We have a new update on the Pentagon Propaganda story we previously reported on here and here.

Congressional Quarterly is reporting today that the Federal Communications Commission is investigating this matter. The story says, "The FCC is looking into whether TV networks and certain on-air analysts broke the law by failing to disclose to viewers that the apparently independent analysts were in fact part of a Pentagon-funded information campaign, a spokesman for the commission said."

I moved two months ago and one month ago I sent in a new voter registration form to update my address in Washington, DC.

For the past month, on the DC Board of Elections web site, when I searched for my "voter registration status" I got the following message:Registered Voter
PENDING APPROVAL PER RECEIPT OF SIGNED APPLICATIONOf course, the signed application is what I sent in a month ago.  I called on Friday to see if perhaps the online database just wasn't updated.  The woman told me it was, but they'd gotten a ton of registrations and would be processing them through the weekend.  "Don't worry," she said, "but call back on Monday to make sure."

Today, Monday, is the voter registration deadline for DC.  I just called.  This time, I got a busy signal at the Board of Elections.

Our friends at the Brennan Center put it succinctly in a piece on The Hill's blog today:Wall Street routinely doles out large campaign contributions to members of Congress. In the current election cycle, the financial services sector (which includes insurance and real sector), contributed more money to candidates for Congress, the presidency and political parties than did any other sector, totaling $339.6 million from 2007 through today. Both chambers' banking committees also benefit handsomely. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, PACs and employees of the securities and investment industry are the second largest source of cash for members of the Senate Banking committee. During the 2008 election cycle, these contributors raised $11.7 million for the 21 members of that Committee. Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) received about $4.3 million since 2003, or half of all contributions to his campaign coffers.

Does campaign cash influence legislation and regulation? When Congress last debated regulation (or rather, de-regulation) of the financial industry in 1999, a study by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that members of Congress who supported the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act received twice as much money from commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies as those who opposed the measure. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the product of many years of lobbying by the financial industry and allowed for the loosening of bank regulations that had been in place since the Great Depression.Gutting regulations that had been in place since the Great Depression, leading to a financial crisis that has us moving closer to a repeat of the Great Depression, all because of a pesky little privately-funded campaign system in which Wall Street used its financial might to keep Congress quiet.

When public attention shifts beyond the bailout to the longer term concern of our economy -- and who makes the decisions and regulations going forward -- we need to make sure we fix our political system so it's not a money game that continues to reward the wealthiest interests at the expense of the rest of us.  Here's how:Just last week, the Fair Elections Now Act, which would establish a system of voluntary public financing for Congressional elections, was introduced with bi-partisan support in the House. Last year, Senators Durbin (D-Ill.) and Specter (R-Pa.) introduced the Senate version of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would create a voluntary public financing system for Senate candidates. With the introduction of its House counterpart this week by Representatives Larson (D-Conn.) and Jones (R-N.C.) (both from Clean Elections states), lawmakers are presented with a bipartisan, bicameral effort to undertake serious and lasting structural reform. Public financing would eliminate the perils of special interest cash by establishing strict spending limits, enabling small donors and greatly increasing the power of ordinary voters to hold Congress accountable.

Joe Torres at Free Press posted a blog yesterday titled "Hate Speech Rises in the Media" which gives some examples of the increase of hate speech in the mainstream media.

ANY hate speech is more than our society should have, but it's especially alarming when it is increasing. So where are the voices to counter the hate speech? Silenced. Not by force. Not by intimidation. But by the media ownership structure.

People of color who are being attacked by talking heads in the media have little capacity to respond or frame the message themselves because they can't get into the media market.

On September 25th Common Cause President Bob Edgar, Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., CC advisor Joseph Montville and I attended a dinner hosted by the United Nations Office of the World Council of Churches and other religions groups that featured Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Our involvement was a part of our upcoming public diplomacy visit to Iran to take place later this fall.  The theme of the event was, "Has not one God created us?," and the guest list included representatives from more than 20 world religions as well as other prominent figures such as UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockman and former Norwegian Prime Minister, Rev. Kjell Bondevik.

