Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist

Posted on September 16, 2009 by MikeT

What a great post! In her post Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist, Christina Warren writes about the White House search for a social media archivist, explaining that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978 made the records of the President public and mandated that they by filed with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Now collecting those records has never been easy, but over the years procedures have been worked out.

Now, however, it is a whole new ball game. This administration has begun to make use of online social networking tools. Though their efforts have been a bit clumsy, they have been successful enough to pose new problems.

as White House (and by extension, the Executive Office of the President) communication extends into areas of social media, that presents new challenges in archiving things like blog postings, Twitter messages, YouTube videos and so-on. This content, plus the comments and replies associated with them (think letters to the President) all need to be archived under the PRA.

And so the White House is seeking bids from an outside contractor to do that for them. But what I really liked was the way the post brought the issue back down to our level.

As social media becomes a more integral part of how the government communicates, saving that data and making sure it is accessible and recorded in the proper context for the future becomes more and more important.

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Do you preserve your own lifestreaming data? What about your company? What do you think needs to be done to make archiving social media streams more accessible?

It’s such a good question. I don’t plan on hiring a social media archivist anytime soon, but it does give me pause. I still have boxes of letters from when I was in Morocco and reading them brings back a lot of memories. How will I ever do that with cyber correspondence which, ultimately, is save on servers no even on my control. Hmmm?

What do you think? Respond here or continue the discussion at Christina’s post.

Academic and Free-Speech Groups Join Criticism of Yale U. Press Over Cartoons

Posted on September 16, 2009 by MikeT

Jennifer Howard writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education today,

Criticism continues to rain down on Yale University and Yale University Press for their decision to remove all images of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming scholarly book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen.

Now the National Coalition Against Censorship and a group of academic and free-speech organizations have sent a letter of protest to Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, and the Yale Corporation. “This misguided action established a dangerous precedent that threatens academic and intellectual freedom around the world,” the coalition wrote. It said that the university’s action “compromises the principle and practice of academic freedom, undermines the independence of the press, damages the university’s credibility, and diminishes its reputation for scholarship.”
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via Academic and Free-Speech Groups Join Criticism of Yale U. Press Over Cartoons in Book – Publishing – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Yale had withdrawn the cartoons from the book for fear of offending Muslims and inciting violence.

Posthumous Apology to Gay Code Breaker Who Helped Defeat Nazi Germany

Posted on September 14, 2009 by MikeT

In what so obviously seems like the right thing to do, Great Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology to Alan Turing, a mathematician and computer pioneer whose work as a code breaker helped defeat Nazi Germany. Mr. Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for having a homosexual affair and was forced to choose between prison and chemical castration via injections of female hormones. Two years later, he killed himself by biting into a poisoned apple.

In his statement, Mr. Brown said:

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War II could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ — in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence — and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison — was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

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via Posthumous Apology to Gay Code Breaker Who Helped Defeat Nazi Germany – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com.

Given this kind of thing, how shocking is it that in the US gays are still being discharged from the armed forces if they are gay, including translators of Arabic, Persian and other languages. This in spite of the fact that eight years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we are still hampered in the struggle against terrorism by a lack of qualified translators.

The Need to Make Your Voice Heard is Urgent

Posted on September 12, 2009 by MikeT

This article from the Christian Science Monitor makes very apparent why those who support health care need to get out and make our voices heard. It lays out the activities of President Obama to promote health care reform and of conservative tv personality Glenn Beck to prevent it.

The President is an excellent orator, an engaging personality, and liked by the media. He is a good person to have on your side, there is no doubt about it. But ultimately the White House does not control the media. Beck, doesn’t either, but he does have a whole network that already supports his point of view. Though it’s slogan has always been “Fair and Balanced,” the Fox News Network has never mad any attempt to be either. So they have been quite helpful to an anti-reform cause.

Meanwhile, back in Washington Beck was broadcasting live on the Fox News Channel as part of something he’s dubbed “The 9-12 Project.” The occasion was a “tea party” march and rally organized by “FreedomWorks” to protest the “irresponsible government takeover of our nation’s healthcare, devastating new energy taxes, and trillions of dollars in red ink.”

