Code For A Cause - The OLPC Hackathon
Hey Everyone, big news to announce.
The USC “Association for Computing Machinery” (ACM) and “Free Culture USC” are partnering on an upcoming “Code for a Cause” programming event on the USC campus. The last “Code for a Cause event”, called “SS12″ had students develop innovative, empowering software projects for disabled persons. This upcoming event will focus on the theory and the technology behind open-source software and the emerging “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) platform. In case you have not heard about the OLPC, it is the organization making the famed “$100 laptop” that is being sent to the world’s poorest children to give them a chance at education. The OLPC’s “XO” laptop is itself based on open-source software and is set up to easily allow people to make software for it.
Like in the SS12 event, we hope to attract students ranging from freshmen undergraduates all the way through Ph.D candidates and put them in mixed teams of about five people. After an in-depth introduction to the OLPC platform and a kickoff ceremony, student teams will be challenged over a week-long period to develop open-source software for the OLPC platform. Teams will be given guidelines for their projects, but be left enough discretion to leverage their own creativity to produce unique solutions. Software experts and OLPC hardware will be made available during office-hours throughout the week of the event. At the end of the week, students will submit their projects and receive prizes for their work at a closing ceremony. The goal of this event is to raise awareness for open-source software, to promote the OLPC platform, and to be educational and fun for all participants.
Additional Links:
While the web site for this new event is under construction, you can visit http://ss12.info to learn more about our last event.
To learn more about the OLPC, visit http://laptop.org.
More news to follow shortly. Feel free to contact me via email if you have any questions - dhodge at usc dot edu
- David
free course materials
Yaay to free stuff! Columbia has a site on their free culture blog that can let you download a whole bunch of good course materials without having to pay for them.
check it:
http://www.freeculturecolumbia.org/archives/12
Returns for In Rainbows
An interesting article over on iTwire makes the following claim about Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment:
According to consumer research firm comScore’s analysis of the behaviour of 2 million online users, 62 percent of people downloading the album did so without paying.
Among those that did pay, the average price tendered was $US2.26. It’s generally held that artists make around $US1 per physical album sold and less for downloads, so even after allowing for hosting and other costs Radiohead is almost certainly ahead by adopting this model.
So yeah, people didn’t pay all the time (or even the majority of the time). And when they did pay, they paid a lot less than we have gone to expect for album. This aside, Raidohead the artist made twice as much. So band wins, record label loses. An interesting development indeed.
University of Oregon and the RIAA
Not only is their football team better, but their administration sure has a hell of a lot more backbone:
The AG’s office has some severe criticism of the RIAA’s tactics in the memorandum supporting the motion to quash the subpoena. Before the lawsuit was filed, deputy attorney general Randolph Geller spoke to RIAA counsel Katheryn Coggon and assured her that the school would preserve all the relevant data. Despite that, the RIAA told the court that there was a “very real danger the ISP will not long preserve” the data it wanted. The AG points out that the RIAA neglected to tell the court that the school had already guaranteed that the evidence would be kept as long as necessary.
The school also says that the subpoena would put an undue burden on it, given the amount of effort required to discern the identities of those flagged by SafeNet. “In short, the subpoena requires the University to create discoverable material to assist Plaintiffs in their litigation rather than merely disclose existing documents,” argues the school, citing case law that indicates that non-parties “are not required to create documents that do not exist, simply for the purposes of discovery.”
The Blog Effect on The Black Kids
A very well written piece pertaining to the effect blogs have on up-and-coming bands. Technology isn’t always necessarily the savior.
Students for Free Culture in NYTimes
Check out this article on Students for Free Culture in the NYTimes today. If you look hard enough, you might even see a quote from one of the FC.USC members…
EMI’s New CEO and the Record Indsutry
Interesting piece on TechDirt about the new sheriff over at EMI. Seems like he might be thinking in new ways. Big ups:
…reader Eric Samson writes in to let us know that EMI’s new bosses may finally be adding some sanity back to the process. EMI was bought out by a private equity firm recently, and the CEO of that firm apparently took the Radiohead story as a reason to email the folks at EMI and tell them to pay attention. Specifically, he said that it’s “a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy” and that the industry “has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold” and finally, that the industry has screwed up: “rather than embracing digitalisation and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, the industry has stuck its head in the sand.” Amazing. It only took someone from totally outside the industry to buy one of the major labels and tell its executives the obvious for them to hear it. Now, let’s see if EMI can convince the RIAA, who supposedly represents EMI (among many others) that perhaps suing everyone and fighting the inevitable tide isn’t such a great idea.