The event was held at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan and was not without the controversy one might expect from a visit from the current President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Fewer than 100 protestors outside the Hyatt railed against Ahmadinejad and tried to antagonize those of us who were interested in having a dialogue with him (although some press reports suggested the turnout was much higher it wasn't a very big crowd).  The protests were sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, Concerned Women for America, Arabs for Israel, American Maronite Union among others.  The groups were angry for what they believed was a feting of Ahmadinejad instead of the dialogue that it was.

The sky is falling on Wall Street and now more than ever we need all the information we can detailing the possible impacts for Americans. What are the news stories about the financial bailout telling you? Do we know any real details about proposed legislation? How many and what kinds of experts have been asked about these details? Where are the headlines with possible outcomes for Colorado? All I can find are articles mentioning the bailout, only to have the rest of the article about horse race campaign issues.

We see the same headlines in every newspaper in every town. Where are the guts of the stories?

We need a diverse marketplace of ideas in times like these, not superficial headlines that are sent down to all the local newspapers and TV stations from just a few corporate owners. Look at what several Colorado newspapers are running and notice that all but one are written by the Associated Press, instead of local journalists.

The Denver Post Bailout defeated in House; stocks plunge (Associated Press)
The Rocky Mountain News Stunning defeat in House for economic bailout; stock plunge a record (Associated Press)
Durango Herald Durango businesses feel the crunch (local story)
The Pueblo Chieftain DENIED! - House defeats $700B financial markets bailout (Associated Press)
Daily Camera Stunning defeat for economy bailout; stocks plunge (Associated Press)
The Coloradoan House rejects bailout plan (Associated Press)

Watch it live online!

Today and tomorrow St. John's University School of Law in NYC is hosting a symposium titled MAKING HISTORY: Race, Gender and the Media in the 2008 Elections.

This symposium will investigate the subject of race, gender and the media in the 2008 elections. Many democracies, such as the United Kingdom, Argentina, India, Israel, the Philippines, Pakistan, Liberia and other countries have or have had women heads of state, and other countries, like Peru and Bolivia, have elected presidents who are members of racial minority groups. However, the United States has never elected a woman or a person of color as president and has traditionally discriminated against both women and minority voters and candidates. In 2008, we stand poised  to witness the historic event of a black male or a white woman heading the presidential ballot on behalf of a major political party.

WATCH LIVE
All sessions of the MAKING HISTORY Symposia will be broadcast live via the St. John's University Web site. Viewers are also encouraged to submit questions to panelists for any session.

Voter Hot Line Upgraded for Election

With the Nov. 4 presidential election less than four weeks away, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is gearing up its IT systems to handle an expected 150,000 Election Day telephone calls on voting-related issues to its toll-free hot line.

The Washington-based nonprofit group created a basic telephone hot line -- 1-866-OUR-VOTE -- four years ago for the 2004 election, using a system of linked phone lines to connect voters with volunteer lawyers and paralegals.

Because it used traditional phone architecture, some of the hot line offices had an overflow of calls that couldn't be handled quickly enough, while others had excess capacity and volunteers who were available but couldn't be reached by voters. The problem was that the system had been set up manually and once created, it couldn't be quickly changed to adjust to incoming call patterns.

Jon Greenbaum, director of the committee's Voting Rights Project, said the group needed to find a better way to handle the Election Day crush of expected calls and help more voters deal with problems as they cast their ballots.

For the 2006 off-year elections, the group brought in Angel.com, a McLean, Va.-based call center and interactive voice response system vendor. Using Angel.com's Web-based Virtual Call Center application, the Election Day hot line can be monitored in real-time online and reconfigured instantly to re-route calls to available hot line volunteers across the country.

The D.C. Board released its report on its investigation into an incident from last month's primary where some 1,500 phantom votes were recorded on Sequoias tabulator after being uploaded from a paper ballot system. There should have been just over 300 votes, instead of thousands, from Precinct 141.

