I ran across this Chicago Tribune article. Defense Contractors have lobbied the Pentagon to delay rules that would require them to police subcontractors and employees to prevent human trafficking.

We know why defense contractors don’t want to be required to police subcontrators and employees. I’m sure it’s very annoying, bad for business and cuts into their profits. Besides, they’re required by U.S. law to pursue profits first, and all else second. It’s immoral, but it’s business. So I’m not bashing them.

But we, as a people. What do we value? Do we allow companies to do business with or employ people who smuggle humans and sell sex slaves? Do we require companies to uphold and share our moral values when it costs them money?

How much do we care about human suffering?

“Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Read the rest of this entry »

I just saw Dan’s post on his next steps, and his departure from Bayosphere for Berkeley’s new Center for Citizen Journalism. I’m excited for him. But I think Lea and Fleddy’s comments on his post are important. There’s more details in their comments - but the gist: “Hey Dan, What about Bayosphere?”

Bayosphere was started as a citizen journalist venture. Bayosphere denizens have invested in it and communicated through it, some occassionally, some frequently. Citizen journalism tries, among other things, to create a more bottom-up and granular system of reporting and accountability to the truth. The grassroots part of it implies to me that accountability to each other is valued more highly than accountability to the dictates of established, monolithic outlets for ‘truth’. Yes, currently we aren’t really community-owned and driven. But what drew me here was the vision of co-ownership. I also believed in the potential of the vision because of Dan, his track record, and what I perceived to be his commitment to shared process rather than shared endpoints. He was seeding the venture, and he embodied the principles I thought necessary for a grassroots journalism project. Read the rest of this entry »

An interest that preoccupies me currently is the development of a scientific meta-semeiotic. Essentially this means that if you have a well-defined (formalized) semeiotic model of how the world is apprehended by individuals in species then how do you achieve the same goal - a formalized model - that describes the behavior of collections.

More specifically, let’s say you know how an individual (a worker or a terrorist, for example) sees herself in the world then - all conventional influence aside - what are the underlying inevitable behaviors when they are in groups? How do various group notions arise? What makes a population accept oppression or rebel? Conventions mitigate these extremes of behavior. Read the rest of this entry »

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

Screw the law, says the government. Screw the customers’s data and privacy rights, say the telecom companies.

Happy holidays to you, too.

Merry American Christmas? No–there’s 51 countries (including the principality of Washington DC) in the United States, so that doesn’t do it. Merry Californian Christmas? Nup. As any map of how folks voted in the recall election two years ago will show you, California is a patchwork of different cultures and political leanings.

Merry Bay Area Christmas, then? Uh-uh. The fabled cultural diversity that is the San Francisco Bay Area is solidifying into a kind of re-tooled world atlas with Europe, Asia and the Pacific predominating in the West Bay, while the East Bay hosts Africa, those parts of the American continents below the US border, and South and South West Asia.

Wikipedia, academia and Seigenthaler. Sure, students shouldn’t be citing from Wikipedia instead of the primary texts they were supposed to have read. But Wikipedia is a stunning supplement to most texts and often provides pointers to other relevant material that one didn’t know existed. We should be teaching our students how to interpret the materials they get on the web, not banning them from it. We should be correcting inaccuracies that we find rather than protesting the system. We have the knowledge to be able to do this, but all too often, we’re acting like elitist children. In this way, i believe academics are more likely to lose credibility than Wikipedia.

On Opinion Page, a Lobby’s Hand Is Often Unseen. Susan Finston of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative research group based in Texas, is just the sort of opinion maker coveted by the drug industry.

In an opinion article in The Financial Times on Oct. 25, she called for patent protection in poor countries for drugs and biotechnology products. In an article last month in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, she called for efforts to block developing nations from violating patents on AIDS medicines and other drugs. Read the rest of this entry »