Archive for March, 2009

You and Elijah are now friends

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

In case the various existing modern-version Haggadahs out there are not modern enough for you, try this. Thanks to Carl Elkin for CC-licensing this, see his page for the rest of the story.

Facebook Haggadah

Islamic art

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Art museum ceilingI spent a few days in Qatar earlier this week and got to go to the recently-opened Museum of Islamic Art. The building itself is stunning (to the right here is the ceiling) and the art inside was wonderful.

In college, one of my favorite courses was Smith’s famous “Art 100” (since discontinued, * sniff *), a year-long course that covered art through the ages and across cultures. The time we spent on Islamic art was one of the highlights for me so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to see this wonderful museum in Doha.

Here’s a sampling of my collection of photos taken in and around the museum, click the various thumbnails for larger versions or see the Flickr set for more.

Museum of Islamic Art, Doha Old book in Arabic Art in the museum Patterns Ceramics
Monkey Museum fountain Turquoise Paintings of people, rare occurrence Art museum visitors
Rotational symmetry Rotational symmetry Arches Mask Museum of Islamic Art at night

links for 2009-03-28

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Survey data on Internet uses

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

New Pew Internet & American Life site

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP), a very important source on data about Americans’ Internet uses, has completely revamped its Web site. Among other things, it is now even easier to download their data than before. These are made available in SPSS format only. I use StatTransfer in such cases (for conversion to Stata), any other tools that have worked well for folks?

They also have a handy tool for searching their data base of questions. We’ve been working on something similar in my lab for a bunch of Internet-related surveys although stopped the process due to lack of funding. Pew was smart to work with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at UCONN on this since they have so much experience in this domain. Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that a search on the same term on the Roper and the PIP sites does not yield the same results. While some Pew data seem to be available through the Roper site, these seem to originate from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and not from PIP. That’s something to keep in mind when looking for Internet-related data.

For those not interested in accessing the raw data directly, PIP’s full reports continue to be easily available by topic on the site as are some stand-alone figures from these. Overall, the amount of material PIP is making easily available is a wonderful resource so many thanks to the great folks there!

links for 2009-03-14

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

links for 2009-03-13

Friday, March 13th, 2009

links for 2009-03-11

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

links for 2009-03-10

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

links for 2009-03-09

Monday, March 9th, 2009

links for 2009-03-08

Sunday, March 8th, 2009
  • daily printed newspaper "comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content"
    (tags: news blogs)
  • From the "Society for HandHeld Hushing":) come these cards to help when encountering a loud person using a cell phone

links for 2009-03-06

Friday, March 6th, 2009
  • "As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried to control the network by filtering out content objectionable to the countries for any of a number of reasons. A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent this filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered content. In this report, we describe the mechanisms of filtering and circumvention and evaluate ten projects that develop tools that can be used to circumvent filtering"
  • "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it."
    (tags: privacy eff howto)

Recently released resources on online privacy and security matters

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

I’m back at NU for a few days with about 20 (no, really, I counted) meetings in the next two days so no time to comment at length on the following, but I thought they were definitely worth a mention. Here are two recently released resources from a couple of great organizations:

* The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a resource on Surveillance Self-Defense.

* The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (my host for the year) has released a 2007 report on circumvention tools.

Both are carefully-written, interesting and helpful documents worth a look.

links for 2009-03-04

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

links for 2009-03-02

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

links for 2009-03-01

Sunday, March 1st, 2009