Tuesday, March 8, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Board-game that teaches about public health determinants: The Last Straw

Posted: 08 Mar 2011 04:47 AM PST

The Last Straw is a multilingual board game designed by my old friend Dr Kate Reeve and her colleague Kate Rossiter while Reeve was completing her residency in family medicine. It was initially created as an exercise in exploring ways of teaching about the social determinants of health, but after Kate presented it at a conference, other public health practitioners demanded that she get them a copy of the game for use in their own lives. Now they've sold more than a thousand copies of the game, which they manufacture in small quantities on a non-profit basis.
The Last Straw! takes players through the life cycle where they will encounter "macro" issues such as political climate, economic structure and environmental change, as well as "micro" issues, such as individual finances, education, and family dynamics.

Each player develops a character profile that includes gender, socio-economic status and race. The player then receives Vitality Chips based on this profile.

Each character moves through various life stages from Childhood, to Adolescence, to Adulthood and finally to Old Age, updating the profile as the character passes from one life stage to the next.

On the board, a character encounters two kinds of squares: individual scenarios, which the Game Master reads out loud out from the Game Guide, and Community Cards, which affect all the characters on the board and are read aloud by the players themselves.

The Last Straw (Thanks, Kate!)
 


Nevada student charged with hacking in to school network, upgrading students' grades for cash

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:32 PM PST

tyler_coyner.jpgA 19-year-old University of Nevada student in Nevada has been charged with hacking into his school district's computer system and improving his classmates' grades for a fee.

Local police say Tyler Coyner led a group of 13 students (most of whom were minors) who have all been charged with conspiracy, theft and computer intrusion. "Last year, Coyner somehow obtained a password to the Pahrump Valley High School's grade system and, over the course of two semesters, offered to change grades in return for cash payments."

Coyner is reported to have bumped his own grades so high (a 4.54 GPA) that he "was the salutatorian at his graduation, an honor given to the student with the second highest GPA in the school."

Cops raiding his dorm room also found a stolen LCD television set, and gear for printing fake driver's licenses. Not so smart after all.

Slow loris with a tiny umbrella (cute video)

Posted: 08 Mar 2011 01:10 AM PST

[Video Link] What is a Slow Loris? Glad you asked. (thanks, Tara McGinley!)

William Shatner, as Star Trek's Kirk, delivers wakeup call for Discovery STS-133 crew

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:35 PM PST

[Video Link] William Shatner, who, as everyone reading Boing Boing knows, played Captain James Tiberius Kirk on the original Star Trek television series, provided a special message to the crew of space shuttle Discovery during the Flight Day 12 wakeup call today. From the NASA description:

As Alexander Courage's theme song played underneath, Shatner replaced the original television introduction with, "Space, the final frontier. These have been the voyages of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her 30 year mission: To seek out new science. To build new outposts. To bring nations together on the final frontier. To boldly go, and do, what no spacecraft has done before."

The "Theme from Star Trek" received the second most votes in a public contest from a Top 40 list for NASA's Song Contest. The top two songs with the most votes from that list earned a slot on the list to wake Discovery's crew during its final mission. The total number of votes cast during the four-month contest for STS-133 was 2,463,774. Of that, Star Trek received 671,134 votes (27.2 percent). Shatner recorded the new, special introduction for Discovery's final voyage -- its 39th flight and 13th to the International Space Station.

Improvised toilets of earthquake-struck Christchurch

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 02:31 PM PST

Tiger kills Lion

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 01:27 PM PST

A tiger at Ankara zoo managed to find a gap between its cage and that of a lion, which it attacked and killed. From the BBC: "The tiger severed the lion's jugular vein in a single stroke with its paw, leaving the animal dying in a pool of blood, officials said."

Saudi Chicks

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 12:16 PM PST

Chicks brillianty dyed with food coloring sit on display at the animal market in Souq Waqif. A photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by freelance mideast-based journalist Omar Chatriwala.

Virtual Cafe opens to help New Zealand Earthquake victims

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 12:02 PM PST

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The Christchurch cafe is a site where you can buy virtual items you might find in a coffee shop, from a $2 espresso to a $300 espresso machine. This is a creative and interesting way of raising aid donations: 100% of funds raised go directly to the community in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was hit hard by the earthquake last week. I love this idea, and would love to see this kind of thing catch on. It's an inspired way to encourage people to help out financially after a disaster.

