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By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros August
23, 2002 Unwanted newborns can be
given up without penalty: The Safe Haven for Infants Act
grants criminal immunity to anyone who leaves an infant 30 days or younger at
a hospital, fire station or police station. Sen. Catherine E. Graziano,
a Providence Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said the bill was prompted
by a series of incidents in which babies were abandoned or found dead. ... A wide
range of groups — from Planned Parenthood to Right to Life — backed
the proposal, she said"
-- The Providence Journal, June 29, 2001 I'm
blogging this in response to two stories, one from AP today -- R.I.
girl who left newborn outside charged with child endangerment and this
story from Santa Cruz: Santa Cruz's Deputy District Attorney
wants the stickers placed on trash dumpsters thoughout the city. The idea is to
discourage child abandonment. Other
states with Safe Haven laws are listed here.
Link to this item | Comment
Wireless
channel use sets up turf battle: The
Portland Oregonian reported this week on a collision between Starbucks' wireless
and Personal Telco,
a nonprofit grassroots effort to build "city wide wireless networks
which are open to, and maintained by, the public."
The
world's biggest barista and a grass-roots group are squaring off in a wireless
game of chicken at Pioneer Courthouse Square. On one end stands Starbucks,
which this week likely will begin marketing a paid service that lets its customers
in Portland's living room connect their laptops wirelessly to the Internet. On
the other is Personal Telco, a local group of computer hobbyists, which has provided
the same service for free in the square since February. Sure, there's room
on the wireless spectrum for peaceful coexistence. But Starbucks, using wireless
carrier T-Mobile, is transmitting its signal on the same channel Personal Telco
has used for the past six months. Neither has budged. The result? Both Starbucks
customers and Personal Telco members may face slower speeds on the suddenly crowded
channel. ... Now, (Personal Telco members) can inadvertently connect to
the Starbucks paid service. ... The group's New
Users Guide may be of general use to those wondering how to get started with
wireless. Meanwhile, Starbucks doesn't foresee wireless Internet
access in its Rhode Island stores this year.
Link
to this item | Comment
Windows 2000 workarounds:
Both from John Lettice at The Register: Win2k
SP3, the 'snooper' licence, and the workaround How
to defang Win2k SP3's auto updating Link
to this item | Comment
Your choice here:
Doc
Searls responds to yesterday's question, "Who can start a list (of candidates
and officeholders who are clueful and friendly to the Net?" by pointing to
the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC)
site. There's not a lot there now but its subtitle is "Educating politics
about technology " so it sounds like a natural for the future.
Link
to this item | Comment
Blog
the Vote, Baby: And Shelley Powers, at Burningbird (aka Burningzilla),
reminds in a post worth reading in its entirety, I have
a set of issues that are important to me. They include our policies in the Middle
East, our environmental policies, health care in the world, women's rights, fair
trade, and so on. Copyright is in the list, but it's wa-a-y down. This
will emerge. People who agree on tech issues are often far apart on everything
else -- like the so-called tech bloggers and war bloggers. And then there
are the promises politicians make to get elected that are forgotten by the dawn
after the Inauguration Ball. Tricky territory to come.
Link
to this item | Comment
August 22, 2002 Future-building:
While targeting members of Congress who represent corporate interests over those
of Netizens may send a message, there's positive action possible as well: How
about identifying candidates and officeholders who are clueful and friendly to
the Net, with the intention of supporting them because they represent us? Who
are they? Make it clear that a voting bloc will support and help finance them
because of these positions, and that this bloc will extend that support to other
candidates who adopt these positions. Who can start
a list?
Link
to this item | Comment
Photos:
Rock 'n' Folk Musicians of the Sixties: John
Byrne Cooke experienced the 1960s within the music of the counterculture.
