The negotiations on the Telecoms Package may come to a close this Wednesday. The Council of the European Union is still pushing for 'three strikes"' policies in Europe but is also attempting to allow private corporations to restrict citizens' Internet access. Will the European Parliament continue to hide behind a disputable legal argumentation provided by the rapporteur Catherine Trautmann, and accept the unacceptable for the future of Internet access in Europe?

A campaign page has been set up to allow everyone to contact Members of the European Parliament and urge them to refuse any proposal from the Council allowing "three strikes" policies in Europe, and to explicitly protect EU citizens' freedom to access the Net.

The new version of the compromise amendment presented by the Council of the EU still allows for restrictions of Internet access such as "three strikes" policies in Europe. Moreover, contrarily to the Parliament's version, the Council's proposal also permits private corporations to restrict Internet access, notably enabling entertainment industries to pressure Internet service providers in order to police the Net.

Somebody is going to lose the World Series. It's true. I have heard this is how these things work. But, when the inevitable happens, where do all their commemorative hats, T-shirts, shoelaces, giant foam hands, etc. go? After all, nobody knows which team will win. To meet the instant, post-game demand, manufacturers have all that championship memorabilia--for both teams--made up and sitting in a warehouse before the final game is even a twinkle in an announcer's eye.

If you guessed that it ends up in a dump, you'd be wrong. Mental_floss investigated and found the World Vision, an international Christian charity, gets the losing gear from baseball, football and basketball.

The merchandise doesn't go to waste, people living in poverty receive new, clean clothes, and the clothing makers recoup some of their losses--they get tax credits for the charitable donations. Why don't the clothes go to needy families in the United States? Overseas donation is part of the agreement between World Vision and the leagues. The farther away the clothing is, the less likely it is to offend a losing player (or heartbroken Buffalo Bills fan).

In fact, fear of fan alienation used to keep the MLB from donating. Up until two years ago, they required all inaccurate championship clothing be destroyed.

Building a bit off the "conflusion" (Bravo, btw, insert) post from yesterday, I'm going to launch right into something near and dear to my heart: The way biased and badly done health journalism can really mess up the people who read it.

Biased and badly done are two very different things. I don't have data on this, but I think it's fair to say that, when the main-stream media (which, BoingBoing aside, includes me) gets a health story wrong, it usually isn't trying to be intentionally wack. Trouble is, whatever the intent, it leaves you--the reader--in the same place. Conflused.

Luckily, there are people working to help you. Like, for instance, the good folks at Behind the Headlines, a project of the British National Health System that does Q&A, myth busting and in-depth explanations on the science behind top health news. I first found out about this from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog, which is, in itself, a great site everybody ought to be reading.

Dr. Alicia White, one of the aforementioned "folks" behind Behind the Headlines, has a wonderful primer on the questions you should be asking yourself every time you read health news. Until we police ourselves into doing a consistently better job, sorting the wheat from the chaff is (unfortunately) up to you. This will help. Plus, it's a fun read:

If you've just read a health-related headline that's caused you to spit out your morning coffee ("Coffee causes cancer" usually does the trick) it's always best to follow the Blitz slogan: "Keep Calm and Carry On". On reading further you'll often find the headline has left out something important, like "Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumours eventually. (Study funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)".

Evocative image courtesy Flickr user bdjsb7, under CC.

Photos, above and after the jump, shared with Boing Boing by Audrey N. Carpio of The Philippine Star. Her first-person account from the ongoing disaster follows, and includes recommendations on how you can help the victims. She shot the photos in this post two days after the typhoon, on a relief drive in a town called Tumana. Link to Flickr set.

Typhoon Ondoy by Audrey Carpio

Typhoon Ondoy, aka Tropical Storm Ketsana dumped 40 cm of rain on the Philippines last Saturday before he/she left to wreak watery havoc upon Vietnam and Cambodia. But Manila and its surrounding environs are still in various states of calamity, with many parts of the city still submerged under dirty brown water and others, while drying out, caked in leptospirosis-inducing mud. The government and its presidentiables have been slow to act upon what could've been their Hurricane Katrina-hero moment but quick to seize upon relief efforts for electioneering. Instead, it is thanks to the generosity and ingenuity of the Filipino people who mobilized themselves through Twitter and Facebook that hundreds of thousands of victims have been fed, clothed and sheltered.

As early as Saturday evening, when people began to realize that floods have flashed rather quickly and videos of drowning trucks emerged on YouTube, relief plans grew almost organically on the networks. Tweets encouraging people to gather food, blankets, and clothing for donations were some of the earliest; by the next day there was an updatable and sharable Google spreadsheet on all the drop-off and volunteer centers; by Monday, almost all status updates and tweets had to do with emergency hotline numbers, relatives of friends who were stranded on a rooftop, and traffic advisories warning which roads were impassable. A Google map of people in need of rescuing was uploaded, although its usefulness is questionable, considering the general low-techness of the National Disaster Coordinating Council's rescue squads they only had 13 rubber boats with which to deploy to the affected barangays †or villages (to put it into perspective, 1.9 million people were inundated with flood water, nearly 380,000 have been evacuated into schools, churches and other emergency shelters, and 246 people have died.

I reviewed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for Good. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's an excerpt of my review:

William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family’s corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

Read the rest of my review at GOOD.

(It was very exciting to read that William's favorite magazine is Make!)

Ayittey, whose famed "cheetahs vs. hippos" TED speech I've blogged before, is co-founder of an inspired new project called Radio Free Africa. (thanks, Emeka Okafor)

GO Campaign is a US nonprofit dedicated to bettering the lives of orphans and vulnerable children throughout the world. We believe education and vocational training can be inspiring and life-changing. The GO Ingenuity Award has been established to encourage the sharing of innovation and invention with marginalized youth eager for a better future.

GO Campaign announced they will award a maximum of five GO Ingenuity Awards (GIA) to artists, inventors, and small business entrepreneurs to stimulate the next generation of "makers" and turn makers into role models and sources of inspiration for children in their community.

Up to five GIAs will be awarded in amounts ranging from $500 to $2,500 each to selected applicants who are eager to share their skills with marginalized youth in developing countries in ways that educate and inspire youth to harness their own ingenuity.

The one-year, one-time fellowship grants emphasize the sharing of innovative artistry and technology in informal, hands-on learning workshops with youth. Complete Guidelines and Application available at www.gocampaign.org/gia. Application deadline: December 1, 2009

I dropped in on this place a few years ago and was absolutely charmed and delighted. This is a very worthy cause indeed.

