Fresh Beulah Links- 4 November 2010

So this post is actually being typed on the Beulahland public computer, a stalwart defender of strangers ability to look up random stuff online.  I have, yet again, a few good links to share and want the two followers (and countless lurkers, no doubt) of this blog to know that my post on the Geocities Archive is almost finished and will be posted today.  It's a doozy, and by doozy I mean awesome and somewhat longer than I expected.  Keep taps on Facebook/Twitter to know when I finally post the, um, post.

From @brainpicker: The CIA used modern art as one weapon among many against the cold, heartless, and uncreative Soviet Union.  (And the two fans of socialist realism go nuts)  So crazy it's true, as the CIA wanted to push the freedom-loving, open & creative image of America, especially against the backdrop of the Red Scare then circulating through American culture.  Will never look at a Rothko the same way again...

Have a burning desire to read John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' and support free, online education?  Look no further than the Virtual Philosopher.  Lots of interesting links here, plenty for an aspiring liberal theorist to take on.  

Finally, as tweeted by @jayrosen_nyu, turns out the newly elected Republican house majority has already planned to hold hearings on the 'fraudulent' science of climate change.  The author of the article states that such hearings are not necessarily bad and in fact could provide avenue to defend climate change.  Well, I think such hearings are just a means to get some press and sound-bytes to rev up the base that is looking for action now.  What an interesting two years it will be.

Okay gotta make room for others who need to get their internet fix.  Weekend Reading is tomorrow and I have a few choice texts to share.

Post-Election Day Videos!

So I would normally provide some links for your eager perusal, but the twittersphere was en fuego with comments on the elections.  As such, i've decided to just post some videos I felt were good enough to watch no matter how you lean politically.  Well, the second video with George Takei might not appeal to right-wing types but still an important message!


First: Super Nintendo version of 'There Will Be Blood'

Super There Will Be Blood from Tomfoolery Pictures on Vimeo.

And second, George Takei speaks out on a certain member of the Arkansas School Board.


Enjoy!

Fresh Beulah Links-2 November 2010

So i'm running a bit behind today meaning I'm cutting short the *awesome* commentary and going straight to the links for today.


From @bookbench: Cornell University president, David Skorton, launches new campaign to revive interest in the humanities.  His call echoes a similar argument made by John Dewey in the 1930's, one that I covered in my first post on History and the Teaching Philosophy.  In this period of the Great Recession, Humanities programs across the nation are being cut to the bone.  Unlike the supposed gap in Science education, the gap in Humanities education will not be felt for a while- but once manifested, it will prove extremely detrimental.  


From @pourmecoffee, on a Wired post: the making of a DIY sun photograph.  This is far better than any other 'sun' photo i've seen and demonstrates, once again, the supreme creative capacities citizens are able to partake in with the rise of the microprocessor.  This is NASA quality but done on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.  Simply awesome.



Thats it for now- might post new thoughts on Geocities archive today, but still a lot to do.

Fresh Beulah Links: 1 November 2010

This morning's Fresh Links brought to you by the post-Halloween sugar crash, courtesy of my overfilled bowl of leftover candy.  Turns out most of my neighbors didn't turn on their porch light, so I ended up being the only nice house on what no doubt looked like a very creepy street to trick-or-treaters and their parents.  At least I have some candy to spread around the next few days....or weeks.....so much candy!


From the New York Times: Maya Angelou's archive to be housed in Schomburg Center in Harlem.  It's great to see prominent writers having their creative materials archived for future reference- in a digital age where change over time is easily documented by historical web cache's, it can be difficult to comprehend such change in an analogue sense.  I fully expect this archive to be digitized in time, allowing professional and amateur alike to view and compare Angelou's changes over time.


From the American Historical Association's blog, Historians.org: A cautionary article about inadequate facts being presented to schoolchildren in a district approved textbook.  The author is correct in stating that such errors, such as the example used of asserting that two black battalions fought under Stonewall Jackson during the Civil War, demonstrates poor use of digital sources to provide background and that we need to set better examples for our students.  History texts can become hot button issues, their contents all too easily melded to the viewpoint of a biased presenter. 

Finally, noted by Boing Boing, vintage Soviet car ads at metkere.com- sign me up for a Volin 969!  


That's all for today- as a spoiler for my next post, lets just say it involves looking at this gem- the newly available Geocities Archive.  

Weekend Reading

Occasionally during my excursions through the internet, I come across papers, books, manifestos, etc., that I feel should be shared with a larger audience.  As one of the central themes of this blog centers on greater awareness of the current battle over culture and intellectual property enclosures of the 'commons', I want to promote texts I believe bring new light or alternative opinions to these issues.  Thus the introduction of 'Weekend Reading', a weekly Friday post that offers some interesting choices for your (free) perusal.


The first text I want to mention is a research paper by Christopher Newman, professor at the George Mason University School of Law, on 'Transformative Use and Derivative Works in Property and Copyright'.  I mentioned in my post yesterday that the front lines of the current culture battle are presently being manned by a diverse band of lawyers, and this article follows that same vein by attempting to outline a new legal conception on our idea of 'copyright'.  Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

Far from implying “absolutist” authorial rights, an in rem approach to copyright requires that we place clear boundaries around the identity of the “work of authorship.” This means moving away from the notion that disembodied fragments of “protected expression” can be owned separately from the “work of authorship” of which they are a part. I show how this might be done, proposing to define a “work of authorship” in terms of a coherent expressive experience designed by an author. Putative “copies” that are not tailored to facilitate beneficial use of the work as conceived by the author, but rather to communicate second-order information, or to give rise to expressive experiences radically discontinuous from the ones the author designed, therefore fall outside the author’s right to exclude altogether.

 The second text I want to post comes from the 'Institute of Network Cultures Weblog' and is titled The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner.  Playing off of the same ideas and themes of Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, Kleiner's text analyzes current social relations with regards to battles over information sharing and cultural production.  One of its central tennets is that workers must move beyond the motives of the 'free software movement' or 'communization of immaterial property' and, instead, engage in 'self-organization in production'.  Here is an excerpt:

This publication is intended as a summary of the positions that motivate the Telekommunisten project, based on an exploration of class conflict in the age of international telecommunications, global migration, and the emergence of the information economy. The goal of this text is to introduce the political motivations of Telekommunisten, including a sketch of the basic theoretical framework in which it is rooted. Through two interrelated sections, ‘Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. The Client-Server Capitalist State’ and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture’, the Manifesto covers the political economy of network topologies and cultural production respectively.‘Peer-to-Peer Communism vs.The Client-Server Capitalist State’ focuses on the commercialization of the internet and the emergence of networked distributed production.  It proposes a new form of organization as a vehicle for class struggle: venture communism.  The section ends with the famous program laid out by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, adapted into a Manifesto for a networked society.

So there you go, one text that seeks to play within the rules of our legal system and another that seeks to promote an alternative means of production that goes beyond our current legal boundaries in order to critique them.  Enjoy the weekend and take some time to read the above, if only to bring alternative viewpoints into your frame of mind.