The Olympic absurdity continues. Athletes are prohibited from blogging. Support your rights. Support the EFF.
Wired covers this issue as well.
JoongAng Daily on the wrestling match between the old media and blogs at the Olympics. Via Scripting News.
Wisconsin Dells view on Iraq & Presidential Election
Monica Davey talks politics in the Dells.
The New Caesars – Gary Hart Opinion via Salon
The cause of imperialism, weakened for a time by the fall of the European and Soviet empires, has found new advocates. The fact that the 21st century imperial power happens to be the United States of America, whose independence from colonialism was declared 228 years ago, seems not to matter. The neoconservatives’ project to position the United States as the world’s dominant power — and to use that power to govern in venues chosen seemingly by them alone, and collectively where reasonably easy but unilaterally where necessary — has been advanced and saluted.
Midecins Sans Frontihres – Sudan
Terry Gross interviews Dr. Rowan Gillies, president of Doctors Without Borders, just back from Sudan. Donate.
Is Globalization Changing How We Eat?
Tyler Cowen’s interesting talk before the Institute of Culinary Professionals:
If you look at Mexican food in this country, a lot of it, of course, is not eaten by Mexicans at all. It is eaten by Americans. But consider the Mexican food eaten by Mexicans. Well, who are the Mexicans, for the most part, who are currently coming to America? They tend to be fairly young, and they tend to be male. So take a group of young men, say ages eighteen to twenty-five, put them together in large numbers and let them eat. What do you get? Well, some of it is quite excellent, some of it is not so great, but you get something very different than the native cuisine. Let’s say you performed this thought experiment with France. Take a million Frenchmen, male, ages eighteen to twenty five, bring them to the United States, let them loose, have them eat. You are not going to get classic French cuisine.
Via Marginal Revolution.
Campus Reactors
Matthew Wald on the UW’s “little” nuclear reactor:
The University of Wisconsin’s nuclear reactor is an unassuming little model, operated (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only) by students in T-shirts and shorts. In the last few months it has been used to identify the source of pottery shards from an ancient settlement in India, to test whether heart stents work better if they have been irradiated, and to study the water and gas balance that would be present in a future generation of power reactors.
But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium. If it were stolen, experts say, it could give terrorists or criminals a major head start on an atomic bomb.
And Wisconsin is not alone. Five other university research reactors around the country use weapons-grade fuel, even though the federal government has promised for more than two decades to reclaim their uranium and substitute a less enriched variety that is closer to the kind that commercial power plants use.
Coke via Cell Phone
120 Yen via cell phone for a coke? Now available in Japan.
the 4th Estate & Newspaper Circulation Scams – Slate
Officials from several newspapers have recently confessed to fudging their circulation numbers. Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer talks to NPR’s Noah Adams about why media officials would do such a thing, and what it could mean for public trust of the press.
Healthcare Pricing Transparency
Adam Hanft has some useful suggestions that would help all of us evaluate health care costs.
The industry could address this by employing this very notion of pricing transparency. How much of its premium income gets passed through to its members and their doctors and hospitals, versus how much is overhead and profit? Imagine how much better consumers would feel if they understood that HMOs exist to collect premiums from everyone in order to redistribute the money to those who need it. Essentially, it’s a major re-education campaign.
This is a model that the non-profit world has adopted, as scandals such as the United Way mess focused attention on what percent of a contribution finds its way to those who need it. Indeed, these metrics have become part of their messaging strategy.
Digital Audio & The Copyright Gap
Witness the Copyright Gap in its full majesty. In the UK, Digital Radio has been live at the BBC for about three years now. As the BBC says, ?Digital Audio Broadcasting gives you far greater station choice, better reception & clarity of sound with no re-tuning.?
Yet meanwhile, in the country that invented both the radio station and the transistor, digital radio is stuck. Among other problems, the FCC is contending with the RIAA?s arguments that, absent proper controls, digital radio would be ?the perfect storm? for the music industry. Digital radio, the RIAA believes, must be prevented from causing the ?enormous damage wrought by peer-to-peer piracy.? On Monday, the RIAA filed a new letter reiterating that the ?threat? from digital radio is ?real and imminent.?