DARPA double-dealing

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 11:40 AM PST

Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, a book about paranoia, technology, psy-ops, and "UFOs"

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 11:50 AM PST

2010 06 Mmb Header3
Bus 300 800 9781602398009 I first met my friend Mark Pilkington, the UK journalist and publisher of Strange Attractor Press, a few years ago when he was visiting San Francisco researching a new book about UFOs. Mark (smartly) wasn't trying to find out if UFOs are "real" in the extraterrestrial sense. Rather, he was exploring what I think is much weirder territory: the story behind the UFO story -- a history of disinformation, paranoia, hoaxers, espionage, and weird psy-ops. Mark interviewed dozens of characters across the country, from kooky ET enthusiasts to former air force officers whose truths, if you believe them, are far stranger than the fictions you'll get from most UFO books. The result of Mark's intrepid reporting is Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. It's a provocative, informative, freaky, entertaining, and often damn funny book. For a taste, you can read a bit of a Fortean Times cover story adapted from Mirage Men after the jump.


America's relationship to the flying saucer changed dramatically between 1949 and 1953. After two years of intermittent "UFOria" sparked by Kenneth Arnold's original 1947 sighting, by late 1949 it looked as if the public might finally be losing interest in the elusive intruders. This was largely thanks to the Air Force's Project Grudge, which had spent the year doing its best to play down public enthusiasm for the phenomenon – largely by ridiculing it – and, most importantly, inocul­ating its own pilots against the UFO bug.


In late December 1949, however, all Grudge's hard work came undone thanks to an article in the hugely popular men's magazine True. "Flying Saucers are Real" by pulp author Donald Keyhoe, a retired Major from the US Marine Corps naval aviation division, was a shocking exposé of the Air Force cover-up of the awful truth – that flying saucers were real, and they were from Outer Space.


Although the Extraterrestrial Hypo­thesis (ETH) had always been a contender for the discs' origin, until then most people, civilian and military, thought the saucers were American or possibly Soviet in origin. Even Kenneth Arnold had spoken publicly of his belief that what he saw were experimental US craft, perhaps powered by atomic energy. It was these comments that caused him to be drawn into the Maury Island UFO affair in July 1947, a bizarre honey-trap involving Air Force Intelli­gence, the FBI and, possibly, the powerful Atomic Energy Commission. Arnold was lured to Tacoma, Washington, by the promise of UFO debris, but his investigat­ion inadvertently led to the deaths of two Air Force intelligence agents (the newly-formed USAF's first ever casualties) in a plane crash and a lucky escape for Arnold in his own aircraft.


Although Arnold wouldn't have known it, the Air Force did have a nascent atomic aircraft project at the time – Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft – so it's not surprising that he became the subject of an intense investigation, especially given how seriously the US authorities took the threat of Soviet infiltration. It was only eight months since the Venona intelligence decryption project – so secret that not even Presidents Roosevelt and Truman knew of its existence – had made its first breakthrough, and the situation it unravelled was nothing short of devastating. Venona identified Soviet moles inside the Man­hattan Project and in government bodies including the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA in 1947), the Army Air Force, the War Production Board (chief spymaster Victor Perlo headed the Aviation Section) the Treasury, the State Department, and even amongst President Roose­velt's trusted White House administrators. The United States was paranoid, and with good reason: there really were Reds under the bed, including the four-posters at the White House.


The strange brew of technology and paranoia that led to the first outbreak of the UFO bug was fomented by the breakdown of relations between the US Air Force and the Navy. As they fought over post-war funding, each side accused the other of corruption in pursuing government contracts and leaked one another's internal documents in what was described by some as a civil war. Things deteriorated so badly that a chronically depressed Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who had previously headed the Navy, leapt to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, an incident that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories.

