Scribd

I'm playing with Scribd. Here is my resumé.

Who's a guru?

Something from the wonderful world of TED.

Building Online Communities

Some geeky social media stuff... Pretty interesting.

Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

View more documents from JD Lasica.

Shit my dad says...

Someone forwarded me a link to this Twitter page today. It's awesome. Everyone should look at it.

It's from a guy called Justin. As described in his mini-bio, he's 28 and lives with his 73-year-old dad. (Sound familiar? Yeah, but my dad is 84.)

Here are some choice bits:

"Here's a strawberry, sorry for farting near you...Hey! Either take the strawberry and stop bitching, or no strawberry, that's the deal."- about 21 hours ago from web

"It's just a fucking june bug, calm down. Jesus Christ, what happens when something bigger than a testicle attacks you?" - 10:12 PM Sep 2nd from web

"You know, sometimes it's nice having you around. But now ain't one of those times. Now gimmie the remote we're not watching this bullshit." - 8:18 PM Aug 28th from web

"How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes." - 10:55 PM Aug 25th from web

"How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes." - 10:55 PM Aug 25th from web

Follow Justin, and the shit his dad says at http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays.

Soros thinks the next boom should be in alternative energy

On a totally random note, here's an interesting clip with George Soros. He says that America's late 90s/early 00s bubble (the one that just exploded) was the result of Americans consuming more than they produced (made possible by very easy-to-get credit). To climb out of that hole, Soros says that America needs to get on top of alternative energy--investing into research, technology, etc.



His ideas are hardly new--you might want to check out what folks like Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman of the New York Times say about green energy and the future of economy--but when a bazillionaire like Soros talks about alternative energy, it's pretty important. (Because it means that doing nice things for the planet isn't just about tree-hugging, recycling, vegetarian hippies anymore...)

Should people go to journalism school?

As you may or may not realize, I'm in Paris now, and I've just begun my SECOND masters program in journalism. (I know, I know...) I'm going to write more about this shortly, but until then, here's a clip from Big Think about journalism schools and whether people should go. (The man interviewed is Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine.)



P.S. If you don't know Big Think, go over and check it out. It's kind of like YouTube for clever people (though perhaps not quite as heady as TED).

My friend, Julianne, goes to Indonesia

My friend, Julianne, is going to Indonesia. She just finished her masters in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she was selected to be teaching fellow in a U.S. government program. She'll be there an academic year.

I met Julianne in 2002 when we both took a teacher training certificate course in Boston. Julianne had been in Switzerland for more than a year, and she had her sights set on returning. After the course, she found a job in Basel, teaching English to the blind. Then, five years later, she got into Columbia the same year I did--a total coincidence.

Now, she's back on the road, and blogging about it. If you'd like to see what she's up to, go to http://www.julianne-in-indonesia.blogspot.com. (She's only just started writing, though, as she leaves the U.S. tomorrow.)

Catching up and sand animation...

Yes, it's been MONTHS since my last post. No, I have not stopped writing here. I've just been a bit busy.

Since May, this is what I've done: graduated from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University with a M.S. degree (didn't do the cap and gown, though--not my thing), left New York, drove up and down the California coast with a lovely, young Frenchman, got my visa to study in France (not as simple as one might think), saw my sister graduate from her master's program at UC Irvine, went back to Hawaii for four days, flew to China and chaperoned a group of teenagers in and about the country, took a few days for myself in Beijing, flew to Paris via Doha, got an apartment, a bank account, a phone, an internship at the International Herald Tribune, and a folding table for my place. It has been a long couple of months and if I had been able to see one of my best friends get married in New England last week, I would have made it AROUND THE WORLD.

So now I'm settled, mostly. I'm waiting on the last two pieces of French bureaucracy that make me 100 percent legit--my carte de sejour, a kind of a residence permit, and a carte vitale, my health insurace card--and that's it. Then, I will be fully settled-in.

I do want to write about some of the things I've done, but then again I don't want to bore people with long and rambling tales of travel. So, my solution to this is a plan to post a few snippets, with photos, about the things from my journey that I liked best. Then, once I start school and get moving with my internship, I'll post normally again, I think.

In any case, that won't happen today. Maybe I'll start tomorrow. But until then, I wanted to share this. I saw it today and was so so so impressed. It's well worth the entire 8:33 minutes. I promise.

Andrew Revkin and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Rajendra Pachauri talk live at Columbia!

Science writer, Andrew Revkin, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, talk about climate change and the environment live at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

"I could break Sean Hannity just by giving him a middle seat in coach!"

Wanda Sykes to President Obama: "You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight!"

I love her. (And finally, someone has come out said Obama is BI-RACIAL. Thank you, Wanda.)

What is citizen journalism?

This is what Jay Rosen, NYU scholar and the think behind PressThink, says:



Please comment.

