shelbinator.com

If you hadn’t noticed by the crickets chirping around here, I’m on a bit of a writing sabbatical — and not the kind of writing you see here. Obviously checking in here to look for news is going to be disappointing, so you might as well just subscribe to the feed and save the trouble.

Things ought to pick up again in a few weeks once the dissertation pump is good and primed, and there will always be the weekly MTV pieces.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been meaning to write over on Blog for Democracy about a certain Republican Congressman who is really showing us up on the new media front, using Twitter and Qik — personally, not just via a younger, hipper staffer — to communicate with his constituents (okay, let’s get real about TX-7; with the national cadre of poligeeks) in ridiculously real time.

And then Rep. John Culberson had to go and screw it up by being hysterically partisan, in 140 characters or less at a time.

Yesterday Rep. Culberson began some Chicken Little tweeting about the sky falling, claiming “I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them.” The problem is, he was basing this on a memo he saw from — and a conversation he may have had with — Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) about some proposed updates to the antiquated rules governing “official” House communications. These updates Capuano was proposing were intended to expand the ability of Representatives to use external social networking sites (specifically video hosts like YouTube) and not to restrict the use of Twitter et al any more than they were already being restricted by rules written by people whom my mom could out-internet blindfolded with a gimpy mouse.

As “evidence” of this Dem conspiracy to choke off free speech, all Rep. Culberson could produce was this memo (excerpted below) of 6/24/08 from Rep. Capuano to the Committee on House Administration. Capuano’s intent was basically to say, 1. The current House system for hosting and playing official videos on house.gov websites sucks, hardcore. 2. Current House rules of official communication prohibit Representatives from using sites like YouTube for better hosting of such videos. (Capuano apparently told Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-IN, in conversation that scores of Representatives do it anyway with a wink and a nod, and it’s just time to update the rules to reflect that.) 3. The House really ought to let Representatives use external hosting sites for videos, because these communications are a good thing. And 4. In order to keep up with the “decorum” of the House, they ought to find a way to do so that doesn’t get too tangled up in commerce or political campaigning due to free market forces (i.e., if you watch a Representative’s “official” YouTube video, it might be unbecoming if the three “related” videos that pop up in the YouTube player after it’s over were a racist anti-Obama ad, a pitch for Viagra, or candid footage of Britney Spears’ crotch). Not unreasonable suggestions, I think.

Apparently the guv’mint was already talking to YouTube about finding a way to do this, and YouTube was willing to create a “clean space” for official civic communication, according to this WaPo article. But Rep. Culberson grabbed Rep. Capuano’s language about how the updated rules should handle the hosting of video content — including a “this is official House bizniss” type notice at the front and the non-commercial entanglement concerns — and ran with it, screaming bloody murder, as if House Democrats woke up one recent morning and decided to enact a “rules change” to crack down on his Twittering and any other innovative use of new media.

But again, the problem with Congressional use of new media is that the rules already don’t allow for the use of commercial third party sites that might commingle the official with the unseemly. Rep. Capuano’s attempt to expand the ability of our Representatives to use the YouTube might be, at worst, a rather narrow-minded and poorly-worded proposed change to the rules that would create no extra wiggle room for people like Rep. Culberson to do things like Twitter (which are already against the rules as they stand anyway). But hey, I guess it’s not as easy to say, in 140 characters or less, that “ZOMG! House Dems are going to update the rules to expand Congressional use of social media in a very limited and non-forward-looking fashion, but still an update that House Repubs never got around to considering in 2006!” than it is to claim the House Democrats are taking away your Twitter because they hate free speech. (Sure enough, the right-wing screed blog Hot Air ran with the headline for Rep. Culberson’s plight, “Why do Congressional Democrats fear free speech?”) But even that kind of “non-forward-looking” allegation wouldn’t have been fair to Rep. Capuano, given this particular chunk of his letter:

While the above recommendations will help CHA as it seeks to provide House Members with the ability to post official video materials on the Web in an efficient and economical way, further changes to CHA regulations and practice may be necessary to account for the continual emergence of new technologies. I encourage CHA to view these recommendations as the first step in a process towards modernizing the regulations that govern communications of Members.

