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April 29, 2007
Harper's Ferry Arsenal Blues
Last weekend we took a daytrip to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, perhaps most famous for John Brown's raid prior to the US Civil War. It was also home to one of the first two arsenals in the US, where the government would manufacture its weapons. That, plus its prime location at the place where Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia meet, made it a significant prize during the Civil War. It changed hands between north and south many times, and at one point it was torched by retreating Union forces, to prevent its resources from falling into the hands of the Confederates.
In this video, a volunteer from a local historical society in period costume talks about the arsenal ruins. -andy
Tags: arsenal | Civil War | Harper's Ferry | History | war | West Virginia
Posted by acarvin at 10:45 AM
April 27, 2007
The Not-So-Fine Line Between Creative Writing and Disorderly Conduct
I've been counting the days since the Virginia Tech shootings to see how long it would take for a school to overreact to a student doing something that disturbed them. For example, following the Columbine shooting, scores of students around the country were suspended from school because they posted goth-themed content on personal websites, and worried that somehow goth culture would influence them to kill, kill, kill. Some of these students managed to get the last laugh, either through lawsuits or court injunctions.
So now I read on CNN that a straight-A student named Allen Lee is facing two counts of disorderly conduct - for a creative writing assignment. His teacher told the class to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing," according to a copy of the assignment. So Lee decided to push the envelope, writing the following:
"Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s...t...a...b...puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.
Tasteless? Sure. Inappropriate for a high school classroom? Likely. But school officials were so freaked out that this honor student might suddenly go postal on them that they decided to call the police. He was arrested and now faces up to 30 days in jail for what he wrote.
"In creative writing, you're told to exaggerate," Lee later said. "It was supposed to be just junk. ... There definitely is violent content, but they're taking it out of context and making it something it isn't."
I can understand if the school got nervous about what he wrote and called him in for counseling, or at minimum, a friendly chat with him and his parents, particularly if the school had ever had concerns about his mental stability. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think back to the kinds of stuff I wrote in high school and I wonder if in today's climate I would have gotten suspended or arrested. For example, in one creative writing class I recall writing about cannibalism (two buddies crashing their plane on a deserted island, going nuts and hunting each other down for a nice dinner) and suicide bombers (a poem from the perspective of a terrorist's final thoughts as he counts down to the moment of detonation). I also remember doing a full chapter of a story that could only be described as a mediocre first-person ripoff of Platoon - soldiers swearing, murdering civilians, taking drugs and everything in between. Come to think of it, everything I can remember writing for that class involved violence. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - I was reading a lot of Stephen King at the time, did papers on him, and even corresponded with him once.
How did my teacher react? I generally got A's on my assignments, plus a brief introduction from her on Ludwig Wittengstein, nightmares and the creative consciousness. I loved creative writing in that class because it gave me a chance to write about stuff I would never do or would never believe myself, but could explore from the perspective of very flawed characters, even when written in the first person. My teacher was also smart enough to get us to talk about why we wrote and why, so we could explore the root causes of inspiration.
I loved that class because I felt safe that I could literally write whatever I wanted. I felt secure that the teacher and my classmates knew the difference between me and my characters. I'm so glad I'm not in school now; the chilling effect is palpable. -andy
Tags: Allen Lee | characters | CNN | creative writing | Ludwig Wittgenstein | overreacting | school | stories | violence | Virginia Tech shooting
Posted by acarvin at 8:22 PM
April 26, 2007
Captain America Assaults Woman With Burrito
What is it with my home town?
Raymond Adamcik, a doctor from Indialantic, Florida, where I grew up, got arrested this week. He and his buddies were at a local bar, all dressed up as Captain America as part of some superhero-themed pub crawl. He allegedly groped a woman, wielding a burrito he pulled from his pants, then got into a scuffle with the woman's significant other. The police arrived, and they made all the Captain Americas go outside for a line-up so the woman could identify the not-so-super superhero.
"There were a lot of people in costumes," said Jill Frederiksen, Melbourne Police spokeswoman. "They had to ask all dressed as Captain America to step outside, so she could identify him."
