SIVACRACY.NET

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Columbia Journalism Review has collected "oral history" material from journalists who have recently spent time in Iraq. Below are some excerpts from this page:

Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

I’ll never forget going to a school that was supposedly rehabilitated. And there was the adviser of the Education Ministry and he was in tears because of the shoddy job that had been done. It was basically a paint job had been done in the school; it hadn’t really been renovated. The toilets didn’t work, and this was the school that we had been taken to for showcasing the reconstruction at the beginning of the school year. And it was clear that the contract to redo the school had passed through many hands, and a very cheap job had been done at the end.

On a related note, Riverbend of Baghdad Burning has two post up about Saddam's hanging, here and here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been attending the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, one of the great bastions of academic print culture. Yesterday's MLA session on "Where the Bloggers Are" featured literary academics with some of the more widely read blogs reflecting about the cultural implications of the form for both university environments and the mainstream. It started with Scott Kaufman of Acephalous, which often devotes itself to relatively abstruse literary and philosophical reflections, although the writer did achieved his fifteen minutes of fame for a posting about walking in on two students having sex in his office. Scott is also a blogger from U.C. Irvine, although we had never talked until after the session. As a blogger on the job market, he was particularly concerned with the discouraging news from Ivan Tribble's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education "Bloggers Need Not Apply," and the recent report from the MLA Taskforce on Tenure and Promotion, which indicates that even electronic publication with demonstrable institutional value continues to be undervalued by the academy.

John Holbo of The Valve has posted the draft of his paper, "Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine," which argues that the real "vanity presses" are academic publications designed only to fill curriculum vitae for tenure and promotion, because they lack broader circulation among the general public. He proposed a different publishing model with Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? as an example, which is published by Parlor Press, which put out the excellent Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, as Siva has just pointed out. (Holbo also writes for the political blog Crooked Timber.)

Tedra Osell of Bitch Ph.D. compared her own offerings to the blog genre to noncanonical pseudonomynous eighteenth century periodicals like The Female Tatler. It was interesting to hear how her "bitch" persona had a genealogy that went back to being pregnant and her earlier participation in informal Internet advice-sharing culture among moms. I also thought her case that blogs that use pen names and fictionalized personae to develop identity positions that were genuinely reflective of the real writers' marginalized status was provocative, and certainly true in the case of an online personality like Twisty Faster, although it's trickier to make that claim if you are talking about something like Libertarian Girl, which was actually written by a guy. I would have liked to have heard more about her survey in which 95% of female bloggers were conscious of how their writing was gendered, but only 60% of male bloggers were.

Michael Bérubé finished up the session by discussing "blogspats" and how learning the norms of taking sides could be important in academia as well, particularly when some particularly contentious long-running online battles can involve, as he said, "thirty years of feminist theory." Given my interest in how images can be arguments, I thought that there was probably more to be said about the second blogspat he mentioned, "Burqa-gate" on Pandagon. (The first concerned academic power relations and a comment he posted on Scott's blog.) If you look at the debate about the Lieberman blackface image from Firedoglake blogger Jane Hamsher that was posted on the Huffington post, I think that images seem to function as particularly powerful arguments in online communities. (As I've said before, I also think that part of the reason that so much of the user-generated content on the web is composed of parody material may be due to the widely-shared intuition that there is less risk of prosecutable violation of copyright law involved.) I periodically have quibbles with Bérubé's arguments, but I was sorry to hear that he's talking about cutting back on blogging because I count on his sports predictions to amaze my friends and family with my abilities to predict the outcomes of games.

Cross-posted on Virtualpolitik.

Posted by Liz Losh at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the same vein as Ann's Grand Canyon book, here is a photo I shot yesterday. If you look closely, you will realize that this display is in front of historic Independence Hall and that the group is advocating "religious and civil rights." All of the people were wearing National Parks uniforms on the grounds.

Posted by Liz Losh at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Parlor Press: Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion by John Logie

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates investigates the role of rhetoric in shaping public perceptions about a novel technology: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. While broadband Internet services now allow speedy transfers of complex media files, Americans face real uncertainty about whether peer-to-peer file sharing is or should be legal. John Logie analyzes the public arguments growing out of more than five years of debate sparked by the advent of Napster, the first widely adopted peer-to-peer technology. The debate continues with the second wave of peer-to-peer file transfer utilities like Limewire, KaZaA, and BitTorrent. With Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, Logie joins the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman, and James Boyle in the ongoing effort to challenge and change current copyright law so that it fulfills its purpose of fostering creativity and innovation while protecting the rights of artists in an attention economy.

About the Author
John Logie is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota.

It's published with a Creative Commons license and available for download at the publisher site!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the HuffPo:

Due to pressure from Bush Administration officials, the National Park Service is not permitted to give an official age for the Grand Canyon. Additionally, a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood is for sale at the National Park's bookstore.

The sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View was scheduled for review over three years ago, but no such review has been scheduled or even requested. The creationist book was the only item approved for sale in 2003 (22 other items were rejected).

More details here. Via Arse Poetica.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Indexed" is for "think[ing] a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. The South Carolina Football team beat Houston in the Liberty Bowl 44-36. Not much defensing went on in that game, as may be obvious from the score.

2. The South Carolina Men's Basketball team beat Jacksonville, 80-73. Watched that one live and courtside. I have season's tickets in the crappy nosebleed faculty section, but due to the students being on break and many fans being away at the Liberty Bowl, the Carolina Center was practically empty so my companions and I got upgraded. Only downside to being courtside was the "mascot antics" we were subjected to by Cocky: For me, this included getting doused in popcorn and having a giant megaphone placed over my head and pounded on. Good times.

I could hear the Jax coaches shouting, "Don't foul Number 4!" A compliment to that player, I think.

Most fun player to watch is Tre Kelly, but he hurt his leg in the second half. Hope it's minor.

Sure miss Renaldo Balkman:

He skipped his senior year in favor of joining the NY Knicks.

3. In-state rival Clemson lost to Kentucky!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend gave me a bottle of cinnamon schnapps for Christmas. It tastes like liquid Atomic Fireballs.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Me, ‘Person of the Year’? No thanks:

... Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me. As soon as I saw myself on my local newsstand, I had to buy a copy of Time.

Notice that Time framed the Person of the Year as "you." That should sound familiar. Almost every major marketing campaign these days is about empowering "you."

