The Death Penalty and Easter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 10:44Yesterday, Christians around the world celebrated the resurrection of a man wrongfully sentenced to death. At the same time, Chris Powell’s editorial in the Journal Inquirer reflected on recent discussions about the death penalty in Connecticut.
In his column, he discusses “the risk of mistaken convictions and wrongful executions, a risk to which Connecticut now should be more sensitive, having just seen, thanks to new DNA evidence, the spectacular exoneration of a man wrongly convicted of rape and another man wrongly convicted of murder.”
This, along with many other reasons is why I oppose the death penalty, and believe that bills that would eliminate the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or other release is the right way to go.
Mr. Powell doesn’t seem to want to go this far, and is instead suggesting that “another precaution against mistaken executions is available -- to pass a law requiring that any death sentence have the affirmation of both jury and judge that the crime has been proven not just "beyond a reasonable doubt" but to a certainty.”
I’m not sure how you can ever be certain of anything, so that might be a step in the right direction. However, I have a different idea. If we can’t do away with capital punishment, what about making it a capital offense to wrongfully sentence anyone to the death penalty, or to fail to stay the execution of a person later found to be innocent?
If you are a judge, a prosecutor or a member of a jury that sentences a person to the death penalty, and that person is later found innocent you are guilty of premeditated murder and the capital penalty should apply to you. Likewise, if you are a Governor and you fail to stay the execution of a person later found to be innocent, you too are guilty of premeditated murder.
While this won’t do away with the death penalty completely and I don’t think it is feasible or appropriate for a lot of reasons, it might help people think a little bit more seriously about the issue that Mr. Powell raises.
Happy Social Media Easter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/12/2009 - 20:01“The Lord is risen!” We shouted this as a greeting to friends at church this morning. “The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah!” It was a great sermon, bringing the resurrection from two thousand years ago into the modern context. It hit the core issues of the Gospel, that all Christ has been victorious over death, and all that drags us down. If the Resurrected Christ could conquer death, He can certainly conquer our small issues, worries about health or finances, and so on.
There was also a good discussion about God’s love as a source of renewable energy. God constantly showers us with His love. We can chose to rely on old examples of God’s love, sort of like how we’ve relied on oil, or we can rely on the love of God gives to us each day and that we have an opportunity to reflect to the people around us.
I pray that each of you experience God’s love, however you understand it, and pass that on to those around you.
For us, much of God’s love is reflected in simple family activities, like coloring eggs, or an Easter Egg hunt. We colored eggs on Saturday and broadcast it on Ustream. During the egg coloring, various friends connected and chatted with us.
I also have some good pictures of the events of the day in my Easter 2009 photo set.
What a does cyberstalking bunny have to do with Chris Dodd, Bloggers, Talk Radio and Corruption?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 19:41This evening, I read a blog post by former talk radio host Colin McEnroe about Providence, RI’s “NBC 10’s Jim Taricani’s interview with alleged cyberstalker Ann Bruno.” It is a great example of a failed television interview and perhaps says something about what is happening to media today. In the interview, Ms. Bruno dons a bunny costume and runs circles around Jim Taricani. Yet it seemed like there was more to the story, so I decided to follow Ms. Bruno down the rabbit hole to see where it leads.
First, I found information about the nature of the ongoing hostilities between Ms. Bruno and Tracy Sisson. The best description of the conflict is probably in this article, and the best understatement about the Ms. Bruno comes from WPRI, “Bruno refused to answer questions about the charges.”
Yet, somehow, it seemed that there was more to the story. So, I thought I’d see what I could find out about Mr. Taricani, who attempted to interview Ms. Bruno. This is where things got much more interesting. Back in 2001, about the same time that the hostilities between Ms. Bruno and Ms. Sisson appear to have started, WJAR, also known as NBC 10 aired a portion of a videotape showing a Providence city official accepting a bribe from an undercover FBI informant. The tape was sealed evidence as part of a Federal investigation into corruption of Providence officials. Mr. Taricani was subpoenaed to reveal the source of the tape, which he refused to do. He was fined $1000 a day for 85 days, which NBC picked up the tab on. Then, he was convicted on criminal contempt charges for not revealing the source.
