Jared Dunn

The Info

Jared Dunn, 10-19-03

I'm 31, grew up in central Illinois, and went to school around here at UIUC. I moved back here 2 years ago planning to launch a nonprofit dedicated to mobilizing web activists to address digital divide and community development issues on the local level. However, the economic crash intervened, and I went to plan B, which was freelancing and working with local and regional nonprofits to help them use the web and social media more effectively. My biggest project has been goodWORKSconnect.org, which is a regional social networking site and knowledge base designed to foster collaboration within the nonprofit community in downstate Illinois. I've since enrolled at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois for Fall of 2010, and plan to continue doing this sort of work in a library or other public service context.

Before my latest endeavors, I lived in Boston for five years after college and worked as a neuroscience lab manager for one of the local mega-research universities. My training is in the biological sciences, but I got hooked on the web early on, and I've intermittently done freelance and personal web design and writing/editing work for the past 10 years or so, and am now looking to take my passions for this medium and for civic life and make them into a vocation.

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Technology Liberation Front | The News Innovator's Dilemma: it's often close to impossible for an organization built around an older technology to retool for a new, disruptive one because their cost structures just don't allow it.

TPMCafe | Hebron Agonistes: Too Much For Israel: It has been common for educated Israelis to think, and Israeli diplomats and American Jewish leaders to present, the settler community of Hebron as a kind of radical nuisance. Presumably, the settlers are a side-show of a defensive strategic policy, a touch of hubris gone wrong, a little understandible selfishness after centuries of self-effacement--anyway, a line that can be moved when the time is right. You think out from Hebron, and the holes in the common wisdom become obvious, well, certainly less abstract.

Brand New | Best & Worst 2008: The best and worse logo designs / rebranding experiments of 2008.

Brand New | America is Watching: In memory of WGN's hideous Anime Eyes Goth-Girl animated logo experiment. I'm sorry, but you just can't sex up WGN, especially when you continue to show notihng but Cubs games and re-runs of Coach. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the meetings where this was decided upon.

Chicago Tribune | Sports, Too, Hit Hard by Economy: American sports have long been viewed as recession-proof, but Monday's decision by the Arena Football League to cease operations for the 2009 season is the latest indicator that the economic downturn has reached the games people play … and watch.

Newsweek | The Evil Solution: Young and desperate, Somali pirates aren't afraid to commit heinous acts of destruction, says one of their leaders.

ZKEA | Artificial Organisms, Synthetic Viruses, Oligomers: Imagine this scenario: in the near future, in some scrubby backwater, a dictator or terrorist leader tells his biological technician that he'd like a virus tailored to just kill members of a particular ethnic group. The virus should be 100% lethal and easily transmissible by air and water. In addition, the virus should be immune to all known anti-virals. Finally, the virus should be invisible to current detection methods, hardy, and easily weaponized and spread.

ZKEA | South Africa, Project Coast: Apartheid South Africa had a very extensive biological warfare program, code-named Project Coast. Unlike South Africa's terminated nuclear weapons program, the status of Project Coast is now unclear. Pathogens remain unaccounted for, and there are indications that "research" is continuing. It is also known that many of the agents have ended up in private hands. Incredibly, these agents may be for sale to the highest bidders.

ZKEA | The Australian Experiment: The scientists thought they might learn something useful about mouse contraception, but instead they had learned how to create a universally fatal virus. And this killer virus had been created via a very simple genetic manipulation, accessible to every country with a few PhD microbiologists. Imagine their surprise.

Arthur Ganson's Machines | Kinetic Sculpture: Self-described as a cross between a mechanical engineer and a choreographer, Arthur Ganson creates contraptions composed of a range of materials from delicate wire to welded steel and concrete. Most are viewer-activated or driven by electric motors. All are driven by a wry sense of humor or a probing philosophical concept. (I got a chance to see his work up close at MIT, and it was enthralling.)

Bad Astronomy | Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008: I choose the pictures for beauty, for scientific interest, for both or for neither. Sometimes they're just cool, and sometimes they are a little frightening, but I hope they all will make you think, and move you in some way.

HowStuffWorks | All the Gold in the World: It is amazing, but the total amount of gold in the world is a surprisingly small quantity. Here's how you can calculate the total amount that is available.

Foreign Policy | E. Benjamin Skinner | A World Enslaved: There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves.

Nettuts+ | How To Implement sIFR3 Into Your Website: sIFR3 is a combination of JavaScript and flash, which allows you to dynamically view text using flash. This can improve you website look dramatically, because you are sure that it will look the same in every browser and that it's much smoother looking than basic HTML text.

Web Designre Wall | Fonts and the Web: Web typography is different from printing typography in that a CSS font rule is merely a request to the browser and therefore open to interpretation. Which poses a problem when the specified font is not available on the client's computer. (This article details some methods for getting around that problem.)

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