Saturday: Fair Trade, etc, nap

I'd definitely support getting AC Transit passes for UC Berkeley staff. I'd also consider selling my car to be part of a City Car Share in the East Bay, slated to start in Berkeley in January. (BBC reported on the SF Car Share program.)

On Thursday, David and I had lunch with David Geihufe, Principal of Source Source Software LLC and social-source.org. The concept David Geihufe is pursuing is one I agree deeply with: " The social source technology development model—where organizations directly improve technology because it is liberated from the legal constraints of intellectual property, as long as improvements are subsequently contributed back into the community for others to improve upon—represents an unrealized opportunity for the social purpose sector to develop and disseminate state-of-the-art technology that is mission driven. With access to affordable open-source technology, social purpose organizations can mould technology in their own image." The challenge is how to realize it -- and that's what we spent most of lunching brainstorming.

The strange saga of Yahoo and WebRing (Salon). "The sorry saga of WebRing is just a squinty footnote in the history of one of the Web's biggest, still-standing companies, Yahoo. But it tells more about what was sacrificed on the Web in the Great Internet Bubble than a terabyte of spreadsheets detailing paper losses. It's what happened when a nifty little homegrown Web phenomenon that was never designed to make money got swept up and sucked in by the boom, only to be orphaned in the bust."

My friend Krista Faries wrote a wonderful review of the Harry Potter books (Why Harry Potter is Not the Chronicles of Narnia); the review has been made available online.

Free-lancers Joust With Publishers " It is argued that free-lance writers and photographers are 'a dime a dozen,' even "hacks, 'as one editor of this writer's acquaintance is fond of saying. Talented free-lancers, however, are not so easy to come by. And the benefits of talented free-lancers contributing to good newspapers can be so mutually constructive that tightening the contract noose, as some have done since Tasini, is foolhardy at best and self-destructive at worst. [link from JD]

I'm having fun reading The New York Times Year in Ideas (Sunday Magazine).

My housemate Tibor and I had a great laugh over the latest New Yorker cover. ("New Yorkistan") I didn't realize that the cover would be featured in the New York Times! (There's a radio interview on Here and Now -- the page has a scan of the cover.)

McCarthyism redux?

Frank Rich (NY Times): " While I wouldn't dare call it treason, it hardly serves the country to look the other way when the Ashcroft-Ridge-Thompson-Mineta team proves as inept at home as the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Rice team has proved adept abroad. In the Afghan aftermath, the home front is just as likely to be the next theater of war as Somalia or Iraq. Giving a free pass to Mr. Ashcroft and the other slackers in the Bush administration isn't patriotism — it's complacency, which sometimes comes with a stiff price."

Dan Gillmor: " These are ugly times. Please speak up. If you don't, the republic is in trouble."

Dave Winer: "I don't trust Ashcroft."

Jacob Weisberg (Slate): "As someone who was actually prepared to listen to Attorney General John Ashcroft's defense of military tribunals and other security measures, I have to say that I was completely disgusted by his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. It was an arrogant, bullying performance that went a long way to substantiating the views of his harshest critics."

More about Radio/Manila directories

I've started to build my site directory, but it's not very organized yet and will change drastically for a while yet. It's a bit of a pain to navigate too since everytime you look at some item requires another trip back to the server.

Sjoerd Visscher has written an OPML loader that combines server-sided programming and javascript to make looking at directories a much more pleasant experience. To look at my directory, jump to his OPML Loader page and drop http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/rdhyee/discuss/reader$238 into the URL box. You can navigate the directory much more responsively. (I wonder whether Userland would be interested in incorporating this type of rendering as an option into Manila.)

ActiveWords

I finally decided to check out ActiveWords (because of what I've read on Robert Scoble's site). I'll report back how I like it. (Thirty minutes later: I ran into some bugs and have contacted ActiveWords to see what they know about the program. Bummer. I really like ActiveWords and already started thinking about how I would be using it.)

To help my readers know what I'm talking about, let me quickly describe ActiveWords as I see it. One thing about graphical user interfaces is that sometimes it takes a lot of effort to something to happen. For example, to launch Microsoft Word on my system, I have to navigate to the Start Menu and then find the Word icon. (Windows Keyboard shortcuts definitely help but they often involve remembering arcane key combinations.) I think of ActiveWords as extending the keyboard shortcuts ideas -- but in addition to typing things like Ctrl-Esc (to fire up the Start Menu), I can also type "word" and hit F8 (the default ActiveWords magic key) and ActiveWords will launch MS Word for me. Indeed, I can type Word and hit F8 anywhere in Windows and the action will happen.

The possibilities are exciting: I set up "blog" to fire up this blog in a windows, "ecco" to open my PIM, "google" to go the google site. I started thinking about to wire ActiveWords so that typing "google_sub cantata" would submit do a google search on "cantata" and drop it into my Word document (I'm not sure whether the ActiveWords scripting language would let that happen.) Also, I thought of using ActiveWords substitution facility. Maybe I could type HOL{dog, cat, food} to get

dog
cat
food

.

I hope my problem gets resolved so that I can use ActiveWords....