"You" have freedom of choice. "You" can let yourself be profiled so that "you" only receive solicitations from companies that interest "you." "You" could customize "your" mobile phone with the "Hollaback Girl" ringtone, but "you" would not because that’s so 2004. So you choose Ne-Yo’s "Sexy Love" instead. "You" go to the Nike Store to get your own design of shoes. Because "you" roll like that. After all, "you" are an "Army of One."

But to quote the Who, "Who are You?" Are you the sum of your consumer preferences and MySpace personae? What is your contribution worth? It’s worth money to someone, if only as part of a whole.

Google, for instance, only makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors who unknowingly grant Google the right to capitalize, or "free ride," on their work. Who are you to Google? To Amazon? Do "you" really deserve an award for allowing yourself to be rendered so flatly and cravenly? Do you deserve an award because media mogul Rupert Murdoch can make money capturing your creativity via his new toy, MySpace?

The important movement online is not about "you." It’s about "us." It’s about our profound need to connect and share. It’s about our remarkable ability to create among circles — each person contributing a little bit to a poem, a song, a quilt, or a conversation.

So it’s not about your reviews on Amazon. It’s about how we as a community of Web users choose to exercise our collective wills and forge collective consciousnesses. So far, we have declined to do so. We have not harnessed this communicative power to force the rich and powerful to stop polluting our air and water or to stop the spread of AIDS or malaria. We have not brought down any tyrants. We have simply let a handful of new corporations aggregate and exercise their own will on us. And we have perfected online dating. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

By Jonathan Malesic:

... There are probably dozens of reasons why some students plagiarize. They're lazy. They're afraid. They perceive plagiarism to be standard practice at their college. They believe that any means to a good grade are legitimate.

If that is, in fact, what goes on (or, rather, doesn't go on) in our students' minds when they are copying material from the Internet, then we may have run into an example of a broad human tendency to take our individual selves as the standard by which we judge everyone else. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According to this WaPo article:

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus. As the practice has taken hold over the past several years, however, some advocacy groups have questioned whether marketers are using such tactics to dupe consumers into believing they are getting unbiased information.

The article also notes:

The FTC said it would investigate cases where there is a relationship between the endorser of a product and the seller that is not disclosed and could affect the endorsement. The FTC staff said it would go after violators on a case-by-case basis. Consequences could include a cease-and-desist order, fines and civil penalties ranging from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. Engle said the agency had not brought any cases against word-of-mouth marketers.

The group has also tried to hold members accountable. Sernovitz said the group is reviewing the membership status of the Edelman public relations firm after Wal-Mart, one of the firm's clients, reportedly gave positive comments to bloggers who then posted the comments without mentioning the source. Edelman later admitted that some of its employees had written the blogs. ...

Well, it's a step in the correct direction, at least. I hope the astroturfing blogger "opinion shapers" are taking note, particularly those working for the porn industry. The relevant staff opinion letter is accessible here. It was written in response to this. Complaints can be filed with the FTC here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Me neither. Robert H. Dierker Jr. is a circuit judge of the Twenty-Second Judicial Circuit of Missouri who authored a book called: The Tyranny of Tolerance. Chapter One is reportedly entitled "The Cloud Cuckooland of Radical Feminism," and uses the term "femifascists." In addition:

The first chapter was heavily discussed at the recent holiday party for the Women Lawyers' Association of Greater St. Louis. One judge who attended noted, "Everyone's just pretty much shocked."

Although Ricci said she has not studied the chapter, she said, "It appears that he's cloaking his own personal preferences against women in alleged legal research and a partial examination of the law."

And...

...Dierker said that he had to be "polemical" in the book to get attention, and said "controversy is inevitable." But, he said, the controversy may draw attention to an issue that is permeating the law and the judiciary. "If I wrote a law review article, who would read it?" he asked.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As this NYT article discussed back in August, Internet sites featuring fully clothed children in erotic poses are currently the focus of legal actors. That article observed:

While many of the recently created sites are veering into new territory, the concept of for-pay modeling sites using children has been around for years. They first appeared in the late 1990's, when entrepreneurs, and even parents, recognized that there was a lucrative market online for images of girls and boys.

Sites with names like lilamber.com emerged, showing photographs of children, usually modeling in clothes or swimsuits. Their existence set off a fury of criticism in Congress about possible child exploitation, but proposed legislation about such sites never passed.

Under 18 USC 2256(2)(A)(v) child pornography is defined in part as the "actual or simulated...lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person...under the age of eighteen years." Of course what constitutes a "lascivious exhibition" is incredibly ambigous and subjective. In a recent Wired article, Declan McCullagh wrote:

Until a 1994 case called U.S. v. Knox, judges interpreted that language to mean either images of nude minors or of minors having sex. In that case, however, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals extended that definition to include videotapes of girls in leotards, and upheld Stephen Knox's conviction on child pornography charges.

Courts have also looked to a 1986 case called U.S. v. Dost for guidance on what's "lascivious" and what's not. Among the factors they evaluate: whether the focus is on the child's genitalia or pubic area; whether the image suggests sexual coyness; and whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.

This article reported "indictments against Marc Greenberg, 42, Jeffrey Libman, 39, partners in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., business called Webe Web, which in turn ran the now-defunct ChildSuperModels.com site." (see also; here and here too). McCullagh mentioned that in 2002, the Rep. Mark Foley (yes THAT Mark Foley) "announced a bill called the Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act that would effectively ban the sale of photographs of minors. But under opposition from civil libertarians and commercial stock photo houses like Corbis, it never left committee." McCullagh asserted: "That leaves judges and juries faced with the difficult task of making distinctions between lawful and unlawful camera angles and facial expressions--an exercise that proves to be impossible to do without running afoul of the First Amendment." For support he quoted NYU law prof Amy Adler asking: "How do we distinguish pictures like these (on child modeling sites) from the everyday photos that our culture tolerates and even prizes? ... For instance, who's modeling in Vogue? A lot of those people are 15 and in scantily clad or suggestive photos."

Earlier in the piece McCullagh obligatorily cited "First Amendment scholars" who he said "warned that any legal precedent might endanger the mainstream use of child models in advertising and suggested that prosecutors' budgets might be better spent investigating actual cases of child molestation." The tone of the article is one of civil liberties advocacy, and though he doesn't say it outright, my impression is that McCullagh endorses a legal rule that images of fully clothed children cannot be pornography. Here is the paragraph of the article that gave me the most pause, however:

"I don't know what the DOJ's trying," said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "The best I can say is that it's puzzling that they would devote investigative and law enforcement resources to something (like this). This is a far cry from what folks normally think of as child pornography."

