Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Survey Finds First Amendment
Is Being Left Behind in U.S. High Schools.
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Jan. 31, 2005.

A new study, The Future of the First Amendment, of high school student, teachers, and administrators shows a shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment by high school students. Among the findings: half believe the government can censor the Internet, and more than a third think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.

• key findings
• The report, powerpoint, and an editorial cartoon.
• methodology.
• The report was sponsored by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
• Freedom of what?
  First Amendment no big deal, students say CNN.
  Monday, January 31, 2005.
• More Than 1 in 3 Students Want Gov’t Control of Press, Knight Survey Finds
  Editor and Publisher
  By E&P Staff. January 31, 2005.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Blogosphere

This is a continuation of the previous post on the Pew Internet report, this one on the state of blogging. I’m surprised by the low rss use only because the bloggers that I know are all agog on rss. Read on…

8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

DANGLING CONVERSATION
Rock & Rap Confidential. No. 209, January 2005.

This is a very nice short item in a great little newsletter. The article is about the
Pew Internet & American Life Project
study, Artists, Musicians, and the Internet, of 2,755 artists.
The study shows that musicians are embracing the Internet and do not share the music industry’s antipathy to file sharing. The
story shows what the music industry thinks of musicians when it quotes Jay Rosenthal, a music industry lawyer, as saying that interviewing musicians was “like going to Fallujah and asking how they feel about Americans.”
It also quotes Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy:

“What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.

Business > White House Drops Effort to Relax Media Ownership Rules” h ref=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/business/27cnd-media.html?ex=1264568400&en=b0f560bbece8fb57&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>White House Drops Effort to Relax Media Ownership Rules

This is great news. However, there’s a cloud in this silver lining (see quote below). The FCC didn’t want the SC to take the case because they want to keep hammering away at first amendment issues with the stringent indecency rules that Powell put into place. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Officials said one reason the administration decided not to seek Supreme Court review is that some lawyers were concerned that the case could prompt the justices to review related First Amendment issues in a way that could undermine efforts by the commission to enforce indecency rules against television and radio broadcasters. Over the last year, the agency has issued a record number and size of fines, and has been pressed by some conservative and other advocacy groups to be more aggressive.

OMB Watch - Industry Challenge Prompts Removal of EPA Database

OMB Watch reports that “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has removed one database from its public website and slightly altered another due to a Data Quality Act (DQA) challenge submitted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” The Chamber claims some of the data are erroneous, inconsistent and contradictory.

The Data Quality Act
is less than half a page in a public
law of more seven hundred pages
(Public Law 106-554 Sec. 515; Statutes at Large volume 114, pages 2763A-153 to 2763A-154, available online as
plain text and as
pdf).
The Act is nominally about requiring the government to set standards for
the accuracy of scientific information, but is controversial because
it was supported and largely written by industry-backed groups which
have are using it to challenge government data. Successful challenges such as this one can result in the data being withdrawn from publication and withdrawn
from government web sites.

OMB Watch notes:

[S]cientists concerned about the DQA and OMB’s subsequent peer review standards have stated that scientific certainty and identical results are an impossible and unreasonable standard for scientific information.

While instant access to the most up-to-date data is a desire of any information user, EPA and other federal agencies must operate in the reality of limited resources. Industry seemed to realize this impossible standard, and used the opportunity to push for information removal, which has been a growing side effect of the DQA. This ultimately means less health and environment data getting to the public.

PRIVACY, INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM AND THE PATRIOT ACT: What Does It All Mean?
(streaming Quicktime format)

Speaking on the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act:
Judith F. Krug,
Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom;
Karen G. Schneider, Chair of the California Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee
and a member of the ALA Council and Director of LII.org, the Librarians’ Index to the Internet;
and Candace M. Carroll, Attorney in private practice in San Diego, specializing in civil appeals.

This is a video of a session
at Weaver Center, Institute of the Americas, University of California San Diego on
Wednesday, May 19, 2004.
The
program was sponsored by
the UCSD Research & Professional Development Committee, Librarian’s Association of the University of California.

You will need QuickTime software to view this video (available free here:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
and here:
http://www.download.com/3000-2194-10002208.html?legacy=cnet.

India struggles to document its biodiversity.
by CHANDRIKA MAGO.
The Times of India.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2005.

In the United States, it is the entertainment industries (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) that have latched on to the term “piracy” for what they describe as “theft” of their “intellectual property.” But in third world countries, piracy is a much more serious problem than teenagers copying pop-songs. In the 1990s, the U.S. granted a patent on
turmeric’s use in healing wounds, something
which India had taken for granted. Since then India has been leading the way in trying to identify and protect its tradtional knowledge through programs such as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).

This article describes efforts to document India’s biodiversity by panchayats (institutions of local self-government).

In certain states, panchayats are now preparing bioresource registers. Activist Ashish Kothari says there are two broad models. One, where scientists, NGOs and others facilitate a community register in a uniformly applicable format that is also “computerisable”. This would enable larger databases to be constructed, village up. The second is where the community itself prepares the register, in its own language and format, primarily for inter-community exchange.

See also: Biopiracy
The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge by Vandana Shiva. South End Press, 1997. Available at the library.

This is the initial entry for a new category called “Quotes”. From time to time, we come across pertinent/thought-provoking/weird quotes, so this category is more of a parking spot for us until we can get them into Jim’s great little quotes database, “A Commonplace Book”. If any readers find any of them interesting, then so much the better.

So, to the quote. This was a sig quote on an email I just received. I looked it up and sure enough the quote is true:

“And Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, drafted in 1796 (President Washington’s last year in office), passed unanimously and signed into law in 1797 by President John Adams, says:

“…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…”

Business > Powell Is Stepping Down as Chairman of F.C.C.” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/business/21cnd-powell.html?ex=1264050000&en=704d891842c25da8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Powell Is Stepping Down as Chairman of F.C.C.

This just in from the NY Times: Michael Powell is stepping down as FCC Chair in March.

The list of replacements includes: another Republican member of the commission, Kevin Martin; Becky Klein, a former head of the public utility commission in Texas; Patrick Wood III, the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; and Michael Gallagher, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Commerce Department.

Science Online RSS Feeds

Science now has separate feeds for
Table of contents, current issue,
News Summaries — The week’s news highlights, from Science Magazine,
This Week in Science — Brief summaries of new research papers published in Science.
Editors’ Choice — Highlights of the recent literature.
NetWatch — Best of the Web in science, and more.

Thanks to beSpacific.