Ralph Nader apparently gave the students at my journalism school a gift... copies of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? in their mailboxes. Apparently he just called up Richard Roth, one of my professors, and said he'd be sending over 1,200 copies of the book. A columnist for The Daily Northwestern smells something fishy, though I think he might be reading a too much into this.

Did Nader have an ulterior motive for giving me a book that obviously has an agenda? Probably, but that in and of itself didn't appear that threatening to me. I can deal with people telling me what to believe politically.

It's the free gift part that sometimes gives me problems. For example, several weeks ago, I took a tour of the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, Wis. The tour, along with the beer samples, didn't cost a cent.

I wondered why Miller wouldn't charge for the tour. That is, until I realized that immediately following my visit, I purchased Miller High Life.

Woah buddy, just because you get a free lunch doesn't mean you have to eat there again! Nader clearly wants to promote his ideology among journalists. So he sent some j-school students a book. This shouldn't change anyone's opinion unless the book is persuasive and someone decides to read it. 

Being an "editor" of the Harvard Crimson is no rare distinction:

The Crimson currently claims that about 800 undergraduates are Crimson “editors.” That’s because, until recently, it identified anyone who has ever joined the staff as an “editor.” Joining the staff involves writing a certain number of stories (or taking photos or designing pages as the case may be) and attending a few seminars, steps fully one in eight undergrads has taken.

h/t Romenesko. 

Eric Bacovic at the delightfully detail-oriented Language Log went through and found that Falwell's "apologies" for blaming 9/11 on gays, feminists, the ACLU, PFAW, and others aren't actually, well, apologies. Here's one of the half dozen he takes apart.

Falwell told CNN: "I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize."

Sure, the words "I apologize" are there, but let's examine this a little more closely. If it's true that he "would never blame any human being except the terrorists" for the attacks of September 11, then how are we to interpret the pointing-of-the-finger that he clearly articulated on September 13? Even putting this incongruency aside, there are several obvious ways in which this is not an apology in the relevant sense. For one, Falwell might only be apologizing for leaving an "impression" ("if" one was even left!), but not for the comments themselves. Or, Falwell might not really believe that the people his comments laid blame on are "human beings". Or, Falwell might believe that the people his comments laid blame on are also members of the group "the terrorists".

Or, somewhat more complicatedly, we might ask what the phrase "that impression" refers to. Of course we're supposed to think that it refers to "the impression that Falwell would blame a human being other than the terrorists". However, it could also refer to "the impression that Falwell would never blame any human being except the terrorists", which corresponds directly with what Falwell actually says in the immediately preceding clause (a prototypical way to resolve the referent of a phrase like "that X"). Under this construal, Falwell would be apologizing for leaving the impression that he would never blame anyone but the terrorists, which is certainly not the impression that his comments left, so he's really not apologizing for anything!

The Defense Department has decided to make it impossible to reach 13 Web sites from its network, citing an overabundance of “recreational traffic.”

In the policy released today, General B.B. Bell, commander in South Korea, said use of those sites “impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.”

The Mormon institution Brigham Young University invited Vice President Cheney to speak at graduation. Appropriately, students are protesting, hoping for someone a little more inspiring. In what was apparently a big deal, the BYU administration let students hold a protest in one of college America's infamous "free speech zones"--that is, until the clock struck one. Then they sent in the thugs and stole students' signs.

Thanks to Steve Greenstreet for the video.

I have to credit this post to Treehugger, which yesterday reported that Ontario has banned incandescent light bulbs, which are not energy efficient. Which led them to post about an elegant way to keep those now-illegal Edison-style bulbs out of landfills and also to solve the problem that most fluorescent lights can't be dimmed. Oil conversions!

I for one have been completely baffled as to what interior designers are going to do as incandescents become illegal or discouraged. What will light paintings in galleries? How will dark clubs stay dingy?

Shortly after yesterday's tragedy made its way into the U.S. media, reports that the shooter appeared to be Asian appeared on television and online. Before authorities identified the man as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean national and English major at Virginia Tech, several news outlets including the Chicago Sun-Times (with a link from Drudge) and The Times of London reported that a suspect was Chinese.

Readers will note that both of the articles linked above now reflect the correct shooter. The papers apparently have used the same URL for their online story on the shooting, continually editing it. In this case, the Times has removed any mention of its previous statement regarding a Chinese suspect. (I'm trusting Josie Liu that the page did reflect this mistaken information before.) On the other hand, the Sun-Times includes the following statement in it's current story:

...at least, that's the situation for people who take abstinence pledges and the like. Apparently, they have sex too! From the Daily Illini:

WASHINGTON - Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not, according to a long-awaited study mandated by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes, and they first had sex at about the same age as their control group counterparts _ 14 years and nine months, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc. ...