I don't know exactly what the DOJ is attempting either, but I am very, very curious about one issue that McCullagh doesn't address in an otherwise seemingly well researched article: the timing of the indictments. Why did the DOJ decide to act more than five years after main stream media outlets starting porting about the pedophilia-based business model of child modeling Internet sights? McCullagh actually linked to a November 2001 "investigation" of Webe Web by an NBC affiliate which noted: "Our investigation found a Fort Lauderdale company called Webe Web runs eight child modeling Web sites. The same company also sells sex online, having operated at least 14 sites that market adult pornography."

Earlier still, in July of 2001, Wired News (the same publication that McCullagh writes for), published an article entitled "Girl Model Sites Crossing Lines?" by Julia Scheeres, the topic of which is, yes you guessed it, the Webe Web Corporation. Here are some excerpts:

Amber seems like a typical 11-year-old girl who loves horses and hates chores. Her website shows her hugging a stuffed white rabbit and playing dress-up.

Another complained: "She's gotten too developed for my taste, I doubt I'll be an Amber fan anymore." ...

Webe Web gets mentioned in this July 2002 MSNBC article and this September 2002 CBS article as well. Why did the DOJ wait so long to act, and why are they addressing this issue now? I'll update this post if I come up with any answers or interesting theories.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

According to this article: "The text of the holiday card that Susette Kelo sent to members of the New London Development Corp., city officials, and others involved in taking her house to make way for private development:"

Here is my house that you did take

By the power of will

The article further notes:

The cards were conceived and produced by a friend of Kelo's and sent to city officials and members of New London's development agency.

Kelo said she also considered sending the cards to five U.S. Supreme Court justices who ruled in June 2005 that New London had the right to take homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood to make way for a riverfront project slated to include condominiums, a hotel and office space.

NB: In July 2005 I wrote this about Kelo.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Obviously, I won't be quitting my day job any time soon, but you can watch me summarize the year's political digital rhetoric stories here.

Posted by Liz Losh at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your workplace productivity will surely take a hit if you click here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Zaporozhye is a musical condom. Insert bad joke about karaoke or lipsync here. See also.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Belated NSFW Mashup!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Yorkies" man sized chunks are for sale in my local World Market.

From Nestle's Yorkie website:

YORKIE - "IT'S NOT FOR GIRLS"

The 'Not For Girls' campaign theme for Yorkie uses humour, which resonates with today’s British male and simply states that Yorkie is positioning itself as a chocolate bar for men who need a satisfying hunger buster. With five solid chunks of chocolate, it’s a man sized eat!

(Above two photos via Feminist Reprise)

According to Catherine Redfern at the f-word:

The Yorkie ad sparked off tons of publicity as Nestle embarked on a campaign to 'reclaim the sweets' (groan-sorry) for men. The tv ads show women attempting to purchase the chunky chocolate bar - but the only way they can do this is by glueing on fake beards, dressing up as builders with hard hats, and swaggering into corner shops asking (in deep, gruff, fake-male voice) for a "Yorkie please." In one ad, the large, bearded, super-gruff male shopkeeper 'tests' the woman to prove she is a man, by quizzing her on stereotypically male questions, thrusting a fake spider in her face to see if she screams, and so on. He finally hands the bar over, but when he tells her the it really highlights the blue in her eyes, she gasps "really?" and he snatches the Yorkie out of her hands and bites off a huge, masculine chunk in one go.

Nestle claims to be taking a stand for the "British bloke" and says that by making a chocolate "just for men", they are offering men something just for them in a changing, confusing world. They have actually used the word "reclaiming", as if women have "taken" chocolate away from men - despite the obvious fact that chocolate is mainly marketed to women by the people who create it. But from the ads, they seem to be targeting not "British men" but British, large, bearded, macho, builders. That's gotta be a limited market, guys. Using the most hackneyed stereotypes, the Yorkie ads seem to be trying to say that eating chocolate is an okay thing for a man to be seen to be doing; it isn't a cissy thing to do, it's not emasculating. But they are also saying that men can only feel happy eating chocolate if it is associated with everything very, very MACHO. Men can enjoy things associated with women - as long as they are constantly demonstrating in the most tired cliches that they are still REAL MEN. They can only eat chocolate if the chocolate in question is branded as NOT-FEMALE. Really, they do protest too much, don't you think?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One economist has a theory about journalists that may apply to lawprofs as well. Here is an excerpt:

WHY are there so many well-padded books out there that really ought to be nice, long articles? The subject came up over dinner the other night, and having just wrapped up a nice, long article, I think I may have an answer to this question: journalists, like many non-economists, do not properly understand sunk costs.

Sunk costs are expenses that have already been incurred and cannot now be recovered. They have a peculiar effect on the human mind, inducing us to incur further costs rather than give up the money or time already spent. So rather than giving up on a disastrous IT project, companies spend another $100,000 to "rescue" the previously expended funds. You have probably seen the same behaviour among friends—perhaps at a casino, where at least one member of the party inevitably refuses to leave the casino because he has already lost £1,000 pounds. How having lost a great deal of money somehow makes it a better idea to stake large sums on a game where the percentage is always to the house . . . well, perfectly rational people don't gamble, do they? At any rate, the practice is common enough that we have a folk term for it: "throwing good money after bad".

In the case of authors, particularly journalists, they generally expend a great deal of time, effort, and emotional frisson in writing a good-sized article. At the end of it, the author is invariably left with far more material than he can cram into five or ten thousand words: reams of statistics, loads of telling anecdotes, pages of interviews with charming and intelligent people who said nice things about their new suit, and ever so many sparkling epigrams with which he longs to entertain someone besides himself. The natural response is to seek an outlet for this overflow, at which time a lightbulb appears. "I will write a book!" he says to himself, rubbing his hands in glee. "A book will use all this excess material."

Via Yet Another Sheep.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At least according to this NYT article, in which Peggy Orenstein expresses confusion and concern about the popularity of Disney princess merchandise and the princess meme generally that is apparently wildly popular with girls in this country. Here are a couple of short exerpts that were especially sad:

"...Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, t.hough for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior’s gear.)"...

"...The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female. ..."