This photo was taken by the security camera at the police station. Say it ain't so, captain! -andy
Tags: burritos | Captain America | crime | doctors | Florida | Indialantic | Melbourne
Posted by acarvin at 9:56 AM
April 25, 2007
Horsing Around at the Village ATM
Here's something you don't see every day: a horse hanging out in an ATM vestibule. Apparently, a German man went out on his horse for a few drinks and was too blotto to make it home, so he decided to crash at the local bank. And since the bank didn't have a hitching post outside, he brought the horse inside with him. Everything was fine until a customer came by sometime after 4am and interrupted the sleepover.
Local police released this photo from the bank's security camera. Neither the man nor his horse are facing charges, though the guy may have to pay for cleaning up the deposit the horse reportedly left at the bank. -andy
Tags: banks | Germans | horses
Posted by acarvin at 5:06 PM
April 24, 2007
How Can Public Broadcasting Make a Real Difference in Election 2008?
Today is the second day of the NPR annual membership meeting, and yesterday afternoon I got to facilitate a group discussion on how public broadcasting should use social media tools to engage the public during the 2008 election cycle. Following the meeting I wrote up some notes while riding on the train home, in order to prep for a summary presentation to the whole group this morning. I wanted to share these notes, which I've cleaned up to make them more readable, to help catalyze a broader conversation on the subject.
First of all, it's not a matter of talking about using social media just to improve our election coverage. Yes, we need to improve our technological capacities to create and share high-quality content about the election - no doubt about it. But we need to take it a step further. Several steps further.
It's about using our capacities as broadcasters, journalists and community conveners to facilitate a more participatory democracy. Creating an enabling environment for civil, civic discourse - achieving consensus whenever possible, but remaining respectful of each other's beliefs and values when we can't. Providing tools where we can work in conjunction with the public to help everyone make their vote - and our journalistic coverage - as informed as possible. Curating knowledge and data about issues and candidates so the public can hold candidates accountable before and after the election.
No matter what we do, we need to remember the election is about all of us, so all of us should have an opportunity to participate in public debate. An informed citizenry isn't achieved through lecturing to them, or only giving them a choice of partisan talking heads as the sole perspectives on a given issue. It's achieved by creating an ongoing, thoughtful conversation not beholden to soundbytes. To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the public knows more about what's at stake than any single institution within public broadcasting ever could, and we need their help to make this conversation happen.
We must not neglect undeserved audiences - on the contrary, we should embrace them, providing platforms for participation, including activities on air, online, and on location. The voices in public radio and within the Web 2.0 world need to reflect the diversity of constituents who will be pulling the lever in November 2008. Whether it's young people or the elderly, chronic nonvoters, people of color, people with disabilities, people with limited Internet access or tech skills, etc, we must strive to give all stakeholders a stronger voice - one that political candidates recognize, respect and take seriously. Our work is to serve the public interest through public media - and what can serve the public interest more than strengthening our democracy by creating new, sustainable opportunities for all people to have their say?
We should strive towards common branding of all public broadcasting election activities. Common branding will allow us to connect the dots, from a rural station organizing an on-air debate for county commissioner candidates, to countrywide social media projects coordinated at the national level.
We need to recognize the challenge of encouraging local innovation while embracing national coordination, and strive to reconcile this paradox. It's a matter of fact that local initiatives will often utilize different social media tools. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to dictate to everyone that they need to use Gather.com, they need to use Public Interactive, they need to use some tool created by NPR, etc. Multiple tools will probably be used no matter what, so we must promote open standards for aggregating content - consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc - to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level. Simultaneously, we should explore open, distributed tools for social networking, such as Explode and Elgg, as a way of creating a more seamless, transparent social media experience. For example, if New Hampshire Public Radio organizes an e-debate, residents in Spokane or Sarasota shouldn't have to jump through hoops if they want to participate. IF NPR hosts an online discussion, ideally that discussion could be reflected on station websites, allowing the public multiple points of entry. Again, dictating a single platform for all activities is probably impossible, but promoting open standards and principles of implementation to give the public better online right-of-way will make things a lot more productive.
What are some examples of some projects that could take place during the election cycle? Here are some I've been batting around.
