infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

The FCC is holding a public hearing in Austin tomorrow night to gather public input about media ownership policy. The FCC is reviewing its limits on how many media outlets a given corporation can own in a particular market city. Both of my readers will remember that the 1996 Communications Act loosened radio ownership rules and allowed organizations like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS) to dominate the airwaves. Further relaxation has only accelerated the ability of major corporations to shift away from serving local interests toward homogenized national programming.

The commissioner attending the hearing, Jonathan Adelstein, is one of the more liberal commissioners in a body that often rubber-stamps the desires of the major telco and media players, so speakers concerned about localism and corporate control will have a sympathetic audience. I’m not sure I’ll make any comments in person, but I’ll certainly attend out of scholarly and personal interest. If you’re interested in testifying, there are tips here.

The hearing will take place in Jester Auditorium on the UT-Austin campus. (Jester is the big, honkin’ dorm at 21st and Speedway; just take the bus to 21st and Guadalupe, rather than worry about parking.) There will be an “educational” presentation at 5:30, followed by the hearing at 6:30. I imagine it will go on for hours.

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• Berthold Brecht: “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”
  Brecht imagines utopian possibilities for radio in this 1932 essay. In my reading, this essay is often alluded to, but rarely cited. Props to jill/txt to tracking this down.
  (del.icio.us tags: academic citizensmedia oldmedia radio)
• Pearls Before Swine for 09.16.06
  Those Starbucks are popping up everywhere!
  (del.icio.us tags: coffee comics starbucks)
• Lawrence Lessig: AutoWeek: On come on
  Larry Lessig discusses how a commercial magazine used a photo from Flickr that was shared under a non-commercial, attribution Creative Commons license without acknowledging the photographer.
  (del.icio.us tags: photography Flickr CreativeCommons copyright)

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• WOS4: Citizendium
  Wikipedia co-founder and critic Larry Sanger is forking Wikipedia into a new project called Citizendium, which will have tighter controls over editing.
  (del.icio.us tags: Web2.0 freeculture wikipedia)

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• Editorial: Nancy’s disgrace
  Steve Safran sounds off on how CNN Headline News commentator Nancy Grace refuses to accept any responsibility after a woman committed suicide after an agressive interview.
  (tags: TV cable crime ethics news)
• Starbucks Gossip: A reader asks: “Is it fair for a customer to order a ‘ghetto-latte’?”
  Starbucks customers have found inventive ways to trim the prices of their beverages. I do, however, find the use of “ghetto” in this context very loaded and problematic.
  (tags: starbucks coffee hack race)
• Making Music with Cosmic Rays
  The Kosmophone is a device that generates music based on high-frequency radiation.
  (tags: music geek dorkbot)

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I often walk past the UT police station on my way to the gym and see the rows and rows of impounded bicycles. I find it a sad sight to see all of these bikes going unused; it seems like a project like Bikes Across Borders or Austin Yellow Bike could make use of these bicycles. Most of these bikes are abandoned, but UT requires cyclists to register their bikes and the UTPD will impound unregistered bikes on campus. I imagine cyclists with nicer bikes pick up their missing rides, while students with junkier bikes don’t want to pay the fines to get their bikes out of impound, leading to the hundreds of bikes chained up in front of the Benson library.

It looks like some of these bikes may find homes after all. UT’s department of Parking and Transportation is holding its Fall bicycle auction tomorrow night starting at 5pm with silent bidding starting at 5:30. As you might expect, most of the bikes up for sale are junky Wal-Mart style bikes, but there are few bikes that have potential. Judging from the way they were stored and the amount of rust I see on the chains and gears, I suspect it will take some work to get these bikes back into working order. There’s no indication of whether all the bikes sell out or what happens to unsold bikes. I do hope they go to the Yellow Bike Project.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive used bike, but lack the skills or inclination to fix up a bike, Austin Yellow Bike may be a useful resource for you. Although they’re best known for the yellow community bikes which are supposed to be left around town unlocked, ony the junkiest bikes are turned into Yellow Bikes. The organization fixes up the nicer bikes and sells them at a low cost. You can also volunteer your time and build a bike from one of the available rides. Finally, Yellow Bike offers their tool library: if you need to overhaul your bottom bracket and don’t want to shell out for a bottom bracket tool, you can do it in their open shops.