Ricky Gervais and Elmo

How cool is this video?!

And before I pass this off as my own find, I must confess I ripped this clip off the blog of a Twitterer I just discovered. He's apparently an English journalism student called Alastair Plumb. (Great name, eh?) He's got wicked links. (Might have lifted a few others too...)



Check out Alastair. His site. His Twitter feed.

Editor-in-chief of the Guardian talks about the future of journalism, Twitter and new business models

Alan Risbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian talks about the future of journalism, the changing role of the journalism, reader participation and, of course, Twitter. (He's a fan of Twitter.)

This interview was conducted relation to an event at the Institut für Medienpolitik in Berlin.

Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo.

A summary of the economists' event and some thoughts

To sum up the event: Nobody really knows what's going on, not even the really smart guys, and one smart lady. Everyone is convinced that things must change, but all anyone has is theories. Right now, we are playing a game of "which theory is best, which should we choose?" The slightly unsettling part is that we have to try one to see if it'll work.

These are interesting times, indeed.

Ferguson came out as the unpopular one and that's because he is pro-private sector and against accumulating too much government debt. (Which actually doesn't seem to unreasonable to me, but then again, I'm a neophyte.) I was a bit surprised that Soros--given his reputation--was all for regulation (with some restraint, however).

Another note, and this might not have been clear in the coverage: No one really expressed any feeling of panic. (Though Ferguson was getting awfully passionate.) They all said things are looking better than worse. No one was VERY optimistic--there was an air of cauton--but no one said out loud that things were just rotten. If this is true, it's reassuring.

After the event, I stayed on to send out a couple of e-mails and wrap up my computer gear. Most of the place had cleared out, and when I looked up from my computer, I saw an immaculately groomed blond woman. She was either in her 30s, or a very well maintained woman in her 40s. Her make-up was perfect and her hair was styled into a kind of post-WWII poof. Behind her was Mr. Soros. He is shorter and older-looking in real life than he is on TV. The woman was clearly a part of his party. Then Krugman appeared. He is also shorter and heavier that he appears in pictures. He was with a woman, too--she was less notable--then they all started talking about dinner plans. Though I could not confirm it, it did seem that the financial folks would dine together.

It took me a good 15-20 minutes after the fact to realize I was arm's length from George Soros, the billionaire, and Paul Krugman, winner of a Nobel Prize. In the world of economics, these guys are rock stars! However, it also made me recognize that the problems of the world's economy, as well as the solutions to them, rest in just a few people's hands. (More than the two of them, of course, but not all that many.) And these guys are just guessing, too! (They devote their lives to this stuff, of course, so I'd imagine they are in a position to make better guesses.)

Back in my political, pink hair and nose ring days, I used to hang around a bunch of really smart philosophy people. (This was in Boston.) We'd read the papers and talk about politics, the economy and what could be done to improve the state of the world. At that time, I have to admit, we were all pretty convinced that there were definitely some conspiracies going on. "The Man" was most certainly trying to bring someone down. But now, I'm really not so sure about any of those ideas. Of course, I'm still a skeptic, but it really does seem to me, that when it comes to the economy, international policy and perhaps other things, no one really knows what's going on. Everyone just tries really hard to do their best.

To me, the economy is like a living animal. You can feed it, starve it, train it, beat it, love it, or tie it to a tree, but at the end of the day, it's still an animal with a mind of it's own, and you can't really always predict what it's going to do. I am coming to the point-of-view that most people usually just try to do what's right. However, we are all limited: Not just in understanding, but also by the finite number of years we all live, by communication (the left hand doesn't always know what the right foot is doing) and by the fact that to get really good at something, you have to give up other pursuits (thus limiting the creative process that is inherent to mental cross-training). Throwing a master conspiracy into all of that is just impractical.

In any case, I digress. It was great to hear what these folks had to say, even if there were no clear answers to life, the universe and everything. It's stuff like this really makes living in New York so worthwhile.

Top U.S. Economists talk in New York!

Live from the Grace Rainey Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Featured panelists: Senator Bill Bradley, Paul Krugman Niall Ferguson, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros and Robin Wells. Moderated by Jeff Madrick. Introduced by Robert Silvers.

**UPDATE: My 84-year-old father is on Twitter!

Dad is now on Twitter! You can follow him at http://twitter.com/geancannon. (But there are no posts, yet. He says he is trying to work out TweetDeck and needs some time.)

Talking about Twitter with my 84-year-old dad...

My papa (father, not grandfather) is awesome. This is what he looks like: (--------->)

That's his desk and he spends most of his waking hours there, working. My dad has been a lawyer since he finished law school in 1951. Though he officially retired in 1987, he still works everyday.

