Four students held a sit-in Monday in the Tucson office of Senator John McCain. They were, from left, Tania Unzueta, Lizbeth Mateo and Yahaira Carrillo, of Mexico, and Mohammad Abdollahi of Iran. Raúl Alcaraz, a legal resident from Mexico, joined.
Photograph By Joshua Lott
By JULIA PRESTON
NY Times Published: May 17, 2010
In an escalation of protest tactics, five immigrants dressed in caps and gowns held a sit-in on Monday at the Tucson offices of Senator John McCain, calling on him to sponsor legislation to open a path to legal status for young illegal immigrants.
Four of the protesters, including three who are in the country illegally, were arrested Monday evening on misdemeanor trespassing charges. The three were expected to face deportation proceedings.
It was the first time students have directly risked deportation in an effort to prompt Congress to take up a bill that would benefit illegal immigrant youths.
Separately on Monday, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Phoenix by a coalition of civil rights, labor and religious groups challenging the new Arizona law that allows the police to detain suspected illegal immigrants as unconstitutional, saying it would lead to racial profiling.
Though it was the fifth suit challenging the law, it was widely believed to have the best chance of being heard by the courts given the groups’ experience and the nature of the complaint.
Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said of the protesters, “The individuals have a right to peacefully protest in the senator’s office,” and added that Mr. McCain “understands the students’ frustrations.”
But she said: “Elections have consequences, and they should focus their efforts on the president and the Democrats that control the agenda in Congress.”
Mr. McCain, a Republican, has in years past repeatedly sponsored a bill that would offer legalization for illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children by their parents, known to its supporters as the Dream Act. But this year he has not. Mr. McCain is facing a primary challenge from J.D Hayworth, a talk show host who has taken a tough stand on illegal immigrants.
The students protesting in Mr. McCain’s office said they wanted to increase pressure on Congress to pass the Dream Act this year, even if lawmakers do not take up a broader overhaul of the immigration system. The student bill is currently part of a Democratic proposal for an overhaul, largely written by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York.
“I’ve been organizing for years, and a lot of my friends have become frustrated and lost hope,” said one of the students, Lizbeth Mateo, 25. “We don’t have any more time to be waiting. I really believe this year we can make it happen.”
Ms. Mateo, who came to the United States when she was 14, said she paid full tuition to earn a degree from California State University, Northridge, the first member of her family to graduate from college. She said her plans to attend law school had failed because she lacked legal status.
Ms. Mateo was arrested, along with Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Yahaira Carrillo, 25, of Kansas City, Mo. All three are illegal immigrants.
Also arrested was Raúl Alcaraz, 27, an immigrant from Mexico who is a legal resident and a counselor at a Tucson high school.
The protesters walked into Mr. McCain’s office just before noon and sat in the lobby.
Tania Unzueta, 26, who is from Los Angeles, joined the sit-in, but she said the group decided she should leave the protest in order to avoid arrest.
Mr. Abdollahi said he could not return to Iran, where he was born, because he is gay and feared persecution there.
Margo Cowan, a lawyer representing the students, said that the Tucson police said they would advise federal immigration authorities of the arrests, and that she expected the students would be put in immigration detention.
Illegal immigrant students have become increasingly public in their protests in recent months, as the prospects for an immigration overhaul faded in Washington. Four immigrant students walked from Miami to Washington, arriving in late April. So far, immigration authorities have not moved to detain student protesters.
Lawmakers are divided over whether to take up the Dream Act as separate legislation. Andy Fisher, a spokesman for Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a Republican who is a lead sponsor of the bill, said that the senator did not support any effort to advance a comprehensive immigration overhaul this year, but that he believed the Dream Act could be “doable” separately.
An aide to Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat who is the act’s other lead sponsor, said he continued to see it as part of an overhaul.
Lawyers for the groups that filed the suit over the Arizona immigration law Monday took aim at a chief argument of its supporters: that it largely parallels existing federal statutes. The lawyers said the Arizona law went further because federal agents are not required to check the immigration status of people they stop or arrest, as the state law requires.
May 17th, 2010
Michiko Doihara Tamaki, left, gets help from her daughter, Jeanne Tamaki, as she prepares for a special ceremony to receive an honorary degree.
Photograph By Irfan Khan
The 48 people recognized in a special ceremony in Westwood had been students when they were shipped to camps during World War II.
By Patrick McDonnell
Los Angeles Times
May 16, 2010
A lifetime ago, the Yamaguchi family labored long and hard in a chop-suey shop in downtown Los Angeles to send their son, Kei, to university, hoping it would give him the chance for a better life.
