Last month… NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilizations gallery: Blue Marble, originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there werent many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the webs most widely read meteorologist, explains, The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.
In fact, its likely that the week that photo was taken will prove the driest first week in recorded U.S. history. Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56%of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier. Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids. — Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet
Asked this month, the Harris Poll finds the lowest number [of Americans] who believe in global warming since the question was first asked in 1997 (44% now do, down from 51% in 2009 and 71% in 2007).
The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, theyre leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, theyre raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion. — Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet
Yelling it like it is | Alchemical Musings
Her interviews with [Eben Moglen] should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time.
Should you boycott academic publishers?
"Elsevier has committed too many sins to give an exhaustive list: they have created fake academic journals so that pharmaceutical corporations could claim that certain facts appeared in a journal, they have sponsored evil regulations, and they have restrictive views on what constitutes fair use. Unbelievably, they were also involved in arms trade. They probably have the devil on their board of directors."
Apache considered harmful
GitHub is truly a system of anarchism, in the most classic sense of the term. It is a system of communication and contribution that is without a central organization or institution of governance. Sure, it is hosted, developed, and maintained by someone but they do not enforce any set of governance or process over the users of the system.
Soundmachines
"Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer."
I was bemused by the backlash against GoDaddy from opponents of SOPA. Sure, heartened to see some pushback for the company’s short-sighted and hypocritical stance, but surely this was a company that had failed ethical tests long ago? Better late than never, I suppose… though Paulina Borsook’s decade-old book comes to my mind every time I see someone trumpeting their sudden decision to boycott.
But even if it is simple self-interest, the GoDaddy boycott contrasts with the relative apathy about SOPA amongst educators. It is well-understood by solid, well-meaning, mainstream organizations that the effects of the Act could be disastrous, and those solid, well-meaning, mainstream concerns have been waved away by ignorant lawmakers just as they always are…
So, are there examples of universities re-assessing their purchases from corporations that are actively lobbying against their interests? Hell, are there any individual professors taking a stand, taking textbooks off of syllabi? If there are, I haven’t heard of any. (I did see this call to boycott Elsevier, though it comes from outside academia.)
And lest we think of DIYDIO-powered open educational production as an alternative…
SOPA would also expand the definition of copyright infringement to include hosting a single link to a site that is alleged to contain infringing material. Thus, if an authors blog, or a book discussion group, attracts a single post that contains a single link that goes to a site that someone accuses of copyright infringement, that site becomes one with the alleged infringer, and faces all the same sanctionswithout any proof required, or due process.
And…
Many OER platforms are nonprofit, operating with Creative Commons licenses and allowing global users to upload content on the honor system. The scope and size of OER platforms makes it difficult to monitor them in real time. Under SOPA, if any copyright-infringing material is discovered on an OER, the organization “could potentially have their domain name blocked by the goverment”even if platform staff are unaware that it’s been uploaded. And because OERs are by definition open to anyone, entire sites could become “unavailable due to the behavior of a tiny minority of confused or malicious users.”
Come on, feel the FUD! I suspect that to the academic publishers named above, the resulting chilling effect is a feature, not a bug.
And as ever, as a Canadian I can watch this process, and know I will be affected, but I don’t have a vote, or a member of Congress to call… Ain’t global corporate dominion grand?
I am tempted to wrap up 2011 with some sort of epic jeremiad in which I dismiss the preceding twelve months as the year in which all hope was lost, and acknowledge that the 2012-dead-enders might be on to something. But I can’t write a better version of that than Mr. Kernohan already has… So I find myself in the unlikely position of poking through the embers in search of light and warmth.
And if I am wholly honest, this year-old Abject space is very much a product of 2011… While it is safe to say that this blog did absolutely nothing to make the world a better place, it did provide me with a space to get my hands into the gears of webwork again, to spew verbiage as I see fit. The readership here is miniscule, but if I had to draw up a select list of people whose work is most important to me, the ones I most want to interact with for inspiration and for laughs… well, I pretty much have that here. So if you have spun by this little lovenest of ed tech subversion for whatever reason, and especially if you ever cared to toss off a comment or a link, I truly appreciate it.
