Deep Winter Reading

Well, it’s not all reading, because I’m starting with photography, notably the latest from Stephen Lewis, whose prose runs as deep and broad as the soul in his work. — DS

Photography

• Stephen Lewis in Bubkes:
  • A Short-Lived Project: Chaos, Intentionality, and the Symmetry of Friendship
  • The Women’s Market, Sofia, Bulgaria, Mid-1990s: One Poem, Two Faces, and Recollections of Three Photographers
• Downtown Los Angeles, shot on approch to LAX from EWR
• Sunrise over the South Coast from Santa Barbara on 7 January
• Sunrise over the South Coast from Santa Barbara on 8 January
• Pano shots of sunset over the Pacific from Santa Barbara on 12 January
• Puerta del Sol, Madrid, on 28 December 2013
• Flying into Seattle on 7 December 2013
• Searls family plot in Englewood, New Jersey, on 20 July 2013
• Richard Lawler in Engadget: Google Image Search makes it easier to sort results by licensing rights
• Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery

Personal

• AMA Foundation Announces 2013 Best Books in Marketing. The Intention Economy was a finalist. Not bad, considering that it wasn’t a marketing book and it came out in 2012. But hey: it’s unclassifiable, and Cluetrain (an anti-marketing book) is still a big hit with marketers, so why not? Big thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for continuing to put its weight behind the book. Much appreciated.

Surveillance vs. Privacy

• The World is now an airport
• Bruce Schneier: Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA
• Kevin S. Bankston and Askam Soltani in The Yale Law Journal: Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones
• James Ball in The Guardian: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep
• Steven Levy in Wired: How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet. Subtitle: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.
• OffNow.org: California Lawmakers Introduce Fourth Amendment Protection Act, push back against NSA spying
• Andy Oram in O’Reilly Radar: How did we end up with a centralized Internet for the NSA to mine? Subhead: The Internet is naturally decentralized, but it’s distorted by business considerations.
• Hal Berghel, originally in IEEE Computer, December 2013: The Intimidation Factor: How A Surveillance State Can Affect What You Read in Professional Publications

The Internet, Communications and Tech

• David Isenberg: After the Open Internet Order, Reclassification! Bonus link.
• Slashdot: Some history and analyusis of recent court ruling on Verizon and network neutrality
• Harold Feld in Public Knowledge: What Does Network Neutrality Look Like Today?
• Global digital statistics, 2014
• Mark Suster: Why Most of Your Assumptions About Phone Calls are Wrong
• Fred Wilson: VC Pitches in a Year or Two
• NPR’s All Tech Considered: Internet in America: An On Again, Off Again Relationship
• KUOW: How Seattle’s Bid for Faster, Cheaper Internet Fell Apart
• David Levine in the Center for Internet and Society blog: Bad News From the World of Fracking and, Even More Importantly, Corporate Control of Information
• Martha Mendoza for AP in the San Jose Mercury News: Selling social media clicks becomes big business.
• Brian Fung in Washington Post‘s The Switch: Netflix is shooting “House of Cards” in ultra HD. Can America’s broadband networks keep up?
• Tim O’Reilly in Google+ pushing back on Joe Nocera’s take on Jaron Lanier’s latest.
• Lukasz Olejnik, Minh-Dung Tran and Claude Castelluccia, all of inria.fr: Selling Off Privacy at Auction
• Dave Winer:
  • Is Apple Disruptive?
  • Internet shaming
  • When will it end?

Science, especially geology

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe
• Andrew Alden in About.com/Geology: Interview with Michael Welland, Author of “Sand”. An earlier review of the same book, which I am now going to get.
• Jacob Aron in New Scientist: Buoyant magma behind calamitous supervolcano eruptions