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The ISEF08 winners have been announced, and the recipients of the grand prize scholarships are these fine young ladies (left to right, below): Natalie Omattage of Cleveland, MS; Yi-Han Su of Taipei, Taiwan (I’m politically incorrect like that); and Sana Raoof of Muttontown, NY. While they were being put through the wringer for publicity photos, I asked them to do one more silly pose. Eat this, “Math is Hard” Barbie!

Oh, to be eighteen again!

Some mobile video from the N95:

MP4 format

At this point I think it’s safe to say, if not for the N95 I’d have no reason to live.

Now Nokia’s giving us geeks another thing to distract us from our day jobs, and Spike Lee is part of the problem. Partnering with Jumpcut — the online audio-visual mashup tool that Mitt Romney used in an ad-making contest for his campaign — Nokia is soliciting user-generated content around a theme, from which Spike Lee will weave a movie after viewers vote on their favorites. (I assume they want us to create this media on our Nokia handsets.)

Music means different things to different people. A soothing escape during rush-hour traffic. The remedy for a broken heart. A fire under some dancing feet. With Spike’s Lee’s help, we’re co-creating a film about music and the shared human experience.

Here are the details in case you missed them:

Theme is Humanity and how music plays a role.

Three Acts for you to explore through music, text, photos or video.

Act 1 is Birth.

Birth, huh? Way to narrow it down.

Hillary Clinton was chomping at the bit as hard as John McCain to attack Barack Obama this weekend for being so “elitist” and saying things that don’t mesh with her idea of “American values,” after the so-called gaffe discussed here yesterday. She then went into the heart of middle (”Don’t call us small!“) America and attempted to out-America Barack Obama by “bellying up to the bar” (as the Sunday pundits loved to repeat) and double-fisting with a beer and a shot of whisky.

The widely-reported shot of whisky was Crown Royal. Crown Royal Canadian blended whisky.

FAIL.

Last week, all I had to offer was camels on campus. This week, I got to talk to the former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders while she was on campus amidst a veritable storm of prophylactics. Apparently the GT Young Dems teamed up with Trojan’s national Evolve campaign (complete with “Roll Out” flagged mics, get it?) to promote, you know, liberal sexual health and whatnot.

It’s nice to meet someone like the Surgeon General, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the current marketing. From the bizarre misalignment of evolution in the pig-to-man schema, to the magical ability of buying a condom in a bar to make women jump your bones, to the inevitably bad pork-themed puns…it’s just weird. Bring back Trojan Man and lose the oinkers.

Anyway, I asked Ms. Elders if we were on a bit of a venereal downturn over the last, you know, few years, health policy-wise. She said yes, that after some good gains in the 90’s, we are once again headed in the wrong direction — though she blamed our lack of conscious fear of disease rather than anything going on in Washington, D.C. So politic of her. Scroll in to about the 0:55 mark:

In addition to a political celebrity, they had condom races (I dunno, there’s nothing very sexy about trying to best the record of 27 seconds), an inflatable theater shaped kinda like a reservoir tip, and much, much more.

There was some vaguely motion sickness-inducing film about space herpes on the attack featured at Reservoir Tip Theater; you can take a tour in this Qik video, after you watch two very serious faculty-looking types wearing pig-noses pull condoms off bananas.

Definitely cooler than the camels, if you ask me.

Pop quiz: calculate the relative increase in probability of sexual intercourse occurring at Georgia Tech tonight after all these free prophylactics put ideas in their technological heads.

Answer: #DIV/0!

Next month I’m presenting some of my research with NASA and Pratt & Whitney at the Propulsion Safety and Affordable Reliability conference. This isn’t like the other conferences I’ve attended or presented at, which have been largely organized and attended by professional societies and academics; this is a big tri-service meeting for the military to hear from industry and academia how we can keep their planes in the air longer, cheaper. And when I went to look at the agenda to see when in particular I was speaking and decide whether I wanted to go out for the whole blessed thing, I noticed something weird about this particular kind of research get-together.

On each of the three days, all of the sessions wrap up neatly at 2:30 in the afternoon.

