infozo: moron librarian

we've packed our tent and moved on to the next town

2003-07-06T18:15:00.000-04:00

please note that the Infozo can now be found at http://infozo.info.

There's a new RSS (0.91) to boot.

infozo.blogspot.com will no longer be updated.

You will automatically be taken to the new location in 5...4...3...2...

hiatus

2003-07-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

to whom it may concern:

Infozo will be put on hiatus for the next week or two as we

catch up on some classwork
migrate to a movable type system that will be available at http://infozo.info

until then: I saw this in the paper while eating lunch today.

n2h2 and scpn

2003-06-29T15:16:00.000-04:00

Thank you for your submission. Below please find a listing of the category (ies) in which your submitted URL appears. For a detailed description of each category, visit our filtering categories section.

The Site: http://www.stopclownpornnow.org/
is categorized by N2H2 as:
Jokes
Sex

Jokes
Sites that post jokes, humorous stories, or other forms of humor.

Sex
Sites that contain descriptions or depictions of sexual acts, specifically those without the intent to arouse (sites which contain material intended to arouse fall under the Pornography category). Sexual merchandise and fetish sites fall under the Sex category. [N2H2 says in tiny category-page footer: "N2H2 suggested categories for basic Children's Internet Protection Act compliance. Sex category optional for workstations used only by adults."]

The Anti-Pornography League isn't categorized in their databases. Whither the singling out of SCPN? On the one hand, it is an earnest site earnestly fighting the spread of clownsploitative and obscene imagery. On the other hand, it is a site satirizing the efforts of those who seek to censor. Which is its real purpose? Why, the former, of course! :) Regardless, to my knowledge, there is no obscene imagery on the site. Nor is there anything funny. Perhaps we should write a letter...

think globally, act no-cally

2003-06-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

tennessee has had a do not call list for a while now. I've never bothered to sign up.

It's not that I don't get unsolicited phone calls. In fact, I get more unsolicited phone calls than I get spam.

Ok, that's not quite true. But it does take me less time to deal with my spam (and unsolicited snailmail) than it does to deal with unsolicited phonecalls. Largely because I enjoy entertaining the telemarketers. Asking them for personal information, trying to make them laugh, all in the effort to use their company's resources without giving them anything in return (other than verification that my phone number is, in fact, in use by some crazy guy).

Sometimes I do want the telemarketer him/herself to suffer a little. The previous owner of my phone number was an elderly man; when shim-sham take-advantage-of-the-elderly types call, I make sure to break down and tell them how he just died--and then keep them on the phone asking about their product and if there's any way that I can help. They tend to demur.

Aside from my personal fun, I also think I should get calls from local charities; I might otherwise never figure out that they exist and do their good work here. Local charities and political candidates. Local charities, political candidates and academic social science researchers asking me to complete a 10-minute phone survey.

Just for the record: the federal do not call exceptions:

If I register my number on the National Do Not Call Registry, will it stop all telemarketing calls?

No. Placing your number on the National Do Not Call Registry will stop most, but not all, telemarketing calls. Some businesses are exempt from the national registry and still can call you even if you place your number on it. Exempt businesses include:

long-distance phone companies
airlines
banks and credit unions; and
the business of insurance, to the extent that it is regulated by state law.

However, many telemarketing calls are placed by professional telemarketing companies, and even if the company whose goods or services are being sold is exempt, the telemarketing company may be covered.

You may still receive calls from political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors or companies with which you have an existing business relationship.

The FCC has initiated a rulemaking proceeding that would extend the National Do Not Call Registry to many of the businesses that are exempt from FTC coverage.

So charities, surveyors, and political organizations can still call. That's good. But banks (which is a euphemism for credit card solicitors, n'est-ce pas?) and long distance companies can still call? That accounts for at least 75% of my current unsolicited phonecalls--and the bank/long-distance telemarketers tend to be the most hardened and battle-ready, willing to hang up on me the second I start reading chapters from Infinite Jest...

What lobbyists/previous legislation did they have in play that exempted them? (And I suspect that many new organizations will pop up claiming to have something to do with banking, long-distance service, and airlines whose business models focus on the dinner hour and home-intrusion...)

Bottom line: I won't be signing up. Anyway, if they stopped calling, I wouldn't be able to encourage the telemarketer to unionize and demand more from the crappy corporation that's making them call me in the first place.

friday clown-related content

2003-06-27T23:46:00.000-04:00

submitted for your disapproval right before the buzzer: more clown porn.

shuffling the mobile coil

2003-06-27T23:31:00.000-04:00

it was an epiphany when I realized that information technology infrastructures didn't have to depend on cable.

Now U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has articulated the promise of wireless for developing countries, allowing a leapfrog effect in information technology, untetherd by the overburdening costs of laying cable.

I haven't been able to locate any such statement originating Thursday on the UN Web site, though. Yet another example of the infozo's lame info-fu. Regardless, I want to know the extent to which the UN is asking for help in implementing the wireless infrastructure and how much (or whether) the provision of content (e.g., proprietary agricultural full-text databases).

the anal-retentive city-state and its libraries

2003-06-27T23:07:00.000-04:00

"singapore now has noise police to keep volumes down in its public libraries." Heh. Next time some tightly wound librarian shushes me, I'll just tell 'em to go to...

Well, I'll tell 'em to go to Singapore.

[infozo learnt this from LISNews]

more cipa musings: a modest proposal

2003-06-27T22:16:00.000-04:00

the Shifted Librarian offers a modest proposal w/r/t SCOTUS's CIPA opinion:

if you think that some corporation somewhere should have the right to decide what library patrons can and can't view, then I have a proposition for you. Let me come over and set up a filter on your personal internet access. I get to decide what political, idealogical, educational, informational, and every other -ical site you get to view. You get to surf only those sites I think are appropriate for you. [emphasis in the original]

In addition to hitting on a very important problem with the opinion (a problem that one would not expect in a ruling from a conservative, states rights over federal power kind of court): in order to comply with CIPA, public libraries will be flocking to the products of a small handfull of national filtering companies, companies that are not capable of predicting whether or not a given image would be considered obscene in a given community. (See the end of this post for rambling parentheticals...)

She also quotes Mark Glaser's "Justices Put Access to Online Information in the Wrong Hands". These few paragraphs do a great deal, including:

point to peacefire, a site offering information and advice on "how to disable your blocking software."
summarize the EFF/Online Policy Group study on filters
indicate the complexity of the filter problem by rhetorically juxtaposing the supposed simplicity with which most of us see stories floated in the mass media: "Pro-choice vs. pro-life. Pro-gun vs. gun control. Anti-porn vs. free speech."
emphasize that librarians as gateway keepers--and not publishers--will be the ones who have to ensure patrons can get to the information that they need:
But Bill Hall, [a Department of Health and Human Services] spokesman, was slow to see that this might be a problem for his agency, and told me that he had never seen or used a software filter. "We don't take a stance on the ruling," he said. "Sure, it's a common problem among health info sites, getting blocked by filters. But it's up to the filter companies and libraries to fix them, not us. We've never been aware of people not seeing our sites. If there were angry letters or people telling us about it, then we'd look at the issue."

(Remember the rambling parentheticals I mentioned earlier? Here they are...)

(Obscenity is legally defined using community standards--and whether or not a given image presented in a given context is obscene can't be legally predicted anyway.)

(A savvy national/multinational software corporation could conceivably engage in a type of effective market segmentation that might be able to accurately predict what filters a given community's public library system's users would tolerate. But this marketing exercise will not reflect community values, it will define them. Consider that advertising will be involved. Our hypothetical corporation will have a stake in the dissemination of homogenized "family-values" programming on national TV, and they will also write letters to the editors in The Local Gazette-Herald.)

moveon.org primary

2003-06-27T20:35:00.000-04:00

we're trying to put together a few entries tonight; they will probably get sloppy as the evening wears on.

The first is news I'm sure you're familiar with already; regardless, for posterity's sake:

In just a little over 48 hours, 317,647 members voted, making this vote larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined. Here are the vote totals and percentages, when voters are asked to choose one candidate:

BRAUN 7021 2.21%
DEAN 139360 43.87%
EDWARDS 10146 3.19%
GRAHAM 7113 2.24%
KERRY 49973 15.73%
KUCINICH 76000 23.93%
GEPHARDT 7755 2.44%
LIEBERMAN 6095 1.92%
SHARPTON 1677 0.53%
OTHER 6121 1.93%
UNDECIDED 6378 2.01%
317647 100.00%

My friend and Kerry-supporter Kevin will be thrilled that, even though Kerry failed in the election, he would still garner the support of the majority of the MoveOn community. I didn't vote, and I really hope right now that we aren't going to see a Kerry/Dean alpha-ape ticket in Nov. 2004. (Don't get me wrong; Kerry seems to have been an intelligent and active legislator, but he plays up the Harley a bit much for my media tastes. And then there's that war thing.)

[from MoveOn.org PAC]

happy birthday!

2003-06-27T09:56:00.000-04:00

the song "Happy Birthday", celebrated in the commons but avoided like the plague by servers in mall satellite restaurants and other royalty-liable institutions of Haut Couture, celebrates it's birthday (according to disparate sources of varying reliability, its melody was composed on June 27, 1859, published in 1893, copyrighted in 1935--this lasts until 2010, and currently owned by a Time-Warner subsidiary).

Happy Birthday to Gerry and Matt!
We're a little shocked and dismayed that the Library of Congress Copyright Office doesn't seem to have a citizen's fact sheet on this case in particular to demonstrate the nature of copyright law and intellectual property. Perhaps they should work up something for their Kidz section?
We're a little dismayed that we don't know the particulars of this über-pop copyright case. We should know them. And we will.

[infozo caught wind of the song's birthday through Daniel Barry]

more cipa musings: whither the images?

2003-06-27T09:04:00.000-04:00

The Chicago Trinbune has a CIPA-related article: Filtering Free Speech.

Any sites that so much as mention the words 'rape' or 'incest' can be subject to censorship, including those run by groups whose mission is to counsel survivors of those crimes. At the same time, sites with offensive images can slip past the filters; a computer program can't reliably tell the difference between an obscene photo and an innocent one. Even the most permissive programs often suppress Web pages dealing with safe sex and condom failure rates--a troubling fact, considering that 70 percent of teens report going online for health-related facts. Will those who supported the filter law do anything to help kids access such sensitive information?...

