"Zap rat Saddam, sez Prez"

Great title from the New York Daily News, to depict how the President feels about the fate of Saddam. I also read another interesting article criticizing the President for being a little too trigger happy to kill off Saddam.

This comment from the article made me laugh "The US will create the instrument that will render Hussein’s verdict based on the time-honored American principle of “give him a fair trial and hang him.”" (Taken from www.wsws.org). I love 'independent' media just as much as the next, but seriously, I think that too many of them are too worried about pointing out the Bush Admin's faults and not concerned with what the Saddam actually did. You get things like this as a result.

After a quarter century of remorseless brutality to his country and people, he was finally executed as of a few hours ago. Now whether or not the court he went through is just a "puppet-court" (not the "kangaroo court" that Bush didn't want i.e. International Criminal Court) is really entirely speculation.

To be honest, I think the trial was a courtesy (just like most war tribunals are). The fact that he even was given a trial--even though it wasn't really a trial--was miracle enough. I was surprised he was assassinated --like his lawyers--before the trial was complete.

He is indisputably guilty of murder, torture, forced deportation (I know from second hand experience after speaking with a friend who was dropped out in the middle of the desert by Saddam's men and forced to walk for in the desert to Iran with his family) and received what was coming too him. Oh, and let us not forget the 100,000 Kurds in the 1988 Anfal campaign.

It blows my mind when Saddam's lawyer says "... he believes in destiny", and yet was enraged about the position he is in. To me, this is a fine example of Iraqi *cough*US*cough* due process.


Music:
Markus Shulz feat. Carrie Skipper - Never Be The Same Again (REMIXES)
Wonderfully composed track form Florida's Markus Shulz. He used Carrie Skipper for vocals again (we heard her voice in "Time Goes By" last year)! She has an incredible voice that adds to the song making it sound very robust and dynamic. The link is to a RAR for all three mixes, so unzip and enjoy! I hope to hear the Jose Amnesia & Sean Mitiska remix, when Sean will play in SLC at the end of Jan at the circle lounge. The Remixes all compliment each other very well, Mike Shiver did a nice uplifting remix that would work perfect for closing the night.

Coconut Monkey Rocket

One last note:
Click on the image above and download the MP3's for nonsensical grooviness!

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas & Happy New Years! Hope everyone is enjoying the time spent with family and good friends.

As far as today's subject goes, I thought to share some ideas and books that I found in a book called "Static" (written by many of the same people from "Democracy Now!") I got it from my neighbor while we were both whining about how liberal CNN can be at times, and what a bunch of b*ll*cks they spout out. I've never been one (IMHO) to be overly critical of our President George "The Decider" Bush. Rarely have I been able to come up with appropriate solutions in my own head to fix the complicated problems our nation is facing.

I've also found that many, if not MOST, who monotonously murmur about the injustices of the Iraq war haven't a clue how to solve the problem. Of coarse it is important to address the problem--that is the first step to solving it--however, there have been few that have stood up to give viable solutions. It seems to me Americans are pretentiously expecting some panacea that will fix all our problems. "If we just get out, everything will fix itself", or "Nuke the whole ****** place" was another one I heard.

With rumors of Iraq becoming the next Vietnam floating about, there hasn't been much "deciding" going on from our "DECIDER". Static addresses a lot of the propaganda failures in Iraq, and also the blowback that those failures have sent to the US. While being somewhat politically naive and immature, I still found this book to be incredibly interesting, despite the slandering tone that it uses for our President. It reveals some of the most interesting stories about how Bush Administration has used its muscle to weave a tangled web, in order to choke out media coverage IT deemed inappropriate or unfavorable.

Music:

On a lighter note, just want to promote this again for any of those who haven't cemented their NYE plans.

One word: Giant Maximus
Best Line-up to hit SoCal in a long time....




and I am going to miss it...

I Dislike Finals...

Music:

Sean Tyas - Phased Out Phriday (Spundae L.A. 12-09-06)
We all know Tyas has done a remix or a rework of a new song, just about every week. A lot of them are great remixes; however, you get a few crappy ones here and there. I hate to always pick the upity happy-go-go music, but this set will make you DANCE! I could barely sit in my chair while listening to this! Technically, it wasn't spot on (little eq errors, and things), but the tracks are just one thumper after another, after another.

Plus this is when he played at a local club (wasn't in town to be able to go). Had I been there I would have stomped craters into the dancefloor. Anyway, I havn't seen a lot of people checking his sets out, so please, just listen to this.

Beware: DON'T burn this as a CD and drive. YOU WILL BREAK THE SPEED LIMIT UNCONTROLLABLY!

