Exactly what you’d want from a Die Hard movie: characters and plot just strong enough to get you from one ’splosion to the next. Good times.

via Chris Glass

Lifehack.org has 15 practical tips for becoming a better writer and they’re all solid tips, not just for folks hammering out a story or a paper but blog posts as well.

Despite an approval rating polling in the mid-20s, Congress is gonna get itself a raise:

Despite low approval ratings and hard feelings from last year’s elections, Democrats and Republicans in the House are reaching out for an approximately $4,400 pay raise that would increase their salaries to almost $170,000.

The cost-of-living raise endorsed Wednesday evening gets lawmakers back on track for automatic pay raises after a fight between the parties last year and again in January killed the pay increase due this year. That was the first interruption of the annual congressional pay boost in seven years.

The blowup came after Democrats last year fulfilled a campaign promise to deny themselves more pay until Congress raised the minimum wage. Delays in the minimum wage bill cost every lawmaker about $3,100 this year.

On a 244-181 vote Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans alike killed a bid by Reps. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and Lee Terry, R-Neb., to get a direct vote to block the COLA, which is automatically awarded unless lawmakers vote to block it. The Senate has not indicated when it will deal with a similar measure.

Last week God Save Virginia asked that question after listing what it meant to them:

It means kindness to your fellow man.

It means respecting the host, the visitors, and the subjects.

It means a respect for the opinion of others but also a respect for differences in those opinions. That respect does not mean you don’t debate, it simply means that ones approach to the debate needs to be framed by the issues and an understanding that both parties are at their core good people who are strong in their convictions.

It means being able to admit when you are wrong.

It means being able to separate yourself from those elements that you feel cause harm to yourself and others. This does not mean removing yourself from differing opinions, but if you feel a site does not meet your personal criteria for ethical actions, why continue to visit, promote, and discuss that site?

While those views are certainly a good start, they don’t really get at the core of what is necessary for them to be followed.

It all starts at the blogger.

Kenneysian ethical blogging has always aimed at transparency, authenticity, and containment. As Kenney the Elder put it:

Transparency is a question of who is doing the writing. Nothing more.

Authenticity is whether what is being written is a true and honest account, not just in what is being written but why it is being written.

Containment is an action then placed upon the reader; why is this person asking me to believe their account of events?

The last two are strongly based on the first point, transparency. If the reader does not know who the author is, does not know the author’s intention or background, then the rest is moot. You can not believe the account or intent without knowing the source.

The Virginia Federalist has touched on the question of blogger identity:

The Virginian Federalist strives to improve discourse in the Virginia blogosphere in a similar fashion. We hope to build a strong reputation not so much for ourselves as for our ideas. If we reduce ourselves to making baseless personal attacks against others on our blog, then we might not personally suffer, but the credibility of our arguments will be damaged irrevocably. I have this same consideration when I am commenting on other sites as “Lumen” - it is not my real name, but “Lumen” represents my thoughts in the blogosphere.

I expect that most other anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers share this motivation to have their thoughts or ideas read and considered seriously. Therefore, I do not think that anonymous blogs pose much threat to civility in serious discussion on blogs. Those anonymous bloggers who expose a tendency to post nonsense will be ignored, just like obnoxious people who write under their real name. Anonymous writers who post thoughtful commentary deserve to be read and considered for the merits of what they write.

But there will always be that doubt. Just as the doubt exists for sites like God Save Virginia. But there’s a difference between anonymous bloggers speaking in grand terms that cross party lines and those that try and argue for certain candidates or issues.

If an anonymous blogger blogs for a candidate but is then revealed to be a paid staffer of that candidate, the credibility and value of their work is gone. Whereas, if they were honest and upfront with their readers to begin with, people know what they’re getting.

Writers have to be honest with their readers if they expect to be taken seriously. People need a face to value it.

The “Blog” Of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

Facebook users versus MySpace users:

Characterising Facebook users she said: “They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

By contrast, the average MySpace teenager tends to come from families where parents did not go to college, she said.

Ms Boyd also found far more teens from immigrant, Latino and Hispanic families on MySpace as well as many others who are not part of the “dominant high school popularity paradigm”.

“MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracised at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers,” she said.

Teenage users of both sites have very strong opinions about the social network they do not use, she noted.

Ms Boyd was wary of drawing too many conclusions from her research and calling Myspace “bad” or Facebook “good” or condemning social networks out of hand.

She wrote: “This division is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values.”

Not seeing the full study, I don’t know whether or not this takes into account the business models for each site when they started. Facebook originally was a site that targeted college students, you had to have a college based e-mail account to join. VCU has integrated Facebook login in their portal used by students to check e-mail, class announcements, registration and the like. MySpace was open to any and everyone. And while Facebook may have grown since opening up their registration to the anyone, they are still defined by their initial batch of users who helped set the tone and shape the development of the site. Still would be interesting to see the full report.