As a member of the Charles River Valley Boys bluegrass band in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
his musical home was the legendary Club 47, one of the principal wellsprings of
the folk-music boom. When folk gave way to rock and roll, John moved to San Francisco,
home of the Haight-Ashbury and acid rock, to become the road manager for Big Brother
and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin. Through it all, he was taking pictures...
via wood
s lot Link
to this item | Comment
Janis
Ian vs. the recording industry on file sharing: The San Jose Mercury News
interviews the singer who
wrote The
Internet debacle - an alternative view: "She credits
Napster and its progeny with sparking renewed interest in her music, at a time
when she can't be heard on contemporary-hit-obsessed radio stations. And she says
her decision to offer free music downloads had done the opposite of what the industry
predicts it would do: It caused a 300 percent spike in merchandise sales."
via Dave
Winer Link
to this item | Comment
Online
'Spoofing' Turns the Tables on Music Pirates: From The Washington Post,
"All this smacks of desperation," says Eric Garland, president of
BigChampagne, a company hired by major labels to measure online file-sharing traffic.
"When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions
of people say, 'I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it,'
it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around
it rather than fight it." Link
to this item | Comment
Wi-Fi
and free lunches: After running into an open Wi-Fi connection in a sandwich
shop in an unnamed new England town, John Patrick writes, at News.com:
Has the "free lunch" arrived? In the Internet's early days, many
people thought it was free. That misunderstanding eventually got cleared up. So
it is that community wireless networks will hopefully continue to spread. All
that's now needed are business models that can make this happen. Link
to this item | Comment
Letter
from Larry #4, Part 2: Larry Novick, the new expat who's writing from
Cape Verde, had mentioned sending a photo essay, so I didn't think it too strange
when I had only captions and jpgs from him. "What happened to the text?"
he wrote the next day. Oops. That email went wide. I've
put the
photos and the text on one page. Here's how it starts:
August is the holiday month here, which means that most establishments close
at 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and don't open on Saturday. This translates to
a mass exodus to the beaches, neighborhood cookouts and of course, music, music,
music. The festivities started on my corner Friday evening with grilled fish and
beer, continued with music at a neighbor's courtyard... More... Larry
also looks ahead to the Baia
das Gatas Festival, the concert founded after a local showing of the movie
Woodstock: Tomorrow, Cesaria
(Evora) arrives and preparations for the Festival at Baia das Gatas begin.
The town is already filling up with tourists and the international press. The
immediate effect is there is no small change or parking places. There's a real
cosmopolitan feel as the Italian and French are all about (Haven't run into any
Yanks yet). I'll keep you updated on the happenings. Earlier
Letters from Larry: August
5, June
25, May
23
Link
to this item | Comment
Internet
to reach South Pole: My colleague Tim
Barmann sends this along. Soon, the Internet's reach will
extend all the way to the South Pole. In what will be one of the most dramatic
and challenging engineering tasks ever carried out in Antarctica, a fiber
optic cable will be laid across nearly 2,000 kilometers of polar ice. It will
take years to design and construct, but when finished it will revolutionize communications
with the South Pole. The pole is the only permanently inhabited place on
Earth that cannot see geosynchronous communication satellites, a fact that severely
restricts communication with the base. The U.S. National Science Foundation has
just issued a request for companies to bid to build the trans-Antarctic fiber
optic line that can be useable by 2009. Link
to this item | Comment
August 21, 2002 Starbucks
offers Wi-Fi access -- but not here: News.com reports,
Starbucks is now serving up high-speed wireless Internet access
at about 1,200 of its coffee shops, the company said today. The Seattle-based
coffee shop operator has surrounded the shops with a local area network supplied
by T-Mobile,
which is the wireless division of Germany's Deutsche Telekom, and computer maker
Hewlett-Packard, the three companies said in a joint statement. The three
aim to offer the wireless Net access at up a total of 2,000 cafes in the United
States as well as Europe, including Berlin and London, by the end of the year.
The network uses the Wi-Fi
communications standard that allows computers with the correct equipment within
a short distance of the network hub to log into the Internet.