"Weapons of Mass Deception: Mirage Men" (Fortean Times)


Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs (Amazon US)


Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs: The Weird Truth Behind UFOs (Amazon UK)

Mirage Men blog



Cyndi Lauper entertains fellow travelers stranded in airport

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:46 AM PST

King Philip IV signs autographs at The Met

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:40 AM PST


The merry pranksters at Improv Everywhere brought King Philip IV to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art to sign autographs beside his portrait, painted by Velázquez circa 1624. Improv Everywhere: King Philip IV

A drug mystery in South Africa

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:22 AM PST

The BBC and other sources have reported that some South Africans have taken to stealing an antiretroviral HIV medication, and using it as a street drug. That may or may not be true. But the drug in question, efavirenz, is known for producing temporary side-effects that can include altered dreams and mild hallucinations. And that's really weird, writes scientist-blogger Neuroskeptic, because, so far, nobody understands the chemical mechanism that could connect efavirenz to those sort of symptoms—either in legitimate users, or illegal ones.

NoteSlate, the $100 electronic drawing pad

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 11:00 AM PST

noteslate.jpg Noteslate plans to offer an e-ink drawing tablet later this year. Its single-purpose design — it's for drawing things in monochrome and dumping them to SD card — will hopefully keep the price at the advertised $100. Editions will also be offered with colored overlays. CNN tracked down designer Martin Hasek for a skeptical article; if nothing else, the attention demonstrates that people still like the idea of gadgets that do just one thing, perfectly: "NoteSlate is best described as buzzware: a tech concept masquerading as a full-fledged idea because it needs consumer enthusiasm to support its development." Personally, I think it might be disappointing for artists given the lack of pressure sensitivity, which seems the holy grail for artists and tablet computers. Currently, however, you have to fork out a thousand dollars or so for a Wacom-equipped Tablet PC to get that, so a $100 digital notepad has its charms. Product page [NoteSlate]

Diana Gameros: Latin/indie singer/songwriter in San Francisco

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:16 AM PST


On Saturday, my son and I visited Pirate Cat Radio, a low-power community station in San Francisco, to see our favorite Bay Area singer/guitarist Diana Gameros perform. Diana plays a wonderful mix of traditional Latin songs and her own soulful, passionate songs. At Pirate Cat, Diana sung a new original tune that was stirring, beautiful, and perfect for a sunny day after endless rain. When I got home, I found a video of her playing the song on piano at a recent concert celebrating the rich culture of her home Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. For another taste of Diana's diverse style, below is a video of her and a full band performing my other favorite of her originals, Para Papa. Diana's next live show is Friday, March 11, at Berkeley's La Peña Cultural Center for an event with poet-musician MamaCoAtl tied to International Women's Day and supporting the No+Bloodshed campaign against violence in Mexico. Diana also plays solo most Friday and Saturday evenings at the excellent Roosevelt Tamale Parlor in the Mission District. Diana Gameros



 


FAA may limit blackout on private jet flights from real-time flight tracking data

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:02 AM PST

ProPublica continues to serve as an important and credible force for transparency: "The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing rules [1] that would prevent private plane owners from keeping their flight records secret unless they can provide a valid security concern. The FAA said the practice of blocking flights from real-time tracking data had created a transparency issue and cited a federal court ruling involving a Freedom of Information Act request that had been filed by ProPublica."

How a BoingBoing science feature was mutated: the "telephone" game

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:14 AM PST

mutation.jpg

As somebody who does a fair amount of curating—collecting and commenting on cool stories from around the Internet—I'm very aware of how easy it is to accidentally mutate the news. Kind of paranoid about it, actually. Done well, this kind of curation can add new ideas to a discussion, or, at the very least, help readers find stories and learn about new ideas they might otherwise miss in the vast sea of information. Do it poorly, though, and curation quickly turns into a game of telephone. The story gets twisted. The point gets lost.

For example, a few weeks ago, BoingBoing guest blogger Lee Billings published an interview here with Greg Laughlin, an astronomer who'd worked out a formula that calculated the value of newly discovered planets. The point of Laughlin's work isn't so much about the cash money price of a planet. Rather, it's meant as a guide. A way to help the press and the public get a better feel for whether or not we should get real worked up about a discovery. Calling a planet "potentially habitable" doesn't tell the average person as much as, say, comparing the probable worth of Gliese 581c ($160) to that of our home planet (approx $5 quadrillion). Laughlin's formula is meant as a way to provide context, and as a gauge that shows us the intrinsic value in exploratory scientific research.