Papercut needs new space for August 15 (Thanks, Aaron

As some of you know, I've been dealing with a rare biliary cancer for many months. It has already taken my gall bladder, bile duct and most of my liver...and it's not done yet. It looks like in a matter of weeks I'll be facing chemotherapy, in an attempt to at least slow its progress...

There are many things I need as I prepare for my third act--supplements, prescription drugs, counseling, expensive alternative therapies, etc--and they all cost money...money I don't have. So, after all these months of being silent and private about my illness, I recently said yes to my close friend Michelle Meyrink when she asked if she could organize a benefit concert for me. http://www.spiderrobinson.com/images/Dream%20for%20jeanne.pdf

Others have since jumped in, including my Vancouver Buddhist sangha, Mountain Rain Zen Community, and a dear friend in Florida, Jan Schroeder, who has been auctioning donated items (such as rare Babylon 5 scripts and other SF memorabilia) on eBay for me. Goods or services can be donated for the auction by contacting Jan at dreamforjeanne@aol.com. Several other methods of helping out, including a straightforward PayPal donation account, can be found at http://wedreamforjeanne.blogspot.com/.

Another way to help would be to buy our books from Amazon by clicking-through from Spider's site, so we can get the affiliate commission. We've spent decades holding up visions of humankind's highest evolutionary potential while entertaining you enough to keep you turning pages.

From FORA TV, this video of a presentation by George Kembel, co-founder of the Stanford d.school, about the "Embrace," an extremely low-cost incubator for premature newborns. The challenge: design better technology to help keep premature newborns alive. The reality: the most at-risk newborns are in rural areas, far away from hospitals where $25,000 incubators are housed. The solution: a $25 "incubator" with materials that can be heated up in a pot of boiling water.

Awakening Creativity / FORA (thanks, Blaise Zerega)

So a lot of those books we sent them in the spring are now covered in water and sewage. And so are the bookmobiles. And the mechanical equipment for HVAC. And the data center. And $50,000 worth of new computers. The initial estimate is $1 million in damage, but they must just be guessing at this point.

Boing Boing and Boing Boing Video are partnering with Institute for the Future and Sun to support the Digital Open, in which youth around the world are invited to submit technology projects "that will change the world--or even just make life a little easier or more fun."

The final deadline for submissions is August 15, 2009, but projects posted before the deadline will benefit significantly from feedback from the Digital Open community. We are giving away more than $15,000 worth of very cool prizes including laptops, video cameras, recycled billboard backpacks, solar-powered gear and more. We've already received 49 projects from eight countries: Argentina, Canada, India, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the UK and the US!

There is an update to the story today from Mark Benjamin at Salon, where you can also read through the archive of related FBI documents in PDF form.

And Ben Greenberg writes in from Physicians for Human Rights, the organization that discovered the mass grave where the victims were buried. They've been investigating the case and advocating for appropriate action since 2001. Ben says:

We've produced a 10 minute documentary video about the massacre and the three federal investigations that were impeded by the Bush Administration. It's called War Crimes and the White House: The Bush Administration's Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has also produced a report based on high resolution satellite imagery that shows evidence of when and how the mass grave site was subsequently dug up. A blog post on the satellite imagery report is here and the main images from the report are available here, along with a .kml file that can be used with Google Earth.

Dare I say it, “green hat” hacker extraordinaire Austin Heap (See SF Chron a few weeks ago) and a group of domestic and foreign techie folks wanting to help Iran have announced the upcoming release of Haystack. Heap writes on his blog that it’s a “new program to provide unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran. A software package for Windows, Mac and Unix systems, called Haystack, will specifically target the Iranian government's web filtering mechanisms.

Related reading: Clerical Leaders Defy Ayatollah on Iran Election (NYT)

The first word came from abroad. An aunt in the United States called her Saturday in a panic. "Don't go out into the streets, Golshad," she told her. "They're killing people."

The relative proceeded to describe a video, airing on exile television channels that are jammed in Iran, in which a young woman is shown bleeding to death as her companion calls out, "Neda! Neda!"

A dark premonition swept over Golshad, who asked that her real name not be published. She began calling the cellphone and home number of her friend Neda Agha-Soltan who had gone to the chaotic demonstration with a group of friends, but Neda didn't answer.

At midnight, as the city continued to smolder, Golshad drove to the Agha-Soltan residence in the eastern Tehran Pars section of the capital. As she heard the cries and wails and praising of God reverberating from the house, she crumpled, knowing that her worst fears were true. "Neda! Neda!" the 25-year-old cried out. "What will I do?"

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was shot dead Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators who allege rampant vote-count fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The jittery cellphone video footage of her bleeding on the street has turned "Neda" into an international symbol of the protest movement that ignited in the aftermath of the June 12 voting. To those who knew and loved Neda, she was far more than an icon. She was a daughter, sister and friend, a music and travel lover, a beautiful young woman in the prime of her life.

I am fortunate enough to teach children who have a variety of disabilities, ranging from Autism, Mild Mental Retardation, to Specific Learning Disabilities. Many of my students come from low income households where even items as simple as crayons are not easily attainable. It is rare that special education students get what they truly need in a system where budget cuts take away the most basic tools for these wonderful children.

Last year Cory adopted my class through Adopt a Classroom and I'd like to make Boing Boing Readers aware of this wonderful website.

Whether you choose my class or another, 100% of your tax deductible donation (as little as $25) goes directly to the teacher and you are informed of every item purchased. The budget cuts are worse than ever this year, but I know there are people out there willing to help.

I hope this doesn't sound like an advertisement. I am a teacher, with 2 California Teaching Credentials and a Master's Degree. I work for LAUSD, one of the largest school districts in the country. Yet, if I don't get donations or use my own money, my class doesn't get things as simple as printer ink and crayons.

I also always make sure to thank my donors personally from all the kids!

Adopt a Classroom (Thank, Patricia!)

At left, a photo I shot of Phuntsok Dorjee with a fellow volunteer, setting up a wireless network relay point inside a tribal family's garage on the top of a mountain at the southern edge of the Himalayas. Goats and routers, under the same roof, not far from the Tibetan Government in Exile's home of Dharamsala, India.

Phuntsok says,

"We have 10 students in the radio team but have only 2 Sony IC voice recorders. A friend of the organization will be in San Francisco sometime in early July on his way to India and he can bring for us the voice recorder if we manage to get some."

Got any used voice recorders, or related gear you're not using? Email him at: phuntsok at tcv.org.in. These are good folks, doing innovative work without a lot of resources.

Related: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa' (Xeni on NPR)

Demonstration against Censhorship in Berlin (Thanks, Markus!)

