The FCC and Clear Channel reached a settlement on all pending indecency proceedings involving Clear Channel. You can read a copy of the Consent Decree and the statements of the various Commissioners here. As usual, I’m more interested in what it means. To me, this says “the Bush Administration wants indecency to go away as an issue.” Surprised?
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
My Thoughts Exactly:
Ghost Writer
I was ego surfing today when I came upon this
link to a book “Inside the Sun386i and Sun486i” by Peter Norton and, to my great astonishment, me.
Amazon lists the book as “not in stock”, but I wonder if it even exists, or ever existed. If it does exist I would certainly love to get my hands on a copy. Because I never wrote it.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Tales of the Sausage Factory: Goodies for the Broadcasters, Zip for the Public
Only in Washington would the Clear Channels of the world, those great champions of efficiencies and deregulation, declare that their monopoly on local content must be protected with regulation. And only in Washington would the deregulatory anti-big-government Republicans lap it up with a spoon. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has petitioned the FCC and Congress to prohibit the new satellite radio competitors from providing local content (mostly traffic and weather). Of course, this is moving at hyperspeed, while the effort to impose real public interest obligations on the broadcasters moves at one quarter impulse. Still, I can’t help stirring the pot at the FCC and seeing what bubbles up.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
New Unlicensed Wireless Blog
Those interested in the unlicensed revolution should tune into a new blog wireless unleashed. The four contributors: Kevin Werebach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, and Clay Shirky are among the most articulate and visionary writers about spectrum issues today. The blog covers a wide range of issues from the technical to the legal to the philosophical. I’ve put it on my morning favorites list, and I hope you do too.
Neutrino:
Quantum networking, Cambridge style.
Not content with a single bank transaction, The New Scientist is reporting that there’s a quantum cryptography network now running between Harvard and BBN Technologies. The two are connected with 10 Km of fiber optic cable and employ custom servers, making it very expensive. However, BBN is the company that created the use of @, among other things, so I expect the current Qnet will grow, and we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.
My Thoughts Exactly:
Wedding announcement musings
I live on the People’s Republic of Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island vaguely associated with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where gay marriage recently became the law of the land. Last Sunday the weather was particularly fine. I was on the back porch, setting up for a cookout, when my neighbor Andrew came crashing through the underbrush that separates our houses. He had just come from a meeting with the minister of the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard, during the course of which he had discovered that my wife and I are members of that church.
“We’re getting married in your church,” Andrew said. “Now that it’s legal, you know. I’m Jewish and Ron is Methodist and we wanted some kind of religious thing, so we said, ‘Let’s see what the Unitarians say about it.’”
“Maybe the rainbow flag on the church flagpole gave a clue?” I said.
“Well yes. And we just met your minister, and she was great, and it’s all set up.”
My wife Betty joined the conversation and gave Andrew a hug when she got the news.
“What’s the date?” she asked.
“September 11,” he said. “We have decided to reclaim that date from the haters. It will be a day of joy.”
Neutrino:
Where regret lives
The role of the frontal lobes in the regulation of emotion-motivated behavior has long been known. Lobotomies are designed to cut off the forebrain, and the behavior change is dramatic (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). A recent study published in the latest issue of Science used a gambling scenario to compare the behavior of normal people vs. those who had lesions in the orbitofrontal cortex.
Regret is an emotion related to “what if” – missed opportunities, mistakes. It is primarily associated with past events over which we had some level of control. The study compared “normal” people vs. those with lesions in the pre-frontal cortex in a gambling scenario. In one case, the subjects could choose the wager, and in the other, they could not. If normal subjects “lost” in a random gambling situation where they had no control, they felt no regret (nor much elation when they “won”). Where they had control, they reported experiencing negative and positive emotions associated with losing and winning, and changed their behavior to successfully promote winning.
People with lesions in the orbitofrontal cortex felt no different winning or losing in either scenario. They did not change their behavior, but placed the bets they could control without learning from past losses. They continued to lose. They had no sense of regret.
If wonder why some people never learn from their mistakes, there may be a wiring issue.
Camille et al., The Involvement of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in the Experience of Regret, Science 2004 304: 1167-1170
Here’s the abstract.
Inventing the Future:
seeing red
I often get chain letters about things like wearing yellow ribbons and not buying gas on a particular Sunday. I sympathize with many, though I doubt if I ever passed any on. But I sure like the idea that I can.
At one point do I actually participate? At what point do I feel I must take action including either passing the communications or doing what the letter asks? Am I moved to action more by anger or love or fear?
Here’s one to which I’m particular drawn, which I have edited and posted for reference.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Unlicensed Spectrum in TV
The FCC has released its eagerly anticipated (or dreaded) Notice of Proposed Rule Making which would authorize the use of unlicensed spectrum access in the television bands. (Word, PDF, and Text). This is one of the real important proceedings before the FCC on unlicensed. You can be sure that major companies on both the pro-unlicensed and the anti-unlicensed side will file? But will you? Are you content to let Microsoft or Intel cut a deal with Viacom, News Corp and the rest of the media conglomerates for you? Or would you rather participate yourself and help define your own rights?
Inventing the Future:
President Bush is no Hitler.
I have a number of friends and relations that have supported George W. Bush in the past. It’s pretty hard to admit you’re wrong, and these folks still support him. So I’m going to write this out in one burst, for fear that I won’t have the balls to click “submit” if I bother to make this a coherent argument.
I feel that if we return George W. Bush to office, we’re a bad people. While what the Bush administration is doing is not as bad as what the Nazis did, folks who work to keep Bush in power are doing the same thing in their turn as those who supported the Nazis when they knew what they were doing was wrong. This includes folks who have given a record $200 million dollars directly to Bush’s re-election cause and the untold more to soft money. If you honestly and thoughtfully disagree with me, ok. But failing that, support for Bush’s re-election is equivalent to support for keeping Hitler in power.
