The current state of soccer discourse really saddens me. There’s a new article in ESPN by Gab Marcotti about the current race for third place in the English Premier League. Marcotti feels that if two teams finish level on points, there should be a playoff, with the winner taking third place and the loser fourth. Currently in that scenario, the team with a superior goal difference would take third.
I can understand preferring a playoff to goal difference. It’s more exciting, certainly. It’s what makes the FA Cup so great (and by contrast, the Champions League so bad): the win or go home atmosphere. However, this is not the primary reason that Marcotti provides. Instead, he incredibly believes that this would be a more equitable solution.
The quote is here:
I can hear the “goal difference” brigade getting up in arms already. There are still people who believe that goal difference measures the relative strength and performance of a team over the course of a season.
Well, most analytics guys — and, perhaps, common sense — will tell you that it does not. The object of the game is to win matches and, barring that, drawing them. It’s on that basis that we award and use points to determine who wins the league.
Marcotti has clearly never talked to an analytics guy (we prefer the term soccer nerds anyway): all analytics guys, and common sense, would tell you that goal difference does measure the relative strength and performance of a team over the course of a season, often better than a team’s point total. The point is that in soccer there are only three kinds of results (a win, a loss, and a draw), but all kinds of performances can lead to those results. A 1-0 win and an 8-2 win both give you three points, but the latter is usually indicative of a better performance. If you keep scraping 1-0 wins together, you are not as good as a team consistently putting up 3-0 scorelines. Analytics guys, unlike Mr. Marcotti evidently, understand there is a fair amount of luck in football, and close games can swing either way. A team can lose by a goal and still have been the better team on the pitch; that is close to impossible if the team loses by six. The results bear this out, as goal difference is a better predictor of future results than points totals (this concept, with different units, is also true in American football, basketball, baseball, etc.). Over the course of the season, goal difference is a reasonable proxy for team talent.
Marcotti defends his solution by attacking a non-existent argument in favor of goal difference: that it encourages attacking play. This is an argument people made for certain other rule changes, such as making a win worth three points instead of two. It is even a possible argument for the second tiebreaker, which is the number of goals scored. However, it is rarely, if ever, used as an argument in favor of using goal difference to settle ties in the standings. Some of the other straw men Marcotti sets up and beats down: logistical problems (nobody except Premier League execs give a crap about that) and tradition (not valid for English football, as the first tiebreaker used to be goal average).
The best part though is this quote. It is so unreservedly stupid that I can’t help admiring it a little. It’s like a toddler being so proud of falling down, you kind of have to respect it. Ready? Here it is.
The other problem with goal difference is freak results. If your opponent’s starting goalkeeper gets injured in the first minute and the substitute gets sent off in the third minute, you will play 87 minutes against a nonkeeper in goal (and against 10 men). That’s a totally artificial situation, granted, but you might end up winning 8-0, not because of your merits but because of the opposition’s sheer bad luck.
Did you catch it? Marcotti wants ties decided by a playoff to guard against freak results! I apologize if this is obvious to the reader, but this is completely backwards. Goal difference is based on a sample of 38 games, a playoff would be based on a sample of 1 game. There is a far greater chance that “bad luck” would determine the winner of a playoff than it would determine which team had the higher goal difference over the course of the season. In a playoff, it wouldn’t have to be Marcotti’s wholly unrealistic scenario to achieve a freak result either, it could be an undeserved red card handed out, a missed penalty, a balloon on the field, et cetera: a single moment could determine the winner. This is why competitions that feature one-game playoffs, like the NFL and the Championship, allow much more random results, such as the Baltimore Ravens winning this year’s Super Bowl and Blackpool being promoted a few years back. Exciting? Yes. Fair? No.
As I said there are arguments to be made in favor of a playoff, though I must admit I don’t personally agree with them. However, Marcotti is not making them, and bringing soccer journalism ever lower as a result.
Buzzfeed gets a lot of shit for publishing material people want to read.
That’s silly, because if Buzzfeed didn’t publish that material, someone else would. Fixating on Buzzfeed (or Fox News, for that matter) is pointless, because as long as the audience for cat memes (or right-wing propoganda) exists, it will be fed.
Furthermore, Buzzfeed’s content is actually really great! Critics presume that cliche-strewn, vapid, old-form journalism is somehow superior to funny pictures of animals. Bullshit! At least animal pics engage human emotions!
“Thirty-three Animals Who Are Disappointed in You’ is a work of literature,” [Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben] Smith said defiantly, referring to an April Buzzfeed post that has so far received 2.5 million views. “I’m totally not joking.” The author of the piece “spent like 15 hours finding images of animals that would express the particular palette of human emotion he was going for and wrote really witty captions for them,” he added. “And that in some ways is harder and more competitive than, say, political reporting.”
