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test2 - Media Bits and Bytes - October 23, 2012 - Edition
<span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-10-23T00:00:00-04:00">October 23, 2012</span>
By
Portside (Tue, 2012-10-23 00:00)
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Seattle Times news staffers protest company's political-ad campaign</strong></p>
<p>by Jim Brunner</p>
<p>October 18, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.seattletimes.com/politicsnorthwest/2012/10/18/seattle-times-news-staffers-protest-companys-political-ad-campaign/">Seattle Times</a></p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.seattletimes.com/politicsnorthwest/2012/10/18/seattle-times-news-staffers-protest-companys-political-ad-campaign/">Politics Northwest</a></p>
<p>More than 100 Seattle Times news staffers - including reporters, photographers, columnists, artists, editors and online news producers - signed a letter Thursday protesting the Times Co's decision to sponsor newspaper ads supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna and a statewide referendum for legalized gay marriage.</p>
<p>The letter, which was delivered to Times Publisher Frank Blethen, said the decision to publish the ad "threatens the two things we value the most, the traits that make The Seattle Times a strong brand: Our independence and credibility." While the Times company has described the ad campaign as a "pilot project" to demonstrate the effectiveness of newspaper advertising, the letter warned of the impact on the newspaper's core mission of journalism, noting the Times had now become "part of the campaign's machinery, creating a perception that we are not an independent watchdog."</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Newsweek to reduce staff, eliminate print edition as it goes digital only in 2013</strong></p>
<p>by Andrew Beaujon and Julie Moos</p>
<p>October18, 2012 </p>
<p><a href="http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/192028/newsweek-to-reduce-staff-eliminate-print-edition-as-it-goes-digital-only-in-2013/">Poynter.org</a></p>
<p>Newsweek will publish its final print edition December 31, the company announced Thursday morning. It will launch a digital subscription product called Newsweek Global, some of whose content will be available on the Daily Beast. According to Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown, the magazine had reached a tipping point at which they could most effectively reach readers in all-digital format. Layoffs will accompany the move.</p>
<p>The Daily Beast, which merged with Newsweek two years ago, now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a month, a 70 percent increase in the past year alone - a healthy portion of this traffic generated each week by Newsweek's strong original journalism.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Twitter Censors Users for the First Time</strong></p>
<p>by Adam Clark Estes</p>
<p>October 17, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/10/twitter-censors-users-first-time/58078/">The Atlantic Wire</a></p>
<p>For the first time ever, Twitter censored a controversial account at the request of local government in Germany earlier this week. The banned tweet, posted by neo-Nazis, is the first of its kind under a relatively new Twitter policy that gives the company "the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country -- while keeping it available in the rest of the world." As such, the ban is only effective in Germany, but the issue isn't so simple for free speech advocates. Twitter has long been a haven for dissidents, activists and freedom fighters, but this particular group fits all the qualifications that Twitter laid out when it warned in January that it might "restrict certain types of content" in "countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression ... such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."</p>
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<p><strong>Community Radio Station Doble Via Raided by Guatemalan Police</strong></p>
<p>October 16, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/community-radio-station-doble-raided-guatemalan-police">Cultural Survival.org</a> (Partnering with Indigenous Peoples to Defend their Lands, Languages and Cultures)</p>
<p>On October 11th, the community radio station Radio Doble Via, of San Mateo, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala was raided by police. Agents of the Public Prosecutors Office and the National Police forced entry into the station, but because of an alarm system, community members arrived in large numbers to defend the station. The officials fled the scene, taking a computer and some broadcasting equipment. "The console they took is invaluable for us," lamented station founder Recinos. "We had used that same console since 1982, to broadcast Voz Popular, the radio program of the guerrilla movement, from the top of the Tajamulco Volcano." Station programing covers topics such as the 1996 Peace Accords, the environment, historical memory, Mayan cosmovisión, community leadership, preventative health, self esteem, and gender equality. It is operated and directed by 40 local youth, and is supported by more than 10,000 community members.</p>
