(thanks for the photo, SoStark. I knew I could count on you)
The Northeastern News, the de facto source for campus goings on, announced today that they are going independent of the University, and instead of licensing the name “Northeastern” have opted to change their name to “The Huntigton News.”
The News has been operating primarily as an independent newspaper for nearly a decade, supporting itself through advertising revenue. However, the publication was a student organization and used university office space.
The move to cut ties with the university was set in motion about a year ago by then editor-in-chief Ricky Thompson and former managing editor Derek Hawkins. The pair said they first seriously discussed becoming independent last summer, when The News was relocated to a smaller space in the Curry Student Center, which is approximately a third of the size of the original space. [...]
Thompson said talk escalated when fear of prior review arose recently, during a time of speculation about the university’s humor publication Times New Roman (TNR) staff’s decision to pull its December 2007 issue and reprint it with modifications.
Although Hawkins said the TNR reprint was a catalyst, The News was already financially self-sufficient through advertising, so it seemed like a good opportunity to go independent.
While I graduated in May, I still work on campus, and still am curious as to how my alma mater is faring. I still have the 2006 newspaper which contained three editorials about me and my selections for Springfest. I’m proud of the News for moving off campus, as I hope this is a signal for them to focus on some of the tabboo issues facing Northeastern that the administration would not allow - case in point: the ongoing pressure to offer NU Janitors a living wage. The issue has been on the minds of active students for more than three years, and only this year has the news reported on the incident, and only in very soft terms. There are adminstration issues, dynamic cuts in student activities, escalating tensions between NU and the Roxbury community, and so many other things the News could go out and get investigative about. I see this as an exciting moment of maturity for the News, and very much hope that they embrace it.
This is a heavy piece for the NU News to tackle, but I’d love to hear a little more about this:
The associated press and Wired are reporting that the next issue of Nature is going to include a Northeastern University study into the movement patterns of humans, based on tracking the location of cell phone calls outside the US. Problem is, the tracking was done without the subject’s knowledge or consent, and no effort was made to conduct a formal inquiry into the ethics of the study.
Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals’ locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week’s time period. [...] That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking, however, is legal and even marketed as a special feature by some U.S. cell phone providers
I naturally feel conflicted by the outcome of this. I understand and appreciate the value of the data, and never like to constrict the flow of science. Equal to my desire to protect research, however, is my desire to protect human privacy, and this clearly flies in the face of that.
While my feelings on the outcome are inconclusive, there is one element I feel quite strongly about. It’s embarrassing for my alma matter that no effort was made to clear the ethics of the study. Clearly, this was not an oversight, as the experiment had to be conducted outside the US in order to avoid FCC blocking. Researcher Cesar Hidalgo’s moving this outside the US, and then offering the excuse of not clearing the study because it was in the area of physics and not biology sounds an awful lot like a loophole exploitation, and a school desperately trying to establish itself as a top research institution should expect better of their staff. This is an experiment on human beings. It may not be putting drugs into people, but the sheer fact that it had to be done outside the US might have warranted a closer and neutral review.
Next Friday I’ll fulfill a lifelong dream - I’m playing the Boston Garden, so to speak. It’s Commencement at Northeastern. For the remainder of the summer I’ll be in beantown, working on several exciting projects, but come early August I’ll be moving on to the next big thing, in Washington DC. I’ll be starting to observe fun goings on down there as well, and anyone who is down thataways say hi.
I’m on the road, so to speak, at Matthews Arena working on Springfest, with Ludacris, Toots and the Maytals, The Roots, and DJ Knife. Writing from behind the stage, as I’m watching 8 one-ton chain lifts hoist array speakers and trusses of lights into our old shed of a hockey rink. The stage is built; the sound is live; the lights are rising. All we need now is a few thousand Northeastern kids and a few good acts. It’s good to be back.
It occurs to me that I should get a camera, or get my old one fixed up. Pictures would be good for these sorts of posts.
Next week: prepare for the battle of the themes. The Blogagauntlet starts Monday. Taylor is going down.
Bostonist has the scoop on some rising legal challenges to City Council-approved rule which prohibits more than four students living in the same unit. Attorney Stephen Greenbaum is tackling the issue, saying:
- the new law is unconstitutional, prohibiting the rights of equal protection under law, and freedom of association.
- the law violates right of privacy, as students would have to make aware their status as students.”Students are under no obligation to release that information.” according to Attorney Greenbaum in the Allston-Brighton TAB.
