derivative work

Иконописиконографияиконимека мебелRosalind Picard, a co-inventor of software that can assess people’s expressions, is marketing the software for people with autistic spectrum disorders, and other users. However, she notes that:

Affectiva, Dr. Picard said, intends to offer its technology as “opt-in only,” meaning consumers have to be notified and have to agree to be watched online or in stores. Affectiva, she added, has turned down companies, which she declined to name, that wanted to use its software without notifying customers.

Steve Lohr, Smarter Than You Think: When Computers Keep Watch, NYT 2011/01/02.

While I have to acknowledge her consistency, it would be a more elegant bit of turn-around justice for consumers to be given those shy companies’ identity.

“I do think it’s true that the large contours of national and international policy are much harder to keep secret today,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It would not be possible to conduct a secret war in Cambodia, as took place in the Nixon administration.”NYT 2010/12/12

Indeed. That’s kind of the point.

THIS. Glenn Greenwald on “The media’s authoritarianism and WikiLeaks”. Please note Greenwald’s excoriation of the widespread misstatement about what WikiLeaks has actually done: WikiLeaks has only posted 1269 of the 250,000 cables they possess. They have not “posted” or “published” all of them; they have not “dumped” them. They have published a very small, screened selection of the cables; and then provided copies of the entire set to media organizations. It’s just infuriating that almost nobody in the media gets this right.

And, for good measure, THIS, “a brief history of Operation Payback”.

I was interested to read this review of the new documentary, ‘Client 9′, about the Eliot Spitzer takedown. The reviewer, O’Hehir, describes it as, “an act that in retrospect looks an awful lot like a political assassination.” Ya think?

“Politician caught with pants down” and “White knight has feet of clay” are stories we’re all drawn to, almost by primal instinct. They satisfyingly confirm all our worst suspicions about human nature. But that primal satisfaction was used, in this case, to distract our attention from the takedown of one of the few American politicians devoted to fighting corporate power and ruling-class privilege, an act that in retrospect looks an awful lot like a political assassination.

Blog hiatus continues.

My partner sent me this article about the furor over a public school field trip to a local Muslim community center.

Folks seem to be upset because a few kids participated in religious observances / prayer. Personally I’m not too bothered by that — it appears to be voluntary participation at the event, and likely the field trip itself was voluntary. Prayers should not be sponsored by the school, but kids are free at school to engage in non-sponsored religious rituals should they choose; so why not on a field trip?

But what I am bothered by is the below paragraph, which doesn’t seem to have excited much controversy:

The 10-minute video, which weaves the words of a narrator and video of activities at the center, says that during the field trip, girls and women were instructed to stay at the back of the room during the prayer service — as per Muslim custom — and the boys were allowed to stand side by side with mosque members during prayers.

Letting kids see folks at religious observances, and learn about said religion, is one thing. Encouraging them, or requiring them, to participate in sex discrimination is quite another. wtf?!? Seriously, there are all sorts of institutions that are sexist and racist in practice. We ought not be taking kids to them. Find a Muslim cultural center that does not practice sex discrimination, or keep the kids out of the religious chambers in this center. Similarly if you have to cover a girl’s hair to take her into a Church of Christ cultural center, or make her wear a dress to visit an Orthodox Jewish facility — this is the definition of gender discrimination. And this religious-based sex discrimination is the imposition of religious practices and beliefs, not the voluntary prayer. I say again, wtf?

Let’s just picture the teasing between the kids about this enforced gender division, and how the individual kids felt to be sent to the front of the room or the back of the room based on gender.

Participating in prayers, voluntarily, is not illegal. Being discriminated against on the basis of your gender is illegal.

I say again, wtf?!?

The judge also finds that the two adult stem cell researchers who brought the case would suffer imminent and irreparable harm without the injunction because they would have to compete with embryonic stem cell researchers for research funds. That is absurd. Adult stem cell research is funded far more generously than work with embryonic stem cells. And there is no firm limit on the amount of money that can be spent on each. NYT editorial

How did this case not get knocked out on standing? Competing for funding? In two different fields ??? Absurd.

But for this absurdity we have to blame the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, not Judge Lamberth; it was the D.C. Circuit Ct. which granted the researchers “competitor standing”.

The Guidelines, by allowing federal funding of [embryonic stem cell] research, increases competition for NIH’s limited resources. This increased competition for limited funds is an actual, imminent injury. See Sherely, 2010 WL 2540358 at *5 (explaining that the increased competition that plaintiffs face is “substantial enough to deem the injury to them imminent”). There is no after-the-fact remedy for this injury because the Court cannot compensate plaintiffs for their lost opportunity to receive funds. Sherley v. Sebelius, D.D.C. 2010

Stacking the D.C. Circuit for years with pro-life Republicans has finally paid off!

The mind boggles: Any agency that funds more than one thing is open, now, to scrutiny by the possible fund-ees for potential legal suit. I suddenly see a future for all those laid-off New York law firm associates.

And, a fine example of how Congress works: Default BS caving in to lobbyists. In this instance, the “Dickey-Wicker amendment, that has been attached to annual appropriations bills for the Department of Health and Human Services since 1996″ — i.e., more absurd religious BS around abortion and fetal rights, affecting science and medicine.

And did the Obama administration tackle this problem directly? No, they avoided the problem the same way the other administrations have.

Disgraceful all around.

cite: quotes from NYT Editorial 8/25. opinion available at uscourts.gov (PDF).

• The Petermann ice shelf in Greenland (the northern-most glacier in the world) has lost a quarter of its mass, calving a 100 square mile iceberg now known as the “Petermann Ice Island (2010)”. Note that there is a “2010″ designation to distinguish this one from a smaller iceberg calved in 2008. Ed Markey had a good idea.

  Relevance to the pending apocalypse: Sign of global warming; loss of Arctic / sub-Arctic environments and habitats; influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic currents; Greenland is smaller.

  sources: AFP, wikipedia.

• The drought and related fires in Russia continue, threatening, among other things, wheat prices and harvests. Relevance to environmental and social DOOM: Farmlands diverted from other crops to wheat; wheat prices increasing; and, of course, smoke from the fires may contribute to global warming as well as causing shorter-term respiratory problems.
• Rising temperatures diminish rice harvests. It’s getting too hot at night for rice to grow. Yields have already diminished by 10-20% in some parts of the world, over the last 25 years. Need I mention that rice is the #3 staple food crop? And the primary staple food crop in Asia and Africa?
• Rising food costs. Related to both the wheat & rice fiascos, the FAO has predicted that staple food prices will rise significantly, between 15 to 45%, over the next decade.
• Genetically engineered pesticide-resistant strains of canola growing wild on roadsides. “Roundup Ready” and “Liberty Link” varieties have been found, and varieties resistant to both pesticides — indicating cross-breeding of the varieties. Why is this a problem? To the extent these are pest plants — weeds — they will have to be controlled with other, more toxic, pesticides, or controlled through agricultural methods (e.g., plowing) that adversely affect soil erosion. Plus, of course, once those now-wild genes start jumping, the problems will just multiply. As my partner has pointed out, one-in-a-million events happen millions of times with plant propagation.

Or rather, the phenomenon that is Google cries out for Tom Lehrer. Come out of retirement, Tom! Political satire is not obsolete, notwithstanding Kissinger’s Nobel ….

A colleague posted on a listserv a brief note about an article on “Google’s planes”. I thought, no, really? Google is buying planes? for streetview, I imagine — holy cow, what’s next?

Then I clicked on the link and was relieved to see it was about Google’s plans; the colleague had merely made a typo.

Or so I thought.

Cue ominous music: dunh dunh dunh.

Because, as that same colleague informed me, Google actually IS buying unmanned drones for aerial surveillance for Street View ! ! ! ! ! (I think screeching violins a la “Psycho” would be good here.)

Well, no, not really. A Google executive is buying it “for personal use”. Google categorically denies Street View applications, which shows that its PR department definitely is on the ball.

Sometimes reality is not nearly as weird as it should be.

Grabbing a couple of my paperback books, my two-year-old pages through them and engages in a lengthy monologue.

A: “This is about Mamiche’s copyright car. I’m just going to read this page and then go back to the cat page. Okay! Let’s go back to the cat page. This book is your book and it is about copyright. This is your book.”

me: “Thank you,” I say, accepting the book she hands me.

A: “Read it, and then it is my copyright. This is called Mamiche’s copyright. This is MY copyright, and this is YOUR copyright, and this is MY copyright. Here it is.” She shifts into a downward dog pose and holds the book below her. “I need my copyright. When I get my copyright I tell Mamala [ed.: that's me], ‘I need my copyright now!’”

I am speechless.

sun, summer … no blogging.

матрациFacebook has deleted “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!”, a user-created page, and apologized to the Pakistani government which had blocked Facebook. A Pakistani minister said Facebook had assured them that “nothing of this sort will happen in the future”.

Yeah, good luck with that. And fuck you, Facebook. How about not knuckling under to paternalistic theocratic states that block Internet access for millions of people?

See:
* Huffington Post, 5/31; hat tip to boston-atheists mailing list.
* comicsalliance.com
* and, yes, wikipedia

You can’t see http://www.facebook.com/pages/Everybody-Draw-Mohammed-Day/121369914543425?ref=ts..plz which redirects you to facebook, nor can I find a cache of the site on Google or on the Internet Archive.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday released its decision in Berghuis v. Thompkins, reversing the 6th Circuit and eviscerating the simple bright line rule of Miranda: The police must advise suspects of their rights; for responses to police questioning to be admissible in court, the suspects must make a knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver of those rights. This 5-4 decision, penned by J. Kennedy, eviscerates the letter of the law — it’s bright-line-ness — as well as the spirit of it — eliminating the incentive for cops to mistreat suspects through browbeating and other forms of coercive behavior.

hat tip to michele, who was listening to npr and found out the opinion was out, when for some reason the NYT failed to cover it, at least in any meaningful way …

One of the best articles I’ve read on the math used to estimate Gulf Oil Spill quantities: Jenn Kepka’s “Putting the Gulf oil spill in perspective”, Salon.com, 5/28.