Some 450 tour buses were expected to bring protesters from around the country. FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon predicted that it would be “the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives that we’ve ever had in the nation’s capital.” Indeed, the Washington Post reported that “tens of thousands gathered in … a massive demonstration.”

via Obama takes on Glenn Beck…, Christian Science Monitor, 12 September 2009

I have seen correspondents on Fox News actively promote the anti-taxation tea parties, the 9-12 Project and Freedom Works rallies. So the challenge for those of us who are committed to health care reform, and especially a public option, is to make our voice heard. How, I’m not so sure. But I can think of a few things. Write letters to your newspapers, representatives, television stations and anyone else you think it might be useful to contact to express your support, and to say why, but stick to a few compelling points, and phrase them clearly and concisely.
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Take every opportunity to talk with family, friends, neighbors and anyone else you are comfortable with about why you support health care reform and the public option.

Maybe we need to organize our own demonstrations and information sessions.

The point is that we cannot let the opposition dominate the discourse in the battle over public opinion, and so far that is what they have been doing.

For talking points on why a public option is a good idea, I suggest the following link to the key points of a December 2008 report Institute for America’s Future and the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Health, Economic & Family Security. Any other suggestions?

Respect that is due the President

Posted on September 11, 2009 by MikeT

It is not a secret that I supported the candidacy of Barack Obama for President, nor that I was overjoyed he won. Overall, I am also happy with his presidency. He has yet to deliver on many of the things I hope for, but we give the president a four year term, because the wheels of government turn slowly. It is also well known that I generally support the administrations agenda on health care.

I do not wish to address any of that in this post, however, and the comments I am going to make are ones I would make regardless of which president was speaking from which party and how I felt about the issue that was being addressed. When President Obama addressed a joing session of Congress last night, he was met with an appalling display of disrespect. The most egregious example of this was the outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (Rep. S. Carolina. But that was only one example. Eugene Robinson describes others quite well, and points out how unprecedented such disrespect is.

Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas waved hand-lettered signs at the president, as if he thought he were attending one of those made-for-television town-hall meetings rather than a solemn gathering of the nation’s highest elected officials.

Throughout the speech, there was grumbling, mugging and eye-rolling on the Republican side that was not only undignified but frankly un-American…

Congress didn’t heckle Lyndon Johnson like that during the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Congress didn’t even show that kind of bitterness and aggression toward George W. Bush, who did lie—specifically, about the intelligence that his administration relied on to justify an unnecessary war that has cost 4,300 American lives and enough money to fund Obama’s health care proposals for a decade.

via Truthdig – Reports – No Way to Treat a President.

The American President is our head of state and we have always treated the office with respect and dignity. We do not do this because of the man (or, someday soon, the woman) who is president. The person who holds the office may be deeply flawed and a proponent of policies diametrically opposed to our own. We may even work hard to block his policies and against his re-election.
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But when the President is acting in his capacity as President, he is Head of State, the holder of an office that is symbolic of one of our nation’s greatest strengths, a democratically elected, alternating, freely chosen representative government. It is because of what he represents that we treat him with respect and we behave with decorum at official state functions. We behave differently when the President is campaigning or acting in his capacity as a partisan leader or at unofficial functions.

Soldiers salute the President. Ambassadors and dignataries stand when he walks in the room. Congress gathers in joint session and greets him with ceremony. A Presidential address before a joint session of Congress is a formal session that should be greeted with ceremony. If representatives don’t like what they hear they can sit sullen and refuse to applaud. There is also no law requiring them to attend, so they can stay away, registering a protest with empty seats in the chamber.

But it is NOT acceptable to disrupt a speech. It is bad manners and not behavior most of us want our children to learn. But more than that, it is un-American. When the President of the United States walks into the room, be he President Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon or any other president past or yet to come, we treat the President with respect!

