The Latest from Boing Boing

Kinect-controlled Disneyland sim lets you hug Mickey
Mini Maker Faire in Brighton, England: Sept 4
School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf
Voice of America operator plans "sunset" for shortwave radio broadcasts
Woman receives angry letter from person she experimented on in 1939
Anime Doctor Who

Kinect-controlled Disneyland sim lets you hug Mickey

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 04:11 AM PDT

Here's a demo of an immersive motion-controlled Disneyland simulator shown at this year's E3: using a Kinect, players can run around Disneyland, ride the rides, and even hug Mickey (which is a total show-stealer).

Star Wars Kinect & Disneyland Adventures - E3 2011 (via Wonderland)

Mini Maker Faire in Brighton, England: Sept 4

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 03:58 AM PDT

Meeware sez, "Makers across the South of England are putting together the UK's first Mini Maker Faire, to be held in Brighton on the 3rd of September at the Dome. The call is now out for more makers to join the event, with demos or workshops. Save the date!"

School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 03:42 AM PDT

Jack Christie, a grade 12 student at Donald A. Wilson Secondary School in Whitby, Ontario, has been indefinitely suspended for posting surreal, crude, humorous videos to YouTube. The videos were shown in his Economics and Politics class, where they were thoroughly enjoyed, but when he posted them to YouTube, the school principal gave him a one-day suspension and ordered him to take the videos off YouTube. He refused, and was given an indefinite suspension. Members of the school's student government, including Gavin Russell, the student government's prime minister, took up a petition for Christie's reinstatement, but were ordered to stop collecting signatures or face punishment.

Christie has made an appropriately funny and profane rebuttal to the student council, which I have embedded above for your viewing pleasure.

When I was 18, I was writing short stories, some of them good, most of them awful, and several of them decidedly offensive. I sent them to magazines, sold a few, and had there been a Web to post them to, I would have done so. I can't imagine what impact a similar ban on publishing my creative work would have had on my future development as a writer.

"They've unfairly judged me and judged my character based on something I made for entertainment," he said on Wednesday. "I have the right to post videos on the Internet on my own time." A spokeswoman for the Durham District School Board refused to discuss the case, citing confidentiality laws, but obliquely explained the school's actions: "If something is considered detrimental to the positive moral tone of the school, it doesn't necessarily have to happen inside the school [for us to get involved]," said Andrea Pidwerbecki.

Student cites freedom of speech after suspension for online videos (Thanks, Jesse!)

Voice of America operator plans "sunset" for shortwave radio broadcasts

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 01:42 AM PDT

The sun is setting on Voice of America's shortwave radio service, heard worldwide in dozens of languages for 70 years. A strategic technology plan prepared by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal agency responsible for Voice of America, Alhurra, Radio Free Asia and other international stations, concludes that it should end many shortwave broadcasts in favor of "more effective" media such as internet radio. "The intrinsic high cost of operating high powered shortwave stations is constantly being weighed against the rapidly diminishing effectiveness of shortwave within a growing number of countries," the report states. "... the cost effectiveness of shortwave transmissions continues to wane and is expected to be circumscribed to a very small number of target countries in the relatively near future." The "sun-setting strategy" proposed will reduce the number of stations owned by the BBG in favor of lease or sharing arrangements with—or outsourcing to—independent broadcasters. A "long-term analysis" of each country and language, and in-house research on shortwave's effectiveness in each, would determine which areas retain service.

The report, released following a Freedom of Information Act request by Government Attic, took six months to surface and it isn't clear to what extent its recommendations have been implemented. In February, however, Voice of America ceased shortwave broadcasts in China.

Its authors anticipate "political pressure" to continue widespread use of shortwave radio broadcasts. The BBG's own 2012 Budget Request (PDF) reported that it "must continue to broadcast via traditional technologies such as shortwave [because] the impact of not investing in infrastructure improvements will be the loss of capability and the loss of audience." It noted Burmese listeners as particularly dependent on shortwave service.

Titled 2010-2012 BBG Technology Strategic Plan, the report claims that BBG-funded broadcasts reach 101.9m people worldwide by radio, 81.5m by television, and 2.4m via internet. Internet broadcasts accounts for 1.4 percent of the unduplicated total audience.

The largest internet audiences are in Iraq, China and India, with large percentages of the population listening online in Oman, Kosovo and Morocco. The report notes that Voice of America's audience in Iran was about half that of the BBC World Service during recent electoral unrest there. A brief overview of anti-censorship software the BBG supports, such as Freegate and Tor, was also offered.

Much of report, however, is dedicated to describing the upgrades and management shake-ups required to address problems within the BBG's apparently shambolic I.T. department, whose failures are covered in detail and illustrated with photographs.

Throughout, the complexities of maintaining and staffing a worldwide, multilanguage broadcast media network weigh heavily on the report's author. But criticisms often fall upon particularly egregious lapses such as servers hidden under nests of network cabling, major software choices determined by the "dogmatic beliefs" of influential staffers, and redundant systems standing idle.

"The most serious situation presents itself at the heart of the BBG IT network," the report states. "Currently, the network is dependent on a single enterprise-class Cisco core router whose failure would severely cripple the entire agency for an extended period of time."

Adds the author: "Many other such situations exist ... such as servers equipped with dual power supplies but with both power cords plugged into the same electrical circuit."

While the engineering section is said to be well-functioning, disaster recovery plans rely on "the presence of key individuals." The department lacks "baseline operational discipline" and labors under "several historical and personality-related 'accommodations' designed to isolate certain individuals and maintain legacy reporting relationships."

Even the email system is outmoded, according to the report, which recommends platform consolidation, virtualization, systems colocation, cloud computing to cut the number of physical servers in use, "clear standards and expectations for interpersonal behavior," and adoption of MPEG-4 for broadcast and archive use, as part of a two-year plan to fix the problems while trimming costs.

The report was released after a FOIA request from Government Attic, which posted it in full at its archives early Monday morning. One paragraph of the report, concerning disaster recovery, was redacted.

Woman receives angry letter from person she experimented on in 1939

Posted: 05 Jun 2011 05:12 PM PDT

An item from Greg Ross's amazing Futility Closet blog

In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor began an experiment with local orphans, warning them that they were showing signs of stuttering and lecturing them whenever they repeated a word. The children became acutely self-conscious, and many began to stutter, fulfilling the theory that "the affliction is caused by the diagnosis."
Sixty years later, when Tudor was 84, she received a letter from one of the orphans. It was addressed to "Mary Tudor Jacobs The Monster."
"You destroyed my life," it ran. "I could have been a scientist, archaeologist or even president. Instead I became a pitiful stutterer. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell off, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoid people to this day."
"I didn't like what I was doing to those children," Tudor told the San Jose Mercury News in 2001. "It was a hard, terrible thing. Today, I probably would have challenged it. Back then you did what you were told. It was an assignment. And I did it."

The Monster Study