My bit of year-end good cheer is drawn from someone who has been in this field doing great work ever since I got here, Sebastien Paquet, who a few weeks back Tweeted:
The slight shift to “DIO” from “DIY” is obvious enough, and if I think about all the fun and all I learned this past year through, say, DS106, it’s equally obvious I didn’t do any of it myself. I can’t do anything by myself… but maybe I can help kick out the jams, because WE ROCK:
Onward to a loud and rowdy 2012 my friends. Nobody’s gonna do it for us, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Mess with the bull, you get the horns.
Scripting News: Why apps are not the future
"The great thing about the web is linking. I don't care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can't link in and out of your world, it's not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don't need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.
We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money."
No Copyright Intended
"For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay."
Access? Copyright! | Ariel Katz
" The already dire situation of Canadas school libraries should serve as a good reminder. Moreover, in post-secondary education, it has been well documented that the consolidation of the academic publishing industry over the last few decades and the licensing practices of the major commercial academic publishers has led to an escalation in the price of periodicals and forced libraries to cut back on their purchase of monographs. This highlights another issue that tends to be overlooked. When publishers (and some collaborating authors) can collude and raise the prices of the most essential books (or reach the same outcome with the imprimatur of the Copyright Board), those who pay the price are not only the users, but also other authors and creatorsthe majority of Canadian authorswho do not share the monopolistic loot and get to sell fewer works."
"Commons in a Box" & the Importance of Open Academic Networks
"...open source versus proprietary technology isn't the only thing at stake. Nor is it simply that Commons in a Box supports an open ecosystem versus a "walled garden." It is that latter piece that seems particularly noteworthy, however, as the project is part of a larger movement on campuses to open up academic scholarship itself -- not just through (open source) social networking but through open access."
Open Educational Resources Expand Educational Inequalities
"If this model is generally true, then virtually every education technology initiative which does not specifically target the needs of particular populations will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, even if the materials are free."
The end of social
"There's no "sharing" at all. Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it's just a feed in some social application that's constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It's just another form of spam, particularly if I'm also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends."
Watching that cute pre-picture cat reminded me of when we lived in Hermosillo, Mexico in the late 90′s. We went to a lot of movies because they were fairly cheap and air-conditioned. The films often sucked, but I always loved the cute pre-picture cats that sang a song about the importance of not talking during movies, reminding us to turn off our cel phones. I can’t find the exact clip they played, but this more recent production starring “Front Row Joe” (el gato Joe) is a less charming example.
Thinking back to those cinema trips I remembered another pre-movie short they would always play. The explicit message is “vive sin drogas” (live without drugs), but the trippy visuals and hypnotic aesthetic undercut that ostensible moral:
The vive sin drogas campaign was bankrolled by TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, privatized in the 90′s by since-disgraced President Carlos Salinas. At the time, I remember reading reports in the Mexican and international alternative press alleging that TV Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego was linked to narco-money. More recently, Salinas-Pliego (currently the second-richest man in Mexico) has called for the legalization of drugs.
As another aside, the Mr. Show character of “Drugachussets” Professor Ellis D. Traills is played by Tom Kenny, who would go on to voice Spongebob Squarepants. Nothing weird about that one…
Marty Krofft has neither admitted nor hinted in occasional interviews that the references were made knowingly; in one case, a writer reported that when pressed as to the connotation of “lids” in the titleLidsville, “Well, maybe we just had a good sense of humor,” Krofft said, laughing.[21]His comments to another interviewer were more direct; in aTimes Unionprofile whose author observed, “Watching the shows today, it’s hard to imagine a show with more wink-and-nod allusions to pot culture, short of something featuring characters named
