This was a fun way to end a busy day. As I was walking home, the President’s motorcade came down Houston Street on the way to an event in Greenwich Village. I took the first photo using an iPhone, and went out later with my Sony Alpha 300 to catch the motorcade leaving Manhattan.

East Houston Street, 7:17 PM – Presidential State Car (top right) followed by secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – Presidential State Car (left) following secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – NYPD squad cars and secret service SUVs follow the President to the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

Kevin C. Tofel explains how simple branding transcends category names used by industry insiders, and captures a place in the public consciousness:

Such simple branding and product awareness goes a long way toward helping Apple sell products. Look at the iPad, 3 million units of which the company has sold in just 80 days. Instead of floundering around by trying to define the device as a keyboard-less smartbook or a tablet PC without native handwriting capabilities, Apple gave it a definitive name with specific, usable functions and in the process — as I noted when the name was first unveiled in January – cornered the nascent smartbook market before that market even got started.

WikiLeaks is building a system that would enable any website to host a form for collecting disclosures:

The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy.

WikiLeaks hopes this system will help journalists and others who receive specific submissions to study and report on those submissions in depth, because a massive collection of raw information that’s not studied and reported on will get little or no attention:

Once Wikileaks confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a news story or report based on the material.

The embargo period is a key part of the plan, [WikiLeaks Advisory Board member Julien] Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

Ken Auletta:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing.

© Roy Zipstein

Classical composer Annie Gosfield’s advice to young composers:

Make sure you’re always doing some work that is yours and yours alone — not composed for the approval of teachers or colleagues. There’s a chasm between writing in school and writing in the real world. Regardless of what you’re doing in school, you should always write something that’s not subject to grades. You may learn a lot comparing what you write for yourself to write for others. Guidance can be helpful at times, but I have never found authority to inspire creativity.

When I was studying composition at U.S.C., I would sneak into the Arnold Schoenberg Institute after hours to rehearse. It gave me access to a stage and a P.A. without having to run my music past my teachers, so I could experiment with my own band and work with other improvisers. It was a very conservative environment, so it was especially fun to sneak around, another great motivating factor that got me started as a composer/performer/improviser.

She also offers advice on gracefully handling the unexpected during performances:

Remain calm in the face of computer crashes. Better to distract the crowd with a joke then to show off your trembling hands when you fumble to re-boot your computer.

Molly Keener:

If scholars are to be truly evaluated on their impact to the field, a blog that fosters healthy debate and discussion, and ideally advances ideas or problems within the field, is a strong indicator of immediate impact. Blogging busts through access barriers that are currently limiting scholarly advancement by tying scholarship that “counts” to a centuries-old system that often fails to connect and engage scholars expediently. Through commenting and response posts, blogging has even evolved its own peer review system, albeit post-publication. Do you believe it is time for blogging to be validated by the academy as a means of scholarly discourse?

Widespread recognition of the scholarly impact of blogging is long overdue, and the fact that it is taking so long signals a dangerous lack of adaptability in the academy. A blog can help make scholarly work more transparent and approachable by giving readers a window into ongoing research, publishing findings to spark discussion and feedback, and giving potential collaborators or supporters an opportunity to discover ongoing work that’s relevant to their interests.

Keener says the peer review system on blogging is post-publication. That’s true for the blog itself, but in the larger scholarly research process it’s actually pre-publication. Much of what is posted on a blog comes before publishing a paper on the completed research, so a blog can enable an overall increase in peer review by allowing it to take place earlier, and impact ongoing research more quickly and iteratively.

In light of all the attention on Facebook’s announcement this week that it has 500 million users, Randall Stross reminds us that no single website is as open, or important, as the Internet itself.

Every link found on the open Web, inviting a user to click and go somewhere else, is in essence a recommendation from the person who authored the page, posted it or broadcast it in a Tweet. It says, “I’ve taken the trouble to insert this link because I believe it will be worth your while to take a look.”

These recommendations are visible to search engines, which do far more than just tally how many recommendations point to this or that item. The engines trace backward to who linked to the recommender, then who linked to the recommender of the recommender, and so on. It’s a lot of computation to derive educated guesses about which recommendations are likely to lead to the best-informed sources of information and then placed at the top of a search results page.

