Toward a better understanding of wikipedia:

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

The people who malign wikipedia tend to be blockheads who think that people are completely incapable of filtering information on their own. But I applaud this tool, which significantly aids in the filtering of information. My own experience with wikipedia is that political figures and pharmaceuticals tend to be very scrubbed and full of disinformation; posts in the humanities tend to be too short and lacking a great deal of information; and posts on the sciences and mathematics tend to feature everything you could possibly want to know about a subject with very few organizing principles. The tool is useful, straightforward, and astoundingly simple.

I found a new blog that some of you (whoever you are) might be interested in. It's squattercity.blogspot.com, a blog written by Robert Neuwirth, a journalist who spent four years living in squatter communities around the globe, working on a book entitled Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. The blog Squattercity is a collection of blurbs and news items on squatter towns around the globe. A large portion of the blog focuses on evictions, but there is also a great deal on the nature of squatting, squatter networks, the politics of squatting, and so forth. Check it out.

Judd Gregg: bad cabinet pick or worst cabinet pick? Judd Gregg was such a bad pick. More and more people are sounding off on this. At Open Left, Chris Bowers discusses his lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00. At Climate Progress, what comes to the fore is, naturally, his terrible record on the climate. To top it all off, it looks like they're not even going to replace him with a Democratic senator, which, it would seem, would be the entire point of putting such a schmuck on your cabinet in the first place. Good grief, says Charlie Brown.

From Mark Bousquet's "How the University Works" blog, I found the following interview with graduate student strikers at NYU (who lost when the NLRB ruled against them; NB: this was under the Bush administration). There's several interesting moments in this interview, but I was particularly interested in when the guy in front points, at the end, that while academia is expanding its understanding of what constitutes work (or labor) - affective labor, domestic work, intellectual labor - corporate legal practice is trying to narrow that definition. I'm not sure this is quite accurate, but the point is very illuminating to me. Instead, he perhaps should have pointed out that, as the labor force becomes increasingly non-industrial, it becomes easier for corporations to deny unionization to those facets of the workforce that try to attain it, by denying their status as workers, etc. There are, of course, a number of other social processes involved here; but the point is nevertheless very illuminating (to me, at least.)

I've compiled all of the Superbowl commercials from this year that either talk about the economic downturn, the misery of working, or downsizing. The most depressing is the first one, an ad for careerbuilder.com that appeared in the third quarter. Also, although the GM Robot commercial didn't appear in this Superbowl, I thought I would include it to demonstrate how unbelievably insensitive GM advertising executives are to their labor force (second ad down). Granted, when the ad aired in 2007, GM appeared to be doing just fine. In any case, it is far more depressing right now than it was then.

I've been avoiding blogging for a while, and that might remain the case. Nevertheless, I thought I'd post an update on global warming. I've been following the trends, and it seems that even those who recognize that global warming is real don't always know what's going on. The short version is that 2008 was the coldest year since 2001, which still makes it the tenth warmest year on record. This was because of a La Niña temperature anomaly which kept the Pacific particularly cold (hence our cold winter). La Niña and El Niño are two phases of the same climate cycle, the former being the cold phase, the latter being the warm phase. The effects of La Niña were particularly strong in 2008, and thus brought about cold temperatures. Nevertheless, the Arctic remained exceptionally warm, in fact much warmer than the average for the previous 7 years. That has led to a drop in the sea ice levels to below 2007 levels, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (see the daily snow and ice data chart for October through December with comparisons for 2006 and 2007 here; Joe Romm's analysis at Climate Progress here). It's easy to forget that global warming continues despite cold weather, so I just thought I'd give everyone a reminder.