After that interview went up on our site, Laughlin was interviewed about it by another publication, Britain's News of the World. They did a reasonably good job with the story, he says. But when other publications and websites jumped onto that article, they changed the focus, ending up with a story that was very far from the point Laughlin was trying to make. Laughlin tells the tale of what happened next on his own blog:

Predictably, newspapers in Britain saw the News of the World story and immediately picked it up. As is to be expected, successive iterations tend to lose focus on the exoplanets, and gain focus on the value of Earth. Radio stations are calling, trying to set up interviews about how much Earth is worth. Angry e-mails drift into my inbox. Google news is at 61 articles and counting.

What was an exercise in calming hyperbolic media speculation about astronomy research became a hyperbolic media story about wacky real estate. I think this is pretty interesting. Both as a peek at "how the sausages get made" for you, and as a cautionary tale for me. There, but for the grace of calm blogging & careful reading, go I.

For an example of curation gone right, check out blogger Paul Gilster's post about the exact same BoingBoing article.

Via Lee Billings

Rob Beschizza reports on green alien blob that produces fapping noises (video)

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 09:50 AM PST

Perhaps you missed Rob Beschizza's epic review of this gadget cleaning goop, posted over the weekend. You should watch it now. [Video Link]

Poignant quote from student rebels in Libya

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 09:01 AM PST

"Maybe I die, but as Shakespeare says the question is to be or not to be". —untrained Libyan rebels, guarding a checkpoint on the road to Ras Lanuf. One was an economics student, the other in chemical engineering. As quoted by Channel 4's International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum. (Via Wandering Gaia)

Satellite map of the Christchurch earthquake

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:49 AM PST

earthquakefromspace.jpg

This is what the effects of an earthquake look like from space. Vertical movement was mapped by a Japanense satellite as the ground shifted closer to it (blue) or further from it (red). (Via Jon Fildes)

Russian nuclear power plant is all buttons and knobs

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:39 AM PST

Russianpowerplant.jpg

The control panels in this Russian nuclear power plant look like something out of the 60s, but it was built in the 1990s. Why so little computer interface? It's probably a budgetary issue, but, at Fast Company Design, John Pavlus wonders whether there's a bigger lesson we can learn.

But what about all those clunky, straight-outta-Star-Trek knobs and lights -- what if they're a safety feature, too?

Well, here's the thing, as Christopher Mims at Technology Review brilliantly points out: touch is a powerful, powerful thing. And not the sterile, featureless version that passes for "touch" on your iPad. I'm talking about the physical, primal, ultra-high-res sensorium that you experience from interacting with everyday objects in the real world. Our brains and hands evolved they way they did for a reason, and virtual displays and interfaces simply don't "click" with the kind of infomation-processing we've evolved to do so well. Deep, spatial sense-memory—"colored THING in THAT location that feels like THIS and STAYS there"—is how our savannah-dwelling ancestors navigated their environment and avoided getting killed, and it's still true today.

There's more photos of the power plant at Fast Company Design.

Photos taken by Ilya Varlamov

Via Mark Changizi!

Motif Cubes

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:31 AM PST

75.jpg I don't quite know what it is about Brooklyn5and10's Motif Cubes that's so addictive, but at $25 a set I just can't resist. There's nothing to solve, no winning arrangement or maze (though wouldn't that be neat?) just a few billion combinations to explore. There's also a white edition with more angular designs.

Wisconsin protests—now with farmers (and tractors)

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 10:26 AM PST

convoy!.jpg

Note: This is not an image from next week's farmer-labor day at the Wisconsin Capitol Building. That hasn't happened yet. This is an image meant to illustrate the concept of a tractorcade for anyone who's never seen one. Apologies for any confusion.

Tens of thousands of people were in Madison, Wisconsin, again this weekend, continuing to protest Governor Scott Walkers attempt to do away with collective bargaining for some state employees. We're at Day 18 now, if you're keeping track.

