As previously reported, the pro-democracy rallies in Myanmar have been closely covered by regular reports coming out of the embattled nation via cellphone, email and even YouTube. The government's attempts to try and pollute the web with their own propaganda must not have worked, since on Friday morning, the government shut off Internet access, cut phone lines and confiscated mobile phones in an attempt to control the outflow of information about the rallies. Though this may have slowed reports, it's very difficult for the government to completely clamp down, so some news reports are still getting out through mobile phones and a few satellite uplinks to the Internet. Even if the junta is able to completely shut things down, events can still be monitored from satellites, which are providing evidence of potential human rights abuses conducted by the government. Now that its next actions are being played out under a vigilant global eye, hopefully Myanmar officials will make the right choices in the coming days.

It's no secret that many folks in the newspaper industry are freaked out by the market changes impacting what they do. However, we keep hearing increasingly bizarre suggestions for solutions. My personal favorite is still the idea that Google somehow has a moral obligation to just give money to journalists. The latest such suggestion may be even more far-fetched, with a long article at the Columbia Journalism Review suggesting it's time to start thinking about having the government prop up newspapers (via Romenesko). The good news is that many people asked about this suggestion respond with reasonable distaste (or outright horror) to the idea. The author of the piece brings up examples of government support for news operations, but in almost every case the scenario is quite different. Often, the gov't support is for getting something going in an areas where there's nothing, rather than propping up an industry that has had trouble adapting to a changing marketplace. The fact is that it's silly to think that there really aren't business models that can support a reasonable news operation (and yes, they need to realize it's a news operation, not a newspaper, if they want to survive). The demand for news and information continues to increase, as does the supply. It's certainly shifting business models around, but it's a huge opportunity for those who can spot the economic trends and adapt to them.

BoredStiff writes "Heard on NPR and reported in ScienceDaily: a study finding that migratory birds may be able to 'see' magnetic fields. The report comes from a current study by a research group from Oldenburg, Germany. They found that migratory birds use their visual system to perceive the reference compass direction of the geomagnetic field: 'Sensory systems process their particular stimuli along specific brain circuits. Thus, the identification of what sensory system is active during magnetic compass orientation, provides a way to recognize the sensory quality utilized during that specific behavior.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Due to the diligent work of a few determined individuals, the US Patent Office (once again) began to look into Amazon's infamous "one-click" patent. New prior art was demonstrated, and in an initial re-examination, the examiner rejected some of the claims in the patents, noting that they appeared to be obvious. Of course, patent appeals processes are long and involved, and after Amazon presented their side to a 3-judge panel, that panel has now ruled that the examiner did not do enough to show why the patent claims were obvious, suggesting that what many of us (including those who are skilled practitioners in the space) think of as obvious, won't be considered obvious. It sort of makes you wonder what it takes for the Patent Office to consider something obvious. Obviously, "obvious" has a different meaning to the US Patent Office than to most of us.

Over the past few years there's been an ongoing debate over the question of muni-wireless offerings, with most people falling into one of two camps: either totally against muni-broadband (to the extreme point of proposing laws against allowing it) or completely for it (to the extreme point of suggesting it's a natural right to have free WiFi). I don't fall into either camp, but tend to fall into the middle. I have no problem with municipal broadband offerings when there's a clear market failure. That is, when (for whatever reasons) incumbent providers are not doing enough to provide the service -- which may exist in quite a few places. Then, if the people want it, it seems perfectly reasonable, depending on how it's implemented. However, I do have a problem with the idea that every city needs to have municipally supported broadband.

Tim Wu's latest article for Slate discusses why he believes muni-WiFi offerings have been such a flop lately and it includes a few problematic assumptions. He completely brushes over the question of why muni-WiFi needs to exist, saying "The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound." But is it? I recognize the fact that there are natural monopolies to deal with, but that still doesn't necessarily mean that the government needs to provide broadband as a utility. It absolutely can just be about providing the right of way and then allowing private competition.

Wu's argument also brushes over the fact that WiFi really isn't the right technology for this sort of thing. Yes, he's right that it works on college campuses, but it's not perfect there, and college campuses are a lot smaller than most cities. Given the right technologies (and more are on the way) it is possible to set up better wireless coverage without the same problems. Wu's conclusions that cities need to take over muni-WiFi projects and make them truly city supported makes a lot less sense when you add back in those two things. Not every city needs a municipal broadband connection and it's way too early to call all of the efforts failures, because better technology is coming along that will make it possible to offer wide area broadband at a more reasonable cost -- without the government needing to get involved.

Here is an all-too-short clip of the Velvet Underground playing "Venus in Furs" at Andy Warhol's Silver Factory. Also making the scene are Edie Sedgwick and "whip dancer" Gerard Melanga.
Link

ByeByeWintel writes "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a recent interview on Devx.com he stated: 'If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads ... There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the 'running of applications' interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi has uploaded another episode of his terrific cartoon, Mighty Mouse. He says, "This week's Mighty Mouse Cartoon is loaded with all my obsessions." Link

Our buddy Diana Eng wrote an article for CRAFT Vol 3 (Disclosure: my wife, Carla is editor-in-chief) on making this cute Harajuku style T-shirt. The entire how-to is now available online at HP's Wetpaint Wiki. Link

Glyph Jockey made a high-res scan of an old, low-res record club ad. The effect is pleasing. Link

Marginal Revolution links to a new paper by economist Stan Liebowitz on the economic effects of file sharing on the recording industry. It's a response to an earlier paper that argued peer-to-peer file sharing has had little impact on CD sales. Leibowitz digs into the arguments and finds a number of problems. For example, one of the arguments in the original paper depends on the assumption that college kids use peer-to-peer networks less during the summer than during the school year. Unfortunately, Liebowitz presents data suggesting that's not true: in two of the three years they studied, file-sharing activity was actually slightly higher in the summer than the rest of the year. Liebowitz also faults the authors for failing to release their full datasets; he says he was unable to replicate several of their results using publicly available data. In the end, Liebowitz makes a pretty convincing case that file-sharing technologies are hurting the recording industry: industry revenues in the United States fell by a third from 1999 to 2005. Of course, Liebowitz's data also suggests that the RIAA's current strategy of suing everyone in sight—which they launched in 2003—isn't working so well either: revenues continued to fall between 2003 and 2005. They've tried suing technologists and suing customers, and neither has saved them. Maybe it's time they tried some more creative approaches that don't involve hiring lots of lawyers.

