December 2007
When a Rose Is Not Red →
There’s an interesting article in January’s Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience about a brain injured patient who has a curious form of simultanagnosia - the inability to perceive more than one object at once. In this case, he also seemed unable to report more than one attribute, like colour or name, at a time, while looking at the object. Simultanagnosia: When a Rose Is Not Red. J Cogn...
The GOP’s Muslim Problem →
I’m very consciously about to break Godwin’s Law here, but I think it’s warranted: The rhetoric coming from the Republican party is so hateful that I nearly expect to hear someone propose a final solution to “the Muslim problem.”
John Deady, the co-chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy, is standing by the comments he made in the controversial interview with The Guardian we posted on below,...
Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage →
Shopdropping is the practice by anti-consumerist artists of leaving fake products with political messages on shelves.
Google Raises Privacy Concerns With Ill-Conceived... →
The other day we woke up to find that a story we’d accidentally “shared” on Google Reader was now being automatically broadcast to a wide swath of strangers who were listed in our Gmail contacts and had been “auto- added” to Google Talk . It was startling, but no big deal because we didn’t use the “share” feature on Google Reader and therefore had...
Deluge Anonymizing Browser Now Includes Bittorrent →
markybob writes “An open-source bittorrent client, Deluge, now provides an internal, anonymizing browser to protect its users from overzealous ISPs. The client runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. From the site: “Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many...
Australia Plans to Censor the Internet →
SenatorLuddite writes “From January 20, 2008 new content laws introduced by the Federal Government will force sites to verify the age of users before accessing content intended for mature audiences (MA15+ and R18+). The laws bring internet classification into line with Film and Book classification laws and completely prohibits X18+ and RC content from the internet. ACMA (The Australian...
SpecGram—Speculative Grammarian Online →
premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics
Edge: RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT By Daniel L.... →
Universal grammar is the most important theory in linguistics. Has the language of one tribe now disproved it?
Brooklyn Museum: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for... →
presents online the work of over 150 artists “whose work reintroduced the articulation of socially relevant issues after an era of aesthetic formalism”
Philosophy Research Base →
thousands of annotated links and text resources for philosophy research on the Internet. Categorized by history, subject and author, this meta-index serves as both a study guide and a platform for a wide variety of community services for students and teac
NCAA Puts Severe Limits On Sport Event Blogging →
An anonymous reader writes “You would think that the NCAA would be thrilled to have reporters live blogging events in order to generate more interest and keep passionate fans talking about NCAA sports. Not so. The governing body of the NCAA has released new rules for receiving press credentials and it includes severe limits on live blogging. If you’re covering NCAA football, make sure...
Shocker of the Day: Sex education actually works →
While federal funding for abstinence-only education is being extended for another 6 months despite extensive reports showing its ineffectiveness, a new report shows that comprehensive sex education is doing its job. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a report, which was also published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, revealing that teenagers who have...
Offensive Like Me →
The latest crap online journalism trend? Playing dress up and writing a really offensive piece about your time spent as “the other.” First up, Danielle Crittenden wears a niqab around Washington for a Huffington Post series called “Islamic Like Me.” Muslimah Media Watch points out that this title is a grammatical horror, and goes on to do the definitive take-down: Ms....
Nazis Are Mad They Can't Bring Their Guns To Jena →
The white nationalist group planning to march on Jena, Louisiana on Martin Luther King Day is suing the town because they contend local laws inhibit their First Amendment rights to run around like crazy people carrying automatic weapons. A white separatist group planning a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Jena is suing the town, claiming officials are violating the Constitution by asking...
Gagged again →
Citing Bush’s guaranteed veto, Democrats stripped out language repealing the Global Gag Rule from a spending bill recently passed by the House Appropriations Committee. We all know Bush hates women — especially poor women — and would have vetoed the bill, but it’s incredibly frustrating that Democrats preempted him. In the end, the legislation did not even include an...
Colorado Decertifies E-voting Machines →
mamer-retrogamer writes “On December 17, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified election equipment used by 64 Colorado counties, including machines made by Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. A report issued by the Secretary of State’s office details a myriad of problems such as lack of password protection on the systems, controls that...