Put a different way: I would trust a reader of “Thirty-three Animals Who Are Disappointed in You” to adopt smart, humane political positions, given the relevant information, before I’d trust an aficionado of Politico to do the same.
Going after Jezebel is almost too easy, given their astonishing tendency to not see the forest for the trees (literally, in the case of the pressing issue of rampant worldwide deforestation). But I feel I had to comment on their take on the new issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition photos. Not about the racial insensitivity they perceive in the photos (I’m going to leave that alone), but on their absolutely astounding lack of any geographic knowledge whatsoever.
As a sinophile, the following excerpt about a photograph taken in Guangxi province in China is particularly poor:
China has tons of skyscrapers and modern cities that make New York look rickety, but this image recreates an age-old narrative in which anything non-Western is quaint, backward and impoverished. This is the image the mag is using to represent Asia. (Maybe the editors didn’t want to shoot swimsuits in a city, but they did take shots on dry land and they didn’t have to use a dude with dental issues on a river raft.) Also: People are not props.
Oh my God. First of all, the author fails to recognize the simple fact that China is a big place. Yes, there are big cities on the coast, and some in the interior as well, but the majority of the people still live in rural areas. Guangxi also has some of the most beautiful scenery in China. This is like complaining because someone decided to use the Grand Canyon to represent America in a photograph.
(Also, the author should note that no matter how they look, Chinese buildings, bridges, etc. are considerably more rickety than U.S. ones. Following the news of the train crashes, bridge collapses, etc. that happen frequently in China might help.)
The more incredible thing is the contradiction the author makes without noticing. I don’t know where the photos are actually taken (looks more like Yangshuo to me), but if they were taken in Guilin they were taken IN A CITY. More than that, they were taken in a city of almost 5 million people. This shows a common misunderstanding of China that I’ve talked about before: the word city in Chinese doesn’t really mean city, but rather “county” or “urban area”. Guilin itself is approximately the size of the state of Hawaii. These very large population totals given for Chinese cities rarely give a good idea of how densely populated it is. This photo actually does a rather good job of showing that population totals for the city don’t reflect its urbanity.
But even more upsetting (to borrow a phrase) is the section on Namibia:
But even more upsetting are the shots taken in Namibia, in which a black man is a prop. A black model was also shot in the African country, but when the magazine used the man as a prop, they used a white model, for contrast. Photographing Emily DiDonato against the country’s stunning sands wasn’t enough. A half-naked native makes the shot seem more exotic — even though Namibia is a country with a capital city where there are shopping malls and people, you know, who wear Western clothes. Also: People are not props.”
Yes, Namibia has a capital city where people are probably reasonably Westernized (I don’t honestly know, and I’m surprised that the author knows a lot about the shopping malls in Windhoek). However, it is one of the least densely populated countries in the world, due to the deserts featured in the shot. The country is home to a fairly large population of bushmen, who you know, actually inhabit the place where the photo is taken. Taking a shot in a café in downtown Windhoek would be less representative of the country than a shot of the desert, and sticking a guy wearing a suit in the middle of the desert would be very weird indeed.
I know, I know: making a big deal out of this seems to go against my original point. But I feel that pointing out cultural insensitivity should be done in a culturally sensitive way. I can see how some people have problems with these photos, but please don’t use inaccurate geographic information to make your points.
The memo is as troubling as it sounds, offering a broad, flexible legal justification for the president to assassinate Americans at will.
Glenn Greenwald apprises the Obama administration’s ominous Constitutional overreach.
The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen. [...]
What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.
Greenwald’s admonishment to all Americans, to police the killing powers that we grant our government, should be read in full. But I’ve included some brief excerpts below the fold.
After visiting Pennsylvania, Yoko Ono bears witness to fracking’s wrath on the state (“I was there. I saw it. It made me cry,” her post is entitled).
Driving into the quaint town of Montrose, PA, I could hardly have anticipated how upsetting the next stops on our tour would be: a gas pad of four drills and a hissing pressure release, a giant compressor station under construction, large trucks full of sand and toxic chemicals rumbling down narrow dirt roads, and a drilling rig reaching to the sky.
To see such a beautiful landscape ruined was disturbing enough, but not nearly as bad as the heart-break of meeting those whose health, homes and lives have been forever changed because of fracking: Vera Scroggins, Craig Stevens, Rebecca Roter, Frank Finan, Ray Kemble and the Manning family. They welcomed us into their homes with complete hospitality, and Tammy Manning even baked us delicious muffins. [...]
They cannot move to a healthier place to raise their families because the value of their house plummeted when the water went bad — and they cannot afford to relocate. They have to open their windows when they run the water to prevent methane gas from building up and risk explosion. [...] And it is outrageous that the gas companies accuse these honorable, defenseless people of lying — we saw the brown smelly water ourselves in homes right next to fracking sites.