Shafer had originally claimed (as usual) human error and static electricity were to blame. When the incident was first discovered in September, Shafer told the Washington Post: "There's absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No."

Turns out, Shafer lied. Again. As the D.C. report notes Sequoia was "too quick to exonerate itself and the equipment used in the tabulation process" and that "the evidence appears to indicate that there was a problem both in equipment (the server) and in the software"...

Last month, the Computer Security Group at UC Santa Barbara released a video showing exactly how to hack a touch-screen Sequoia voting system --- in such a way that even a manual count of the system's "paper trails" would not have revealed the hack. In 2006, just days before the general elections, The BRAD BLOG revealed how a yellow button on the back of Sequoia's touch-screen systems could be pressed in such a way as to allow any voter to vote as many times as he/she liked.

Sequoia is America's number three voting equipment vendor, allowed to do business in 17 states, including D.C. The same machines that have been failing spectacularly in recent primary elections will be used again, as is, in this November 4th's general election. Even the yellow buttons are still there.

The incident in D.C., however (as well as the one in Palm Beach County, FL, where their op-scan systems were unable to count the same ballots the same way twice!) was on one of the company's paper ballot electronic voting systems. From WaPo late last week [emphasis added]...

The report dismisses Sequoias theories that human error or static discharge, not defective software or hardware, was at fault when a cartridge from Precinct 141 added thousands of votes. It commits the special committee to examine the effectiveness of the three-member elections board and its top staff.

But those issues cannot be resolved before the Nov. 4 election, which officials expect will draw a record number of voters. The committees recommendations include actions to be taken Election Day.

A significant step is to train poll workers to persuade voters to use optical-scan machines instead of electronic touch-screen ones, although the primary night blunder has been traced to a cartridge from an optical-scan machine.

[Original article accepts comments]

• UC Computer Scientists Release Video on How to Hack a Sequoia Touch-Screen Voting Machine
• D.C. Election 'Glitch' Blamed on Sequoia Voting Machine Failure
• Sequoia Op-Scan Ballot Counters Fail to Count Same Way Twice
• Sequoia Voting Systems site hacked

Stevan Harnad, OA Publishing is OA, but OA is Not OA Publishing, Open Access Archivangelism, October 10, 2008.  Excerpt:

Many silly, mindless things have been standing in the way of the optimal and inevitable (i.e., universal Open Access) for years now (canards about permissions, peer review, preservation, etc.), but perhaps the biggest of them is the persistent conflation of OA with OA publishing: OA means free online access to refereed journal articles ("gratis" OA means access only, "libre" OA means also various re-use rights).

OA to refereed journal articles can be provided in two ways: by publishing in an OA journal that provides OA (OA publishing, "Gold" OA) or by publishing in a non-OA journals and self-archiving the article ("Green" OA).
Hence Green OA, which is full-blooded OA, is OA, but it is not OA publishing -- just as apples are fruit, but fruit are not apples.

Hence the many OA mandates that are being adopted by universities and research funders worldwide are not Gold OA publishing mandates, they are Green OA self-archiving mandates.

It is not doing the OA cause, or progress towards universal OA one bit of good to keep portraying it as a publishing reform movement, with Gold OA publishing as its sole and true goal.

The OA movement's sole and true goal is OA itself, universal OA....

(I post this out of daily frustration at continuing to see OA spoken of as synonymous with OA publishing, and of even hearing Green OA self-archiving mandates misdescribed as "OA publishing mandates" [e.g., 1, 2].) ...

Stevan Harnad, Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics, Open Access Archivangelism, October 10, 2008. 

Summary:  Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-book citations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

Comment.  I support OA metadata for all non-OA literature and the development of book metrics from open metadata.  But I depart from Stevan on one premise:  he says that OA for full-text books cannot be mandated, but I think it can.  There are reasons why book mandates are more difficult than article mandates to implement well and fairly, and why none yet exist.  But the difficulties can be met.