This I Demand. Create a social networking tool that allows the public to speak truth to power and spell out why they're going to vote, and what they expect of their elected officials. A place where people can share and discuss what they demand of their policymakers. I believe this idea came up in February while eating Indian food with Dave Winer and others from Harvard's Berkman Center, but I could be wrong. If someone remembers where I first started talking about this and with whom, please let me know. :-)
A national video clearinghouse of candidate statements. Inspired by Dan Gillmor's work in California during the last election cycle, the idea would be to create a framework in which members of the public would capture candidates' statements on video every time they appear publicly. The goal isn't to capture macaca-like moments, but to get everything the candidates say on the record. Participants would then volunteer to transcribe and tag content based on the policy issues discussed, creating a distributed video database of candidates' positions. And for those who are elected, the archive could be used to gauge whether they've kept to their positions or not.
Community mediamaker partnerships. Every public tv and radio station in the country should invite local bloggers, podcasters and vloggers over for beer and pizza. Seriously. There are countless members of the public creating smart, insightful content about the election, both locally and nationally, and we could work with them so their voices are heard beyond the blogosphere, while new voices are also injected into the conversation.
Town hall meetings with local ethnic press. Not all of this can occur online or on air. What can we do on location? Events like town hall meetings are useful, but we need to reach out to new audiences. And that often means going directly to them rather than waiting for them to come to us. For example, many communities have a strong ethnic press, either offline or online. What partnership opportunities exist between them and public broadcasting? What other community-based orgs would be well suited for working with us and creating local dialogue that's meaningful and productive?
More mobcasting! I've been arguing for two years now we need better open source tools that make it possible for people without Internet access to listen to and create podcasts simply by using a telephone. There are commercial tools and open source systems like Asterix that can do this, but should make it easier for any station to do. The election provides us with an excellent opportunity to make this happen.
Things we need to coordinate local and national social media projects:
An election 2.0 toolkit - evolving collection of best practices and tools to help stations unfamiliar with Web 2.0 to experiment at the local level. This might also include recommended approaches for creating social media projects, common editorial principles and copyright principles for user content (Creative Commons, etc), how to involve users in moderation/curation, etc. The toolkit would exist and develop online but be portable so any station could have it in hand when they need it. It would emphasize turnkey tools with low barriers to entry, including open source tools.
An election 2.0 clearinghouse and knowledge sharing network. We need a way to keep track of who's doing what in public broadcasting related to the election. We need better tools that would track projects, tools, who's partnering with whom, discussions for coordinating activities, etc. It would serves as an enabler of initiatives, partnerships, help us avoid reinventing the wheel. We'll also have to figure out how content gets shared as well, local-2-national, national-2-local and local-2-local. That's a probably a dissertation in its own right, let alone a humble paragraph in a blog entry.
A public broadcasting election 2.0 strike force. The truth of the matter is that there isn't enough time to form a committee and create a white paper on what we might want to do, then report back in six months. Or even three months. With each week that passes, we fall further behind. And we can't think of this as a one-off taskforce that comes up with a plan, then walks away while expecting someone else to implement it. We need an Election 2.0 SWAT team, a strike force that can literally pull together the vision in a matter of weeks, not months, then evolve into the team that pulls it off over the next 18 months. A small group of people from across the system tasked to lay out the details, building upon the ideas many of us have been working on, in conjunction with new ideas from the system and the public. This team needs to be able to dedicate their time fully to this cause, while having the standing within the system to achieve a critical mass of consensus - then implement it, asap.
Again, time is running out, and the stakes are high. This is an opportunity to public broadcasting to shine. We can't do it on our own, and we can't do it without public involvement. It's their civic duty, but it's ours as well. It's about all of us. Public broadcasters, community partners and the public working together. Our voice, our vote. -andy
Tags: citizenship | civic engagement | consensus | debate | election 2008 | participatory democracy | politics | public broadcasting | voting
Posted by acarvin at 12:33 PM
April 23, 2007
Sitting for my Second Musical Portrait with Pete Townshend's Computer
While Susanne was putting Kayleigh to sleep tonight I decide to sit for another music portrait with Pete Townshend's online music generator, The Lifehouse Method. You may recall I sat for my first portrait last year after being invited to beta-test the tool. The system, created by Townshend electronic composer Lawrence Ball, asks you to input several unique pieces of content, which it uses to interpret your musical portrait. It asks for a sample of your voice, which you can record with the website's flash recorder. I recorded a short message in a soothing voice, saying "Isn't my voice oh so soothing?" Then, it asked for a photo, so I supplied it with this photo of me taking a picture of the coliseum of El Jem in Tunisia. When asked for an audio clip, I gave it the opening bars to the Dresden Dolls song, "Coin Operated Boy," which we use in the opening credits of our Dirty Diaper Diaries videos. Finally, I needed to give it a rhythm. So I tapped out the opening bars to the Rush song "YYZ," which spell out the letters YYZ in morse code, in a 10/8 time signature.
