Dowbrigade

Coming
to you live from the floor of the Internet and Society 2004 conference
at the Harvard Law School.  Today the sessions are being held in
Pound Hall, which miraculously does have functioning wireless access,
so participants in the current session "Global Voices – International
Blogging Track – How to Build a Blogosphere" are madly blogging away
on a variety of technology (although Macs predominate).

Global
Voices is a joint project by a group of concerned
blogging internationists who are trying to act as a clearinghouse, support
forum, contact point and promotor of projects to promote blogging around
the world.  Early projects, and the present presentation, deal with
Iran and Aftrica.

Could we do something similar in Ecuador? So far we
have personally net only two indigenous Ecuadorian bloggers, but certainly
there are more. Do we have anything to contribute to the development
of the Ecuadorian blogosphere?

For a while we have been thinking of ways to breach
one of the barriaers they are discussing right now – language.  As
indigenous blogospheres sprout around the globe like mold on a ten-year-old
sandwich, most of the grass roots blogging is being done in non-English
languages.  At the same time, English is for better or worse, the
lingua franca of the Internet as well as international commerce, communication
and
culture. How to make this language barrier as permeable as possible?  Reliable
machine translation is still years if not decades away.

live from Internet and Society 2004

Bennington Outlaws Public Nudity

BENNINGTON, Vt. (Reuters) – Students occasionally parading
buck naked around Vermont’s Bennington College campus has been a tolerated,
if peculiar, part of the university’s student culture here since the
1960s.

Now Robert Graves, hired this year as Bennington’s dean of students, has embarked
on a crusade against public nudity — one that has run afoul of the school’s
free-spirited students.

Students have long enjoyed an informal policy allowing them to go naked on campus.
Whether it was as a topless sunbather lounging on the lawn or students running
naked at an annual bonfire party, college officials turned a blind eye.

Lindsey Gage, a Bennington senior leading the fight to preserve what she concedes
is an unwritten policy, said she has grown accustomed to public nudity since
enrolling here.

"It is never lewd but a natural sight," she said.

American liberal arts colleges do not get much more liberal than Bennington.
Nestled in Vermont’s Green Mountains, the school has a nontraditional approach
to education in which students draw up their own curricula.

Another cherished collegiate tradition threatened by
the new American prudism and political correctness. No more peeping Tom
road trips up to Bennington….

from Reuters