New Orleans Police Attack Demolition Protest →
Despite the attack on New Orleans culture made evident by the recent arrest of traditional jazz funeral procession band players, the city’s residents took to the streets in true New Orleans style to peacefully demonstrate against plans to demolish four public housing units. Watch this horrifying video of what happened when the residents organized a protest against the destruction of their...
The Future of Google Search and Natural Language... →
eldavojohn writes “You might know the name Peter Norvig from the classic big green book, ‘AI: A Modern Approach.’ He’s been working for Google since 2001 as Director of Search Quality. An interview with Norvig at MIT’s Technology Review has a few interesting insights into the ‘search mindset’ at the company. It’s kind of surprising that he claims...
Apparently, if you know him and he rapes you, it... →
Date rape should be treated differently from attacks on women by strangers, John Redwood has said. The former cabinet minister - now a senior Tory party adviser - suggested rape accusations made by women against their partners should be treated as “disagreements” between lovers.
This is in the context of the tightening up of rape laws in the UK. He actually says, “They [Labour]...
Saudi king ‘pardons rape victim’ →
What a sad headline. It encapsulates all that is wrong with this story, and the justice system in Saudi Arabia, Bush’s partner in Bush’s War on Terror. Life for women in that country is a human rights nightmare. Women cannot drive, vote, or to appear in public without being accompanied by a male relative. Judgment is harsh for any breach of social and religious norms; in this case the outcry over...
Abstinence-only Education: What we're missing →
Earlier this year, we reported that states were starting to refuse abstinence-only funds. You know, because they don’t work. Well, it seems that the trend is catching on: 14 states are now straight up refusing federal funds for abstinence only education. (Two more states are applying for funding but saying that they’ll use it for comprehensive sex ed—making them ineligible.) The...
Quick Hit: Cocaine is Cocaine is Cocaine →
I was so thrilled when I read that the United States Sentencing Commission finally voted, 7-0 I might add, last week to reduce retroactively sentences for crack-cocaine offenses, bringing them more in line with the equivalent punishment for powdered cocaine. The disparate sentencing of the two forms of essentially the same drug has long been evidence of our justice system’s racist and...
Nature releases genome papers under Creative... →
Nature Magazine’s announced that it’s going to share all its human genome papers under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses.The genomes themselves are not copyrightable and go into a public database, but the papers — which are a vital part of the science — may now be freely copied by any non-commercial publisher.
In the continuing drive to make...
Senate set to forgive telcos for spying on... →
Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, “At EFF, we’ve just sent out an urgent action alert. Monday morning, the Foreign Intelligence Service Bill bill finally goes to the Senate floor, and at noon the Senate will cast their most important votes yet on Telecom Immunity for participation in massive, nationwide illegal NSA wiretapping. We’ve set up an action alert page for...
Nature releases genome papers under Creative... →
Nature Magazine’s announced that it’s going to share all its human genome papers under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses.The genomes themselves are not copyrightable and go into a public database, but the papers — which are a vital part of the science — may now be freely copied by any non-commercial publisher.
In the continuing drive to make...
Save New Orleans public housing. →
The post Katrina housing crisis is one that we know about but is failing to get as much national attention as it should. It is an ongoing problem and the structures that are supposed to be fixing up housing, providing and protecting the residents and working to “bring New Orleans back,” have failed to keep their promises. New Orleans has been flooded with bad policy decisions in the...
Facebook's Beacon was illegal as well as dumb →
James sez, “Everyone knows that Facebook’s Beacon application was a privacy disaster. But it was also probably illegal. I’ve written up an analysis of Beacon under a 1988 law that flatly prohibits video stores from telling people what their customers rented. Every time Blockbuster spammed your friends list with an announcement about your latest online video purchase, it was...
The Truth About Female Desire online →
From Mind Hacks: “The Truth About Female Desire was a four part UK television series broadcast in 2005 which was a collaboration between the respected sex research centre The Kinsey Institute, London’s Brunel University and Channel 4.” In a major science event led by John Bancroft, six single girls share a dormitory at Brunel University, London, where scientists from the Kinsey...
