- that is, he has systematically and convincingly proven, again and again, that we are creatures of our situations, environments, and cultures. I would recommend anything he's written, but especially The Geography of Thought and Intelligence and How to Get It.
* Iain Pears. Pears is a novelist. He wrote An Instance of the Fingerpost and, most recently, Stone's Fall, among many others. I think he's the finest pure storyteller working in popular fiction, and those of us who are in the business of making arguments and communicating ideas have to pay attention to storytellers because they have the skills we desperately need.



41. Esther Duflo

for adding quantitative rigor to assessments of foreign aid.

economist | MIT | Cambridge, Mass.

If there's any hope of adjudicating the Sachs-Easterly contretemps, the 36-year-old Duflo -- who has stayed neutral -- might be able to provide it. Unlike traditional economists who test new aid products under laboratory conditions, Duflo, who just won a MacArthur "genius" grant and has been hailed as "the new face of French intellectualism," tests products in the field, with all the interference and compounding data points that go with it. She has turned her methods on the questions of whether it's best to give away or sell mosquito nets, whether grandfathers or grandmothers are more likely to spend on the health of their families, and what incentives work for vaccination. As co-founder of MIT's Poverty Action Lab, Duflo is imposing new rigor on everything from women's empowerment to computer-assisted learning: "[W]e are trying to raise expectations but make them real."

Reading list: The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuscinski; The Biographer's Tale, by A.S. Byatt; In Xanadu, by William Dalrymple.

Wants to visit: Brazil

Gadget: Neither Facebook nor Twitter. BlackBerry.


42. Jared Diamond

for helping us understand how societies not only grow, but die.

Geographer | UCLA | Los Angeles

Diamond writes about destruction. But if his most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was about how Western civilizations destroyed their competition, his most recent book, Collapse, traces how societies, such as Greenland's Vikings, destroy themselves by squandering their natural resources. Climate change may be a new concern, but the need to live sustainably is an old one, Collapse shows. More recently, Diamond has turned his attention to modern predicaments, urging less consumption and population restraint. The Earth today has more than enough resources to sustain its current population, Diamond thinks, but we must use them more intelligently than our ancestors did, lest we go the way of the Vikings.

Reading list: Colomba, by Dacia Maraini; The Divine Comedy, Dante; New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw, Luigi D'Albertis.

Wants to visit: Uzbekistan

Best idea: Triple the price of gasoline in the United States.

Worst idea: Fertilizing the ocean, or injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere to combat climate change.

Chomsky og Buckley.

En analyse af imperialismen.
Du tager udgangspunkt i Chomskys bog om usa, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-GUAxmxdk&feature=related, et interview mellem buckley og chomsky... her gennemgås imperialisme. Der er tre standpunkter her som er vigtige... 1) det almindelige folks ansvar. 2) Alle USAs handlinger efter anden verdenskrig, eller hvornår det nu er, har været imperialitiske dvs. i virkeligheden har været guidet af grådihged og egen interesser. 3) De historier om godhed, begrundelser og lign, som der har været givet, har alle sammen været løgn.
Først; Interviewet er et godt eksempel på to mennesker der står på hver sin side af et ganske signifikant politisk skel og alligevel taler sammen. Buckley er et lille mirakel og ville virkelig være en sjældenhed idag.
Bogen er faktisk ganske god og veldokumenteret. Men den handler om noget andet for mig at se. Jeg tror ikke at Chomsky mener at historierne vi fortæller os selv for, at retfærdiggøre os selv og vores gerninger kun er usandheder. Mit argument er at deres argumenter og de historier vi fortæller enten har en hvis virkelighed, dvs. en hvis virkning for os selv, eller at de i hvert fald får det (og dermed var istand til at virke, det er ikke alle historier der istand til at virke). Dermed er angrebet på disse historier ganske komplekse, for man skal faktisk sige, de gælder ikke, de er ikke sande, de handler ikke om fx irakerne, samtidigt med at man skal sige, de handler om noget andet end i tror. Dette er det komplekse, at der ikke adskilles og jeg tror, at denne adskillelse faktisk som filosofisk problem ligger i grunden af vores måde, at erkende på, omgås verden på. Det er en global sammenhæng, vi taler om, gennemførelsen af videnskab og autoritet. Men hvordan taler man imod dette.
De sidste par års begyndede, fremvoksende historie om tidelige tideres problemer er et brugbart redskab. Redskabet består netop i, at der blev fortalt historier og at de var mere komplekse end kommunister og akademikere gjorde dem til, at der var skygger af sandhed i dem.