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• Independent Online: Vehicles ‘drive closer to cyclists wearing helmets’
  According to a British researcher helmeted cyclists are more likely to be hit by cars because of the perception of safety. I wonder how culturally specific these findings are.
  (tags: cycling transportation)
• Vanity Fair: Help the Warmongers Help Themselves
  A gag cover to put on issues of conservative opinion journal The Weekly Standard. It’s interesting to see a mainstream publication engage in culture-jamming like this.
  (tags: prank hack media politics magazine)
• The History Of Hacking - Google Video
  Via Cory Arcangel, this TLC documentary from 2001 doesn’t present a lot of information new to me, but it’s interesting to watch Kevin Mitnick and Captain Crunch talk about their lives.
  (tags: hacking documentary history video cable)
• WSJ.com: Will Wikipedia Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias?
  I think this conversation between Jimmy Wales and Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg must have taken place via email.
  (tags: wikipedia interview production)

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One of my classmates in Don’s Semantic Web Technologies class last semester hacked together a Greasemonkey script that looks to see if a book you’re viewing on Amazon.com is available in the UT libraries. This script is enormously useful, since UT’s online catalog is darn near useless unless you have the exact title of the book you want. With this tool, I can search using Amazon’s interface, then click through to the catalog entry.

Tonight I was looking for a book assigned in one of my classes. I couldn’t remember the title or the author (OK, maybe this tool makes you a little stupider, too.) but I remembered it was about gay culture and television, so I did a query for “Gay TV.” The first result was the book I was looking for, but I was disturbed when I found this item in the top results. I certainly hope it’s not circulating in the UT libraries.

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I noticed something odd this afternoon watching my Oklahoma Sooners struggle and eventually triumph over the U-Dub Huskies. During the half-time show, the announcers kept referring to “ESPN on ABC.” I knew both ESPN and ABC are owned by the nice folks at Disney, but it seemed like a strange turn of phrase. Could this be the new branding for sports programming on ABC? Indeed it is. Even the graphics indicating the scores are marked as “ESPN,” rather than ABC.

This press-release-like AP story does little to explain the change in branding, except that it gives Disney to consolidate its sports programming and Web properties under a single brand. Considering the conglomeration has shuffled ABC’s venerable “Monday Night Football” to ESPN, I suppose this makes sense, but, at the same time, ABC has started running college games on Saturday nights, which was once the sole province of cable content providers like ESPN and TBS.

Further complicating the “ESPN on ABC” branding is the way that ABC is promoting its high-definition programming. When plugging next week’s showdown between OU and U of O, the announcer said it was on “HD on ABC.” Is the game on ESPN, ESPN on ABC, or HD on ABC? More importantly, is the game on channel 3, 52, or 53? I imagine in the age of interactive program guides, prestige viewers (unlike me) just scroll through channels until they find they game they want, while extended-basic losers like me flip through channels looking for the OU game.

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• WebCite
  Via Larry Lessig, this service from the University of Toronto caches web pages so scholars can create persistent links to the documents they’re citing. It’s too bad they couldn’t develop a TinyURL URI style.
  (tags: academic archive useful)
• Abandoned Stations
  This awesome series of web pages has photos of abandoned New York City train stations and their historical context.
  (tags: transportation history architecture NYC)

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• Attention Artists: Brushes and Paint are now Free
  Matt Haughey discusses changes in the economics of producing creative works. I’m not sure I buy his assertions entirely – Photoshop is quite expensive, even with a student discount – but he focuses on how YouTube and others have solved the hosting problem.
  (tags: art economics net.art)
• Prisoners of Katrina - Google Video
  BBC documentary about inmates at Orleans Parish Prison kept in lockup as the city flooded. It’s interesting how the sheriff was politicking all through Katrina and its aftermath.
  (tags: documentary disaster politics video)

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