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Friday Fun Link – “Dad Dancing”

Evolution even has an explanation for why your old man dances the way he does!

(h/t to SM on Twitter)

Posted 14 October 2011 § Family § FridayFunLink § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

We are the 99%

Depending on where you live (and where you get your news), the Occupy Wall Street movement, may or may not be on your radar. These protests, which started in New York but have since spread to other cities around the world, are “mainly protesting against social and economic inequality, corporate greed, and the influence of corporate money and lobbyists on government, among other concerns.”

One main slogan coming out of these protests is “We are the 99%” which is a reference to the fact that the vast majority of people today are being screwed by the multi-millionaires and billionaires who make up the top 1% of income earners in our society.

Worried about the possible impact of this growing protest movement, right-wing mouthpieces, some of whom are part of the 1% and some of whom just think they are, have responded that the protests are “muddled”, “nutbars” and worse.

Right wing operatives have even set-up a counter site called “We are the 53%” which is a reference to the fact that only 53% of Americans apparently pay federal income tax (conveniently ignoring that a) many still pay a variety of payroll and other taxes and b) that still doesn’t explain why Warren Buffet pays a smaller percentage of his income in federal income tax than his secretary!)

The irony is that many of the contributors to “We are the 53%” don’t seem to get that they are still part of the 99% and working 2 jobs or for 80 hours a week, all with no health insurance, doesn’t mean you’ve achieved the American Dream!

In fact, the most important message that the Occupy Wall Street folks need to take forward is that, for all intents and purposes, we are all part of the 99%, no matter our politics or personal financial situation and when we battle each other in terms of right vs. left or hard-working vs. unemployed or old vs. young or whatever, we are falling into the trap of exactly what those 1% want us to do.  (Er, Mr. Buffet excepted of course! 😉 )

Posted 13 October 2011 § Politics § Work ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Amazon, You Magnificent Bastard

An article on how Amazon’s use of their Kindles as loss-leaders for the digital content within their own “walled garden” ecosphere is a winning strategy that makes them a strong contender against Apple.

Posted 12 October 2011 § Library § PopCulture § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Reddit, Free Speech and “Child Porn”

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the site, Reddit. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s currently my favourite site on the Internet.

One of the reasons I like the site so much (and one of the site’s greatest advantages) is the fact that it literally has an unlimited number of “sub-Reddits”.  These are sub-communities that anyone can start on any topic from atheism to Saskatchewan to the TV show Breaking Bad (just to name three I check regularly.)  That doesn’t even do justice to the full scope of Reddit’s sub-sites – if there’s a topic you’re interested in, I bet there’s a related sub-reddit.

I even created my own sub-Reddit the other week just to see what the moderator interface was like.  (I made a sub-Reddit called “LibraryLandProblems“, modeled on Reddit’s very popular “FirstWorldProblems” sub-reddit.)

As enjoyable and popular as Reddit is, one of the disadvantages challenges of a system which allows anyone to create a sub-Reddit on any topic is that inevitably there will be some sub-Reddits with subject matter which is disturbing or troubling for all manner of reasons.

Recently, Reddit hit the news on CNN’s “360 with Anderson Cooper” program for one of these particularly challenging sub-Reddits – one called /r/jailbait (link safe to click).  This was a sub-Reddit that contained pictures of teenage women, likely between the ages of 15-18, who were scantily clad although not naked or engaged in any sexual activity.  Instead, it was bikini shots, pictures of teen girls in their underwear and the like.

Now, there are numerous sub-Reddits that feature NSFW (not safe for work) images including one called (quite obviously) /r/nsfw.  Another called /r/gonewild features nude photos submitted by Reddit members which can occasionally move beyond titillation to be quite empowering.

Most of the NSFW sub-Reddits are labeled as such due to nudity but there are also others which also have other types of provocative content – on subjects from right-wing extremism to illegal substances to blatant racism and worse.

Originally, after the Anderson Cooper piece aired, the Reddit administrators came out with a strong pro-free speech argument:

Reddit.com general manager Eric Martin responded in a written statement: “We’re a free speech site and the cost of that is there’s stuff that’s offensive on there. Once we start taking down some things we find offensive, then we’re no longer a free speech site and no longer a platform for everyone.”