Broadsheet @ salon.com is usually a pretty fair source for recycled news and commentary about women, gender, and sexuality.

But Tracy Clark-Flory’s recent commentary about yet another celebrity sex tape — Kendra Wilkinson, who I had to look up after reading this article — is possibly one of the most pointless articles on the phenomena I’ve ever read.

Clark-Flory gives a brief review of the facts — sex tape made; released for big bucks by ex-boyfriend who made the tape; Wilkinson trying to get a C&D on privacy grounds. She then reviews the Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson sex tape litigation — primarily copyright litigations that were settled. Then she concludes that Wilkinson is not likely to succeed because the video has hit the Internet and quotes a lawyer who says if you don’t want your sex tape released don’t make it.

Wow, how insightful.

Could we please talk about the merits of the privacy argument, which is the only real piece of this that makes it a gender issue? (or interesting at all)

Or maybe talk about the phenomenon of women’s boyfriends releasing privately made sexual materials? How that implicates privacy law, as well as ethics and sexism? Instead of quoting a lawyer (male) who says if you don’t want your sex tape splattered on the Internet, don’t make one; why not tell women not to leave their sex tapes in their boyfriends’ hands ????

American Needle v. NFL is out ….

Some great commentary coming out in the wake of Rand Paul’s floundering attempts to dodge explaining his philosophy. For instance, this from No More Mister Nice Blog:

Here’s the thing: segregation at lunch counters didn’t exist because individual privately owned businesses were determining for themselves that they would not serve black people. They relied on the local government to enforce this discrimination. Otherwise it would have been possible for non whites to sue white businesses for physical assault. Just because something isn’t statutory doesn’t mean that it isn’t taking place with government aid. A truly libertarian stance on the Civil Rights Act that wasn’t covertly conservative/racist would be to argue that the government must withdraw all legal aid, police help, and rights to sue for damages from discriminatory businesses *and then* leave the business free to discriminate. … The line between public and private property is guaranteed by government action and its something we all pay for and no private business has the right to take our money and then refuse service to us.

Oh man, Rand Paul was on Rachel Maddow weaseling around a straight-up answer on his views of whether the federal government can prohibit discrimination in public accommodations.

A, I thought this guy was supposed to be glib and personable? This was one of the least smooth, least adept weaseling’s I’ve ever seen. Maybe that’s all just due to Rachel Maddow, who is a far more kick-ass journalist than most in terms of straight-up asking for a yes/no answer (and still not getting it).

B, wow, is he just stupid, or completely disingenuous, about the differing rationales that might justify (a) a ban on guns in establishments serving alcohol versus (b) a ban on racial discrimination?

C, again, is he just stupid? Or did he not realize that by picking on the ADA that he was also picking on the rationale underlying all civil rights laws? and that his ass would be busted on this issue? not because it’s “hypothetical” but because it’s real, live, and current — as even he must concede, since he’s picking on the ADA!

D, He’s seriously confused about law and regulation. Nobody has ever explained to this guy one of the fundamental rationales underlying the permissibility of banning some forms of private behavior — that state action would in fact otherwise be involved in enforcing those private behaviors. If someone is trespassing on your private property, you can call the police and get them to bust heads for you. That’s state action. You can sue the trespassers and get the courts involved. That’s also state action. So allowing “private businesses” to ban Black people or gay people necessarily involves state action, since the definition of a “civil right” involves the possibility of invoking the law to enforce the right. He’d like to hand that right not to individuals of color (or queer folks, or disabled folks) but instead to racist, homophobic, short-sighted business-people. Nice.

Along with other areas of law, Paul must also be unfamiliar with the long tradition, far predating the Civil Rights Act, enforcing different rules on hospitality and traveler businesses and such public accommodations. (eta: that’s common carriage, folks, although the wikipedia article is woefully inadequate on the history.)

E, Entirely unsurprisingly, he is also seriously confused about what “institutional racism” is, apparently thinking it is just state action.

F, I like how Paul pulls out the “It’s interesting…” line just before he weasels. I myself have a tendency to pronounce that things are “interesting” but not, I think, when I’m weaseling; more when I think there’s some contradiction or something a little surprising that piques my interest.

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see if Rand Paul & his libertarian policies really get him up to the U.S. Senate. How backwards-ass are my old neighbors in Kentucky? I guess we’ll find out come November.

Wow, the Alabama Education Association has hit a new low: shelling out half a million dollars to a Republican PAC to run attack ads against a gubernatorial candidate … for supporting evolution. Yikes.

Summary judgment against Limewire on a number of key points, including inducement à la Grokster. As predicted, footnote 13 of Grokster is troublesome.