By David Pescovitz at 8:58 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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MilesTag is a homebrew laser tag gaming system that its makers say "is comparable to the best commercial systems on the market (honestly, we think it already surpasses most of those systems in both capability and flexibility) and can be built for a fraction of the cost of a commercial system."
"Many of the functions and capabilities of the MilesTag design were modeled after the MILES 2000 weapon training system currently in use by US Armed Forces. A lot of inspiration and ideas are also drawn from computer- and console-based First Person Shooter games and Role Playing games. Unlike most DIY, consumer and commercial laser tag systems, MilesTag uses a digitally encoded signal that allows differentiation between up to 32 players and 7 teams, and supports a wide range of weapon types, including mines, area-denial and even non-conventional weapons. Damage inflicted by each weapon is scalable..."
Link (via Gizmodo)
By David Pescovitz at 8:52 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Carmelo Cisabella of Rome is owed a half-million dollars by his health insurance company resulting from a claim filed a decade ago after he was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. According to Reuters, the insurance company agreed on the damages but are in no hurry to pay him. Cisabella took them to court, but was told it would take fourteen months for a ruling. The problem is that Cisabella has a spinal infection and doctors predict that he'll be dead within six months.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 8:40 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Drawn! is a new group blog about illustration, art, and cartooning. It's only been online for five days and I absolutely love it. So far, the posts include links to the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery, a DIY mini binder sketchbook, Batman logos from history, vintage magazine cover-art, former Spumco artist Katie Nice's doodles (left), and much more. I am hooked.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 8:18 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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In a new study, cognitive scientists show that humans can usually track just four mental variables when trying to solve a problem. In the journal Psychological Science, cognitive scientists from the University of Queensland and Griffith University report on a study where they tested these limits of processing capacity. It's tough to measure because people commonly break down complex problems into manageable chunks. For example, a baker doesn't have to think: "break egg one into bowl, break egg two into bowl, etc." Instead, he'll track it as one chunk: "add all the eggs." To measure their test subjects, the researchers devised problems involving statistical interactions between fictitious variables. The details of the test are vague, but apparently the problems couldn't immediately be broken into "bite-size chunks." From the press release:
The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.
After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, "I kept losing information," and "I just lost track."
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 6:15 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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BoingBoing reader Brian who lives and works perilously close to an active volcano sez,
Okay, there's no national coverage yet (they're trying to figure out what to say), but Mount St Helens did something. A big cloud of steam and ash that is trying to be classified (eruption? emission?) busted out of the crater. We saw it from work. Bye bye, Tulutson Glacier.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:26 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Here's a childhood monkey attack recollection that was posted on a blog before the horrible chimp attack in Southern California. It involves a boy at summer camp and a vicious organ grinder monkey named Spud.
Spud trailed me by twenty feet or so, and the door was, well, now that I'd jumped up on the porch of the Nature Hut it was just two giant steps away. I grabbed the screen door and threw it open just as Spud leapt up onto the end of the porch. I had about three seconds, plenty of time to dash into the Nature Hut and close the door behind me. A detail from a bad dream, but true: I threw the screen door open only to find the second door locked. I tried to open it--chunka, chunka, chunka---just as Spud, still shrieking, leapt into the air.
And directly he was on my shoulders. I raised my arms and stumbled away from the door. Spud grabbed the collar of my t-shirt and was pulling on it, his feet on my back, now both of us shrieking.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 4:05 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Michael Geist sez,
A substantial group of Canada's security technology companies have sent a public letter to the Industry and Heritage Ministers to express concern about the potential for DMCA-like legislation in Canada. Years of discussions and no one bothered to ask these guys what they think.
The public letter has been posted online.
A release and backgrounder.
This might be a sign of Canada's technology community waking up to the implications of copyright reforms that directly impact their businesses.
By Cory Doctorow at 4:03 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Donturn sez, "David Nunez has put together a great guide to attending SXSW this year. He's even included his phone number to help out with questions and suggestions!"
Last year I batted about 50/50 sitting in on good/miserable panels. I will absolutely not name names, but I was furious at certain panelists who clearly prepared nothing for their session and expected to wing it or fill their entire hour with Q&A ("So... I think I'd like this to be a conversation... any questions?" grrr...) . I frequently hopped between panel rooms when the sessions started to stink; my advice to you would be: express selfishness with your time... if the panel isn't interesting or useful, I'd leave to find one that is... You should only feel guilty for the seconds it takes to step over your neighbor as you make your hasty retreat, especially if the panelist didn't do his homework.