As I read the piece, Orenstein is describing, in rather convoluted fashion, the classic double bind for feminists: Women who embrace “princessism” are vapid and materialistic and rejecting feminsm while embracing their shallow, fragile feminine femaleness. However, women who reject “princessism” are actually rejecting women-identified things and are therefore being sexist themselves, which is hypocritical and self-hating, and also drives women away from feminism. She comes closest to acknowledging and explaining this herself when she writes:

At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.

According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they’ll always remain themselves? ... By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.

The essay has a rather trite happy ending, in which Orenstein notes that her daughter still wants to be a "fireman" when she grows up, but it raises some issues that are worth contemplating, though in ways that felt a bit like fingernails on a chalkboard at times. And what to make of "Dark Tink?" Here is some sample Dark Tink merchandise:

Is she supposed to offer a “slutty” princess alternative? Is offering that option in addition to virginal tulle and satin an improvement?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click here:

They really need your help. Just a few bucks from each of us would go a long way.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let it begin with me. Warmest holiday wishes to all.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Read about them here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the NYU Press site:

Women are completing MBA and Law degrees in record high numbers, but their struggle to attain director positions in corporate America continues. Although explanations for this disconnect abound, neither career counselors nor scholars have paid enough attention to the role that corporate governance plays in maintaining the gender gap in America's executive quarters.

Filled with real-life cases, No Seat at the Table opens the closed doors of the boardroom and reveals the dynamics of the corporate governance process and the double standards that often characterize it. Based on empirical evidence, Branson concludes that women have to follow different paths than men in order to gain CEO status, and as such, encourages women to make flexible, conscious, and often frequent shifts in their professional behaviors and work ethics as they climb the corporate ladder.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Densho's mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. We offer these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy and promote equal justice for all.

Via Eric Muller at Is That Legal? Eric also does important work, reminding us to remember, but not to repeat, bad aspects of history.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Manufactured by the Route 66 clothing company and for sale at KMart.

Whoa, stunning remix by Chris Clarke here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a long rant about the Bush administration's use of information graphics over on Virtualpolitik, but in light of the festive occasion today, I'll spare readers here.

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

She is one-year old today!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Evil, lying corporations. Here are two excerpts from the linked article:

For at least a year, Eli Lilly provided information to doctors about the blood-sugar risks of its drug Zyprexa that did not match data that the company circulated internally when it first reviewed its clinical trial results, according to company documents.

...Zyprexa is by far Lilly’s best-selling product, with $4.2 billion in sales in 2005, which represented 30 percent of Lilly’s overall revenue. Zyprexa’s active ingredient is a potent chemical that binds to receptors in the brain to reduce the hallucinations and delusions associated with schizophrenia and acute bipolar disorder. About two million people worldwide took Zyprexa last year.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I know that the month isn't out yet, but how much better than this can my inbox get?

Posted by Liz Losh at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Watch this toy commercial from the 196os all the way through and see if it makes you want to bonk your head on your computer monitor. Don't miss the final chilling sentence. Via Sparkle*Matrix:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Want to see me talk too fast and interrupt the judges on an episode of the American Law Journal? Fast forward 37 minutes in.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is an excerpt from Oxfam International's account of the issue:

Ethiopia’s farmers produce some of the finest and most sought after coffees in the world—including coffees that have been sold under Starbucks’ Black Apron Exclusives line for up to $26 a pound—but receive only 5 to 10 percent of the retail price, in a country where millions live on just a dollar a day. Ethiopia is working to gain greater benefits for its coffee growers by seeking control of its coffee names, a move that would give Ethiopian coffee farmers a fairer share of the profits in the global coffee trade.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sounds like some sort of creepy conservative political initiative, doesn't it? But actually, it's an effort to speed up delivery time, according to this article (via NTodd) which touts software that reportedly makes UPS drivers more productive. Here's an excerpt:

Collectively, the hundreds of UPS trucks driven in Minnesota have cut an estimated 353,755 miles over the past two years.

The software also allows better route planning. That already is something of a science at UPS, which has sought to minimize the number of left turns a driver must make, wasting time waiting for oncoming traffic before turning.

The software sounds terrific from a technology standpoint, but I suspect the drivers have to work harder than ever if they are now making more deliveries per day.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Recently The Los Angeles Times covered the intellectual property infringement lawsuit against celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton filed by the paparazzi photo agency X17 in "Perez Hilton Takes Their Best Shots." Apparently X17 is complaining that Hilton wasn't properly accrediting their snaps, and they are now publishing their own rival gossip blog X17online, which is full of dreary shots of celebrities Christmas shopping. The lawsuit alleges that the dollar value of some of their most scandalous pics of star misbehavior, which were slated to be sold to print tabloids, actually dropped as a direct result of Perez's scoops that previewed the material. Access to the X17 site involves elaborate approval procedures, which yours truly was not able to charm on scholarly research grounds. The agency is also loudly declaring their use of a new interface that prevents easy right-click acquisition of digital files, as if we all don't know what that "print screen" button is for on the keyboard.

Hilton often Photoshops the images that he gets illicitly from the photo agencies and then adds rude comments or obscene graffiti (along with his own proprietary URL) . He also periodically looks at intersections between real and virtual worlds as he did in a piece on how fans created sims of their favorite celebrity Paris Hilton for online role playing games. I don't like the catty misogyny of his gossip coverage, even if I might appreciate the way he thumbs his nose at this kind of IP litigation, as even his choice of sound-alike name indicates. The curious can see this recent Saturday Night Live monologue to get a sense of the main kind of story Perez Hilton runs.

Of course, even though I'm an IP activist, my general feeling is: a pox on both your houses. Digital culture is about being a media star yourself and making your own brand; it's not about marketing the pre-fabricated corporatized images of others. Even if you do it in an out-of-the-closet "queen of all media" allegedly subversive way, I don't dig the patriarchal voyeurism that this kind of "journalism" supports.

When it comes to entertainment based on copying, I say send in the real clowns. Last night I went to see Slava's Snowshow, which was gloriously full of imitation of the work of others: music, gags, costumes, and all. In our trademark-happy era, Slava is lucky not to be facing lawsuit claims about his nose or bald head or about the way he delivered the conventional clown-full-of-arrows schtick with an unauthorized pathos. And those who want to extend the rights of content producers beyond first sale might say: that umbrella has been modified to spray water on people rather than protect them from the elements. According to the blog about unintentional legal humor perpetuated by lawyers, Lowering the Bar, there certainly have been clown-related IP lawsuits in the past.

Cross-posted on Virtualpolitik.

