It’s not every day that an 8 foot tall Lego man washes ashore, yet it has happened twice; a green-shirted man landed on the shores of Brighton Beach on October 30th, and a year earlier, a similar blue-shirted man arrived at the Zandvoort, a resort in the Netherlands.

(Lego)Man Overboard! & Other Unscheduled Deliveries - Ship Happens – the uShip Blog

Your friday music video...

YouTube - ‪R.E.M. I remember California (Live)‬‏

I thought this was an intelligent observation:

This fascinating history serves to introduce the major thesis of Influencing Machine: that the "media machine" that cynically distorts in order to serve the rich and powerful is a delusion. The reality is that the "media agenda" is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously from commercial constraints, human frailty, state interference, and cognitive blindspots.

From one of the reviews on Amazon

All media products are inherently biased, so as the audience it's our duty simply to identify these biases as they reveal themselves. Gladstone, however, addresses the question of bias by pulling back to the 50,000-foot level and positioning the "boring" controversy about "political bias" alongside the far less obvious biases that we really "should worry about"--commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, narrative bias, and, most iconoclastically, fairness bias.

Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone's comic about media theory is serious but never dull - Boing Boing

I pretty much agree with Dagmar on this. New intellectual property rights are not required to deal with signal piracy and they would create a myriad of unintended consequences that would largely be counterproductive.

No, no, a thousand times, no 'Broadcast Treaty'

Robert Morris, a cryptographer who helped develop the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, died on Sunday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 78.

Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78 - NYTimes.com

Thirty-one years old, Len was an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET since 2010. He was an internationally acclaimed cypherpunk and privacy advocate, a PhD candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and a researcher with the COSIC research group. Suffering from depression Len ended his own life on July 3, 2011.

Len SassamanLen worked on privacy enhancing technologies and anonymous communication systems such as the open source Mixmaster remailer software. He worked for Network Associates on the PGP encryption software, was a member of the Shmoo Group, a contributor to the OpenPGP IETF working group, the GNU Privacy Guard project, and often appeared at technology conferences like DEF CON. He was the cofounder of CodeCon along with Bram Cohen, coauthor of the Zimmermann-Sassaman key-signing protocol, and was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov.

Sad News: IEET Affiliate Len Sassaman Has Died

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school.

Lots of insight here about the realities of public education.

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

Recently uncovered evidence suggests that William Shakespeare used marijuana, and now a team of paleontologists want to dig him up to prove it.

Scientists want to dig up Shakespeare to find out if he smoked weed | The Raw Story

“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab.

The Beer Archaeologist | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

This is very interesting on multiple levels.

The first level is that AT&T has been donating large sums to various non-profits, apparently in exchange for their favorable "public comments" to the FCC on issues of interest to AT&T, in this case a merger.

Politico ran a piece last week examining progressive non-profits that received AT&T donations.

Some of them, including GLAAD, then wrote in support of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, and in the case of GLAAD, wrote to the FCC opposing possible net neutrality rules.

GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios resigned moments ago.

Its interesting that the views of a group like GLAAD would have an impact on a question like this - it goes to show you the amount of influence that the feelings of a politically active constituent group can have. Is it possible that the merger (a business transaction) could be held up if GLADD said that they don't like AT&T for reasons that have nothing to do with the legality of the merger?

The FCC wants views from the public on its regulatory decisions. The real public is largely uninformed on these issues. So the companies are out corralling "commentary" which comes from the leaders of public constituent groups - a class of people who are as abstracted from the real "public" as the politicians themselves, and clearly subject to the same influences.

Would this make sense from a governance standpoint if these groups were not taking money from the organizations that have stakes in these decisions? Do we want GLAAD (and other, similar organizations) commenting on FCC issues as a way of ensuring that someone is paying attention?

Its interesting how Net Neutrality played into this. AT&T seems to have tricked GLAAD into submitting an anti-net neutrality letter to the FCC. This ticked off liberal activists and was the smoking gun that led to the unraveling of this particular relationship. Although I see net neutrality as a mostly phoney political issue I have to admit that it was useful here.

However, I'm not sure exactly what the solution is. Clearly GLAAD's membership should have been better informed that GLAAD was commenting on issues like this, and what GLAAD's positions were.

Should community advocacy groups refuse to accept corporate money?

This is literally a "money where your mouth is" kind of question for those who are interested in campaign finance reform. Could you do all that "great work" you are doing influencing the system if you were only funded by the actual constituents you represent?

That is a challenging question.

GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios resigns amid AT&T scandal - Boing Boing