This has been a very weird event, by U.S. standards. We don't often have protest movements that sustain their momentum, at this level, over this long a period of time. Hell, one day is usually the maximum. So it's been interesting to me to see the Madison protests evolve. Up next, apparently, are theme protests. Next Saturday, March 12, starting at noon, it's farmer-labor day at the Wisconsin Capitol Building—with farmers from across the state set to bring a tractorcade of support to the protesters in Madison. Yes. A tractorcade. This just got 10x more awesome.

Next week, farmers from across the dairyland will bring tractors and solidarity to the WI capitol to fight for labor rights and a just state budget. Rural communities will be disproportionately hurt by the cuts to education and badgercare, and farmers in Wisconsin stand with state workers, and all working and middle class families in the state. The event is sponsored by Family Farm Defenders, Wisconsin Farmers Union and Land Stewardship project.

All farmers and eaters welcome and encouraged to come! If you have a tractor and would like to join in the tractorcade please contact John Peck at Family Farm Defenders - (608) 260-0900; familyfarmdefenders@yahoo.com

Couple of other notes:
• Remember how cleanup in the Capitol Building was supposed to cost $7 million. Yeah. That's been retracted. The State is now estimating $350,000.

• The City of Madison issued a press release on Saturday thanking protesters for another huge protest with no arrests and no citations. That's right. In 18 days, nobody has done anything worthy of arrest, or even ticketing. Good work, Wisconsin! In the Upper Midwest, even our "thugs" are well above average.

Some rights reserved by mahalie

Canadian MP who shills for the record industry is an enthusiastic pirate

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:15 AM PST

Michael Geist,
Canadian Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who was recently linked to the Canadian Recording Industry Association, has been the most outspoken MP in favor of tough penalties for copyright infringement. Yet it now appears that McTeague may have himself infringed dozens of copyrights on his own website.

Since the introduction of Bill C-32, McTeague has posted dozens of full-text articles from mainstream media organizations on his website, at times without attribution. In addition to the articles, McTeague has also reposted many photographs associated with the articles.

The more likely scenario is that this is a case of repeated copyright infringement under which there would be the possibility of hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential statutory damages. Targeted Canadian mainstream media organizations include the Globe and Mail, Postmedia, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Canadian Press, CTV, QMI (Sun News), Hill Times, and many local news organizations.

Liberal MP Dan McTeague: Repeat Copyright Infringer?

Fractal Lab

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:49 AM PST

Tom "Subblue" Reddard, whose fractal work was featured here recently, developed an interactive WebGL fractal explorer app that runs in the browser. Fractal Lab currently works in Chrome or the latest FF4 beta.

NPR restricts commenting

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:32 AM PST

NPR is sick of spam and trolls and has switched to auditioning commenters before accepting their submissions. Only after establishing themselves over multiple comments will their comments begin appearing automatically when posted. Matthew Lasar in Ars Technica:
This new policy has been a while in coming. In October, NPR noted that the site had grown to 350,000 registered participants, and thus needed a little help moderating comments, particularly with trolls who come "to wreak havoc in discussions." Hence, the media organization brought in Canadian-based ICUC Moderation Services to assist.
Looks like they're simply overwhelmed by nasty anonymous and just-registered comments. Public radio decides it's time to chase trolls away [Ars Technica}

Looking after books properly

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 07:24 AM PST

How to extend the life of your books. [Lifehacker]

The Monster: the fraud and depraved indifference that caused the subprime meltdown

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 06:54 AM PST

Michael W Hudson's book-length investigative journalism piece on the subprime meltdown, The Monster, is both a brilliant example of skeptical business journalism done right, and a brilliant example of the storyteller's art. Hudson combines his meticulous, exhaustively documented research with a novelistic approach to telling the story that strips away all the financial jargon and the cosy justifications and rationalizations and lays bare the heart of the story: greed, depraved indifference, fraud, and a howling moral vacuum that swallowed up people at all levels of finance and financial regulation.

The Monster starts with the S&L crisis, and the fraudsters who destroyed the finances of the ordinary people who'd trusted them, and shows how the worst of the S&L conmen moved on to subprime, founding companies like Ameriquest and FAMCO. People like Richard Arnall, who became a billionaire, was the prime financier behind George W Bush's 2004 presidential bid, and actually served as the US ambassador to the Netherlands, even as he built an empire built on outright, deliberate swindling.

