95 hours after shooting his pal Harry Whittington in a hunting accident, Dick Cheney agreed to answer questions – at Fox News, questioned by Brit Hume. Note also that Cheney wouldn't talk to police until 8 hours after the shooting. This reminds me of similar behavior by a politician after a troubling accident - Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick..

This won't surprise anyone who was part of the successful effort to stop Texas legislation that would have banned municipal networks last session, but the legislators who want to outlaw muni networks are those who get the most campaign money from incumbent telcos like SBC, now AT&T. [Link]

Jim Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and Bush's top climate modeller, says the Greenland ice cap is melting even faster than scientists had feared, and "the implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic." This isn't surprising for those who've been attentive to the signs of global climate change for years now, but we don't often hear acknowledgement of the climate change scenario from scientists connected with the Bush administration, and Hansen offers insight into why that would be:

...a few weeks ago, when I - a Nasa climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of Nasa's mission is to understand and protect the planet.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, "the anarchist in the library," made a brief appearance on the Daily Show this week. He blogged that the "Trendspotting" segment he was on took four hours and many takes to shoot, confirming my suspicion that those news items are carefully constructed to look "candid." [Link]

Sascha Meinrath posts about two bills that are favorable to community wireless and network innovation. While your friendly neighborhood monopolistic monolithic telco's been hoping to sew up ownership of networks, ditch the concept of net neutrality, and control your access to innovation, the message seems to be sinking in with legislators - we're in a new world of digital convergence best supported by a network that is accessible to all, neutral, dumb, with intelligence (and freedom to connect) at the edges. (Via boing boing)

Metropolis has an overview of Pliny Fisk's work. Fisk created the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, based in Austin. An earlier Metropolis article discusses Fisk's GroHome concept:

The GroHome--part of a broader program Fisk calls "Community-Supported Architecture"--was conceived of as a way to offer residents the flexibility to expand their living space with minimal impact to the site, the local landfill, and residents' daily lives. The construction is based on a series of joints that can be used to erect a variety of structures, from simple lampposts to large meeting halls.

Here's one for the GhostBusters: a glob of tarry slime is ingesting parts of Los Angeles. [Link]

People with no real estate experience will often make incorrect assumptions about their properties' values.

Example: Someone might think "The guy down the street has had his property on the market for $100,000; my house is bigger, so it's worth more than 100K." However, the listed price of a property may have nothing to do with its actual market value. Anybody can list a house for any price; the relevant data point is not the listed price, but the sold price, which tells you what someone was actually willing to pay. If the home hasn't sold for the $100,000 asking price, that could just as easily mean that it was priced too high for the market.

Which brings me to Zillow. Zillow is supposed designed to help ordinary mortals see what a property's worth, the idea being that, if you have access to the same data realtors have at their disposal, and you a apply a smart algorithm to the numbers, that's all you need to make an informed estimate of a property's real value. However it could be that Zillow actually just legitimizes incorrect assumptions about value by associating them with real data.

I'm talking from (admittedly limited) experience. Marsha and I are selling a condo, and our own research suggested a value between 55K and 60K. (Marsha's a realtor, and she knows her way around a market analysis). Zillow shows a value around 72K.

Somebody's off by 20%.

Zillow allows you to look at the comparable properties it used, and we did. Zillow includes three sold properties from 2004. That's an issue off the bat - good comps would be more recent. But what really threw us was the sold data on the three comps: 294K, 5K, and 42K, with a price per square foot of 259, 4, and 71, respectively. The average sold price is 111 per square foot, and the recommended price is based on 79 per square foot, which suggests that Zillow appropriately considered other factors - but that price is still too high.

The sold price data alone suggested that the three comps were hardly comparable. Looking closer, we found that the house that sold for 294K was shown to have a value of 74K, so the 294K may be bad data. A realtor would have have had the good judgement to toss that property out of the mix... in fact, would probably have thrown all three properties out, because one was unusually low, and another was much older.

The local Multiple Listing Service has its own market analysis program that may be more effective, but no algorithm so far has successfully encoded human processing of visual data and judgement calls based on an analysis of property condition, relative size, modifications, condition of the neighborhood and surrounding houses, etc. Some of that is ambient data that isn't stored where a system like Zillow and find it. A good realtor will get beyond the data and spend a lot of time touring and evaluating comparable properties, applying an experienced business perspective to data and physical observation to get an accurate sense of market value.

Which is not to say that Zillow isn't a cool tool for gathering data. I just wouldn't use its results as the basis for real-world business decisions. And I think we have to acknowledge that there are very human aspects of business processes and decisons that you can't address with code alone.

Tricycle blog explores the Buddhist perspective on the Muslim/cartoon controversy, noting that Buddhists also lapse into violent breaks with peaceful tradition.