If I may be frank: The problem, which is a blessing and a curse, is that this industry has an abundance of relatively young and inexperienced trailblazers. They have incredible ideas, have the "audacity" to actually execute on them, and create amazing results. These people are honest-to-god genius guerilla marketers and technologists.
Unfortunately, very rarely do they know "how to be a panelist," and they even more rarely have the modesty to admit they don't know everything, much less haven't done respectable research on their so-called "expertise."
Link
(
Thanks, Donturn!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:02 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Neil of Comicology has an 11MB podcast about a getting attacked by a monkey in Pennsylvania when he was in the seventh grade.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 3:02 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Mmmmm I can smell the hairspray and cigarettes already. Magnificent gallery of posters from New York's Danceteria, an '80s mecca for new wave music and weird / hip / artsy culture. Featured artists and personalities include Nina Hagen (shown here), Sonic Youth, Gene Loves Jezebel, Laurie Anderson, Richard Hell, and many others.
As you browse the scans, remember: at the time, design was 100% Photoshop-free, making these all the more awesome.
Link to gallery. I'm pretty sure this image is my favorite: Link. (Thanks, Jason Grier).
Previously: Awesome hip-hop flyers from the '70s, '80s.
Update: Robin says,
Nina Hagen is still around and recently set up her own fashion label "Mother of Punk". She hasn't let go of her old look, just made it all new again.
Link.
And BB reader B.D. sez:
Nina Hagen is indeed still kicking. She's playing a live show in Seattle tomorrow night at Neumo's. She'll be in Portland on Saturday night. This is part of her "50th Universal Bearthday Concert Bash".
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 2:20 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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A recent NonSequitur strip calls a newspaper a "dinosaur blog" -- bahahahahhaha!
Link
(
via Kottke)
Update: Jon's made a nifty graphic illustrating the "dinosaur blog" notion.
By Xeni Jardin at 2:12 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Ellen Weintraub of the FEC says:
Bloggers of America, chill. Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to "crack down" on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated.
First of all, we're not the speech police. We don't tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There's got to be some money involved, or it's out of our jurisdiction. Second, let's get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of "general public political advertising."
The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we're under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do.
Link to CNET op-ed. Previously:
The coming crackdown on blogging?
By Cory Doctorow at 2:10 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Bob Stein writes,
The Institute for the Future of the Book and Flickr.com issued a call today for photos and stories documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates Project in New York's Central Park. Using Flickr's unique photo-sharing platform, the Institute for the Future of the Book will gather pictures of the Gates from anyone and everyone who wants to contribute. The aim is to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine - one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. "The photographs are a jumping off point for further exploration," says Ben Vershbow of the institute. "Ultimately, we are interested in collecting anything that can be shared over the web - film, audio, text - parodies and remixes."
While the photos and stories are being collected, the institute will encourage discussion and debate on how best to present the archives in hopes of finding new, unexpected ways to view and bring meaning to the content. The institute also welcomes the possibility of collaboration with designers, developers and web curators.
"This project is the beginning of a long-term exploration for us," says Bob Stein, director of the Institute. "Through this work, we are asking: how do we use social software to create works that are in the spirit of the web - i.e. free-form, ad hoc, always evolving, and driven by people's enthusiasm to share - but are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value? It is that tension - between frozen and fluid works - that we aim to explore. We are excited to see the ideas people will bring to the table."
Link
(
Thanks, Bob!)
By Xeni Jardin at 2:02 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Boing Boing reader Tom from MusicThing blog
says,
"A couple of weeks back, Boing Boing linked to my story about a hamster-powered MIDI sequencer. That was nothing. Here is my post about a homebrew synth with a patchbay which is controlled by wriggling live worms. And apparently they enjoy the electrical stimulation. The guy sells kits so you can build your own."
Link to the din datin dudero website, including MP3s produced by the squirmy little electrocritters.
By Xeni Jardin at 1:48 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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18-year old college student Parvin Dhaliwal is believed to be the first person in America convicted of a crime under state law for illicit music and movie downloads. He pled guilty to charges of possession of counterfeit marks (unauthorized copies of intellectual property).
Under an agreement with prosecutors, Dhaliwal was sentenced last month to a three-month deferred jail sentence, three years of probation, 200 hours of community service and a $5,400 fine. The judge in the case also ordered him to take a copyright class at the University of Arizona, which he attends, and to avoid file-sharing computer programs.
"Generally copyright is exclusively a federal matter," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil liberties group. "Up until this point, you just haven't seen states involved at all."