Posted by Liz Losh at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cartoonist Scott Adams weighs in:

From here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Instructions and more photos here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Each year there are awards for best official website and other lauds from those who study digital government, like the ones from the Center for Digital Government or the National Policy Review Council, for example. But I prefer to recognize the very worst in digital politics, over on Virtualpolitik, where the embarrassing and ineffective use of technology by policy makers usually gets the spotlight.

As 2006 draws to a close, it seems like an appropriate time to hand out the prizes to those on the very bottom of the barrel when it comes to state-sanctioned cyber-rhetoric. From now on in, I'd like to call these awards the "Foleys," in honor of the disgraced former Florida congressman who was caught sending x-rated instant messages to underage pages after building a reputation as a crusader against online porn.

So please, use the comments section attached to this post to send in your nominations for the worst use of communication technology or digital media by a government agency or official. You can choose the work of local, county, state, or federal government for your rasberry preferences, although the presence of a .gov extension in an associated URL or e-mail address is desirable. The categories for the 2006 Foleys are as follows:

• Worst overall web design
  
• Worst online information access
• Worst online social marketing
• Worst visual rhetoric
• Worst user interface
• Worst technical incompatibility
• Worst electronic message to the masses
• Worst official PowerPoint presentation
• Worst government-funded videogame
  
• Worst abuse of copyright law
• Worst appeal to children
• Worst call to patriotism
• Worst regulation of technology in response to a craven fear
  

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big drama this week has to do with ailing South Dakota Sentator Tim Johnson, who may be 85th in the Congress.org power rankings but is critical at this moment to preserving the Democrats' majority. (He also doesn't score that high on CNET's Technology Voter Guide.)

I looked up Senator Johnson's official web page, which is a remarkably simple affair that looks dated now, perhaps like one of the old Microsoft FrontPage templates. When I hit "View Source," I also discovered that a lot of the JavaScript had been lifted, which may be kind of ironic, given his intellectual property positions and his support of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

// (C) 2000 www.CodeLifter.com
// http://www.codelifter.com
// Free for all users, but leave in this header
// NS4-6,IE4-6
// Fade effect only in IE; degrades gracefully

During my visit to his site I also found out that Johnson has a son in the military who has served in Iraq, like the newly elected Senator from Virginia. I also learned that he and his wife are cancer survivors (prostate and breast respectively).

In general, I give the site a "B" grade. It's not very interactive or visually well-designed, and it was hard to find the promised "video welcome," but it does give the visitor a clear sense of Johnson's positions and his advocacy for senior citizens, veterans, and Native Americans. I wish him a speedy recovery. Right now the site has a lot of audio files to update constituents on his condition.

This preference for a lowest common denominator business look may be regional. Republican South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds, who may have the power to replace Johnson, just has an off-the-shelf FrontPage site, according to his "View Source."

Posted by Liz Losh at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I interviewed Michael Zyda, one of the fathers of the military recruitment videogame America's Army, who currently directs the Gamepipe Lab at USC.

America's Army has been called a "propaganda game" by Gonzalo Frasca, creator of the pacifist non-shooter game September 12. In the name of free speech, Zyda himself, who has left the America's Army project, says that he has no problem with in-game protestors, like the activist who messaged the names of soldiers killed in the current conflict under the nom-de-guerre "Dead-in-Iraq."

In addition to its over-the-top patriotic kitsch, America's Army serves up a mix of deliberative encounters with an encyclopedic variety of lovingly rendered military weaponry and a testosterone-oriented environment of male-only avatars duking it out in a kilometer by kilometer field of battle.

America's Army is certainly a strangely psychotic game, given that you can play collaboratively as either attackers or defenders in the same game space, but you can only see yourself as a uniformed U.S. soldier holding a weapon produced in the Good Old U.S. of A. In other words, if you drop your M-16 and the enemy picks it up, it magically turns into an AK-47. If you seize his Soviet-era assault rifle in some nifty hand-to-hand action, it turns into a standard issue American weapon right before your eyes. I guess the only advantage would be that it would prevent Battlefield2 type misunderstandings when fan films are posted on the Internet.

Another weird switcheroo in AA, apparently security flaws allow online Gold Farmers to move into the game who can earn points for military training, service, and promotion for others in exchange for eBay dollars . It's sort of like the 19th century practice of paying a substitute to stand in for you during the Civil War, but apparently its used just to bypass the boring parts of basic training.

Of course, being an electronic communication geek, I liked learning about some of the meta-rhetoric embedded in the game. For digital rhetoric fans, you can actually watch a PowerPoint lecture to further your training as a medic and then take a version of the real certification test. If you look closely at the game environment, you can also spot a framed copy of the letter to the game designers authorizing the game's development.

Yes, but what does all of this have to do with intellectual property and the duplication of digital media?

A lot, actually. Like some other military videogames, America's Army is based on the proprietary and prohibitively expensive Unreal game engine. As advocates for game-based learning, like James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins, get heard by more policy makers, this stranglehold on the market by a few companies also makes public game development work for education and training more costly and inconvenient, because the entire enterprise is wrapped up in corporate red tape and secrecy. Now Zyda is working with the open source game engine Ogre and has plans to share his lab's customizing of the program at Gamepipe with others who are similarly pursuing peaceful and constructive ends. You can read more about it in Zyda's "From Visual Simulation to Virtual Reality to Games."

P.S. In case anyone wondered, I was in Australia for the CGIE conference.

Posted by Liz Losh at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UNC School of Information and Library Science:

SILS selects ARL Academy fellows for 2006-2007

"The ARL Academy has provided a wonderful opportunity for a group of very talented students with advanced degrees to prepare themselves for academic library careers," said Dr. Joanne Marshall, Alumni Distinguished Professor at SILS. "The shifting demographics in the library workforce make it imperative that we have such programs in place to develop and mentor our future leaders."
...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Kevin Mattson wrote this for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:

... And where are the professional historians who are trained to understand the past and could scrutinize such claims? They’re in academia, churning out esoteric articles that move fast onto resumes but rarely into public debate. Go to recent issues of the American Historical Review and you’ll find articles like "Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France," "Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics," and "The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914—1920"–and those are just the titles. If you make it through them, you’ll face the back of the journal where there are reviewed, literally, hundreds of books with similarly arcane titles, all of which give a sense of the overwhelming amount of scholarship out there on topics that few people know exist, let alone care about.

