Let's Waive Some Laws 'Cause we Feel Like it

I have this problem when I haven't blogged for a really long time that then when I want to blog I feel like I have to write about everything I've wanted to write about since the last time I blogged. But every time I see something that makes me mad, I get a little closer to finally blogging. Here's what pushed me over the edge today:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a plea by environmental groups to rein in the Bush administration's power to waive laws and regulations to speed construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has used authority given to him by Congress in 2005 to ignore environmental and other laws and regulations to move forward with hundreds of miles of fencing in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

The case rejected by the court involved a two-mile section of fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area near Naco, Ariz. The section has since been built.

"I am extremely disappointed in the court's decision," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said. "This waiver will only prolong the department from addressing the real issue: their lack of a comprehensive border security plan."

Thompson chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. He and 13 other House democrats — including six other committee chairs — filed a brief in support of the environmentalists' appeal.

Earlier this year, Chertoff waived more than 30 laws and regulations in an effort to finish building 670 miles of fence along the southwest border. Administration officials have said that invoking the legal waivers — which Congress authorized in 1996 and 2005 laws — will cut through bureaucratic red tape and sidestep environmental laws that currently stand in the way of fence construction.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080623/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_border_fence

*sigh*

I had read about this before, but I forgot about it. How did this government happen?

Graduation!

I am now officially a college graduate!


I had a fantastic day, and tomorrow morning I am off to Peru. Hopefully I'll blog while I'm there! I'll be back on Tuesday the 27th.

Brewster Kahle 1, FBI 0

Rock on, Brewster Kahle:

Online librarian from S.F. wins his fight with the FBI

"Brewster Kahle, who runs an online library in San Francisco, was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications with one of his patrons as part of an investigation of 'international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.' ...

"He was allowed to speak publicly Wednesday under a rare settlement in which the FBI agreed to withdraw its letter and lift the gag order."

Tag Cloud

I did a tag cloud (thanks to TagCrowd.com) based on the text of all my blog entries from 2008 (excepting super-common English words and words built into the Blogger interface), and this is what I got:

archive article available books brewster class community companies content cool copyright davies digital display excellent farm flickr forum francisco free global google immigration important information interesting internet issues kahle library life literacy lot love media national number online open page people photos pretty probably public pupusas reading really rights san service social someone something space stop story street students studies sure talk technology things think used user usf war website week work world year youtube

created at TagCrowd.com

I love my tag cloud. Library and people stand as the most common words, which I think is a fantastic reflection on my values. Books, digital, photos, and USF are runners-up. Some common words reflect my mediocre vocabulary (lot, really, something, things). I love the sequence in descending size, "library literacy lot love" (with a tiny "life" sticking itself in there).

Clearly, most of my posts have been related to my Digital Literacy class, but my blog entries have rarely felt like assignments (at least not in the burdensome sense). I've had a wonderful time doing this blog and this class. I'm happy that I've created something that I like and find interesting.

This class was never about telling us what to do - it was about encouraging us to do something, to use these technologies in ways that work for us. For me, that was a lot of announcements about things happening at USF, random interesting resources or information, work I was doing in other classes, and personal reflections.

As the semester comes to a close, the question remains, what will become of this blog? I'm definitely going to continue blogging here, but I expect the common themes will shift as my activities shift. Over the summer you can expect a lot about service-learning, and starting in August you'll hear about JVC and worker's rights issues. I'm sure I'll still talk about digital literacy sorts of things, since that's such a big interest of mine, and of course I'll continue to post about any other random stuff I want to share with the world.

I'm excited.

Photos of the World

One of our final assignments for Digital Literacy is to come up with a concept, and ideally an implementation, of some sort of ongoing blogging project. The idea is that we start something knowing that we will continue to add to it over time. An example is David Silver's "gone" posts. Every time an evil leader (my words, not his) is fired or arrested or quits, he posts a photo with the word "gone." He also has a Flickr gallery of these entries.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is how global it is. It can do a lot to break down artificial barriers we've built between groups of people. With the help of Flickr, I'm going to start posting photos from around the world.

Since I'm traveling to Tacna, Peru in a few weeks, here is the first photo, from Tacna:


"la dueña del pan"
by arcketipo

How to Post Photos on Your Blog

Something that's come up in our class is how to best get Flickr photos onto a blog. We went over it a bit in class, but I'm going to put instructions on here.

The easiest way is if you have a Flickr Pro account and you're working with your own photos or the photos of someone who has given others permission to use their photos through a Creative Commons license.

At the top of every photo, if you have a Flickr Pro account, there is a menu that includes "all sizes."
Click on "all sizes" and choose the size you want to include on your blog (probably small or medium, depending on your blog and the photo).

If the photo belongs to you or has been licensed for sharing, scroll down and you'll see something like this:

Assuming you want to link back to Flickr, copy the HTML from the top window into your blog post window. Note that if you're in "Compose" mode in Blogger, you don't have to go into "Edit HTML." I copied and pasted it in, and voila:



But! What if your situation is not so straightforward? What if you wanted to, er, borrow photos without permission? (Because clearly that person didn't know how to put a Creative Commons license on their photos, right?) Or, what if they are sharing their work, but you don't have a Pro account? Or what if you're using a photo that's not on Flickr?

What you do is find your photo of choice in your size of choice (if applicable), then control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) and choose "Copy Image Location" (or the equivalent). Then use this HTML code:

<img src="http://imageurl.jpg">

But, what if you want that photo to link back to the page you got it from (or some other web page)? Go copy the URL for your desired page and use this code:

<a href="http://webpage.com"><img src="http://imageurl.jpg"></a>

But but, what if you want it centered? Do this:

<center><a href="http://webpage.com"><img src="http://imageurl.jpg"></a></center>

You can put those <center> </center> tags around your code copied and pasted from Flickr as well.