Rhode Island is not on the list today, although Boston is. An employee at the
Wayland Square coffee shop had never heard of the program, but promised to inquire
of the mothership when it would come to his store. We inquired ourselves, and
are awaiting a call from Seattle with a date for Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts
shops. Today's rollout goes live at Starbucks stores in Atlanta; Austin,
Texas; Boston; Connecticut; Denver; Dallas-Ft-Worth; Houston; New York; New Jersey;
Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; the San Francisco Bay area; and the Seattle-Puget
Sound region. Additionally, stores in southern California, including Los Angeles;
Chicago; Maryland; Pittsburgh; Virginia; and Washington D.C., are scheduled to
go wireless before the end of 2002. If you're in one of the favored areas,
the free software is at http://www.starbucks.com/hotspot;
24-hour free passes from the wireless ISP, T-Mobile, are available there,
too. Other locations where T-Mobile access works -- mostly airports -- are at
T-Mobile's site. If
you'd like to learn more about Wi-Fi,
I gathered some links a couple of weeks ago here.
Link
to this item | Comment
"Let's Start Here": Stanford Law professor
Lawrence Lessig and Userland blog pioneer Dave Winer are hammering out a dialogue
that includes positions
on copyright that Ernie the Attorney sums up well. Also at issue is a speech
Lessig gave that made
Doc Searls bristle: "But if you don't do something (political) now, this
freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be
taken away. ... But you've done nothing." The snippet below from Lessig's
blog yesterday, written after a series of emails
with Dave, makes me jump in: "Right now we have a
culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st
century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect. "How?
Here's the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress
-- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress
saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas." I
think an even simpler thing, with far greater potential impact, would be to create
together a National Online Computer Course called "Let's Start Here." Many
non-techies, perhaps most, can only click and type inside programs -- they use
AOL, email, shop and consume the web like a Disney movie, clicking from Google
to look up information, but they don't know how to copy and paste. Others are
afraid to download anything at all. Teach more people how to use this architecture.
Show them what you've built and how we use it, in language so clear they just
get it. Teach them how to do what they're going to lose if they don't
act. And then get them tell their friends (some of whom will be politicians and
neighborhood activists) and get upset and use the traditional political channels
-- rallies on TV, sound bytes, letters to the editor. Give them simple,
free blogware so local groups can form online. Make it a movement. Stop the war. The
Chicken Little theory of history says that if enough citizens believe the sky
is gonna fall and they go to the king and demand action, whether the sky is falling
or not the king must act; if he doesn't, the king will fall. Votes are
the one thing with more power than Hollywood money.
Link
to this item | Comment
 |
| Tara Sue Grubb
Libertarian
candidate for Congress from N.C. | The
first Congressional candidate to blog: Meanwhile, Dave Winer is championing
the candidacy of Libertarian candidate Tara Sue Grubb, who's running against Howard
Coble (R-N.C.) for a House seat. Dave's intention is "to elect Ms. Grubb
as the first Representative that the Internet helped elect (to balance the help
that Coble and others get from Hollywood)." Here's Dave's description
of her: "I had an hour phone talk with Tara Grubb. She
sounds great. Next step, get a website going. She's going to send me some of her
writing, and a picture. She's quite a contrast to Coble. A young mom, 26 years
old. Daughter of a Vietnam vet. All her brothers were in the military. She's been
broke and homeless. 13,000 people in her district have lost their jobs recently.
Very ambitious, but seems quite sincere in wanting to reform politics. Her only
issue is the Internet." Coble, along with Rep.
Howard Berman (D-Calif.), from Disney's district, last month introduced the
Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act
(.pdf) — a bill that, if passed, would authorize copyright holders to covertly
hack into Internet users' computers and use technological weapons, such as viruses,
against anyone whom they have a "reasonable basis" to suspect is engaged
in copyright infringement. Coble's hometown paper, The Greensboro (N.C.)