No “friending” is needed to gain access; no company is in sole possession of the interconnections.

On the other side of a highly-complex wall is Facebook. The company wants that wall to work to its own benefit: your activity on the Web can be tracked and fed into the closed community, but none (or precious little) of what happens inside the community will be shared with the open web.

[Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University], points to the recent introduction of the Facebook “Like” button at Web sites, which allows Facebook to note recommendations of those sites among one’s friends. The record of who clicks that “Like” button, however, is not part of the open Web; it’s Facebook’s. The public visibility of users’ Likes on Facebook depends on their privacy settings.

What makes Facebook’s privacy settings so complex is that it wants you (and your “friends”) to share enough information to make it worthwhile for companies to target you with advertisements, but it doesn’t want your information to appear outside its walls where non-members can see and link to it without logging in to Facebook. The only use Facebook has for search engines is to make sure they have just enough data to ensure that when someone searches for you, they see a link to your Facebook profile.

While using the WordPress for iOS app on the iPad, I’ve found that it crashes most often when adding images to posts. Specifically, when you open a post, tap the photo icon in the upper right to add an image, then tap the + button at the bottom of the popover to access your iPad’s photo albums, the app suddenly quits. I’m not sure why this is happening, but I’ve observed a specific behavior by the app that indicates when the crash will happen:

Figure 1. Note the absence of the photo icon in the toolbar. The arrow at the top of the popover is pointing to blank space in the toolbar. When the photo icon disappears, as in this case, tapping the + button will cause the app to crash.

Here’s the workaround I’ve found: after you tap the image icon in the toolbar, the popover appears, and the photo icon disappears, don’t tap the + button. Instead, tap the blue Edit button at the bottom of the iPad screen, then tap the photo icon again.

Figure 2. After following the workaround, the popover appears and the photo icon is still present in the toolbar. Now, when you tap the + button, the app will not quit and your photo albums will appear.

Robert Wright, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Evolution of God, on the campaign to demonize Park51, a proposed community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan:

Bin Laden would love to be able to say that in America you can build a church or synagogue anywhere you want, but not a mosque. That fits perfectly with his recruiting pitch — that America has declared war on Islam. And bin Laden would thrill to the claim that a mosque near ground zero dishonors the victims of 9/11, because the unspoken premise is that the attacks really were, as he claims, a valid expression of Islam.

Rep. Peter King (who, Wright points out, raised money for the Irish Republican Army when it was carrying out attacks throughout the UK that killed hundreds of civilians), and Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio are leading the campaign against Park51:

One thing Peter King and Rick Lazio demand is that Rauf unequivocally denounce Hamas. In other words, they want him to go beyond just not being a professed supporter of Hamas and, in effect, criticize everyone who supports Hamas in even the “soft” sense.

No doubt Osama bin Laden, if apprised of the situation, would hope that Rauf will cave in to these demands and ritually denounce Hamas. Because the Muslims who are most vulnerable to bin Laden’s recruiting pitch are, it’s safe to say, at least somewhat sympathetic to Hamas. And if moderate Muslims like Rauf can be pressured into adopting Israel’s position, and thus be depicted by truly radical Muslims as Zionist tools, that will make them less effective in their tug of war with bin Laden for the hearts and minds of the vulnerable.

Pathetically, Rick Lazio seems to have made his demand for an “investigation” into Park51 the centerpiece-du-jour of his gubernatorial campaign. Happily, Mayor Bloomberg has shown true moral leadership and opposed Lazio’s demands in clear language. “Government should never — never — be in the business of telling people how they should pray, or where they can pray,” Bloomberg said last week. “We want to make sure that everybody from around the world feels comfortable coming here, living here and praying the way they want to pray.” Amen.

The discussion thread on Wright’s piece is well worth reading. There are a few knee-kerk reactions, but many comments recognize and explore the complexity and nuance of this issue. Decisions based soleley on emotional reaction to a horrific terrorist act, while understandable, are not the best means to preserve our most closely held democratic values.