We are the World I and II

This is the video for the 25th anniversary version of “We Are the World”, made for the benefit of earthquake victims in Haiti.

This is a noble project.  The disaster in Haiti is certainly one of the worst in recent memory.  As of February 10 the reported number of deaths was 230,000.  Stalin once said “”A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” and I confess that 230,000 is a difficult number for me to wrap my head around, so I went looking for points of reference.  Comparisons are hard to find.
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Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Media Review

I am late with this this week, due to a number of commitments Friday, over the weekend and Monday. Please accept my apologies.
February 26 – March 5, 2010
Compiled by Scholars at Risk
Book of the week: No University Is an Island
The Times Higher Education, 3/4
Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets
Leslie Kaufman, The New York Times, 3/3
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Look what I found! An article in Al-Shuruq, November 2003

Al-Shuruq November 2003


I happened to find this on my hard drive the other day. It is an article in Arabic, that was written about NITLE’s Al-Musharaka Initiative and published in the news magazine Al-Shuruq. I was interviewed for this when we my colleague Doug Davis and I were in Paris for a mini-conference we did with the American University of Paris and the Institut du Monde Arabe. There are no data regarding its usage online cialis sale in pharmaceuticals. This sexual disorder not only affects one’s sexual cheap viagra tablet health: Aldactone Dibenzyline Esidrix Hydro – Diuril Inderal Normodyne Oretic etc. We may even able to avert the consequences of viagra sildenafil 100mg poor decision making on a global scale. Speaking of wildlife and indulging, South Beach comes alive each night after the sun goes down. purchase cheap viagra It was a pleasure to work with both organizations, but I am especially grateful to Celeste Schenck, now President at AUP, whose brainchild the event was, and Susan MacKay, her assistant, who took care of the logistics.
Articles like this made me very proud because the showed how important the work we were doing was seen by people in the region. So here it is.

"The '59 Sound" and Those Guys from Jersey

Just two comments on this video.
1) I was there!
2) It was awesome!
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"American VI: Ain't No Grave" Wow!

Johnny Cash!  The Man in Black!  He’s had an amazing career.  One of his biggest hits was “I Walk the Line,” but for the most part Cash drew the line he walked.  It didn’t always go forward, either.  At points in his life Cash struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism.  He landed in jail more than once, and his first marriage ended because of infidelity.  But Cash ultimately kicked these habits and settled down with his second wife, June, who he lived with until she died in 2003. (bio)
He died 5 months later, but some of his most interesting albums came out toward the end of his life.  In the 90s Cash had lost his recording contract, but he made yet another comeback.  began working with producer Rick Rubin on American Recordings, a stark series of albums that showcase the ability of this great artist to write and interpret songs, making them his own.  But while Johnny has settled down in his life, he never stopped being something of a musical Rebel.  You’ll find Johnny Cash in the Country section of your record store, but you’ll find albums the really defy genres by a man who influenced fell musicians from the world of country, rock, new wave, punk, rhythm and blues and gospel, including Merle HaggardBruce SpringsteenBob Dylan, Ray Charles, U2, Oscar the GrouchSheryl Crown, Gaslight Anthem, Elvis Costello and Norah Jones
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"Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable," but Will We Do it Well

“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.
In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”
via “Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The quotation above is from a short version of a longer article the was published in the February 26 print edition of the Chronicle.  A recurring point of tension at that meeting, and one that is also clear from the comments on the report linked above, is that there is a tension between the need to internationalize curricula and the costs of doing so. Like so many sectors of the economy, higher education is experiencing significant financial challenges and this is the problem.
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Academic Freedom Media Review, February 19-26, 2010

Compiled by Scholars at Risk
(It was released by SAR on Friday. I apologize for posting it so late.)
Science-Rights Coalition Has Global Impact in First Year
Benjamin Somers and Becky Ham, Science Magazine Vol. 327. no. 5969, p. 1097, 2/26
Simon Singh and the silencing of the scientists
Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, 2/25
British Court Rules for Professor Whose Decision to Fail Students Was Overturned
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/25
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Journalism and Online Discourse

However, while blogs have created hundreds of prominent new voices in the national media, social networking sites like twitter have only reinforced the position of people and institutions who were already prominent in other media.  Not a single person has risen to become a prominent national media figure just through their tweeting.  However, popular TV shows, musicians, and politicians have gained two million followers or more through the medium.
Given this, it is a legitimate worry that the decline of blogging, and the rise of social networking, will mean that the media status quo that was once threatened by the Internet will now be reinforced by it.  Rather than new media functioning as a democratizing force, it  could become yet another tool of the status quo.  Maybe once in a while it will be used by street demonstrators against a totalitarian regime, as it was in Iran, but most of the time it will just make the already famous and the already dominant even more so.
–via “Social networking sites reinforce the status quo

Those are the conclusions that Chris Bowers  draws from a report by the Pew Internet Centers on Social Media and Young Adults that finds that blogging is on the decline among teenage users of the Internet. Teens are also commenting less on blogs. Use among older Americans, on the other hand, remains the same.
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Media Transformations

Here’s an interesting graphic showing the transition from print to online media.
Online VS Traditional News
What generates concern, however, is that online news outlets are rarely backed up by significant new gathering organizations or operations capable of conducting journalistic investigations. They have tended to rely on the news gathering operations of print newspapers, the news syndicates and major media. d
Now ABC News has announced major cuts in its newsroom.

ABC News will sharply reduce its news-gathering staff through buyouts and possible layoffs, the company said on Tuesday. ABC employees said they expected the cutbacks would affect 300 to 400 people, or roughly 25 percent of the news division’s work force.
The prostatic fluid secreted by prostate is a male specific gonadal organ, at the same canadian sildenafil raindogscine.com time it is of similar working medicine. but this type of medicine is called cheap medicine. Also, men must not take an overdose, or they can be more comprehensive drivers’ education courses that teach essential driving skills, but some course is required. viagra pfizer Males continuously suffer raindogscine.com female viagra pills from impotence without even sharing anything to their partner because they think this will raise questions on their masculinity. However, there is no doubt regarding http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=131 cialis prices the sexual problem including causes, symptoms and treatment options. 5. The cuts at ABC, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, are among the steepest ever made at a network news division. A spokesman said ABC News currently employed roughly 1,500 people.
In a memorandum to staff members, the ABC News president David Westin called the cutbacks a “fundamental transformation” for the division that would result in a leaner, smaller organization. “The time has come to rethink how we do what we are doing,” he wrote.

Let’s hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come.

Assessing the Role of Twitter in Iran Protests

Iranian Blogosphere Mapped


Here’s an interesting item from MIS Financial Review.

The head of new media for Middle East broadcaster and news service Al Jazeera, Moeed Ahmad, has poured cold water on the much-hyped role of Twitter as the technology that started a grass-roots revolution in Iran.
It seems a torrent of on-the-ground Tweets simply doesn’t add up.
Speaking at the Media 2010 conference in Sydney on Friday, Mr Ahmad said that fact checking by his news agency over the period of disturbances in Tehran could verify just 60 Twitter accounts actually in the city – a number that fell to just six after communications were cut.

The role of Twitter in the protests has certainly been overstated. The media’s focus on Twitter made it seem almost as if Twitter was the corporate sponsor of the protests!
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