World War II interrupted the immigrant family’s dreams, but on Saturday, Kei Yamaguchi finally received his degree from UCLA — almost seven decades after he left.
“It feels great,” said the 91-year-old Yamaguchi, who is still active in the family termite-control business.
He was among 48 Japanese Americans who were awarded honorary degrees, some posthumously, in a special ceremony at the Westwood campus.
All were from families forcibly relocated to camps after Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066. In one of the darker chapters of U.S. history, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were interned.
Among those shipped to camps were about 700 University of California students from four campuses, including UCLA. Some ended up earning degrees at other universities; others never returned to college.
Last year, the UC Board of Regents voted to suspend a three-decade ban on awarding honorary degrees in order to recognize the former scholars. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger later signed legislation directing the UC system and other post-secondary institutions to confer honorary degrees upon those obliged to abandon their studies during the war.
Some of Saturday’s honorees, including Yamaguchi, were able to attend and donned robes, caps, flower leis and ribbons crafted by current students. Children, grandchildren and other relatives stood in for those who had died or were unable to attend.
A few were in wheelchairs. Many walked slowly, using canes and leaning on loved ones.
But all exuded pride as UCLA Chancellor Gene Block awarded them diplomas during an upbeat ceremony at Schoenberg Hall. Cheers and thunderous applause erupted as each recipient’s name was read aloud.
“It’s been a long time coming. I never thought it would happen,” said honorary graduate Toshio Matsumoto, 87, a retired electrical engineer from Sacramento.
He traced a life arc not uncommon among this group, from UCLA to the camps to a resumption of studies in the Midwest to a stint in the Army and a successful career in private industry. He recalled how his father was forced to sell his grocery store in downtown L.A. for a paltry $500 before the family was whisked away.
“It was very traumatic,” said Matsumoto, who, like others, displayed no rancor.
Yuriko Ito Takenaka, 86, voiced hope that the group’s collective experience would resonate with a younger generation for whom an injustice like forced internment may seem hard to fathom.
“People nowadays don’t think about civil rights,” said Takenaka, who was a freshman at UCLA when her family was interned and who later completed her nursing studies at Stanford University. “They take it all for granted. This is a way to remind people what happened.”
Fumio Robert Naka, 86, who was a UCLA student when he was sent to the Manzanar internment camp in the Owens Valley, said the experience taught a lesson in how humans can persevere when confronted with events “beyond our control.”
Naka, who travelled from his home in Massachusetts and delivered the honoree address, eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard and became an acclaimed electrical engineer. He worked on radar technology for the U.S. government, much of it top secret, and recalled how his former boss once said to him: “You’ve gone from being a distrusted American to one of the most trusted Americans.”
There were also bittersweet moments for the loved ones of those who have died.
“This feels wonderful, but sad at the same time,” said Kerry Cababa, whose late mother, Masa Fujioka, was among those honored. “My mother would have loved to have been here. She was always a big UCLA booster.”
May 16th, 2010
Accounts closed because of failure to explain fully who shares access to users’ personal details.
By: Rhodri Marsden
The Independent UK
Saturday, 15 May 2010
A friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked him, back in 2004, after the 19-year-old had casually mentioned in an online conversation that 4,000 people had uploaded their personal information to his fledgling website: “How did you manage that?” He typed back: “They just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’,” then indiscreetly described them as “dumbfucks”.
This week’s reporting of that conversation, brushed off by Facebook but not denied, comes at an awkward time for the social networking site, whose 400 million members have made it the second most popular online destination behind Google.
Its privacy policies, inextricably coupled with it urging that we share our information with the world, have regularly hit the headlines, but in the past fortnight the privacy debate has developed into what some excitable commentators are calling a “firestorm of anger”.
Prominent technology bloggers have publicly deleted their accounts, and an EU data protection body has issued a strongly worded statement criticising the website. Anyone busy using Facebook probably will not have noticed, and that is essentially the problem.
The biggest charge levelled against it is that users simply are not fully aware of changes that are regularly made about who can see our information, which search engines can catalogue that information, and which companies can advertise products to us based upon it. At the end of last year, certain categories of data belonging to over-18s were made visible to “everyone” (Facebook and non-Facebook users) by default.
This was presented in a benign, socially inclusive way, but it did not take long for concerned users to urgently forward instructions to their friends explaining how to revert these changes. In addition, more widespread use of Facebook Connect (a system where we can permit external websites to link to our Facebook account to improve the “user experience”) has furrowed many brows, particularly when we see pictures of friends unexpectedly popping up next to gossip columns or cricket scores.