News-Record, in an Aug. 10 editorial, suggests, Coble
should retool Internet piracy bill: Howard Coble obviously
means well. But a bi-partisan bill he is co-sponsoring to combat Internet burglars
effectively could make the entertainment industry judge, jury and executioner
of alleged cybercriminals and would permit them unfettered access into anyone's
home computer. The Sixth District congressman from Greensboro, who is
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet,
and Intellectual Property, supports a measure that would give record companies
and other entertainment industries the right to invade our personal computers,
based merely on the suspicion that we might have illegally downloaded copyrighted
material. That would be tantamount to allowing Sears or Kmart to invade
your home if they believe you have shoplifted merchandise from one of their stores.
And if they should accidentally bang a door or shatter a window in the process,
well, no harm, no foul. The language of the measure grants the entertainment
industry Internet policing powers and specifically absolves these companies of
any legal liability for "disabling, interfering with, blocking or otherwise
impairing files" on personal computers. Ed
Cone, a journalist-blogger in Grubb's North Carolina district, doubts the
Libertarian neophyte can beat Coble, but notes, "Already, she is the first
candidate for U.S. Congress to have a Weblog, and that alone is noteworthy. " Grubb
writes her new blog, Tara
Grubb For Congress Radio Weblog, in her own energetic voice. She gets instant
feedback from the comments feature, where one voter asked,
Hello Tara, I'd like to know your position on the proposed FedEx hub
at the Greensboro airport. As you may be aware, the federal government is prepared
to poney up $108,000,000.00 for a third runway to be used exclusively by FedEx,
the state is prepared to spend $36,000,000.00 to relocate a perfectly good road
in order to accommodate the third runway, and the state and county have offered
$90,000,000.00 in tax incentives. All of this to bring to fruition a project that
will add to our air pollution problem, diminish our drought-plagued water supply,
and subject thousands of cititizens to thunderous overnight noise. Where do you
stand? She answers
the question today, and gets tips
on better technique from yet another commenter. (This is gonna be fun!) In
1994, I wrote, "Politicians
who venture online will find a well-informed constituency already there, and can
expect to account for their actions publicly and often." And now it's
happening. Spread the word.
Link
to this item | Comment
August 20, 2002 Court
Upholds Stoning for Nigerian Mother: Amina Lawal Kurami's appeal was rejected.
She will be stoned to death for bearing a child out of wedlock. The father denies
being the father (and apparently has no DNA). Here's the NYT version (reg.
req.) (photo):
An Islamic high court in northern Nigeria rejected an appeal
today from a single mother sentenced to be stoned to death for having had sex
out of wedlock. The woman's lawyers said they planned to file an appeal
to a yet higher Islamic court. If that failed, they could appeal to the Supreme
Court, where the case would force a showdown between Nigeria's constitutional
and religious authorities... In court today, Amin Lawal clutched her baby
daughter and burst into tears as the judge ruled. Ms. Lawal, 30, was first
sentenced in March, having given birth to her daughter more than nine months after
divorcing. The man she identified as the child's father denied the accusation
and was acquitted for lack of evidence last spring. Nigerian
writer and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and the Muslim Council of Britain's Professor
Dawud Noybee explained
their opposing views on Lawal's case for the BBC.
Link
to this item | Comment
"The
life of the Dead:
Band insider Dennis McNally talks about his new 600-page biography of the Grateful
Dead, and answers questions about their long, strange trip." In
Salon, Douglas Cruickshank interviews the
Grateful Dead's biographer-in-residence, Dennis McNally.
McNally: "They did things often for completely odd reasons. As an
example, taping. They permitted taping for no other reason than that they didn't
want to be cops. They were lousy cops, they were antiauthoritarian to the core,
and it was too much work, too much bad vibes, too much everything. And, frankly,
they were realistic and said, It's impossible to stop taping unless you strip-search
every member of the audience, which ruins the atmosphere, of course. "But
the serendipitous result was that they doubled their audience..." You
may download .pdfs of the introduction
and first
chapter of McNally's What a Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the
Grateful Dead.