And this just made me wonder about the public librarian's constant struggle between entertainment and information, that public health information is often designed not to appear no-thrills authoritative but instead to imitate the mass media, supposedly to draw in the intended audience using a visual vocabulary that they understand (and that they are willing to tolerate/engage). I'm also really curious about whether any filters have been found to block sites that have no image files (CIPA specifically legislates the effort to block visual obscenity); and whether common filtering algorithms weight the probability of the presence of obscenity based on the number/size of image files on a site.

[infozo learnt this from The Shifted Librarian]

blogger goofies

2003-06-27T08:27:00.000-04:00

somehow the <Blogger> tag disappeared from the infozo template sometime yesterday. Or rather, Blogger acted exactly as if the <Blogger> tag had disappeared from the template, and hence displayed only the blogger tags themselves (e.g., <$BlogItemWhatever>)

In site statistics news, I don't think CQCounter is registering hits that I personally made from unix machines using lynx (while I was trying to doublecheck some code in the template).

In MozBlog news, the point of this whole post is to see if MozBlog will work with dano. (Specifically, to see if I can post now avoiding Fault!<XML-RPC Fault: (0) java.lang.NullPointerException>, and to see if the title is entered into the entry appropriately.)

kucinich vs. dean

2003-06-26T22:21:00.000-04:00

apparently this useful page drawing the lines between "progressive" dem candidates Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean is making its way into the hearts and blogs of lefties across the 'net. It doesn't paint a pretty picture of Dean (patrician, SUV-drivin', fence-straddlin', death-penalty-promotin', former governor of a state with 1/7 the electoral votes of Kucinich's).

[infozo learnt this from knoxnet]

dano

2003-06-26T07:49:00.000-04:00

we've finally been migrated to dano. The whole infozo site has been republished, and the archives are now complete (just in case you had been incredibly curious to see what was written between October and March). The old styles within the archives have not been preserved; these are maintained, however, in a secure vault underneath our corporate headquarters. The SiteMeter code has been removed until I figure out its problems with subsequent double-hyphens.

2003-06-25T13:28:00.000-04:00

never seen this before...

2003-06-25T07:53:00.000-04:00

vivísimo

e.g., Fedgov search for "cipa":

There's also news searching (try librar*).

2003-06-24T10:06:00.000-04:00

tachnical gaffes

a couple of things are getting under my craw w/r/t this blog...

I still haven't been migrated to dano.
single ampersands in URLs are being replaced with a bunch of amp; gibberish, rendering the links mostly useless
ampersands used to display special characters like em dashes do not display special characters like em dashes (I think this is a blogger thing, I just haven't taken the time to figure out their workaround)
haloscan comments are still pretty spotty... they had Big Server Problems yesterday
I think that whatever code the sitemeter javascript grabs is keeping me from being able to use two concatenated hyphens (my natural preference to an em dash). Whenever I add those two characters, they appear to combine with the greater than in the next tag to make an end comment tag, thus obliterating the content that comes before... there's also these two hyphens hanging out next to the sitemeter graphic...
Whereas I should have been working on a paper and reading for class for the past 24 hours, I'm more tempted to learn more about the CIPA ruling

Two things I'd like in the PIM/CMS that I move to next:

An in-browser blogging tool that codes the way I like code to be
Some wiki-ness. Set links that apply to given words/phrases, regardless of where they appear. Some focus on what's been built here already rather than the endemic blog focus on what's new
And I still want it to make me look cooler than I really am

2003-06-24T09:56:00.000-04:00

supreme court and cipa redux

from reading around, there seem to be two questions I don't know the answer to re:CIPA's implementation.

Where does the money to institute the policy change and installation/maintenance of technical measures come from? Is it part of the E-rate? (Is the E-rate a discount or do libraries get a check? How much is the E-rate? If I'd read for tonight's Public Libraries course (excerpt from Molz and Dain, Cyberspace/Civic Space), I might know the answer...)
What's the bare minimum a library can get away with w/r/t the technical measure?

2003-06-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

aw, crap: supreme court rules in favor of cipa

The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld a law that requires public libraries to put anti-pornography Internet filters on their computers, or lose federal funding.
The court, in a 6-3 decision, ruled that the Children's Internet Protection Act does not violate the First Amendment.
...
CIPA marks Congress's third major attempt to shield children from Internet smut. In 1997, the Supreme Court overturned most of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which banned online pornography. The court also invalidated much of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which required adult Web site operators to make it impossible for children to gain access to their material.
...
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said the law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, does not turn librarians into censors. (The Washington Post)

The SCOTUS opinion, if you're interested, can be found here.

Of note in the majority opinion:

'Internet terminals are not acquired by a library in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves. Rather, a library provides such access for the same reasons it offers other library resources: to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality.' Well, I suppose that's our own damn fault. Public libraries should be strongholds of the First Amendment, both in the right-to-know and the right-to-free-speech (and right-to-assemble and right-to-file-grievance, while we're at it). And the World Wide Web really does offer the opportunities of publishing to the public that could fit in so well with this vision of the library...
But this vision of the library isn't a common one, and apparently holds no weight with the Supreme Court.
'As Congress recognized, "[t]he Internet is simply another method for making information available in a school or library." S. Rep. No. 106-141, p. 7 (1999). It is "no more than a technological extension of the book stack."' No, no, a thousand times no. The Internet is a medium of communication. It's power to researchers is only partly due to the amount of information one can retrieve; it also allows for the creation and dissemination of new texts, be they academic treatises, winamp playlists, emails or chat room logs.
'Concerns over filtering software's tendency to erroneously "overblock" access to constitutionally protected speech that falls outside the categories software users intend to block are dispelled by the ease with which patrons may have the filtering software disabled.' Asking the librarian to remove the filter has its own socially-restrictive problems that I'll ignore for a second here ('the Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment')
The problem is when you're doing research you might not know whether relevant results are being excluded, or if a filter is even in place. Justice Stevens backs me up: 'Until a blocked site or group of sites is unblocked, a patron is unlikely to know what is being hidden and therefore whether there is any point in asking for the filter to be removed. It is as though the statute required a significant part of every library's reading materials to be kept in unmarked, locked rooms or cabinets, which could be opened only in response to specific requests.'
On a different note, a lot of time was spent on the mechanics of turning off the filters and leaving them off all day during the presentation of oral arguments.
'As in Rust, the Government here is not denying a benefit to anyone, but is instead simply insisting that public funds be spent for the purpose for which they are authorized: helping public libraries fulfill their traditional role of obtaining material of requisite and appropriate quality for educational and informational purposes.' Note the ontological assertions made re: public libraries: they are collections of owned, locally held materials ('obtaining'; i.e., not 'accessing') meeting certain standards w/r/t quality and community in order that they educate and inform (lipservice was paid to recreation earlier in the ruling). The majority opinion also assumes that libraries select in a vacuum without the benefit of other libraries to share resources; some libraries do collect porn and (I should hope, at least) make their collections available through ILL. Furthermore, variations in community standards (county to county) is not mentioned... could I manufacture a faux filter (filtering out only, say, this single site) to be sold to liberal communities that they may comply with the rules?
'Moreover, because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all the Internet material that is appropriate for inclusion from all that is not.' And how the hell are the boys and girls that stitch together the filters supposed to do this?

The ALA has already come out with a statement of disappointment, noting that the decision conflagrates the information needs of children and adults as well as the crappy nature of the current filters. I imagine something should be posted here in the near future...

[of course, the infozo totally agrees that clown porno should not be available to adults or children, in libraries or anywhere else.&150;Ed.]

2003-06-23T10:20:00.000-04:00

the soapboxes

for those of us who are willing to straddle the fence until the last possible moment, perhaps even for those of us who prefer information to action, there is now WatchBlog: 2004 Election News, Opinion and Commentary, a blog that juxtaposes the posts of Democrat, Republican, and Third Party voices. (Interestingly, the Third Party color scheme is Green; their Blog's column is situated squarely inbetween the established parties.)

There's this disconcerting thing that happens when you juxtapose multiple threads of text. They naturally comment on one another. Infoglut really gets out of control. Q.v. Glas.

[infozo learnt this from beSpacific]

2003-06-22T16:33:00.000-04:00

gif patent expires

the LZW patent that protects the lowly GIF file expired Friday.

This event exposes some of the infozo's personal shortcomings as a web designer and protector of the public interest

I had heard about possible IP problems with using GIFs before, but never paid any attention to them. On rare drunken Tuesday afternoons, I'd make PNG files (like the ones on this site), but this was hardly the rule. Do I understand the technical or legal differences between the two formats. Hell no.
Do I understand why GIFs were a problem and MSWord DOC files aren't? No.
Does the patent expiration mean I should change the PNGs here (and elsewhere) to GIFs? I dunno...
Is this a case example of intellectual property becoming part of the public good through our patent system? I guess so.
Is the software industry still suffering from placing most of its products under the control of copyright rather than patent? Wha?

[infozo learnt this from Brad Choate. Don't ask him how he ended up there...]

2003-06-22T15:26:00.000-04:00

peripatetic sunday

it's getting late in the afternoon and I've made very little progress on my to-do list. What I have done: read some of yesterday's k2k digest, where they like to talk about whether or not Knoxville needs a "destination attraction." Brent Minchey compared Knoxville to a Pacific island "cargo cult."

These were villages that had hosted temporary airfields during WWII and were dismayed when the airmen (and all their goodies) stopped coming. They built wooden replicas of aircraft and buildings in an attempt to lure the cargo planes back. This sort of thing is bound to happen when a simple culture tries to leapfrog its way to the amenities of an advanced society without a clue of the complexity behind them.

Since cargo cults sounded like so much fun, I googled them and found out that Richard Feynman gave a Caltech commencement speech using cargo cults as the central conceit. The speech is about the practice of good science in the face of political pressures and parapsychology. It mentions governments stacking the research deck and nude hottubbing.

The general tone is similar to a relatively new post up at Bushies Suck!. Truth is inevitable, as long as the persons in its trust remain truthful.

Oh well, time to mow the lawn so that I can appear marginally competent to my neighborhood association. Or maybe I could build a lawnmower-like box out of hotdogs... Or, better yet, pretend that I did and save myself the trouble...

