PopTech is pretty awsome and they’re hiring. An, my friend Sara, who is the Development Director at Union Settlement House, is looking for an assistant, and I heard a rumor that there’s going to be an opening real soon for a numbers crunching database using reporter at a certain radio network. Call me if you want to know where to send your resume for that one.
Posts Tagged ‘news’
A World of Opportunities
In Stating the Obvious, learning, linux on August 28, 2009 at 3:47 pmI’ve been kicking around the right way to announce a thing I announced to my colleagues a week ago. That thing being that I’m leaving Gotham Gazette. The reasons are both simple and complex, but the simplest is that the publication really, really needs someone to evaluate web analytics tools not someone to tackle the big, fun, challenging question of why New Yorkers aren’t more interested in public policy. Well, I think they do need the latter, but fundamental scarcity of resources means that the former is winning out.
These are good questions, though. The civic engagement ones, I mean. Is it because we think policy is impenetrable and our legislators are all bought? Is it because we don’t notice that land use decisions matter until developers are breaking ground on a sky rise across the street? That we think the game is won already? I’m not sure, but I think changing the way people think about local policy is a really interesting part of our project here.
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Thou Shalt Not Charge Thy Massage
In learning, misc on July 12, 2009 at 4:29 pmVia consumerist, I landed on this list of things you should never charge from Marketplace. I keep thinking that I’m going to post something about how we’re using Wesabe and what I’m learning from looking at where our money goes.
A note about Wesabe: I like it for two good reasons. One, I can download statements manually from my bank(s) and upload them to Wesabe, which means that I’m not sharing any identifiable personal information with Wesabe (yes, I’m sure: qif files are human readable, there are no account numbers stored in there.) And two, I can download my tagged and edited transactions from Wesabe and tinker with them in OpenOffice. Actually, I haven’t worked out ways to do much with charts in OpenOffice, but I have fun trying.
I had written more here, but … I dunno. I think it was too stream of consciousness. Do you really want to know these things?
This isn’t (Updated)
In misc, various on July 12, 2009 at 2:03 amI had bad information folks, and I apologize for that. I have been following the investigation into Brad’s murder just closely enough that I was pretty shocked to learn that the local activist who the authorities are trying to pin the murder on had already been tried, found guilty and sentenced. He hasn’t, though.
I know that you, my dear readers, read to stay in touch with me, not to learn the news, but I still like to know what I’m talking about. I don’t post what I don’t know to be true, but in this case I wanted to get the word out about Monday’s protest so I just went with it.
There’s still a protest on Monday. It is still a joke to pin Brad’s murder on anyone but the two armed men who Brad filmed as they fired shots directly at him. But no one has been tried yet, let alone sentenced.
I wasn’t there, and no matter how many times I watch the footage I can’t know what really happened, but I’ve got no good reason to believe that the Mexican government has conducted a good faith investigation — that they honestly believe they’ve got the right guy.
Anyway. Here’s what I wrote last night:
This isn’t complete. Not at all, but I’ve been cooling my heels thinking that, sure, justice takes time, but it will be served. Instead, a bystander and an activist has been sentenced in the murder of Brad Will. Not only did he not do it, there’s footage of the men who did. Footage Brad shot as he was dying. I’ve been numb to this story for a really long time now. But in my numbness I was, honestly, believing that eventually we’d know more about why he was murdered. Instead, we know only that the bare minimum hint of justice is gone from this.
Friends,
Some of us have been talking on the phone about what to do about the sentencing of Juan Manuel Moreno, and we feel that something, no matter how large or small, urgently needs to happen to mark this travesty of justice.A gathering at the Mexican Consulate of New York City (27 E.39th St.) at 4:00pm on Monday is going to happen. We are in the process of drafting a press release, are in contact with the Will family to ensure that we are on the same page as they are, and will be making more press calls tomorrow and Monday.
Other actions, and a broader strategy for pressuring the U.S. State Department are also under discussion, but we need to do something on Monday, and this seems the simplest, most direct route to take to generate some stories in the press.
Please come. The most important thing you can bring is yourself, your voice, and a friend.
We all know what happened here: a local activist- someone very much like you or me- was railroaded for the murder of our friend. It is outrageous. Action is the best antidote for despair.