TRACKLIST:
01. Carl B Feat. Breaking Benjamin - Diary Of Jane (Sean Tyas Rework) [CD-R]
02. Blake Jarell Meets. Dane Cook - Dude I Just Wanna Dance (Sean Tyas Rework) [CD-R]
03. 8 Wonders VS. Marco V - The Feeling After (Sean Tyas & Bryan Kearney Bootleg Rework) [CD-R]
04. Sean Tyas - Lift (Fuck The Pirates Rework) [CD-R]
05. Insigma - Open Your Eyes (Sean Tyas Got Piano Remix) [ATCR]
06. Will Holland VS. Six Senses - Frantic (Sean Tyas Remix) [Enhanced]
07. Dave202 & Sean Tyas - Torrent (Original Mix) [Armada]
08. Thomas Bronzwaer - Constellation [Vandit]
09. SeluVibra - Divine (Sean Tyas Rework) [Somatic Sense]
10. Mike Foyle - Shipwrecked (Sean Tyas Remix) [Armada]
11. Beats Of Genesis VS. Legend B - Lost In Love 2006 (Sean Tyas Remix) [Thrustgroove]
12. DJ Tatana & Sean Tyas - Children 2006 (Original Mix) [Sirup]
13. Sean Tyas - Mirella (Sean Tyas Rework) [Afterglow]
14. 4 Strings - Take Me Away 2006 (Mac Zimms Remix) [Liquid]
15. Oxia - Domino (Sean Tyas Rework) [CD-R]
16. Dave202 - Generate The Wave [Silicon]
17. Neal Scarborough - Stung On The River (Sean Tyas Remix) [Discover]
18. Activa Pres. Mekk - Restless (Dark Dub Mix) [Discover Dark]
19. DJ Tatana & Sean Tyas - Airwave 2006 (Original Mix) [Sirup]

The Square Root of Thoughts?

The Department of Homeland Security is not foreign to getting shrapnel blasted into them from the media flak-cannons. Most of the time it's not worth reading; however, there was one article that has caught my attention and is a good laugh.

It has to do with the notion that terrorist thoughts have been quantified into arithmetic formulas--that number into the billions--used to determine the likelihood of a certain place being subject to terrorist attack.

A small clip from the article:
"And now Jim O'Brien, the director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in Clark County, Nev., has discovered another hard-to-fathom DHS notion: a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target — an all-important estimate outside the Beltway, because greater slices of the federal anti-terrorism pie go to the locations with the highest scores. Overall, the department awarded $711 million in high-risk urban counter terrorism grants last year.

O’Brien took an active interest in how the government runs its risk-assessment numbers when the department announced this year that it was downgrading Las Vegas from among the highest-risk urban centers to the lowest 25 percent grouping of such potential targets.

That shift put Las Vegas on what’s called a “sustainment” line of funding, which represents a loss of more than $700,000 in federal counterterrorism money. The city — the population center of Clark County — previously had placed among higher risk targets thanks to its highly visible skyline and the vast complement of tourists it attracts.

As O’Brien reviewed the risk-assessment formulas — a series of calculations that runs into the billions — he found himself unable to account for several factors, the terrorist-intent notion principal among them. “I have a Ph.D. I think I understand formulas,” he says. "Take the square root of terrorist intent? Now, give me a break.” The whole notion, O’Brien says, is a contradiction in terms: “How can you quantify what somebody is thinking?""

What ever happened to using common sense? Read the full article here: "Root of All Terror"

In other news:

Still working for the abolish-winter movement. Not much progress as of late. Official petition to follow soon...

Music:

Filo & Peri feat. Fisher - Ordinary Moment (Breakfast & Big Mike Remix)
Wow. You gotta hand it to these two TA's from the east coast. They really knew how to make a bangin' remix of an already epic tune from 2006. Ferry has canned this Ordinary Moments for a while, and it's been a great listen. However, this remix takes the cake--by far--in my opinion. A wonderful listen!!!

Jack-O is Sick-O

Blegh! Looks like I caught the cold that is going around. Boo-urns to that! I tried to be good about washing my hands, but alas, I have come down with the nasty bug. Fever, runny nose, and my sinuses feel as if they are being pumped full of concrete.

Regardless, I chose to continue my thoughts (although admittedly many are just re-hashes of what Jeff Howe has written) on crowdsourcing here:


WHY NOT TO CROWDSOURCE?

Mark Harmel is a soft spoken stock photographer specializing in health care related photos. Lee Foster is also a professional photographer who specializes in photos of U.S. National Parks. While last year they were able to charge a competitive price of $150 a photo; amateurs have made the same thing available on the internet at $1.

The aftershocks of crowdsourcing are rolling in with hordes of motivated amateurs, and they are literally crowding out the professionals in certain fields. Stock photography is the epitome of how crowdsourcing is ferociously crowding out others. Another great example is journalism. The internet is swamped with reliable and legitimate news sources that are composed of people contributing their writings for free.

An additional problem is that crowdsourcing is like a radio which you have to finely tune in order to get a good signal-to-noise ratio. Jeff Howe in an ABC interview estimated that only “between 5% and 10% of what the crowd is actually creating will, in the end, be usable.” Think of it like a prospector hunched over in a knee deep river panning for gold. The time it takes to sift through the utter garbage to find the gold has a cost. Despite the fact that you receive content for free, it usually requires a lot of time to find the golden nugget.

Not only is it difficult to find what you are looking for, but it can often be difficult to implement the information you receive. Without a sound crowdsourcing model much of the good material that is gathered is wasted, because there is a lack of company protocol and infrastructure for implementing it.

