Ever won­der how MapQuest, or the OnStar nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem, directs you from one point to another? The New Yorker’s April 24 issue has an in-depth arti­cle about it. Here’s an inter­est­ing syn­op­sis of the system:

Gen­er­ally, MapQuest and OnStar choose a road based on their cal­cu­la­tions of which will get you there fastest. The cri­te­rion is time, a func­tion both of speed and of dis­tance. They do not, as some peo­ple sus­pect, sim­ply pick the short­est route; oth­er­wise, you might spend all your time on side streets, stuck at traf­fic lights or goat cross­ings. The algo­rithms con­sider the length of a road seg­ment and the expected speed of the road and cal­cu­late the time it will take you to pass along it. Every road seg­ment has a “cost­ing,” a sum of the fea­tures that can slow a dri­ver down. Turns, merges, exits, toll plazas, stop­lights, speed zones: they all carry a cost. (Navteq has five “func­tional classes” of road, ranked accord­ing to con­nec­tiv­ity and speed. An inter­state high­way is a one; a local street is a five.) These sys­tems do not yet take into con­sid­er­a­tion traf­fic, con­struc­tion, weather, time of day, or one’s ten­dency, on cer­tain roads, to go faster than the speed limit.

Nor, I might add, do they sug­gest the most serendip­i­tous or breath­tak­ingly scenic routes.

San Jose Merc: Let the bid­ding for the largest wire­less Inter­net project in Amer­ica begin. The group push­ing an ambi­tious plan to bring free or low-cost Inter­net access to all 1,500 square miles of Sil­i­con Val­ley released a “request for pro­pos­als” on Fri­day, offi­cially ask­ing com­pa­nies to make the Wire­less Sil­i­con Val­ley project a reality.

Eye­spot is hav­ing a mobile video con­test this week­end. Send in your mobile mixes.

Some Flickr pho­tos of the meetup we had in San Fran­cisco yes­ter­day plan­ning for the Vlog­ger­con videoblog­ging con­fer­ence com­ing up June 10–11 — from Enric and Markus.

Sun­day NY Times: In Leak Cases, New Pres­sure on Journalists.

Ear­lier admin­is­tra­tions have fired and pros­e­cuted gov­ern­ment offi­cials who pro­vided clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to iden­tify their sources.

But the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is explor­ing a more rad­i­cal mea­sure to pro­tect infor­ma­tion it says is vital to national secu­rity: the crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of reporters under the espi­onage laws.

Such an approach would sig­nal a thor­ough revi­sion of the infor­mal rules of engage­ment that have gov­erned the rela­tion­ship between the press and the gov­ern­ment for many decades. Leak­ing in Wash­ing­ton is com­mon­place and typ­i­cally entails tol­er­a­ble risks for gov­ern­ment offi­cials and, at worst, the pos­si­bil­ity of sub­poe­nas to jour­nal­ists seek­ing the iden­ti­ties of sources.

But the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is putting pres­sure on the press as never before, and it is oper­at­ing in a judi­cial cli­mate that seems increas­ingly recep­tive to con­straints on journalists. …

Because such pros­e­cu­tions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought incon­ceiv­able. But legal experts say that exist­ing laws may well allow hold­ing the press to account crim­i­nally. Should the admin­is­tra­tion pur­sue the mat­ter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thor­oughly alter the bal­ance of power between the gov­ern­ment and the press.

This is a rad­i­cal and unprece­dented assault on the press’s fun­da­men­tal right to keep the pub­lic informed about the ille­gal or ques­tion­able activ­i­ties of gov­ern­ment. It’s shame­ful, and needs to be chal­lenged at every cor­ner by every­one who believes in a free and informed society.

Free con­fer­ence call­ing
For the past year I’ve been using freeconferencecall.com to make con­fer­ence calls with busi­ness asso­ciates and friends. A lot of peo­ple still don’t know about it. No gim­micks — it really is free. A num­ber of com­peti­tors offer a sim­i­lar ser­vice, which they can afford to do because VoIP is so damn cheap.

Free direc­tory assis­tance
Just came across this: Phone com­pa­nies charge you $1.40 or more for a sim­ple 411 infor­ma­tion call, even if you don’t get the num­ber you’re seeking.

There’s a free alter­na­tive: Sim­ply dial 1–800-FREE-411 or 1 800–373-3411 for both local and national direc­tory ser­vice. Try it out. Again, no gimmicks.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Rush Lim­baugh arrested on pre­scrip­tion drug charges. Couldn’t hap­pen to a nicer guy.

Not often that pro­duc­tive days are also fun, but that was the case Thurs­day when I talked shop with pod­caster Dale Will­man of Fieldnotes.tv and video site archi­tect Todd Siegel over lunch and then headed over to a panel dis­cus­sion and screen­ing of 20 cre­ative, clever 30-second spots for Fire­fox — cre­ated by users, natch.

You can see the Fire­fox Flicks entries online here. I liked:

Xraalthraal and John
Smells Ter­rific
Song and Dance
and:
Weeeeeee! (which I don’t see online)

BTW, user-generated pro­mos seem to be all the rage. See the page of video pro­mos for the Vlog­ger­con conference.

Just com­pleted: a com­pre­hen­sive Legal guide for pod­cast­ers. It’s also avail­able in pdf for­mat and they’ll soon have it avail­able for print on demand from Lulu.com. Great job cov­er­ing all the bases! Now, we need an abridged version.

NY Times: Pub­lisher decides to recall novel by Har­vard student.

Just a day after say­ing it would not with­draw “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” from book­stores, Lit­tle, Brown, the pub­lisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, con­fessed to copy­ing pas­sages from another writer’s books, said it would imme­di­ately recall all edi­tions from store shelves. …

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between “Opal” and Ms. McCafferty’s books were strik­ing in some cases, with many pas­sages in Ms. Viswanathan’s novel — Crown cited more than 40 — echo­ing Ms. McCafferty’s works almost exactly.

Nev­er­the­less, Ms. Viswanathan main­tained through­out the week that her copy­ing of the pas­sages was “unin­ten­tional and unconscious.”

Pla­gia­rism is bad enough. Let’s not com­pound it by lying.