Instead of a real http proxy (like Psiphon), the best implementation would simply let you append a URL to your Unite URL and get a website back, like "http://foo.bar.operaunite.com/www.cnn.com/". That would get rid of handing over your cookies to an unknown third-party; it'd probably also discourage people using the service for private communications (no https, in Unite -- it'd be great if Opera fixed that!).

Maybe I'd also stick in a geoip check to make sure the incoming requests are coming from a known Iranian IP block, just so users could feel worthy that they're just catering to Iranians (you could pull them out of this free geolocation database). That way we wouldn't be creating a permanent global clunky, insecure proxy network -- or at least not until Iran recovers and starts its own phishing services.

I know I'm not a good enough JS programmer to pull this off, but the Unite JavaScript API certainly appears to permit cross-domain XMLHttp calls, and you can catch generic HTTP requests using opera.io.webserver.addEventListener('_request',somehandler,false);, so it is theoretically possible (and here I hand wave to the implementation Gods).

If you live in Ontario, or want to (quickly!) send some books to a good cause, the Lieutenant Governor of the province is doing his annual drive for new books for kids living in remote First Nations communities. These are generally small, isolated communities located deep in the northern boreal wilderness. Most have a population under 1000 and are accessible only by aircraft. Kids in these communities often have access to only old books in bad condition, so our province's Lieutenant Governor launched this annual effort several years ago to refresh community libraries with up-to-date titles.

The deadline, June 21, is only a few days away, unfortunately. If someone from outside Ontario REALLY wants to help out, feel free to get hold of me directly at dglad@sff.net and you can make arrangements to send a book or two to me, and I'll get it into the donation stream. But for those of you who live in Ontario, or nearby (I'm lookin' at you, folks in northern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.!) this is a great chance to get some new reading material into the hands of kids who really, really need it.

For Cory's benefit, I know where my brand-new hardcopy of "Little Brother" is going. I'm quite happy to live with my digital copy and get the dead-tree version into the hands of a young Aboriginal kid.

Iranians around the world are making extraordinary use of Twitter and Twitter APIs to send updates and coordinate the uprising that now disputes Ahmadinejad's election. (Some background from Andrew Sullivan here) Last night Tweets from Iran seemed to go silent for several hours, apparently after Iranian government intervention, but protesters just used TwitterFall.com and other workarounds to keep the information stream going. (As one developer supporter put it, "Open APIs equal freedom.") The mainstream media has been tragically slow to cover what seems to be a major social upheaval fueled by Twitter.

Persiankiwi on twitter is tweeting like a crazyman about the protests happening RIGHT NOW in Tehran and has just posted this video on Youtube. Also this twitter user is posting. They reckon the protests are largely peaceful and also guess at least hundreds of thousands are on the streets.

Above, an earlier a rough cut of the film Invisible Children. The movie appears to be an ongoing work in progress, and as much an advocacy movement as much as it is a work of filmmaking. Richard Metzger writes,

This is one of the most fucked up things I have ever heard of: A Ugandan warlord by the name of Joseph Kony kidnaps children from their parents who are powerless to do anything about it. He is feared as if he has voodoo powers and any kids trying to escape from his army have their tongues cut out or are killed.

The young guys who organized the "How it Ends" event made the film. I saw it on Rick Sanchez's CNN show last month at the gym and it is WEIRD and disturbing. I ran home and looked it up.

The interesting thing about their movie (much of it online at their site) is that they were these these young guys from San Diego who made skateboarding videos and were best friends. They had the idea to go to Africa to have an adventure and shoot it for a movie. What they found was Joseph Kony's child army. The story had not been really been told before that. They brought it back with them and started a movement. They've been on Oprah and Larry King. They're heroes, full stop.

It's riveting scary, stuff. A nightmare. A human rights disaster of the worst kind.

It turned out that our entire class was angry or confused over the cameras. Out of a class of 18 students, 17 felt uncomfortable with the idea and decided to boycott the room until the issue, and the students, were addressed. This was a difficult decision as we were three months away from exams and we had five lessons a fortnight in the room. The student body was supportive and a petition gained over 130 signatures from the sixth-form...

Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been "narcissistic megalomaniacs" angry at "being nabbed for our churlish troublemaking". This stereotypical and frankly ignorant view ignores the fact that Davenant Foundation School produces some of the best exam results in Essex. Violent behaviour among pupils is simply not an issue, making the justification for putting cameras in our classrooms more surprising.

Adults are often quick to define the youth of today as stereotypical troublemakers and violent offenders - generalisations which are prompted by the media - when in fact the majority of students at our school are as responsible and arguably better behaved then the majority of adults. Some commentators insinuated that we overheard adults talking about rights and repeated it. That notion isn't worth the space it was typed upon. We are A-level politics students who have been studying civil liberties as part of the curriculum for the last two years...

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life.

The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache groups, but also exotic and endangered moustaches like the Shirley Temple and the LARP-stache. Recently cultivated strains of moustache such as the Octopus also feature prominently, and the headstock is graced with an inspiring moustache quote, sure to please any moustache fancier.

You may be asking yourself at this point you have survived without such a practical object, and what you can do to obtain one. If this is the case, please contact us.

The excellent work of Guatemala-based photojournalist James Rodriguez has been featured on BB a number of times before. The most recent photo-essay on his blog documents a protest march that took place a few days ago in the capital here, carried out by indigenous people from San Miguel Ixtahuacan, where the Canadian mining giant Goldcorp operates the Marlin Gold Mine. Background here on the mine, and Goldcorp's campaign of harassment and intimidation of indigenous residents. Snip:

The movement, made up almost in its entirety by indigenous local Mam Mayans, reiterated their intention to pursue a peaceful dialogue so as to bring to a close Montana's mining activities in the region. As of now, three people have died due to the toxic contamination in the local water sources and other natural resources.

Gregoria Crisanta Perez, one of the 8 women accused by Goldcorp of sabotaging their electric supply (read more about the case here), declares: "We demand our rights because we do not want to be killed by the mining company. We ask the government to please listen to our demands, as we are the legitimate owners of the territories. We are indigenous people, we were born there, and we should die there. But our death should be decided by God, not by the mining company."

A few meters down the road from the Canadian Embassy, one of the many Goldcorp billboards that can be found in Guatemala City read: "We invest in the dreams of a developing country."

Some residents of San Miguel Ixtahuacan identified the billboard and felt it was inappropriate due to the damage they have suffered from the mine's presence in their communities. Gradually, protestors began tearing little pieces as an expression of discontent with the mining company that has incited grave social conflicts. Dozens of people suddenly charged the billboard euphorically in a festive mood.