But the recently introduced “Instant Personalisation” service has pushed things too near the edge. Facebook describes it as “magical”, but the wider consensus is “creepy”: three websites (namely docs.com, pandora.com and yelp.com) now know that you are a Facebook user and welcome you as such on your first visit, unless you have specifically turned the option off within Facebook.
But making decisions and taking action over these privacy issues isn’t easy. Facebook’s commitment to providing “granular” privacy settings for each type of information results in a fiendishly complex system. About 50 settings are spread across several pages, with important and alarming-sounding sections such as “what your friends can share about you” buried within a submenu of a submenu.
Each external website you approve with Facebook Connect provides another potential information leak and yet another screen of privacy options, and the privacy policy governing all this runs to some 5,830 words.
People are choosing to close their accounts (another seven-step process that, ironically, does not actually delete your information from Facebook’s servers.) Signups to the site have also reportedly slowed, albeit to a colossal 20 million per month.
But for many, Facebook has become indispensable. It is a one-stop address book; it is a diary of upcoming events, from gigs to birthdays to political rallies; it is a place to chat with friends when you are having an evening in, and it strengthens bonds between people who might have become estranged through laziness or forgetfulness.
Facebook could certainly be accused of tapping into a narcissistic streak that compels us to publicly share information to make us seem more important than we actually are, it is also a powerful friendship tool. Without it, many of us would feel bereft, not technologically, but socially. That’s why we are there, and why we stay there.
What most users say about privacy is, “Well, who cares?” Social networking is such a fast-developing medium that the consequences of our information being disseminated are not really understood. In fact, other than the appearance of adverts for barbecue sets appearing on the same page as our stated love of picnics, it is barely noticed. News stories of people losing their jobs because of drunken photos appearing online are seen as rare exceptions that happen to others, and if you asked people if they really wanted to lose control of their online persona, you would not blame them if they said, “I don’t know. What does that even mean?” And few of us would be able to give them an answer that did not sound unneccesarily paranoid.
But even prominent Facebook supporters are voicing concern, not least because Facebook’s response to the outcry has been muted. They are used to complaints about cosmetic changes to the website, but the impossibility of keeping nearly half a billion people happy means that, understandably, they ignore these. They are used to the retroactive whining of those whose voluntary uploads to Facebook find their way into the public domain via indiscreet friends; understandably, they ignore that, too.
Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president for public policy, has apologised, but only for the confusion surrounding the changes, and not the changes themselves, which have been described in that statement from the EU as a possible breach of data protection law.
This could give Zuckerberg a far bigger headache than a clutch of critical blogs, but he cannot say that he did not see it coming. After all, he was the one who apparently expressed such surprise six years ago at our willingness to give him all our information free.
May 16th, 2010
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Young man after young man hugged Father Gregory Boyle and shook his hand after Homeboy Industries announced it was laying off 300 employees. “I’m always more hopeful than I am optimistic,” Boyle said.
By Tim Rutten
Los Angeles Times
May 15, 2010
Does Los Angeles have a conscience?
Does it have a heart?
If the answer to either one of those questions is yes, then we ought to share a common anguish over the crisis that threatens to cripple Homeboy Industries, the phenomenally successful gang intervention program founded 18 years ago by Father Gregory Boyle at East L.A.’s Dolores Mission. More than simply wringing hands, this county’s wealthiest men and women need to step up and help put this invaluable program back on its feet.
Homeboy, which occupies a strikingly vibrant headquarters near Union Station, operates successful cafe, bakery and silk-screening businesses. It also provides job training, work, counseling, educational programs, legal assistance and tattoo removal to 12,000 young men and women formerly involved in gangs from all over Los Angeles County. It is what every social service organization purports, or aspires, to be: an effective program with a soul.
However, as the demands for its services have risen, Homeboy has been pinched by the general drop in charitable contributions that have followed from the grim economy. Since last fall, when the organization’s problems surfaced, Boyle and his staff have been relying on a stream of small donations to cobble together their payroll. On Thursday, they had to lay off 330 of the 427 people they employed. Boyle and his staff will continue to work without pay, and the profitable cafe, bakery and silk-screen businesses will go on as usual.
Essentially, Homeboy needs $5 million in what amounts to bridge funding to carry it through until, as planned, the growing revenues from those successful businesses can support the rest of the program. This is an organization that has saved thousands of lives and demonstrably contributed not only to the lives of the young people it serves but also to our collective public safety. That’s why Boyle and his work are supported strongly by both Police Chief Charlie Beck and Sheriff Lee Baca. What, moreover, is $5 million in a city that spends $25 million annually on gang intervention programs of dubious efficacy? What is it in a city with eight billionaires and millionaires by the thousands?