Index on Censorship: No platform won’t work

Posted on September 9, 2009 by MikeT

These are a few paragraphs from a challenging article by Salil Tripathi in the Index on Censorship. Tripathi believes it is wrong to exclude the right wing, unltra-Nationalist, British National Party from a current affairs program on the BBC. He lays down a difficult challenge, but one I am sympathetic to. I believe that civil rights and those First Ammendment rights are absolute, and that is why I struggle every time there is a call for a boycott of a media outlet or establishment for giving a forum to a person or group for the views they promote. Hate speech that can lead to violence must not be tolerated, and that is hard to define, but the line between the two is not very clear. How do we define it and what is acceptable?

The BBC has said it “may” invite Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), to appear on its flagship current affairs programme, Question Time.

The BNP is a legal political party in Britain. In June, it won nearly 943,000 votes in the European parliamentary elections. Its 6.1 per cent share of the vote cast was nearly three times what the Scottish National Party got, and only two percentage points less than the Green Party’s tally. Imagine the furore if leaders of those two parties were kept out of a talk show because the chattering classes decided that they represent only marginal views.

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But it is ridiculous for anyone to think that you can defeat the BNP by silencing them. A sinister thought, when silenced, only gets wider currency in the subterranean world where everything “establishment” is viewed as a conspiracy. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the mutually contradictory positions within the party’s platform would evaporate under that glare.

via Index on Censorship » Blog Archive » No platform won’t work.

Best in the World? US Health Care

Posted on September 9, 2009 by MikeT

Life Expectancy in the US averages 70 years, 20th in on the list behind Israel, Germany, and Malta, each of which averages 70.4 and 70.5. Japan tops the list with a life expectancy of 74.5 years, followed by Australia France and Sweden.

And yet, our total spending on health care as a percentage of our GDP is 2nd on the list, 15.2%, behind only the Marshall Islands. Japan spends only 8.2% of its GDP. Australia 8.8%, France 11.2%, and 9.2%. It seems that the countries with longer life expectancy achieve it with a much lower percentage of their GDP.
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The World Health Organization rates the US Health care system 32nd in the world based on a complicated set of criteria, seen here.

YouTube – A very short video about the NHS

Posted on September 8, 2009 by MikeT

YouTube – A very short video about the NHS.

70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually

Posted on September 6, 2009 by MikeT

Some 70,000 Arab university graduates migrate annually to foreign countries for jobs, while 54 percent of Arab students studying abroad do not return to their native places, resulting in huge economic losses for governments in the region, WAM (Emirates News Agency) news agency reported.

Arab countries, which make substantial investments for educating and training youths, lose over $1.5 billion due to migration of graduates for overseas jobs, while recipient countries exploit the refined talent without having to spend on education, a study conducted by Department of Population and Migration Policies of the 22-member Arab League said.

via 70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually.

That quite a brain drain. Apparently 70% of the scientist who go abroad to study don’t come back. The rate is 50% among doctors and 23% among engineers.

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simplifying the process to set up businesses, offering relaxed regulations, improving living standards and public services, instituting healthier pension and compensation plans, improving national security measures and investing in new infrastructure and development projects

Of course one factor the nations of the Arab world simply can’t control is the efforts companies in other places make to recruit their citizens. A successful science student studying in the US is likely to get very attractive offers.

Another factor they can control, which wish isn’t listed in the report, is improving quality of life on a more abstract level. Too many of the countries in the Arab world heavily restrict freedom of expression, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, creative expression, who one associates with, the rights of women, etc. Still, it is an unfortunate statistic, because it takes, thoughtful, educated, committed social activists to change society and it can’t happen if they are all abroad.

Prescription for Change

Posted on September 6, 2009 by MikeT

The site Prescription for Change summarizes what is at stake in the health care debate pretty well.

When Congress returns in September to work on health reform, let’s remind them what’s really at stake – your health, your financial peace of mind, and your freedom.

How’s that? Without real health reform, you could lose your health insurance because of a layoff, go bankrupt due to medical bills, or be forced to give up dreams of starting a business or a better education because you have no access to affordable health insurance.

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