What if you want to insert your photo via the Blogger add image tool (if you have the image on your hard drive), and you want to add a link (to Flickr or wherever)? Click on this icon:


Browse to find the photo on your computer, choose your preferred size and alignment, and click to upload. It will put the image at the top of your blog post. Super annoying. You can click on the image to select it, then cut (Mac: command-X; PC: ctrl-X) and paste it in your desired location.

To make that photo into a link, find your desired URL, select the photo (still within your Compose window), and click the Link icon:


Paste your URL in there, and it will link-ify your image (you can check in Preview to make sure it worked). You can also go into Edit HTML and work from there, but if you're not familiar with HTML it's a little scary looking.

If you have any questions or problems, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer.

Update: I realized that even if another Flickr user is allowing their photos to be used by others, the HTML code to copy and paste isn't there unless they're your own photos. So if you want to use someone else's photos, use the code I provided with the photo URL and page URL.

Gospel Choir Concert

I wanted to let everyone know that I will be singing in the USF Gospel Choir concert this Sunday, May 4th at 6 p.m. in Xavier Chapel in Fromm Hall. You should come! It'll be fun, and we sound pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Here's a video from last spring's concert. The visual isn't great, but the sound is pretty good. You can find more videos if you poke around YouTube. (I'm not in this because I was abroad at the time.)

Jasmine Park

Last Thursday, Jasmine Park of Pike/Pine, a Seattle-based street fashion blog, came to speak to our Digital Literacy class. During the week, Jasmine does program management at Microsoft, but every weekend she walks around Seattle looking for fashionable people to photograph. She told us about how she started out and how her blog has developed since September, 2006, when she started it. She created four rules for herself:

1. Take good photos.
2. Make people look good.
3. Be nice.
4. Only post what she's proud of.

And she outlined three lessons she's learned:

1. Everyone's a critic.
2. Diversity is good (and hard to find).
3. People are nice.

It was in interesting talk, especially because fashion is never something I've paid attention to. It was cool to hear from a part-time blogger. It's still just a hobby for her, as it is for most people. I also liked to hear her thoughts on comments and her decision to delete mean comments in order to create a positive environment.

Moral of the story: If someone stops you on the street and wants to take your picture for a fashion blog, be nice and say yes.

Immigration Facts

This afternoon, our Amnesty International group is doing an immigration thing in Harney during dead hour, in conjunction with SOA Watch's series of events (Not For Sale will have something too, so it will be a big ol' social justice party). I volunteered to make handouts, so I thought I'd share them here. They could be better, but they're all right (the info is mainly copied and pasted from a paper I wrote last semester).

Immigration Facts:

• There are over 12 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, over half of whom are from Mexico.(1)
• In 1993, at least 205 immigrants died crossing the border into the U.S., and in 2005 the number was over 460.(2) As more border fences go up and security increases (such as with the 1994 Operation Gatekeeper), immigrants must go through very dangerous places, like the desert, to reach the U.S.(3) People die from suffocation, dehydration, hypothermia, and hyperthermia, among other things.
• 94% of adult male undocumented immigrants work, in contrast with 86% of legal immigrants and 83% of natives. Undocumented immigrants made up about 4.9% of the workforce in 2005.(4)
• In the last five years, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. have sent over $90 billion to Mexico. Mexico receives more money from remittances than tourism, and remittances are Mexico’s second largest source of foreign income, after oil.(5) These remesas help sustain families suffering from poverty.
• Immigrants are HUMAN BEINGS.

1. Hoefer, Michael, Nancy Rytina, and Christopher Campbell. “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2006.” Immigration Statistics. Department of Homeland Security. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ill_pe_2006.pdf.
2. Hill, Jacob. “Free Trade and Immigration: Cause and Effect.” Council on Hemispheric Affairs. 18 July 2007. http://www.coha.org/2007/07/18/free-trade-and-immigration-cause-and-effect/.
3. Romellón, Jorge Santibáñez. “Migration and Borders: The Space for Contradiction, page 2.” Border Battles. 31 Aug. 2006. Social Science Research Council. http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Santibanez/index1.html.
4. Passel, Jeffrey S. “The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.” Pew Hispanic Center. 7 Mar. 2006. http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf.
5. "Finance And Economics: Counting the Cash; Remittances to Latin America." The Economist 6 Oct. 2007: 102.

stop spam. read books.

I just discovered something so cool I had to put off homework a little while longer and blog about it. I was reading the excellent blog learning.now ("At the crossroads of Internet culture & education with host Andy Carvin"), and I noticed at the bottom of the entry in the space for comments, it required the commenter to type two obscured words, to make sure only real people could comment.

The first thing that struck me was that it asked for two words, instead of the standard one. The second thing I noticed was that there is an audio alternative for people who are visually impaired. This is fantastic. Then I noticed "stop spam. read books," and I was very intrigued. I went to the reCAPTCHA website and learned more.

It turns out they work with book digitization projects like the Internet Archive, and when you type in the distorted word, you are reading a word that a computer could not recognize with OCR (I guess the computer knows when it's not reading a word right). They put one word they already know and one they don't, so if you get one right they know you probably got the other one right. They give the same word image to multiple people to get a higher accuracy rate.

So, for example, in the image above, they might already know that the first word is "Germantown," but their OCR software couldn't read the second word, "were." When I type in "Germantown were," I am helping the Internet Archive turn scanned images of a book page into digital text. Awesome. It looks like you can add it to your WordPress blog, among others, but I didn't see a way to attach it to Blogger.