Obama voted in the US senate against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is a critic of the free trade agreement with China, and expresses strong reservations about trade deals in general.

He has even threatened to withdraw the US from the North American Free Trade Agreement – which created the largest trading bloc in the world – if the other members, Canada and Mexico, do not agree to renegotiate its terms.

This statement is reinforced by an article on Obama’s website; an article he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 2005.

Globalization is not someone’s political agenda. It is a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing the world’s economy, producing winners and losers along the way. The question is not whether we can stop it, but how we respond to it. It’s not whether we should protect our workers from competition, but what we can do to fully enable them to compete against workers all over the world.

At first this stance seems like a case of Obama’s protectionism gone awry. But is it? Is DR-CAFTA really free trade? I’m sure Stiglitz would agree with Obama on this one. Is it more important to fight to provide fair trade agreements, or to just have free trade agreements in place?

Without fairer trade agreements, the benefits from trade will not be realized. NAFTA and CAFTA will increase poverty because they prematurely open markets to US agricultural goods which are subsidized, making local farmers unable to compete with imports, and the nations in question do not have the ability to bear the costs of switching resources with their available capital, nor deal with the consequences of even short-term unemployment. These agreements have been more geo-political than economic, and the essential problem with recent bilateral agreements, including CAFTA, is that they are not free-trade agreements. More generally, bilateral agreements fail to produce all the benefits expected, in part because of the inequality of the negotiating position of the parties involved.

In this case, I believe Obama is fighting for the just cause and not just the cause that is most beneficial for Americans.

(The final quote is adapted from the Opposition section of the DR-CAFTA entry on Wikipedia. It discusses the main points of Joseph Stiglitz’ opposition to the DR-CAFTA free trade agreement. The paragraph is flagged as requiring citation, but if you have read Stiglitz’ Globalization and its Discontents or Fair Trade for All you will know that it follows his views pretty closely.)

And yes, this is just an excuse for me to post these pictures!

I’ve been experimenting in Photoshop recently (I’m disastrously unskilled at present) and this is my first attempt at a triptych, a diptych, and at selective colouring.

It’s true, though: I find that to relax there’s nothing better than half an hour of doing nothing with only an espresso (or Americana) and PBJ on toast for company.

GTD is the closest I’ve ever come to actually utilising an information management system full-time, but I find it too structured – even when not adhered to as rigidly as some purists demand.

However, my dabbling wasn’t a completely failed attempt at Getting Things Done: one of the core GTD principles is the crux of my new system for managing the information I come across on a daily basis: moving tasks out of the mind by recording them. Simple yet effective.

But how to record? I’ve tried and failed with many methods – with del.icio.us being the closest I’ve come to finding a  permanent solution – but I eventually discovered that ‘bookmarking’ was not the method for me.

I want to save websites or articles on obscure and interesting topics, that contain great quotes, or sometimes I just want to save a video that I want to share with some friends at a later date. I don’t want to write a full-blown post on the item here, but if I don’t I’ll have to spend half an hour tagging each page in order to find it again 12 months down the line. Now it seems I’ve come across a method that works… and it’s been staring right at me for almost 2 years. Blogging!

Taking the structure from two of my more regular reads – kottke and BoingBoing – I’m now ‘bookmarking’ with LoneGunman. All it takes is a quick sentence or two explaining the entry, a quote, and a link. Eureka, you’ve got yourself a searchable, elegant bookmarking facility that you can control. So far I’ve found it to be extremely effective.

Take a look.

“…It is not surface, it is not the last thing that needs to be considered, it is the thing itself” – Stephen Fry

Unformatted code is analogous to an essay without paragraphs – or perhaps a paragraph without punctuation: all the data you need to understand the ‘essay’ is there, but without the correct formatting it just appears to be a jumble of words without any real thought or structure behind it. To fully understand the program (essay) we must be able to decipher the constituent parts and understand them as separate entities as well as inter-related parts. In programming, formatting and indentation aid understanding – without them, this task becomes exceedingly difficult. It’s the same as how without punctuation, we cannot fully understand the context of a sentence or paragraph.

It was here that I wanted to write about whitespace and its importance in programming, graphic design and photography. However, browsing the Internet to find some good articles to plagiarise verbatim reference and cite correctly, I came across a great piece on the powerful use of whitespace from A List Apart. Focusing on the design of both web and print media, the theories found there can be translated to many different types of content: advised reading if – like me – you’re a newcomer to design and usability theory.