Richard Sietmann, Open Access 2.0: Freier Zugang zu Forschungsdaten, Heise Online, October 10, 2008.  Read it in German or Google's English.

The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Audio about OA for community editing and enlargement.

Like the lists of Video about OA, Educational materials about OA, and the official list of Events celebrating Open Access Day, this one is timed to support Open Access Day (October 14, 2008) and capture the many new resources now under development for it.

The first version of the list is short, just enough to justify a launch.  If you know of audio recordings about OA (not just recordings which happen to be OA), please take a moment to add them.  OAD contributors must register, but registration is free and easy.

Savas Parastatidis has released the Word plug-in, OfficeSWORD.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From Parastatidis' announcement:

When we started thinking about what we could do to support researchers with tools and services, interoperability with existing formats, protocols, and services was amongst our primary goals. The Conference Management Tool (CMT), eJournal, Chem4Word, Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007, “Famulus”, etc. are all trying to implement as many of the community standards that are out there (as time/resources allow us of course). We also wanted to support the entire research lifecycle, from client tools to services....

During discussions with the Fedora Commons and DSpace communities, it was suggested to us that an open source plugin for Word 2007 that talks with any repository service through SWORD would be a good idea. I finally managed to put some time aside to develop such a plugin and upload it to Codeplex. You’ll need VS.NET 2008 SP1 to load the code and run it (there is currently no separate installer I am afraid but we are working on one). Please let me know if you have any issues. I am sure the code is not perfect and it only covers the basic cases. I hope that the community will pick it up and evolve it.

Parastatidis works with the Technical Computing @ Microsoft group and released the source code for OfficeSword under a Microsoft public license.

Microsoft Research has released Beta 1 of its Research-Output Repository Platform.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the site:

MSR’s Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) aims to provide the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization’s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused documentation. New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets—such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.

Microsoft is releasing the source code under the Microsoft Research License Agreement, which allows essentially all uses except commercial use and has a share-alike clause.

PS:  For background, see our past posts on the Microsoft repository platform.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider papers at the OA Journal of Instrumentation were downloaded 55,000 times in their first two months online.  (Thanks to Enrico Balli.)

Andrea Gawrylewski, A match made in open access heaven? TheScientist, October 10, 2008.  Excerpt:

...According to an Email sent to editors at BMC by the BMC publisher Matt Cockerill, BMC will be an autonomous operating unit within Springer, and everything remains business as usual....

"If BMC's presence within the organization means Springer moves closer to the BMC model and not BMC closer to the Springer Open Choice model -- then this will be a very good thing for open access," Rebecca Kennison, director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, told The Scientist in an Email. "Time will tell."

With BMC under its wing, Springer will offer authors three publishing choices, depending on the journal they choose in which to publish their [work]: the traditional subscription model, the Open Choice model, and the BMC automatic open access model. "All of the business models are going to grow in the future," Eric Merkel-Sobotta, spokesperson for Springer told The Scientist, adding that they aren't going to stop adding journals under the subscription model, or the BMC model. There's no publishing model that fits all, he added, and no publishing business model is for free. "We don't refer to them as business models for nothing -- they're not an ideology."

"I think people are very interested in seeing how you put these two diff publishing models together," Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told The Scientist. The AAP has been a vocal opponent of the National Institutes of Health's mandate requiring federally-funded researchers to deposit a copy of their papers into PubMed Central. "It's exciting to see [the two publishing models] get out of silos," Schroeder added. "I'm anxious to see how it all evolves."

The Library of Congress is calling for public comments on new exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.  (Thanks to Kevin Smith.)  Comments are due by December 2, 2008.

Top Concerns Survey 2008, a report from SCONUL (the UK Society of College, National & University Libraries), 2008.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

See esp. Table 2.2 on p. 18. Of eight surveyed concerns, institutional repositories ranked fourth and OA publishing ranked last in the level of "high concern" they raised.  The top three concerns were "access management", "provision of e-resources", and "other".