The result? Have a listen.
For one thing, you can't dance to it. In some ways, it's reminiscent of some of the more dissonant musical studies my late father-in-law David Cornwall used to compose. It's rather slow, with strings and keyboards plodding along at a modest tempo, while a bass and piano interject themselves at inopportune moments. There are very few chords - mostly individual notes from each instrument overlaid with each other. I can't decide if it sounds like Morton Feldman revved up or Conlon Nancarrow slowed down. The first minute or so doesn't do much for me, but then it gets a bit more coherent, as several instruments fade away and elements of bassoon and marimba pop up, but in a very minimalist way. There's also a haunting, high-pitched whistle that weaves through the piece, not unlike a theremin. Fascinating stuff, but probably not for everyone.
Thanks again to Pete and his colleagues for letting me experiment with it. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:54 PM
Yet Another Case of Breaking News I Learned Via Twitter
So Boris Yeltsin died today. I learned about it via Twitter text messages from NPR chairman Tim Eby and a few other people over the last hour or so. Tim just mentioned Yeltsin's death in the meeting. He asked how many people heard about this morning's breaking news. A few people raised their hands. He then asked how many learned about it by listening to a radio. No takers.
Proshai, Boris Nikolayevich. Mir spokoysviye. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:12 AM
Are We Doing The Denial Twist?
Someone in the audience suggested to Alan Deutschman that maybe public radio is doing just fine, and that change could actually be a bad thing. Alan replied by asking a question and telling another story.
First, the question: if you could take a pill that would solve all of public radio's problems, would you take it? Even if it had zero side effects? Alan said you probably wouldn't, and he explained this by talking about statin drugs, which are taken by millions of people to prevent heart attacks. Statins have kept Alan's dad alive by reducing his cholesterol dramatically. If there's any drug that represents the promise of pharmaceuticals, it's statins, he said. Yet according to a massive study of patients with cholesterol problems, people don't stick with taking the pills that can save their lives. They may start by taking them, but as the months pass by, as many as three-quarters of them quit. Why? Because the act of taking the pill every day puts them in the mindset that they have a problem - a chronic illness that they have to deal with. And no one likes to admit when they're sick.
So now you're mad, denying the truth
And it's getting in the wisdom in the back of your tooth
Ya need ta spit it out, in a telephone booth
While ya call everyone that you know, and ask 'em
Where do you think she goes?
Where d'ya suppose she goesThe truth, well, you know there's no stoppin' it.
And the boat, well, ya know she's still rockin' it.
-andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:04 AM
How the Cookie Guy and the Chicken Guy Saved IBM
Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs and Change or Die, is giving a pep talk to NPR executives and station managers at the NPR annual membership meeting in DC right now. He just finished telling a brief story about how IBM managed to save itself from oblivion.
How did IBM reinvent itself? The basic problem in the early 90s: it had been enormously successful but then nearly collapsed. They had the greatest talent, amazing research labs. Yet they almost became toast, losing billions of dollars, laying off 140,000 people. They realized they had great ideas but they weren't putting them to practice. New CEO Lou Gerstner noticed they were investing in ideas, but then would cut the budget just to save money that quarter. He went apoplectic, saying you can't cut investment in new business and innovation.
Lou came in from Nabisco, derided by career IBM folks as The Cookie Guy. Lots of resentment. He brings in Bruce Harreld, the co-founder of Boston Chicken - the Chicken Guy. Somehow they were going to run a high-tech company. Lou asks him, how often do we kill stuff because we're too busy defending old businesses. He found 22 new projects that got killed not because of merits but because the company was too set in its ways.
