No trolling

Taking a lead from the story of Kathy Sierra, the blogger who cancelled a conference talk for fear of injury, Mary Brandel discussed trolling and cyberstalking. In an article entitled “Five ways to defeat blog trolls and cyberstalkers” in Comptureworld, Ms. Brandel not only provides an introduction to trolling but also offers recommendations for combatting it. Check it here.

Ultra-what?

Eli Saslow has an extended entry on the Barkley Marathon in the Washington Post. It’s a pretty fabled event, as a perusal of links available via google will show.

Turn off the TV

Tomorrow is the first day of TV-Turn-Off week.The Center for Screen-Time Awareness encourages folks to watch no television from 23 through 29 April 2007. I wonder whether it will be observed.

Macaque genome

In its 13 April 2007 issue, Science provides an important set of articles and other resources about the genome sequence of the rhesus macaque monkey. The magazine includes a research article and four reports that describe the biomedical and evolutionary developed from the work on the macaque genome.

But wait! There’s more!

Founder

Mr. Jefferson, as we call him where I work, advocated some pretty important things. Around here, we consider him the founder of U.Va., which was one of the three items he wanted noted on his tomb stone and which is an important landmark in the history of higher education. Today we celebrate the anniversery of his birth. Like most of us, he wasn’t perfect, but those who know more than I do can document his achievements. They are extraordinary, as noted by Wikipedia authors:

Middle phishing

Chris Soghoian, a graduate student in informatics at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, US), has demonstrated how phishing schemes can be implemented using man-in-the-middle methods— Sitekey image, Passmark image, or Yahoo personalized sign-in seal—that circumvent what banks are touting as a means of avoiding them. He has a video demonstrating how it works, and it’s getting some press coverage.

TJ Muzzles

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression published it’s Jefferson Muzzle Awards for 2007. This annual compilation of items that illustrate the restraint of free speech routinely tickles me. They find some doozies. Here’s a list of links to the vignettes. (One can, of course, simply go directly to the TJ Center’s page and browse them directly.) I think my favorite for this year is about the four kids who were expelled for making a video about teddy bears directed to kill a teacher (the bears’ attack is thwarted by students).

1. The Bush Administration
2. The National Collegiate Athletic Association
3. The Charles A. Beard Memorial School Board of Knightstown, Indiana
4. The Philadelphia (PA) Commission on Human Relations
5. United States Department of Defense
6. The Maine Bureau of Liquor Enforcement
7. The Federal Communications Commission
8. Watson Chapel (Arkansas) School District
9. U. S. Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.)
10. The City Council of East St. Louis, Illinois
11. The Miami-Dade County (Florida) School Board
12. The Administration of Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher
13. Ben Davis High School (Indianapolis, IN), Princeton High School (Cincinnati, OH) and Wyoming Valley West High School (Kingston, PA)
14. The Ohio General Assembly

What’s your favorite?

Helpless self-help

In today’s Washington Post, Tim Watkin has a good take-down of a currently very popular self-help book by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret. Mr. Watkin patiently traces how this newest craze in what must be one of the most craze-crazy areas of US culture perpetuates, at its base, a hoax.

The revelation that inspired her? “Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life,” Byrne writes. “You are the most powerful magnet in the universe . . . so as you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you.”

Despite the rather inexact science — when it comes to magnets, it’s opposites that attract — Byrne asserts that this secret is a natural law as “precise” as gravity. It was the power, she argues, behind geniuses such as Plato, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein. Of course, none of these gents is alive to vouch for the accuracy of her claims, so Byrne has rallied support from a Who’s Who of the self-help industry, including John Gray, author of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” and Jack Canfield, who wrote “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” Oprah Winfrey had Byrne on her show and raved about “The Secret.”

They all endorse a book, with its clever “Da Vinci Code”-like cover, that presents the law of attraction as the ultimate shortcut to success and the American dream. Anyone who wants it badly enough can be a millionaire, the president, even an American Idol.

In his opinion piece about the book, Mr. Watkin tells it much better than can I.

I’m reminded of Wendy Kaminer’s marvelous dismantling of the self-help movement in I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional.