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Does Porn Rule or Ruin?

In the August 1, 2005 issue of Newsweek, the rise of Porn Podcasting is investigated:

Aug. 1 issue – Podcasting, that baby medium, is suddenly home to a lot of adult content. Introduced to a mainstream audience just last month, the technology — radiolike programming for your iPod — that was once the chaste province of “Geek News Central” and “Knitcast” is now reddening faces that sport those trademark white earbuds. “No matter what the technology is,” says Andrew Leyden, founder of podcastdirectory.com, “sex finds a way to get involved.”

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eBooks Smash Paper

One of the harbingers of how fruitful the continued marriage of technology and research can better serve the future is found in the status of the New York Public Library’s position on electronically borrowing books. One can head off to the NYPL eBooks online library and actually check out books by downloading them to your home computer.

These downloaded books are “time bombed” to expire at the end of three weeks so instead of taking the book back to the library you just let the book expire on your hard drive. There are certainly sticky copyright issues that must continue to be dealt with in the internet “borrow but don’t return” lending scheme for libraries; but for those who understand eBooks are good for authors and publishers and libraries the concern over digital rights borrowing can be resolved in the greater favor of the consumer.

Publishers will rent individual licenses for their books that will expire the same way a parking space expires after you purchase its limited use for a quarter. eBooks, for libraries everywhere, means they can finally sustain a relationship with their patrons beyond the walls of their libraries.

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Native American Gangs

In the February 1, 2005 edition of Law Enforcement Technology, writer Liz Martinez investigates Gangs in Indian Country and offers the following insight:

Native Americans have some of the highest poverty and addiction rates in the United States and a rapidly increasing population, along with some of the highest rates of infant mortality and lowest educational levels. Because the reservations are in remote areas, the opportunities for jobs and industry are virtually non-existent.

Coupled with the fact that many young people have lost touch with or never known their native languages, customs or religious traditions and are exposed to the relentless commercialism of mainstream America–yet are without the wherewithal to achieve most of the commercial ideals–and the white-hot anger erupting among American Indian youth and manifesting itself in an explosion of gang involvement should surprise no one.

Gangs create bonds of belonging for those who feel outcast, lost and disconnected.
Helping to find ways to retie the disconnected to the positive moral core of society must become a paramount human mission reaching from suburban corral to urban core to rustic reservation.

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A Curious Return to the Lancasterian Monitorial System

With the rise of exclusive online teaching via WebCT and Blackboard where teacher and student are never in the same room together, we are in a rebirth of a strange form of the 1805 Lancasterian Monitorial System in 2005 and beyond where thousands of students will sit and stare at a flickering image of an instructor standing before them.

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