Clicking through to the author’s website I discover that not only does Mark Boulton work a leisurely 5 minute stroll from my current place of work, but he also creates interesting and beautifully simple presentations – my favourite of which is Better Typography; produced for the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo on the importance of typography in design. With its practical and usable examples and vivid depictions of the impact typography can have, I advise giving it a read. Mark’s kindly allowed me to mirror the presentation locally, and I feel that Paola Antonelli’s TED Talk is a perfect compliment if you’re reading about design and typography for the first time.

Finally, if anyone has a good book recommendation on design, usability, etc. it’ll definitely make a welcome addition to my Intelligence by Osmosis series.

Regardless, below are my top 10 lists of 2007. You know the ones – they proclaim to contain the best 10-or-so of something from the 12 months that have just passed? Come, soak up the nostalgia:

• The Best 19 Movies You Didn’t See in 2007 – Looking for the best independent films of 2007 that didn’t make it big? Well then, this is the list for you. A great list to accompany this is /film‘s ingeniously compiled 25 Definitive Movies of 2007. A ‘glass-is-half-empty’ kinda person? Well how about the 9 Worst Movies of 2007?
• Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks – I love this stuff. While it’s got nothing to do with 2007, it’s got everything to do with making your life just that little bit easier. This is the reason why I once read Lifehacker religiously: reading this list makes me want to resubscribe to their RSS feed. In fact, I will.
  
• Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007 – Watching these videos you may laugh (Don’t Tase Me vs. MC Hammer), stare in amazement/puzzlement (Daft Hands/Prison Inmates Performing ‘Thriller’), or simply cringe and wonder how it all went so wrong (Miss South Carolina Teen USA). The list could be refined though: where’s Chocolate Rain, Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and the Finger Painting Turtle-Kid?
• 10 of the Most Interesting and Entertaining Images of 2007 – The top 10 viral images of 2007. That means, that if you have an email address, you’ve undoubtedly seen these 10 times already.
  
• 7 Things We Should Pretend Never Happened – I knew I was going to agree with most of this list as soon as I read the headline for item number one: Huddled Masses Lining Up for Bullsh!t.
  
• D!ckheads of the Year – Like Ronseal, this list does exactly what it says on the tin. Erik Prince of Blackwater, College Republicans, Congressional Democrats and – of course – George Bush… all nominated by Rolling Stone for the honour of being ‘D!ckhead of the Year’.
• Top 10 Astronomy Pictures – I’ve never been a huge astronomy fan. Yeah, the Universe is fascinating and full of mystery; but there’s something inherently unknowable about it that – for some reason – distracts me from its splendour. Nonetheless, these images are truly captivating.
• Top 10 Most Pirated Movies and TV Shows of 2007 – Bored and trying to think of something to download and watch? I’m not as that’s illegal, but if I were (hypothetically speaking, of course) I would go here to see what films and TV shows were downloaded the most last year.
• Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 – From the Ashera GD hypo-allergenic cat to super CO2-absorbing trees, it’s been an interesting year in genetic engineering and Wired does the this round-up for us. If genetic engineering isn’t your scientific tipple, why not have a look at their Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007 instead?
  
• Best ‘Professional’ Photographs of 2007 – There’s UNICEF’s Photo of the Year, National Geographic News’ Top Ten Photos, and The Press Photographer’s Year Awards (my personal favourite, yet also the one with the worst website). Of course, it’s not just professionals who take captivating photographs, and so PhotoCompetitions.com has the definitive list of amateur and professional photography competition for your perusal.

As a bonus, have the following too:

• My favourite round-up of interesting links from the past year: Jason Kottke’s Best Links of 2007
• The best ‘personal’ round-up of the past year: The Girl in the Cafe’s The Year That Passed
• The best post detailing the biggest news stories of 2007: (cough-plug-cough) My Top 10 News Stories of 2007.
• Update (16th Jan) – The best single post of the entire year? It has to be Carl’s Why I moved from Boston to Nashville or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Everything in Snowclones – you had me at ‘sliced lolcats’.
  

As 2007 comes to a close, I decided that it was time to have a round-up of the big stories of the year. I like to do this every year as I find that you’ll undoubtedly be surprised: either by a ‘big’ story that somehow managed to pass you by, or just by realising how fast the year has gone. So, how to do this summary of events? After all, a year is a long time in news and news is different everywhere you look!

One of the best barometers of stories that made it big on the Internet is, of course, Digg – the news aggregation service that I do not visit often enough. So, what were the big online stories of 2007? Here they are – in reverse order – according to Digg:

• Stand up for your rights, get arrested – 2007 saw a lot of people arrested for doing, well, nothing in particular. One story that made it big on Digg was a man who was arrested for using $2 bills in BestBuy.
• Net Neutrality – I’m not getting into this now, but here’s a Digg’d picture showing why it’s an important issue.
• The Nintendo Wii – ‘Nuff said.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force ‘terrorists’ and other Bostonian mishaps – In 2007, Boston definitely put the ‘error’ in ‘terror’: overreacting to so-called ‘hoax’ devices, blowing shit up, and prosecuting innocent people is the name of the game here. Refuse to be terrorised, people!
• PirateBay – 2007 was the year where piracy went mainstream. Too many stories to mention.
• Microsoft Surface – Pretty nifty look at the future of personal computing: the end of point-and-click. I first saw this technology being (better) demonstrated in Jeff Han’s 2006 TED talk.
• Paris Hilton – You can’t avoid this woman if you tried… 2007 saw her do ‘time’ in jail and the loss of her inheritance. Oh, and she’s still the most annoying person on the plant.
• Execution of Saddam Hussein – Executed 40 hours before 2007 began, the leaked video of the hanging was undoubtedly the first big online story of 2007.
• iPhone – Love it or loathe it, the iPhone arrived in 2007 to much fanfare. Well, at least it’s getting people thinking about design, right?
• 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 – A vivid depiction of the Streisand effect. This is one story that showed – in no uncertain terms – the power of the Internet as a consumer tool: we don’t want restrictions on our music, our books, our television and (as this story makes abundantly clear) our HD-DVDs. This was the 21st Centuries ‘Digital Revolt’.

We can’t spend all our time online and ‘real world’ news is important too, right? So, here’s another list of the top 10 news stories from around the world, according to Time and The Times Online:

• Pakistan’s Political Crisis – From the pressuring of Musharraf to give up command of the Army to the assassination of Bhutto; Pakistan’s politics hasn’t been out of the news all year.
• US Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis – When the US housing bubble eventually popped it wasn’t just the US that suffered – markets around the world felt the impact as banks reeled in their debts.
• Burma Protests – A bad year for democracy in Burma. As tens of thousands of monks took to the streets to protest against a rise in petrol prices (and thus the price of other staples), the military junta cracked down by raiding monasteries and tackling the peaceful protests head on.
• Goodbye, Harry Potter – At last, it’s over!
  
• Iraq War - The Iraq war was for oil you say? The only surprising part of this ‘revelation’ is that it came from the man who was head of the US Federal Reserve for 18 years – Alan Greenspan.
• Chinese Toy Recall – Made in China took on a new meaning this year as millions of toys made there and exported to the US were recalled for using lead paint, having loose parts, and burning children. Of course “buying local” is still an alien concept to half the western world and a little mishap over some paint isn’t going to make a difference, is it?
  
• Virginia Tech Massacre – There was more to this story than just another school shooting. Not only did the gunman mail manifesto-style tapes to the media halfway through his rampage; he was also pronounced by a judge to be mentally ill and in need of hospitalisation – yet still managed to legally buy his arsenal of weapons.
• iPhone – Enough already!

Yes, I know that’s only 8 stories, but it was hard picking another two that had world-wide status: was the Madeleine McCann story known throughout the world? Was the saga of Alan Johnston’s capture and eventual release as big in the US as it was here in the UK? Can the rise and rise of Facebook be classed as ‘real-world news’ (it only went fully public in late 2006)? How about 2007′s ‘Data Chernobyl‘? It’s a tough choice.

This would have worked so much better if there was a speaker next to it playing the ‘Rocky’ theme tune, don’t you think?

Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah… etc.

Who on earth comes up with this stuff?

“Royal Mail, the Cruciform and the colour red are registered Trade Marks of Royal Mail Group plc.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a minute there… the colour red? Now, is this just a mistake on my side because I’ve been brought up believing that the ‘serial comma‘ is bad grammatical practice, or has this company just registered a trademark on a colour?

