An Update On MIT’s Free Open Source Courseware

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MIT Everyware
Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.
By David Diamond for Wired News.
(via Boingboing.)

When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program – dubbed OpenCourseWare – would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT’s audacity – and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required…
And MIT will learn a few things, too, just as it did during OpenCourseWare’s first year. One lesson of the beta test revolved around access, which in some parts of the world is costly and slow. A second issue: lack of assistance to Web-based students. Even the most brilliant university course can falter without the kind of intensive teaching support provided at a school like MIT. Then there are the nagging intellectual property headaches. How, for example, do you police Third World scam artists from hawking MIT degrees as if they were Calvin Klein knockoffs?

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Meanwhile, The Deficit Reaches New Heights

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2004 Deficit Could Near $500B
By the Associated Press.

The federal government is heading toward a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 and will rack up red ink of almost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The estimate may even break the half-trillion dollar mark, a newspaper reports.
Congressional aides with access to the CBO report said it also confirms earlier estimates that the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 will be $401 billion, well above the previous record of $290.4 billion set in 1992.
The 2004-2013 deficit estimate of $1.397 trillion by the nonpartisan office reverses previous predictions that the federal budget, battered by economic recession and rising defense and security costs, would edge back into the black over the coming decade.
According to The New York Times, the CBO will actually provide two estimates. One ignores the cost of the military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are running at a combined $4.9 billion a month.
Another assumes that war costs this year will continue at the same amount for the next 10 years.
Both assumptions are considered somewhat unrealistic. The method assuming a 10-year war cost could push the deficit over $500 billion.

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Day 1 – March 1, 2003 – AM – David Reed At Stanford’s Spectrum Policy Conference

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At long last! I’ll be putting up presentations from the Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons? conference at the rate of about one every other day for the next two weeks or so.
This conference changed the way I think about a lot of things, not just spectrum, but I must admit that I didn’t fully grasp cognitive radio beforehand. They really took the time to explain everything to us and then gave us a chance to dig our teeth in a bit as the weekend progressed by engaging in some discussions and, at the very end, a moot court where the issues were debated.
This conference was a bit of a death march** in the sense that it started at 8am and went until 8 or 9pm (or 10 or 11) easily both nights. (Oh wait, that was Joi Ito’s party that went late on Sunday 🙂 (**And I mean that in a good way — I didn’t realize how exhausted I was till the end — it was very exciting while it was taking place. It was just a lot of information crammed into two days.)
Anyway I recorded the whole darn thing. Even the speakers who presented over dinner — as you’ll be well aware of from the silverware noises in the background. I had to record everything because it’s all so important.
So here it is. If you haven’t been able to wrap your head around open spectrum and cognitive radio yet, this conference will bring you up to speed immediately. Particulary the first half-day of presentations — an array of backgrounders from the top experts in the field. It’s not so hard to understand when these guys explain it to you step by step.
For each of the presentations, I will be creating a single, huge file (the “1a, 2a, etc.” numbered files) and four smaller files for easier downloading (labeled 1, 2, etc. as the day progresses).
If I haven’t explained this before, the reason I make all of these slides is to enable people to use them in presentations they are putting together themselves for their own classes and collegues, should they wish to do so. (I’m trying to save teachers the time of trying to capture stills from the video.)
Enjoy!

David Reed – Sat AM – Part 1 of 4 (Small – 32 MB)

David Reed – Sat AM – Part 2 of 4 (Small – 24 MB)

David Reed – Sat AM – Part 3 of 4 (Small – 38 MB)

David Reed – Sat AM – Part 4 of 4 (Small – 35 MB)

David Reed – Sat AM – Complete (Small – 127 MB)








Left to right (above), Ren Bucholz (EFF), Cory Doctorow (EFF), Matthew Haughey (Metafilter), Aaron Swartz (Creative Commons)

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Texas Dems Stick It Out In New Mexico

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Our heroes!

Texas State Senators in Exile Fear Arrest
By the Associated Press – In the NY Times.

Texas Senate Democrats who stymied Republican redistricting plans by fleeing to New Mexico may not be returning home any time soon, despite running down the clock on the special legislative session.
The 30-day limit on the latest session expired Tuesday and Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry said he was prepared to call yet another special session to get the issue resolved, though he would not say when.
If they re-enter Texas, the 11 Senate Democrats now in Albuquerque said they feared being arrested and hauled back to the capitol should Perry call another session. Senate rules allow for the arrest of members who intentionally thwart a quorum.
Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said she and the 10 other Democrats are prepared to stay away another 30 days, the maximum length of a special session.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Laredo declined to rule on a related matter, the Democratic senators’ federal lawsuit alleging that the GOP had violated their constitutional rights and the Voting Rights Act…
Republicans, who control the Texas House and Senate, have been trying to redraw the state’s political lines to increase the number of Republicans in Congress.
Democrats have a 17-15 majority in the Texas delegation and have said the current map should not be changed. They argue that proposals before the GOP-dominated Legislature this year would have hurt minority representation.