Jeff Chester makes a good point about the post-Imus discussion over diversity of ownership in media, namely that we ought to be concerned about the online media as well:

If we are to ensure that the new media landscape in the U.S. doesn’t repeat the same market models and homogeneous control we have with broadcasting, cable, and satellite, action is required—now. Powerful media behaviors are being developed that connect young people to the “always-on, always connected” online world. We must make sure that the public interest—especially diversity of ownership—is a fundamental part of this system.

This question of ownership, however, may miss the mark. The internet by nature is open to anyone, and most of the content online is user-generated. If Chester's other efforts to oppose an inequitable internet infrastructure succeed, this shouldn't change. But user-generated content is only as "diverse" (some of the worst English usage in the progressive movement) as the users are.

And users in the United States are disproportionately likely to be white. Seventy-two percent of white adults use the internet, versus 58 percent of black adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. (Pew has a category for English-speaking Hispanics, of whom 69 percent use the internet, but there is no figure for Hispanics over all or other groups.) It's not exactly a new idea, but this is the digital divide. Chester's focus on ownership is a useful point, but the user base is the root of the problem.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Dozens of schools have recently refused to fill out surveys used to calculate ranks, and efforts are now afoot for a collective boycott.

Colleges have complained in the past about the rankings. But recent events have rallied opposition, including the tying of presidential pay to ranking at Arizona State University and accusations by the president of Sarah Lawrence College that the magazine threatened to use hocus-pocus data to stand in for average SAT scores at the school.

I'd like to see a list of who's boycotting . I'd also like to hear more details from U.S. News, which claims in the article that it will continue the ratings even without the surveys by culling data from other sources.

While I'm basically in favor of screwing the rankings, I take issue with one point made by a pro-boycott administrator:

"This increasing interest in measuring everything – these so-called science-based measures of [educational] outcomes and the like – seems to me to be so misguided that it's now captured the imagination of the leadership in higher education," says Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., who heads an association of 124 prestigious liberal arts schools. "This is a bad way of talking about an education. [Students] aren't consumers shopping for a product."

I agree that prospective students aren't like appliance shoppers, but let's not forget that they're paying a lot of money and taking on lots of loans for a service rendered by an organization. It's not a product like a haircut or a Harley, but school is something that can be more or less worth the money, like it or not.

I'm not sure whether I'm proud or not to see Northwestern well represented here.

Colleges also compete in the “least number of words you need to read before you know you are being rejected category.” Often the contestants need two words as in “We regret ... .” This year, however, the winner was Northwestern which began their letter with the word “After ... .” That, of course, is the prelude to telling the student how carefully they considered her credentials before rejecting her. It’s always a good bet that a college never starts off telling you how carefully they considered your credentials before accepting you.

Via Eszter

After having it's Feed fed to it for lunch by almost three quarters of a million users protesting the feature last fall, Facebook was much more cautious when it rolled out the new interface and features that hit the site last night. For one thing, they actually seem to make the site more usable, with the introduction of the obviously useful regional network pages, complete with a wall and what not.

But if 740,000 people will join a group complaining, how many will join a group to test and comment on the new features? Well, it seems like a hell of a lot. Facebook decided to take their input from committed users before foisting it upon the user base over night through a Facebook group, and 113,000 people joined to try it out and give comments.

Well done, folks. 

My alma mater is apparently close to a deal to open a branch of the journalism school in Qatar. This puts its Evanston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., locations in a little bit of perspective, doesn't it.

Others have already done so. And here's why:

The Qatar Foundation pays all of the universities' costs -- from construction of new buildings to faculty and administrative salaries -- and it offered Cornell an undisclosed financial gift when it opened a medical school there in 2002, according to Dr. Antonio Gotto, dean of Cornell's medical school.

Greenpeace International has Apple placed last in its recent rankings for environmental friendliness among major electronics companies. A spokesperson for Greenpeace claims Apple failed to stop using several types of harmful chemicals in its manufacturing processes, and has yet to make a plan for stopping their use. Apple, meanwhile, is rejecting the rankings, claiming its products are among the “greenest” in the world.

Always believe corporate PR! From here via Arkitip.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently reacted to prohibited practices at one organic farm collective by banning all together a system that let collectives gain certification by having a random sample of the member farms inspected, Salon has reported.