Audio Appropriation Exhbiit in San Diego
This Stealing Audio in San Diego exhibit sounds fascinating. Obviously talk of remixes, appropriation, samples, etc. is nothing new in relation to digital content but this sounds like it could put an interesting spin on it:
he show features recent work by 16 artists, including Dave Muller, Dario Robleto, Alyce Santoro, and Diana Thater, that range in media from audio installations to painting. Some literally create sound by adapting material not typically used for that purpose, as in Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s ‘Untitled (series #3),’ from 2001. Channeling John Cage and 1950s concrete music, the installation floats a collection of china inside inflatable wading pools to produce noise through the chance rippling of the water. Others take from audio material to compose visual work. Tim Bavington, for example, presents well known pop songs as blocks of bright color in painted abstractions—greatest hits from his oeuvre include the painterly covers ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You (Solo)’ and ‘My, My (Into the Black).’ All the work in the show demonstrates a slightly different way of incorporating audible media and repurposed material, proving the museum’s success in reflecting these two ubiquitous forces in contemporary cultural production in its collection.
Late September/Early October 2007 News Roundup
This is the first of what will hopefully be a long line of news updates here on the FreeCulture USC Chapter Blog.
Over at Arstechnica there is good coverage of the recent RIAA trial Capitol Records vs. Jammie Thomas. They start on the first day with opening statements, continue with the second day, cover the confusion over the jury requirement that an actual transfer take place, and finally report the verdict. To make a long story short, Thomas lost the case and the jury awarded Capitol Records $222,000 dollars in damages. The best part of the trial? A Sony executive saying that the RIAA’s anti-P2P lawsuits is a money pit, and at the same time admitting that they’ve lost money on the program.
The fight over the 700mhz spectrum is heating up over at the FCC, with Verizon suing the FCC over its open access requirements, Google attacking Verizon over its lawsuit, Frontline asking forcefully for the FCC to bar the Verizon from the auction, and AT&T requesting changes to the public safety requirements. Don’t worry, Microsoft won’t let itself be left out of the fun (more information about white space electronics here). Even Apple looks like it might start getting in on the hot hot 700mhz action.
Amazon.com launched its DRM-free online music store on September 25th, check it out here.
Radiohead is launching its new album “In Rainbows” on October 10th, only online (until december), in DRM-free mp3 format. The kicker? You pay whatever you want for the digital version.
It’s been a mixed month for peer-to-peer sites, with torrentspy disappearing from computers in the US and Demonoid disappearing from computers in Canada. Suprnova, however, is back up!
The Pirate Bay is suing multiple Swedish media companies for “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.” Good show.
[EDITORIAL]: “Of course, They’re Lying To Us”
“They’re lying to us, ” was an activist’s answer, protesting the G8 summit in the fields of Rostock, Germany, to why he traveled 500 miles and endured attacks by dogs and German police. Rostock, Germany is South of the Baltic Sea close to Sweden. The activists was talking about the “leaders” of the “Free World” who, again, employed SWAT-like police and helicopters to attack them. USC Free Culture sends props out to the protesters in Germany.
There is a growing, global “knowledge ecology” movement. USC Free Culture is proud to join these struggles. This is the next stage of the ages-old American struggle to secure freedom and basic human rights, most couragously led by African-Americans who have protested the hypocracy at the core of the American experiment, first in ending slavery then initiating the civil rights struggle of the 50s and 60s. That history imploded in the identity politics and blowback of the 1970s. But the explosion in 1992 demonstrated a hunger that has not disappeared. Now, a new generation of Americans are demanding fundamental changes.