Soulmate
Soulmate is someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality and/or compatibility.
from Wikipedia
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A lately watched film has taken list of my favourite films by storm - “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (French: “Le Scaphandre et le Papillon”) by Julian Schnabel, with brilliant cinematography by Janusz Kamiński.
The screenplay is based on the memoir by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby, aged 42, an editor of the fashion magazine “Elle” sustained a massive stroke, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome.
This is a moving and beautiful picture about a man whose perfectly clear conscious mind and energetic, lively personality have unexpectedly been imprisoned in his completely paralysed and disabled body that the author likened to the mentioned in the title diving bell. It is a disquieting thought that anyone of us could face a similar fate. The film portrays humanity put to one of the most extreme tests and Jean-Dominique Bauby coming to terms his tormented existence with which he was condemned for the rest of his life. Out of the darkest horror optimistic streaks of dawn emerge when he painstakingly manages to communicate with about 200,000 eyelid blinks his personal message to the world and his loved ones. The published book and the following film in a tremendously artistic way add something very valuable to our understanding of conditio humana.
Butterflies have flown away… but will return next summer.
See also: Metacritic.com and Rottentomatoes.com
Beauty of Wikipedia
One can say a lot about Wikipedia. There’s also a beautiful side of the project, please see:
Blofeld’s Angels of Death
WikiGenes links to Wikipedia
This is really nice that an innovative scientific wiki - WikiGenes links to its senescent rival Wikipedia.
Recently Wikipedia has been chosen as a platform for open, collaborative knowledge database about the Human Genome1. WikiGenes wiki is far more technically advanced and is based on entirely different contribution model. It seems that WikiGenes is going to be a Wikipedia killer in this respect.
Flickr alternatives
There are dozens of photo sharing websites (with online community features) on the net. Among the finest is Flickr.com or it used to be. Apparently things have gone wrong since the Yahoo aquisition of Flickr. The latest outrage broke in May 2007 when Flickr/Yahoo started imposing its censorship policies (they call it content filtering). Please read this thread.
Flickr.com has also rather unpleasant feature of showing only the last 200 pictures that have been upload to your account. Otherwise you have to upgrade to the pro account.
Due to this mis-feature and the latest backlash I embarked on a casual search for good alternatives. And what I have found:
1. Ipernity - a social website for content sharing that is a kind a Flickr clone and competitor. You can upload not only photos but also other media (music, videos) - all you need for your multimedia blog. Yes, they provide a blogging capability too. Ipernity is an European (French) website and in my opinion it has a lot of potential.
2. 23 - a good looking site for a socially minded photo enthusiasts that seems to be a viable alternative to Flickr. This website is also an European one.
No need to say people running both websites are very friendly and responsive to all feedback and feature request their users present.
The lamest wars among Wikipedia editors
Wikipedia is huge, Wikipedia is a household name for an encyclopedia (remember Britannica?), Wikipedia even has developed its own folklore.
Have a laugh at Wikipedia’s Lamest edit wars.
Wikipedia for schools
Wikipedia is great and it is huge. Schools especially in the developing world need good, free sources of knowledge. And Wikipedia’s main aims is to provide such a source of knowledge. Not necessarily is it ideally suited for for use in schools and by schoolchildren.
Therefore a project has been created within the Wikipedia community and in conjunction with SOS Children that main goal was to create a selection of Wikipedia articles for schools. The project’s website is:
http://schools-wikipedia.org/.
Best articles from the English Wikipedia were “handpicked”, fact checked, proofread and reviewed for accuracy and suitability. Extra material was added that is specifically selected to be of interest to children who follow the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere in the world. Of course, all material that might be regarded as of adult nature was meticulously excluded. This is the 2007 edition of the material and it is also available as a CD-ROM/DVD or can be downloaded for free zip file (792 MB) or torrent (2.5 GB).
The selection is roughly equivalent to a 15 volume encyclopaedia with 24 000 pictures, 14 million words and articles on 4 625 topics.
Aside from being accessible on the site, it is also possible to download the entire selection via BitTorrent (2.5GB compressed with full size images, 792MB compressed with only thumbnail images).
Dr Andrew Cates, of SOS Children and himself a Wikipedia administrator, said:
“Wikipedia offers a fantastic learning resource. We are delighted to have been able to play a part in increasing the number of children who will be able to benefit from it. We are indebted to the volunteers in our offices and on Wikipedia who helped check articles and to the Wikipedia community for their help with this project.”
Further future updates of the Wikipedia School Selection are planned.
To request a DVD copy, email info@tuxlabs.co.za and put “Wikipedia for Schools” in the subject field.
Serbian pop music
On May 12, 2007 Marija Šerifović won The Eurovision Song Contest with a song called Molitva (Prayer in English, the title of the English version is Destiny).
This is only the second time a contestant from the former Yugoslavia won the Contest (the first was a Yugoslav band called Riva winning in 1989). Interestingly Molitva won despite it is sung in Serbian and not in English which has become a lingua franca of the music industry.
Molitva is a really great song and it rightly won but to some it may come as a surprise that such a small country was victorious this year.
Molitva - Marija Šerifović
Audiences all over the world are largely unaware of the great potential of pop music from the Balkan countries of south-eastern Europe. This is real music that is the fruit of true creativity that comes from the heart. It’s not soulless product of money hungry show biz profiteers sung by manufactured pop idols that we hear all around every day. It’s real, it’s powerful, it’s heart-wrenching…
The Balkans is full of great artists and one of my recent favourites is a band called Neverne Bebe (Unfaithful Sweethearts) . Check out their tremendous tunes on youtube.com
Tuzna pesma - Neverne Bebe
Wikipedia Explosive Editing Phenomenon
… online collaboration Wikipedia-style
In spite of widespread criticisms of problematic credibility of Wikipedia content, the online encyclopedia is sometimes praised for coverage of dramatic events of global interest like:
- The Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004
- The terrorist bombings in 2005 in London
- The Virginia Tech massacre
The editing process happening practically simultaneously (in real time) and at a frantic pace managed to create well-researched, reliable articles in a relatively short time, short enough not to lose its topical relevance of a good news source. When an event or a disaster of massive global interest strikes Wikipedia seems to be suprisingly a dependable (sometimes the best) news source on the net.
This remarkable success of online collaborative journalism (?) was noted by both by blogosphere and the mainstream media (NYT for example). It seems that this is a unique and unparalleled phenomenon.
It might be interesting, I think, to study these examples of the Wikipedia Explosive Editing Phenomenon (WEEP, what an acronym, heh
) and compare with a representative sample of other Wikipedia articles.
Maybe some insightful conclusions might be drawn from this study with implications for Wiki(pedia) and other online grassroots journalism projects.
See also: Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia by HP Labs researchers Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman
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