It meant they missed three weeks of studies and led to the drafting of a petition signed by about 150 of their peers.

A father, whose son took part in the walk-out, said the school was wrong not to consult parents about the use of technology which "threatened our children's civil liberties"...

Epping Forest MP Eleanor Laing, who has written to the school on behalf of concerned parents, and is due to meet the Information Commissioner to discuss the case, said: "We need to find out if the pupils are happy to be filmed but there are two valid sides to this argument, and I am trying to get to the bottom of it."

Protests are taking place today in Guatemala City to demand justice for an attorney who was assassinated on Sunday, and who claimed in a posthumously released YouTube video taped before his death that if he were to die, it would be at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom.

Quick background: The slain attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, represented a man who refused to take an assigment by Guatemala's president to serve on the board of a bank widely known as a money laundering hub and a shelter for narcotrafficking spoils. This whistleblower client of Rosenberg, Khalil Musa, was assassinated in March. On Sunday, after reportedly refusing to participate in the corruption and the coverup, Rosenberg himself was assassinated.

Protesters are at the presidential palace today. Libertópolis is streaming the action on Ustream.tv, as I type, though the stream is going on and off as armed military police swarm in.

Twitter users are marking conversations about today's protests, and about the case in general, with the hashtag #escandalogt. To take this sort of public action in Guatemala is not something one does lightly, and the young people at the center of these protests are placing their lives at risk.

I'm seeing some Guatemalan Twitterers spreading word that "chicken bus" drivers will gather tomorrow in the capital for another round of protests. Why? These same transportistas have long been the target of ever-escalating assasinations and extortion from narco gangs. The same corruption Rosenberg and Musa attempted to expose fuels this cycle of violence.

I don't have factual confirmation, but Guatemalan BB readers and Twitterers are saying that coverage of this story on the Guatemalan television networks is actively censored by the state (and that the recently declared "swine flu emergency" in a country with only 3 confirmed H1N1 cases was little more than a thinly disguised attempt by the state to exert more control). Claims of censorship there have historic precedent, and it makes the existence of these online "citizen TV" transmissions all the more significant. (via deztyped and many others)

Previously: Guatemala - In YouTube Video Shot Before His Death, Attorney Blames President for His Assasination

Update, 3pm PT, May 12: CNN now has an item on the story.

Update, 330pm PT, May 12: Photos from the protest are here. And here is audio from the protest. And here is a website demanding the president be impeached and brought to trial.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

I may regret this. Last night, I started playing Foldit, a free computer game that's rapidly becoming every bit as addictive as, say, Crayon Physics Deluxe, which is, to say, dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

On the plus side, I will at least be losing productivity for a good cause. Released about a year ago, Foldit is a puzzle game that harnesses the power of human putzing to help scientists unravel the mysteries of protein structure. Long chains of amino acids folded in on themselves like a biochemical game of Twister, proteins do most of the heavy lifting around your body; moving and storing important molecules like oxygen and iron, controlling your growth, making your immune system work ... they're kind of a big deal. Scientists know the genetic sequence of proteins, as well as many of their functions, but still don't know a lot about how and why the amino acid chains twist and turn into their complex shapes.

That's where Foldit comes in. Computer programs could calculate all the possible protein shapes, but it would take far longer than the average researcher's life span. Instead, the University of Washington team that developed Foldit is hoping that human game-players can figure things out faster.

After playing a series of practice challenges that teach the rules--basically the laws of physics as applied to protein structure--players are then set on tasks that use their natural 3-D problem solving skills to pin down the best structures for certain proteins. The hitch: Game developers don't know what the "best" answer is, so you can't get any hints. And points are awarded not by how close you're getting to the known solution, but by how much energy would be needed to hold a real-life protein in the shape you've created. The real challenge comes from competing against other players to make the highest-point-collecting version of a specific protein.

Researchers hope to use the game play to make better protein structure prediction software, based on gamers' strategies; to have players figure out the mysteries of proteins that don't yet have a known structure; and to create challenges that let players design new proteins that could fill some real-world needs---like disabling a specific virus.

All of which are fine and noble answers for you to toss out there when your boss asks what, exactly, you're doing fiddling with a computer game on company time.

Many thanks (I think) to Mun-Keat Looi, the Twitter friend who turned me on to Foldit.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

A Stanford team that's studying the public's knowledge of, and response to, H1N1 flu, has a survey and they're looking for willing participants to fill it out. Here's team member Marcel Salathé:

There is a possibility that the situation might develop into a pandemic if the virus continues to spread around the globe. The news media report excessively about this threat, and while health officials urge people to stay calm, there is an increased level of anxiety in the population.
Models have predicted that when a disease breaks out, changes in behavior in response to an outbreak, and in particular in response to information about an outbreak, can alter the progression of an epidemic. While this makes intuitive sense, there is no good data to test such a hypothesis. One of the major problems is that emotional reactions and behavioral response to an epidemic is generally assessed quite some time after the epidemic has fizzled out."

Short version: They're trying to figure out whether the info dump about H1N1 flu that you're getting from the media and the Web might really be enough to educate us all right out of a pandemic. I know that theory has come up in the comments threads on my previous flu postings. Let's help find out it if it works!

Take the survey here

EDIT: Marcel Salathé answers a couple of reader questions from the comments thread here. First, about when the results will come out and how you can see them:

There are a number of options. We will collect data while the epidemic runs its course - how long that's going to take is unpredictable, so I cannot really say more about the timeline - we just don't know yet. But we're constantly monitoring the data, and once we start finding interesting patterns we will certainly publish those quickly and make them open access. Feel free to publish my Stanford email address, and people who want to the results can send me an email."

Second, are Boing Boing readers completely screwing up the data by virtue of their savvyness? Salathé says it's a concern, but he doesn't think it will mess things up too badly, and he needs the volume of response more:

I am relatively confident that once we have a large enough sample we will get a good feeling for the average level of concern in the population. Yes, it might be that the ones responding to the survey are not the ones most panicky. On the other hand, one could also make the argument that people who are absolutely unruffled and calm might not be bothered to take the survey either. There can always be bias in any direction. In principle, any online survey has the potential for bias (by the fact alone that the survey is online) - but with a large enough sample one can avoid most of the problems regarding bias."

Boing Boing also isn't the only large-volume return place Salathé has published the survey link, so he's confident his results won't be all-BB, all the time. He does say that if you've got suggestions on more places to publish the survey link that are likely to be BB's polar opposite, you should contact him.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Energy Circle, a sort-of Consumer Reports for cost-effective energy efficient gadgetry, announced a new project today that I find absolutely fascinating.