Boyle and I have been friends for more than 20 years, and though he doesn’t do bitter, he does do bemused. That was his mood Thursday, when he wondered how a city and county that “wouldn’t close an animal shelter ever,” that has rallied to save its Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hollywood sign, could stand by and let Homeboy nearly go under. “A Warhol, a sign on a hillside, any puppy are more valuable to the city and county of Los Angeles than all the 12,000 gang members who come through our door every year,” he said. “Part of my sadness is that the poor get this place, but the rich just don’t. Too many of them believe that there are some lives that matter more than others, and our kids matter least of all.”
Boyle pointed out that Homeboy’s core businesses never have been more successful. “Ralphs is now taking our Homegirl salsas for all its stores. We’ve got a shot at opening another cafe in the renovated LAX, and even Patina now is a client of our bakery. We’re the opposite of a sinking ship.”
For the sake of its soul, this city and county need to show the young people who have found hope at Homeboy that we don’t believe that they’re dispensable, that their lives matter less than others. That’s why I called former Mayor Richard Riordan, whose experience as a successful venture capitalist has made him a particularly effective and hardheaded philanthropist, and asked him whether he was willing to step in and help out Boyle and his staff.
He agreed without hesitation, reminding me that a few years ago, he personally contributed $50,000 to Homeboy, a sum he helped persuade billionaires like Cheryl Saban and Stewart and Lynda Resnick to match. “There’s no question Greg Boyle is a saint,” Riordan said, “but even saints need good businessmen who can recruit other wealthy businessmen to keep them going…. I can help with that. Give them my home phone number.”
And so I have. Once Boyle and Riordan have their mutual efforts on behalf of these young people underway, you can look to this column to see who has responded and what more needs to be done.
Friday morning, Boyle reminded that ” Martin Luther King said once, ‘I have felt the power of God transform the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.’ That’s what every homie, and anyone else who visits, experiences in our place.”
What price can Los Angeles put on hope?
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
GRADUATING Not everyone does.
By JACQUES STEINBERG
NY Times Published: May 14, 2010
WHAT’S the key to success in the United States?
Short of becoming a reality TV star, the answer is rote and, some would argue, rather knee-jerk: Earn a college degree.
The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)
For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.
That can be a lot of tuition to pay, without a degree to show for it.
A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop credible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so.
Whether everyone in college needs to be there is not a new question; the subject has been hashed out in books and dissertations for years. But the economic crisis has sharpened that focus, as financially struggling states cut aid to higher education.
Among those calling for such alternatives are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University and Robert I. Lerman of American University, the political scientist Charles Murray, and James E. Rosenbaum, an education professor at Northwestern. They would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.
“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”
And much of their training, he added, might be feasible outside the college setting.
College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.
Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.
“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.
Professor Lerman, the American University economist, said some high school graduates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communicate in the workplace.
Such skills are ranked among the most desired — even ahead of educational attainment — in many surveys of employers. In one 2008 survey of more than 2,000 businesses in Washington State, employers said entry-level workers appeared to be most deficient in being able to “solve problems and make decisions,” “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others” and “listen actively.”
Yet despite the need, vocational programs, which might teach such skills, have been one casualty in the push for national education standards, which has been focused on preparing students for college.
While some educators propose a radical renovation of the community college system to teach work readiness, Professor Lerman advocates a significant national investment by government and employers in on-the-job apprenticeship training. He spoke with admiration, for example, about a program in the CVS pharmacy chain in which aspiring pharmacists’ assistants work as apprentices in hundreds of stores, with many going on to study to become full-fledged pharmacists themselves.
“The health field is an obvious case where the manpower situation is less than ideal,” he said. “I would try to work with some of the major employers to develop these kinds of programs to yield mastery in jobs that do demand high expertise.”
While no country has a perfect model for such programs, Professor Lerman pointed to a modest study of a German effort done last summer by an intern from that country. She found that of those who passed the Abitur, the exam that allows some Germans to attend college for almost no tuition, 40 percent chose to go into apprenticeships in trades, accounting, sales management, and computers.
“Some of the people coming out of those apprenticeships are in more demand than college graduates,” he said, “because they’ve actually managed things in the workplace.”
Still, by urging that some students be directed away from four-year colleges, academics like Professor Lerman are touching a third rail of the education system. At the very least, they could be accused of lowering expectations for some students. Some critics go further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics.
Peggy Williams, a counselor at a high school in suburban New York City with a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic, understands the argument for erring on the side of pushing more students toward college.
“If we’re telling kids, ‘You can’t cut the mustard, you shouldn’t go to college or university,’ then we’re shortchanging them from experiencing an environment in which they might grow,” she said.