This post at TechDirt nails the analysis on the head, as far as I’m concerned. The right-wing bloggers parroted Rep. Culberson’s rather hysterical partisan interpretation. Even the social media powerhouse blog, under the steady hand of Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins (whom I’m biased against anyway after he blew off our Street Team ‘08 Super Tuesday stunt), put the disclaimer “This isn’t a knee-jerk post” at the top of a knee-jerk post that used its headline to perpetuate Rep. Culberson’s partisan myth. And to think I was intrigued when my Twitterrific feed asked me, “Why are the only people spun up about House Net rules on the right? I’ve seen nothing from lefty friends? Where’s the transparency crowd?” But I quickly realized that the answer was, “We aren’t sucking down your spin because the story has no merit.”

It’s even funnier when you put Democratic and Republican memos right next to each other for comparison, as TechnoSailor does. First he presents Capuano’s “letter sent to the Democratic House majority leadership to silence [social media like Twitter and Qik.” He, too, parrots the Culberson mythology at first, calling Capuano’s memo “ridiculous.” He later posts “the GOP response to the [Capuano] letter,” from Reps. Ehler, McCarthy, and Price, which in itself contains language that totally highlights Rep. Culberson’s Twitterspasm for the partisan smokescreen it is.

Committee rules that apply to these [web-based] services and technologies, however, significantly pre-date their invention. In some cases, Members have begun using these services and technologies despite being in violation of existing rules.

Despite being in violation of existing rules. So sayeth the Republicans themselves. And yet Rep. Culberson has stirred up this tempest in a teapot (via Twitter! against the existing rules!) suggesting that somehow the Democrats are suddenly out to censor him with new rules.

The Republican letter goes on to suggest updated language that highlights another inconsistency on Rep. Culberson’s part.

Toward that end, we request that the Committee consider adopting the following updated policy language.

With regard to the Internet
Members may use technologies, websites and services (paid or unpaid) to communicate with their constituents via text, video, or audio so long as the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations.

(Emphasis mine.)

And yet, one of the particular things that had Rep. Culberson all up in arms was his interpretation of Rep. Capuano’s language here, which is hardly different:

Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;

As for what “clearly identified” entails, there is nothing in the letter to suggest that Rep. Capuano and the CHA wouldn’t be satisfied with some language on the main Twitter profile page of any Representative using Twitter. It’s a stretch to suggest, as Rep. Culberson does, that they would be forced to include a “disclaimer” in each single tweet that would exceed the 140 character limit by default, because in the memo Rep. Capuano is talking about video content only. But Rep. Culberson also zeroed in on the “existing content rules and regulations” phrase in a response he tweeted to all of us who questioned his allegations:

@shelbinator Look at page two - note each Twitter etc must meet “existing content rules and regulations” that means prior approval/rewrite 05:41 PM July 08, 2008 from web in reply to shelbinator

Huh. If it’s the House Democrats who are “trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter” because of the “existing content rules and regulations” suggested in Rep. Capuano’s letter, then what the heck are the House Republicans doing so much better by recommending that “the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations?”

Oh. Right. Absolutely nothing. Rep. Culberson is just acting like another extreme partisan trying to fan the flames of a fake fire so he can pretend to be the guy fighting the good fight. On his House.gov website — which apparently is unencumbered by any Franking Commission rules that might prohibit lies and bullshit malarkey^* — he alleges,

Democrats are looking at restricting Member content on websites outside the house.gov domain. Websites such as Youtube and other social networks would have to comply with government regulations before Members of Congress could post content on them.

He claims this despite the fact that (1) Democrats are looking at removing restrictions, as I detailed with self-admitted neophyte Capuano’s own language above (indicating that more evolution of standards will be necessary), and (2) the Republican letter to the CHA recommends the exact same compliance with regulations that Capuano’s does.

Yeah. I think bullshit is being too forgiving, even of a Congressman from Texas.

And that’s so, so very disappointing from somebody who really displayed a lot of initiative and openness by embracing these emerging technologies to open Congress up to the world. Too bad he thought it was just another medium he could use to pull the standard Republican playbook move: make up a lie, then repeat it as loudly and as frequently as possible until people dumb enough to fall for it start repeating it for you.

* Hat tip to my boy Joey B.

UPDATES:
1. Rep. Capuano brought the smackdown too.
2. ZOMG someone in Speaker Pelosi’s office apparently read this blog and got her to link to it (fourth paragraph) in a response to Leader Boehner! Leader Boehner!
3. I think we’re all going to put down our partisan guns and get behind the Sunlight Foundation’s Let Our Congress Tweet push. I’ll defend Democrats against exaggerated partisan claims, but I’m not going to let them have the dumb if they can’t brain the internet.