Link
to this item | Comment Segway
isn't really "IT": Dean Kamen's "IT'' was disappointing.
After some who had seen it said "IT" would change the way we live, it
turned out to be just a scooter. But that may not have been "IT."
Graham Hayday at ZDnet reports, According to a posting on
the 'ginger-chat.com'' site,
the Segway Human Transporter (SHT for short) cannot be the same thing as the much-hyped
mystery invention originally known as Ginger and IT. The claim revolves
around inconsistencies between the description of Ginger contained in publicity
for a book written by journalist Steve Kemper and the actual
scooter-like invention. There are also some alleged patent irregularities.
"...Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com (and inventor of Ethernet)
and someone not known for participating in hoaxes, also claims to have seen Ginger
-- and says it's not Segway. Metcalfe
told the New York Times earlier this year: "Some months ago when speculation
was running high, I said that Kamen's IT was more important than the Internet,
but not as important as cold fusion, had cold fusion worked out. The IT I was
talking about, which I did not disclose, was NOT Segway. That's all I can say."
"...Another posting on the ginger-chat
site points out that the series of images of the machine on the official Segway.com
site changed subtley in June this year. Originally, there was a bloke standing
on the now-familiar two-wheeled scooter; now, there is one image which appears
to be the same bloke floating above the ground. " Metcalfe
is the man who served up the intriguing analogy, " 'If I invented metal,
and came out with the first spoon, which would be the big invention, the spoon
or metal?'" Suppose the scooter was just the way to test a stabilizer?
The bulky prototype might lead to a wearable device that would lose the scooter.
When pigs fly... (so can I?) Here's
a prediction from the owner of the "ginger-chat. com" site, registered
only as Spliff: "After many months of debate, research,
and contemplation I have decided that I can't be sure what makes GINGER/IT hover/fly
but I have a gut feeling that it does. In a nutshell this is what I believe Ginger
is going to be: It's going to be a Personal hovering/flying vehicle that employs
some type of revolutionary propulsion system. In order to maintain air control
and balance as it hovers/flies it will advantageously employ technology similar
to "Dynamic Stabilization" found in Kamen's iBot wheelchair. Finally,
Ginger will be powered by Kamen's
Stirling engine. It will change the world. " That
iBot wheelchair was touted by none other than ... Bob Metcalfe, in InfoWorld magazine:
"Dean
Kamen's IBOT is not a wheelchair -- users wear it, processors and all."
Link
to this item | Comment
Newspaper
ads are down again, causing worries: Felicity Barringer (NYT, reg.req.)
reports, "While many in the newspaper industry were somewhat
optimistic just a month ago, after a mildly encouraging ad-page performance in
the second quarter, there is now cause for second thoughts. Gannett reported yesterday
that at USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, ad volume was off
16 percent in July, compared with the same period in 2001. Advertising volume
at The New York Times dipped 5.7 percent compared with July 2001. The drop in
advertising has caused many newspaper chains to reduce their workforces; some
have eliminated more than 10 percent of jobs in the last two years." One
Southern CEO noted, "The big dark cloud for all our newspapers is Kmart and
what's going to happen with them. Over all, they are our second-largest advertiser." Kmart
is just the most recent example of the Walmart effect: Warren Bufffett's retail
chain doesn't advertise, but when it moves into an area it causes the death of
competitors who do.
Link
to this item | Comment
Sidebar: J-students
are probably asking: "Too late to switch majors?"
A University of Georgia report says starting salaries in journalism/communication
jobs are down, benefits are reduced, jobs are less plentiful, and the satisfaction
with those jobs is declining. The average starting salary for a 2001 journalism/communications
graduate with a bachelor's degree was $26,000, down from $27,000 for '00 graduates.