In Myrtle Beach, there are over 70 golf courses, to say nothing of the ridiculous amount of putt-putt.

There are also close to twenty strip clubs.

Aim High, Air Force.

One of the problems of a weekly publishing cycle is that a lot of political stories go cold before you go live. But dangit, I interviewed the Pro-Life Unity woman, I wasn’t going to drop that footage in the archives. So this week’s MTV piece:

(Video source/embed)

For the out-of-Georgia readers, some background:

While the goal of HR536 is ostensibly to end abortion, its definition of life at the earliest possible biological stage — and the attachment of “the inviolable right…to life” to that moment of fertilization — would effectively mean that several forms of birth control, including some hormonal pills or shots and intra-uterine devices (IUDs), which prevent implantation of the early blastocyst into the uterine wall (thus preventing pregnancy), are terminating human life. According to HB1, which also states that a “fetus is a person for all purposes under the laws of this state from the moment of conception,”

‘Abortion’ means the intentional termination of human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or remove a dead fetus…. Such term does not include a naturally occurring expulsion of a fetus known medically as a ’spontaneous abortion’ and popularly as a ‘miscarriage’ so long as there is no human involvement whatsoever in the causation of such event.

Thus, intentionally taking or using a form of birth control which by its nature interferes with a fertilized egg, zygote, or blastocyst after “the moment of conception,” could be considered an abortion. HB1 continues,

Any person performing an abortion in this state shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, shall be punished as provided in subsection (d) of Code Section 16-5-1.

Section 16-5-1 (d) applies to felony murder, punishable by death or life in prison.

And the language is open enough to leave one to ponder whether a woman who refuses to give up her morning cup of coffee and then suffers a miscarriage would be guilty of the “human involvement whatsoever in the causation” of an abortion.

Tea and cake or death! Tea and cake or death!

The Pro-Life Unity woman — a 31 year old mother of 6 who clearly enjoys defining “persons” as often as biology will allow — said this was all part of the eugenics movement that started in the 1800s to “exterminate the blacks” and the weeds of the poor classes, and it’s created a big “hole in the work force” which we don’t miss ’cause we have all them illegal aliens coming in.

See, if you’d stop aborting all the black babies, you could put them to work on the farms, I guess. Wait, what?

And of course, the real cure to the eugenics problem is to outlaw abortion so that poor women who don’t have the same access to birth control are forced to have poor babies, and not to do something about poverty so that working class women could afford birth control and afford to raise children.

Two weeks ago, I hit a doggie landmine while I was out walking my own pooch (complete with my in-the-city necessity for clean living: plenty o’ poop bags). It took me three solid days to get that crap out of the treads of my sneaker.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. Everyone’s all a-twitter about Obama and plagiarism today: is it a big deal, or is it a desperate move by desperate Clintons? And either way, will it stick?

I don’t know if it’s a big deal and I don’t care; both of these candidates are just show ponies to me and I’ll be looking to the Congress to step up to its own burst of productivity whoever takes the White House. (Rots o’ ruck.) But it’s sticky, alright. Trust me, I know.

As a former Biden Blogger, I can tell you that a day hardly went by when one of us didn’t get the knee-jerk “plagiarist!” attack in some blog post somewhere (most often on DailyKos, where a bunch of self-proclaimed filters of all that is truly progressive didn’t give Biden a moment’s rest until the whole Pakistan prediction started coming true). We knocked it down time and again with the truth, but that hardly ever mattered. A one-word smear label is easy, it’s memorable, and it goes to the core of politics: it’s about trust.

For the record, the truth is that Biden’s alleged plagiarism was nothing but one failed attribution out of many quotations. Let me plagiarize WikiPedia here:

Though Biden had correctly credited the original author in all speeches but one, the one where he failed to make mention of the originator was caught on video. In the video Biden is filmed repeating a stump speech by Kinnock, with only minor modifications. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife . . . is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.” After Biden withdrew from the race it was learned that he had correctly credited Kinnock on all other occasions. He failed to do so, however, in the Iowa speech that was recorded and distributed to reporters (with a parallel video of Kinnock) by aides to Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee. Dukakis fired John Sasso, his campaign manager and long-time Chief of Staff, but Biden’s campaign could not recover.

