logging a 10% victory over McCain in George W. Bush’s home state of Texas.
The results of the Weekly Reader Presidential Election Poll are in, and Barack Obama won the poll of US K-12 students. One interesting tidbit is that Obama won the great state of Texas by a ten percent margin over McCain, which may point to a profound political shift here in the years to come.
Communication Professors Speak Out is an open letter from several political communication professors to the McCain-Palin campaign, protesting efforts by the campaign to “other” Obama I agree that the Republiclans are stoking the fires of racism while avoiding direct racist attacks, but I do wonder how effective messages from academics like this are in improving political discourse.
I’m blogging in a variety of different places this semester. I’m reposting this from a blog related to my assistantship, the Digital Media @ Colab blog.
This week, US citizens began noticing billboards promoting Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This would be nothing new, except the billboards appear in the XBox 360 game “Burnout Paradise.” The Obama campaign has sunk a portion of its funds into advertising in online games. The skeptic in me doubts that these ads would have much effect in electoral outcome, but, instead, encourage younger voters to become more engaged with politics and extend Obama’s branding as a new kind of politician.
Of course, if Obama wins, seeing the president’s face in your video game could very well seem Big-Brother-ish, rather than revolutionary.
The fact that Bill Ayers can be a fully rehabilitated, functioning member of the Chicago political scene after his 1960s antics is exactly the sort of outcome we should be striving for with the angry young men who get swept up in the jihadist movement.
-Blake Hounshell in “Old terrorists fade away” from FP Passport.
I’ve got a number of axes to grind with UT’s Parking and Transportation Services, and at the top of the list is how it gives short shrift to cycling as a transportation option, but pours money into private-automobile services. Today PTS sent out a survey to assess student transportation needs, and it has many flaws, including almost complete neglect of cyclist needs.
After an initial classification question, the second question asks, “What is your primary mode of transportation to campus?” and offers “drive,” “bus,” “walk,” “carpool,” and “vanpool” as explicit options. Surely cycling is a more popular way to get to campus than a vanpool, and I wasn’t even aware that Austin offered vanpool services. This presents a coding problem for PTS as well, since it will under-represent students who cycle, since a number of responses like, “bike,” “bicycle,” “cycling,” or, hell, “fahrrad,” would all mean the same thing, and I doubt PTS is going to invest time into coding these other responses.
Since I’ve got some graduate-level training in survey design, I thought I would point out some other flaws in this survey. Questions four and five ask the respondent what times he or she usually arrive and leave campus. The possible responses are structured in one-hour intervals, like “8am-9am.” This may make sense for people who have rigid report times, but broader intervals would make more sense for professors and grad students who have flexible grad students, and nearly all undergrads get to campus just in time for their first class. There are two problems here: it doesn’t address the needs of two large populations on campus, students and faculty, and I don’t see how this question can provide good data with such narrow intervals, unless they’re only interested in employees who need to be at their desk exactly at 8:30.
The survey is clearly aimed at motorists who operate private vehicles alone, which I think reflects a profound bias in PTS, and this bias needs to be addressed.
At the Flow Conference this weekend, one of the sessions I attended discussed political videos on YouTube. An audience member raised the issue of fair use on YouTube, and I suggested that Google had little business interest in evaluating fair use claims after a DMCA copyright notice. I suggested that fair use under the DMCA would probably only happen after test cases were sponsored by academic or library hosting sites.
Now it appears support for DMCA fair-use rights comes from an unlikely quarter.
NewTeeVee has a story that describes how the McCain campaign has sent letters to YouTube, asking the service to evaluate the fair use of news material used in McCain-Palin advertisements. Apparently the service has taken down McCain ads after news organizations have sent YouTube DMCA notices because the ads poached materials from their broadcasts.
Obviously, I’d rather see the McCain campaign go down in flames and the DMCA repealed, but it’s interesting to see this organization stand up for fair use rights.
The Harvard International Review has an interesting item on Mexican teachers’ unions. As some readers may know the violence that began in Oaxaca two years ago begain a teachers’ strike. Like the Oaxacan teachers, teachers nationally are standing up to the corrupt PRI-established union. I hope this brings the situation to some kind of resolution.
One of my favorite shows right now is “Mad Men,” a serial drama about an advertising agency in the early 1960s. Although the characters and lighting are great, one of the things I enjoy the most is the insane attention to detail paid to props and set dressing. With that in mind, I was a bit dismayed reading Mark Simonson’s teardown of the typography of the show. According to Simonson, there are several anachronistic uses of type in the show. Reading his piece, however, I wondered how the producers could avoid these anachronisms, short of hiring a dramaturge or production designer as fastidious as Simonson. He ends the piece saying, “I don’t mean to be so hard on Mad Men. I dearly love this show,” which confirms that historical consistency is really hard to do.
Joshua Marshall shares an account of the start of Talking Points Memo on Alternet. I run hot and cold about the site, but it’s certainly one of the best resources online for understanding political news. One thing I have wondered about is its expansion from a blog to a broader political news site, which Marshall says was necessary in order to get the ad revenue to support a news operation.