Berkman Buzz: November 16, 2012

Reporter Jason Tomassini discusses Project Information Literacy's latest research report (PDF) about college graduates in the workplace and asks, with just the right amount of irony, can the digital generation do anything right? Alison Head and Justin Reich, both Berkman Fellows, are quoted in the blog post from Education Week this week.

On November 1, Russia’s latest internet censorship law came into effect. The new measure, titled “On the Protection of Children From Information Harmful to Their Health and Development,” establishes a registry of sites with content judged harmful to children. Sites that contain child pornography or that promote self-harm or drug use may be placed on the registry without a court order; sites with other forms of “illegal” content may be placed on the registry after judicial approval. A government agency, Roskomnadzor, will be responsible for maintaining the list. Under the law, ISPs will be liable if they fail to block sites placed on the registry, and individuals will be liable if they circumvent the blocking.

LazyTruth is a Chrome extension for Gmail that fights misinformation in your inbox. http://lazytruth.com re: #truthicon http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/truthiness
—Berkman Center (@berkmancenter)

I’m happy to report that the semester has been going swimmingly. Sorry for the dearth of posts here, but I’ve been rather engaged with reading, for one course, across a vast and dense literature on music, race, & nation while exploring, in another, the history and potential of music’s (and sound’s) deep entanglement with technologies of transduction & reproduction.

As we barrel almost unbelievably toward the end of the term, we’ve managed to produce a pretty striking set of technomusicological etudes. While two big assignments remain (a video montage and a DJ mix), the students have produced soundscapes, radio collages, sample-based beats, and mashups. Impressed and entertained by them all, I want to share a few exemplary pieces to give people a (musique) concrete sense of what we’ve been up to. We recommend listening with headphones.

Can someone please write an article on the history of baby animal live streams? It would be the cutest media history ever.
—Molly Sauter (@oddletters)

Siva Vaidhyanathan [twitter: sivavaid] has a really well-done (as usual) article that reminds us that for all the excitement about Massive Open Online Courses — which he shares — we still have to figure out how to do them right. There are lots of ways to go wrong. (And I should hear note that I’m posting this in order to: (1) recommend Siva’s article, and (2) make an obvious point about MOOCs. Feel free to stop here.)

Egyptians are drafting their very own secular law - on Twitter. It all started when Mahmoud Salem - aka Sandmonkey - suggested writing such a law after noting that Islamists have no respect for secular people and consider them to be both un-Islamic and controlled by non-Muslims. On cue, the hashtag #?????_????????? [ar] (Secular Law) soon came up, and was populated with suggestions on what this new sharia (law) for secular people should be.