2003-06-22T15:10:00.000-04:00

sunday morning summary

things I noticed in the Sunday morning politico shows:

Inside Tennessee focused mainly on the new Univeristy of Tennessee Athletic Director, about whom I care so little I didn't even get his name. But after they were done with him, a short time was devoted to the mayoral election. Susan Richardson-Williams said that the mayoral race "has no issues," and therefore people don't even know that there's a mayoral race. And she's probably right. What are the issues?

Inside Washington: someone really should make a dirty flash animation featuring Ms. Totenberg's shrill "no-no!"s and Mr. Krauthammer's disinterested "let me finish, Nina"... or have they done this already?

Meet the Press: Russert interviews Howard Dean, M.D. Dean gets flustered, 'cause apparently he's trying to back down from the maverick stance since he might actually have a shot at the nomination. On this show, he backed off of a constitutional ammendment to balance the budget, gay marriage, and the death penalty. Is Dean really just the liberal version of Shrub? His kids get drunk and in trouble with the law, he talks like he's in a western&emdash;except when asked a direct question, and then the fence-straddlin' begins... Oh, but wait, he's a doctor. But is he playing a stupid card?

Back to the death penalty thing: he stated that the DP could be warranted in three situations: when there is mass-murder, when the victim is a child, or when the victim is a police officer. The first two on the reasoning that society won't be able to control them if they get back in the civilian population, that killing them would net a lower loss of human life than not killing them.

The last because of the DP deterrent: if a criminal has a gun pointed at a cop and thinks to herself, "If I shoot, I'll go to the chair," then maybe she won't shoot. Not to be too snide, but if you have a gun pointed at a police officer, haven't you already reached the conclusion that "they" (the police and the judicial system) are going to try to kill you?

Fox's thing: Hell, I don't even know its name. It was on again this week though, if you were concerned.

This Week: mostly centers around an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan (it seems like Queen Noor was on just yesterday). Chris Tucker and he are going to hang out.

Tennessee This Week: interview with Governor Phil Bredesen. I was honestly shocked when Gene Patterson asked him about the death penalty. I was mostly not shocked by his answer: "I basically support the death penalty."

I was, however, shocked when he mentioned "racism" as one of the things that goes wrong in the system.

2003-06-21T13:19:00.000-04:00

this life and iraqi information gaps

this week's episode of This American Life, "I'm in charge now" [link won't actually be available until sometime next week], ends with a piece on the information gap separating the Americans making decisions over the daily life of Baghdad and the Iraqi's living that daily life. And that's the way Ira Glass describes the problem: an information gap.

Rumors are flying around like crazy. Are they helped along by 105 upstart newspapers? Yes. Are they helped along by the new American civil servants, who, like their Baathist predecessors, are "reclusive men who still make decisions in private"? More than likely. Is this yet another example of the Bush administration's penchant for anal-retentive control of information? Perhaps.

The one particular rumor repeated through the piece: that Saddam Hussein invited the invasion and that he is currently secreted away, living the high life in the White House.

2003-06-21T01:05:00.000-04:00

comments via haloscan added

okee-dokee, so I've gone searching around for comparisons and reviews of the numerous remotely-hosted, blogspot-friendly commenting systems. Unfortunately, I couldn't find much in the way of either useful reviews or comparisons, but the systems themselves were pretty self-limiting: many have stopped accepting new users! YACCS sounds like the system I'd like to use, but, alas, they won't let me.

So I'm reduced to checking out the individual sites and attempting to glean whether their products offer the one feature I'm really looking for: a convenient method to extract all comments so they can be imported into another blogging system. The only mention I found of this was in Squawkbox.tv, but their "Facility to backup comments to your PC/server" only comes with the paid version, as does the RSS syndication feature.

Enetation's system appears pretty comprehensive, but I found mention of neither RSS alerts nor archiving the comments, so I've decided on haloscan, since they mention the former.

So now let's see if this works...

[20030621 update: worked fine last night. This morning, though, the haloscan db appears to be down. Grr.]

2003-06-20T22:23:00.000-04:00

mozblog and blogspot

i've been monkeying around with MozBlog this Friday evening, hoping to find a way to avoid spending the longest day of the year entirely indoors in the future. And it isn't working.

The reason, found after a few hours of searching:

By Monday, tools using the API will not work for blogs on the old version of Blogger. However, these blogs will be moved to the new version within the next few days. We, therefore, do not anticipate that these third-party tools should be unavailable for more than a day or two. (status.blogspot.com)

Oh well. In the meantime, anybody else got blog-speeding-up tools they want to tell me about?

2003-06-20T15:47:00.000-04:00

clown news

i honestly had no idea that other, more reknowned clowns were using the corporate image in their costumes.

And in other clown news: let it be known that clown pornography is still spreading its evil across the internet.

2003-06-20T13:48:00.000-04:00

online petitions: death penalty

NCADP is urging its members to support legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. Bill #S.402 in the U.S. Senate, sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), would put an immediate halt on executions and ban the imposition of capital punishment under federal law. In the House, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is expected to introduce a similar bill this month. Please contact your senators and representatives and voice your support for the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act.

You can write your legislators (or forward along a pretty well-written prefabbed letter) from http://capwiz.com/ncadp/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=2620226

[infozo learnt this from tcask]

2003-06-20T13:24:00.000-04:00

glass houses, stones, and hatches

from the :) file:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.

But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes. (Wired)

The Senator from Utah is funny...

2003-06-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

knoxville residents: vote in mayoral primary, september 30

knoxNews.com announces another mayoral dropout:

Mayoral candidate Steve Hall withdrew from the Knoxville mayor's race today, whittling down the field to two major contenders and virtually ensuring a winner in the primary.

...

"The main reason is money - the lack of it," Hall said. "In September, you will probably see a barrage of media hit (Haslam's) campaign, to the point that you'll think he's the only person running."

The primary election will be September 30, 2003. Register to vote by August 29. Early voting: September 10-25.

Here's a hint: http://www.madelinerogero.com/

Also on the September 30 ballot: Three at-large and the District 5 City Council seats and a city judge seat.

More hints: District 5: Bob Becker; At-Large B: Norris Dryer, or maybe Chris Woodhull, or perhaps Jean Teague.

[infozo learnt this from k2k]

2003-06-20T12:20:00.000-04:00

epa report information on global warming blatantly spun

honestly, I can't even pretend to have strong moral indignation over information massaged to support policy decisions, like E.P.A. reports leaving out information on global warming (or replacing it with caveats from research financed by the American Petroleum Institute). I have no moral indignation because I don't have enough information. I don't know for a fact that global warming happens. Heck, I don't know for a fact that opposing policy that focuses on global warming is actually beneficial to American oil interests. But I do think that "the fat cat American oil interests," symbolized for the moment by President Bush's administration, thinks that they might benefit by keeping the hush hush on all the melting polar ice-cap crap. Or at least I think that a couple of reporters earnestly believe the public has a right to read an article that protrays the Bush-administration-qua-fat-cat-American-oil-interests as thinking that they might benefit from the hush-hush, and that those same reporters apparently want to emphasize that there is still useful information in the report, regardless of the hush-hush on the global warming.

In a simpler vein: "Boy, Bush sure does like to restrict the release of pertinent information."

2003-06-19T08:11:00.000-04:00

knoxville neighbor blount county legislates against usa patriot act

the Blount County Commission appears to have unintentionally stuck its chin out at the USA PATRIOT Act.

If there were any debates about it in the Intergovernmental Committee where it was introduced, Blount County Chairman Bob Ramsey couldn't recall it.

"I don't remember any controversy about it,'' he said. "It sounded like some sort of standard thing.

"We might ought to reconsider it.''

The resolution also caught the eye of the American Civil Liberties Union, which posted a copy on its Web site. The ACLU notes that Blount County is one of a handful of communities in the Southeast to take such a stand.

2003-06-17T23:52:00.000-04:00

a calling for infozo?

got a note today about participating in The Abolitionist Action Committee's June 2003 action on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court:

CALLING ALL CLOWNS!

The AAC is looking for clowns. TWO TYPES OF CLOWNS.

#1 - We need about 12 people to participate in street theater that will take place on Monday, June 30, from about 11am to about 1pm. We need people to dress and act like clowns. Can you juggle? Walk on stilts? Blow up and twist animal balloons? And... Can you be there at the time indicated? Elaborate costuming welcome, but not necessary. All we ask is a willingness to play the part.

#2 - We need giant puppets of pResident Bush, AG Ashcroft, and as many pro-DP Governors as possible, AND the people (or information) to give a one minute presentation based on the pro-death penalty statements these clowns have made.

Hmm... Greyhound to Washington and back again: $127? $127? Yikes!

2003-06-17T23:38:00.000-04:00

dean takes bush's position on the death penalty

although I've been a bit turned off by the whole Clint Eastwood imitation thing, I've still hoped that former Governor Howard Dean would come forward as an unforgivingly liberal presidential candidate.

W/r/t the death penalty, that ain't gonna happen.

Specifically, Dean has stated that certain crimes, like murders involving children and terrorism, deserve the death penalty. He did not bother to define terrorism.

2003-06-17T08:15:00.000-04:00

precedents to the patriot act

Thom Hartmann's got an article at CommonDreams.org that I need to read more carefully: "How An Earlier 'Patriot Act' Law Brought Down A President". Seems like the story is good enough, but a few of the extrapolations are off-kilter (e.g., that the Federalists became the Republicans).

Furthermore, there's a list of subsequent Alien and Sedition acts that I should become more familiar with... Moynihan's Secrecy is doing some part to fill me in.

2003-06-16T23:09:00.000-04:00

new infozo rss 2.0-ish feed

after a little help from Mr. Schwartz, Matt's example, and a healthy dose of the PHP manual, we have finally been able to re-establish the rss feed for this site. I've been tinkering with the generating code, so right now it's not quite valid RSS 2.0, but we are getting there.

2003-06-16T11:39:00.000-04:00

online petitions: death penalty legislation

i got a notice that Kucinich (who's been sporting a better toupee now for a couple months)

plans to introduce the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2003. This legislation, which is a companion bill to Senate legislation introduced by Senator Feingold (D-WI), will put an immediate halt to executions and forbid the imposition of the death penalty as a sentence for violations of federal law. Please contact your U.S. Representative today to urge him/her to sign on as an original co-sponsor of this important legislation!