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 1:39 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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BoingBoing reader
Reason says, " William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved!"
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 12:29 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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This Chinese drive comes in a book-shaped enclosure with a video-out port. Plug it into your TV or monitor and it pops up a GUI that lets you browse and play back your photos, movies and audio.
Link
(
via Red Ferret Journal)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:23 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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This is a fantastic gallery of Soviet-era anti-alcohol posters -- a lost cause that inspired lovely graphics.
Link
(
via We Make Money Not Art)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:14 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Rudy Rucker sez, "I'm back from being offline 3 weeks in Micronesia and I'm blogging 20,000 words of notes and a bunch of photos, maybe you could mention it on bOING so my old reader know I'm active again. Today a topless (but dressed) girl with a pet bat chewing betelnut..."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:07 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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Yesterday I wrote about a couple of monkey vs. human skirmishes. But in India, the war between higher and lower primates is waged on a massive scale. This article reports that "Unpleasant man-monkey faceoffs are becoming a terrifying part of everyday life across India."
Purnima Verma always scans the outdoors carefully through her heavily
grilled front window before leaving her home in Ghaziabad, Uttar
Pradesh. She'll step out only if she doesn't see a rhesus monkey.
Even then it's only with a heavy stick. The 35-year-old homemaker
doesn't want a repeat of what happened in July, when a monkey attack
left her with a mangled arm, a scratched face and a ripped ear.
Link (Thanks, Tom!)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:05 pm Tuesday, Mar 8
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This remix of Da Vinci's Last Supper with Katamari Damacy made me snort beverage keyboardwards.
Link
(
Thanks, Kirsten!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:46 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Jewish Fashion Consipiracy has a great range of funny Jewish tees and stuff for the
Heeb Magazine generation -- I also like the knickers that say "A GREAT MIRACLE HAPPENED HERE" and the "YO SEMITE" shirts.
Link
(
Thanks, Sarah!)
By David Pescovitz at 11:45 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Harvard is rejecting 119 applicants who "hacked" (note the quotes) into the site of admissions management software vendor ApplyYourself to see if they had been accepted into the MBA program. From the Boston Globe:
A half dozen business schools were swamped by a wave of electronic intrusions Wednesday morning, after a computer hacker posted instructions on a BusinessWeek Online message board. Harvard is the second school to say definitively that it will deny the applications of proven hackers. The first was Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, where only one admission file was targeted...
''Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world," (dean Kim B.) Clark said in yesterday's Harvard statement. ''To achieve that, a person must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass -- an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this website have failed to pass that test."...
One admissions consultant, Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to elite US business schools, said he thought Harvard was overreacting.
''What they did was stupid, but that's all it was," Kreisberg said. ''This seems needlessly harsh and rigid. I think it's inflexible, and it's wrong, and it doesn't treat individual circumstances."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:14 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Researchers at Stanford University are planning to create mice with brains made entirely of human brain cells from aborted fetuses. The mice would be used to study Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
...the university's ethics committee approved the research, under certain conditions. Prof Henry Greely, the head of the committee, said: "If the mouse shows human-like behaviours, like improved memory or problem-solving, it's time to stop."
Link (Thanks, James!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:53 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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The
crack smoking UCLA professor who sits in monkey cages and tries to teach monkeys how to smoke crack is probably very excited about the following news.
tinyjudas says: "Guardian Online story about the Ig (thanks, Dan!) Nobel Prize being awarded to a man investigating homosexual necrophilia in ducks. apparently he watched as a duck flew straight into his window, killing itself, before another male duck came up and had its way with it several times."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:38 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Designer Milton Glaser presented a speech titled "10 Things I have Learned" at the AIGA Voice Conference in 2002. The things he talked about apply to anyone, not just designers.
Number 2: IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceeding well prepared for my old age’ he said.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:17 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Last month I
wrote about the questionable legality of the Russian site, allofmp3.com, which sells non-DRM'd songs for about twenty cents apiece. Today the BBC reports that Moscow prosecutors who looked into the matter say they "will not take legal action because Russian copyright laws do not cover digital media." The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries is displeased with the decision.
Link (Thanks, Raanan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:05 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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The iNo is an iPod "substitute" made by grafting a pair of cheap-lloking headphoens to an old Apple mouse, as a kind of wry commentary on the expense of an iPod and the ephemerality of Apple's designs.
