a thaumaturgical compendium

Congratulations go to Paul Visco, who presented his MFA project to his committee (Josephine Anstey [chair], Loss Pequeño Glazier, and me) today. The project, which I’ve written about before, is the Elmwood strip community site, which has existed in various incarnations since 2002. The initial site was started as part of a Virtual Communities class, and has grown to become a large, influential, and interesting site over the past few years.

It’s interesting because it has grown up largely outside of the blogging phenomenon. It’s a bit like LiveJournal in this respect, but to an even more extreme degree. Paul made the site in response to the needs and the interests of the community, and as a result, it feels a lot like other blogs in some ways, and not at all in others. Judged on its own merits, it is a striking design, and has a very rich feature set. Particularly for community-based journalism/journaling, which has always been at the heart of the project, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better platform.

But it is also interesting in the ways in which it integrates with the physical community—a section just north of downtown Buffalo surrounding Elmwood Boulevard Avenue—but manages not to integrate much with other blogs. Certainly, there are links to it from other prominent blogs in Buffalo, and it is widely read by bloggers in the area, but it has somehow managed—largely by design—to be a very place-based community website, and for that reason, among others, a particularly interesting collaborative community. Paul did a lot to publicize the site, but none of it was virtual publicity. Mostly, he linked to the site from the physical location: the side of his house, chalking the sidewalk, or t-shirts on people.

If this is true, Jet Blue has some serious explaining to do. Raed Jarrar wore a T-shirt on his flight from JFK to Oakland reading “We will not be silent” in English and Arabic. The Jet Blue staff (and possibly others) disagreed, and told him he had to remove or cover up his shirt if he wanted to board the flight.

Then I once again asked the three of them : “How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt? Isn’t this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?” so inspector Harris answered “you can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank”. I said “but the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says “we will not be silent”. I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com . It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, English, etc.” Inspector Harris said: “We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don’t have a translator. Maybe it means something else”. I said: “But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic and English”. He said “maybe it is not the same message”. So based on the fact that Jet Blue doesn’t have a translator, anything in Arabic is suspicious because maybe it’ll mean something bad!

They offered to buy him a new T-shirt to cover up his message. Initially, they thought a “I (heart) NY” T-shirt might be good, but one of them remarked “No, we shouldn’t ask him to go from one extreme to another.”

I would like to have an official response from Jet Blue. If it happened, I want to know how they are going to make sure that it won’t happen again. If it didn’t, I want a clear message indicating that they do not discriminate against non-English-language t-shirts. I also want to buy a shirt that reads in Arabic either “Coke is it!” or “I am not a terrorist” for my next trip.

(Click on the image above to get your own “Go Away” shirt. I would want some assurances from a native speaker that this is really what it says before wearing it around. I mean if I were going to get it as a tattoo, I wouldn’t need to be so worried, but as a T-shirt…)

Update (8/25): Ah, someone has answered my call. Via Boing Boing a I am not a terrorist T-shirt. And the profits go to the ACLU. What a deal!

Went out to the Museum of the Moving Image to see a pre-release screening of The Protector, second film—after Ong-bak—in which Tony Jaa plays a starring role. The curator of the martial arts series at the museum makes the case for Jaa being the “it” martial arts star of the 00s. Bruce Lee had the 70s, Jackie Chan the 80s, Jet Li the 90s, and Jaa is our next action hero.

Hard to come away from this movie without thinking this is the case. Plot? Ong-bak plus elephants. Character development? What’s that? But as with Ong-Bak the martial arts sequences were breathtaking. The audience for this showing especially liked a muay thai vs. capoeira sequence, and a single, four-minute long take that has Jaa fighting his way up three flights of stairs, turning up obviously exhausted by the top. Jaa noted that it took them a month to plan and film the scene, and it took eight takes over four days to finally capture it. For me, the scene at the film’s denouement was the most thrilling, as Jaa does almost all the fighting as a series of joint-locks and breaks. He later said that this didn’t come from any particular form—all martial arts draw on joint manipulation to some degree. But to me, and I suspect to many in the audience, the techniques looked less like muay thai and more like jiu jitsu, judo, or aikido.

Mr. Jaa (I’m sure that sounds a bit funny to Thai-speakers) was self-effacing and charming in the film and in person. We missed much of the short demonstration he and his fellow stunt men performed, but really, that’s why you go to see it in the theater. While Jaa’s films eschew the wire-work and fast cuts in favor of a truer depiction of the action, the camera does a much better job of capturing that action than viewing it from a few dozen feet away. If you aren’t already a martial arts fan, this probably doesn’t rate as a “crossover” movie, but if you like really good martial arts sequences caught on film, and if you like baby elephants, this is not a film you should miss.

We capped the afternoon off with dinner at Sripraphai, over in Woodside, which earns its ranking as the best Thai food in the area.

A lot of newspapers have been shy to link outside of their own news organization: so much so that it is almost a truism. They followed the corporate credo of keeping users on the site. That has changed over the last few years, with more and more traditional news sites willing to include hyperlinks.

The New York Times has a very nicely done article on underaged model sites, sites that include images of (often barely) clothed minors in sexual poses. This is sometimes referred to as “legal child porn,” and while that certainly seems to be an oxymoron, it may not be entirely. While US v. Knox established a test that allowed for prosecution of those selling (and receiving) images of clothed minors under certain circumstances, it strikes me that pedophiles can turn any image of a child into pornography, if more explicit images are not available. In other words, unlike a lot of laws, while you are still held responsible for breaking the law, it’s not completely clear where that line is drawn.