Inspectors under ideal circumstances can inspect four or five farms a day, and it currently takes about 20 to 30 days at $150–270 per day to certify a grower group. Under the new rules, these farmers who are supposed to benefit from their collective organization will all have to be certified individually in order to use the "organic" label in the United States. For some, this means they're getting screwed in new and original ways!

[C]onsider the case of one co-op of Peruvian banana farmers, for whom the USDA ruling is especially ironic: The 1,500 growers formerly worked as tenants on a single plantation, but with agrarian reforms in the 1960s each family got a plot of the landlord's land. Had that plantation been maintained, it could have had one visit a year from an inspector. But because the property is now split among 1,500 families, inspectors will need to visit each farm on the land.

Let's hope a better policy can be developed.

• Oops No. 1: She says "roughly a third" of we younguns "endorse making abortion generally available." That's versus, wait for it, 35 percent of older people. Wow, that's stark.
• Oops No. 2: She uses this faulty data point (margin of error, anyone?) to conclude that "A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work." You'd have to read the article, but trust me, there's no support for this odd statement
• Oops No. 3: She hopes that maybe this means the 18-25 crowd will be more generous and help people in our lives. Well I hope we help the world too, but who said previous generations have never acted gallantly? Or is she too bitter to be a Boomer and not a member of the Greatest Generation to respect her elders.

Well, folks, get ready to focus your green energy on a new King of Polluters: CHINA!!

The Chinese government has released new data showing that China will almost certainly pass the United States in 2007 or 2008 to become the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Based on data from the new study and from the International Energy Agency, the increase in the amount of China's greenhouse gas emissions is now greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.

If the green policy battles aren't tough enough in the United States, consider how much fun it's going to be once the Chinese fifth of the global population starts belching its fair share of carbon. And the Indian sixth isn't far behind.

[from Wired]

One-hundred-fifty years ago, some Americans might muse over freedom fries, France was so old that it was already irrelevant. Not so, but a country that more or less invented the nation state was well into middle age. Meanwhile the Qing Dynasty, from which we derive the name "China," was in its 213th year (after 3,800 years of China before that) and fighting the Second Opium War. It was a spry old country that ultimately got beaten up by those middle-aged Brits and French.

The United States was in its first century 150 years go, a precocious country, the experimental offspring of Enlightenment political philosophy and renegade Christianity. One-hundred-fifty years ago today, however, our liberal democracy was still in its awkward infancy: The United States Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which denied all legal protections as citizens to African Americans. The court held, according to Wikipedia:

Africans residing in America, whether slaves or free, could not become United States citizens and the plaintiff therefore lacked the capacity to file a lawsuit. Furthermore, the parts of the Missouri Compromise creating free territories were unconstitutional because Congress had no authority to abolish slavery in federal territories. Judgment of Circuit Court for the District of Missouri reversed and dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.

The 13th and 14th amendments made quick work of that, but not for another eight years. We've come a long way, my precocious compatriots, but we have a long way to go before we graduate from our tumultuous national teenage.

As a six-month truce agreement expired yesterday, some in Northern Uganda were moving back to internally displaced person (IDP) camps in uneasy anticipation of what might happen next. Negotiations in Juba, Sudan, for a permanent peace between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have been stalled for much of the truce.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, the ENOUGH campaign, a joint project of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group, held an event with absentee hosts Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Russ Feingold (D-WI). Though the senators could not be there, Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) did attend, but short two long-winded politicians, there was much more time to hear from the gathered experts.

Fresh back from a trip to Uganda, Betty Bigombe of United States Institute of Peace and John Prendergast of ENOUGH reported what they saw. They related the unease of the 2 million people who have been displaced by the fighting. A U.S.-side grassroots organizer on the issue, Michael Poffenberger, who graduated from Notre Dame only two years ago, reported that new estimates put the number of excess deaths due to the situation at 1,000 a week.

The panelists stood aghast at the U.S. media's lack of attention to Uganda at a time when Sudan has finally broken into the mainstream news if in a modest way. But their strongest words were for the U.S. government, which they say could give the Juba peace process much-needed legitimacy.

"This I think is the easiest war in Africa to resolve," Prendergast said. "We don't need billions of dollars, we don't need troops. We just need the us to take some ... leadership." Indeed, he said, the United States has not so much as appointed a full time liaison to the region. But politicians are unlikely to respond without pressure from voters.

Uganda-CAN, co-founded by Poffenberger, is a good place to start if you want to take action. Go there.