Link
(
via We Make Money Not Art)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:55 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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John sez, "still in beta, CommonBits.org is drawing on powerful new downloading, indexing and newsfeed technology under an activist agenda to help independent audio, video and other media find wider distribution and their natural audience. Go to the site and you find all kinds of content, from 'The Daily Show' clips of Jon Stewart monologues to 'Democracy Now' broadcasts."
Link
(
Thanks, John!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:52 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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If your music player has a Bluetooth out, but your car stereo only has a cassette deck, you can use this Bluetooth cassette adapter and get higher fidelity than you'd get with one of those low-power FM trasnmitters and fewer wires than you would with a traditional cassette adapter.
Link
(
via Red Ferret Journal)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:39 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Dave Barry reveals the contents of his gadget bag in a funny piece on Gizmodo.
I have a Sprint network card that plugs into my notebook so I can get on the Internet anywhere. That is the good news. The bad news is, it’s pretty slow. It is just now receiving radio signals originally broadcast by Marconi.
My phone is a Treo 600. It’s a bit too big, but I like that it syncs easily with my computers, and it has everything in it – contacts, calendars, email, and a really, really bad camera, which I call “The CrapCam.” I take pictures on it and post them to my blog, mainly because the quality of the photos enrages the blog readers and causes them to rant in an entertaining manner.
Link
(
via Ambiguous)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:38 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Last month, I
wrote about a Finnish blogger whose website had been censored when he wrote something critical of a local school headmaster and the headmaster got the cops to take the page down. Now the coppers have backed down from their absurd, anti-speech position:
I've just been informed by Tuomas that the Deputy National Police Commissioner had found the demand made by the Oulu police to remove my posts to be unlawful. He had also admitted something that to me seems an important point: "the law regarding the freedom of speech and mass media is not known well enough among the police." This to me is what the whole mess was about: I never considered the officer in question to be evil, he just didn't know the law he was wielding.
That in itself is a serious matter, naturally, since the police of all people should know the law by which they come to dealings with people. However, I'm happy to find the police in this case willing to admit that a mistake has been made.
Link
(
Thanks, Janne!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:34 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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The OrphanWorks project is collecting comments for the Copyright Office in which people tell their stories to build the case for a new copyright law that would let the public rescue "orphaned" material -- works where no copyright holder could be found for out-of-print stuff. On the FreeCulture blog, they're publishing some of the comments they've collected -- if you haven't commented yet,
you should!
The DigiBarn Computer Museum is engaged in an online project to tell the
whole 30 year story of personal computing, its culture and people. We have
over 50,000 objects on our web site, many of which are "orphaned works"
(scans of brochures, photographs, video and audio clips, text, articles,
etc) from now defunct firms. We have a statement on every page on our
site offering to remove works if the original copyright holder objects. In
5 years we have never once been challenged about any one of the works on
our web site suggesting that a large part of these materials are in fact
bona fide orphaned works. However, as professional and amateur historians
we could very much utilize a formal definition of what constitutes an
orphaned work. This will greatly clarify use of this material and the work
of this large group of historians...
A couple of years ago, my in-laws were going to celebrate their 50th
wedding anniversary, so my wife and I decided to throw them a party. In
preparation, I took old portrait photos of my in-laws to a local photo shop
to have enlargements made (we wanted to display the enlargements at the
party). The photo shop refused to make copies of the photos,
since...according to the shop, the shop that took the photos still had the
copyright, and they could get in trouble for making copies. The facts that
a) the photos were at least 40 years old, b) we had no idea what portrait
studio originally took the photos, much less if it still existed, c) my
in-laws *hired* the studios to take the photos in the first place, and d)
the enlargements would only be displayed in a private party...all made no
difference. The shop's fear of the potential penalties for even this
extraordinary slight chance of copyright violation kept them for performing
the enlargements (not to mention making a hundred bucks in the process).
So we don't get to have a nice little surprise at a family party, and a
local business doesn't get to make a little money, all because of an
unfortunate clause in copyright law.
Link
(
Thanks, Gavin!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:12 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Cory Ondrejka is VP of Product Development for Linden Labs, the company that makes the massively multiplayer online world
Second Life, where users are expected to create, improve upon and trade objects using a rich scripting environment. Alice Taylor was at his speech yesterday at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco and took notes on his fascinating spiel on the universe of user-created content growing inside of Second Life.
Second Life allows users to collaborate and teach each other. Learning scripting: it’s easy, you have immediate feedback, and other people are willing to help. People spread knowledge and do FAQs. SL really encourages this. As an example: skydiving classes, ingame. Players sell lessons and parachutes. Skydiving became a huge fad in SL for a while. Abbot’s Skydiving sells equipment and airplanes to go up in. An elevator to 4000 feet. Total freedom to create. A service.