Helping students to be metacognitive

Isaac asks whether we should have a more structured discussion about CY's question of "what are some good ways of encouraging this kind of self-consciousness?" I had mentioned metacognition as the word that came to my mind. The book Engaging Ideas by John Bean is a wonderful resource for the undergraduate and graduate classroom. I have the book and used the techniques in my ATDP worldviews class geared for really bright teenagers. Do you think these ideas would work for a general secondary or middle-school audience? Are there books similar to Engaging Ideas, except written for the K-12 world? (I'm sure there are lots of books about "critical thinking" for K-12 -- but are there really books as useful as Bean's?)

Steve Johnson on Larry Lessig's latest book

On Thursday, I pointed to Johnson's review of Lessig's The Future of Ideas. The review is worth the read. Johnson thinks very highly of Lessig and his book but thinks that Lessig is a bit too pessimistic about the effects of ever-increasing control mechanisms being slapped on the Web. I hope that Johnson is right. I'm certainly worried. Perhaps it's time to become active with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I wonder how much on-campus collaboration there is around the issues of the commercialization and lock-down of intellectual property in a digital age. I've known about the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic for a while now: " The Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall was the first clinic in the country to provide law students with the opportunity to represent the public interest in cases and matters on the cutting-edge of high technology law." Maybe the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology is another good place to look for the relevant campus community.

The battle over the future of intellectual property in a digital age is an extremely important one -- but one that is difficult to get most people excited about, it seems. How to change that? How to talk your mom and dad about these issues and get them to see their importance?

Pamphleteering for Fair Trade Coffee

I did something new in Berkeley. My friend Matthew and I were on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, handing out pamplets for the December 8 Day of Action for Fair Trade Coffee. As fellow members of the Justice Task Force at First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, we have been involved in publishing newsletters informing the congregation about various aspects of justice. Indeed, Matthew wrote an article in the latest newsletter about Pura Vida Coffee, a company that sells "great coffee" for a "great cause", "the product of an ambitious and radical idea: that the resources of capitalism and power of technology can fuel work undertaken with the passion of faith to bring comfort and hope for a better future to children living in need." [quotes taken from their website]

Two months ago, when I learned that the topic of our newsletter would be fair trade coffee, I thought to myself that in a world of millions of dying people, fighting wars, destroying themselves and the world, why would I (especially as a non-coffee drinker) care about gourmet coffee? Why, in fact, should the congregation care and why should we focus their attention on the matter? I'm thankful that I kept my mouth shut and went along with the newsletter. Fair Trade coffee is certified to have been produced in an economically sustainable and environmentally friendly manner by farmers who have been paid a living and fair wage. As layed out, for example, in a series of article in the San Francisco Chronicle [1,2,3,4], we are in the midst of greatly depressed coffee bean prices, which have been ruinous for the farmers. (Profits for coffee for the major multinationals retailing coffee have remained high since Americans remain willing to pay good money for coffee.) Today's day of action was to ask coffee drinkers, especially gourmet coffee drinkers -- of which there are many in Berkeley -- to buy Fair Trade coffee (and to ask their favorite cafes and supermarkets to stock Fair Trade Coffee). Farmers selling coffee to TransFair USA currently receive $1.26 per pound rather than the $0.50, the rate paid by local middlemen. The extra money goes to keeping the farmers in business through wise re-investment and sound farming practices.

I've become intrigued by the Fair Trade movement because it points to small changes that we can make here in our daily lives (small for us because we are rich) that can make profound differences in the lives of the global poor. Certainly, we are called to sacrificial giving -- so we can't stop with the small changes that are really tweaks on our abundance -- but we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere is in the heart of our consumerism. I drink tea -- I will look for Fair Trade tea now. In the short term, I don't think that I will completely switch over to Free Trade tea (since it is so difficult to find in the places I buy tea). But I can certainly ask for it wherever I go -- and encourage my tea-drinking friends to do likewise.

It was tough to give flyers away on Telegraph. I should have known that, being someone who wave off people wanting to hand me stuff every day on campus or on the street. "But I'm trying to sell anything," I think. How to craft the 1-2 second message to get people's attention, we wondered. Matthew found that posing the question, "Do you want to help a farmer when buying coffee?" was somewhat successful at getting people's attention. I was glad that everyone was friendly. A highlight of the morning was encountering an old friend who used to go to First Pres. "Christians handling pamplets out for social justice?" He was surprised.

Matthew and I stopped at a number of cafes to ask whether Fair Trade Coffee was available. None of the three we checked out (Cafe Mediterranean, Cafe Milano, Cafe Siena) was selling Fair Trade Coffee; we left information for the managers to consider doing so. After about two hours on the street, we headed to the Free Speech Movement Cafe for lunch. Apparently, Fair Trade coffee has made some headway on the Berkeley campus. Every drop of coffee in the dining commons is Fair Trade certified. The campus restaurants offer a Fair Trade option, as well as some (all?) of the campus' privately owned cafes serve Fair Trade Coffee, including FSM. When we left the remaining flyers with the cafe, we hoped that we would be helping coffee drinkers at FSM understand better the context of their coffee drinking.

The Cosmic Bach?

I finally put an article I wrote about Bach (The Cosmic Bach?) on this site. It was published in the magazine Radix ("Where Christian Faith Meets Contemporary Culture"), for which I have recently become a board member.

I had incredible fun writing this article. It is an unabashedly personal take on the effect that the work of J. S. Bach has had on my spirit and heart.

Note: I know that the HTML for the article is horrendous -- I wrote the piece with Microsoft Word, exported it to HTML and ran HTML Tidy on the output -- and still the HTML is much messier than need be.

Nov Jan

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