We have been monitoring our home energy use for several months now, using our preferred whole house energy monitor TED, The Energy Detective. With Earth Day 09 as our starting point, we are going to make our electricity use public on EnergyCircle. We have adapted the TED to make it capable of streaming our household's data directly to the Internet. (A somewhat sophisticated hack inspired in part by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone's Tweet-A-Watt. We'll open source it in the next day or so).

What I love most about this, is that the building in question isn't the sort of green industry "House of Tomorrow" thing that bears more resemblance to Epcot Center than to the places you or I live now. By following Energy Circle's data, you'll see how the average American home uses energy, and you'll see the changes in energy use that happen (or don't happen) when the bloggers try out new energy-saving ideas and products. In fact, they're not just posting all this data, they're annotating it. You'll know whether that spike in use is their dryer or their hot water heater. And you'll know what was going on behind-the-scenes to cause a dip in use.

But, beyond being a really cool experiment, does this matter? Hell, yeah. What you'll be seeing at Energy Circle is a living example of how consumer awareness of energy use cuts consumer energy use. And that's a big, fat, hairy deal. According to the DOE, electricity use in one average single-family home accounts for more CO2 emissions than two average cars. Studies have found that monitoring home energy use, and giving the people who live there access to that information, can end up cutting use by anywhere between 5-to-15%---and those reductions connect directly back to the amount of CO2 being pumped into the air.

Very zippy stuff, indeed.

Over at Slate.com's XX Factor blog, Susannah Breslin writes:

Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country."

Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair."

You can follow Susannah's work here, and she posts brief items to Twitter and Tumblr, too.

A Guatemalan police officer has been arrested in connection with the abduction and disappearance 25 years ago of a labor activist named Edgar Fernando García, during Guatemala's civil war -- a period in which extrajudicial executions, dissapearances, and torture by government agents were widespread. The arrest on March 5 of former police officer Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos is the result of an investigation of García's case by Guatemala's Human Rights Prosecutor, and all of this was made possible by using records recently discovered among the massive archives of the former National Police.

I reported about the tech forensics process at these archives for NPR a couple of years ago, and you can listen to that report here. We're talking about a giant, dingy, moldy, bat-infested hellhole that was once the site of a clandestine detention center and torture cells. The police dumped records here during the civil war years, and the whole mountain of rotting documents was accidentally discovered years after the war ended.

Using scanners, database systems, and teams of analysts and "digitalizadors," a large team of people working very, very hard in the years since have accomplished something incredible here. More about the recent arrest and what it means:

García was kidnapped by police agents in Guatemala City on February 18, 1984, during a wave of government repression targeting the left. He was never seen again. The policy of terror used by the Guatemalan security forces to intimidate and destroy perceived "subversives" during the country's 36-year civil conflict resulted in the disappearance of an estimated 45,000 civilians and the death of some 200,000, according to the Historical Clarification Commission in 1999.

Reports published today in Guatemala's Prensa Libre and EFE described the arrest of agent Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos, currently chief of police in Quezaltenango with 28 years of service in the former National Police and National Civil Police. Ramírez was charged with "illegal detention, kidnapping, forced disappearance, abuse of authority and failure of duty." According to Human Rights Prosecutor Sergio Morales, Ramírez was identified by human rights investigators from the recently uncovered records of the old Fourth Corps of the ex-National Police, which described how he and other agents secretly captured García and took him to an unknown location.

Kate Doyle, Director of the Archive's Guatemala Project, commented "The arrest of one of the alleged perpetrators of Fernando García's disappearance 25 years later underscores the critical importance of the archives of the Guatemalan police and military in achieving justice for the atrocities committed during the civil conflict. The government of Guatemala must do everything in its power to see that state records are made public for future human rights investigations if it truly supports accountability and justice for these crimes."

(...)Although there has been no information about his capture since he disappeared in 1984, Fernando García's name appeared in the notorious "Military Logbook," an army intelligence document listing dozens of people disappeared by security forces in the mid-1980s and released publicly by the National Security Archive in 2000. The logbook indicated that García and other young students, professors and labor leaders were the subjects of intensive police surveillance in the weeks leading up to their capture and disappearance.

Photos in this post were snapshots I took at the Guatemalan police archives in 2007.

(Thank you, Jorge Villagran of PRAHPN - PDH - Guatemala, and all who suggested this).

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

On Wednesday, March 11, 2009 the United Nations' Commission of Narcotic Drugs held its 52nd session in Vienna, Austria, just10 years after Kofi Annan's pledge to have a "drug free world" by 2008. Representatives from around the world attended the conference voicing support and opposition to the centuries old "war on drugs."

Working with Witness and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, we cut together excerpts from "Dare to Question? Using Video to Take on UN Drug Policies" and other testimonials appealing to the United Nations to reconsider its hardline policies combating the cultivation and use of illicit drugs.

Most of the experts interviewed agree that an ideal world would be a drug-free world but perhaps we should put that on the shelf among other concepts like a world without war, disease, or Fox News.

Some interesting facts according to drugstatistics.com:

75% of drug related arrests are related to marijuana 65% of drug related arrests are for simple possession of marijuana

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union also staged a press conference at the entrance of the Vienna International Center speaking from wire cages, attempting to draw attention to unjust penalties and human rights abuses of drug offenders around the world.

We'd like to especially thank the Director of the HCLU, Mr. Balázs Dénes and Istvan Gábor Takács, HCLU's Video Advocacy Guru and Peter Sárosi, DPP Director. To learn more, you can visit Dare to Act and Drug Reporter.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

For all the charity and humanitarian aid that's been poured into the Darfur region, and all of the celebrities pleading for change -- it seems nothing has changed. People are still dying, atrocities continue, and the war worsens. This sense of futility is what makes the project we're sharing with you today so interesting.

The ultra-low-budget documentary "Christmas in Darfur?" follows the challenges two amateur filmmakers (and their limited crew) face as they attempt to make a film about what it was like for aid workers to spend their holiday season in this war-torn African desert. Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Sean Bonner interviewed the film's director Jason Mojica about that experience, and we bring you that conversation today, along with clips from the finished film.

Driven by the desire to understand the gap between all the global attention to Darfur and the worsening conditions there -- and with no experience in filmmaking, or any connections in Africa -- the filmmakers' guileless approach takes them deep into the refugee camps of Chad and Sudan.

"Christmas in Darfur?" is about an hour long and available online for anyone to freely view, embed, or dowload. You can watch the full film online at christmasindarfur.org. And you can make a donation to the filmmakers, if you are so moved -- they're still trying to recoup the costs of making the film. Look for the PayPal link on the left side of this page.