Another example of collaborative business: VERTU is a group in RL. They contacted the EFF and wanted to do a fundraise in SL. They raised 1700 bucks. Next month (for Charity X) they did 1900. Then for Hurricane Relief = 2000 US. People in these spaces recognise the virtual currency has value. Philanthropy, giving .. having an impact back on the RL is a real possibility.
Tringo, the current SL fad. A cross between tetris and bingo. Someone in SL wanted a fun social game to play ingame. He created Tringo. In the 3 months since, he’s generated the equivalent of 4000 US in Tringo. He just licensed the realworld distribution rights to Tringo to a mobile game company. Because SL lets him maintain the rights to his IP, he can distribute said rights in the real world, although apparently part of the deal is that he continues to manage the rights individually ingame.
Virtual Hallucinations. Done by a medical doctor who built a place that looks sort of like a hospital. It plays voices from interviews with schizophrenics as you move around the environment. It recreates hallucinations similar to those experienced by schizophrenics: voices from objects, objects that don’t actually exist. There’s a survey at the end. Did this explain schizophrenia to you? Did you find this disturbing? He got about 700 survey responses (for free) so far. He took real-life doctors and schizophrenics families through.. it’s early prototype work, but it’s a very powerful direction for the game to go in.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 5:55 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Bruce Sterling's Wired column this month is about his travels in Belgrade in Serbia/Montenegro, a city that is dominated by counterfeit goods dealers.
The Chinese-run shops in Serbia and Montenegro, known as kineskae, carry products in every possible variant of honesty and dishonesty. Running shoes most Westerners have never heard of - Die Xian, Gui Ren, Renke - sit alongside knockoffs with Nike-like names such as Wink, not to mention blatant acts of deceit like my bogus shoes. Of course, you can also buy real Nikes for the crippling international price. The shiny, glass-fronted stores that sell them grimly alert shoppers to their anti-shoplifting technology; mom-and-pop kineskae make no such fuss.
Kineskae represent the former Yugoslavia's choice to step outside the global economy and embrace the criminal underground. Phony brand-name items - which account for 6 percent of international trade - have become an integral part of the pernicious flow that includes narcotics, small arms, oil, and the sex trade. They have the relationship to genuine products that corrupt government has to legitimate representation, rigged balloting to fair election, captive press to free expression. Bogus products are part and parcel of the worldwide marketplace - more so than dated symbols of globalization like Coca-Cola.
Serbia and Montenegro isn't a failed state like Iraq or Sudan, but a faked state. This purported country, which has had serious problems settling on an anthem and a flag, is best understood as a giant covert operation, like Iran-Contra or Enron. Nobody is less likely than a Serbian to collaborate with the ever-more-anxious overlords of intellectual property: the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Customs Organization, and Nike's own clique, the US Council for International Business. For all their treaties and trade agreements, these paper tigers might as well be waving bread sticks as billy clubs.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 5:53 am Tuesday, Mar 8
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Andy "Waxy" Baio -- blogger extraordinaire -- writes about his mother, who runs the journalism department at Oxnard College. She's just gotten wind that the school administration is using its budget crisis to eliminate the whole journalism program -- including the student paper, something that Waxy attributes to the student paper's criticism of the administration. There's a public meeting on this tonight to discuss this, and Waxy's mom is tipping off the local press while Waxy works the blogosphere. If you're in Southern California tonight, you should turn up -- it's bound be a blast.
This isn't the first clash between the administration and the journalism program. For the past year, they've grown increasingly upset with the student-run campus newspaper. The President publicly referred to it as a "tabloid" and "yellow journalism." Students have been advised to "stay away from hard news stories." After one article discussed shortcomings of the campus library, all issues of the paper were removed from school grounds overnight. And, in a clear violation of First Amendment rights, the administration decided to form an advisory board to read and review all stories before they went to print.
The budget crisis facing community colleges is serious, but it's being used as a scapegoat to remove the student body's right to free speech.
Before my mom got her Master's degree, she worked in public relations. As you can imagine, the board meeting tonight should be very interesting. So far, the LA Times, LA Opinion, Daily News, Ventura County Star, KEYT News (CBS), and three radio stations are covering the event. The First Amendment Coalition, Student Press Law Center, and MECHA will all be represented, along with the local and state divisions of the JACC.
Link