But Ms. Williams said she would be more willing to counsel some students away from the precollege track if her school, Mount Vernon High School, had a better vocational education alternative. Over the last decade, she said, courses in culinary arts, nursing, dentistry and heating and ventilation system repair were eliminated. Perhaps 1 percent of this year’s graduates will complete a concentration in vocational courses, she said, compared with 40 percent a decade ago.
There is another rejoinder to the case against college: People with college and graduate degrees generally earn more than those without them, and face lower risks of unemployment, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even those who experience a few years of college earn more money, on average, with less risk of unemployment, than those who merely graduate from high school, said Morton Schapiro, an economist who is the president of Northwestern University.
“You get some return even if you don’t get the sheepskin,” Mr. Shapiro said.
He warned against overlooking the intangible benefits of a college experience — even an incomplete experience — for those who might not apply what they learned directly to their chosen work.
“It’s not just about the economic return,” he said. “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.”
Nonetheless, Professor Rosenbaum said, high school counselors and teachers are not doing enough to alert students unlikely to earn a college degree to the perilous road ahead.
“I’m not saying don’t get the B.A,” he said. “I’m saying, let’s get them some intervening credentials, some intervening milestones. Then, if they want to go further in their education, they can.”
May 15th, 2010
David Korty
Black and Yellow – Newspaper with Plants
2010
Gouache, Matte Medium, Paper on Canvas
24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm)
The Flower Show” with David Korty, Chris Johanson and Stan Kaplan
Opens May 22, 6-9 PM
May 15th, 2010
By NICK BILTON
NY Times Published: May 12, 2010
Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy?
If you guessed the latter, you’re right. Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long; the United States Constitution, without any of its amendments, is a concise 4,543 words.
Facebook, one of the most popular social networks in the world, has more than 400 million registered people on its Web site. Half of these users log in to the service every day, the company says, and users spend 500 billion minutes on the site each month.
But in recent months, Facebook has revised its privacy policy to require users to opt out if they wish to keep information private, making most of that information public by default. Some personal data is now being shared with third-party Web sites.
As a result, the company has come under a blitz from privacy groups, government officials and its own users, who complain that the new policy is bewildering and the new opt-out settings too time-consuming to figure out and use.
“There are always trade-offs between providing comprehensive and precise granular controls and offering simple tools that may be broad and blunt,” said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook. “We have tried to offer the most comprehensive and detailed controls and comprehensive and detailed information about them.”
The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.
Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.
Facebook’s “Help Center” is available to assist users, but the word count for the privacy-related FAQ adds up to more than 45,000 words.
Even if a user changes all the settings on the privacy section of the site, certain pieces of information will still be shared across the site unless a user takes further action. For example, under the Account Settings option, in the Facebook Ads tab, two options are automatically turned on to share some information with advertising networks and friends. Anyone who wants to keep this information private must uncheck the boxes in that tab.
And still, some information will no longer remain private because Facebook has also added a feature, called community pages, which automatically links personal data, like hometown or university, to topic pages for that town or university. The only way to disappear from those topic pages is to delete personal data from Facebook.
May 13th, 2010By JIM DWYER
NY Times Published: May 11, 2010
How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?
A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.
They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.
It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.
“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”
They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22.
Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”
The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.”
The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as “spying for free,” Mr. Salzberg said.
The four students met in a computer room at N.Y.U., and have spent nearly every waking minute there for months. They understand the appeal of social networks.
“Certainly, as nerds, we have nowhere else to go,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re big nerds.”
“My social life has definitely collapsed in favor of maintaining a decent GPA and doing this,” Mr. Sofaer said.
One of their teachers, Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”
And the demand for a social network that gives users control is strong, Mr. Brunton said. “Everyone I talk to about this says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like that.’ ”
There have been at least two other attempts at decentralized networks, Mr. Brunton said, but he thought the Diaspora* group had a firmer plan. Its quick success in raising money, he said, showed the discontent over the state of privacy on the social sites. “We will have to see how widely this will be adopted by the non-nerds,” Mr. Brunton said. “But I don’t know a single person in the geek demographic who is not freaked out” by large social networks and cyber warehouses of information.
The Diaspora* crew has no doubts about the sprawling strengths and attractions of existing social networks, having gotten more than 2,000 followers of “joindiaspora” on Twitter in just a few weeks.
“So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re making it because we want to use it.”
May 12th, 2010
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
“I am much more self-censoring,” said Sam Jackson, a student.
By LAURA M. HOLSON
NY Times Published: May 8, 2010
Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.
Enlarge This Image
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Min Liu, thinking about her career, has begun removing personal information from the Web.
Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.
The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.
While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.
They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”
The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends’ supposedly private information, including personal chats.
Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”
He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.
His Facebook account, which he has had since 2005, is strictly personal. “I don’t want people to know what my movie rentals are,” he said. “If I am sharing something, I want to know what’s being shared with others.”
Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.
That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.
Elliot Schrage, who oversees Facebook’s global communications and public policy strategy, said it was a good thing that young people are thinking about what they put online. “We are not forcing anyone to use it,” he said of Facebook. But at the same time, companies like Facebook have a financial incentive to get friends to share as much as possible. That’s because the more personal the information that Facebook collects, the more valuable the site is to advertisers, who can mine it to serve up more targeted ads.
Two weeks ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to review the privacy policies of social networks to make sure consumers are not being deliberately confused or misled. The action was sparked by a recent change to Facebook’s settings that forced its more than 400 million users to choose to “opt out” of sharing private information with third-party Web sites instead of “opt in,” a move which confounded many of them.
Mr. Schrage of Facebook said, “We try diligently to get people to understand the changes.”
But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.
Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said.
Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.
Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of culture, media and communication at New York University and author of “Privacy in Context,” a book about information sharing in the digital age, said teenagers were naturally protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood, and the frequency with which companies change privacy rules has taught them to be wary.
That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student at Tufts University. Recently she sought to limit the information a friend could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. “I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn’t,” she said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to figure it out after finals.
“I don’t think they would look out for me,” she said. “I have to look out for me.”
May 9th, 2010By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: May 8, 2010
DEATH NOTICE: The Tooth Fairy died last night of complications related to obesity. Born Jan. 1, 1946, the Tooth Fairy is survived by 400 million children living largely in North America and Western Europe, known collectively as “The Baby Boomers.” “We’ll certainly miss the Tooth Fairy,” one of them said following her death, which coincided with the 2010 British elections and rioting in Greece. The Tooth Fairy had only one surviving sibling who will now look after her offspring alone: Mr. Bond Market of Wall Street and the City of London.
Sitting in America, it’s hard to grasp the importance of the British elections and the Greek riots. Nothing to do with us, right? Well, I’d pay attention to the drama playing out here. It may be coming to a theater near you.
The meta-story behind the British election, the Greek meltdown and our own Tea Party is this: Our parents were “The Greatest Generation,” and they earned that title by making enormous sacrifices and investments to build us a world of abundance. My generation, “The Baby Boomers,” turned out to be what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation.” We’ve eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.
Now we and our kids together need to become “The Regeneration” — one that raises incomes anew but in a way that is financially and ecologically sustainable. It will take a big adjustment.
We baby boomers in America and Western Europe were raised to believe there really was a Tooth Fairy, whose magic would allow conservatives to cut taxes without cutting services and liberals to expand services without raising taxes. The Tooth Fairy did it by printing money, by bogus accounting and by deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising home values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.
Greece, for instance, became the General Motors of countries. Like G.M.’s management, Greek politicians used the easy money and subsidies that came with European Union membership not to make themselves more competitive in a flat world, but more corrupt, less willing to collect taxes and uncompetitive. Under Greek law, anyone in certain “hazardous” jobs could retire with full pension at 50 for women and 55 for men — including hairdressers who use a lot of chemical dyes and shampoos. In Britain, everyone over 60 gets an annual allowance to pay heating bills and can ride any local bus for free. That’s really sweet — if you can afford it. But Britain, where 25 percent of the government’s budget is now borrowed, can’t anymore.
Britain and Greece are today’s poster children for the wrenching new post-Tooth Fairy politics, where baby boomers will have to accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debts tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re headed for intergenerational conflict throughout the West.
David Willetts, a British Conservative candidate and the author of a new book, “The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future — and how they can give it back,” told me that the Tories’ most effective campaign ad was a poster showing a newborn baby under the headline: “Dad’s eyes, Mum’s nose, Gordon Brown’s debt.” Beneath was the caption: “Labour’s debt crisis: Every child in Britain is born owing £17,000. They deserve better.”
What is most striking about the British election, said John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, was that it may be the first Western election “based on pain.” All the leading candidates warned voters that “cuts are coming,” but none were even close to honest about how deep.
Here is how The Financial Times described it on April 26: “The next government will have to cut public sector pay, freeze benefits, slash jobs, abolish a range of welfare entitlements and take the ax to programs such as school building and road maintenance.” Too bad no party won a majority mandate in the British elections to do this job.
After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.
It’s no fun. Just ask Greek parliamentarians, who, in the wake of announcing radical austerity measures, found their Parliament besieged by rioting anti-austerity protestors reportedly chanting, “Burn it down! That brothel Parliament!”