This is the final piece in the video series about local Iraq veteran and ex-Marine Chris Raissi. In this chapter we revisit Chris’s trouble with recruiting duty and hear about the hostile chain of command there, an environment that only exacerbates Chris’s post-war stress that he, like many other veterans the MTV Street Team has talked to, self-medicates with alcohol. That approach was one way out of his seemingly dead-end situation.

There was no way to do his story justice in a series of short, web-consumable video bites; you got about 12 and a half minutes of the interview while another 80 or so hit the cutting room floor. (Part 1 aired on MTV2 last Friday, but only 60 seconds of that made it to cable.) I didn’t have room to tell you about the times Chris would call home in a sweat with shaking hands — not from Iraq, but from Macon, as he struggled with an NCOIC who was determined to break him and make him leave the Corps because he wouldn’t sell pure, unadulterated bullshit to the potential recruits. I didn’t have room to tell you about the unspoken loopholes pitfalls that a “picture of a perfect soldier” can be lured into during judicial proceedings and when reaching out for psychiatric counseling. I didn’t have room to tell you about an idealistic patriot watching his fellow Marines and soldiers cause more hostility among the population in al Anbar around them through heavy-handed application of (or disregard for) ill-communicated rules of engagement.

But you can ask him about these things yourself next week. Turns out, the Young Democrats of Atlanta contacted IVAW for a speaker for their next happy hour, and Chris, who I am pretty sure listens to more Neil Boortz than Rachel Maddow, stepped up. Next Thursday, July 17, the happy hour starts at 7pm at Madison Grill in Midtown (on the east side of Peachtree around 16th Street).

(Video source page)

About 39 minutes ago a version of my first veteran video aired on MTV2, as thirteen other Street Team videos will throughout the day. I was too busy watching America’s Next Top Model on the main MTV channel (the only one I get), but I’m sure it kicked ass.

Just in time for today’s holiday, part two in this series.

—

Former Marine sergeant Christopher Raissi thought it was important for him to speak out as part of Iraq Veterans Against the War, precisely because he does not fit the stereotype that conservative Georgians may have about anti-war protesters. In Part Two of this series, Chris explains how a patriotic suburban kid who chose to enlist became disenchanted with the "Support the Troops" rhetoric. (Watch Part One here if you missed it.)

(Video source page)

Some people think Catholic guilt is unhealthy, but I think it can be a fine and dandy motivator. And while we can’t all get nailed to a tree to save humanity, one can certainly try.

Or, one could let another year slip away writing an average of five words a day on a dissertation that, now that both machines I could use to finish my experiments have up and crap-died on me with almost no hope of recovery, may never be worth reading. One could fall in love but still find a way to let happily ever after vaporize in the night. One could just settle on the couch with a cheap beer and contemplate credit card debt because a proper career path just hasn’t crystallized in the imagination.

All perfectly reasonable things.

But now that it’s time to shut down the pity party and prepare for the regular old beer party, I guess I’ll try to look for some positive achievements in year 34 in order to justify a 35th.

• I actually ran a set of the experiments that for a while didn’t seem like they would ever happen. The bare minimum amount of laboratory work may have been exceeded to get me out of here.
• I presented my research to a bunch of military-industrial brainiacs in March and no one threw anything at me. In fact, some people are apparently already starting to use a bit of the data. I would recommend against flying on their equipment, but that’s just me.
• I got a teensy tiny taste of a presidential campaign, met some really awesome people that I still keep in touch with, and worked for a really outstanding candidate that reminded me what it’s like to believe in something really deeply. Too bad we never made it out of Iowa.
• I’ve poked and prodded the edge of the envelope of that citizen journalism thing. The first YouTube debate was a stuttering start but still a wild ride: chasing the Biden campaign all over Charleston; live-streaming video from the press center and spin room and Google party with guests like John King, Anderson Cooper, and Obama Girl; and of course getting chastised on the big screen when Anderson called out Team Biden for trying to force a question on YouTube. Then there was the Huffington Post’s Off the Bus project and making fun of Romney and Giuliani with more YouTubery. And now I’m a contracted freelancer-type for the ol’ MTV machine. Who the hell could have seen that coming? Sadly, none of that really stacks up against being hot and female — or Scoble — on the internet, but I’m not going to change who I am.
• I got an N95. Hey, it’s not much of an “accomplishment,” but a boy needs his toys. And hell, it got me on the front page of CNN.com for three days, so nyaaah.
• I uh, I…

Damn. That’s really not a very good list. I may owe some back-taxes of societal debt to really warrant another go ’round the sun. Or at least a finished bloody dissertation.