For comparison to Kinnock’s original, see European Voice:

The silver-tongued Welshman aired a TV advert the previous year in which he asked: “Why am I the first Kinnock in 1,000 generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak, those people who could work eight hours underground and come up and play football, weak? … It was because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

Kinnock never held the incident against Biden (the two met in London the following year and joked about it) and, in the intervening years, the transgression has come to seem almost quaintly insignificant.

The similarity in the purpose, context and overlap of the Biden-Kinnock episode to the Obama-Patrick episode is overwhelming; see for yourself. There are two differences here that you might argue cancel each other out: Obama and Patrick are friends, so he can reasonably say he had permission to basically repeat stump language; but Biden, all but once, actually cited the source of his language. Other than that, I say apples and apples, despite that fact that plenty of the meme-repeating Biden bashers keep parroting the same old crap on Twitter as they flock to Obama’s defense.

Naturally, since I didn’t think it mattered a hoot to the kind of man I believe Biden is, and what kind of president he could have been, I probably shouldn’t give a hoot about Obama having done the same stupid — minor, but stupid as hell in this cutthroat game — thing.

Biden did it 20 years ago, and I spent many, many days in 2007 still putting out the fires. Trust me, it sticks.

And then you have the media. There’s only one thing the media loves to do more than tell The Great American Story — a passion that Jeff Jarvis has been accusing of creating a veritable MediObama lovefest for quite some time. And that thing is to tell The Great American Story so that they can build, build, build up a candidate only to tear it all down again, like a child who gleefully crashes through the biggest castle of blocks he spent all day stacking. They spent the first 9 months of 2007 telling us that Hillary Clinton Is Inevitable. Inevitable, that is, until she “stumbled” in a debate answer about drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens. Then the story was Stumble! Stumble! Stumble! Inevitable No More??? twenty-four-seven. The blood was in the water and the sharks were feeding, and like frenzied sharks, it didn’t matter that they were eating one of their own [creations].

Why should we expect anything any more intelligent from the MSM tonight? This story has buzz, and they’re going to ride it like [obscene metaphor]. Turn on CNN when you get home tonight and count how many times you hear the word “plagiarism.” Grift, you’re a gambling man, what would you say the over-under is?

I feel like the last blogger in Georgia to chime in on the ridiculous SB 59, a bill crafted by Republicans to be exactly the kind of “nanny state” they accuse Democrats of foisting, and to make the internets come to a screeching halt. Okay, not really; the internets would go on unmolested, but Georgia would be made to look even more asinine in the world of science and technology after getting its teeth kicked in by federal courts.

For my out-of-town readers, here’s the crux of the proposed law:

It shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page at all times.

Right. Implausible enforcement (and Republicans thought undocumented Latinos were hard to catch?), questionable constitutionality, and general lack of a clue, all in one delicious crime.

In poking around for a little more background info to include with my pending Street Team blog post on the subject, I saw, right there on WikiPedia, what the even bigger underlying problem with this whole situation is.

Republican state Senator Cecil Staton, the Chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, is a “publisher” with three advanced degrees.

A Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology (thesis: “A study of the language of theophany in the Old Testament with special reference to the niphal of [raah]”) from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And a Ph.D. from Oxford (yay? oh no, wait) with a dissertation titled, “‘And Yahweh appeared … ‘ : a study of the motifs of ’seeing God’ and of ‘God’s appearing’ in Old Testament narratives.”

The Reverend Staton is in charge of our science and technology legislation here in Georgia. Giddyup and pass the leeches.

With six days to go before the Iowa Caucuses, Joe Biden finally has a hot date for the last several Caucus Countdown events.

Not that his wife Jill isn’t totally smokin’, nor is this to discount the dedication of his entire family as they fan out over Iowa to hit several dozen meetings as his surrogates. But when you’ve got competitors hanging out with Oprah, Tim Robbins, and Barbara Streisand (wtf?), it’s nice to finally have a familiar TV face on the campaign trail. I couldn’t ask for much better, save maybe President Bartlett himself.