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XML, P2P, and Semantic Web Related Terms

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Just realized I never linked to this glossary from my blog yet. I’m gearing up for teaching at University of San Francisco this semester and realized I hadn’t linked to it or updated it for quite some time.
I’m also looking for other great glossaries to add to this category, so please, send them along.
I also need a lot more “semantic web” terms in this puppy too — so send them along so we can argue about them 🙂

XML, P2P and Semantic Web-related Terms

NY Times Editorial: Victory Act Is Unpatriotic

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An Unpatriotic Act
A NY Times Editorial

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a charm offensive on behalf of the USA Patriot Act. He is traveling the country to rally support for the law, which many people, both liberals and conservatives, consider a dangerous assault on civil liberties. Mr. Ashcroft’s efforts to promote the law are misguided. He should abandon the roadshow and spend more time in Washington working with those who want to reform the law.
When the Patriot Act raced through Congress after Sept. 11, critics warned that it was an unprecedented expansion of the government’s right to spy on ordinary Americans. The more people have learned about the law, the greater the calls have been for overhauling it. One section that has produced particular outrage is the authorization of “sneak and peek” searches, in which the government secretly searches people’s homes and delays telling them about the search. The House last month voted 309 to 118 for a Republican-sponsored measure to block the use of federal funds for such searches…
One member of Congress, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, has charged that Mr. Ashcroft’s lobbying campaign, in which United States attorneys have been asked to participate, may violate the law prohibiting members of the executive branch from engaging in grass-roots lobbying for or against Congressional legislation. Legal or not, the campaign seeks to shore up a deeply flawed piece of legislation. The Patriot Act is the Bush administration’s attempt to make the country safe on the cheap. Rather than do the hard work of coming up with effective port security and air cargo checks, and other programs targeted at actual threats, the administration has taken aim at civil liberties.
The administration is clearly worried, as opposition to the excesses of the Patriot Act grows across the country and the political spectrum. Instead of spin-doctoring the problem, Mr. Ashcroft should work with the law’s critics to develop a law that respects Americans’ fundamental rights.

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Clare Short: It’s Official – Saddam Was Not An Imminent Threat

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It’s Official – Saddam Was Not an Imminent Threat
By Clare Short (Yes the Clare Short who resigned as British international development secretary in May)

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.
The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world’s leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists – and presumably others – to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.
The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report – from such an eminent source – to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report … and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source…
I agree completely with Jonathan Powell’s conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix’s inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.
If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq’s WMD programmes – just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein – just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.
Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac’s view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.
The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell’s conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq’s reconstruction.

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GAO Blames Vice President For Interfering With Investigation

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GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe
The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants.
By the Associated Press.

Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House’s energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.
Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.
The unwillingness of Cheney’s office to turn over records and other information “precluded us from fully achieving our objectives” and limited its analysis, the GAO said…
Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney’s energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration’s energy plan.
The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO…
The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

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Teens Charged With Raping Each Other While Engaging In Consensual Sex

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Ed Note: I’m going to start including a few guest entries in my blog from a couple of friends of mine in an attempt to expand my blog’s content a bit to cover other important issues without my having to do too much extra work! I hope you will find them interesting. The first is an entry from Bobby Lilly about a frightening situation where teens are actually being prosecuted for raping each other while engaging in consensual sex.–lr
Thanks Lisa,
I’ve always wanted a forum like this but haven’t had the time to set up my own blog so I’m thrilled to be here. I do want to warn your readers though that, while the provided link to the FFE speakers network gives them a lot of information about who I am and my concerns, it still shows me as the chairperson of Californians Against Censorhip Together even though Cal-Act no longer exists. It was an interesting ride for more than a decade though 😉 and for all too many years my life revolved around my political work
Now days, things are different. I’ve got an internet job working on-line from my office at home and I finally have the time to try to master the world of digital photography and be the artist I’ve always dreamed of becoming. These days I have to confess to being a Photoshop-aholic and I am just another activist working with a variety of groups on a variety of issues but not the political junky I once was.
For years, I focused on the importance of sexual speech and still consider myself a sex positive feminist even though those terms may be out of fashion these days. But both sexual speech AND sex itself still need someone defend it from prudery and speak the truth about it. There is still a crying need for sexual sanity in the US today.
A friend passed on the following story which I think deserves much more publicity and, hopefully, a demonstration of outrage from all of us to the paper which had this article, if not in larger venues as well:
Take a look at: Teens have right to have sex, lawyer argues
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim for the Journal Sentinel.
While it may seem ridiculous for any prosecutor to charge teens with rape for engaging in consensual sexuality, it is both a travesty of justice and a tragedy of the first order that this nation’s legal system has been so co-opted (or should I say corrupted) by an anti-sexual mentality/morality that children were charged with RAPE for innocent sexual exploration.
I can only hope that situations like this will raise an alarm that finally wakens the American people from their passive acquiescence to the nightmare of our legal system being hijacked by extremists on both the left and the right for their own political agendas. This should outrage us all.
The prosecutor deserves to be booted out of her position for her callous treatment of two ‘troubled’ (i.e., rebellious) teens. I can’t believe she dared to tell the press, “The reason I charged this case was because of their attitude,” Kornblum says. “I believe they had to be brought before an authority.” “Not to punish the children,” she said, “but to help them through various court-ordered services.”
Yah, sure that’s WHY she charged them with RAPE!!!…she should be ashamed of herself. Prudery, whether on behalf of the sex-negative left or the anti-sex religious right, runs rampant in this country these days and has harmed too many of us in too many ways to list here. It has to end.
So, why don’t you take the five minutes it will take to write a letter to the on-line edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel right now at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/submit.asp and DO something about it.

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The EFF’s Jason Schultz Explains The Privacy Implications Of The RIAA Subpoenas

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This is from the August 23, 2003 program of “Bay Area People” on KTVU Channel 2 in San Francisco.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Jason Schultz explains why the RIAA’s Subpoena process raises several red flags in the areas of privacy and due process in terms of one’s rights being violated before it’s been proven that they’ve even broken the law).
Jason also explains the EFF’s How Not To Get Sued and Subpoena Database Query Tool websites and how consumers can use them to protect themselves against this travesty of justice.

Jason Schultz On The RIAA Subpoenas (Small – 19 MB)