Other MTV Street Teamers had already done plenty of stories about the Iraq War. I hadn’t; no particular reason why.

I’m really glad I did. This is part 1 of what will probably be 3.

Christopher Raissi isn’t your typical anti-war protester. In fact, he isn’t particularly anti-war at all; he’s just against this war, in Iraq. Being against the war doesn’t mean he’s a liberal; he’s a libertarian. And while he could have gone to college for free, this suburban Atlanta kid decided after 9/11 to enlist in the United States Marines. He may not think his government is doing its best to faithfully uphold the American way of life our founding fathers envisioned, but he wanted to defend it. The son of an Iranian immigrant, Chris enlisted to protect the only country that has “the American dream” that made his family’s story possible.

After serving his first deployment to the Horn of Africa, Chris pushed his chain of command for an advance deployment to Iraq. He then volunteered for an extended 12 month tour in al Anbar province instead of the normal six month Marine deployment, from December 2004 to December 2005. As a Combat Operations Center watch officer, he coordinated intelligence and logistics on everything from rocket attacks, “casevacs” (casualty evacuations), and deployment of up-armored Humvees. When he returned from Iraq, he re-enlisted and was sent to Recruiters School in San Diego to become a Marine recruiter in Macon, GA.

And that is when things began to fall apart. Along with the rest of the country, Chris began to reexamine the justification for the war and compare the political rhetoric to his own experiences in Iraq. As he became disillusioned with the war itself, he also could not accept the disingenuous tactics that his superiors were recommending he employ as a recruiter. And while he dealt with an increasingly hostile work environment, he was also trying to deal with his own post-combat mental and emotional stresses which, as a Marine, he was expected just to “suck up” and keep inside.

This video is just a brief introduction to Chris and his story. Stay tuned for future videos about life after Iraq, what really saps troop morale, the challenges of recruiting for an unpopular war, and Chris’s ultimate departure from the Corps.

I came up to North Carolina to visit the ‘rents for Father’s Day and, theoretically, get a good chunk of dissertation writing done. I wasn’t quite ready for my writing sabbatical, but on the day I was about to start my last experiments ever, my POS machine blew a piston seal and dumped oil all over the lab. It’s down for repair for, oh, you know, a couple of months, and I figured I’d better get out of town for some TLC before I went completely postal.

The problem with Mom’s TLC is the food, which comes at me from all directions at all times. And on weekend visits, that includes the nuclear assault of Sunday brunch at the clubhouse. Nothing like having all the time in the world to lollygag at your table with periodic trips to four buffet tables.

So I guess it’s a good thing I brought my bike up with me. And what better excuse than miles of quiet country roads and golf course cart paths to give the bike and the GPS-enabled application Sports Tracker a good workout.

And what better excuse than wanting to barf up a lung than to stop right there. Enough is enough!

Sports Tracker and the GPS in my phone did alright, although with the handset in the closed position (and tucked away in a sweat- and rain-proof plastic bag in my pocket), the resolution wasn’t as good as it can be when you’ve got it out in your hand. Variations of up to 50 meters from the true track in places raise some questions about its accuracy for total workout distance, but in less contorted routes, it should be pretty good.

And of course, the other bonus of GPS-enabled handsets: had I actually barfed up a lung and died out on the ride, since I had Fring updating my position in real time, my mother would have known where to look for me when I didn’t come home. You know, so she could bring more food.

Live mobile video is breaking out all over. Last week, Qik announced a new version of its video software for a couple of Windows Mobile devices, the Samsung Blackjack and the Motorola Q. This can really expand the pool of potential live streamers — and of course make us Nokia types feel a little less special.

But even more deflating for us anti-iPhone curmudgeons is today’s announcement by Flixwagon that they’ve developed a version of their mobile broadcasting software for iPhone. Great, now the iPhone fanboys will proclaim victory all over again, because some external vendor has been kind enough to fill in where Steve Jobs seems so egregiously lacking. I heard it before when those willing to hack their iPhone pointed to the “solution” of a really tragic, no-audio, sub-10 frames-per-second monstrosity of an app you could download and record limited duration clips with if you were willing to risk bricking your $400 investment and voiding your warranty. The Flixwagon app for iPhone also requires one to jailbreak the cloistered device — this is not something that’s going to be available in the iPhone App Store:

While we don’t condone or recommend unlocking iPhones, as avid iPhone users ourselves we wanted to experiment with ways to enable flixwagon on the iPhone, until the official SDK supports video. We’re going to continue working with the iPhone SDK in the future so we can offer this functionality to all users once video becomes a standard part of the iPhone.