But even as debate raged back and forth across the wider Reddit community on how to proceed, /r/jailbait was shut down a few days ago (sparking new debates).  This coincided with a new post to the official Reddit blog on “How Reddit works“.   (This also wasn’t the first time /r/jailbait caught the attention of the wider Reddit community.  The knowledge that a Google search for “Reddit” brought up /r/jailbait as one of the site’s main sub-pages caused considerable embarrassment for many.)

The shutdown provoked an outraged response from user, ViolentAcrez, who had created and moderated /r/jailbait as well as another infamous sub-reddit, /r/PicsOfDeadKids.  In his response, ViolentAcrez said that jailbait-esque content was scattered throughout various sub-Reddits and the site administrators were just caving to media pressure.

There are all sorts of inter-connected ideas around this issue:

  • the role of corporate media in policing the internet (Reddit is now owned by Conde Nast, publisher of “The New Yorker”, “GQ”, and “Teen Vogue” magazines among others – and I probably don’t have to point out that these magazines often also feature pictures of scantily-clad underage females.  In fact, some would argue that magazines like Teen Vogue promote the mentality that leads to jailbait-style poses and photographs being so prevalent among teen girls in the first place!)
  • the impossibility of controlling information online (researching this post, I read that there were at least two alternate “jailbait” sites that have already sprung up to replace the original.)
  • the role of journalists in defending free speech versus their role in creating and/or sensationalizing news (one commentator on the Cooper segment kept saying /r/jailbait featured “child porn” and should be shut down while the other admitted the sub-Reddit “probably wasn’t illegal”.  Anderson Cooper didn’t try to answer the question definitively either way but instead, just seemed to hone in on the alleged “seediness” of the site.)
  • the role of language in perception as well as the arbitrary lines we draw as a society in making our laws.  If the sub-Reddit had been called /r/cutegirls, it may not have drawn the same negative attention as /r/jaibait which deliberately evokes our society’s laws about how much changes (in a legal context) from when a young woman is 17 and 364 days and when she turns 18 (even if very little changes physically).  (Along the same lines, why is the speed limit 100kph and not 105?  110?  90?  You have to draw a line somewhere but it’ll always be arbitrary.)
  • the role of copyright in the Internet age (more than the legality of what the /r/jailbait images depict, a more relevant question might be how are these photos obtained in the first place – from teenager’s Facebook profiles and elsewhere – and is this a copyright violation or even theft?  IANAL but likely yes in both cases.)
  • possible double-standards relating to male versus female sexuality
  • of course that ever-present question of the changing nature of privacy in the Internet age also rears its head as does the issue of informed consent.  Does every teenager know the risks of posting photos of herself (or himself) in a swimsuit or pyjamas?  Do some teens not even consider this a “risk” and that’s more of a concern for mom and dad (and Anderson Cooper?)
  • MetaFilter has some discussion on the subject too – though I’ll be honest and say that MetaFilter sometimes has a smugness, especially towards Reddit, and this comes through loud and clear in this particular discussion.

Ultimately, if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll probably know which side of the fence I come down on whenever a topic like this arises no matter how hard it is to defend the much more offensive side of the ledger.  That’s why I find Reddit’s decision to remove the sub-reddit, whether I agree with it or not (I don’t) so disappointing.

Posted 11 October 2011 § Politics § PopCulture § Technology ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , , ,

Music Monday – “You know she’s there waiting/Just anticipating/The things you’ll never ever ever possess.”

Love those A/V Club covers…

…although in this case, Peter Bjorn and John don’t hold a candle to the original…

…or even to my own personal favourite version, originally featured in one of the greatest music movies of all-time and now in a clip from The Commitments’ live tour:

Posted 10 October 2011 § MusicMonday ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Thanksgiving Genealogy

My mom’s taking a genealogy class so we spent quite a bit of time this weekend looking through her class notes, different web sites and reviewing the information she’d already gathered about her family.

I’d taken a genealogy class in library school and had done quite a bit of research as well but mostly on my dad’s side.  I’d even entered it in some program I’d bought but when my PC died, I somehow managed to lose the original database file (no big loss – most of the info was stuff I had elsewhere – more just a pain in the butt to re-enter it all.)

So we spent time this weekend re-building the stuff I had before on my dad’s side of the family and entering the stuff my mom had entered on her side of the family into an online genealogy site called MyHeritage which allows you to enter up to 250 individual records for free before you have to start paying for the service.

If you’re not logged in, I think you can only see the deceased people in our family tree – not sure what happens if you’re logged in but not as an administrator – I suspect you can see a bit more but not everything.