He started thinking about how children learn. First they learn from parents, then from people they respect and like. So who's respected in the company? One guy was named Rod Adkins - a career IBM guy that ran a successful unit. What motivated talented execs was revenue size and unit size. It's a status symbol, a form of recognition among peers. They used Rod as a guinea pig, asking him to start a new billion-dollar business from scratch, starting with basically no employees. Adkins new what had happened - he'd just been fired. He'd done everything right and new how to succeed. And out of the blue, blammo. He thought it was just a cover story to being fired. "What am I going to tell my mother?" he said. But Gerstner said, no, you're our only hope. We're serious about this, and the Chicken Guy can be your mentor to get started.
Adkins thought it was ridiculous, but they would get together every week for a few hours. Chicken Guy would ask him what problems he had. Adkins said I don't have any problems. His whole conceptual framework was how to look at the IBM bureaucracy. The Chicken Guy says no, all you have is problems when you start a new business. This went on for weeks, months, staring at each other. Finally they got to know each other, like each other. Adkins was able to spend the next three years forming a new business that generated more than two billion dollars in revenue. His success was used to motivate others within IBM to do the same thing. Other senior members started to go to the IBM leadership and said they wanted their own internal startup. They launched 25 new lines of business. A few failed completely, but others were successful, creating $15 billion in new revenue. So now, the prestigious thing at IBM isn't to run an established unit; it's to start a new unit from scratch and make it rock. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:32 AM
Time-Warner to Allow Fon Wifi Hotspots
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Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon |
While Fon has been successful partnering with ISPs in Europe, they hadn't had any success penetrating the US market. (This didn't stop tens of thousands of Fon enthusiasts, or foneros, setting up their own Fon hotspots on the Q-T, though.) Now, Time-Warner cable customers will be allowed to use the technology and become purveyors of community wifi without having to violate their terms of service. The question still remains whether other ISPs will follow suit. Starbucks and T-Mobile, for example, have been somewhat dismissive of Fon, which caused the Spanish company to respond by giving away nearly 7,000 free Fon routers to people who live adjacent to Starbucks, allowing them to provide a competing service.
Last year I got a chance to meet Martin during a presentation he gave at Harvard. Here's a video of him discussing the idea behind Fon. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:56 AM
April 20, 2007
So Much for Common Sense
 |
God bless the Internet Archive. This is a video called Common Sense. Dating from 1982 and starring Michael Conrad of Hill Street Blues, this film is a piece of propoganda funded by the tobacco industry to argue against the notion that second-hand smoke is dangerous, and that banning smoking from public spaces interferes is unnecessary governmental heavy-handedness. The film features several hilarious skits in which smokers' rights are violated and nonsmokers act as all-around nudniks. As for Michael Conrad, he died of cancer about a year after he made this film. So much for common sense. -andy |
Posted by acarvin at 11:00 PM
Virginia Tech Video Tributes as Mashups
This moving video of the candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech was posted on Planet Blacksburg by Tim Leaton. Along with being a moving tribute to the lives lost this week, it's also a demonstration of the power of online video editing tools. The video was edited using Jumpcut, a website that works like video editing software. You can upload your own clips or find other clips on the Internet, and use their tool to edit it together, and invite other people to edit it as well. For example, this particular video is open to editing, so anyone could use the footage to craft their own tribute. It will be interesting to see if more people use tools like Jumpcut to collect and edit their own memorial mashups based on other people's footage. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:49 PM
April 18, 2007
A Brief History of Blogging
Speaking of cartoons, I just saw this one on Hugh Macleod's blog. As always, Hugh nails it.
Posted by acarvin at 10:51 AM
My Life in Caricature
Comic blogger/cartoonist Derik Badman sketched this pic of me while I was giving the keynote at the Computers in Libraries conference yesterday. The first bubble is pretty straightforward - I was talking about the role of SMS text messages in emergency response situations on school campuses. The second bubble needs some explaination. I was talking about when I first came to NPR and some of my online buddies emailed me and said, "Oh no! You've gone Old Media on us!" I said it didn't seem to matter if I still used new media up the ying-yang - I was now Old Media and had to learn to live with it. Not sure why I had such a grim expression on my face, though. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:49 AM
April 17, 2007
Keynote Surprise
So I was at the office yesterday morning when the phone rang and someone asked me if I felt like doing a keynote today.