<p>Indigenous Peoples' right to their own media was promised in the 1996 Peace Accords that ended the Guatemalan civil war, but the Guatemalan telecommunications law does not allow licenses for nonprofit community radio; only commercial and government-run stations are legal. The station is looking for donations, and for support to encourage lawmakers in Guatemala to approve Bill 4087 that would legalize community radio.</p>
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<p><strong>Netflix settles with deaf-rights group, agrees to caption all videos by 2014</strong></p>
<p>by Joe Mullin </p>
<p>October 10, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-with-deaf-rights-group-agrees-to-caption-all-videos-by-2014/">Artstechnica</a></p>
<p>In an agreement that the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) called "a model for the streaming video industry," Netflix has agreed to caption all of its shows by the year 2014.</p>
<p>The online-streaming giant is already captioning 82 percent of its videos, and will now finish its entire library by 2014. The captioning service works on most, but not all, of Netflix's 1,000 types of devices, and the company promises to make "good faith, diligent efforts" to get it working on all devices. The agreement ends a class-action lawsuit that NAD filed in 2010, claiming that Netflix's website was a "place of public accommodation" that was out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Rules to help deaf viewers threaten local TV shows</strong></p>
<p>by Paul Merrion</p>
<p>October 15, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20121013/ISSUE01/310139982/rules-to-help-deaf-viewers-threaten-local-tv-shows">Crain's Chicago Business</a></p>
<p>Rockers, wrestlers and religious broadcasters producing low- budget television shows are facing a costly federal edict: Add subtitles to your programs or you're off the air. Under pressure from advocacy groups for the deaf, the Federal Communications Commission last year applied its 15-year-old closed-captioning rule to more than 1,000 churches and other independent, nonprofit TV show producers. Nonprofit video producers are still hoping to get waivers if they can prove it's "economically burdensome" to comply, but so far not one of more than 1,100 requests for exemption has been granted.</p>
<p>The bulk of low-budget television subject to the rule is religious programming, but nonprofit, nonprime time also has its quirky side. All American Pro Wrestling in Carbondale IL asked for an exemption for its live broadcasts of regional "competitions" to benefit local charities but was turned down by the FCC.</p>
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<p><strong>Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong</strong></p>
<p>by Alexis Madrigal</p>
<p>October 12, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/">The Atlantic</a></p>
<p>The accepted history of the web goes like this -- In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers/search engines, and some time around 2003, the social web really kicked into gear. After that, the web's users began to connect with each other, leading to Web 2.0, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.</p>
<p>But the sharing on sites like Facebook is the tip of the 'social' iceberg. One dirty secret of web analytics is that the information we get is limited. It's usually pretty easy see how someone came to your site, but Most sharing is done with no referrer data, such as using email programs, instant messages and some mobile apps. This means that a vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. The idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive, even if it isn't actually true, because it backs up social media marketing firms.</p>
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<p><strong>The Data-Mining Industry Kicks Off a Public Relations Campaign</strong></p>
<p>by Natasha Singer</p>
<p>October 15, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/the-data-mining-industry-kicks-off-a-public-relations-campaign/">The New York Times</a> <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/the-data-mining-industry-kicks-off-a-public-relations-campaign/">Technology - Bits Blog</a></p>
<p>The Direct Marketing Association, a trade group in Manhattan, introduced a $1 million public relations campaign on Monday morning with a lofty title: the "Data-Driven Marketing Institute." The purpose of the effort is to buff the image and forestall regulation of the consumer data-mining industry. This industry consists of business-to-business companies, known as data brokers, that collect and sell information about consumers' online and off-line behaviors in order to tailor marketing pitches to them.</p>
<p>The trade group intends to promote such targeted marketing to lawmakers and the public "with the goal of preventing needless regulation or enforcement that could severely hamper consumer marketing and stifle innovation" as well as "tamping down unfavorable media attention." It comes as legislators in both houses, plus the FTC, have opened investigations into the practices of leading data brokers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The dangers of data mining for votes</strong></p>
<p>Editorial</p>
<p>October 16, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/editorials/article/The-dangers-of-data-mining-for-votes-3954740.php">San Francisco Chronicle</a></p>