The next day, Sen. Chris Dodd introduced a Federal Shield law for reporters. One of the questions people argued about after the bill was introduced is whether it would apply to bloggers. Two years, to the day, before Colin put up his blog post about Mr.Taricani’s attempted interview with Ms. Bruno, I wrote a blog post about shield laws, Chris Dodd and Jim Taricani.
Now, you might think that the only talk radio tie-in is that Colin is a former talk radio host. However, he isn’t the only former talk radio host involved in this story. The investigation led to the conviction of Providence Mayor Vincent Albert "Buddy" Cianci, Jr. on corruption charges. This resulted in the second resignation by Mr. Cianci. After his first resignation, in 1984 after pleading no contest to a charge that he assaulted Rhode Island contractor with a lit cigarette, he worked as a talk radio host on WHJJ in Providence.
So, who are the reporters? A former mayor who becomes a talk radio host, mayor again and then gets convicted of corruption? A television reporter who gets convicted of criminal contempt for not revealing sources, and then later gets pwned in an interview? A former talk radio host who wrote the blog post that got my attention? Me? You? What does it tell us about shield laws, reporters, and the state of the media?
Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr, etc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 11:12One of the mailing lists I’m on has gotten into several interesting discussions about Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr and related sites. I've been busy working away on other things and quietly listening to the discussion in the background. However, I have had a little time to digest things and wanted to share my thoughts. I wrote this initially as a response to the list and have edited it to be a blog post here.
Ning: One discussion was about changes to the Ning Terms of Service that many people found offensive. As best as I can tell Ning is just as evil as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of them. When you are essentially giving your content to someone else for their cost of providing the service, it seems to be up to the terms of service they provide about what they will do with it, and pretty much all of them are in it for a profit. It makes sense to push back at times, and this might be a time to push back at Ning, but I'm not a big Ning user, so I'm not getting active in that cause.
Elgg: Someone on the list mentioned Elgg as an open source competitor to Ning. I forgot who mentioned it, but to whomever did, thank you. I've now installed Elgg on my machine. It was a fairly simple install, at least for someone who has a VPS account and experience setting up other open source packages.
Elgg is current at version 1.5 and it acts like it. The parts that work, work very nicely and cleanly. I really like the parts that work. Other parts that they talk about that I'm interested in exploring just don't seem to be there. The OpenID client portion seems to work, but doesn't have the ability, as far as I can see, to add OpenID to an existing user. I couldn't find any way of getting FOAF to work, and it looks like it may take a while to figure out how best to change customize a theme.
It also has it's own microblogging and its connectivity to Twitter. It is pulling in Twitter feeds nicely but I haven't been able to get it to send feeds out yet.
The support community looks fairly sparse as of yet but as more people start experimenting with Elgg I expect to see the community grow.
All of that said, it looks like a fun tool to play with. Anyone who wants to play with my Elgg setup is free to join at http://elgg.smartcampaigns.com. It is a test site, and may go away abruptly. Feedback is appreciated about Elgg and ways to make the best use of it.
So far, I don't have a need to set up Elgg for any group, but I think it is a good tool to have in the toolkit.
Twitter: Another discussion was about FollowCost. I follow lots of people on Twitter and have lots of followers. I find followcost interesting, but only a very minor factor. Put simply, it gives the sum of the signal and the noise of a person's twitter stream. For some people that can be very high, and it might be because they have a lot of information. For other people it can be fairly low, but they have no useful information.
I do agree with everyone else that talks about the importance of Twitter clients. I end up using a large mix of many Twitter clients. Right now, I use PeopleBrowser as a primary client.
Flickr: Someone asked about Flickr. I use the simple aspects of Flickr a lot and have often recommended it to organizations for these aspects. It is nice to have a place to put your photos that other people will come look at. Beyond that, I use ability to mail pictures to Flickr, so when I take a picture from my cellphone, I send it to a special email address that Flickr sets up. This allows my picture to show up on Flickr right away.
On my cellphone, I can send an email to a list of people, so I send my pictures to Facebook, Flickr, Utterli and Zannel. As an aside, I do the same thing with videos, sending them to blip.tv, facebook, Utterli, Youtube and Zannel.
I also have a special account where I send a picture and text to Flickr. Flickr stores the photo on their site and the sends the picture and text to my blog as a blog post. It provides a great way to blog when you are off at some event. If your group organizes events, I strongly recommend this. You can build buzz about events as they happen.