So I went to the good ol' ncadp site to see if there was a quick and dirty way to get turned down by my representative (John J. Duncan, who wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot lethal injection). When I got there, I found a ton of legislative information that I didn't know existed! Hallelujah!

Hell, there's even votes out there to stop stoning as a method of execution...

2003-06-16T11:24:00.000-04:00

prison library practicum

I've considered seeking a practicum in a prison library. (Actually, I had considered seeking a practicum in a mental institution library, for the messy and therapeutic client interaction and to see some form of bibliotherapy in action; prison libraries were just similar institutions that our practicum advisor happened to know more about.)

There's an article in this month's Library Juice about a guy doing exactly that. In "The Great Escape (Portrait of a Prison Library)", Holbrook Sample muses on the history of prison libraries, bibliotherapy, the black market economics of text, power relationships, and the particular prison personalities he encounters.

At a maximum-security prison, there are few diversions as powerful as a good book. At public and school libraries, the staff must lure patrons in with clever advertising and the Internet. Here at Eastern, the surroundings may be grim and the resources minimal, but the customers are absolutely devoted.

2003-06-16T10:34:00.000-04:00

president bush's information environment and life-or-death decisions

the July/August Atlantic Monthly will feature "The Texas Clemency Memos" by Alan Berlow:

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales—now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee—prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand.

The article gets into the frightening details of a healthy handful of the men and women Texas executed during Bush's gubernatorial stint, details that did not float up to the governor when he considered and denied clemency.

I suppose you've got to keep incoming information to the bare, unambiguous essentials if you're gunning for a record of action and the record for the most executions (150 men and women) in modern American history.

The article cites Bush's autobiography, A Charge to Keep, several times w/r/t its protrayal of the governor's place in clemency decisions. Perhaps I should pick this book up...

Nahh, that would just be too much information. I've already made my decision re: President Bush. Next!

2003-06-15T17:05:00.000-04:00

more geeky star trek talk

so I was watching Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country the other day... how many times have you run away from someone at a party who started that sentence?

Anyway, I really was watching Star Trek 6 the other day, and I was thinking about how goofy the computer terminals seem today, even though the movie isn't all that old. Just as I was formulating a thought or two on how the artificial separation of input and output devices will undoubtedly disappear before we break light speed, how the blinking panels of the Enterprise NCC 1701-A's bridge may seem absurd to us now, but anything less than the holographic interfaces from Enterprise (the show) will seem ridiculous very soon...

Just as I was shaping these thoughts, the Star Trek 6 crew started translating to Klingon using, well, guess what.

If you guessed books, you'd be right. BOOKS! I fell on the floor laughing! [Prepare yourself for haughty nerdspeak:] As if the universal translator couldn't produce text output! As a format, books simply are not good for on-the-spot language needs (unless you are Really Familiar with a given book, and I seriously doubt our intrepid bridge crew was all that chummy with Langenscheidt's Pocket Klingon).

(That, in an alternate future from Enterprise (the show), our reduction to print archives of our history and knowledge is visual proof to the audience of some temporal catastrophe, again shows the franchises' futurist writers' odd relationship with the book.)

2003-06-15T16:41:00.000-04:00

video killed the voidstar

although I'm sure everyone's figured this out by now on their own, I thought I should mention that the voidstar rss syndication of this site has died. Kaput.

I'm sure that I'll find an alternative rss-ifier soon. Maybe like when damn blogger new takes over this damn blog.

2003-06-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

super dmca update

the Tennessee version of the Super-DMCA is dead, for this year at least.

I just ran across this May 20 article by Glenn Reynolds of instapundit fame that explicitly links the Super DMCA legislation with the recent FCC ruling that will facilitate media conglomeration by way of the Mamma Bell fight against third-party attachments to the Mamma Bell network back in the day (specifically, the plastic background-noise muting cup called Hush-a-Phone, another in a long line of unforseen technological advancements).

Hush-a-Phone. *snicker*

2003-06-15T15:47:00.000-04:00

nightmares

there are really only two themes connecting my rare nightmares:

Massive traffic catastrophes in which a busload or trainload or planeload of people is facing certain death, and, try as I might, I am totally powerless to avert our fate. I usually don't wake up until after I've seen everyone else suffer mangled bodies, crushed skulls, and the like.
High school theatrical productions, which frighten me for pretty much the same reasons.

2003-06-15T15:41:00.000-04:00

governor frank clement, tn attempted to repeal death penalty

the Spring 2003 issue of Tennessee Lifelines: The Newsletter of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing has a little piece on page 7 about Governor Frank Clement's efforts to deal with the death penalty in Tennessee in 1965. Basing his arguments in Christian theology, "Is the Sixth Commandment of God meant only to apply to the defendant in a capital case - Does it not apply to the State of Tennessee? ... Can anyone deny that human judgment is inadequate?" the Governor was able to convince the Senate to pass a bill abolishing the death penalty, but it narrowly lost in the House, 47-48. So he commuted the death sentences of five men slated for the electric chair.

So, is Frank Clement Bob Clement's dad? (Bob Clement lost the Senate race to Lamar Alexander last year; his daughter is a recent UTK SGA president.) Yes.

2003-06-15T15:21:00.000-04:00

a question about the anti-death penalty movement

In scouring through some blogs sometime in the past two months, I encountered someone who asked something to the effect of "Why do the death penalty opponents put so much effort into individual cases when it's the whole kit and kaboodle that they're after?"

Well, why is that?

Paul Reid, for example, is not the most mediagenic death row inmate, and his crimes are most brutal and most definitely his; these facts plus the surprise and speed of his impending execution made drumming up support for his right to life difficult.

But the closer you get to a case and its details, the more ambiguity surrounds it. Each case has its own peculiarities which, taken one-by-one, call into question the system as a whole. Paul Reid, for example, is absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt insane. He is our charge.

The peculiarities of certain cases also lead to certain strange alliances, temporary coalitions of groups like the NCADP and groups they would otherwise not have the opportunity to help because of incumbent and often ridiculous political polarization along party lines.

Furthermore, we must do what we can to protect the individual lives that would otherwise be murdered by the hands of our state, our own hands. As their protection must be legal, this involves getting embedded in the details of individual legal cases.

Don't get me wrong. These aren't entirely satisfactory reasons to me. However, it should be noted that there are many fronts in the fight against the death penalty. But, hey, playing the details game gives us something to do other than just roll our eyes around and sigh when we think about the patently ridiculous system of state-sponsored executions.

2003-06-15T14:57:00.000-04:00

death penalty update

it's been about six weeks since I last wrote about the death penalty here. It's been a very busy, news-packed six weeks. In short:

Paul Reid was not executed by the state of Tennessee on April 29. Whew.
Abu-Ali Abdur' Rahman will not be executed on June 18. Whew.
Philip Workman has received an execution date of September 24.

2003-06-15T14:26:00.000-04:00

catchup and the onion

so I'm devoting this afternoon to activities academic and bloggy (having foresaken my filial father's day duties), and this includes making about a hundred posts for the news-packed month that I've let go lightly.

Needless to say, I can't even find the first thing I wanted to post on, and it's probably for the best. I think the May 14 edition of The Onion said something funny about librarians or perhaps libraries. And I think that this funny thing was mentioned in their STATshot info-graphic. And I'm sure that them librarian bloggers said something about it.

But The Onion doesn't appear to archive these info-graphics, nor do they appear to maintain an archive of issues' front pages (just in case you ever need to do an historical search of Onion archives...).

(And another parenthetical on the tangled webs we weave trying to find stuff: the Atomz seearch engine for librarystuff.net confuses "one" and "onion", and that sucks.)

2003-06-15T12:55:00.000-04:00

blogger new, where art thou?

i've been waiting a couple of weeks now for the new blogger interface/engine to take over this blog. I've been anxiously awaiting the change in hopes it would fix the problems with my archives, and not-quite-so-anxiously awaiting the change 'cause the new interface looks better in Mozilla.

But no new blogger for the Infozo. *sniff*

2003-06-04T10:13:00.000-04:00

online petitions, cont.

the Infozo is looking for a tool. He knows that it's out there, but doesn't know where to find it.

You see, every once in a while, the Infozo finds himself with a few spare moments that he uses to stare off into space, twiddle his thumbs, or otherwise waste away with pursuits that do nothing to alleviate the ubiquitous state of human suffering in this world.

The Infozo could instead be signing online petitions!

They take almost no time, they might actually make a difference in the world, and it's not like the Infozo worries about the integrity of his public political facade; hell, he's got a ton of credibility to spare!

But where is one lonely clown to find a reliable resource of requests for radical reform?

Perhaps PetitionOnline.com is a good place to start? Please post opinions to infozo *AT* stopClownPornNow *DOT* org.

2003-06-04T09:53:00.000-04:00

online petitions and one for eldred

the question of online petitions has again presented itself to me. For some time now, I have simply ignored them as entirely ineffective political tools, and that's the best case scenario (when they're at least legitimate, which most of them aren't).

There's an online petition out there in support of the Eldred Act, an effort to reclaim the interest of the public good in the face of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (aka the "Mickey Mouse Act," so named b/c it saved Steamboat Willy from being torn from the loving arms of Disney, Inc., only to be left by the State, abondoned and alone, in the Mean Streets of Publicville, sure to be graphically raped and dismembered by the likes of Sunday school teachers, day care professionals, candy-stripers, and other miscreants and ne'er-do-wells).

As with any such document, there are problems in the details, but, on the whole, surely this is worth the time it takes the Infozo to sign his Hancock?

The thing I really like about this petition: in addition to the requisite name and zip code information, they also ask you to include a citation of "Something I Created Using Public Domain Work." Needless to say, most signees didn't fill this part out; most of the ones that did hyperlinked the work; and there seems to be, generally, a confusion of the meaning of copyright and public domain (which is wholly appropriate and one of the seminal reasons for recognizing the public domain). But there's also some really cool signers doing some really cool things.

So I'm going to have to think a while before I sign. Think a while about how I use the public domain, and how I give back to it. The perfect entry should be Hallmark for the House persuasive (like one signee's use of patriotic songs in a documentary of an elementary school's 9-11 memorial) and include the feedback loop, preferably of a generated work that the senators and representatives would be expected to use.

So, if the Infozo can pose as Ken Burns for just a couple clicks...