Pirates and Steamfitters
In Stating the Obvious, various on April 29, 2009 at 5:52 pmEventually: my promised report back on the Pirate Bay talk, which was great, and after which Mister Mux Tape explained that commercial software is, by its very nature, better than free and open source software and then asked me if I worked for the FSF when I called him on that bizarre and baseless assertion. I’m not even talking about Apache here. Or I am, but at the present moment, Open Office is better documented than the MS Office suite. And calc’s financial functions are just plain better. I didn’t point out that I don’t think that the Free Software Foundation really has the staff resources to travel the Eastern seaboard heckling speakers at community arts talks. I also didn’t point out that there are people in this world (no really, there are!) who hold opinions they aren’t paid to hold and expertise on subjects they are not professional lobbyists on behalf of.
Actually, I could kind of wrap that one up and repeat what we already know which is that the Bureau of Piracy is great, you should take a look at the links on the original post and (this is the part I hope you already know) that the real problem with the prosecution of the buccaneers is about free speech. Not about my right to swap music willy-nilly, copyright be damned (another thing I didn’t say to Mux Man: there is, I think, a big difference between software and music) but about whether a file sharing platform should be held accountable for the files shared over it. Particularly in a world where some musicians do want to make large files (their own) available free of charge and politically significant data sets can be a difficult thing to host on your own little server. Fundamentally, neither the laws nor the recording industry have kept up with the modern world and it is worth asking why that is really the fault of the Pirate Bureau.
That was rough. I might come back and try to make it sound a little coherent. Read the rest of this entry »
Two Things I Didn’t Know
In various on March 9, 2009 at 2:57 amIn a story about a kid caught up in a sentencing scandal (judges taking kick-backs from private juvenile detention facility operators was never on my list of reasons private jails are wrong) I learned that parents pay some part ($110 bi-weekly, in this case) of the cost of a child’s detention. They just kind of slipped it into the story, listing these payments as one of the costs of this judicial corruption. So that was one: paying for your kid’s jail-house boarding.
And, a few weeks ago now, another one that I just can’t shake. An NPR piece about a peculiar NIH funding controversy–should venture capitalists be eligible to apply for funds earmarked for small businesses. This is the debate the story covers. What was apparently no type of noteworthy is that the NIH is funneling money to private business at all. Public funding supports private research? Do venture capitalists get involved in research that doesn’t come with the shining light of patents at the far end of the tunnel?
I didn’t know this. I maybe should have, but it never occurred to me that parents could be forced to pay for their children’s detention or that public funds would be used to support research the public will never own.
For the Red Wine Files
In various on June 5, 2008 at 3:14 pmIn a surprising scientific development, it seems that red wine may be good for you in small quantities.
Or, I’m sorry, is that not surprising at all?
The Garbage Game
In various on November 14, 2007 at 5:41 pmI played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 1,897,871 tons of refuse across 290,226 miles.
Homegrown (are you ideologically motivated?)
In various on November 6, 2007 at 6:27 pmBet you haven’t read about this one any place lately, and you can be sure that they won’t be spending a lot of time studying violent repression of organizers and activists.
I’m scrambling with a few projects today, but this passed the House last week (two weeks ago?) and it is currently headed to committee. Could be on the Senate floor next week.
Here’s the Senate Committee on Homeland Security roster if you want to reach out to anyone:
Joseph I. Lieberman Chairman (ID) (CT)
Susan M. Collins Ranking Member (ME)
Carl Levin (MI)
Ted Stevens (AK)
Daniel K. Akaka (HI)
George V. Voinovich (OH)
Thomas R. Carper (DE)
Norm Coleman (MN)
Mark L. Pryor (AR)
Tom Coburn (OK)
Mary L. Landrieu (LA)
Pete V. Domenici (NM)
Barack Obama (IL)
John Warner (VA)
Claire McCaskill (MO)
John E. Sununu (NH)
Jon Tester (MT)
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007
AN ACT To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007′.
SEC. 2. PREVENTION OF VIOLENT RADICALIZATION AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
(a) In General- Title VIII of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 361 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following new subtitle:
‘Subtitle J–Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
‘SEC. 899A. DEFINITIONS.
‘For purposes of this subtitle:
‘(1) COMMISSION- The term ‘Commission’ means the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism established under section 899C.
‘(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.
‘(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term ‘homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
‘(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term ‘ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.
Critical Art Ensemble (more news)
In various on October 12, 2007 at 3:05 pmOctober 11, 2007
SICKNESS, “ABSURD” DOJ PROSECUTION FORCE SCIENTIST TO PLEAD IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Scientist’s Wife and Daughter Comment on Case
Buffalo, NY – Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal charges of “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” in a surreal post-PATRIOT Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.