It wasn’t always this way. In the postwar era, there was a generation of historians–like C. Vann Woodward, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, and Schlesinger himself–who were consummate professionals and engaged in the important matters of the day. These historians benefited from the stringent demands of professional objectivity, a tradition that had solidified during the early years of the twentieth century with the growth of the modern university as well as the founding of numerous graduate programs in history and professional associations like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Yet historians like Woodward, Commager, and Hofstadter did not believe that objectivity and professionalism required locking themselves up in an ivory tower–just the opposite. Objectivity and the broad perspective that a training in history provided made these intellectuals’ engagement in public life an imperative. Now, as professionalization and objectivity–and the cruel realities of limited academic jobs for young historians–exert more pressures than before, we are forgetting the balancing act carried out by a previous generation. Fewer and fewer historians have the skills or ambition–let alone incentives–to make history speak to a wider public world. This leaves public engagement to those who are willing to cheapen the historian’s craft and play political football with the past. Both our understanding of history and our public discussion are the worse for it. ...

Here is my response:

You only listed six or seven public historians from the supposed golden age of public intellectuals.

Such declinism and nostalgia is ahistorical and simply wrong. Your evidence that historians fail to engage with the public comes only from some choice titles of journal articles. That does not cut it.

Just for a lark, here is a list of current academic historians -- some quite young -- who engage with the public through books, magazine articles, and media interviews on matters of history and public interest:

• Gary Nash
• Eric Rauchway
• Niall Ferguson
• Jonathan Zimmerman
• Tony Judt
• Sean Wilentz
• Patricia Nelson Limerick
• Ed Morgan
• Eric Foner
• Susan Douglas
• Richard Pells
• Juan Cole
• Robert Dallek

I could go on. It took me about 45 seconds to come up with that list.

So what's the problem? Publishers still want good writers. Publishers still publish good and well-written history books. Historians still show up on talk shows and NPR. People have always misused history and they always will. Most academics have always and will always decline or fail to engage with the public.

What, exactly, as changed?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Check out PlagiarismToday.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Siva, "news" from the BBC entitled "Carey battles porn star over name." The entire article is below in bold text, with my descontructing comments interspersed in italics:

Singer Mariah Carey has threatened legal action against porn star Mary Carey to stop her trademarking her similar-sounding stage name.

By "threatened legal action" I assume the author means, "indicated she will file a trademark opposition."

The singer believes fans could get the two performers confused if Mary Carey's trademark application is successful.

Sounds silly unless you actually know something about trademark law, in which case it is actually a fairly reasonable claim. According to the PTO and the courts, consumers are really stupid, and can't tell (e.g.) "Ben's Bread" from "Uncle Ben's" used for rice products (Uncle Ben's, Inc. v. Stubenberg Int'l, 47 U.S.P.Q.2d 1310 (T.T.A.B.1998)) or "Nutra Salt" from "Nutrasweet" (Nutrasweet Company v. K & S Foods, Inc. 4 U.S.P.Q.2d 1964 (T.T.A.B. 1987). In the dilution context, "Tempanol" was found to be similar enough to "Tylenol" to be dilutive. Anytime two marks sound similar and are used to identify similar goods or services (in this case that would be "entertainers") there are colorable grounds upon which the holder of a senior mark can oppose the registration of a junior mark.

However, the adult film actress, whose real name is Mary Cook, has said she will not be intimidated by the singer.

Grammy-winning Mariah Carey is particularly concerned by the possible confusion in the names because the actress wants to trademark the name for audio and video recordings.

Sounds to me like Mariah Carey is simply trying to prevent Mary Carey from receiving federal registration for a trademark that she asserts is substantially similar and possibly dilutive of Carey's mark. Given the state of trademark law, it's an entirely reasonable claim. Even if Mariah Carey wins, it is not clear that she would even try to make Mary Carey stop using her stage name, and even if she did, she is unlikely to succeed.

But David Beitchman, a lawyer for Mary Carey, said he believed Mariah Carey stood little chance of winning a court battle over the names.

Well, if he said that Mary Carey would surely lose, I suspect he wouldn't be her lawyer for very long.

"My first thought was, does Mariah Carey realise what her lawyer is comparing her to and are they seriously concerned?" he said.

"Do they seriously think the fans are going to be confused?"

The implication of Beitchman asking "does Mariah Carey realise what her lawyer is comparing her to" is a little disturbing. Mary Carey probably should get a new lawyer. In any event, declaring that Mariah Carey is "threatening to sue" is obviously employed here to attract attention and sympathy, and the BBC has played right along. Should we be grateful they didn't label it a "cat fight"?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According to this Guardian Unlimited article:

A world-famous British scientist failed to disclose that he held a paid consultancy with a chemical company for more than 20 years while investigating cancer risks in the industry, the Guardian can reveal.

Documents seen by the Guardian reveal that Sir Richard was also paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and two other major companies, Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer - a conclusion with which the World Health Organisation disagrees. Sir Richard's review was used by the manufacturers' trade association to defend the chemical for more than a decade. ...

Via the MojoBlog, where Diane Dees writes: "Sir Richard Doll is famous for proving that smoking causes cancer, but I hope that, after a recent disclosure, he also becomes famous for having no integrity whatsoever."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A whole website about them here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title is almost as long as the essay itself. Here is the abstract:

"The concept of open access to legal knowledge is at the surface a very appealing one. A citizenry that is well informed about the law may be more likely to comply with legal dictates and proscriptions, or at a minimum, will be aware of the consequences for not doing so. What is less apparent, however, is whether an open access approach to legal knowledge is realistically attainable without fundamental changes to the copyright laws that would recalibrate the power balance between content owners and citizens desiring access to interpretive legal resources. A truly useful application of open access principles would require adoption of compulsory licensing regimes with respect to proprietary legal resources, and significant government subsidies as well. Because affluent individuals today are both more likely to gain access to information and more likely to have the resources to use it, this Article concludes that the open access construct currently does little to actually empower access to legal information in any significant way."

