Politics: December 2003 Archive Page

--Blogging Changing Journalism (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A small number of my students noted in their end-of-term reflection that they weren't all that comfortable with blogging because they expected a course in traditional journalism, not all this cyberspace stuff...

PETA: Mad Cow with a Side of Green OnionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I notice that PETA has lost no time in capitalizing on the mad cow disease to advocate its vegetarian position... but I don't recall PETA having much to say about the green onion scare! (Google turns up plenty of PETA recipies that use green onions, though).

Inspired by a post on Sugarpacket.

Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against the 45-year-old entertainer was a breakthrough for public access. Others countered that it would undermine the spirit of the law and court proceedings, creating even more of a circus-like atmosphere. --Sue Zeidler --Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession (Yahoo/Reuters)

I've blogged about Jackson's defense website, so it seems only fair to link to this article, which mentions the prosecution's site and also comments on the trend towards online access to legal documents.

He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more.

--James Button reviews Don Watson's Death Sentence --Fighting the death sentence (The Age)

The article and the book being reviewed are very Austrailian. The other day, I couldn't find this book in the US Amazon.com database. Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

Bjorn Lomborg, the author of a controversial book attacking the environment movement, was cleared yesterday of "scientific dishonesty" by the Danish science ministry.

The ministry overturned a ruling in January by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty (DCSD), part of the Danish Research Agency, that Mr Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". --Houlder and MacCarthy --Danish writer cleared of 'scientific dishonesty' (Financial Times)

I've been following this one for a while. Well-meaning reporters and students often uncritically accept the statistics given by activists who misrepresent, misunderstand, or simply mis-emphasize scientific findings.

But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better [520c] and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another [520d] about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. --Plato, as translated by Jowett.
--The Allegory of the Cave (Plato's Republic/University of Evansville)

In this excerpt from Plato's Republic, education is presented as the means to creating noble leaders. Socrates (the character in Plato's dialogue) notes a double-dichotomy; those who are most fit to rule do not hunger after power, while those who hunger most after power are the likeliest to rule, though their rule is not best for the State. While the general populace sits chained in a metaphorical cave, watching faint shadows of puppet shows on the wall and doing their best to sort out what they see, the true philosopher has left the cave and seen more of the world through the natural light of the sun.

But -- and here's the part I don't remember "getting" when I first came across this selection as an undergraduate -- it is not enough for the individual philosopher to escape the shadows; those of truly noble character will be moved to pity the multitudes still chained in the dark, and will voluntarily return to the world of shadows. At first, having grown accustomed to the sunlight of reason, they will have difficulty adjusting to the shadow world, but eventually they will be able to teach the masses about the reality of the objects they perceive only via shadows.

I found this site via the Plato FAQ website.

Considering how little return American students get on their books during "Book Buyback" at the end of the semester, I wondered if Iraqi students could use these donations instead? --Mike Arnzen --Gun and Pencil: Book Buyback for Baghdad? (Pedablogue)

A reflection on the CS Monitor's report on the state of higher education in Iraq. Now there are some professors whose problems really make me feel like a whiner.

Me: Okay, okay, Jerz...enough procrastinating, and get back to those papers.

Me: Just one more blog entry? Pleeease?

Me: No!

Me: Then can I at least run that errand to the business office?

Me: Okay... but no stopping off at the cafeteria.

Me: Aw.....

Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products, in what prosecutors said was the nation's first felony charges for unsolicited e-mail. --Virginia Nabs Two Big Spammers (Wired/AP)

I'd like to think this will make a difference... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Thousands of Iraqis took to Baghdad's streets Friday condemning terrorism and urging a halt to political violence. '

[OK... so far, so good.]

The demonstrators shouted "death to terrorists"...

[Gaak! This sounds like a bad MadTV skit. Were these demonstrators paying attention to the supposed purpose of their event? Or are Iraqi political demonstrations just naturally dripping with ironic metacommentary?] --Iraqis Demonstrate Against Violence (UPI/Washington Times)

Found via Drudge.

More Questionable Use of My Work

While surfing the web today, I was surprised to find, in an OpenWiki installation on a web page published by the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (University of California, Santa Barbara), a document containing a subtantial amout of my own work. The OpenWiki document in question states that it has been reproduced with my permission, but that text refers to the (belated) permission I gave when I discovered the first copy that Bren School made.

• Current version of my FrontPage Handout
• Copied and altered once without first getting permission
• Once again, copied, altered and this time released in an open source format without my permission

When I initially found the first copy, I saw that references to me and my institution had been removed, and the site was republished under the Bren School banner. I did give belated permission, provided that my name and institutional affiliation be restored to the document, and that a prominent link direct readers to my current version.

I did not, however, give permission for yet another copy to be made, and neither was I asked my opinion about releasing the document in an open format (which would permit multiple authors to modify and change the text even further).

The latest copy on the Bren site still offers my name, but now neither version contains a link to the current version. Life is too short to get mad, and I am a supporter of both the wiki genre and the open source movement, but this is the second time somebody at the Bren School has misappropriated my work for its instructional purposes.

Update, 11 Dec: A few minutes after midnight, about six hours after I contacted the Bren School, I received an e-mail apology, stating that the material had been removed. I'm grateful for the speedy reaction.

Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Monday that [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell had indeed appointed [James] Brown to be the first US "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk" but said the job description for the post had not yet been drawn up. --Powell 'appoints' soul legend James Brown to new diplomatic postYahoo/AFP)

And yet again, life imitates The Onion

"The time has come to face facts: To move forward, we've got to get on up, and stay on the scene, like a sex machine," said Brick House Majority Leader James Brown (G-GA), one of getting on up's most vocal supporters. "Say it loud: Only when we have gotten up offa that thing will we, as a nation, finally get back on the good foot."

The increased adoption of blogging, citizen journalism, Flash presentations and the like portend a different season of political coverage than what we've seen in the past. These aren't new developments, but they've been used more frequently in the last year by the online-news industry, and will likely be incorporated into upcoming electoral coverage. --Steve Outing --Prepare Now for Better Online Election Coverage (Editor and Publisher)

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" next fall, during the presidential election. Plenty of my students have professed their utter boredom with politics (outside of their particular hobbyhorse, if any). So I'm reluctant to tie a major online project to political current events; still, there will be a lot happening in cyberspace, particularly on the Thursday before election day, when scandals are strategically the most damaging to candidates. I'll have to think about this one.

Anyway, here's a great suggestion from the article: "Candidates were asked to give their stands on a variety of issues. In the print edition, candidate responses were sorted into grids, so readers could see who thinks what with a quick glance. But online, the approach was different: Web readers decided what their own stands are, then discovered who agreed with them the most at the end of the quiz."

Unless the population of a state is dispersed evenly in proportion to the size of each county, there is no direct relationship between the physical area of a county and the number of people, registered voters, or votes cast within it. | Which is why I was surprised to see an analyst from a leading all-news television network point to a map of California and single out San Bernadino county, California'slargest county by area, as a significant reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger'svictory. --Jonathan Corum --Mapping Votes by County: County maps and the 2003 California Statewide Special Election. (Style.org)

Note: The above images come from a screen capture of the original site; the cubist design on the left is, of course, a map of California with the counties adusted in size to represent population. I erased some text that would have been illegible at this size, in order to increase the comprssion rate.

Fascinating study of maps that distort the public perception of Arnold Schwartzenegger's political mandate in California. Very reminiscent of the maps showing George W. Bush winning huge tracts of land, with Al Gore winning in tiny, highly-populated spots.

Via Sylvie's HCI Weblog.

"We want to find out what your working conditions are, anything that we can do to help you," Otwell tells the young women at the factory. He speaks in English slowly, for the benefit of an Arabic translator, who then turns to an Arabic-speaking sign-language translator to sign Otwell's questions to the seamstresses. | The girls' hands start flying as they tell Otwell about their hated boss. --Tara Copp --Iraq behind the cameras: a different reality (Knox Studio/Scripps Howard)

The angle of this story is that TV cameras cover the bombings and the protests, but don't cover the everyday progress that shows that parts of Iraq are improving, with the help of the U.S. forces. Regardless of the political context, I found this linguistic viginette oddly touching.

Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. "This gives us patterns which are kind of the same -- and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.".... [T]he system learned incorrectly that "Palestinian suicide bomber" and "suicide bomber" were the same, and that "killing 20 people" is the same as "killing 20 Israelis", said Barzilay. These mistakes made by the system are "due to how reporters are reporting," she said. "In some sense... the teacher here is what the reporter writes," she said. Kimberly Patch --Software paraphrases sentences (TRN)

The Palestine/Israel detail is presented as an example of pro-Israel reporter bias, but I'm not so sure. If, according to the sample of news reportage being examined, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians, and if the ways in which Israelis were killed (civilians killed in marketplaces by suicide bombers, and also soldiers killed by armed combatants) was more newsworthy than the ways in which Palestinians were killed (armed combatants killed by soldiers and some innocent bystanders killed by soldiers) then the computer's "mistake" might be understandable. But I'm not informed enough about the research involved to be able to make any reliable statement; of course the computer isn't responding to what really happened in the world, it's responding to the way a certain group of reporters described what their research tells them happened in the world. Of course, the results are going to reflect human biases, but the sample fed into the computer is affected by such things as how likely a news source that reflects a particular worldview will publish an online English edition.

On a lighter note...

Speaking at a press conference, researchers shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and coughed into their hands before insisting, "Of course this software won't be marketed to students intending to fool turnitit.com. Whatever gave you that idea?"

America's higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. --College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher Education  (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce)

Boy, these guv'ment folks like long titles.

The key to understanding this flashy website is in the long subtitle -- it is not a fair and balanced resource, it is only for those who want to cut government spending on colleges. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish illustrates the persuasive, rather than informative, purpose of this site:

Only three of the questions are real; that is, only three of the questions are framed with the objective of finding out something the researchers don't already know or think they know. The others are designed to elicit -- no coerce -- responses that can then be used to support the conclusions that McKeon and Boehner have reached in advance of doing any research at all.

Here, for example, is the first question: "Can colleges and universities be doing more to control their spending and avoid large tuition hikes that hurt parents and students?" Although this has the form of a question, its core content is four unsubstantiated assertions: colleges and universities do not control their spending; uncontrolled spending is the sole cause of tuition hikes; those hikes are large (in relation to what norms or practices is never specified); and they hurt parents and students.

The real question then is, "Do you think that colleges and universities should stop doing these horrible things?" and of course anyone who understands it that way (and what other way is there to understand it?) will answer "yes" and thus provide Boehner and McKeon with one more piece of "evidence" with which to convict higher education of multiple offenses.

I'm going to have to save this example for the next time I teach about critiquing academic resources.