She asks that you sign this petition calling on Governor Cuomo to ban fracking in New York.
Remember the quaint times when it was just faucets that erupted in methane-flames? Now, natural, flowing springs emerge from the Earth as explosive perils.
Bryner has just watched iPhone footage of a local spring lit on fire due, according to the landowners, to gases released by natural gas wells. She has also just heard for the first time about a pattern of health problems residents believe are related to fracking across Point Marion and the rest of Fayette County, Pa.
Gas producers would like to drill over 400,000 natural gas wells in the next century. Each one will require an unfathomable magnitude of water, sand and fuel – enough resources, altogether, to disfigure the face of the American landscape.
Each natural gas well requires thousands of truck trips to deliver some 5 million gallons of fresh water and up to 4 million pounds of sand that are combined with chemicals to form the fracking fluid. More trips are needed to carry away the resulting wastewater from the hundreds of wells that dot the landscape of Fayette County. [...]
And it isn’t just reaping the resources to frack the wells that will tear apart America’s wilderness, but also constructing the sprawling, industrial infrastructure surrounding the wells.
The drilled and fracked well itself is just one component of a natural gas operation. Also involved are convoys of trucks, miles of pipes, flare stacks, gas compressor stations and open containment ponds to hold wastewater that flows back up from a fracked well with an array of natural elements and fracking chemicals, some of which companies are not required to disclose. [...]
Why do so few testify to fracking’s destructive ferocity?
Because they’re paid not to.
“If a family has successfully settled with a company, that information is part of the settlement,” Stolz added. “That is pervasive throughout the industry. People are petrified because they don’t want to lose their settlement. I can’t blame them. Their lives have been turned topsy-turvy.”
Then there’s Ron Gulla, who says he lost his farm in Hickory, Pa., to natural gas production.
“They tried to throw more money my way to shut me up, when they bought my farm and wanted me to go away,” recalled Gulla of Range Resources. “I said, ‘No, I’m not shutting up.’”
Gulla never signed a nondisclosure agreement, and says he’s chosen to stay vocal to help protect others from the same kind of devastation he experienced after signing a lease in 2002 — one of the very first for the Marcellus. He details the contamination he discovered on his old property, from feces of site workers to leaking wastewater pits to spills from trucks. [...]
Wisdom is learning from experience. And communities that have experienced fracking, don’t think much of it.
Jeffrey Jacquet, now an assistant professor of sociology and rural studies, recently published a paper while a graduate student at Cornell University that compared opinions of residents in a region of Pennsylvania undergoing simultaneous development of wind and natural gas.
“People were fairly ambivalent, if not positive, before gas drilling occurred,” said Jacquet. “But the more experience people had with the development, the more negative they seemed to be towards the development. Meanwhile, with wind farms, there was little change in opinion.” [...]
Consider this hypothetical scenario: You would like to become a parent, and you live in a region that may soon be industrialized; scientific evidence shows that the planned industrialization could hurt your child’s health in utero.
Would you want to know this before you consented to the industrialization?
Sadly, this is not a hypothetical question. Preliminary results, from doctoral candidate Elaine Hill of Cornell, show that living near a fracking site is correlated with worse health outcomes for newborn babies.
Elaine Hill shared her results at an anti-fracking forum, and was criticized for it because her work has not yet faced peer review.
Academic researchers who are not on the payroll of industry and who are trying in good faith to understand the possible public health effects of a new technology — which is being unrolled without advance demonstration of safety — can sometimes find results that are frightening enough to warrant immediate public conversation.
This is the story of Elaine Hill, the young Ph.D. student from Cornell who has conducted the first population-based, observational study of the public health effects of fracking. Andrew, I would like you to place yourself in her shoes for a minute.
Suppose you took a close look at hospital data on newborn health before and after drilling and fracking operations arrived in communities (in states where the shale gas boom is booming away). Suppose you mapped the locations of individual gas wells, looked at the distance between the wells and the homes where the mothers of those babies lived during their pregnancies. Suppose you analyzed the data carefully. Suppose you found significant effects — bigger even than the impact of cigarette smoking on newborn health. Suppose you took every care to eliminate confounding variables and still believed that you had evidence to suggest that newborn babies were being harmed by fracking operations. At the very least, your research seems to raise serious questions in urgent need of answers.
Now suppose that you happen to live in a state where fracking is not allowed. Suppose it appears, however, that the governor of your state is giving every indication that he is preparing to life the moratorium — even though no a priori attempt has been made to evaluate the impact of fracking on public health.
Suppose it becomes clear that the governor is going to make his decision before your research can wend its way through the peer review process and get published.
What do I mean by industrialization? Watch this (official corporate!) video to find out.
And this is Texas, which is flatter than New York, with less foliage. In New York, acres of habitat will be razed for each pad (tens of thousands of them).
Each pad then produces gas for a year or two.
