From insidehoops.com

With the NBA’s All-Star Weekend headed to Dallas on Feb.12-14, let’s hope the Mavericks and the NBA have a better handle on security than they did Saturday when the Trail Blazers were in town.

During a timeout with 41 seconds left in regulation, two women walked onto the court and into the Trail Blazers huddle. One woman wrapped her arms around the waist of Blazers guard Rudy Fernandez from behind. Fernandez, who was not in the game but focused on the plays being diagrammed by coach Nate McMillan, was stunned.

“I was surprised,’’ Fernandez said. “I was listening to the coach on the bench and behind me, she touches me and says, ‘Rudy, I love you. Nice to meet you. Good game.’’ …

The women were ushered away from the huddle, and amazingly allowed to return to their court-side seats under the basket and watch the remainder of the game, which went to overtime.

If that was two guys, they’d have been dragged from the scene, beaten by security, and thrown in the drink but because it was a couple of good looking ladies they got away with a serious security infringement with zero consequences.

The woman involved in this incident NEED to be treated the same as men (minus the beating please) for the simple fact that if they are not, it becomes a serious security hazard because of the following:

I don’t find it far-fetched that at some point in the near future these organizations are going to employ the services of some good looking woman to carry out their deeds.

In the age of extreme makeover shows — how hard would it really be to dump a comparatively insignificant amount of money into making some ordinary female religious extremist into a complete bombshell and then have her carry out some evil deed?  Really, who is going to seriously question a woman like that?

I will not be surprised that if in the near future a horrific act of some kind is going to be committed by a beautiful young woman who, because of her looks, will have slipped through security with little to no resistance.  I just have that feeling that it’s only a matter of time before this little social loophole come back to haunt us.

For those of you out there with some interest or particular knowledge about kick drum microphones, please drop me a line.  I’d love to have a few guess bloggers to help fill in the site.

…first stop, message boards and forums. If you are like me and have regularly turned to message boards for answers to questions you have, maybe you would agree with something I realized some time back that

searching through message boards and forums is not very enjoyable!

All too many times my searches would end in frustration as I’ve often found it extremely difficult and clunky to navigate these sites.  The search functionality is usually rudimentary, the layout almost always cramped and over-loaded with information, and there no good way to decipher the good authors from the bad.  Let’s face it, most of this underlying software was great when it was first developed well over a decade ago, but I think we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard today.

So, I’ve decided to do something about out it…and I have.  I’ve launched a new recording community powered by software that I’ve developed from scratch that I  hope will address many of the issues I described above.

How to separate the good from the bad.

Why should you trust some random post by someone you don’t know that may or may-not have any clue about what they are talking about?  On recording Questions, users gain experience points whenever they contribute to the site in a positive fashion, and therefore over time earn trust within the community.  Best of all this trust comes from other community members — we let your peers judge you on the quality of your content.  As members gain experience, they are afforded greater freedom and abilities throughout the site — a reward for being an active and engaged member.

Determining quality -

The simple voting system on RecordingQuestions.com determines how information is organized and ranked. The more votes an answer has, the closer it appears to the top of the page. The best answers (as voted on by you, the community) always appear at the top of the page where they may be easily found.

Keeping people engaged in the site over time

It’s fun to get stuff, and what better way to keep members involved than to provide some type of incentive system. Members will collect different awards based on achievements they accomplish throughout the site.  This can be as simple as casting your first vote or as rare as posting something marked as a favorite by 100 other people.  It’s surprisingly addicting to look forward to that next award while you contribute to the community.

For those of you interested in learning a bit more about the site, please feel free to stop by the frequently asked questions page where we go into much more detail about how many of these systems work.

Be sure to follow the evolution of the new system on the Official Recording Questions Blog where I plan to post updates from time to time.

Wikipedia has taken a rather dramatic step to end four year dispute over the Scientology page and more than 430 related articles. The entire IP range of the Church of Scientology as well as the accounts of several contributors are now banned from editing the content in an effort to reduce a “persistent point-of-view pushing and extensive feuding over sources on multiple articles.”

It seems that more than a couple church members were unable to restrain their Thetan love for Xenu while editing the Scientology Wikipedia page.  As far as I can tell this wholesale banning of an entire IP range is a first for Wikipedia itself.

Here is a quick except about the event posted directly on the Scientology Wikipedia page.

The Arbitration Committee of the Wikipedia internet encyclopedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists. A “host of anti-Scientologist editors” were topic-banned as well. The committee concluded that both sides had “gamed policy” and resorted to “battlefield tactics”, with articles on living persons being the “worst casualties”.

 I spent some time with the late traffic designer Hans Monderman and the UK urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Together they have designed and redesigned high traffic intersections in the Netherlands and UK to be nearly devoid of traffic controls. I’m talking intersections with over 20,000 vehicles, pedestrians, and bikes daily.