And swindling it was. Hudson leaves no room for doubt here. You may have heard that the subprime collapse was caused by greedy homeowners fudging the facts about their income in order to secure easy credit, but Hudson shows that in the vast majority of cases, the "liar" in the "liar loan" was usually a banker, a mortgage broker, an underwriter, a bond-rater, an appraiser. These are the people who went into poor neighborhoods where vulnerable, poorly educated people had scrimped and saved all their lives to buy their homes and conned them into taking out brutal, lopsided second mortgages, lying to them, bilking them out of 20% (or more!) in upfront fees, lying some more, forging documents, and then handing off the mortgages to Wall Street to launder out as toxic bonds.

The depravity is bottomless. From small lies to big lies, from hiding documents to robbing developmentally disabled seniors. Stealing from widows by slipping in extra documents after their reading glasses were off. Using sexual harassment and even hired thugs to drive away anyone in the company with a shred of decency, anyone who raised the smallest objection. Coked up millionaires in SUVs, gouging good working people out of everything with a con designed and refined so ensnare people with so much debt that their houses were inevitably forfeit. The subprime outfits literally used the movie Boiler Room as a training film, requiring new hires to watch it in order to learn how to conduct their working lives.

But lest you think that the problem was just the con-artists at the bottom, Hudson shows you how regulators (all the way up to Alan Greenspan), Lehman and the other big Street firms, and politicians all the way up to the President of the United States were all in on it, that there was no way they couldn't have known that they were participating in a once-in-a-century scam that was destroyed millions of good peoples' lives as well as the planet's economy, and how they all sat idly by and collected their share of the wealth rather than speak up. From lobbyists to campaign contributions, dirty tricks and massive media campaigns, bribery and intimidation, the men behind the subprime crisis were not merely expressing some historical abstraction, playing a part in a nebulous "business cycle." They were deliberately, personally participating in something that they had to know would result in terrible consequences for innocents all around them.

Hudson's book is a model for excellent investigative journalism. It's a book that should be required reading for anyone who says that the economic crisis was caused by greedy mortgage-takers who spent too loosely with their credit cards.

The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis

 


Plutopia 2011: a "science-friction" extravaganza during SXSW Interactive

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 07:18 PM PST

In 2006 corporate futurologist Derek Woodgate and I flashed on the idea of an future-focused think tank that would produce experiential events, what Derek has come to call "sense events." Since then we've produced several of these science-friction extravaganzas during SXSW Interactive, and last year we formed a future-focused events and entertainment company, Plutopia Productions, with visionary producer Maggie Duval, and logistics wizard Bon Davis. Plutopia is a mashup of "pluralist utopias" - in a world of digital convergence, maker cultures, and DIY domiciles, you can customize your perfect slice of the known universe.

On March 14 during this year's SXSW Interactive, we're producing our latest and greatest, called Plutopia 2011: The Future of Play. This year's event includes Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) and Text of Light, Intimate Stranger and Telefunken, Scenocosme's Akousmaflora interactive hanging gardens, 8-bit artist Nullsleep, The Total Unicorn Experience, and Portugal's AV wizard Video Jack. We also have talks by Bruce Sterling, Joe Tankersley of Disney Imagineering, and David Merrill of Sifteo.

Plutopia 2011 is an official evening event during SXSW Interactive, which means that Interactive, Gold, and Platinum badgeholders get in free. Our pals at bOING bOING are media sponsors of the event. Plutopia is a great alternative to the usual "booze and schmooze" conference mixers; this should be a highlight of SXSW Interactive week!

Glenn Beck's syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 05:35 AM PST

Premiere On Call, a division of the Clear Channel subsidiary that distributes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is a service that hires actors to call into radio shows and read a script that purports to be a true story presented by the public. They bind their actors to confidentiality agreements, and disavow any involvement in fraud, saying "Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting--while character and script development, and how the talent's contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations."
The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world's leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of "creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks."

Radio Daze (via Making Light)

(Image: Astroturf, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from purpleslog's photostream)

 


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