Congress Wants To Up Copyright Infringement... →
The usual gang of RIAA-funded suspects have introduced a bill that would boost US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them, and allow the U.S. government to seize computers, says Ars Technica. In addition to strengthening both civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement, the big development here is the proposed creation of the Office of the...
Mitt Romney's windy, worthless speech. →
Almost the only clever thing about Gov. Mitt Romney’s long-denied and long-delayed but obviously long-prepared “response” was its location at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, which allowed him to pose (prematurely, I’d say) in front of a presidential seal as well as a thicket of American flags. Composed chiefly of boilerplate, the windy speech raised the vexed...
Congress Drops Measure on Hate Crimes →
Citing objections from Republicans and President Bush, Democratic leaders agreed to strip out the hate crimes provision to clear the way for approval of the Pentagon policy measure.
Non-Competes As the DRM of Human Capital →
An anonymous reader writes “Techdirt has an interesting look at how non-compete agreements are like DRM for people, doing just as much damage to innovation as DRM has done to the entertainment industry. It includes links to a lot of research to back up the premise, including some studies showing that Silicon Valley’s success as compared to Boston’s can be traced in part to the...
House Bill Could Criminalize Free Wi-Fi Operators →
Velcroman98 sends word of a bill that passed the US House of Representatives by a lopsided vote of 409 to 2. It would require everyone who runs an open Wi-Fi connection to report illegal images, including “obscene” cartoons and drawings, or be fined up to $300,000. The Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online (SAFE) Act was rushed through the House without any hearings or...
California Testers Find Flaws In Voting Machines →
quanticle writes “According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a “common office implement”. After cracking the physical security of the device, the testers found it simple to reconfigure the BIOS to boot off external media. After booting a version...
MPAA’s University Toolkit hit with DMCA takedown... →
The MPAA’s Ubuntu-based university network monitoring toolkit software is no longer available for download. An Ubuntu technical board member sent a takedown notice to the group’s ISP noting that the software was being distributed without source code, which is a violation of the GPL.
Read More…
16 Days Against Gender Violence: Raping the... →
Raise your hand if you are tired of hearing about another way that the courts justify rape and blame women for the violence they have suffered at the hands of men. Yeah, me too. A women from the Philippines has decided to take her rape case to the United Nations’ CEDAW because the courts in Manila decided that there are two kinds of women; rapable and unrapable (please no, neither of these...
A response to "Liberal Creationism." →
In response to James Watson’s remarks concerning the intelligence of blacks, Slate’s William Saletan wrote a series of pieces on race, IQ, and genetics. In his first post, Saletan wrote: “It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.” One’s to-do list reflects a...
Missouri proposal aims to ban abortion →
Apparently, a controversial sentiment. A new ballot initiative in Missouri is seeking to essentially outlaw abortion. (H/t Cara) The proposal would require doctors to extensively review the medical literature on abortion and investigate each patient’s background and lifestyle. It would require doctors to certify that the abortion was better for the woman than a full-term pregnancy. Because when...
Net Neutrality Roars Back Onto The Congressional... →
Net neutrality advocates led by Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) are working overtime to turn net neutrality into an election year issue. Markey, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, plans to introduce legislation later this month and push for hearings in both chambers. Could net neutrality actually make it through Congress this time?
Eh,...
Creative Commons turns five -- global birthday... →
The Creative Commons licenses turn five years old in December and they’re having parties all over the world to celebrate! The main one, in San Francisco, is on Dec 15 from 10PM to 2AM, at the Terra Gallery at 511 Harrison Street.
My first novel was the first book released under a CC license, which means that my novel-writing career is turning five in January. Time sure flies! Link
An end to masculinity =/ an end to men →
Feminism Friday post. It takes me awhile, but this post is more about the concept of masculinity than about porn, really. Courtney Martin has an interesting review up of Robert Jensen’s new book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I really like the review, and she captures a lot of the thoughts I had when I saw Jensen give a speech on pornography—basically a combination of...