I Knew It (file under email deliverability)
In various on June 16, 2007 at 1:36 pmBefore I signed up with Constant Contact I asked around a bit. The consensus seemed to be that no one much cares for them and no one can really articulate what is so wrong with them.
One woman (alternative energy, DC. Her card is on my desk at work) said that you couldn’t slice and dice as much as she wanted. Fair enough. We send a lot of emails and didn’t really need to slice and dice that much. For what it is worth, it is pretty hard to slice and dice at all. She did have a point.
Now that we are thoroughly off of their platform, I thought that others might benefit from a brief run-down of why Constant Contact did not work out for us. For one thing, their customer service is for shit. There are all kinds of questions that they must know the answer to, some where deep down, but they will insist, insist, insist that there is no answer. For instance …
- Their interface doesn’t work with Safari, for no good reason, and though they obviously are doing some browser sniffing they claim to be unable to provide any type of requirements or list of browsers that do work.
This is the catch: when you try to use Safari, you get a message saying that your browser won’t work with their software. It isn’t just that it doesn’t work, they’re doing browser sniffing and saying “Safari won’t work” explicitly. And they won’t tell you what they’re sniffing for. It is crazy making.
Safari incompatibility isn’t the end of the world except that our editor has something wrong with her Firefox installation (I haven’t looked at it beyond confirming that it sure doesn’t seem to work.) and I just don’t think it is so much to ask to get a list of known good browsers.
- Their “compliance department” maintains a secret blacklist. Should you choose to link to someone who once wronged them, they’ll lock your account, not mention that your campaign was never sent, make you wait on hold for ten minutes and then tell you only that the linked URL is forbidden. Nothing else. No explanation of why it is forbidden, specifically. No apparent understanding of how unnerving it might be to have your account locked without warning.
And no, they can’t tell you who else is on the blacklist. You’ll just have to wait and see. At least one irreverent NYC newsweekly is on there, though.
After a fair amount of hemming and hawing, they did finally explain that the blacklist item we’d triggered was a former customer that had been using the system to spam people. You aren’t supposed to do that. Fair ’nuff. But all we did was link to them.
- While we’re on the subject, their interface is for shit. You can figure that out for yourself when you do a trial, but it certainly makes the list of reasons to use just about anything else.
And the slicing and dicing? It is pretty bad. Say you have a subscriber and you want to figure out why he gets three of everything. You’d want to search your lists for a particular contact, right? Good luck.
We’re on What Counts now and it rulez.
[tags]whining, technology, learning, politics, news[/tags]
Why are the protesters always so violent?
In various on November 17, 2006 at 3:57 pmI know I should know better than to be surprised by the State Department, but their Mexico Travel Announcement (not a full Travel Warning, for whatever that is worth) released yesterday is infuriating. To wit:
On October 27, 2006, an American citizen was shot and killed in Oaxaca City as a result of the violence and disorder caused by civil unrest in the city during the past several months. Several protest groups have engaged in increasingly violent demonstrations, sometimes resulting in violent reactions from other groups.
Rebeca Romero picks up that thread in the AP, explaining that according to the Oaxacan Atty General, Brad was shot at point-blank range, indicating the fatal shots came from nearby leftist protesters. No doubt she’s entirely correct, that the Attorney General did indeed say such a thing, but if she bothered to watch the video Brad was filming when he was shot, as Juan Gonzales did, she might have been able to interject a bit of reason into her article.
One, Brad was pretty clearly not shot at close range, unless his video was incredibly skillfully edited to make all the shots sound like they were coming from way down the road without losing that un-nerving “pop.”
Two, “sometimes resulting in violent reactions from other groups”? I’m used to seeing media twist a story up in rhetoric (when the federal police moved into the city center right after Brad’s death, the Times described them as “pushing back protestors,” right alongside photographs of mangled piles of people being knocked down by water canons) but this is absurd (and it isn’t the media, I know.)
file under ‘thought crimes’–the nightmare continues
In various on November 19, 2005 at 8:52 pmI’ll confess that I had forgotten about Steve Kurtz. I haven’t heard a peep out of the Critical Art Ensemble in a while, but word is that Kurtz has been released from pre-trial supervision–meaning that since he was released from jail after his arrest in May 2004, he has been under court supervision–subject to random searches of his home and random drug tests.
Imagine for a moment that someone you care very deeply for (perhaps your wife of 20 years?) were to die suddenly and altogether unexpectedly. Imagine you called an ambulance. Imagine the paramedics came and noticed a project you’d been working on. A science kit, something you were tinkering with. A microscope and some petri dishes. And your whole life changed.
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