Thinking about this further I came to the conclusion that this trademark must be regarding the use of the colour red when producing or advertising mail-related products – after all, in the UK this would immediately make (most) people think of Royal Mail and as such they have acquired local distinctiveness in that sector.

This can’t be right though, as how have UPS’ Lynx courier service escaped their wrath?

Ah, to hell with it!

On 7th July 2007, the New Open World Corporation released an updated ‘contemporary version’ of this list amidst a fair bit of controversy; specifically their (non-)profit status, their supposed links with UNESCO, and the voting process. This UNESCO statement, distancing the UN from the initiative, is pretty self-explanatory:

There is no comparison between Mr. Weber’s mediatised campaign and the scientific and educational work resulting from the inscription of sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The list of the 7 New Wonders of the World will be the result of a private undertaking, reflecting only the opinions of those with access to the internet and not the entire world. This initiative cannot, in any significant and sustainable manner, contribute to the preservation of sites elected by this public.

This, coupled with the ambiguity of the corporation’s profit/non-profit status (which is dubious at best) and the fact that votes are ‘bought’ and can be excluded without due cause, makes it all a bit of a debacle. Of course, that didn’t stop the media, and the final list was released to much fanfare: Chichen Itza (Yucatán, Mexico), Christ the Redeemer (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu (Cuzco, Peru), Petra (Jordan), Colosseum (Rome, Italy), Taj Mahal (Agra, India) and the Great Pyramid of Giza (Egypt).

Quite why more ‘modern’ architectural accomplishments made the final seven (Christ the Redeemer, the Colosseum and the Taj Mahal) rather than more wondrous relics such as Angkor Wat (Angkor, Cambodia), Rapa Nui’s Moai (Easter Island, Chile) and Stonehenge (Amesbury, England) isn’t for me to discuss as it’s undoubtedly due to the voting system. What I do want to discuss is a completely different list…

The Seven Blunders of the World, by Mahatma Gandhi

This list was compiled by Gandhi and presented to his grandson on their last day together, shortly before his assassination. I like to think of it as an updated ‘contemporary version’ of the seven deadly sins. It was created as a search for the roots of violence in society – acts of passive violence.

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice
• Politics without principle

Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, later added an eighth ‘blunder’ to the list:

• Rights without responsibilities

If you could ‘vote’ for another, or for the most important of the above, what would you go for? I think it’s an interesting question.

Open Culture’s Foreign Language Learning Podcasts
http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2006/10/itunes_learn_fo.html

Last week, Lifehacker directed its readers to Open Culture – a website dedicated to (quoting the FAQ) exploring “cultural and educational media… that’s freely available on the web, and that makes learning dynamic, productive, and fun”.

On this website are audio and video ‘podcasts’ consisting of a wide range of topics including art and culture, technology, and even law and business school lectures. The section that got me reaching for the bookmark was the ‘Foreign Language Lessons Collection’. Here you can find a wide selection of podcasts to help you learn a new language – consisting of everything from Arabic and Chinese to Tagalog and Spanish!

Mind Hacks on Quinn Norton’s ‘Sixth Sense’ (and the loss thereof)
http: //www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/05/quinn_norton_has_her.html

Mind Hacks is a website dedicated to finding out how our brains – and consequently, we – ‘work’ through psychology and neuroscience. In this article however they discuss something different: the story of Quinn Norton and the loss of her ‘Sixth Sense’.

No, she couldn’t see dead people, but she could feel electromagnetic fields. How? She had a magnet implanted into her fingertip resulting in her being able to “know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like“.

Her Wired article on how body modification can extend the human senses is very insightful and her final journal post regarding the experiment is almost existential. Well worth the read.

Nature Photography and The Orton Effect

http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0106/dw0106-1.html

The ‘Orton Effect’ is the name given to a technique where – usually nature – photographs are given an almost ethereal glow through a method sometimes known as ‘soft focus’. You can see an example image here (courtesy of n8ive). It’s essentially the same as taking two photos and layering them together, one on top of the other – with one in focus and the other out of focus.

Not a new technique, this type of photography is also relatively well-known but nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to have an online how-to document to hand for reference.

Oh, and it’s named after Michael Orton who pioneered – or at least popularised – the technique.