It's also worth noting that neither study looks at trends in the overall music industry, which includes not just CD sales but concerts, T-shirt sales, sponsorship contracts, musical instruments, music lessons, and so forth. These are all important part of the music industry, and some of them have been doing quite well lately. As people use peer-to-peer networks to discover more music they love, they're likely to be inspired to spend more money on these other music-related products and services. As long as plenty of good music is being created and listened to, then the copyright system is working the way it's supposed to, even if the people who ship little plastic discs around the country aren't making as much money as they used to.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Despite it's mellifluous moniker, Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye) is an unfriendly microscopic critter. It eats human brains. From APL

It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

Link

BurmesePython writes "Human rights groups are using high-resolution satellites images to reveal the activities of Burma's junta as it gets tough with pro-democracy protesters. Apparently 'it should be easy to spot groups of monks because of their distinctive maroon robes'. Like previous efforts to use satellites to monitor the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the hope is it will prod the UN and other international actors into putting pressure on the Burmese rulers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "Astronomers are still speculating as to what could have caused an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago when it completely saturated their recording equipment. From the article: 'The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2001, I wrote a document called Payloads for RSS that explained how you could attach something to a RSS item. I didn't explain how a RSS app would display or play one of these things, that would come later.

Today, we may be at a similar place with Twitter.

Sometimes I want to answer Twitter's question, "What are you doing?" with a picture, or a bit of audio. Some people want to send videos. It's easy to imagine in the future that along with a Twit, I might also want to automatically send my location (obviously a preference), and maybe some other status information.

It seems that four bits of data are stored with each post: 1. the person who posted it, 2. the time it was posted, 3. how the post came to Twitter (web, Hahlo, Twiku, txt, twitterrific, twittergram are some examples) and 4. who it's in reply to (if it is).

Now suppose I wanted to allow for payloads, as RSS 2.0 does. The problem is a bit more complicated, because not only do we have to specify how the data is communicated, we also have to say how it's displayed.

Caveat: This is just a proposal, there are many ways to do it, this is just one way.

First, the "update" routine, as specified by the Twitter API, would add 2 optional parameters: 1. the url of a picture that's a thumb for the enclosed data and 2. the url of the data.

A couple of examples...

1. For Twittergrams, which are audible tweets, recorded on a cell phone, the image would be a small speaker, . The second paramter would point to the MP3 file.

2. For a Flickr pic, the image would be a tiny thumbnail of the picture, and the second paramter would point to the Flickr page.

Discussion...

I thought the whole thing could be shrunk down to one paramter, a pointer to a bit of text that Twitter would trustingly display, but that's the problem, you have to trust the app not to break Twitter, and we all know that wouldn't last. Even a well-intentioned delveloper can forget to close a table properly, and that would leave the Twitter display in disarray.

I also thought we might register data types with Twitter, but that's a likely black hole. Apple went down that path, so did Microsoft and the IETF. It's a lot of work to make those systems work, and it's just a matter of time before they break down in chaos.

I think that Twitter should probably handle two or three types specially because they are so common and useful. Those are pictures, audio and possibly video. But that's potentially a lot of work, and can be done later.

Some will object that this only makes sense in the web, and that Twitter is designed for SMS. To that I say two things: 1. Degrade gracefully. 2. You already have features that make sense only in the web, e.g. the pictures next to posts that show iconically who's saying what. That's a nice thing to have in the environments that can display pictures, and its presence there does nothing to diminish the experience for the environments (e.g. SMS) that can't.

When it comes to patents, the argument for pharmaceutical patents is a lot more compelling than for many other areas. However, as you start to dig into the details, the argument for pharma patents becomes a lot more troublesome in that it creates incentives that have little to do with improving healthcare, and quite a lot to do with what can be patented. The monopoly power granted by patents pushes all research money into only things that can be patented, ignoring other possible cures, even if they can be both profitable and quite helpful. A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).

William Stepp points us to an example of how this focus on patents has helped to hold back one doctor's promising research on a way to help heal brain injuries. The doctor in question had come across some interesting findings back in the 1960s, but one of the problems in getting support for the research was that the findings wouldn't produce a patentable pharmaceutical product. Instead, it just showed that progesterone, a natural female hormone, could help heal brain injuries. Since it's just a natural hormone, there's nothing that can be patented, and the doctor had a very difficult time finding anyone to back the research. After decades of working on it -- often completely on the side, it seems that he's finally been able to build up some support -- and it turns out that his early findings did make sense and that the results appear to work equally well in humans as in rats (his initial test subjects). This is a clearly a big discovery -- and it was delayed decades because the focus on patents obscured the bigger issue.

This is the exact same thing that is seen repeatedly in Andy Kessler's book, The End of Medicine about the healthcare system. Time and time again, it's the pharmaceutical industry and their focus on what can they patent (rather than what can be done to improve healthcare) that gets in the way of real improvements that could save lives. The focus on what can be patented, and the games played to extend patents (at great costs) means that money that should be going towards much more useful areas of healthcare get diverted into less useful, but artificially profitable, endeavors. That's what happens when you set up artificial monopolies.