Month: March 2008

There's nothing funny about prison rape – Los Angeles Times Recently I watched the excellent Spike Lee film 25th Hour, staring Edward Norton as convicted drug dealer Monty Brogan who is being sent away for a 7 year stint in prison.

Norton is portrayed as a good enough guy (he saves a dying dog in the beginning of the film for instance) who sort of somehow ended up on the wrong side of the tracks anyways. Although Brogan very much is guilty of the charges of dealing drugs, he’s not the sort of guy who most people would really be worried about having out on the streets.

One of the central concerns and themes of the film is what will happen to Brogan once he makes his way to prison. The concept of prison rape comes up regularly. I’m not going to give away the ending to the film, but I will say something happens in the end to Brogan that is very much a social commentary on what it means to risk rape in prison.

Rape in prison is an ugly thing. For many people I think the fear of prison rape is the worst thought about being locked up — worse than the loss of personal freedom, worse than the boredom, worse than being kept away from friends and family. The thought of being sexually violated is one of the worst thoughts of all.

Now some might say that maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this makes prison that much more of a deterrent for people who might commit crime. But for many in prison their rapes are tragedies. They are deep moral marks of deficiency on our society. The Eighth Ammedment to the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. And yet as a society we make light of prison rape and allow an unusually high percentage of it to take place.

I’m not sure what the answer is to preventing rape in prison, but I think as a society we have an obligation to ensure that it happens less than it happens today.

to this end it was interesting reading an Op/Ed on prison rape from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. While on the one hand chiding political types like Bill Lockyear for suggesting prison rape as a just tool for law and order, the op/ed piece forces us to reconsider just how the idea of prison rape is allowed to continue in our culture and in a very real way in the prisons across the U.S.

It makes you think.

Update from Jay’s comment below more info at Stop Prisoner Rape.

Sparks fly over copyright at Tech Policy Summit | Lawgarithms | ZDNet.com Denise Howell has an informative write up on a copyright debate held last week at the Tech Policy Summit in Hollywood.

Participants in the debate included TiVo VP and general counsel Matt Zinn, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance Patrick Ross, Fred von Lohman from the EFF and moderator Doug Lichtman of UCLA Law School.

Two things I found interesting in the article.

The first was a challenge to Zinn suggesting that rather than build a box that recorded copyrighted content, that TiVo should have asked “permission” from the studios and worked more collaboratively with them to build a box that both would have been happy with.

And the second was a challenge from the audience by Jay Williams of the MPAA suggesting that TiVo was inconsistent in it’s view on intellectual property because while they made a box capable of recording copyrighted materially, they also have pursued a patent claim against Echostar/Dish Network.

TiVo technology and television time shifting technology have been some of the best things to come out of technology in the past 10 years. They have empowered consumers and have redefined the way that we consume content in a world increasingly driven by marketing.

Everywhere you go today you can’t escape the marketing. Billboards push big bold messages across the sky. Radios blast out loud offers of diet pills and aluminum siding. The web pops up messages at you begging you to download the latest smiley emoticon packages (along with its accompanying spyware).

Not only are we as adults inundated by a daily barrage of commerce, but so are your kids.

To me, the biggest heroes of technology are the ones who empower us. The ones who build the tools that allow us to bypass the litter of commerce.

The villains are the ones who would seek to take your tools away. Who think that you are stealing if you don’t sit through a commercial about Bud Light when you watch that free episode of Cheers.

So This is America.

Ok, now I have no idea exactly how this works and I’m still trying to figure it out, but this could be something very, very cool.

On Thursday I got an email from a company called Tagcow. Tagcow claims that they can automatically tag thousands of photos for you. They are using the Flickr API and are set up so that you can either upload photos to their own site or link your Flickr account up to their site where both descriptive and people tags can be added to your photos.

Tagcow has some demo videos on their service here.

I tested the site out yesterday using my avatar and uploaded the photo to their site. The photo was tagged with man, Canon, camera and mirror. Very accurate descriptive tags of the photo.

So I decided to take the Flickr plunge yesterday and linked my flickrstream up to their site via the Flickr API authentication and have started to see tags coming back on my flickr photos.

Take the photo above. I tagged the above photo myself with the following tags: How Berkeley Can You Be Parade, How Berkeley Can You Be Parade 2007, How Berkeley Can You Be 2007, parade, car, art car, art, and Disney.

Tagcow added four additional tags to the photo above: figure, witch, wicked, and toy.

Ok, those are *excellent* additional tags to add to that photo.

Now I have no idea if Tagcow is using some sort of Riya-like photo recognition software or if they simply have a bunch of people manually tagging away my Flickr photos in the background, but either way this seems really, really cool.

I’m not sure on the economics or business model of Tagcow but the application for a site like this in terms of image search seems pretty huge.

I’ll blog more on Tagcow after I understand a little more about how their technology works. This definitely may be a company worth watching.

Update: More from TechCrunch here.

More from Incremental Blogger here.

Not my party: Gravel bolts – First Read – msnbc.com

It looks like Democratic Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel is leaving the Democratic party and joining the Libertarian Party where he “hopes to continue his presidential bid.”

Gravel, of course, is more likely to pull more votes away from whomever the Democratic presidential candidate happens to be as opposed to the Republican candidate.

I’m glad to see Gravel stay in the fray of things and hope his ideas, including legalizing marijuana, continue to get attention in his run for President.