Happens all the time.
Basically, the folks at the Computers in Libraries conference had a last-minute cancellation of their keynote, so Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Project was nice enough to suggest me as a last minute replacement. (That, or he was just messing with me.) Anyway, I figured it was a slow news day, so I'd have plenty of time to prepare something.
Then, the news about Virginia Tech broke, and I found myself running up and down the NPR stair well trying to help coordinate the day's breaking news blogging activities. Eventually, I was able to cobble together a powerpoint presentation mashed up from some previous speeches, just in time to show up this morning to find a group of 2,000 somewhat bewildered librarians wondering why the hell I was there in the first place. Fortunately, everything seemed to go well - lots of nodding heads and laughters at the right moments. A few folks even liveblogged it, including David Lee King, Pegasus Librarian, Travelin' Librarian and Information Wants to be Free.
Anyway, it was a nice distraction from the week's terrible news, and it was great being able to sneak away and talk library tech with some really cool people. -andy
Tags: computers in libraries | conferences | keynotes | libraries | SIL 2007 | social media | surprises | Web 2.0
Posted by acarvin at 9:14 PM
Wrong Place at the Wrong Time?
I was reading some of the public comments on the Talk of the Nation blog regarding yesterday's shooting at Virginia Tech, and saw a quote from someone responding to President Bush's remarks on campus today. First, here's what Bush said:
It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they're gone -- and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.
The full text is on the White House website. When I heard the comment, I didn't give it a second thought. But someone named Danny replied on the blog this way:
I was disturbed by the President's comment today that the victims were "in the wrong place at the wrong time." Aside from the fact that his tone trivializes the horrible deaths with a cliche, and lays a level of blame on the victims, his glib comment is fundamentally wrong. These students and faculty were not in the wrong place. They were in their university, in their classrooms, exactly where they were suppposed to be. Nor were they there, on a Monday morning in April, at the wrong time. There is only one, horrible wrong here and it is the action of Cho Seung-Hui.
Tags: George W. Bush | NPR | quotes | Talk of the Nation | Virginia Tech massacre | VTshooting
Posted by acarvin at 5:08 PM
April 16, 2007
We Need Emergency SMS Broadcasting Tools NOW!
It's been a dizzying day taking in the horrible news from Virginia Tech, just a few hours west of DC, with at least 30 people on campus killed by a lone gunman. I spent a good part of the morning running back and forth between NPR's digital media department, the offices of Talk of the Nation, and the central hub space shared by NPR's news team during emergencies.
Now that I've had a chance to sit on the train, head back home from work, and think about what happened today, I'm already angered by one bit of news I hadn't considered earlier in the day: that approximately two hours passed between the first shooting incident and the later massacre in the classrooms. During that time, it appears that almost no communications went out, apart from several mass email informing students of a shooting incident earlier in the day. The first email went out just before 9:30am, just after the final shootings began in the classrooms:
Subject: Shooting on campus."A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.
"The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case. Contact Virginia Tech Police at 231-6411
"Stay attuned to the http://www.vt.edu. We will post as soon as we have more information."
This was followed by several other emails:
Second email sent at 9:50 a.m.:Subject: PLease stay put
"A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows"
Third email sent at 10:17 a.m.:
Subject: All Classes Canceled; Stay where you are
"Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where there are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus."
Fourth email sent at 10:53 a.m.:
Subject: Second Shooting Reported; Police have one gunman in custody
"In addition to an earlier shooting today in West Ambler Johnston, there has been a multiple shooting with multiple victims in Norris Hall.
"Police and EMS are on the scene.
"Police have one shooter in custody and as part of routine police procedure, they continue to search for a second shooter.
"All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice.
"All entrances to campus are closed."
If the gunman was at large, why on earth wasn't the campus in lock-down mode sooner? Why didn't they have any other form of mass broadcast, apart from the campus-wide email?
At minimum, the campus should have had an emergency PA system. I don't care if you want to use shootings or tornados or any other excuse for making the investment, but every campus in America should have a basic PA system for any potential civic emergency.