2003-06-02T14:42:00.000-04:00

back in the saddle

we've been super-busy here at the Infozo Industries offices, and haven't had much time to maintain this blog (or clean the kitchen, for that matter). Rest assured our crack team of investigative crackpots is still hard at work for you and your interests.

Beware: a flurry of new posts will be on the way soon.

How soon, you ask?

Real soon.

2003-05-06T14:40:00.000-04:00

data mining and online newspapers

right now, I want to build (or find) a program that will monitor a given local newspaper (e.g., knoxnews.com), spider through all the stories for a day, and then deposit all personal names mentioned into a database. Aside from setting up a decent query to recognize personal names versus other capitalized things, I think this part would be fairly easy. The next step would be to associate all the appearing names with names appearing in the same articles and (the whopper) the issue at hand in the article (including with letters to the editor). This won't be so easy. Finally, this program should draw a map indicating individuals' influence over city news, particular issues, and particular people.

Why do I want this?

To be able to identify the major players in the death penalty issue here in town, be they pro, con, or neutral member of the court.
To be able to get a quick rundown of political figures in town on a moment's notice, a rundown not as controlled as press releases and the such.
To take my first steps toward Big Brotherhood. (But, hey, it's all public information...)

Any takers? I know programs like this have to be out there... free lunch to the person who points me to a good example.

2003-05-06T10:32:00.000-04:00

scrolls from under vesuvius and the infared cameras that can read them

wired is running a story subtitled "How a handful of Mormons with an infrared camera unlocked the secrets buried beneath Vesuvius." It tells the stories of thousands of papyrus scrolls buried during the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius that scholars have been trying to effectively read for centuries. Despite microscopes and vigilance, little progress had been made reading and piecing together much of the collection until infared digital photography came into the picture, thanks to a Brigham Young team that was first trying to put together a CD-ROM of the dead sea scrolls.

When I said "little progress had been made," I surely must have been lying. The infared cameras are good at distinguishing between ink and the papyrus background, which in visible light is all pretty much black. But they can't unfold the scrolls. They can't "scan" them while they're still rolled up. And unrolling them is tricky business. I should also mention that this effort and similar ones have been going on for the greater part of the past decade (as the host of previous stories testifies). Discovery is exciting and often excruciatingly slow.

Anyway, turns out the biggest winner in this endeavor might be the Epicurean thinker Philodemus, whose works may have been retrieved in bulk. And some of that bulk is bawdy poetry.

The works on poetry are particularly interesting in view of the fact that Philodemus was himself a poet. This was rare for Epicureans, who generally disliked poetry and considered it a waste of time for the wise man. Still, Philodemus opposed devoting too much time or effort to the study of poetry because he believed such labor detracted from pursuing peace of mind that should be the true goal of life.

What would Philodemus think of the intensive effort to reconstruct his writings? "He definitely would not approve of our work," said Prof. Blank. (UCLA Today)

[infozo learnt about this over at lisnews.com]

2003-05-06T07:38:00.000-04:00

reverse alphabetical order

for a few years, I've noticed an unspoken rule, but I haven't been able to find an authority who'll say I'm right.

The rule goes something like this: when using the construction "from [blank] to [blank]" to show the breadth of a field, and when the [blank]s in that construction begin with the same letter--as they often will because writers appreciate the irony in assonance/alliteration (i.e., the field you're trying to describe as so broad is contained within only 1/26th of the possible lexical spread)--then the [blank]s should appear in reverse alphabetical order.

I can't find this rule in writing, but I can find examples. I'm writing this now because of NYT's article "3 Racy Men's Magazines Banned by Wal-Mart":

The chain's role as a purveyor of pop culture — a role that increases every time a new Wal-Mart opens, with 200,000-square-feet worth of products ranging from groceries to garden tools — seems to be in an evolutionary stage, something not quite defined either by Wal-Mart or its customers.

Am I crazy or is there a conspiracy afoot?

2003-05-06T07:20:00.000-04:00

listen to morning edition!

five stories of information-interest are playing this morning:

Medical Privacy
NPR's Julie Rovner reports on the controversy surrounding the new medical privacy law. Many people are claiming that rights are being taken away. But in reality, the disclosures now being given to patients are restatements of existing policies.

Telemarketing
NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg reports that the Supreme Court made it easier for states to go after telemarketers who solicit money for charities. The high court ruled unanimously that states can press fraud charges against telemarketers or others who deceive potential donors about how much of a contribution really goes to charity.

McCarthy Documents
NPR's David Welna reports on the release of the once-secret McCarthy papers.

E-mail Identity / File Swapping
NPR's Laura Sydell reports on the difficulty of blocking illegal file-sharing of music and movies on the Internet, without violating the privacy of Internet users, who are not engaged in illegal activity.

Audio Blogs: Online Diarists Sound Off
Bloggers -- or Web loggers -- have been sharing their most intimate thoughts and opinions on the Internet since the mid-1990s, mostly with text, links and photos. Now, increasingly they're adding their voices -- literally -- to their online diaries. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports on the advent of audio blogs.

2003-05-04T23:13:00.000-04:00

we may not know what you're doing, but at least you have a sense of humor about it

in reading up on "Security classification (Government documents)--United States," I ran across NARA's "Frequently Asked Questions About E.O. 13292." EO13292 is an amendment to Clinton's EO12958 that initiated a relatively radical program of declassification, especially of billions of documents classified 25+ years before. On March 25, 2003, President George W. Bush signed the amendment that put off some of the earlier EO's requirements...

8. Aren't the changes contained in the amendment another example of this Administration's penchant for secrecy?

No...

2003-05-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

super-dmca sunday

just a reminder here for all tennesseeans: the Senate and House committee hearings on the "Super-DMCA" are Tuesday, May 6th and Wednesday, May 7th.

If you're not in Tennessee, but happen to be in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, or Texas, you might want to check out the EFF's State-Level "Super DMCA" Initiatives Archive.

The Super-DMCA is not good. It is overbroad (like the DMCA, it restricts legitimate uses that you yourself probably engage in without even knowing it), it is unnecessary (there are already laws on the books doing what this bill's supporters say they want), and it is composed of some seriously bad legal mechanics (for example, and this is only one of many examples, it allows plaintiffs to receive damages without proving that damages occurred).

Or at least that's what my smart friends tell me.

But what can you do?

get familiar with the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network
write your legislators
if you happen to be around thattaway, drop in on the hearings

2003-05-02T19:44:00.000-04:00

i.p. freely friday

through no devices of my own, a couple of intellectual property news items just floated my way:

Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan will be presenting a lecture entitled, "The Anarchist in the Library: The Moral Panics over Copyright and Free Speech" at the Library of Congress on Friday, May 9th, from 10:30am-12:00pm. This lecture will also be broadcast live via the Internet at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/lectures/vaidhyanathan.html on the morning of the lecture, EST, and will be viewable with Real Player software. [via library_grrls]

Four college students who were sued by the recording industry for operating computer networks that allegedly offered thousands of songs for illegal downloading have settled the lawsuits for far less than what the music companies originally demanded. [via my boss, via the nando times]

2003-05-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

beware the ukrainians and their cavalier attitude towards intellectual chastity belts

the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative today released its "Special 301" annual report on the global state of intellectual property protection, taking special glee in pointing out the countries that aren't doing to well in WIPO's eyes.

There are four strata of offending nations:

priority foreign country: Ukraine, which is getting spanked with sanctions of USD 75 million
section 306: countries that can spanked with sanctions at a moment's notice
priority watch list
watch list

I'm not sure they can actually do anything to countries in the final two categories other than move them up the list slowly.

Needless to say, It's not exactly G8 countries filling up these lists; much more commonly, we see countries much in the same relative economic and political power level that the US was when it largely ignored the intellectual property laws of Mother England in order to educate and entertain its population.

Surprisingly, three of the Group of Eight are listed! We would expect Russia to be on the list, as well as Italy, whose IP piracy has been infamous since the Medicis, but the kicker is Canada's citation. Canada is under watch for basically protecting the public good with measures against database manufacturers trying to lay property claims to collections of facts. Those damn Canadians and their damnable social responsibility...

(The whole of the European Union is also cited for something to do with "geographical indicators" and trademarks, something that I don't understand... My [undoubtedly erroneous] interpretation goes something like: the EU says that townships, countries, and similar geographically tied political communities aren't beholden to restrict the use of the name of their community if some corporation lays trademark claim to that same name. I'm going to have to craft a good e.g. for this, but the lightening is coming and I need to shut down...)

2003-05-02T08:56:00.000-04:00

brief history of intellectual property

I'm reading Carla Hesse's "The rise of intellectual property, 700 B.C.--A.D. 2000: an idea in the balance" (Daedalus, Spring 2002 v131 i2 p26(20)), which gives a succinct overview of the history of intellectual property, and a number of good sources that I should check out sometime...

A couple of points:

the establishment of idea-ownership is not necessary for the chilling of the free flow of information. Sure, an obvious idea when one considers the hierophantic approach to knowledge in an ancient world that had no concept of intellectual property, but all the 'net prettyspeak on information wanting to be free put an economic prejudice in my understanding of information...
Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his 1791 essay "Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale and a Parable" sets forth the distinction between an idea and its expression, a distinction at the root of our copyright laws. "Once published, the ideas in a book belonged to all -- but the singular form of their expression remained the sole property of the author."
Argument against WIPO: "Every government has a duty to restrict, where possible, the outflow of its wealth, hence to encourage domestic reproduction of foreign art objects."
Hesse constructs a group of objectively-minded folk like Condorcet argued the social utilitarian side while a group of subjectively-minded folk like Locke, Young, Diderot, and Fichte argued "there was a natural right to perpetual property in ideas and that legal recognition of that right was simply the confirmation in statute of a universal natural right."
The full title of the Statute of Anne: "A Bill for the Encouragement of Learning and for Securing the Property of Copies of Books to the Rightful Owners Thereof"
Berne's done this whole international IP thing before: "in 1886, a series of conferences held in Berne led to the signing by ten European nations of the first international copyright treaty." Interestingly, this international decision bolstered the concept of a universal human right to authorial control, subsequently strengthening the position of intellectual property claims over those of the public good. Which is why copyright lasts so damn long these days (much longer than the 14 or 28 years under the Statute of Anne).
A seminal case in US Copyright law, Bleistein v. Donaldson (188 U.S. 239) in 1903, "involved the commercial reproduction of images used in a circus poster" [emphasis mine]. The ruling interestingly brings up the whole haute couture vs. democritization of information thing, with Justice Holmes ruling in favor of the democritizaion of information: the court can't decide what's good = everything's good = everything is worthy of copyright -> lots of copyright lawyers and a situation in which strengths of rights fall to men of action and not necessarily men of genius.
Red China copyright sentiment: "Is it necessary for a steel worker to put his name on a steel ingot that he produces in the course of his duty? If not, why should a member of the intelligentsia enjoy the privilege of putting his name on what he produces?" (the quote is unattributed...)
Sounds like Islamic theocracies are an interesting place to watch IP law develop...