UPDATE: According the the AP two British aid agencies working in Sudan, Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK, have had their licenses revoked and have been asked to suspend operations only hours after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

Boing Boing Video presents an animated short by Bob Jaroc and Andy Ward "The Return of Superbarrio" (La Vuelta de Superbarrio), in Spanish with English subtitles.

Superbarrio Gómez is a "living superhero" in Mexico who seeks to fight injustice and corruption on both sides of the US/Mexico border through protests, civil disobedience, and political action. We're told that a man named Marco Rascón Córdova developed the character and organized the events at which he became famous throughout Mexico, but that the actual guy in the Superbarrio suit is someone else -- someone whose name is kept a closely guarded secret.

Here's something that makes this animated short particularly special, and an odd kind of documentary/fantasy: Jaroc says the characters are voiced by Marco Rascón Córdova and the anonymous guy who plays the role of Superbarrio in real life. So, we're hearing the voices of Superbarrio's creator, and Superbarrio himself.

This animated short was produced by Plaid and Bob Jaroc as part of the audiovisual, mixed media album Greedy Baby.

Given the string of really bad news out of Mexico this week, it seems the nation could use more of the likes of this guy right about now.

Below: images of the lucha-masked crusader courtesy Bob Jaroc. More in this Flickr set.

Update: A number of Boing Boing reader/viewers who speak Spanish have tweeted or written in very politely to point out that "La Vuelta de Super Barrio" may not be the best translation -- "El Regreso de Super Barrio" would probably be more correct. I'll leave that choice to the director, though, and Spanish is not my native language. Also, BB community member Vladimir Bazan Estrada says,

Thanks for running this animation today, it makes me feel that there's still hope and proud of my heritage. Now, time to write to the creator of the animation so i could thank him/her. If you wonder why i dont have that much hope, this animation shows the general mood of the city. Good animation... just a non happy ending. Also, i dont know if you know the comic called "El Santos VS la Tetona Mendoza", (The santos vs Big tits mendoza), that's one of the best examples of underground comic in mexico, the strip was published for the last 8 years in one of the most radical newspapers in Mexico, La Jornada.

Kamal Meattle reported the results of his efforts to fill an office building with plants, in an effort to reduce headache, asthma, and other productivity-sapping aliments in thickly polluted India. After researching NASA documents, he concluded that a set of three particular common, waist-high houseplants—areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, and Money Plant—could be combined to scrub the air of carbon dioxide, formaldehyde and other pollutants.

At about four plants per occupant (1200 plants in all), the building’s air freshened considerably, and the health and productivity results were staggering. Eye irritation dropped by 52 percent, lower respiratory symptoms by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent and asthma by 9 percent. There were fewer sick days, employee productivity increased, and energy costs dropped by 15 percent.

Next stop: a larger-scale experiment in a 1.75-million-square-foot office tower, featuring over 60,000 plants.

Roboticist Catherine Mohr is on stage at TED2009.

She "works on surgical robots and robotic surgical procedures, using robots to make surgery safer -- and to go places where human wrists and eyes simply can't."

She's talking about surgical robots and surgical vision technology. Surgeons are tailors, plumbers, butchers of medical industry.

History of surgery. How did we even come to believe that surgery -- cutting and reforming -- was OK? Shows picture of ancient trepanated (hole drilled in) skull. Goes back 5k to 10k years. This is the dawn of interventional surgery. How much was intended to be religious or therapeutic? we know that these patients lived for many years after being trepanned.

The itinerant barber surgeon - before age of anesthesia. Patient in pain was a public spectacle. Barber surgeon was almost a form of entertainment. Surgery was done on public in front of big crowd.

1847 -- anesthesia. It gave surgeons freedom to operate, to delve deeper into body. A revolution in surgery. But problem: after surgery, the patients died, of massive infection. Surgery didn't hurt but it killed you.

Aseptic technique. Joseph Lister was thought to be a fool for believing that it was as important for surgeons to wash hands before surgery as after. After a while, the medical community warmed to the idea.

Healthy people don't need surgery, unhealthy people need surgery, but since they are unhealthy, it's harder for them to recover.

Laparoscopy -- small incisions. A lot easier on the body. Much easier to heal. But laparoscopy is hard to learn. Surgeons had to give up 3D vision, wrists, etc. External ergonomics are terrible. Instruments are working backwards. You need to take capability of your hand and put it at the business end of instrument.

Robotic surgery tool -- the DaVinci -- has "wrists" and 3D vision that greatly improve dexterity. She's showing amazing videos of heart and prostrate surgery. Tiny pincers at work.

Limitations -- if you need to reach more places that just one, you need to move robot and open new holes in patient. Becomes time-consuming. To solve this we need to bring camera and instruments through one small tube. She's showing a new surgery tool -- it looks like an HR Giger tentacle with mini tentacles that blossom open from the main trunk. Can inject dyes into cells and the light can make cancerous cells visible.

Film producer Jake Eberts is on stage at TED2009.

He was involved in producing Chariots of Fire, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Driving Miss Daisy, and more.

He's working on a film about the ocean. Wants to create an emotional connection to the issue of damage to ocean. He started as chemical engineer in 1962 - a sewage analyst in Stockholm, became a producer in the 70s (said "some would say that's not a huge leap from a sewage analyst").

He met actor, producer, and director Jaques Perrin, who is also a well known speaker (in French only, he doesn't speak English). Perrin's latest film is called Oceans. Perrin devoted his last 8 years to it. Took four years of shooting. Crews works all over the world. One guy spent 23 days in water trying to get shot of whale. Had to invent special cameras to film dolphins swimming at 20km an hour. Shot over 140 species, cost $170 million. 300 hours, will cut to a two-hour feature.

We have time time save the oceans and the dignity of the animals in the ocean.

Disney will release it in the US on April 22, 2010.

Now he's showing a nine-minute clip of the movie. Beautiful shots of ocean waves, whales jumping. Gorgeous jellyfish forest. Best underwater cinematography I've ever seen. Can't wait for it to come out.

(Left: Juliana Rotich and Erik Hersman working on Ushahidi.com, a free and opensource engine that makes it easier to crowdsource crisis information and visualize data. Right: Ornithologist Ana Gabala lives and works in the state of Hawaii as the Avian Disease and Surveillance Coordinator. Click for big)

Tom Rielly of TED Conferences says,

We've just announced a new international fellowship program called TED Fellows. The program brings 50 trailblazing individuals from around the world into the TED community each year. We have two goals:

- To bring the energy and creativity of an eclectic group of talented individuals into the conversations at TED -- hopefully kick-starting some fresh initiatives along the way

- To pair these individuals with ingenious idea-spreaders, from whom they'll get training and mentoring

We're focusing on attracting applicants who live or work in five places: the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America or the Middle East. (But applicants may originate anywhere.) Our target age range is 21-40, though anyone age 18 and over may apply.