Obviously, the solution is to get no where near anything that could be even possibly considered child pornography. But that’s easier said than done. On the “mainstream” porn side, there are extremely popular titles like “Barely Legal” that play to an appetite for youth. On the non-pornographic side, there are the millions of parents who think nothing of taking pictures of their children in the bath, or nursing—photographs that have gotten people in trouble for producing child porn.

The Times article links directly to the lilamber website, as an example of the progenitor of this phenomenon, noting that the new sites tend to be more explicit in their language, if not their images. (As an aside, I am terrible at judging age, and while “lilamber” is clearly young, I can see how someone would mistaken her for being over the age of 18, perhaps.) This follows on the recent arrests in the UK over what is sometimes called “virtual child pornography.”

But the editorial policy of linking to the lilamber.com site (which I have done above) is interesting. One one hand, by providing the name of the site, they have effectively given the reader enough information to find the site. Actually making it a hyperlink is merely a convenience and a pretty common thing for bloggers to do, for example, as a service to their readers. However, it isn’t a convenience offered elsewhere in the article. Indeed, this is the only external link in the article, which affords it some importance.

As the article itself notes, they quickly ran into sites they found to display child pornography in their own investigation. Under such circumstances, is it responsible to shunt readers off to a site that is on the questionable border of such material? Does the Times have a clear policy as to what it does and does not link to?

So, I haven’t been blogging because I need to:

1. Religious blogging paper. Finish my part of the data analysis and writing for a co-authored paper to be presented at AIR next month. It’s way overdue. (I might do some posts on this once the analysis is done.)

2. AIR Membership systems. There were “issues” with tracking on members signing up for the conference that require my attention. The organizers have been patient with me, but I need to get them updated information ASAP. Luckily, the main membership system is working, but I need to perform a little bit of a tweak to make it possible to “bar” unpaid members, and I need to do a bit of documenting so someone can audit it.

3. Wikipedia topic mapping. Working with coders on the second co-authored paper for AIR, also overdue. In this case, it’s heavily on me, since Mr. Lackaff already did the heavy lifting for the Wikimania version of the paper.

4. Class planning. Planning my two graduate seminars for Quinnipiac in the Fall. That should have been done a month ago, and despite lots of snippets of things, I still don’t have a solid plan down. (More to the point, I hope to give the students some input on what we cover, but I need to do more planning, not less, for that to happen.)

5. Book proposal. Promised weeks ago, but very back burnered.

6. Movies. Thought this was going to be a bad year for movies all together, but I’ve very much enjoyed the last two I’ve seen: Little Miss Sunshine and The Illusionist. Both were really enjoyable to watch. Actually, I’m a bit surprised the latter isn’t better liked by the critics. And I know you either love or hate Phillip Glass, but his score made the movie for me. Going to see something this Sunday, too.

7. Desk. I had hoped before school started to get a piece of particle board cut down to use as a standing desk, but I guess it will need to wait.

8. Sleep. I need more sleep.

9. Working out. Little late for New Year’s Resolutions, but now that I don’t feel like I’m melting for 20 hours out of the day, trying to get back in the gym and back away from the pizza.

10. Blog. Once I get through all that, I need to blog. I want to do some fixes for folks with smaller screens, and to include a CV and a “status” page with my calendar, all consuming, and other indicators. Oh, and I want to put my aggregator up as well.

There is my project priority list. Too much, too little time.

Mark Frank joined the faculty at UB a year before I left. Seemed to be doing some really interesting work, and had a cool lab to play with. Had a chance to poke around just before I left, and they are doing some fun stuff. Now you can do a quick visit too.

CBS News ran a short piece this evening (WMV [3Mb], MP4[4Mb]). Mark Frank, of course, is featured prominently, and grad student Carolyn Hurley shows up in an early scene. I’m surprised they didn’t get into all the cool tech gadgets they are working with. In the interests of security, I won’t mention what they are. Yeah, I know, security through obscurity not the best way to go, but some of the stuff they are working on is secret. Leave it as: they have ways of knowing more about your body than most doctors do. Pretty neat, and a little spooky.

The take-away from the material they covered here on micro-expressions? We clearly need to be doing more to police the distribution of Botox.

I was a little bit freaked out about not being able to bring my computer on the trip to Australia next month. It’s a lot of time to spend in the air with very little to do, so I had planned on finishing off a couple of books and still doing some writing.

Luckily, according to the TSA, laptops are still allowed on board for flights originating in the US, and US-bound flights are generally under the same requirements. As the date approaches, I’ll need to keep checking to see what the security arrangements are. And look at ways of defending the poor laptop in checked luggage.

The first choice, of course, is to bring a more disposable laptop—one that won’t hurt as much if it gets thrashed. Namely, an old Sony Vaio. I think the batteries are fried, but I can probably find non-Sony batteries to replace them. The alternative is to bring the Mac Book Pro, which—besides being bigger—I would be a bit more unhappy if it got thrashed. It’s not really “mine” anyway, since it’s a university machine, but still I think I need to keep it in running order for a while.

Thomas Wailbum has posted some hints on how to keep your computer safe and secure if it has to be checked (via Aaron). I’m thinking a Pelican case might be a good idea. Then, if we crash and are “lost” on a South Pacific island, I’ll be the only one with a working laptop. Or perhaps a cheapo version of the same, since the authentic Pelican version costs almost more than the computer is worth (though they are often for sale on eBay). The Container Store had some basic plastic commercial cases that should fit the bill, if it comes to that. (I suspect they can be found elsewhere for even less.)