I have added people as friends on Flickr and joined some Flickr groups, but that isn't really an important part of the discussions I'm part of.
There are a lot of different sites and services that can suck up every minute of your time. On a different list, one person mentioned Retaggr as a way to keep track of all these different sites. I'm http://www.retaggr.com/Page/ahynes1 there. It is a pretty nice site. For another similar, and very nice site, check out DandyID. I'm http://www.dandyid.org/users/ahynes1 there.
These sites can be good at helping people find all your content online and they’re probably worth looking at.
However, the key thing to come back to is, what are you trying to do anyway? How are you using social media to support your mission? For me personally, what I'm trying to do is to know as much as possible about as many different social media tools so I can help others make good use of them. So, I'm on just about every service I can find. Others have very different purposes, raising awareness about a cause, fundraising, etc. Figure out what you want to do, and then look for tools that help you do it.
Social Network Contact Management: Choosing Blogs to Read with BlogCatalog and Graphviz
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 12:48I’m always searching for the best way to find which blogs I should read today. As technology changes, so does the strategy that I use. For example, sometimes I like to check to see which blogs that I’ve subscribed to have new material. Other times, I might hop from one blog to another by following advertisements from EntreCard, CMF Ads, or Adgitize. Sometimes, I might use BlogExplosion to suggest sites I should visit. Or, I might read through the blogs of people that have visited me, as reported by MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog.
Recently, I’ve mostly been following blog advertisements and supplementing it with BlogExplosion recommendations. Yet the recent issues with EntreCard and how they handle advertisements has caused me to change that strategy for the time being. First off, many of the EntreCard ads no long lead to interesting sites, so I’m less interested in following the links. Beyond that, some EntreCard users have called for a strike to protest those changes, and I’ve adjusted my strategy for today accordingly.
With this, I thought I’d dig a little bit deeper into the social network contact management aspect of selecting blogs. I want to build up my readership by visiting sites that have recently visited me.
There are three systems that I currently use to track who has visited me. MyBlogLog is the granddaddy of recent reader lists. They provide a nice API to extract the information and I’ve done some interesting work in the past with MyBlogLog. In addition, they provide lots of information about the services that readers use, so I can go check out the Twitterstreams or Flickr photos of recent readers.
TwitterRemote also provides an interesting tool for tracking recent visitors. The problem with TwitterRemote is that they don’t currently have a nice API. I looked around, and I can fairly easily reverse engineer their widget to get a webpage that I could scrape to be able to process recent Twitter visitors. But that is a lot of work, and they might change the page layout, thereby messing up the page scraping. So, I’ve sent an email to them asking if they will create a TwitterRemote API. It would provide another nice tool.
With that, I decided today to get to know the BlogCatalog API. BlogCatalog has a recent reader list very similar to the MyBlogLog recent reader list. Their API isn’t as rich as the MyBlogLog API, but it is sufficient for some of my simpler tasks I have in mind.
So, I went out and wrote a little routine in PHP. It calls the BlogCatalog API to find out who my recent readers have been. For each recent reader, it then checks to see if they have a blog, and if so, who has been reading their blogs. This could crawl a long time and produce amounts of data so massive that it would be useless.
Instead, I put some limits on the crawling. First, I look at only the six most recent readers for any blog. Then, I look at their readers and their readers readers, and so on. Right now, I’m stopping after I go through sixty readers. Then, I produce a GraphViz chart which shows who has been reading each others blogs.
Also, in order to keep the graph from getting too large, I only show people that are both reading and being read.
Now that I have it working somewhat nicely, I’ve produced the following graph.
The first thing that jumps out at me with this version of the graph is that a lot of people are reading Forced Green, and they have a lot of people reading them, but there isn’t a lot of interaction between the different sites.
On the other side of the graph, you can see some of the community effect with sites like Random Ramblings, Daisy the Curly Cat, I Love/Hate America and The One About… interacting.
Eventually, I hope to gather information from graphs like this and other sources to come up with a nice answer to questions like, who has been reading my blog or responding to me on Twitter, Facebook and the like, that has new content on their blog that I haven’t read recently, or put more simply, whose blog should I read next.
So, how do you decide which blog to read next?