 

Flow and safety have doubled because they create “shared space” with no right of way. You have no choice but to be cautious and alert—and use your noggin. Ben says this: “Research shows that over 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by motorists. What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.” But it is not quite as simple as the trite cliché “look before you leap.”

I thought this to be an excellent observation from an obviously excellent designer.  ”Just becasuse you can, doesn’t mean you should.”  The first comparison I can think of is the difference between navigating my Blackberry — whose time is numbered — and Apples elegant iPhone.  My Blackberry is full of menus and sub-menus and options and settings…and it’s really just a pain in the ass.  

Why not find the simplicity on the other side of complexity?  Make it simple, engaging, elegant.   It’s about playing chess, not checkers…think about what your customer needs, don’t just act on what you want.

According to an article in the New York Times, Professors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Harvard studied business graduates’ careers between 1990 and 2006 and found that women generally worked much less after taking maternity leave and resulted in a noticeable wage disparity.  

I’m not going to assume there are not businesses out there imposing a glass ceiling on female business professionals, but this clear shows that we cannot rely solely on the same historic arguments from years gone by.

I was listening to a piece this evening on the local NPR radion station 89.3 KPCC here in Los Angeles that featured artist Laura Milkins.   Earlier this year she had moved to Mexico city to explore Insurgentes, the longest avenue in the world, and gather stories from local residents.

From the picture that the media has painted you would think that the streets would be deserted or its people wearing full bio-hazard suits — but this is far from what I heard.  Laura explained that life is actually quite normal in Mexico City, life goes on as it always has and probably always will.  While people are certainly quite aware of the situation surounding them they also seem more intent on focusing on life and the fact that utimatly it is more rewarding to live that life than to huddle in fear from something that may or may not be the next great pandemic.

Let’s put a true pandemic event into perspective.  The great influenza epidemic of the early 20th century was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 full years.

We’re all going to have to wait and see if I’m once again spouting nonsense and just plain missing that point, but do remember, I live in L.A.  As I write this one-quarter of the national antiviral stockpile being delivered to California — direct to the front lines.  For now, I’m going to wait it out.   Luckily, I’m a progammer and I don’t see the light of day often — who says the life of a nerd isn’t healthy?

This was a wonderful article that touches on the fact that magic works because our brains contain “blind spots’ that keep us from seeing what’s really going on in front of us.  Check out the excellent article Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and coauthored by Teller, Stephen Macknik, and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.

This article aside, I find it utterly refreshing to observe the way that Penn and Teller bring a new angle to something so old.  I love it when someone comes up with a new angle, a new twist, something that no one else in the magic community is doing..they provide us answers.  Answers to how illusionists for centuries have be tricking the mind into seeing the impossible.

The Penn and Teller experience feels like that great website that finally takes a great service that was once only available through a paid subscription and sets it loose upon the world…for free.  You know someone had to do it.

But you know the best part about all this, the part that I like the most?  It doesn’t matter!  Not to me, and certainly not my brain.  Because even though I know what’s happening behind the scenes, I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.

Even when we know we’re going to be tricked, we still can’t see it.

Sometime this past weekend online shopping giant Amazon.com managed to remove an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes from their normal rankings within the site.  This, ‘un-ranking’  within the system caused these titles to effectively fall off the face of the earth and stir-up a hornets nest of controversy as to the reason that this group of topics suddenly disappeared overnight.  It turns out that a mistake was made in Amazon’s categorization system that flipped these titles to be flagged as adult in nature.

Whoops!  I’m sure this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but it’s one of the first to feel the full power of the twitter hash tag.  The hash tag #amazonfail quickly spread through twitter, and while on it’s own this is nothing new, this hash tag spread more than news…it spread lies.  It turns out that this massive tweet effort was spreading the word that Amazon.com was bigoted toward the gay movement and even helped spawned efforts to boycott the online retailer.

While this is supposed to be about social impact, what about Amazon’s response?  To date, I have still not hear an PR release or statements make admitting anything other than the fact that mistakes were made that they have been corrected.  No appologizes, no sympathy, and certainly no admission of guilt.  I really have to question the way that Amazon has handled this whole situation.  In this day and age swift and cincere action is required by every company due to the instant knowlege sharing capabilities of Twitter and Facebook–and this goes double for online businesses.  If you want to see a truly forward thinking company handle their mistakes, look no farther than Netflix who early last year suffered through delivery problems to 2.8 million of it’s own subscribers.  What did Netflix do:

“We apologize, and we’ll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible and to provide a personalized e-mail update to you if your DVD shipment was delayed.”

Quick and decisive action was taken to ensure that their customer base was secure in the fact that Netflix had their best interests in mind.

Well, now it’s late and I’m just tired but this is nothing new and I think we all knew that at some point Twitter was going to help spread something that did more harm than good, but maybe this is the wake-up call.  That bit of information that makes up all stop and consider, “what am I really forwarding on to my followers”.