2003-05-01T10:19:00.000-04:00

nasa hq library downsizing

the NASA headquarters library is changing its mission from information service to showcase of "the Enterprises." "NASA Headquarters Library to be Downsized?" gives an overview of the services previously offered, mentions a gag order placed on the NASA HQ librarians regarding the transition, and also prints some interesting "insider" reader responses about similar incidents at the Johnson Space Center.

do they intentionally use ambiguosly geek language? "Enterprises"? Geez...
what are the forces at play here, and in the downsizing of government information services generally? Why does management believe that libraries and librarians are ineffective, or, rather, that they're expendable? And who exactly is lobbying them with alternatives? The tech vendors? Or private information services out to eliminate their competition who gives the milk away for free? Are there airplane managers' magazines with brief, crappily written, executive summary blurbs against libraries?

2003-04-27T19:32:00.000-04:00

librarians at the local watering hole

when the Preservation Pub was named "Best Neighborhood Pub", the local information professionals were known to have played their part:

it draws not only the usual downtown barflies, but a diverse assortment of college students, artists, lawyers, yuppies, librarians, politicians, and big-shot developers

2003-04-27T19:24:00.000-04:00

Husband left behind longs to forgive Reid

I should really form or find a large collection of stories like these, of survivors of murder victims not simply out for the blood of the murderers...

Holmes, who is studying Christianity at Mercer University in Georgia, said this is his next step to get on with his life. "I can't ask for forgiveness of the things I do if I don't forgive this man," he said.
It's also important because he is teaching his and Angela's 6-year-old daughter, Ryane, about forgiveness.
"In order to get on with my life, I have to forgive this man. I just have to. And I want my daughter to see that forgiveness," he said. (The Leaf Chronicle)

2003-04-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

bob graham, democratic presidential candidate, and his journals

This Week this morning featured Bob Graham, the Senator from Florida.

While he and George S. talked policy, I didn't much care for what I was hearing. (Maybe he has a point with not being quite as aggressive on health care as Gephardt, but my heart doesn't want to believe it.)

But he got my attention again once George S. reminded me that this was the man who goes out and does odd jobs as a part of his politicking--he has been on the chain gang at the Orange Bowl, and over three hundred others. I want that job, the one where I get to do a whole bunch of other jobs but don't get yelled at.

The senator's clincher gimmick for me, though, is his apparently much-publicized and much-mocked note-taking. Sen. Graham has filled over 4,000 small spiral-bound notebooks with, as they mentioned on the show, details of what people tell him. Which to me seems

entirely appropriate for an elected official without a perfectly photographic memory
like something I would do. Rather, like something I do do.

George S. totally floored me when he asked something to the effect of: "Aren't you afraid that people will see you as obsessive?"

Dear sweet virgin Mary, Mother of God, I should only hope that our elected officials are occasionally "obsessive" enough to, say, bother to write down what other people tell them. Apparently it was this obsession that cost Graham the VP position on the ticket in 2000; the other place on the ticket, we will remember, was filled by a former journalist, who surely took notes at some point.

[Granted, Graham's note-taking is, well, maybe a little obsessive. He records events like showering and dressing. Let's also not forget that Graham was the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, so maybe there's more in those notes than we're bargaining for. He mentioned that the first 12 years worth of notebooks are available through some Floridian archive, but I haven't been able to locate them yet...]

All this brings me to a research interest... political personal information management. How do politicians get their info and what do they do with it? More on this later...

2003-04-25T15:30:00.000-04:00

executing paul

If I were smart, I would try to make this a persuasive letter. I would start off with a succinct line stating that I am for capital punishment and that normally I would support the upcoming execution of Paul Dennis Reid. But I’m not that smart, and my story is not a persuasive tale of transformation from supporting the death penalty to seeking a stay on the execution of Mr. Reid. The death penalty is a barbaric practice that has no place in our society.

I know this now. I knew it 18 years ago when my mother was murdered by a blow with a blunt instrument to the back of the head. I still hurt from her absence, as I know the survivors of the victims still hurt six years after these crimes. My heart goes out to them.

My heart also goes out to Paul, who will be yet another victim of senseless violence. My heart goes out to his family, who will survive him and live only with his memory. My heart aches because we have failed him, we have failed his family, and we have failed ourselves.

Paul is no poster child, and it is difficult to use his story as a persuasive tool. He has been convicted of seven brutal murders. His schizophrenic delusions make him more difficult to talk with than even the most difficult people in your life, and the stress of death row has not improved his people skills. But please remember that Paul is still a person, as are all the death row inmates. I will mourn his loss Tuesday morning; I will mourn his loss at our hands.

James Staub

2003-04-25T15:28:00.000-04:00

executing paul reid: what you can do

Paul Reid is set to be executed at 2 AM Tuesday morning. There may not be a whole lot that we can do about it, but here's four things we can try.

1. Attend the vigil. The Knoxville chapter of TCASK (http://www.tcask.org) will conduct a public sign holding in protest of the death penalty.

Monday, April 28th, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
- Speakers
- Remembrance of the Victims of Violence
- Information on the Death Penalty
- Prayer

Location: Supreme Court Building (sidewalk)
719 Locust Street in downtown Knoxville
(across from the Duncan Federal Building)

(Similar events will be held in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga)

2. Contact Governor Bredesen and Attorney General Paul G. Summers.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has a Web page with information on Reid and a button that will take you to an editable template letter that you can email directly to the Governor and print out to fax to the Attorney General.

http://capwiz.com/ncadp/issues/alert/?alertid=1934001

3. Write letters to the editors of The Knoxville News Sentinel, The Tennessean, The Daily Beacon, and the MetroPulse.

Simply forwarding the letter you sent to the Governor would be adequate.

(Keep in mind two caveats: the papers, of course, can't use their "power of executive clemency to stop Paul Reid's scheduled execution," and the MetroPulse won't be out until after the scheduled execution.)

letters@knews.com
http://tennessean.com/opinion/popups/submit-editor.shtml
letters@utk.edu
editor@metropulse.com

4. Pass this message and suggestions for quick action along to *anyone* you think would be interested in participating.

Thank you again for your concern and action.

More later,
James Staub

Talking points for letters
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcask/message/5833

Tennessean article on Reid
http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/03/04/31933297.shtml?Element_ID=31933297

TCASK Yahoo group (the main Web site hasn't been updated in a while...)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcask/

2003-04-24T16:25:00.000-04:00

trouble in ohio, trouble at home

there are two types of people in this world: those who understand that the public should have free access to government information and those that want to make a buck off information generated by taxpayer money by instituting acts of non-competition, killing off our shared civic life in order to get rich off other people's labor.

ALEC has sent a draft bill out to state legislators that would prohibit government agencies from publishing their own information electronically. They tried it last year, and no state passed it; they're trying it again in Ohio (HB 145), and it might get through.

So is a version of the Electronic Government Services Act on the table in Tennessee? I can't find anything right away by that name, but that don't mean it ain't there... there's reference in a link above to the bill appearing in the Tennessee legislature last year, but I can't even find a record of that.

2003-04-24T10:49:00.000-04:00

library of congress celebrates 203rd birthday!

Happy birthday, LoC!

(I can't seem to find an agenda for celebratory events. I wonder if they'll even get LoC a cake...)

2003-04-24T10:41:00.000-04:00

looming execution

Paul Dennis Reid is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, April 29. It bothers me that he wants to die. If there is a challenge to my stance against the death penalty, it cites cases where the person executed wanted to die.

But of course I can rationalize around it in this case. Mr. Reid is delusional. (There's a terrible irony--he fantasizes that the Government has coordinated a massive conspiracy against him while at the saem time so few people pay him the regard due any human being...) Reid doesn't apparently want to die out of guilt or some inevitable outcome of the crime--he wants to die to end the suffering of waiting to die. He wants to die because the system that intends to kill him has beaten him into wanting to die. And that can't be right.

Reid’s case is yet another example of the ways in which the death penalty system targets the most vulnerable subset of people who enter the criminal justice system. Reid’s physical isolation at Tennessee’s remote Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex in East Tennessee has been compounded by the internal isolation of a mentally ill individual who has not received adequate treatment for his disease. (NCADP)

2003-04-24T01:26:00.000-04:00

TN S-DMCA, cont.: grassroots opposition

TN Digital Freedom has put up a hasty page in response to all the haste surrounding the Tennessee Super-DMCA vote.

What can I do to help?

Show up! The Judiciary committee will be meeting again at 3:30pm, May 6th in room 12 and 14 of the Legislative Plaza in Nashville (map here) We need your support to let the committee know that this law is wrong for TN! We will probably arrange a preparatory meeting before going before the committee. If you would like to, please

Contact Gov. Bredesen, your TN state Senator and Representatives. Gov. Bredesen is tech-savvy, he graduated Harvard with a degree in physics and owned (owns?) a tech company. Many legislators admit they are not. Explain yourself and your position clearly, and briefly. Do not send bulk email to every legislative address you can find. These are ignored and quickly deleted. A brief (2-3 line), handwritten snail-mail is the very best way to communicate with an elected official.

Contact businesses and schools that would be adversely affected by this law. Many businesses and schools use NAT as a cost saving measure to share internet access. If enacted, this law would force schools and businesses to use other, more expensive means to connect to the internet. Legislators are sensitive to this.

Know a good lawyer? Not being one, I suspect we may need one. If you are, or know of a lawyer willing to donate time to this cause, please contact me.

2003-04-24T01:17:00.000-04:00

downsizing the government printing office

Despite heavy criticism, the OMB is going through with its plans to free agencies from printing documents exclusively through the GPO.