UPDATE: Ms. Boyd’s paper is available here.

When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn’t until late 2004 that teens really started appearing en masse on MySpace and 2005 was the year that MySpace became the “in thing” for teens.

Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn’t that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the “cool” thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.

For all of 2005 and most of 2006, MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students. This is not to say that MySpace was solely high school or Facebook solely college, but there was a dominating age division that played out in the cultural sphere.

And throughout the paper she continues to highlight “class” over “business model”. Perhaps it still fits her thesis if the business model was to target a particular class, but the paper also ignores features, that MySpace has grown to do social networking, music, videos, and so on, while Facebook has so far focused on the connection with friends aspect and kept highlighting school features.

What it really is about here is that MySpace and Facebook are not the same sites. They barely even serve the same purpose. Facebook is about social networking among classmates and school organizations. MySpace is about social networking and more outside of that. That they appeal to different classes is because they fill different needs. It’d be interesting to see how many users overlap. I know a good number of folks who use both sites and their assorted features for their various needs.

But you’ll have to find the URLs on your own.

(via Kottke, which you really should just read regularly on your own. Or you could keep coming here for the relinking.)

WRIC is reporting that a peeping-tom has been lurking along Stuart Avenue in the Museum/WoB District. Be careful out there, folks.

The Dunning-Kruger effect hypothesises:

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,

2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,

3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,

4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

And it holds up.

(via Kottke)

Out Tuesday, June 26th, Ryan Adams’s Easy Tiger picks up where 2005’s Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights left off. Though not credited on the album art, The Cardinals again back up Adams, giving the album a good low key, big country feel. A few of the songs on the album are familiar to Adams die-hards who have dug up his demos and unreleased songs from past sessions, but it’s good stuff. Still trying to get a feel for the whole album before I can rank it with the rest, but a good start for sure.

I still assert that Spoon is the best band you have not heard of yet. If you have heard of them then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a great album, possibly the best of the year. Maybe not Spoon’s best (that distinction goes to 2005’s Gimmie Fiction) but the more I listen to it, the more that may change. Start to finish, just a great album.

After spending a good portion of my Sunday playing the assortment of Wii Sports games, I find myself a wii bit sore (har har). I must get me one of those things.

Be careful taking pictures in Silver Spring, folks. It could be against the “law”:

“This past Tuesday I went to downtown Silver Spring, had lunch, and then took out my camera and standing on Ellsworth Avenue, I began taking shots of the buildings with the blue sky and clouds as a backdrop. Almost immediately, a security guard approached and told me ‘there was no picture taking allowed in Downtown Silver Spring.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I am on a city street, in a public place — taking pictures is a right that I have protected by the first amendment.’ The guard told me to report to the management office.

“There, Stacy Horan informed me that Downtown Silver Spring including Ellsworth Avenue is private property, not a public place, and subject to the rules of the Peterson Companies. They have a no photography policy to ‘protect them from people who might want to use the photographs as part of a story in which they could write bad things about us.’ And she told me that many of the chain stores in Downtown Silver Spring don’t what their ‘concepts’ to be photographed for security reasons.”

Ah, but it seems the street was developed with private AND public funds. So everyone owns it!

In response to this limitation on your taking of family photos while out shopping, there’s a Flickr group DC Photo Rights where folks post all their guerrilla photographing of such forbidden sights like a fountain or a big building that has some sort of significance to the running of this country.

Scientists and engineers at Perdue University have created a horrifying yet compelling simulation of the World Trade Center attack:

The simulation could be used to better understand which elements in the building’s structural core were affected, how they responded to the initial shock of the aircraft collision, and how the tower later collapsed from the ensuing fire fed by an estimated 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, said Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering.

The visual is stunning and interesting from a structural and scientific standpoint. The information such a simulation provides could prove quite useful for people invovled in engineering and construction.

But, as News.com says:

Over and over again, wreckage from the Boeing 767 careens towards the viewer. Sometimes the simulation includes only the body of the aircraft. Other times, the plane is removed from the image so fuel or debris can be tracked.

At one point, the crash is played back and the focus is exclusively on the damage done to the tower’s core beams, which are left sliced and twisted in the plane’s wake.

The recreation culminates when all the elements: fire, fuel, debris and plane metal are added and the tragedy is depicted with bloodcurdling accuracy.

The simulation is no doubt a scientific marvel. But can anyone watch the scenes without their imaginations adding people to the pictures?

Indeed. Like I said, horrifying.

If you’re interested in seeing it, the video is available here.

UPDATE: The same team produced a visualization of the Pentagon attack as well. For more information on the project, you can visit its website here.

Take that, Apple.