As it turns out, today saw the issuance of a death threat from not only a Muslim leader, but a respected Buddhist one too. Venerable Ellawala Medhananda, an elder Buddhist monk and Sri Lankan politician, today stated that it would be better off if someone (i.e. the Sri Lankan army) killed Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tiger rebels who are fighting for a separate state in northern Sri Lanka. His statement puts him in such fine company as Southern Baptist Pat Robertson, who last year called for the CIA to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Will Ven. Medhananda suffer legal or political consequences for his incitement, or even widespread public condemnation? Not likely. Just as the anti-cartoon Muslim mobs are as much about terrifically complex political and social issues as about religious ideals, the politicization of the Sri Lankan Sangha and the battling Buddhist monk-politicians are an outgrowth of interlocked problems of ethnicity, power, and post-colonial situations in south Asia. Buddhism, like Islam, becomes another weapon in the struggle against "others;" it becomes a site of expression for rage as well as forgiveness, hatred as well as hope, righteous "self-defense" as well as peace. It both forms cherished self-identities and proclaims the absence of self; it creates nations and breaks individuals of their obsessions with external references. Did we expect otherwise?

Sad to hear that Darren McGavin died. I was a fan as far back as 1956 – my parents bought our first television set around that time, and Mike Hammer, which starred McGavin, was one of the first shows we watched regularly. If you look at his page on IMDB,, you'll see that he was all over television for years, and I caught a lot of those appearances. But I'll always think of him as Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker (1974-75), one of my all-time favorite shows. Night Stalker featured a new monster every week, as well as a bunch of cameo appearances by great character actors from the fifties and sixties. Night Stalker inspired The X Files, and it's fitting that his final appearances were on a couple of episodes of that show. IMDB shows his last appearance as a "reporter standing at a desk," but I think that was an image transferred from the old Kolchak series. Unfortunately the recent version of Night Stalker had zero charm, and died on the vine. It needed a Darren McGavin.

Gallery Lombardin in Austin will have a restrospective of Randy "Biscuit" Turner's work. (Thanks for the pointer to Keith Wyborni, who commented on my earlier Biscuit memorial post.) [Link to Gallery Lombardi's page for the exhibit.]

Sun Microsystems is going to help Cameron Sinclair realize his TED Prize wish for

a means to allow architects, funders, non-governmental organizations and communities to collaborate on generating and implementing innovative housing solutions globally. Sun answered by offering to provide an online platform that will facilitate collaboration and sharing of designs and will use advanced technology to simulate geographic/seismic, political/cultural and financial ramifications of designs. Sun and Sinclair will gather additional support from the technology, entertainment and design industries represented at the TED conference.

The incumbent telcos, corporate giants spawned from a trust-busted monopoly, have never quite got away from monopolistic thinking. They go for dominance, and to get there they ignore the paths of innovation and competition in favor of brute-force legislation. Not long ago they were looking for ways to prevent municipalities from building communication networks for their citizens, nonprofits, and small businesses. Now they want to create new fees for Internet services, tiered pricing that would result in different billing levels for different kinds of services. Mitch Ratcliffe takes a thorough look at the implications of this approach, which would do away with net neutrality, an important aspect of the Internet's success as a platform for innovation. Says Mitch:

Tiered services would make data services pricing a complex Chinese menu and would isolate many homes and businesses in narrowband backwaters. This is the carriers' new holy grail, the ability to milk more from their already crappy services.

Instead of embracing the need to upgrade carriage generally in order to justify higher fees, the telcos are seeking to turn IP-based services such as VoIP and video downloads that compete with their voice and video services into subsidies that offset the weakness of their current business models, which tie connectivity to voice and other services. In David Isenberg's words, we don't need a telecommunications law that helps these companies survive despite their inefficiency, the U.S. must let them fail faster.

David Isenberg, organizer of the second annual Freedom To Connect conference in DC, wrote a poem (in Dr. Seuss mode) that suggests this is a free speech issue, since those who pay will will benefit from a higher quality of service, which suggests that they guy with the money is more likely to be heard. This could marginalize potentially innovative new content sources.

Imagine a world where all the highways are owned by a few companies, and they charge significantly more for the roads that are well-maintained, and you get the idea...but this isn't just about transport. Doc has something to say about all this:

...clearly the Net is not a form of carriage, even though it might appear that way to the carriers and the copyright extremists. The Net has an existence that encompasses carriage and content but is not reducible to either — just as human beings have an existence that encompasses the circulatory system and its constituents but is not reducible to either.

There are higher principles involved. Life is larger than the systems that sustain it. The principle we call net neutrality is as essential to Internet life as consciousness is to human life. When we subordinate Net neutrality to the systems that sustain it, we reduce it to those systems. The Net becomes a cable system, a phone system, a content delivery system. And nothing more. In human terms, this is called brain death.

By framing the Net as a neutral place, we assure that it will continue to serve as what it has already been for more than ten years : a public marketplace where private enterprise of all forms can not only grow and thrive, but can do both better than it ever has anywhere, ever, before.

Yesterday Maida mentioned "curated shopping," and today I saw where Bruce Sterling had blogged a link to a Metropolis Magazine article on the subject. Metropolis defines curated shopping as "the concept of offering a selection of products as carefully edited as a museum collection." They go on to say that "in addition to giving up-and-coming designers a venue, these refreshing boutiques offer shoppers unique items in an age of mass production. And as an appealing alternative to big-box stores, they promise to be retail tastemakers." Metropolis has a list of curated shops. (I might go to Minnesota just to hang out at Robot Love.)