Why is this a problem? The Interagency Council on Printing and Publication Services (a council of the Public Printer, head of the GPO) says:

By enacting OMB's proposal, the government will end up spending more on printing than it currently does... The public will have far less access to documents they are entitled to, competition will actually be restricted and any semblance of consistency in presentation of information, formats, styles, cost efficiencies, will be lost. (govexec.com)

2003-04-23T13:01:00.000-04:00

porn in the library

of course I couldn't pass up posting something on this:

A Romanian public library is buying porn magazines to meet public demand. (ananova.com)

So why exactly couldn't they just get the Internet like all the American public libraries?

[infozo found this thanks, again, to LISNews.com]

2003-04-23T12:05:00.000-04:00

world book day, cont.: UK out of step

for some reason, it's not World Book Day in the UK (and some other commonwealth nations). They celebrated theirs way back on March 6th.

The origins of the day we now celebrate in the UK and Ireland come from Catalonia, where roses and books were given as gifts to loved ones on St. George’s Day – a tradition started some 80 years ago. (worldbookday.com)

But St. George's Day is April 23rd... You'd think England could get it's patron saint's day right.

More than that, it's the day Shakespeare died! Maybe even the day Shakespeare was born, fer chrissake! You know for a fact that the literate Brits could get that right. Probably the illiterate ones, too.

I'm having trouble finding out why this is. General Web searches aren't helping. I suppose if I wanted to get to the root of it, I'd have to get UK government documents. Any other suggestions/answers out there?

(Some other library-related days of note.)

2003-04-23T12:01:00.000-04:00

ok, so the official UNESCO title for today is "World Book and Copyright Day"

Copyright Day?

Sure, why the hell not. As I've mentioned before, the average literate human being encounters the murky world on a daily basis without even realizing it. And since World Book Day is geared towards kids, might as well introduce them to the legal underpinnings that make their fantasies about Buck Rogers, Harry Potter, et al. possible:

In Spain, a comic book, "Copy's Adventures," will be published for this occasion in order to raise awareness about copyright among students and young people. (UNESCO press release)

(Whoever can find a copy of this 1997(?) Spanish comic and send it to me will be lauded with praise and affection)

Despite the ridicule I've received from peers and professors, I've always thought that using literature intended for children is a great way to get familiar with a new field, discipline, or foreign language, for that matter. As far as we here at Infozo Industries, Inc. can surmise, there isn't much as far as analagous kiddie comic materials put out by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. But we're lazy and have only looked on the Web.

(There is a kid's site in the US Patent and Trademark Office Web pages, but it doesn't really educate kids on why we have patents or what they can and can't legally do with them so much as it shows them some actual information recorded in patents. But maybe that's exactly the introduction we all need.)

2003-04-23T11:48:00.000-04:00

South Africa: guns cheaper than books

It's World Book Day! (Who knew? Not me.)

It is cheaper in South Africa of today to buy a second hand AK-47 assault rifle than it is to buy a new JK Rowling Harry Potter book. That is the message author, satirist and social campaigner Pieter-Dirk Uys will bring to Cape Town today (23 April - World Book Day) as part of the campaign to have VAT removed from books.
From police and other sources he has discovered that it is possible to buy one of these weapons for as little as R150. Many paperback books, let alone hard cover editions, are considerably more expensive. (IOL, links mine)

[infozo heard this at LISNews.com]

2003-04-23T01:36:00.000-04:00

cute little metaphor that I don't believe

The DMCA (the federal one that became law) is in part an attempt to reconcile the ease with which people can break copyright law and the pandemic lack of understanding of intellectual property law amongst the general populace (before all this digtal content and equipment became available, the people who really had to worry about copyright law were big corporations with teams of lawyers; now we've got all the law designed for that audience as precedent, applied to a population that shouldn't be expected to swallow it whole). In its attempt to simplify the whole intellectual property thing, the DMCA has potentially severely limited the rights of everyday individual users.

A competing solution to the problem: people getting on the Information Super Highway should get Information Super Driver's Licenses.

(Sure, it's not an original sentiment or phrase, but it's the first time I'd thought of it...)

2003-04-23T01:14:00.000-04:00

wtf? blog*spot is weird

no one's probably noticed, but the links to the archives on this page are pretty screwy. Some have disappeared (the pages are still there, but the links won't generate no matter how hard I try). I've spent considerable time on this problem...

But just now, I go to load the page and this shows up:

huh?

(not to mention that somehow the datestamps appear to have reverted to GMT...)

2003-04-23T01:03:00.000-04:00

TN S-DMCA: main idea, no rambling

The EFF objection to the "Super DMCA" legislation seems to be this:

These proposals dramatically expand the power of entertainment companies, ISPs, cable companies and others to control what you can and can't connect to the services that you pay for. If enacted, they will slow innovation, impair competition and seriously undermine a consumer's right to choose what technologies they use in their homes.

2003-04-22T23:44:00.000-04:00

TN SDMCA, redux

For those of you who might be wondering why this is important: the DMCA is not a great piece of legislation, and it might even be unconstitutional in part (because of a possible chilling effect on free speech), but even it has a certain number of built-in safeguards. The state "Super DMCA" bills and laws, however, are

arguably more sweeping than the federal DMCA, which contains exemptions for reverse engineering, for encryption research and for librarians. The DMCA also created a process that the Library of Congress can use to identify additional exemptions; the state bills do not include such procedures. (CNET News.com)

In Tennessee, there appears to be an amendment in the works that softens the blow somewhat (but the file is awkward and can be difficult to read and I'm not sure if it's actually been put on the floor).

And for those of you not terribly concerned with the future of libraries, there's another problem in the proposed legislation that concerns your privacy: like the bill before the Texas legislature, ours makes it unlawful

To conceal, or to assist another to conceal, from any communication service provider or from any lawful authority the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication. (p. 2)

At least they've sidestepped one possible pitfall. By targeting the act of concealing the existence of a communication rather than the content of the communication, they're setting up a distinction between the practices of steganography and cryptography, and thus not creating a false dichotomy between communications and material protected by this legislation.

Ok, that was rambling... a couple of threads to be teased out here. By changing just a couple of words, we might have a situation in which Movie Company X couldn't legally protect its content using technical protection measures :). Change a couple of different words, and we'd have a truly odd situation in which "local art" would receive none of the protections of "mass-market art" (which is probably the case in the practical world anyway, but the law itself should be held to a higher standard...). The former might be classed "communications" and the latter "whatever it is that's protected by this law."

Problem is, though, that cryptography (the practice of making messages unintelligible to unintended recipients) and steganography (the practice of hiding the fact that there was a message at all) are not entirely separate things; many methods of secure communication employ both techniques, and many techniques have qualities of both practices. And, at their ontological base, both are simply obscure manipulations of a given symbol set.

The natural blending of cryptography and steganography could prove a sticky point in the current legislation. "They" just want to make sure that all communications are visible, whether or not they're intelligible, so that there's a trail in case wrongdoing is afoot. But this requirement should mean that the technology protection measures are themselves visible, even if encrypted somehow, which makes them less effective as protection measures, which... aw crap, I don't know... I'm all jumbled up... it's late... someone help me?

2003-04-22T18:23:00.000-04:00

Tennessee Super-DMCA

Ok, kiddies, after you write your federales to keep the DoD appropriately accountable, those of you in Tennessee still have work to do.

Investigate the so-called "Super-DMCA" (House Bill 457 and Senate Bill 213).

[more on this tonight after I get some food in me.]

2003-04-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

Department of Defense seeks to eliminate annual reports to Congress

Daniel Cornwall has compiled a list of "35 Annual Reports of Special Concern slated for deletion under the Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act of 2003." Pick one or two reports and ask your Congressperson to save them.

I remember an episode of the West Wing in which the elimination of certain government documents gets a witty treatment, but do I remeber any more details? No.

[infozo learnt this at lisnews.com]

2003-04-22T10:38:00.000-04:00

national libraries, national identities, and iraq

Imagine a horde of vandals burning [the Library of Congress] and the National Archives while an alien army guarded the FBI headquarters and the Treasury Department, and you may have some notion of how Iraqis felt when American troops erected a protective cordon around the ministries of oil and of the interior while permitting looters to demolish the National Library and ransack the National Museum.

This is just one of a few precious quotes from "Burn a Country's Past and You Torch Its Future" in Sunday's Washington Post.

The thesis is prectictable: when we destroy the documents (e.g., the Khmer Rouge slaughter of Cambodian libraries and librarians) or allow them to rot in neglect (e.g., the great library at Alexandria), we lose something important, something vital. Sure, there's an ass-ton of problems with a simple adherance to this viewpoint, but, hey, the article is well-written.

[infozo learnt this at lisnews.com]

2003-04-21T20:50:00.000-04:00

the boy who wouldn't let go of his birthday

not that it matters to anyone else, but I tend to pay more attention to articles and events I find on the web when they're unleashed on my birthday.

Can I form a collection of everything posted to the web on my birthday? Should I?

2003-04-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

weblogs are officially big time

while plodding through an exercise for my cataloging course (trying to figure out if "Web sites" is a sanctioned free-floating subdivision in Library of Congress Subject Headings), I found that "Weblogs" recently got an authority record in the Library of Congress authority file.

No. of items making use of this subject heading in the LoC catalog: 1.

2003-04-21T13:41:00.000-04:00

symbols

Why does the peace sign look that way?

Nuclear disarmament = N + D = + ?

2003-04-21T12:57:00.000-04:00

open questions re: iraqi museums and libraries

some questions that occur to me, but it's doubtful whether I'll try to get around to answering them anytime soon:

why would the citizens of a city famous for its libraries (at a time when Europe didn't really care for books or fancy larnin') destroy the collection of the world's oldest library? Is there social class division, e.g., a hatred for the intelligentsia? Is the destruction merely collateral damage of looters looking for saleable items? Well? Why?
The Library at Alexandria received a handsome sum from the previous Iraqi regime... what its there official stance on the war? On the looting? Are they doing anything to help?
Is release from the past by its wholesale slaughter considered a good thing by the imperalists of US-style democracy? An added benefit that they could, of course, never support publicly?

2003-04-19T15:47:00.000-04:00

thirteen days

I was determined to buy a dvd yesterday. I had $15 cash American in my pocket, and I wanted to buy $15 worth of American entertainment. (Honestly, what I really wanted was to buy some CD-R's with a capacity greater than 700MB so I could burn some rather large files that may or may not have been full-length American entertainment that may or may not have been acquired illicitly, but the store didn't have any of those...) The store (perhaps like some hypothetical file-sharing peer-to-peer network) had a lot of stuff, but nothing that both caught my eye and wouldn't be embarrassing to take to the counter. I can never remember anything that I really want to see when that much noisy information is right in front of my face. So, after an hour or more of browsing through the used titles, I settled on Thirteen Days.

