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POPSFrom the horse's mouth: McCain's health-care advisor's personal blog McCain's health-care advisor, John Goodman, thinks we should deal with the problem of uninsured Americans by ordering the Census Bureau to stop calling people "uninsured." I kid you not. He says that since pretty much everyone ends up getting the medical care they need somehow or other, no one's really uninsured. If you read the whole post, you'll also see that Goodman is a little confused about how employer-provided health plans work in real life. This is also the same guy who recently said, commenting on health disparities between whites and nonwhites in the U.S., that "doctors just don’t control our over-eating, over-smoking, over-drinking, and shoot-outs in the hood." (http://snipr.com/3kuaa) Nice, dude. Nice.
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POPSA DIY tiny cabin for about $2000 From a blog on "tiny houses." The builder featured here designed and built his own 14'x14' cabin, including solar-powered water pump, composting toilet, and a propane-powered refrigerator and stove, for about $2000.
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POPSTorah Borntrager on "how I escaped the Amish" A young woman who was raised Amish, but who left the community at age 15, tells her story. This is an interview by Tim Ferris (the time-management guru) -- not what I expected to see at his blog at all, but I assume it's genuine.
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POPSOpenDNS for the non-technically inclined When I mistype a URL in the location bar, Verizon hijacks my request and sends me to a B.S. "search results" page (full of ads and spam). This post is a little starter for how to circumvent your ISP's DNS server with OpenDNS.
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POPSInnumeracy's John Allen Paulos on credulity and love A great post from 3quarksdaily (Feb. 2008) about the human desire to believe in something, even a fraud. Context: Paulos has put together a book debunking probabilistic arguments for God's existence. The clip doesn't do it justice -- RTWT ("read the whole thing").
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POPSTo the victor belong the spoils: Iraq's oil deal Andrew Sullivan reminds us that one of the Bush administrations official "benchmarks" for measuring progress in Iraq was the drafting of legislation to distribute Iraqi oil. Well, surprise, surprise, that legislation's been drafted, and the oil's been handed over to foreign companies with no bidding.
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POPSGoogle Health, HIPAA, and privacy A short post from Profy.com reminding us that Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are not covered by HIPAA privacy regulations. Sure, they have strict privacy policies, but -- as the post asks -- what about the first time an insurance company subpoenas your records trying to fight a workers comp claim?
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POPSFile-hosting and -sharing resources Orli Yakuel, the co-creator of the Go2Web20 directory, offers a current list of promising file-hosting services. Some are well-known, others less so. I can't tell if she's recommending them or only linking to them.
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POPSNew Facebook ads: privacy concerns not just alarmism Security researchers at CA have found that Facebook is now collecting information about your activities on partner sites regardless -- this is important -- regardless of whether you have opted out or even whether you are logged in to Facebook . Also see the linked follow-up post (slightly more technical, http://snipr.com/1utzp). I am not usually really worried by advertising-related privacy issues, but the fact that Facebook now tracks you when you're logged out of the site -- and the additional fact that they are publicly misrepresenting this capability -- is a little unnerving.
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POPSDo you know where that crucifix comes from? Via http://snipr.com/1u90g. The Association for Christian Retail (over $4 billion in business annually), following in Wal-Mart's footsteps, uses Chinese sweatshop labor to make crucifixes and sells them with the label "Made in Italy."
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POPSOld-school journalism + blogging, social networks: synergy? Linked from Dave Winer's blog, I think. A cool, experimental idea: connect beat reporters with an online circle of stakeholders joined by modern net-based social-networking tools. In this scenario, the "new" "Web2.0" model of information distribution doesn't kill old-school journalism but reinvigorates it.
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POPSCartoon: varieties of hijab on the Syrian street A cartoonist calling herself "Puppeteer" drew this amusing catalogue of the varieties of hijab she encounters walking to work each day in Damascus. To see the cartoon at full size, click the link at the very bottom of the clip.
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POPSFeast of Fools interviews Chocolate Rain's Tay Zonday This is why I gotta love the Internet. You don't just get Tay Zonday's wacky YouTube video. You get the video, plus the online conversation around it. Turns out he's an Am Civ grad student with interesting things to say about race and GLBT issues.
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POPSA student blogger on why active learning matters A student responds to one of Gardner Campbell's blog posts (http://snipr.com/1pavi). The point, in a nutshell: many students don't work hard in college because the "content" of each course seems to exist in a vacuum; thus, there's no reason to reflect deeply about it, aside from the desire to simply pass the course.
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POPSDave Winer: the problem with conferences Dave Winer's reflections on why traditionally-structured conference formats don't seem very productive, and what might work better -- free-form, small-scale conversations among smart people who really care about things.
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POPSPalestinian blogger: Hamas & Fatah, go to hell! The title says it all. He, too, sees Western support of Fatah as a treacherous and cynical way of prolonging intra-Palestinian conflict and sacrificing Palestinian lives. Palestinians, he says, want the PA and Fatah -- both corrupt -- and Hamas -- equally brutal and dangerous -- dismantled and an international peacekeeping force sent in to keep order. PS If you're interested in this kind of thing, and you don't read http://globalvoicesonline.org, check it out!
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POPSA Palestinian blogger's disgust at factional fighting A Palestinian student blogger observes that the factional violence in the Palestinian territory is all the more absurd because the PA itself has zero power. Not surprisingly, she blames Israel and the U.S. for building up Fatah's military power and thus for stoking the conflict, but she also blames Hamas.
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POPSOnline graphics generators for your site: roundup Pete Cashmore of Mashable posts a roundup of tools for automating the design of your site. Emphasis is on sleek CSS layouts, pale gradients, and faux-3D reflection effects, so you get a nice Web 2.0 look overall. Can't imagine I'd ever need to use this, but I think I will probably get stuck redesigning my department's website, so ... maybe I will after all.
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POPSIn Iran, "life is insecure" An Iranian blogger's remarks on the "insecurity" bred by the vagueness of Iranian law. For example, freedom of speech is guaranteed, but insults to Islam -- which can be defined however the authorities like -- are criminal acts. As a result, anyone can become a target of government suppression at any time, even though there is no policy of systematically silencing dissidents. Via http://snurl.com/1kg5g
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POPSGoogle Maps director on "the geoweb" Google's Maps and Earth teams have a blog. This first post is a kind of quick glimpse into their thinking on maps and location-based computing (call it "the geoweb" or "where 2.0" or "earth browsers" or whatever). Via http://301url.com/9w5
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POPSFifty songs for kids that aren't utter crap A handy list. I've always felt that most music marketed at children -- or, rather, marketed at parents as "stuff your children will like" -- insults the intelligence and taste of children and adults.
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POPSRiverbend on the rape of Sabrine "Baghdad Burning" discusses the rape of Sabrine al-Janabi by Iraqi security forces. After a fairly cursory investigation, Maliki exonerated the accused parties. No Iraqi woman, says River, would invent a rape allegation; it's too dangerous and too shameful.
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POPS"Back-to-the-land": personal reflections Interesting piece about the tensions surrounding rural life and farming in today's culture. Everybody recognizes that we've catastrophically lost touch with the natural world, but at the same time it seems impossible to regain that connection.
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