My takeaway is that U.S. and European politicians — please don’t laugh — are going to have to get a lot smarter and more honest.
To be the Regeneration, they’ll have to figure out how to raise some taxes to increase revenues, while cutting other taxes to stimulate growth; they’ll have to cut some services to save money, while investing in new infrastructure to grow economic capacity. We have got to use every dollar wisely now. Because we’ve eaten through our reserves, because the lords of discipline, the Electronic Herd of bond traders, are back with a vengeance — and because that Tooth Fairy, she be dead.
May 9th, 2010
“Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin,” 1927; oil on wood
Through August 30
May 8th, 2010
Nature is unmanicured in the Alabama Hills, a rock-climbing area in the Owens Valley.
By VANESSA GREGORY
NY Times Published: May 7, 2010
ACROSS the Owens River, a climber ascended a chalk-marked cliff with such strength and skill that his movements appeared effortless. I, however, had a death grip on the rock, fear in my stomach, and a leg, balanced on a thin ledge about 70 feet up, that shook from nerves and fatigue.
With a final, clumsy motion, I clipped the rope that was tied to my harness into two carabiners at the route’s end. Now totally safe, I was able to relax, lean back from the anchor and appreciate the surrounding Owens River Gorge. I looked south to the river, shaded by cottonwood trees, coursing down between 300-foot-high walls of volcanic tuff.
The gorge, well known among climbers, sits on the northern edge of the Owens Valley in eastern California, a place of austere beauty and violent history, from huge volcanic eruptions 730,000 years ago to bitter water wars waged in the last century. This high desert valley — one of the world’s deepest — is sometimes dismissed by travelers zooming up Highway 395 to the ski resort at Mammoth Lakes and, in the summer, to the campgrounds and trailheads of the High Sierra. But it’s a worthy destination, especially pleasant in fall and spring, when the Sierra Nevada range on its western flank and the White Mountains, to the east, are mostly inaccessible because of snow.
On my last visit, taken with my husband, we started by exploring the Alabama Hills, near the small town of Lone Pine, and slowly drove north on Highway 395 to Bishop and the nearby gorge. We were traveling in the Sierra’s rain shadow, where the low rainfall — less than six inches most years — results in a color scheme for the wide-open landscape that runs to browns and muted greens. Desert dust, wind and extreme temperatures are common, but the Owens Valley also shelters marvels, including pink, fist-size flowers that bloom on cactus plants in spring. I easily found other loyalists.
At Elevation, an outdoor gear shop in Lone Pine, I met Myles Moser, a 22-year-old sales clerk and climber, who spent his first six months in the Owens Valley camping out of a 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle he had customized with solar panels, refrigeration and removable sleeping pads. When we spoke, he had upgraded to more spacious quarters that still kept him near nature: a 1995 Chevrolet van.
“I’m totally out here every day,” said Mr. Moser, who had been climbing in the Alabama Hills before his morning shift. “I climb and I never run into anybody else. It’s this new, radical adventure.”
Hollywood preceded such outdoor enthusiasts in the Alabama Hills. Movie directors came to the plateau, which is strewn with weather-worn granite boulders set below dark Sierra peaks, at least as early as the 1920s. Scenes from “Gunga Din,” “How the West Was Won” and “The Lone Ranger” were filmed here. More recently, the hills appeared as backdrop in parts of “Gladiator,” “Iron Man” and a fantastically melodramatic Meat Loaf video.
My husband and I climbed in the Alabama Hills and took a self-directed hike that wandered through sandy washes and sagebrush and skirting the edge of Tuttle Creek. Marked trails are scarce, but a signed path leads to a granite arch through which Lone Pine Peak and Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states, are perfectly framed.
Some Owens Valley wonders are less natural. A giant pipe near the rim of the Owens River Gorge is one reminder that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power owns 312,000 acres of Eastern Sierra land. About 35 percent of the city’s water supply originates in the rivers, streams and groundwater of this region, and is carried downhill for more than 200 miles through multi-million-dollar aqueducts.
That water was famously hard won more than a century ago, largely through questionable maneuverings by William Mulholland, the department’s first superintendent and chief engineer. His tactics would later help inspire the movie “Chinatown.” In the 1920s valley farmers (soon to lose precious water for their crops) fought Los Angeles by dynamiting the aqueduct and opening weirs to let the river flow into Owens Lake. Today the exposed lake bed is a strange feature, wet in some sections and white with saline in others — an unusually visible example of the effects of water diversions.