And I know I've said this each time a disaster has happened over the last couple of years, but why the hell don't we have an emergency SMS broadcasting tool that can be used to send warnings to every cell phone in a given area or to a given group? Please don't take this as yet another pitch for people to use Twitter or Jaiku or Mozes, because frankly I don't care what tool people use, as long as it's reliable, easy to manage and secure - and Twitter doesn't exactly meet those needs yet. It's a start, but there's a long way to go.
Back during the Boxing Day Tsunami, the Swedish government was able to get the local phone companies to send an SMS broadcast to every one of their subscribers whose phones had recently sent out a signal emanating from Southeast Asia. While they weren't able to do it in time to save lives, it made a major difference in tracking down who survived and who didn't. If they're able to figure out a way to do that, why can't we figure out a way to allow schools and municipalities here in the US to send out emergency SMS broadcasts? There's no way I can know for sure, of course, but I would surmise that almost every student and faculty member injured or killed today had a cell phone on them when they were attacked. Imagine the difference a single text message could have made.
We can wait and see if some dot-com company can come up with a tool that could be jury-rigged for such purposes. Or we could get off our asses and make the necessary investments to develop an serious SMS broadcasting tool specifically designed for emergencies, both for warning the public and coordinating first responders. How many more disasters will it take before we do take the necessary action? -andy
Tags: cell phones | emergency management | first responders | Jaiku | Mozes | NPTech | school shootings | SMS | text messaging | Twitter | Virginia Tech massacre
Posted by acarvin at 6:33 PM
Eerie Video of Virginia Tech Recorded 12 Days Before Shooting
The video, which was posted less than two weeks ago on April 4, is literally a rambling experience across campus, featuring the songs "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and "Remind Me" by Royksopp. The video opens with a cut-off sentence; the first words you can make out are "(mumbled) kill Mr. Jones/yes/can you stop stretching and answer my question/the violinist." Several characters, if you can call them that, are featured, including a woman talking on her cell phone about someone's wedding plans, and a narrator spouting philosophy, such as this:
If determinism is true, and there is no free will, that means there can be no moral judgment or ethics. So no one can be held responsible for their moral dilemmas or behavior... This has flaws... because everyone has to be held accountable for the actions they take.
Given everything that's happened today, it's eerie, to say the least. It appears to have been posted by a VT student named David Covucci, who's also a writer for the campus newspaper. I hope he and the others involved in the video are okay. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
Posted by acarvin at 5:19 PM
April 13, 2007
Grandma's Stories: The Dairy Farm on Auburn Street
Tags: Chelsea | farming | grandma | history | Massachusetts
Posted by acarvin at 10:55 PM
April 12, 2007
Lost in Cyberspace?
"I've got a teenage kid in my neighborhood that can go get 'em for them."
- Sen. Patrick Leahy, in response to White House claims that emails related to the firing of those federal prosecutors have been lost and cannot be retrieved for congressional review.
Tags: Alberto Gonzales | email | Patrick Leahy
Posted by acarvin at 2:10 PM
April 11, 2007
Snapshot: Dizzy in Flight
Tags: cats | Dizzy | tuxedo cats
Posted by acarvin at 7:25 PM
April 7, 2007
Project Hope International
Tags: 07ntc | Cambodia | human trafficking | Project Hope International | prostitution | Thailand | videobloggingweek2007
Posted by acarvin at 10:25 AM
April 6, 2007
Jonny's Busted Laptop
Tags: 07ntc | videobloggingweek2007
Posted by acarvin at 8:10 PM
April 5, 2007
The Four Questions (of Video Blogging Week)
Tags: Passover | Seder | videobloggingweek2007
Posted by acarvin at 4:40 PM
April 4, 2007
Grandma's Stories: How I Met Your Grandfather
Tags: grandma | grandparents | stories | videobloggingweek2007
Posted by acarvin at 10:40 AM
April 3, 2007
Swing Set
Tags: Kayleigh Carvin | videobloggingweek2007
Posted by acarvin at 1:10 AM
April 2, 2007
Cherry Blossoms in Washington
Tags: cherry blossoms | flowers | National Cherry Blossom Festival | Trees | videobloggingweek2007 | Washington DC
Posted by acarvin at 9:11 AM
April 1, 2007
Let's Go Fly a Kite
Tags: kites | National Mall | Smithsonian Kite Festival | videobloggingweek2007 | Washington DC
Posted by acarvin at 6:35 AM