We're seeking people who show real potential to increase positive change in their field, whether it's technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship, NGOs ...

Fellows participate in the full suite of TED community offerings, including one conference. Twenty of them will join an extended, three-year TED Senior Fellows program. Fellows will also have the potential to give a TEDTalk and see it posted online to our audience of millions. Complete program details at www.ted.com/fellows. If you would like to recommend a great potential candidate, email fellows@ted.com.

WATCH: Flash video embedded above and below, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here.

Last week on Boing Boing Video, we presented two episodes which were excerpts from a documentary film called OUTLAWED, about people who have survived extraordinary rendition and torture in America's War on Terror. The film was produced by Witness.org, the human rights/video organization founded by Peter Gabriel, and created in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups including the ACLU. In case you missed the excerpts we ran, here they are again, embedded above and below. Direct download link for part 1, Direct download link for part 2.

A number of Boing Boing commenters asked how interested people could help or take action on the cases presented in these video episodes. Bryan Nunez from Witness says, "Here are a couple places where people can take action: closegitmo.com, and here is Amnesty International's page related to these issues. Hope this helps."

Read the original blog posts for each of these Boing Boing Video episodes, for more background:

* Boing Boing Video: "OUTLAWED" excerpts, pt. 1 -- Guantánamo Detainee Who Survived Torture.
* Boing Boing Video: "OUTLAWED" excerpts, pt. 2 -- Khaled El-Masri.

(Image: Tyler Hicks for the New York Times.)

Photographer Glen E. Friedman, who is the subject of our Boing Boing Video episode tomorrow -- he shot some of the greatest skateboarding photos of our time -- pointed me to this interesting story in the NYT from a few days ago. Glen asks, "Isn't there someone [reading this blog post] who can figure out how to get this guy some more boards for these kids?" Snip:

Afghan youth have learned to recover almost instantly from such routine violence. One person determined to inject some normalcy into their lives is Oliver Percovich. A 34-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, he plans to open this country’s first skateboarding school, Skateistan, this spring. He sees sport as a way to woo students into after-school activities like English and computer classes, which are otherwise reserved for the elite.

“Teenagers are trying to dissociate from old mentalities, and I’m their servant,” Percovich said. “If they weren’t interested, I would’ve left a long time ago.”

Now, when he pulls his motorcycle into a residential courtyard here, a dozen youngsters pounce before it comes to a stop, yanking six chipped skateboards with fading paint off the back. The children, most participating in a sport for the first time in their war-hardened lives, do not want to waste any time. Their skateboard park is a decrepit Soviet-style concrete fountain with deep fissures. The tangle of novice skaters resembles bumper cars more than X Games.

But Percovich has raised the money needed to build an 8,600-square-foot bubble to house the nonprofit Skateistan complex, and the Kabul Parks Authority has tentatively donated land. He is still waiting for official permission to begin the project. And since a spate of kidnappings and the car bombing in late November, he has reduced his daily sessions at the fountain to once or twice a week.

Among those who look forward to his visits is Maro, an elfin 9-year-old girl who was terrified of skateboarding at first. “It gives me courage, and once I start skating, I completely forget about my fears,” she said.

“We're matching homeless people with peopleless homes,” he said with a grin. [Max] Rameau and a group of like-minded advocates formed Take Back the Land, which also helps the new “tenants” with secondhand furniture, cleaning supplies and yard upkeep. So far, he has moved six families into foreclosed homes and has nine on a waiting list.

“I think everyone deserves a home,” said Rameau, who said he takes no money from his work with the homeless. “Homeless people across the country are squatting in empty homes. The question is: Is this going to be done out of desperation or with direction?”

Rameau, who makes his living as a computer consultant, said he is doing the owners a favor, saving the properties from drug dealers, vandals and thieves. He said he is not scared of getting arrested.

“There's a real need here, and there's a disconnect between the need and the law,” he said. “Being arrested is just one of the potential factors in doing this.”

Yesterday, I shared some scanned hand-drawn Christmas cards from children (and their parents) in a K'iche' Maya village in Guatemala -- people who participate in the work of an international nonprofit I volunteer with there, along with family and friends.

This year, we included two additional elders in the foundation's Christmas festivities in the Guatemalan highlands, which brings the total number of participating elders in our Ancianos de Honor program to 22. Two of the most recently honored ancianos are blind. You can see them in the photograph below. They both completed their hundredth birthdays this month. They were brought to our foundation's center by some very caring young people.

Above, the elders receive their gifts from our local director in Sololá, Don Victoriano. It's the first time in the lives of these two new elders that they have received a gift or been honored in this way.

Upon receiving his gift, centenarian Don Juan expressed thanks to Ajaw (the Mayan creator god) and to the givers of the gift who had "the good conscience to remember the forgotten elders."

The Christmas gift baskets they are receiving typically include bread, dried pasta and rice, chocolate and candies, corn flour for making tortillas or tamales, dried beans, fruit, and household necessities. The local project directors, who are from the community themselves, make those arrangements and include things that are customary, and part of the local diet.

These elders are among the most at-risk and neglected members of the community, and often suffer malnutrition and health problems related to a lack of food, water, and protection from the elements. They live literally on the fringes of the village, and fall through the cracks -- they become invisible.
Our foundation works to reach out to them, document their existence and their needs, and provide basic support, bringing them back into the center of the community where they belong, with honor and respect.

We are working toward establishing the same ongoing support system within the community for these elders that we are providing for the children of the village.

- Happy holidays to all of you from the people in our communities in Guatemala and Nima Mam Ajq'ij, Dr. M. X. Quetzalkanbalam, international executive director, and our international staff of directors: Anamaria de To and David To Quiñones, Guatemala; Jolon Bankey, Costa Rica; and Xeni Jardin, Mike Outmesguine, and Mar Doré, USA.

(Photos: Top and bottom, courtesy Don Victoriano; center thumbnails, Xeni Jardin).

(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)

Today is the final installment of Boing Boing tv's three-day special series in partnership with the video network WITNESS commemorating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

In this episode: the story of Jesus Tecu Osorio, a Maya Achí man who witnessed one of the most horrific massacres of Guatemala's 36-year internal conflict, when he was a child -- and what he is doing to preserve the memory of victims, and the rights of survivors.