“The Owens Valley, for being a desert, had a very high water table,” said Carla Scheidlinger, president of the Owens Valley Committee, an environmental group. “The Owens Valley had streams and meadows and even marshes.”
Lawsuits and growing environmental awareness have improved some of the impact. The City of Los Angeles permits hiking, climbing, birding and fishing on much of its Owens Valley land, and it has partly restored water in certain areas, including a limited amount in the lower 62 miles of the Owens River.
After a day in the Alabama Hills, we went roughly parallel to the river as we drove to Manzanar National Historic Site, where United States citizens and residents of Japanese descent were held in a detention camp during World War II. The federal government, fearful of sabotage, made more than 10,000 men, women and children live in wood and tar-paper barracks after forcing them from their homes and businesses. The barracks are gone, but the free interpretive center, in the auditorium of the former Manzanar High School, does a fine job chronicling this American shame.
Exhibitions mix old newspaper clippings, racist cartoons and radio broadcasts that illuminate the nation’s hysterical mood with artifacts evoking daily life at Manzanar: a gardener’s lawn mower, a child’s sketch of a watchtower, a basketball scorebook from Block 16, its game results neatly recorded in pencil.
“I was learning, as best one could learn in Manzanar, what it meant to live in America,” reads a quotation from John Tateishi , a man who had lived in Manzanar as a child. “But I was also learning the sometimes bitter price one has to pay for it.”
Manzanar closed in 1945, but a white memorial obelisk, erected in the cemetery by camp residents and the subject of a famous photograph by Ansel Adams, still stands in sandy soil behind the center.
A few miles away, tiny Independence is home to a very different attraction, the Still Life Cafe, where we stopped for lunch. Run by a French expatriate couple, Michel and Malika Patron, it’s a classic bistro in an improbable spot.
“I was attracted to the desert because of the space and all that,” said Mr. Patron, explaining his journey from Reims, France, to Los Angeles and then to the remote Owens Valley.
Specials on my visit included onion soup gratinée ($10.95), moules marinière with pommes frites ($23.95) and a satisfyingly thick burger topped with caramelized onions and Stilton cheese ($15.95).
After lunch, we headed to Bishop. Highway 395 slices right through Bishop’s main business district, as it does those of Lone Pine and Independence. But with 3,575 residents at last count, Bishop is the Owens Valley’s biggest town, and has some good restaurants and shops.
I knew I’d want caffeine before descending the steep trail into the gorge on Day 3, so we spent the morning clutching mugs of house-roasted coffee at Bishop’s Black Sheep Espresso Bar. Next door, Mountain Light Gallery sells wilderness photographs by the mountaineer Galen Rowell, and by his wife, Barbara.
The Rowells, who both died in 2002, opened the gallery when they lived in Bishop, and it’s now run by family members. Mr. Rowell took photos around the world for publications like National Geographic, but many of his color-rich images were taken in this part of California. I coveted “Back Road Through Owens Valley, Near Bishop,” depicting a gravel road bordered by lush grasses, the sun setting orange and purple over distant mountains ($675 for a 20-by-30-inch print). It was both beautiful and lonely, capturing the spirit of the Owens Valley more eloquently than any words.
If You Go
Sierra Mountain Guides (312 North Main Street, Bishop; 760-648-1122; sierramtnguides.com) offers rock-climbing courses with certified guides. Instructional classes are $375 for the first person and $60 for each additional person.
Information about camping and recreation on public lands is available at the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitors Center (junction of Highway 395 and State Route 136; 760-876-6222; www.fs.fed.us/r5/inyo).
The Manzanar National Historic Site (760-878-2194; nps.gov/manz) is nine miles north of Lone Pine on Highway 395.
Mountain Light Gallery (106 South Main Street, Bishop; 760-873-7700; mountainlight.com) sells photographs by Galen and Barbara Rowell and others and offers workshops by professional landscape photographers.
WHERE TO EAT
Authentic croque monsieur and salade niçoise are at the Still Life Cafe (135 South Edwards, Independence; 760-878-2555). It’s best to call ahead: hours can be inconsistent.
The Black Sheep Espresso Bar (124 South Main Street, behind Spellbinder Books, Bishop; 760-872-4142; blacksheepcoffeeroasters.com) serves coffee, bagels and other snacks.
WHERE TO STAY
The Bureau of Land Management’s Tuttle Creek Campground (west of Lone Pine on Horseshoe Meadow Road; blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/bishop.html) offers 85 basic but scenic sites; $5 a night.
The Best Western Creekside Inn (725 North Main Street, Bishop; 800-273-3550; bishopcreekside.com) has a pool and wi-fi. Rates from $110.
May 7th, 2010