The essay can be downloaded here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my favorite holiday decorations, by local artist Ernest Lee.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click here to see more metal sculptures, created using found materials which are fixed without welding, by Edouard Martinet.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you have somehow forgotten how much misogyny there is here on the internet, read "Giving Boneheads a Bad Name" by Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. Amanda discussed this post by Twisty about what happened when a UNH student wrote a letter to the editor of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) student newspaper, "The New Hampshire." The link to the actual letter and the responses it garnered is now broken. In the interest of preventing rape threats from succeeding at silencing a gutsy feminist, I give you Twisty's account, which in pertinent part reads as follows:

The student, Melissa DaCosta, writes to discuss the misogyny expressed by a safe-sex flyer posted on her dorm bulletin board. Her thoughtful and measured letter, entirely free of what those who enjoy male privilege usually call “shrill feminist man-hating,” seeks to point out that the scenario represented by the flyer reinforces antediluvian attitudes about male dominance. She is careful to temper her argument by doing what we’ve all done in order to mitigate the inevitable smackdown by proponents of the status quo: she admits that her point may seem small, and then tries to explain why even small instances of sexism matter.

Veteran blamers will be unsurprised to learn that the responses (numbering beyond 200 at this writing) to DaCosta’s letter exploded like a piss balloon dropped from a frat-house window, except that instead of piss, the balloon was full of the violent misogyny and asinine wisecracks we’ve come to expect whenever a woman dares to buck the Dude Nation worldview. The vast majority of the commentary — the work of larval boy-brains, the possessors of which, despite their desperate parroting of the psychotic ideology of their pornsick daddies, uncles, and pop stars, are somehow allowed to freely roam a state university without electronic GPS ankle cuffs — opine that DaCosta is a “stupid cunt” who suffers from insufficient “deepdicking.”

You might think this is an exageration, and since the letter and the replies have apparently been down it would be hard to prove otherwise, had not the same thing happened to Amanda Marcotte after she wrote about it, which you can read about here. I cannot emphasize enough how much I admire the courage of Amanda Marcotte.

I read DaCosta's letter and the comments thread that followed at "The New Hampshire" when Twisty posted about it on December 6th, and I tried to convince myself that maybe it was the work of a few disturbed individuals, but the registration requirement at the site suggested otherwise. I can't imagine what life on the UNH campus is now like for the student, who courageously signed her name to her letter, unlike the horrific torrent of cowardly thugs who responded. Another awesome feminst student had a letter published in The New Hampshire in today's issue. I reprinted it here (scrolldown) because the link is wonky, there is a registration firewall, the newspaper may take it down as it did DaCosta's letter, and I think it needs to be read. See also "Rape is Logical" at I Blame the Patriarchy.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

More information brewing here. NB: At Concurring Opinions, Heidi Kitrosser notes a fermenting dispute over the proprietry of "Santa's Butt Winter Porter."

To which I say:

Then of course there is the feminist holiday alcoholic beverage of choice:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Did you know that Elsie the Borden trademark, and Elmer of Elmer's Glue, were married? From Elmer's.com one learns:

"Elsie the Cow became Borden's very popular "Spokescow" in the late 1930's. She was a big hit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and soon afterwards the character of Elmer the Bull was created as Elsie's husband. In the late 1940's, Borden's new Chemical Division asked to use Elsie for its new white glue product. The thought of Elsie representing a non-food product didn't seem appropriate, so as a compromise, Elmer was loaned to Chemical as their very own "spokesbull". To this day, Elmer the Bull still represents the most recognized adhesive company."

Elmer appears on tee shirts and a whole range of adhesive products:

Elsie was onced played by a real cow named "You'll Do Lobelia." I can see why You'll Do Lobelia preferred "Elsie" as a stage name. Elsie is drawn with lots of feminine gender signifiers, but her udder is never in evidence:

In this trademark rendering, Elsie periodically winks seductively at consumers:

Here is a vintage postcard depicting Elsie and Elmer's trademark abode, with a caption that reminds the consumer that Elsie pays careful attention to her grooming:

"Elsie's dressing table, made of barrels, has milk bottle lamps and their toiletries include Tail Wave Set, Henna Fur Glaze and Meadow Mud Pack. Elmer's chair is made of actual wheels with barrel staves for rockers. The candle sticks are half ears of corn and the bed ladders have scythe-handles for supports. Books in the breakfront include 'The Farmer With Cold Hands', and 'Animal Husbandry and Wifery'."

Below is a cheerful trademarked holiday scene. Elsie wears both an apron and part of a house in front of her teats, while Elmer artfully obscures his gonads by standing behind a snowcow. Daughter Beulah appears to sit with her hooves modestly crossed, but what in the world is she photographing?

If Beulah had a trademarked brother, would his name be "Veal"?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Child Online Protection Act has never been enforced, but has been the subject of one federal trial after the other since its passage in 1998. Last May Prof. Philip Stark submitted an expert report in ACLU v. Gonzales. The report, which is available in redacted form here, reached the following conclusions (see paragraphs 22 and 23 at pages 12-13):

This study reports on the Google and MSN indexes, on AOL MSN and Yahoo! queries, and on the most popular Wordtracker queries. About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Close to 90 percent of the sexually explicit websites retrieved by queries are domestic. Filters that block more of the sexually explicit websites also block more of the clean websites. The most restrictive filter blocks about 94 percent of the sexually explicit search results, but also blocks about 13 percent of the clean results. Of the sexually explicit websites that get through the filters, 30 percent to 90 percent are domestic.

The number of sexually explicit websites is huge. Search results often include sexually explicit material. A lot of sexually explicit materiual is not blocked by filters. Of that, a substantial percentage is domestic.

Stark's rebuttal of the reports of other experts (who asserted that filters were much more effective that Stark concluded they are) is available here and a further supplemental rebuttal is available here. Stark's report is important because it somewhat undermines that ACLU's claim that Internet filtering software (sometimes called "censorware") is highly effective. I'd seen descriptions of the report but today was the first time I read it in its (redacted) entirety.

NB: ACLU v. Gonzales trial transcripts are available here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Wired News:

A tough California bill that would have prohibited companies and individuals from using deceptive "pretexting" ruses to steal private information about consumers was killed after determined lobbying by the motion picture industry, Wired News has learned.

"The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,'" Goldberg said. ...

Read the rest here. Cripes those MPAA folks are thugs!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lawsuits brought by porn puveyor Perfect 10 against credit card companies assert a secondary liability theory for processing payments to websites that allegedly infringe the copyrights in pornographic works. If the Ninth Circuit finds the credit card companies liable under theories of contributory and/or vicarious infringement, this would represent an expansive extension of copyright liability that is based on commercial ties with infringers, even if the accused companies weren't aware that they were doing business with infringers. Perfect 10 lost in district court, (see also), but reports are mixed about oral arguments that took place yesterday before the Ninth Circuit. Have to watch and wait. A previous post about Perfect 10's suit against Google is accessible here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On a jar of unsalted peanuts...

is an "allergy statement" that says: "...may contain peanuts..."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

But if you do, they are available here and here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Found this link via the comments at Discourse.net and can't vouch for the accuracy, but here is an excerpt from this post:

... When cell phones are transmitting -- even as bugs -- certain things are going to happen every time that the alert phone user can often notice.