I couldn't get over how this is a movie about signal-to-noise ratio.

The movie clearly presents a struggle between two conceptualizations of what war means and how to engage that meaning: the "embedded" side, largely represented by the admirals and generals, sees clearly that war is a game of winning or losing, and sees clearly that following established policies is means to that goal. Kennedy's team is the other side, which sees the activities of war as being a dynamic game of shared meaning and communication.

The exemplar scene of the struggle of these two conceptualizations of war involves a blockade of Cuba, a lone Russian ship (Grozny) running the blockade, the US reaction, and what all this means. For an hour, the US navy ship closest to the Grozny try using morse code via those shuttered lights boats use, flags, and a loudspeaker using Russian and receive no response. As tension escalates, the Admiral orders firing flares over the bow of the ship, despite orders from the President that no fires should be shot.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: You don't understand a thing, do you, admiral? This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocbulary the likes of whiich the world has never seen. This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Krushchev.

In response, the admiral looks as if the world's axes just sommersaulted.

Other stuff: Krushchev sends a letter to the President that offers to dismantle the missiles in exchange for a promise that the US will neither invade nor sponsor any invasion of Cuba. Its authenticity is surmised specifically because it wasn't polished; it was emotional and rambling. The big problem throughout the movie was the interpretation of actions--did the Grozny cross the line as a message, or were their orders to turn around simply not communicated to them? And who exactly is sending the signal? Kennedy was at odds with the Chiefs and made orders not in line with the message Kennedy wanted to send; and, of course, when you deal with explosives and high tech war toys, sometimes accidents really do happen. But how do you know which signals mean something?

So why couldn't K just call K on the phone and ask him? (An honest question...)

2003-04-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

"librarian chic", invading a vocabulary near you

word spy's word of the day: librarian chic.

[infozo learnt this from Dr. Blabbo.]

2003-04-14T10:54:00.000-04:00

tennessee on the charts again

This time for limiting free speech! Every year around Thomas Jefferson's birthday (April 13), the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression awards "Muzzles" to "those who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson's admonition that freedom of speech 'cannot be limited without being lost.'"

One of the awards went to the Tennessee Arts Commission for its blanket ban on art depicting nude figures in a Nashville gallery.
The other award was garnered by McMinnville City Administrator Herb Llewellyn, who barred public employees from writing letters to the editor or calling in to radio stations without his approval.

I guess word about the injunction against Knox County public librarians talking to the press didn't catch their attention...

2003-04-14T10:21:00.000-04:00

seymour lubetzky, cataloger extraordinaire, dies at 104

We've been reading a little about Mr. Lubetzky's feats at the Library of Congress in our cataloging course this semester...

[Crass thing: "Last year, just before his 104th birthday, the American Library Association awarded him an honorary lifetime membership, its highest honor." Yeah, like that wasn't a safe bet on their part...]

2003-04-12T11:51:00.000-04:00

collections I'd like to see

Marlene Dietrich and Ernest Hemingway apparently held a correspondence of letters, and now the JFK Presidential Library has them.

2003-04-11T20:45:00.000-04:00

peep-off 2003 knoxville, tn

I've been talking about holding a proper peep-off for years. Turns out that this is the year, my friends!

It's the 50th anniversary of the Just Born yellow marshmallow peep, and the candy company that makes 'em is sending two Peeps Fun Buses throughout our great nation over the course of 2003.

Important dates:
February 3 - February 9 San Diego, CA (Sorry, Heather)
April 21 - April 27 Nashville, TN
August 18 - August 24 Knoxville, TN
November 10 - November 16 Charleston, SC/Savannah, GA
November 24 - November 30 Sacramento, CA

Important rules:
The Point: eat more peeps than anyone else.

The contest runs for 30 minutes.
At the end of 30 minutes there is a 5-minute "cooling-off" period, during which contestants must hold down their previously ingested peeps. Anyone puking during this period is disqualified.
Puking peeps is a disqualification unless the contestant re-ingests the puked peeps.
The original contest organizers specified that nothing could be consumed in addition to the peeps--no washing them down, in other words. Dave Smith got a special Sacramento addition whereupon the contestants could drink Pabst. Over time this particular rule has seen the most backsliding. Dennis, for example, has used Diet Pepsi in the last two years--not to wash them down per se but to cleanse the palete.

So, I'll go ahead and announce that the 50th anniversary Knoxville Peep-off will happen at 11AM Saturday, August 23, 2003, wherever they park the Peepmobile.

If anybody can get in good with the Peep peeps driving the bus and humiliating themselves for a living, tell 'em we'll get 'em drunk for free.

Much thanks to champignon!

2003-04-11T20:00:00.000-04:00

why are we in space?

Over a month ago (on my birthday), Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope asked "Why do we travel in space?"

The space program, along with the abolition of the death penalty, is one of the few pursuits whose necessity and moral backing I hardly ever question. With the death penalty, I feel awkward exploring the critiques of my position; if I were to start developing rhetorical arguments to be used to persuade others, I would somehow be giving up the absolute moral clarity with which I see this problem. The space program, however, is open to this exploration (if for no other reason than there are a million ways to skin the cat of space, and that some ways are better than others).

And so I've heard the arguments that it's not terribly cost-efficient, that the scientific experiments conducted on manned spaceflights might as well be carried out on earth, that neither velcro nor tang actually came out of our space travels, that colonization of other solar systems would take the kind of time in which human civilizations are born and die. But to say "I'd be hard put to say we should send people into space just because it's fun," well, that's just crazy talk.

2003-04-08T16:13:00.000-04:00

awww... cool...

aurora as viewed from the International Space Station.

According to ISS Science Officer Don Pettit, auroras can be "like giant green amoebas" crawling over the earth... Creepy. Pretty, but creepy.

2003-03-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

self-imposed assignment

Find the original. This means fessing up that I don't entirely understand the citation notation, and that I might resort to using print materials.

The quote: The purpose of the First Amendment is to secure

"the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources." Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1, 20.

2003-03-28T12:19:00.000-05:00

CIPA and the nature of obscenity

the Supreme Court heard oral arguments earlier this month on the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of the Children's Internet Protection Act.

There's an interesting footnote in the amicus brief submitted by "CITIES, MAYORS AND COUNTY COMMISSIONERS" that got me thinking on that circular path of "exactly where in a document does information happen?" In this case, "exactly where in an image does obscenity happen?" Apparently, different counties at different times have located obscenity in different places, hence laws promoting the sales of pasties and g-strings... What do these precedents (and their failures) have to offer our conceptualization of information?

It is not difficult to imagine that even if technology was available that would perfectly filter Internet access to the satisfaction of the district court in this case, some plaintiffs would invoke the argument that such filtering is not good enough because it is too broad. They might argue that it is necessary to have filtering programs that filter each word on each individual page such that even a child pornography webpage could be accessed, with only the very specific offending words and parts of the pictures blacked out, leaving all of the “constitutionally protected speech” on the page untouched. The picture of the child’s face would be viewable, for example, with only the clear offending content of the photograph blacked out. (n., pp. 11-2.)

2003-03-14T16:46:00.000-05:00

nyt news tracker, redux

I thought they were working on this thing? But somehow my "Libraries" alerts yielded this article:

International: China's Sparkle Bedazzles a Visiting Castro
When Fidel Castro came to China for his first state visit in almost a decade this week, the reunion was warm but a bit awkward as well.

Needless to say, the article has nothing to do with libraries or librarians. No cognates of those words are even used in the article...

2003-03-04T11:28:00.000-05:00

grampa rant i can't wait to give

why, when I was in school, we had to sift through thousands of documents filled with all kinds of irrelevant crap, just to find the one silenian nugget that fit well into our theses. Hell, if you actually spent the time to try to figure something out, become truly educated, you'd be guaranteed that no one would spend the time trying to figure out what you'd figured out. The world just moved faster back then, widening gyres and all...

Yep, those were the good ol' days. Did I mention the snow I had to slouch through?

2003-03-02T15:37:00.000-05:00

birthdays and the power of "browsing"

my birthday is this coming Friday. I'm very excited, vene though there are no set plans as of yet, and there will be no personal performances by Paul McCartney or the other surviving Beatle. I have been calling people today to make sure they get up here, and that they have a place to stay.

I also read charles' favorite poem. While there at the poem site, I decided to search for poems containing "birthday," and hit on Anthony Hecht's "The Transparent Man". I didn't remember who Anthony Hecht was, but the name sounded very familiar, and I ended up getting into a poem for library school students. A character portrait poem, a soliloquy delivered by a 30-year old leukemia patient trapped in her bed to the audience of a single bookmobile librarian. She warns that the structure and qualities of trees are far more complicated than would ever be guessed when we see them covered in snow; so, too, by association, the world described by the books on the cart.

It set me on to wondering how to deal
With such a thickness of particulars,
Deal with it faithfully, you understand,
Without blurring the issue.

2003-02-24T13:52:00.000-05:00

billboards

although not nearly as broadly entertaining as Earth First!'s recent Knoxville billboardry, I was personally tickled on my way into work by an unintentional pairing of the RBB&B Circus with an American Family Assn. pornography billboard.

Fig. 1. Billboards gracing the intersection of Main St. (which many think is Cumberland Ave.) and Henley St.

Fig. 2. Billboards placed in the side parking lot of Baptist Hospital on Council Pl. (which I think is also Sevier Ave.).

Many years ago, under the nom de plume Alexi Hasbro, I had a Lazlo Toth-like correspondence with the AFA, in which I tried unsuccessfully to get $50 to cover printing costs of an anti-porn newsletter. I'm so glad they saved that money for this billboard!

BRAUN	7021	2.21%
DEAN	139360	43.87%
EDWARDS	10146	3.19%
GRAHAM	7113	2.24%
KERRY	49973	15.73%
KUCINICH	76000	23.93%
GEPHARDT	7755	2.44%
LIEBERMAN	6095	1.92%
SHARPTON	1677	0.53%
OTHER	6121	1.93%
UNDECIDED	6378	2.01%
	317647	100.00%