Toby Ziegler, a.k.a. Richard Schiff in real life, will be campaigning with Biden starting tonight. West Wing nerds, rejoice and be glad. Whether this will overpower the bizarre notion in the mainstream media that somehow being married to Bill has magically made seventh-year Senator Hillary a Pakistan expert all of a sudden remains to be seen, but I hope a lot of Iowans enjoyed all seven seasons of the show as much as I did.

From the PR Newsire this morning:

MTV Taps 51 State-Based Citizen Journalists for “Choose or Lose ‘08″

AP Online Video Network & Top Mobile Carriers to Distribute Weekly “Street Team ‘08″ Reports

Knight Foundation Grant Helps Power Mobile Media Election Coverage Experiment

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ — MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign (http://www.ChooseorLose.com), today unveiled “Street Team ‘08″: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists — one from every state and Washington, D.C. — who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network. Carefully selected by MTV after an extensive nationwide search, the one-of-a-kind press corps will be armed with mobile media like laptops, video cameras and cell phones, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states

…

The “Street Team ‘08″ program is made possible by a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge, at http://www.newschallenge.org, is an annual worldwide competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas that use digital media to inform and inspire communities. The Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.

And yes, the punchline is that I am your humble Georgia correspondent citizen journalist. So after 20 hours of online training in Adobe Creative Suite and a two-day orientation in Manhattan next month, I am charged with uncovering the untold stories here in the Peach State.

You know what this means? I mean besides the fact that I’m about to get handed a superfancy new video camera and a (Windows) laptop (please God not Vista) and will be expected to file one story every week (through video, primarily, or text and photos or podcasts or what have you), and that the real shiny stories from the Street Team will get floated up to the MTV cable networks (while the rest remain online), and meanwhile I’ll be getting even less sleep and still have a dissertation to write.

It means I need untold stories. I bet you have stories. You’ve got an issue, a non-profit organization, a candidate, a crusade that you believe in, but you’ve got no platform. Well I’ve got me a very nice platform here, but I’m a little short on causes and crusades. So let’s get your chocolate in my peanut butter, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, who the hell ever thought that was a good advertising campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? And right there is a highlight of one of the first overwhelming challenges this new opportunity presents to me and a handful of other Choose or Lose Street Team members™: Gen X, meet the Millennials. I know the boundaries are pretty hazy, but I’ve seen enough birth year ranges that say I got caught in the last few years of Gen X — and the real point of the matter is that in my frame of reference, getting someone’s peanut butter on your chocolate doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics! Yet now a handful of us CoLSTM’s™, ranging from 29 to 39, are going to have to craft a message a week for an audience that knows “I has a flavor” doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics, either.

I know, that’s a terrible example. See? I can’t even come up with a hip new dirty phrase that is not a sexual euphemism. So while obviously this is all great! and yay! and I’m totally stoked! (see? do kids still say that?) and I’m fired up for this opportunity, that’s also how I’m sure a lot of new Army Rangers feel when they get pinned, and they get their shiny new gun and body armor (sometimes) and night vision goggles and it’s all great! and yay! and then Welcome to Sadr City! and the yay! kinda takes a back seat to adrenaline and trying not to poop.

A representative of the Knight Foundation, which helps fund this project, summarized our call to arms (well, cameras) thusly:

“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event — the election of a president — matters to young people, and whether or not it matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation.

And as if to highlight the challenge for the recipients of the Knight News Challenge Grant, MTV issued another press release to the Newswire exactly two hours later:

* The finale of “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” delivered a 5.9 P12-34 rating to become the highest rated series telecast on MTV since August 2005.

* For the night (8PM-11PM), “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” finale was the most watched telecast across all of television among P12-34, even out-delivering broadcast.

* “The Hangover” Aftershow at 11PM averaged a strong 3.6 P12-34 rating, ranking right behind the “A Shot At Love” finale as the #2 rated cable telecast for the night.

How many people do you think I’ll be able to pull in to watch my live video coverage of the Iowa caucuses? I mean, without putting on the bikini, ’cause you know it’s pretty cold in Iowa this time of year.

But seriously, send your chocolate over to my peanut butter. We’ll talk.