Here is a snip from the Wikipedia article about that massacre:

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extra-judicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities.

This video is narrated by REM frontman Michael Stipe, and is presented with the music of composer Philip Glass. For more on WITNESS, and how they are using video to draw world attention to human rights abuses throughout the globe, visit the recently launched Witness HUB website.

Related: earlier here on Boing Boing, I shared a report I filed for National Public Radio about the group that conducted the exhumations mentioned in this WITNESS video. The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) are technologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists who unearth these mass graves. They work to identify the dead and return the remains to their families for dignified reburial. The process begins with the hard work of the exhumation itself, but they also use DNA forensics and software they develop themselves, so they can identify a greater portion of the remains, and preserve evidence that could be used in criminal trials. FAFG staff routinely deal with death threats from those who do not support their work. Listen to "Group Works to Identify Remains in Guatemala ," and here is the entire NPR special series, "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." (Image below: Xeni Jardin)

(Flash video embedded above, downloadable MP4 Here.)

More than 20,000 children have been abducted and forced into armed service by warring factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996. Many of these children are sexually exploited; many are forced to participate in or witness atrocities, as a way of life.

In day two of Boing Boing tv's three-day special series in partnership with the video network WITNESS commemorating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, we present this special feature on the lives of the child soldiers in DRC.

In this episode, we'll hear from Bukeni Waruzi of the Child Soldier Project (AJEDI-Ka/PES), who are working to demobilize the boys and girls and provide them with protection, rehabilitation, and psychological care.

If you'd like to support the work of the Child Soldier Project, here's more info on how to assist (they are accepting donations, but there are other ways to help, too).

For more on WITNESS, and how they are using video to draw world attention to human rights abuses throughout the globe, visit the recently launched Witness HUB website.

Boing Boing tv commemorates the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights this week in partnership with WITNESS. Have you read the declaration lately? You can do so here. It is as timely and essential to our world today as it was on December 10, 1948, just after the end of World War II.

WITNESS was founded by musician and activist Peter Gabriel with other human rights groups in 1992. They use video and online media to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. We'll be airing reports from the WITNESS archives this week, and tomorrow Boing Boing tv will present an interview with the organization's digital archivist, Grace Lile. She spoke with us about how WITNESS gathers videos like the one I'm embedding here, and why collecting and sharing this footage matters. She also tells us about the recently-launched hub.witness.org, which is a sort of gathering place for people who want to get involved.

Today, as a special edition of BBTV WORLD, we present a video from WITNESS that was produced by Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). With this video, they sought to "prevent continued unlawful acts that threaten the rights to life, liberty and personal security of two boys, Jorge, age 18, and Julio, age 17, and 458 others detained in the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital of Paraguay." The two boys were detained in approximately six-by-six feet isolation cells, naked, and without access to bathrooms. Hospital staff said the boys have been detained in these conditions for the past four years.

The video is deeply disturbing. I found it very painful to watch. But the producers, and the people behind WITNESS, hope that by documenting these abuses and making the documentation available to the world in this explicit form, we will be inspired to stop the abuse -- in this case, and in others around the world.

Here is a direct MP4 link, if you prefer to download. Below, a video from WITNESS commemorating the Declaration of Human Rights, and what it means to us today.

(Special thanks to Yvette Alberdingkthijm, Sameer Padania, Martin Tzanev, Matisse Bustos Hawkes, and Bryan Nuñez of Witness, and BB Patron Saint Joi Ito.)

Hey, folks. I'm getting ready to head into Manhattan to get ready for Fünde Razor, our yearly fund raising event for the Child's Play Charity. If you like to drink beer, play Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and win prizes to raise money to keep kids entertained when they're at hospital, please stop on by. Unless you hate children/to rock.

And it's not just New York: there are sister events happening in Denver and San Francisco. But if you can make it to the New York event (now in our fourth year!) please come say and tell me hello! And as always, if you can't make it, you should toss a few bucks in the box for the kids.

Times, locations, information, and more (not that much more, really) [FundeRazor.com]

Yoko Ono has kindly emailed Boing Boing this beautiful photograph of her husband, former Beatle John Lennon, who was murdered on this day in 1980. Photographer Allan Tannenbaum took the image on November 26, 1980, just a couple of weeks before Lennon passed away.

"Please share your memories of John here at this website," Ms. Ono says to Boing Boing readers, and, "WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT. You can download the poster here. Print it out, and display it in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season."

A few years ago I held an event each year to raise money for the Child's Play Charity that puts videogames into the hands of kids staying at children's hospitals. We called it, in proper rock style, Fünde Razor. We're now in our fourth year, and thanks to help from friends in the industry — Kotaku, Game|Life, Rock Gamer, Gizmodo, not to mention tons of game and gadget manufacturers — we've raised thousands of dollars that we give over in its entirety to Child's Play. We've even moved beyond our original New York event to add a Denver and San Francisco event, all next Wednesday evening. (Location and times over on FundeRazor.com. [There's a similar event on Tuesday in Chicago.])

Prizes will vary a little bit from event to event (a lot of what we bring in are review items and such that all we bloggers have in our closets) but here's a partial list of what you can expect to win in the raffle or as door prizes at all three cities' events.

It really is a blast. If you make it to the NYC event, come tell me hi! And if you can't make it out to any of the nights (or even if you can), please consider donating to Child's Play anyway. They're amazing.

All the prizes that you could maybe possible win but if not you can still drink beer and play Rock Band [Offworld!]

Los Angeles-based photographer and blogger Dave Bullock says:

The Skid Row Photography Club's first show, The Beauty of the Street, premiered last Thursday during the Downtown Art Walk. The participants were ecstatic to see their beautiful work on the walls and the hundreds of people who came into the gallery loved what they saw.

The SPRC started as an idea I "borrowed" from the movie Born Into Brothels . I wrote a proposal to the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council to buy digital cameras which we then gave to people living in Skid Row. I gave the participants brief lessons in composition and turned them loose. For the last six months we've met every Tuesday at UCEPP in Skid Row.

During that time they shot over 20,000 photos between them. An amazing body of work ranging from flowers to architecture to a man defecating in the middle of the street.

More info here on how you can participate. The short version: if you would like to donate digital cameras please email Dave directly at eecue@eecue.com.

Skid Row, in case you don't know, is a massive, permanent homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles -- the largest such community in the United States. About 8-9,000 homeless people live there. This "heat map animation" provides a compelling visualization of the site, though data hasn't been updated in a while.