But if you're not on a call, and you hear a continuing rapid buzz-buzz-buzz in nearby speakers that lasts more than a few seconds and gets louder as you approach with your phone, well, the odds are that your phone is busily transmitting, and bugging is a definite possibility. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Noting the strict word and page length limits judges impose on briefs and oral arguments, Roger Wade Hughes has proposed that appellate lawyers adopt a system of communicating via IM type acronyms, such as:

• ASSA = assuming arguendo
• WADR = with all due respect
• 2SL = slippery slope
• WSA = well settled authority

XF? Via Law.com.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It must be a very popular toy this season?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Justine Cassell has written a short essay available here arguing that fears such as those about girls using social networking sites arise "in part because people are fearful of women becoming empowered as technology users and producers." She writes:

There are, of course, equivalent moral panics about boys and technology (boys taking cues from violent video games and planning attacks on classmates, for instance); these panics tend to paint boys as aggressors and victimizers rather than victims. The stories about boys focus on their power and the damage they can cause to society. The stories about girls focus on their weakness and the damage that society can cause to them.

She also posted another essay here talking about the disjuncture between the fact that girls use many computer technologies even more heavily than boys, but are far less likely than boys to pursue careers in the computer sciences. Both essays via aTypical Joe, who writes:

When I chose television production as a career in the early 80s, I was under the very mistaken impression that it would be a gay-friendly occupation. All those sensitive portrayals on-screen did not translate into sensitive understanding off-screen from the production crew.

Now I'd say that goes doubly so for IT. Ask me nicely and I might explain why one day. Suffice it to say now that I think IT has a lot to learn and could benefit greatly from taking on some of the ways of the library (a historically female occupation I hasten to add).

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Not a great holiday gift for a vegetarian like me, so please don't think I'm dropping hints. Funny post about it here. Via Discourse.net.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The high rate of attrition of women in the legal profession is alarming and depressing; the amount of female energy and talent that gets stupidly wasted due to sexism in the sciences appears to be an even greater tragedy. Here are a few links to posts that help illustrate the scope of the problems women in the sciences face:

If Only I Had Facial Hair (other than eyebrows) at Female Science Professor (and see also)

Several posts at Absinthe, including:
Male intimidation, and the deterioration of what once was a great feminist blog
Typekey vs male intimidation in blog comments
Male intimidation (part III)

Semi-random aside: The link to this post is in the name of science. This panel looks awesome, even though it is neither law nor science.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Mosquito Meter

The Boardwalk

The Trees' Knees

A Future Butterfly

More here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More photos, and some probably descriptive words that I think might be in German, here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm thinking Siva may have some views about this! You can download Travis's article here. Below is the abstract:

Google plans to digitize the books from five of the world's biggest libraries into a keyword-searchable book-browsing library. Some publishers and authors allege that this constitutes a massive piracy of their copyrights in books not yet in the public domain. But I argue that Google Book Search may be a fair use for two interrelated reasons: it is unlikely to reduce the sales of printed books, and it promises to improve the marketing of books via an innovative book marketing platform featuring short previews. Books are an experience good in economic parlance, or a product that must be consumed before full information about its contents and quality becomes available. This makes new technologies that are capable of rapidly searching and previewing relevant passages from books a development that the law should encourage, not burden or restrain.

I conclude by analyzing the antitrust implications of the struggle between copyright owners and technology companies for control over digital marketing and distribution technologies. Joint ventures between major copyright holders may be the only viable alternative for the foreseeable future to technology company search technologies such as Google Book Search, just as MusicNet and Movielink proved to be the only viable alternative for many years to peer-to-peer digital media search technologies. Such joint ventures may facilitate price-fixing and suppression of digital media output, dangers that courts considering the legality of Google Book Search should explore carefully. At the same time, I suggest reasons for courts to be skeptical about publishing industry assertions that by scanning books, Google will seize control over all the content in the world.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Some interesting stuff here.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube - I Don't Want To Go Home

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's a fairly disgusting post title, isn't it? I've had a lot of airline misadventures recently, but today the day was truly saved by vomiting passengers. I had a two part flight, and takeoff for the first leg was delayed by almost an hour, because the pilot was busy reattaching the plane engines with duct tape (or something). At least I wasn't going to or through Chicago, since all flights there were cancelled due to a storm. After it finally took off the first flight was really, really bumpy and neither beverage service nor beverage recycling (a.k.a. using the restroom) was permitted.

I got to the intermediate airport only a few minutes before my flight back to Columbia was scheduled to take off, so I ran though the airport to try to get to my gate before the plane left without me. Back in the olden days I used to call this "doing an O.J. Simpson" in reference to those racing and suitcase leaping television commercials he once made for Hertz. Now of course "doing an O.J. Simpson" has a very different and far more sinister cultural meaning. In any event, I got to my "flights to petit-sized cites" gate, and four small planes were all being boarded at once. I asked the ticket agent if the plane for Columbia had left, and he asked me my name, took my ticket, and waved me through. I asked two additional airport employees which plane was going to Columbia, and showed both of them my ticket stub. The first just sort of pointed vaguely, and the second took my misnomered "carry on" suitcase, which I had to do a "curbside check" with, and put it onto a rolling cart. I boarded the associated plane only to find someone already buckled into my seat. I asked her if she was going to Columbia too, and she said, "No, this is the plane for Columbus, Ohio." The bemused flight attendant verified this midwestern aeronautical destination, so I got back off the plane and tried to liberate my suitcase from the "curbside check" cart, which apparently triggered some sort of terrorism profiling, which required me to have a lengthy and fairly animated conversation with a TSA official.

Finally I got back into the terminal and a new ticket was issued so I could get on the Columbia bound plane, which, it turned out, hadn't even begun boarding due to the fact that about half the passengers on the previous flight had barfed all over the cabin, and it was being cleaned. This flight attendant turned the air conditioning way up, distributed duplicate air sickness bags, and refused to give any of us drinks or snacks (and who could blame her?). Thanks to the airsickness of strangers, I made it home to Columbia only an hour late.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)