SUCCESSFUL CROWDSOURCING STRATEGIES

Crowdsourcing is not as easy as putting a suggestion box on your website asking for good ideas. To achieve a successful model there are many inputs that must be considered before implementation. The tasks or questions must be focused. We all know that vague questions get vague answers. A clearly defined problem will help increase the signal-to-noise ratio allowing for more usable content.

Another way to tune out unnecessary static noise is to implement filters. One of the most popular crowdsourcing filters is (ironically) to use the crowd to filter itself. That means to let the crowd vote on which they think is the best out of all the submissions. This decreases the amount of time and money that is spent on moderation of the crowdsourcing task.

taps into a well of passion about a product that stretches beyond monetary incentives.” In order to truly succeed in a long-term Cash is king and people are always more eager to do something for which they receive payment. However, as said by Jessi Hempel in BusinessWeek “successful crowdsourcingcrowdsourcing projects you must be able to build the participants into an engaging social community.

Next blog we'll cover all the great examples of CS-ing (crowdsourcing, not to be confused with counter-striking . . . )

Music:

Ulrich Schnauss - Nobody's Home
This is a great chill tune that progressively builds up as it goes, and there is a nice little breakdown in the middle with some interesting sounds. Ulrich did a wonderful job with this track. Please give it a listen!

Milk the Masses

A recent interest for me has been the hotly discussed subject of Crowdsourcing. I have attempted to summarize much of the information concerning it here, but visit this website for more information.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism that is storming the corporate psyche in full force. For those unacquainted with the relatively new term, crowdsourcing simply defined, represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. It is a business model that is harnessing the think-power of crowds outside company walls. However, one thing that I really haven't understood correctly is the point at which crowdsourcing and commons-based peer production (CBPP, a term coined by Yale’s Law professor Yochai Benkler) diverge.

A few months ago, nobody had ever heard the term “crowdsourcing”. Now a simple Google search will zip you to over 400,000 returns dealing with crowdsourcing. The genesis of the term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in an article that was featured in the June 2006 issue of a digital-culture magazine WIRED. In the original article they explored case studies involving large, established companies, and they explained the methods by which they effectively mined and sorted through crowd created content. Jeff stated in his WIRED article that “sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”. He showed how companies across various markets were finding new ways of employing cheaper labor.

However, this idea was not entirely new to Jeff and Mark. James Surowiecki's “The Wisdom of the Crowd” was sited as a major reference in the development of the crowdsourcing model. The ideas presented in James’s book, have even deeper roots all the way back to the early Victorian era with Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. James argues that large groups of people are often smarter than the elite minds of the few, while Mackay disputes through historical reference that crowd-think does not always equate 1 + 1 to 2.

All of these ideas were incorporated into the current definition and model of what crowdsourcing is and how it is best applied. However, before we understand how we best apply crowdsourcing, we must first understand why so many people are willing to contribute in return for little or nothing.

CROWDSOURCING MINDSET

Lee Foster, a stock photographer affected by crowdsourcing, noted that “there is a huge desire by the public to become part of the media. People want to participate and not just receive their insight and information from the media.” There is a growing feeling of wanting to be connected to the global populace.

We see that more and more the valium of human contact is not limited to physical interactions, but can be had through virtual interactions via the internet. When we feel connected it is soothing, and in some ways it allows people to be valued by others all over the globe.

While this may seem too simple an explanation, I think it still drives home the major cause of free (or cheaply paid) crowd labor. This is evidenced in the fact that technology companies that have fed this desire to contribute have thrived! With the rise of websites such as YouTube, and Wikipedia, it is apparent that people are willing to contribute material for free. Recent technologies have made it easy to share media from the informal music sharing to formal business research techniques.

WHY CROWDSOURCE?

Where can you find a virtually infinite labor force that will work for less than they consciously know their worth? Could the costs associated with this labor force be cheaper than outsourced labor in India and China? The answer to these questions is found in Al Gore’s self-dubbed “creation”, the internet. The online world provides an almost infinite labor source, numerous skill sets, and lifetimes of experience.

What may take a company’s research team several weeks to problem solve, may take another person a few hours. Knowing this, the company allows anyone with an internet connection to perform the task they need completed in return for a rather miniscule reward. Of coarse most of the solutions received are useless; however, the crowd is so big that the businesses are finding exactly what they need despite the deplorable wages. The bottom line here is that crowdsourcing saves companies time and money.

I will continue my thoughts on this subject some other time... Needless to say if you want to check out more of this visit Jeff Howes Blog for heaps more of ideas from the originator.

Music:

I'm Not a Gun - Long Afternoon
If you thought you liked Explosions in the Sky (ever seen Friday Night Lights? Yea, that was them.), you will become absolutely infatuated with this song (like Ham & Tuna fish). The group is composed of Japanese guitarist 西本武 (Takeshi Nishimoto), and minimal techno DJ, John Tejada (true to the Detroit roots). The spacey rock guitar riffs and breakdowns really go hand in hand with the lovely beats that Tejada has spiced the track with.　本当にこれが凄いよ！今ダウンロードして