There are a couple advantages to doing your genealogy online in a cloud-based site like this – besides being able to log-in and work on this from anywhere, I can invite others (eg. my mom or other relatives) to become administrators and help with building the history.  Also, the site has a feature to try to find where people you enter are also part of someone else’s family tree – perhaps your great-great-grandpa is also part of someone else’s family tree and that can open up all sorts of connections and possibilites.

No luck with that feature yet but as we go back further in our timeline, hopefully we’ll find some of those wider connections.

And in terms of Thanksgiving, you really come to appreciate your own life of relative luxury when you contemplate the life that some of your ancestors had – working seven days a week on a farm, no access to schooling, etc.

Posted 09 October 2011 § Family § Library § MemoryLane § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Saturday Snap – Saskatchewan Legislature

Premier Wall will be officially dropping the writ for Saskatchewan’s next provincial election this weekend but due to legislation his party brought in, we already know the date.

20111008-185437.jpg

Posted 08 October 2011 § Politics § SaturdaySnap ‡ Comments (0) °

Friday Fun Link – Horse Race Politics

Many bemoan the coverage of politics that treats it more like sports than something with real-world purpose and implications.  The good folks at Slate magazine have gone one step further, creating a very cool web page that shows the current Republican nomination battle as an actual horse race!

They should open source this code and let other political races use it – having the “news ticker” at the bottom really does help you understand the ebb & flow of campaigns.

Posted 07 October 2011 § FridayFunLink § Politics ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Is There A Steve Jobs of Libraries?

One of the comments in the long MetaFilter thread about Steve Jobs’ passing stuck out for me:

He made people try their hardest, and that’s the most important quality a leader can ever have.

I really like how this definition of leadership is more about the impact the leader has on other people rather than some internal quality that the leader  excels at (although these two factors – internal quality that impacts external staff – are obviously very closely connected.)

Jobs’ death also had me wondering if there is anyone who could be said to have revolutionized the world of libraries, even on our much smaller, more local scale?  I mean,  Steve Jobs is being compared to the titans of history – Einstein, Edison, Ford, etc. – so the most obvious historical figure in libraries would have to be Dewey.

But in terms of contemporary librarians?  I can’t find a list of all previous winners but probably some of the people who won Library Journal’s “Librarian of the Year” award would be potential contenders as would many who are on (what I think of as) the more techie, youth-oriented (and therefore more Jobsian?) “Movers & Shakers” list.

I looked over the Movers & Shakers list and although there are lots of people who’ve done lots of cool things, no one jumped out at me as someone who’s totally changed the nature of libraries in a seismic fashion like Jobs.

I don’t know – maybe it’s not fair to try to draw parallels between a private technology company which was briefly the most valuable in the world earlier this year against, as I said before, the hyper-local, taxpayer-funded institution that is the public library?  Or maybe Jobs is a once-in-a-lifetime figure and the library world just hasn’t had that person emerge yet?

Posted 06 October 2011 § Library § Work ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

Just heard the news and, as with Jack Layton’s passing, the death of the co-founder of Apple was probably not a complete surprise but still pretty shocking.

In fact, when I said how sad I was, Shea said “As sad as when Jack Layton died?” and I replied “More.”  I went on to explain that although Jack had a huge impact on Canada and its political history, Steve Jobs revolutionized not just one or two but arguably four industries in his lifetime.

Here’s what I’ve just posted on Facebook and in the relevant MetaFilter thread which had 500 comments within an hour:

Most people would be lucky to revolutionize one industry; Steve Jobs radically changed four: computers (Apple), animation (Pixar), music (iTunes/iPod) and mobile (iPhone).

There is a story that during a Presidential summit on technology, a bunch of big name CEOs were sitting around the table. The CEO of Oracle said “Mr. President – there’s only one CEO at this table who can’t be replaced. And that’s Steve Jobs.”

I guess we’ll see…

Although I’ve used Apple products off and on since the earliest days of my life as a computer user, I was a relative latecomer to the Cult of Mac as an owner.  I’m not a total convert either (Shea has a PC as do my folks, her folks and her brother – all on my advice as it’s hard to convince people to buy a $1000+ laptop when you get a cheap Acer for a third of that – even with all the advantages that Macs have.)

Anyhow, coming after the announcement of the iPhone 4GS yesterday, it’s comforting to know that Steve Jobs would’ve at least been able to see that final launch and know that the company would continue to move forward.

Posted 05 October 2011 § PopCulture § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,