Kasi-Blog

Laura Sunderland, Senior Researcher a the G8 Information Centre of he University to compiled information about the upcoming agenda and referring to an article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The problem with the agenda is of course that many of the issues remain highly disputed and it is unclear whether they make it to the G8 discussion table. Read on, my friend »

One more time the Tamagotchi-Issue. Please recall: by mistake I pointed out that the Rüdnitzer was the only source of the Blogs and Tamagotchi comparison – but indeed other people (like kgblog, Teddykrieger, Robert Basic, Vanina DeLobelle,or Fukkle Bim Jerry) have mentioned the idea as well. Sometimes ideas evolve parallel – and this is even more true for blog ideas.

Now another blogger Violine has complained with quite strong words about this issue:

Der muß völlig plemplem geworden sein. [...] Der Typ muß selten doof sein.
The blogger accuses me someone of contradictory behaviour – criticising blogs and blogging myself. What was not understood: in the definition mentioned in my article, parasitism is only mentioned as one form of symbiosis – other forms are also possible, like peaceful coexistence.

But out there, in the blog-scene there are certain users that I would call blog-predators. They wait until somebody else makes a mistake – and then with harsh words they criticize the other blogger. This fits perfectly with the Wikipedia definition of a Predator:

A predator is an animal or other organism that hunts and kills other organisms, called prey, for food in an act called predation.

PS A Blog-PredatOr should not be confused with a blog-predatEr, which is a blogger that uses the time stamp to artificially date back blog entries so that they don’t appear on the first page or that they seem to be older.

PPS This should all not be taken too seriously!

My old O2-contract expired, I am no longer available under +49 174 9917027, I will update this blog soon with my new phone number. Also I finally received my certificate for my Bachelor’s degree.

In a recent article I wrote about Blogs, Tamagotchis and Parasites referring to an idea by the Rüdnitzer. Later that night I received a trackback from the kgblog mentioning that he came across the same idea already in June.

Well, probably often enough bloggers have an interesting idea which is then often copied without citing the source by other bloggers. The only way to identifiy as the origin of an idea is by politely writing a comment. But in this case I am sure that this idea evolved parallel, which brings me again to the definition of Parallel Evolution:

Parallel evolution is the independent evolution of similar traits, starting from a similar ancestral condition - the question is now : what ancestral conditions blogs have had?

Are all currency crisis a like? What happens in a currency crisis? What mechanism are in effect and what counter-measures can be taken? This article aims at exploring some of these questions.

Read on, my friend »

This biannual Conference will be held in Leverkusen, Germany 8 to 12 September 2007 and brings together 150 young people aged between 15 and 24 years, from around the world, to discuss environmental issues, share their experiences and create partnerships. The outcome of the Conference includes individual commitments, regional action plans and a new Tunza Youth Advisory Council comprising 24 youth leaders. For more information, please contact children.youth@unep.org.

Why Bayer is sponsoring this event can be found here. Previous conferences were held in 2003 and 2005.

StudiVZ has also a copy-network: PennerVZ. Penner is German for homeless person.
Found here, here, here, here and here.

The criticism about StudiVZ seems to grow, as can be seen here and here. Besides technical problems, the already well-know accusations of copying from Facebook and discussions about finances are floating around.

But Goethe-Blog points to one flaw of StudiVZ that cannot be excused. Unlike TIG, Facebook and many other social networks, StudiVZ does not allow the import of Blogs. Shame.

During the summer I researched a little bit on the idea of Intellectual Property Rights and also wrote a small essay on the TRIPS-Regime of the WTO seen from the Chinese perspective. The interest was spurred through my own discussions during my candidature for the European Parliament in 2004. During that time I was often confronted with the Copyright issues in European law – and had to find my own position on this issue.

And recently, during a seminar on Political Economy with Prof. Zöller, I rediscovered the issue. Basically we argued about the following standard idea of economists: that property rights (of any kind) ensure that property is better used – in other words ownership is needed to create quality. I argued that there are lots of counter-examples such as Open-Source-Software, Wikipedia etc. The debate goes on and I will try to post some of my thoughts at a later point in time.

Anyway: here is an interesting article that I found about Cliff Richard and Intellectual Property Rights. It counters the argument that long periods of copyrights protection are needed to spur artistic creativity!

In the following article I want to argue for the following idea: If companies offer unpaid internships, it is ethically correct. If NGOs offer unpaid internships, it is ethically incorrect.

Read on, my friend »

A friend of mine – Der Rüdnitzer - recently offered the idea that Blogs are Tamagotchis – they breed, chat and sleep. And they need feeding. Obviously the idea was fruitful: already a large number of other bloggers have subscribed to this idea, for instance Robert Basic, KBlog, Vanina DeLobelle,or Fukkle Bim Jerry.

However I would like to offer an alternative idea: Blogs are nothing more than parasites – creatures that live on the blogger’s time, the blog-reader’s time. They devour other blogs, often do not contain content of their own, instead feast on what other contents, other sites, other real people have to offer.

The definition from Wikipedia seems to be quite appropriate (My own comments are in bold):

Parasitism is one version of symbiosis (“living together”), a phenomenon in which two organisms which are phylogenetically unrelated co-exist over a prolonged period of time, usually their entire life (what else is a blog?). The requirement for a prolonged interaction precludes predatory or episodic interactions (such as a mosquito feeding on a host -or trackbacks, pings), which are usually not seen as symbiotic relationships. Symbiosis encompasses commensalism (“eating at the same table”, wherein two organisms co-exist in the same space, and one organism benefits while neither harming nor helping the other - or covering the same topic), through mutualism (wherein both species benefit from the interaction - or linking to each other) to parasitism, wherein one organism, usually physically smaller of the two (the parasite) benefits and the other (the host) is harmed - like stealing ideas, content and traffic from each other.