Papa is totally online now. He e-mails daily and can do attachments (though, learning to attach took a bit longer to master). His most recent cyber-coup was signing up for Gmail and learning he can chat from inside the inbox. ("But how did you know I was online?" he asked, the first time I appeared on his screen at home in Hawaii while I was at my computer in New York.)

For an 84-year-old, I'd say my papa is ahead of the curve when it comes to being Web-savvy.

Yesterday, he asked me about Twitter. I tried my best to explain. This is how it went (edited for clarity and typographical errors):

geanwcannon: I really don't have any idea what twitter is although I see a lot of reference to it online. Could you give me some idea what it is and what use can you make of it?

me: twitter is a service whereby you can post very small messages online
they must be smaller than 140 characters
so it's a bit like a micro-blog
people write these tiny messages
sometimes from their phone
all day long
and it's open for the world to see

geanwcannon: Where online does it go? How do you get it "online?"

me: you either send a message from the twitter web site, or hook up your phone to the web site
and [the messages] go to a kind of collective cloud of messages
to organize it, each person has an account
then they announce to other people that they have an account
then someone [another Twitterer] can hit a button and become a "follower"
so on your own personal page, you will see your own messages, as well as the messages of people you follow

geanwcannon: Has an account -Where?

me: on twitter
to use twitter
each user has to establish an account on the web site

geanwcannon: What web site?

me: twitter
twitter has a main web site
you go there, set up an account, then send messages through your account
then other people can follow your messages from their own accounts
here's an example
you and me and leilani [my sister] and tom friedman
each of us want to use twitter
so each of us go to the twitter site, which is twitter.com
then, we each open an account. my account is very simply "mailecannon"
so now we all have accounts
from my account, i write short messages
they get posted on my account page
(which is what i see every time i sign into twitter, just like how i [see my inbox each time I] sign into my e-mail account)
so let's say, you and leilani and i want to follow each other
we would find each other my entering our respective account names
then, we would hit a button to become "followers"
so if we all did that, all of our messages would be seen in all of our respective pages

geanwcannon: Fascinating- Now
Now i know. It is a shortcut form of e-mail.

me: well, yes and no
anyone could see it
not just you and me and leilani
it's not that personal
for example: tom friedman
i follow him on twitter
so all i do is enter his name
and press a button to become a follower
so i can see all of his messages
but it isn't like we communicate
he doesn't know who i am

geanwcannon: I want to give this a try. This is an easy way to broadcast to the world.

me: very very easy
and sometimes
total strangers follow me
because there is a search function
so let's say i go to a mozart concert
and i send a message about mozart
and maybe
at the same time
someone is looking for something about mozart
and they see my message
so if they like it, they might want to follow me
i did this recently [followed strangers]
there was a big student protest at new school
and i didn't have the time to go down and see the students. so what i did was make a twitter search. then, i aggregated messages from people who were there and writing messages about it
so it was like live news
though i have to say, it's flawed. because it is so personal, people just write some very silly things and that is impossible to control.

geanwcannon: You have roused my curiosity. I want to sign up on Twitter. I have some foolish things I want to say.

What is most striking to me about this conversation is that it made me realize that there really is a huge gap in natural understanding when it comes to technology and the Internet. Now, it's obvious that younger people usually have the advantage over older people when it comes to technology, but I think it's assumed that that's because older people just didn't learn this stuff, nor care to learn it. However, what became obvious in chatting with my father was that he was approaching Twitter with a mental landscape very different from my own. If tailored handbooks were available to teach people about Twitter (or Facebook, or whatever), my dad's book would not look like mine. For example, I recently explained Twitter to a friend of mine my age and the conversation was simple: "Go to twitter.com and sign-up." There wasn't too much discussion about where these messages might be going, how they got there or what happened to the messages once they got sent. But with my dad, he really wanted to know more before he would buy into it.

For me, all this says a lot about the learning process and how one relates to the world now. To have access to the newest (though arguably not the best) information, one must be in a constant habit of learning HOW to do it. But, from my understanding, learning, in general terms, is the realm of the young. Though people talk about developing a "love of learning," that usually meant maintaining a life full of interests and reading books about them, or perhaps taking a class. This was almost always available to everyone because the method of transmitting information (reading books or talking face-to-face with people) held true once one overcame the initial burdens of learning to read, listening carefully and thinking critically.

Now, with the Internet, people must alter their entire understanding of HOW to GET information. And if we want people, specifically the elderly, to continue being able to stay on top of things, that means we have to consider seniors as a unique learning group, and then develop learning techniques to cater to their specific needs. I don't think this has ever been an issue before, and that's pretty interesting.

This makes me miss China...

Just had yet another mediocre American breakfast (eggs, toast, a muffin and some juice). Then, I saw this. Boy do I miss China.


The Menu Stealer - episode 1: Guilin Mifen from PraxisLanguage on Vimeo.

Lunar Eclipse

The fellow who made the baby video also made this lovely clip.