- it violates the explicit ban of rent control, as ever-floundering Councilor Michael Ross confessed himself that the law was an “effort to reduce value of apartments.” (again as qtd. in the TAB article). Read the rest of this entry »
Lessig’s legacy in the copyright world can be felt the world over: the man was a founding fellow at the Berkman Center, founded Creative Commons, and is responsible for much of the Free Culture movement - including penning two of the movement’s most famous works: Free Culture, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. After over a decade of work in this field, he left last year to start the Change Congress movement. Large portions of their strategy and development will be unveiled this afternoon. Reception to follow.
Oh shit. I don’t know the last time you Stepped in the Name of Love, but it was probably too long ago. This will be, no joke, the third time I’ve seen Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse’s own Henri Mazza do his R. Kelly singalong, and the fourth singalong overall - he hosted the brilliant Jiggy Crunk a year or so ago as well. In addition to showing all 22 Chapters of R. Kelly’s insane quasi-reflective and meditative masterpiece, he usually adds a few other Kelly classics and fun tangentially related videos. The man is brilliant. The show is phenomenal. It doesn’t really matter if you like R. Kelly, hate him, or honestly do not care about his work - come.
This is not to be confused with R. “Ryan” Kell(e)y, whose fantastic blog can be found here.
I don’t feel as though I need to explain the significance of this. For those of us who missed their last stint up here at the Middle East, this is as far north as the Texas post-rock visionaries are making it this time. Some tickets are still listed on Craigslist. Hope you can make it.
Northeastern’s Music Technology seniors (including a slew of my good pals) are showcasing their projects into the fringes of what’s new and exciting in “new music.” Each of these performers are in a class of their own. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Once in a while, Northeastern’s humble music cafe afterHours brings in a truly special guest. In my time we’ve had the Dresden Dolls, MC Chris, Duncan Sheik, Hanson, the Sugar Hill Gang, and a whole slew of others - my favorite of all time probably being the brilliant bill of the Demons of Stupidity, Todd Thibaud, The Shoebox Bankers, and Apollo Sunshine - which is how I celebrated my 21st birthday.
Over the next few days we get two greats at afterHours. NU kids, take a break and come see these shows. Non-NU kids, time to make friends with someone who is.
April 5th, 9PM: Jonathan Coulton is a pretty hilarious comedian and general entertainer. I know him as the man who had the constitution to play “Big Rock Candy Mountain” for about 50 minutes while John Hodgeman listed his famous “700 Hobo Names.” Go ahead, try and listen to the whole thing:
He also made a pretty big splash with his “First of May” song. NSFW, but very good. Link to that tune here. He’s going to be with The Konami Kode and Powerglove - whom I don’t know, but I’m sure I can get behind. Brought to you by the NU Association for Computing Machinery, which in and of itself is pretty awesome.
April 6th, 8PM - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Let me say that again. Ted Leo. With his Pharmacists. In a room about half the size of the Middle East. Let me give you some context: the next time you can catch Ted in the states is opening for Pearl Jam. He’s one of the best rockers out there, I say with no hesitation. The whole shebang is being presented by the fantastic radio station WRBB, as well as the NU Council for University Programs. And, from his amazing “Hearts of Oak,” here is “Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?”, Ted’s fantastic tribute to The Specials.
As my time as a Husky dwindles to a mere handful of weeks, I’m spending some time reflecting on my five years of academic pursuit. The Music Industry program gave me wonderful opportunities to explore different trains of thought in regards to industry problems and solutions.
It’s time to bring those trains back to the station. What follows are some of the ideas I had, and what those amount to today.
- Freshman year I spent some time analyzing Jim’s Big Ego’s decision to release of “They’re Everywhere!” with a Creative Commons license. This was the first time I was exposed to this line of rights management, and my interactions with the CC licensing have only grown. I am most excited with what Creative Commons has done to date with CC+ and the new and growing databases of CC material. What was a rouge move by one of Boston’s best local bands is now common practice. Even my own Hobnox uses the licensing as an option in the content library. This, topped with CC-founder Lessig’s recent shift in focus to work on government influence and corruption promises to bring more excitement - I’m very much looking forward to his April 4th appearance at the Berkman Center.
- 2006 brought the Middler Year Paper - for fellow Huskies, this was back when we still did one big paper for the entire semester. My thoughts amounted to a 20-page, single-spaced appraisal of the future necessity of record labels. In short, my argument was that if the record companies of the world were unwilling to embrace modern technologies of the internet and home recording, it would beehove an artist to simply create an album without them.
Truth is, over this time the marketplace has changed, to a degree that simply could not be summarized in a blog post. Suffices to say, based on a meeting I had today with a major label in NYC who unfortunately I cannot name here due to trade secrets, the current guard is wising up to how the internet works to their advantage. I’ve also come to realize that, for all of the modern ease of getting content to market, many artists still rely on a label for distribution - this is probably due to the plethora of additional funding and support projects that tie-in with that. I can simply look to my own band-of-the-week, Le Loup, to see a clear example of how they leveraged their own home recording with SubPop deal to fund a tour across the country and Europe.