Update from November 2nd: This article discusses whether search engines are parasites.

See as well: HowardOwens, SearchEngineWatch, Roughtype, FreeLanceDaily, OJR, DeepJiveInterests, Webomatica, TheGazette, Citmedia.

Corporate Social Responsibility arrives at search machines. The Search Machine Yodogo uses the google results, displays Google-Ads and will donate any revenues created through the Google Ads to WWF and Unicef.

With the name of Tebis Nador an artifial student from Iserlohn has conducted a social experiment using the new social networks such as StudiVZ. He created an articial profile and tried to connect to 100 people he did not know before – his only criteria was that they had to be good-looking blonde girls.

His full story can be found here and here (in German).

The amazing result: most of the approached girls immediately replied to his friendship attempt – even though they did not know him.

I would like to help spread the news about this particular interesting book:

The Case against Homework – How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It by Sara Bennett & Nancy Kalish Read on, my friend »

Being a member of the International Youth Parliament of 2000, I want to post this short message from the OIYP office about the next stage of this great project. Please read more below.
Dear 2000 action partners,

Email: oiyp2007@oxfam.org.au
Phone: +612 8204 3900
Fax: +612 9280 3426
Web: www.iyp.oxfam.org.

To and from New York City I flew with Delta Airlines. Although Emirates would have been 20 Euros more, I chose Delta. Never again. There are a few things that could make life so much easier when flying with Delta, but apparently the company does not need customers.

Some suggestions that don’t cost much:

• how come that at New York’s busiest airport (JFK), the Delta terminal is so rundown, with paint peeling of and barely no signs pointing the way to the subway?
• how come that in New York if I want to get change for the bus, I need to ask the Dunkin Donuts seller at the Delta terminal?
• how come that when about thousands of people are piling up in the departure terminal, no employee is around to tell them that only a few yards down the termin there is a second check-in point?
• how come that during the flight the first class lights are switched off so that people can sleep while in economy class passengers are kept awake with stupid duty free sales and boring movies?
• how come there is no way to take a shower at the whole JFK airport (and same applies to Logan in Boston)?
• how come that nobody (from the departure in Berlin to the arrival in New York or on the way back asked me if I have a Skyteam membership card? I do, as a matter of fact, but haven’t collected miles for years now – but just in case it would have been nice.

Surely, the staff of Delta are the last to blame. They did a great job working around the incompentencies of the Delta Management. I wrote another article on my flight from New York back to Berlin here.

In the mid 1980ies, Bob Lichter (Chairperson of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, DC) wrote a seminal book about the values of journalists. He discovered that the values of journalists could be described as East-Coast, metropolitan and liberal – unlike the general set of values shared by the American public. Even more, he found that this values also shows in the broadcasting – even though American media prided itself on its political unbiasedness.

Now with a similar study I would like to research how the values of young journalists in Germany are currently shaped – and how they will look like in 15 years! The German Youth Press is one of the most influential German youth organisations. Surely many of its activities will in 10 or 15 years determine German’s media landscape. So the interesting aspect would be to compare the values of young journalists now and then approach these journalists in 15 years again.
Bob Lichter used two methods: he asked journalists to confirm or deny a list of political statements, and he asked them to look at certain ambigious pictures and describe the situation shown in the picture. Something similar I would also like to do in the study.

Comments and Feedback are welcome!

After attending the Model G8 simulation 2006 in St. Petersburg, me and some friends from the German Youth Press and other organisations are thinking about hosting another simulation of the G8 summit in April 2007. Read on, my friend »

Today I signed up to Facebook.com – just to find out that it is an exact copy of StudiVZ. Well most likely StudiVz is a copy of Facebook and Unister is a copy of StudiVz or Facebook or both. It is remarkable how perfect the code was stolen from each other.

Come on, create one network out of the three of them!

The conflict in the Lebanon during the summer of 2006 shocked the world – nobody realised how quick such conflicts could evolve into regional and global crises. Now it seems that the conflict is completely deleted from the news – only once in a while newspapers cover that the soldiers are bored or that Israeli airplanes mistakenly shot at the German navy.

During my trip to the USA this summer, I had a lot of opportunities to discuss the Middle East conflict with Americans who are out of personal and academic reasons very interested in the Middle East conflict. During a discussion with Antony Smith from Seton Hall University, the idea came up to create a book that collects new and provocative articles on the Middle East conflict – especially with regard to the Lebanon conflict. Our idea is to step off the trodden path and generate new ideas on how to solve the conflict – but ensure that our research has a high academic quality.

We are currently collaborating how to get the project started – my idea would be to have the list of authors ready by mid November and the draft of the book ready by mid January. So far, a few friends of mine have already signalled interest, so the list of authors with possible topics looks like this:

• Lars Olofson (Bates College, Maine)
• Jaleh Taheria (Bates College, Maine)
• Jessica Ashooh (Oxford University, UK)
• Anthony Smith (Seton Hall) – The Mission of the UN to the Lebanon
• Karsten Wenzlaff – The case of state-terrorism in Lebanon – a game theoretical analysis (based on another paper that I wrote earlier)

If you are interested or have comments or feedback, please contact me.