<p>Do you watch college football? Listen to smooth jazz? Look at pornography sites online? Do you know that political strategists with the presidential campaigns know the answers to each of those questions? It's disturbing, but they do, thanks to the increasingly precise science of data mining. There are companies that compile and study a wealth of details about your personal life, from the type of beer you like to drink to whether you paid your bills on time last month.</p>
<p>Both campaigns have pledged their allegiance to voters' privacy, but it's deeply creepy that the campaigns know so much about individuals' lives. Data mining at this level carries terrible privacy concerns, and the campaigns need to be cautious. It's one thing to urge voters to go to the polls, but quite another thing to violate their privacy while doing it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory </strong></p>
<p>Judge rules for Google's library partners in lawsuit brought by Authors Guild.</p>
<p>by Timothy B. Lee</p>
<p>October 10, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-rules-book-scanning-is-fair-use-suggesting-google-books-victory/">Artstechnica</a></p>
<p>The Author's Guild has suffered another major setback in its fight to stop Google's ambitious book-scanning project when Google settled with a coalition of major publishers last week. Now a judge has ruled that the libraries who have provided Google with their books to scan are protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. While the decision doesn't guarantee that Google will win - that's still to be decided in a separate lawsuit - the reasoning of this week's decision bodes well for Google's case.</p>
<p>Most of the books Google scans come from libraries. After Google scans each book, it provides a digital image and a text version of the book to the library that owns the original. The libraries then contribute the digital files to a repository called the Hathitrust Digital Library, which uses them for three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who cannot read the print copies of the books.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice</strong></p>
<p>by Tim Cushing</p>
<p>October 15, 2012 </p>
<p><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121013/18332220701/textbook-publisher-pearson-takes-down-15-million-teacher-student-blogs-with-single-dmca-notice.shtml">Techdirt</a></p>
<p>The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice continues to be the go-to weapon for copyright defenders. Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice aimed at a 1974 copy of `Beck's Hoplessness Scale' posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites in 2007. (Edublogs is the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite setup on the web.) The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs were taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach.</p>
<p>Edublogs already has a system in place to deal with copyright- related complaints, and the offending post had already been removed, but these steps still weren't enough. It seems ServerBeach's DMCA policy entails taking entire servers offline in order to "comply" with DMCA notices. For the sake of a $120 paper, ServerBeach was more than willing to drop a $75,000/year customer. Despite all the whining, copyright still has plenty of power. Too bad it's so easily abused.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Chipping away at freedom with RFID chips</strong></p>
<p>October 13, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2012/10/chipping-away-at-freedom-with-rfid-chips.html">Undernews</a></p>
<p>A school in Maryland has installed PalmSecure, a biometric scanning system that requires elementary students to place their hand on infrared scanners in order to pay for their school lunch. The unique nuances of each child's individual hand will be catalogued and the image encrypted with a numerical algorithm that is combined with the cost of school lunches.</p>
<p>The Japanese corporation which also provides an array of RFID chipped tags, markets this "authentication system" in healthcare, security, government, banking, retail and education. The cost to taxpayers and parents for installing the surveillance system in 43 schools in Maryland is estimated to be $300,000.</p>
<p>In Texas, 6,000 children attending school in the Northside Independent School District will be required to carry RFID- chipped cards in a pilot program that hopes to track all students in the 12 districts. PalmSource is also being beta- tested in Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>How Technology Is Fueling Urban Inequality</strong></p>
<p>by Alexis Madrigal</p>
<p>September 27, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/09/how-technology-fueling-urban-inequality/3421/">The Atlantic Cities - Place Matters</a></p>
<p>I spent the last week traveling around the Rust Belt talking with startups and entrepreneurs, observing that few cities are lucky enough to hit it big with a Microsoft, a company that poured hundreds of millionaires out into the streets. For example, just across the border from Palo Alto, there's East Palo Alto, where 96 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced lunch at school. My favorite data design firm, Stamen, released a map showing all the private buses that run from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, the elite's mass transit. Work in one of those places, and you have a wonderful travel experience. Everyone else gets the bus or an underfunded Caltrain. One way for our country's elites. The car and a crowded highway for everybody else.</p>
