The ACMA debacle just gets worse

What the frak does online poker have to do with child pornography? Nothing. Nothing at all. This is just one example of how stupid, wrong and frakking disgraceful the whole blacklist exercise is.

As I told a couple of Labor Party stalwarts (including a former ALP MP) over lunch last week – Rudd was supposed to be the good guy. At least where the ACMA blacklist is concerned, he’s turning out to be more appalling than John Howard. I wouldn’t vote ALP in a pink fit after this experience (mind you, I’ve never voted ALP in my life) and I doubt many digital folks who voted for the ALP in 2007 will make the same mistake in the next Federal election.

clipped from wotnews.com.au
Less than a week after the federal government’s URL blacklist was leaked and caused a furore over the status of online betting company Betfair, Australia’s poker industry is now in the firing line over the number of legitimate poker sites that could be banned by the filter..
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Twitterfast Update

I’ve been receiving emails from people asking “what happened to your Twitterfast”? The posts that you’re seeing from me in Twitter are automated posts from Friendfeed which keeps an eye on my blogs, delicious bookmarks, Facebook posts, Flickr uploads, etc. I haven’t posted directly to Twitter (except asking for help on uStream last night) for 36 hours and it has been HARD. I have the impulse to post to or check Twitter every few minutes. Just nonsense stuff really… about thoughts I’m having, people I’m talking to, where to catch a bus, plugging sites I’ve discovered, etc. Nothing terribly important or special but it does really make me notice how much I rely on Twitter every day. As I was discussing with some folks in a meeting today, Twitter is really my primary search engine for so many things. I’m finding living without it pretty difficult.

Back in 2001, I gave a series of CIO breakfasts for Microsoft. One of the things I talked about was a rating system I had for evaluating new technologies and services in my life. It went something like this:

Rating 1: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would hardly notice.
Rating 2: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would notice but could happily live without it.
Rating 3: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence but would cope.
Rating 4: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence and proactively look for a replacement.
Rating 5: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would go to war to get it back.

Where is Twitter for me right now? Somewhere between 4 and 5 I think.

New Research Confirms Some NLP Theories

Interesting results from recent research done in Germany which seems to indicate that certain kinds of mental “states” assist us to remember data. For example, when asked to categorize words as pleasant or unpleasant, the test subjects had much better recall than when they were asked to categorize words as having two syllables or more than two. With words that were successfully recalled, researchers noticed “an increase in theta wave amplitude in the medial temporal lobe, beginning 250 ms before word presentation.”

BEFORE word presentation! So the brain was in a certain “state” before the word was presented. This reminds me a lot of Tony Robbins’ stuff. He talks about using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques when you are learning a new activity to put yourself into the right “state” for learning. I wonder how many educators consciously use techniques like this in schools?

clipped from scienceblogs.com

A team of researchers from Germany now show that the activity which immediately precedes an event is also important for memory formation. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report the identification of a signature brain state which occurs just before the appearance of a visual stimulus and predicts the successful encoding of it. The findings point to ways in which the process of memory formation could be enhanced.

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