For graduates with a master's degree, the average starting salary dropped to $30,120
from $31,304 in 2000. Here's
a press release, a summary
of the results and the full
report (pdf) -- The Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication --
compiled by the Grady College's James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass
Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia.
Link
to this item | Comment
TV travelogues online: Mike Goldfein of Belo
Interactive does a TV-spot-like
spot that begins, " Whatever happened to all those old travel documentaries
that, decades ago, used to be a staple of saturday afternoon TV?" The
answer: They're at Adventure
TV. Some are virtually ads for tour companies, Goldfein warns, and others
use every cliche banned in travel sections (Paradise, Mecca), but the visuals
are great. Today's featured video a jaunt through Vietnam's Mekong Delta, and
"Titicaca: Lake of the Incas" leads the the weekly features bill that
changes on Wednesdays.
Link
to this item | Comment
August 19, 2002
Neighborhood cookout in Mindelo, Cape Verde. Click to see larger
photos and captions. Letter from Larry #4: Onetime
New Bedford Standard Times reporter Larry Novick and his wife Victoria left Providence
in May, retiring to Victoria's native Cape Verde. Here's his fourth report on
adjusting to life as an expatriate. This is the neighborhood's
weekend cookout which starts shortly after 3 p.m. Friday. Everybody comes out
and by 10 p.m., there might be four grills going with fresh fish and chicken and,
of course, lots of beer. Because of the heat, the festivities continue
until after midnight and as the charcoal turns to embers, somehow more beer appears
and disappears and there's a lot of a capella singing. Earlier
Letters from Larry: August
5,
June 25, May
23
Link
to this item | Comment
Pop-ups put down: Earthlink
to help block the ads EarthLink Inc. said Monday it plans to offer
its subscribers software to block Internet pop-up advertisements as part of a
wider campaign to set itself apart from competitors. ... It will also block so-called
pop-unders, ads that appear under the browser window.
Link
to this item | Comment
Cultural divide: A T-shirt worth having!
Chinese
newspaper tries to shame men into putting on their shirts
Beijing
Youth Daily says its survey reveals that shirtless men are harming the city's
image. In an effort to get men to cover up, the paper is running a daily photo
spread of bare-chested men. (The eyes of the "shamed" are covered with
black bars.) Men who spot themselves in the Youth Daily can go to the paper's
office to claim a free T-shirt proclaiming, "Civilizing Beijing Begins with
Me." (Los Angeles Times) via Romanesko Link
to this item | Comment
"Public
Relations Tactics": How to pitch a blogger, from the PR Society of
America. It is crucial not to spam bloggers and to be aware
of their likes and dislikes before you drop them a line. Canned, conventional
pitch letters can be seen as offensive. Their preferred means of communication
is e-mail and their address is often prominently featured on the site. When communicating
with blogs, make sure to be completely open and honest about why you are contacting
them, disclosing your organizational affiliation. Keep it to the point and always
make sure to include a link to a published story or item that they might consider
featuring. Do not ask bloggers to link to your client's site or latest press release.
Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and
companies, which is the reason they began blogging in the first place. via
JD Lasica "Nice
doggie..." Link
to this item | Comment
Dog
days: Shelley Powers, aka Burningbird,
writes a blog I read for the sheer pleasure of experiencing her voice and
her thoughts. Today she speaks for me as well: This time of
year, the Dog Star--Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major--starts appearing
in the sky just before dawn for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, after
hiding behind the sun for most of the summer. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed
that it was Sirius in combination with the Sun that causes so much of the heat
we feel at this time of year. Those crazy Greeks and Romans. Regardless
of how we got the term, these days are the worst of our summer and it shows. The
Southern Hemisphere webloggers are just going to have to carry the rest of us
for a week or two. Link
to this item | Comment
Subterranean
Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features
& interactive producer of projo.com | 