And I guess since you have to beat the phone’s firmware into submission to squeeze some video out of it, the Flixwagon app, like its video capture predecessor, also has a framerate like molasses, somewhere in the 5 fps ballpark, as you can see below:

I know this is a market the makers of Flixwagon really want to tap into, but I wish they’d spend a little less time making software for a device that’s so dead-set against accepting it and a little more time on the next version of their Symbian software. I heard in the end of April, and then again in mid-May, that a new client would be coming “in a couple weeks,” the most notable improvement in which would be the end of the 15-second “hiccup.” Flixwagon uses a kind of local buffering approach to ensure the integrity of the video stream in the face of periodic bandwidth constraints, apparently caching the data in 15-second chunks; as a result, unfortunately, about a half-second of video is not captured every 15 seconds as the buffer turns over, and this can really screw up the intelligibility of whatever your interviewee might be saying. That is the primary, if not the only reason I started using Qik over Flixwagon, and I’ll be thrilled when the glitch is fixed, if we ever see this rumored upgrade to the client.

I can’t tell if the iPhone version of the app has the same hiccup problem yet, because it’s hard to tell with such a low frame rate if you’re actually missing something.

UPDATE: I obviously didn’t do my homework, because Qik also announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a client for iPhone as well. (But hey, Flixwagon wins the marketing points; that I missed this from Qik speaks to a rather muted release.) Can’t tell what the video quality is like because I can’t find the actual video from the iPhone, just this video of the iPhone. Hello, Qik, link plz! The iPhone isn’t listed yet on their Signup page, and I presume as with any other such app you have to lobotomize your device first. But hey, there you go.

Doug at Live Apartment Fire has an awesome critique of some recent science-bashing by WSB:

Tom Regan found that Georgia Tech had gotten a federal grant to develop a robotic drum machine. The video showed a rather marvelous gizmo that actually pounded a drum. Its distinction was its ability to improvise based on rhythms created by a human being on another instrument.

But to WSB, there was nothing marvelous here. It trotted out Herman Cain, righty WSB radio talk show host, to utter predictable banalities about wasted tax dollars. WSB also found a living, breathing drummer who wanted no part of a government-funded robo-drummer.

The icing on the cake of this post is that Regan himself dropped by to get indignant about being criticized. In so doing, he completely missed another boat, proclaiming that “there’s no ‘federal science expert’ available to talk about our reports. That’s because they [at the National Science Foundation] don’t want to talk.” You might think he was quoting Doug’s original use of the phrase “federal science expert,” but the post didn’t come anywhere near suggesting that Regan find and interview such a fantastic creature. All Doug said was that the piece might’ve been more balanced by the perspective of “anybody available to defend federal funding for scientific research,” in the absence of the professor directing the drumming robot. Hell, I’m available to defend federal funding for research, as a former NSF fellow myself, and I won’t just talk about how it helped me buy better beer than PBR. There are scores more federally-funded graduate researchers here at Tech for you to talk to, Tom, and just about every single professor routinely applies for those bucks, too. We all have tales of seemingly obscure experiments becoming life-altering technologies someday.

As for who should fund robotic drummers, Regan suggested that the music industry pay for such a silly project, still apparently unaware that the artificial intelligence algorithms behind the drumming, and not the making of music itself, is the purpose of the research. But hey, this is Georgia, where we are now sixth from the bottom of the list of states that can get its kids through high school. It doesn’t take much to blow our minds.

Go read the whole thread, it’s a hoot. And there’s no math required.

For a split second I saw the $199 price of the new 3G iPhone and thought I might soon be abandoning my Nokia N95, after a mere three months. Then I clicked through the pages and realized that the drastic price cut must come from the fact that Apple still doesn’t think its mobile device with a camera should shoot anything but still photographs. (And when you take them, it seems you still can’t MMS them to other normal phones.)

Even CNN iReport’s story request was characteristically boring-sounding because of it: “Ever used an iPhone to snap a pic? Send an iReport. http://tinyurl.com/5m733c,” they said on Twitter. Ever used a pencil to do math? Ever used a car to drive to the grocery store? Ever use a match to light a cigarette? Yawn; we want to see sketch art, Formula 500 and forest fires, not the most basic use possible for ordinary household objects.

Ever take a video clip that doesn’t blow on an iPhone? Now that would be an iReport!

This is really getting to be like packing for a family road trip and leaving the baby in the carseat on the roof of the damn car.