As long as the money keeps coming to the labels (which, even if records sales die out, they still will through licensing and publishing, which record companies were wise to snatch up early on) artists will still look to their wallets. The future does see new sources of income from online royalties (if Billy Bragg can help it, anyway), as well as the excitingly brilliant concept of the new “1000 True Fans” model for artist income. In even more abstract terms, the resonance with artists to this off-the-cuff, fast and limber model of doing business makes it attractive so long as the money is good, and I still feel that record companies will have to limber up and further embrace web technology in order to stay the kings of this game. Sooner or later artists will have the power to do this on their own.
- The spring of 2007 was the era of the iLevy, perhaps the only class I ever will take purely pro bono - no grade, no credits, just pure thought exercises. The guiding question was this: if we were to impose a very small tax (talking fractions of a percent here) on content-sharing equipment and services (internet service, yes, but also computers and CD burners and blank media), could the revenue generated subsidize the cost of copyright-protected file traffic in the eyes of the content-holders, so we could do away with all this horrid site blocking, net throttling, and lawsuits?
Well, the concept mas moot before it took off; as I mentioned in my commentary on Christopher Cox, legislation was passed which barred internet taxes for a good long while. A new solution? Singing in the same key as the Berkman Center’s fantastic spinoff Noank, SXSW speaker Jim Griffin spoke this year about about enacting collective licensing - purely voluntary, collected en masse and having a performance rights orgnaization-like body facilitate the distribution. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary here.
More to follow, I think, as long as this is stuff you guys want to hear about. This weekend should have some shorter commentary on Elvis Costello, The Dodos, Dr. Pepper, and the RIAA’s “In Trial.” Stay tuned.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox was just announced as the keynote speaker at Northeastern’s Commencement. Previous to serving as the SEC Chair, he was a Republican Congressman from Southern California.
It’s a bit tough for us seniors to appreciate this Cox fellow, especially knowing that fellow NU alums got to hear all that nice stuff about following your dreams and being good citizens by Jesse Jackson (’78), Mike Dukakis (’84), Maya Angelou (’92), Bill Clinton (’93), Mikhail Gorbachev (’98), and Madeline Albright (’00). My grandfather in 1943 got to shake the hand (I think) of Thomas J. Watson, the President of IBM from the 1920s through 50s.
So who is this Cox guy, anyway? Wikipedia, if you please…
We grew up in Minnesota, got his BA at USC in the early 1970s, came to Harvard and got an MBA and JD from the Crimsons, where he also served as the editor of the Harvard Law Review. He got into private practice at an international law firm in their Orange County department, and also founded the Context Corporation, producing English translations of Pravda, the Soviet Union’s state-controlled newspaper. He came back to Cambridge to work at the Harvard Business School, and from there went to Congress.
For 9 terms, Cox represented the Orange County area. From 1995-2005, he was in the House Majority Leadership (chair of the Policy Committee) and chaired several committees. This is also the same Cox of the Cox Report, a major exposee on the involvement of the People’s Republic of China in espionage missions regarding the US nuclear program. Naturally, before charing the SEC, the man worked a great deal with lobbying for trade and business reform, working with Clinton to modernize US exporting, introducing legislation that prohibits internet taxation (which actually abruptly ended a semester-long project I was working on, drawing up a proposed tax on internet goods and services to offset losses of royalties from creative content online, similar to the Noank project the Berkman Center put forth)… and then there are these two little chestnuts that I love:
- He, along with my own Barney Frank, introduced legislation that privatized and depleted the US Strategic Helium Reserve. That’s right - the US had a Strategic Helium Reserve. Over a billion cubic feet of it. In Texas. Turns out we used it to help supply our airships in times of war, which evokes a sort-of freaky neo-classic retro-futuristic story a la Sky Captain, and helped cool our jets (haha) during the space program. Now, in all fairness, scientists and dirigible hobbyists did rely on the reserve for their supplies for its unique properties. See this 1997 Technology Review article on the subject. Or watch this video of Lionel Ritchie sounding like Donald Duck. Up to you. I can only imagine this is how Cox an Frank sounded once they started depleting that reserve.
- He was on Password Plus in the 80s! And he won! I can’t find a video of him, but check this other PP clip out. I can only assume it went something like this.
So my thoughts? I don’t know - I’ll have to dig some more. But for now I guess I can be okay with him, as long as he lives up to my helium-inhaling-game-show-participating vision of the SEC Chairman. I hope I can ask him about it in May.
Oh, and in case anyone is totally oblivious as to how pop-culture works, he’s not the same Chris Cox that does all those remix videos on YouTube. Though that would totally tip the scales in his favor.