<p>Tech plays a role in structuring the way this bifurcation is going down. There is a set of official augmented reality technologies that will allow us to see the information that humans impose on and decode from the physical world. My hope is that they lead to a reinvestment in the places people live and not a further retreat. Because one chilling vision of the future would be that one in which only the rich can afford a place in the world. For the poor, there will only be cyberspace.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>A Tech Innovation in Detroit: Connect People, Not Computers</strong></p>
<p>by Jamilah King</p>
<p>October 3, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/10/detroit_mesh_networks.html">ColorLines</a></p>
<p>Dolores Leonard's house looks like all the others on her block in Southwestern Detroit, a modest, one-story brick structure. What stands out is what's on the chimney: a slim, 3-foot tall silver pole that's shaped almost like a spear. If all goes according to plan, it will become an instrumental part of one community's effort to build its own people-powered wireless Internet. The device is a router, and once it's up and running, it will work as a hub in what's called a "mesh network," to open up community-owned Internet access throughout Leonard's working class black neighborhood, one of the Detroit's most economically impoverished areas. Detroit, may seem like an unlikely home for a tech revolution, but it's happening, thanks in large part to millions of dollars in federal stimulus money that's helping make the city a hub for broadband innovation.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>How Cellphones Helped Researchers Track Malaria In Kenya</strong></p>
<p>by Michaeleen Doucloff</p>
<p>October 11, 2012</p>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/10/162643881/how-cellphones-helped-researchers-track-malaria-in-kenya">NPR - National Public Radio</a></p>
<p>Cellphones are becoming an important crowdsourcing tool in health care. Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health tracked the texts and calls from nearly 15 million cellphones in Kenya for an entire year and then used the data to make a map for how malaria spreads around the Texas-sized country. The results were unexpected. The roads to and from the capital city, Nairobi, are the most heavily traveled, yet they aren't the most important for spreading the disease throughout the country. Instead, regional routes around Lake Victoria serve as the major disease corridors for the parasite, and towns along the routes are hot spots for transmitting malaria to the rest of the country.</p>
<p>To figure out how this travel pattern contributes to malaria transmission, the research team laid the cellphone data onto maps of malaria infections. The result was a travel network for both the humans and the malaria parasite. A few years ago, health official used a similar strategy - on a smaller scale - to stay ahead of the cholera epidemic in Haiti. As people started fleeing the epidemic's epicenter, cellphone data predicted where the disease would spread and helped aid workers funnel supplies in right place and time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The Tyranny of Anonymity, Reddit and the Future of Your Body Online</strong></p>
<p>by Deanna Zandt</p>
<p>October 16, 2012 </p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2012/10/16/the-tyranny-of-anonymity-reddit-and-the-future-of-your-body-online/">Forbes</a></p>
<p>Reddit is a popular social networking service with a demographic that skews heavily male, white, nerdy. It adheres to principles of free speech and open platform, which means that there are lots of things shared that are on the up and up, and also lots of seedy, hateful things shared.</p>
<p>One of the seedier things shared was in a forum called r/creepshots. Creepshots are photos taken of women in public, but without their knowledge or consent, and shared based on titillation of that non-consent. A woman who was fed up with creepshots started collecting publicly available information about people posting creepshots and sharing it in consolidated identifying posts on a blog called Predditors. [This collecting and sharing of public identity information is called "doxxing." Often, it's part of an overall misogynist tone that's found online. Doxxing is used to find people abusing animals, and also to expose political dissidents who are rounded up and never heard from again.]</p>
<p>When I first encountered the Predditors blog, my eyeballs popped out of my head. Since the information gathered there was provided publicly by the owners of these identities, and not obtained through scurrilous means, it seems absolutely a way to finally hold people accountable for exploiting women in unacceptable ways. Anecdotally, we assume that people won't post creepshots if their true identities are used. I'm not sure that's entirely true, because I also think that the people posting in those forums don't see anything wrong with their entitlement to women's bodies. So culturally, when do we get to say that this is an OK tool to use against people we find reprehensible? Who gets to define "reprehensible?"</p>
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