Jeg er ved at læse bogen Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental Af Marc Gerstein, den handler om hvordan vi i mange tilfælde fx lader historier, omgivelserne bestemme hvordan vi ser et eller andet fænomen og således lader historierne skjule de egentlige farer, vores eget ansvar og vores egne muligheder. Bogen har forord af Daniel Elsberg og til dem der ikke ved det, var det ham der i 1971 publiserede pentagon papirerne. For mig at se er disse historier altid en del af vores måde at omgås verden på og ikke altid til det dårlige. Men det her, fiktionens spil i virkeligheden eller omvendt er et tilbagevendende tema for mig på denne blog.

Nicky hager og undersøgende journalistik.

En lille gennemgang af Nicky Hager om hvordan han skrev bogen the secret power.

Don’t assume that secretive organisations are impenetrable

Many people have asked how I uncovered information about Echelon. They are experiences I think are worth sharing. The starting point for my research was finding out the names and job titles of all the staff within the New Zealand electronic intelligence agency. The breakthrough came when I realised that all their names had been hidden within public service staff lists, scattered through pages and pages of military staff. Because hardly anyone knew even of the organisation’s existence, they presumably thought the names would never be noticed.

By obtaining other lists of military staff that were compiled without the spies, and subtracting one list from the other, I was left with a near-perfect list of the hundreds of people inside the spy agency; and many more who had worked there in the past. Comparing this list to other public service lists gave me general job titles for all these people. Combined with some early leaks, I was gradually able to construct the entire top-secret organisational plan from relatively open sources. The job then began of identifying people in the various sections willing to talk.

People have varied reasons for deciding to leak information. There is, for instance, simply the relief of talking to someone who knows about their work after years of never being able to tell even their wives or husbands what they have done at work all day. But the main reason in this case was the officers’ concerns that an important area of government activity had been too secret for too long, both from the public and Parliament. Some people felt strongly about intelligence activities they regarded as immoral or not in the country’s interests. I decided who might be willing to talk to me, seeking people from all the various compartmentalised sections I wanted to study, and then quietly approached them. I am still surprised that most of the people I approached were prepared to talk to me, resulting in hundreds of pages of interview notes about the high-tech spy systems they operate.

Once the information had started, it poured in. It became known within the spy agencies that I was reearching them – new staff were warned about me in security briefings although they had no idea how much I had learnt or that I was writing a book – but, if anything, this seemed to help the leaks. For a long time I felt a slight thrill when I put my hand in my postbox in case I found secret papers left anonymously inside.

Some information came because ‘high security’ can be more about impressions than reality. For example, the spy bosses must surely have wondered why I repeatedly requested the latest copies of the agency’s internal newsletters, when they always released them with every meanful word blacked out. These people are our government’s chief advisors on security issues, but what they never realised was that by holding the photocopied newsletters up to my desk light I could, with care, read virtually everything – all the details of new or refocussed sections, staff changes, overseas postings and so on – that had been deleted.

High security at the agency’s most secret spying facility, the Waihopai station, was also more impression than reality. Despite electric fences, sensors and razor wire, I went there several times while writing the book and later was able to take a television documentary crew inside, where they filmed the Echelon equipment in the main operations room and even the titles of Intelsat (International Satellite Organisation) manuals on the desks (which confirmed the facility’s role spying on ordinary public telecommunications networks).

While there was very secret information I could only learn from insiders, a lot of the information came from careful fieldwork (such as observing changes over the years in various Echelon stations around the world as telecommunications technology changed) and collating snippets of information from unclassified documents and news reports. Various of the inside sources were friends of friends of friends who I located simply by asking around widely. Don’t assume that secretive organisations are impenetrable. There is important research work waiting to be done on many subjects in every country.