Factor in miles of road construction for each pad, thousands of tanker truck miles driven, waste water and chemical contamination, unsustainable boom-time construction followed by renewed economic depression – all to harvest a gas that adds more to global warming than coal (due to methane leakage).
When a man in a Fort Worth suburb reported his family’s drinking water had begun “bubbling” like champagne, the federal government sounded an alarm: An oil company may have tainted their wells while drilling for natural gas.
At first, the Environmental Protection Agency believed the situation was so serious that it issued a rare emergency order in late 2010 that said at least two homeowners were in immediate danger from a well saturated with flammable methane. More than a year later, the agency rescinded its mandate and refused to explain why.
Now a confidential report obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with company representatives show that the EPA had scientific evidence against the driller, Range Resources, but changed course after the company threatened not to cooperate with a national study into a common form of drilling called hydraulic fracturing. Regulators set aside an analysis that concluded the drilling could have been to blame for the contamination.
Kip Gardner farms organically. Obviously, he doesn’t want chemical fracking fluid anywhere near his property.
Kip Gardner of Creekview Ridge Farm in Carroll County is in the process of becoming organically certified. He says the toxic chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing have the potential to contaminate the water and soil, endanger livestock and threaten the food supply. He says nearly all of his neighbors have signed fracking leases, and he’s concerned that a process known as “mandatory pooling” will force him into a lease.
“We’ve been approached, I think, four times now by Chesapeake and BP about signing leases,” he said, “and so far they have not offered any terms that we consider adequate to protect what we are doing on the farm.”
Mandatory pooling allows the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to authorize access to non-leased land once oil and gas companies have acquired leases for 65 percent of the land in a drilling unit.
Gardner says it’s disappointing that private interests can trump his rights as a landowner.
Marika Burke, a resident of Allegany County, made an eloquent case against fracking to a committee that could put a moratorium on it.
“Ban hydrofracking now and don’t jump so quickly, stand back, look at all the evidence when it starts to come in, because it’s not all been tested or proven safe yet! Just because one company in Allegany County has gone to Albany to push for hydrofracking to be allowed for their potential gain does not mean we have to support that,” she said. “It shouldn’t be about money. It’s about our air, our health, our food sources, our schools, our kids, our water and our homes.”
Burke told the committee the biggest concerns she has about hydrofracking are contamination of water sources.
“We have a large one running through our county called the Genesee (River) Isn’t that enough of a great thing to try to protect?” she asked. “The (Genesee) River Wilds project? If that is contaminated, it will travel to Rochester, and up to Lake Ontario. Once our water is gone, used up in fracking wells, and trucked off to a pit somewhere to be designated as HAZMAT, what next? There’s no fix for that. But the people who got rich from the drilling rigs, and the gas company, can go buy a home in another part of the country or out of the country. But I won’t be able to, or my neighbor. We will have to walk away from our poisoned homes and try to rebuild elsewhere.”
A speech rhetorically simple and direct, favoring a broad, structural argument over too-clever verbiage, built around a re-imagination of several lines from our founding documents.
Some interesting highlights below, with commentary.
The comments, contained in dozens of boxes bearing the names of the environmental groups formed to oppose hydrofracking, were prepared in response to the DEC’s latest set of draft regulations, released in early December. [...]
Sean Lennon said that concern for his family’s farm upstate got him interested in the issue. He said the process threatens an “unparalleled industrialization” of the state’s rural regions.
It’s not clear whether these comments will get the same close eye the DEC devoted to more than 60,000 comments received after the release of the most recent environmental statement — a pile that took months to review by both DEC staff and a private contractor.
“DEC will review, carefully consider and respond as appropriate to all comments received on the revisions to the regulations,” agency spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said in an e-mail.
The DEC has until February 27 to review all comments – which is required before the agency can approve final regulations that will allow fracking to go forward.
Clearly, six weeks won’t be enough time to properly review 200,000 comments.
Thus, (unless the DEC reverses course), the state will once more marginalize real New Yorkers – whose communities, health and heritage are at stake – to benefit the gas industry.
Why the rush to regulate without proper review? Paul Gallay of Hudson Riverkeeper offers two possible explanations.
Given all this controversy over the impacts of fracking, you’ve got to wonder why State officials have rushed out with new regulations when they haven’t even finished all of the relevant studies.
One theory is that New York’s administrative laws would require the Department of Environmental Conservation to start the whole process over again, if it doesn’t finalize its regulations by February 28, and that may simply be too much to bear for an agency that has been so preoccupied with fracking for so many years.
The other possible explanation for the mad push to get these regulations out the door is even more troubling. What if, despite fracking’s negative impacts on air, water, health, climate and community character, pro-fracking officials in New York are simply bound and determined to give the drillers the green light, and they think it will be easier to do so if the public doesn’t have all the relevant studies during the official comment period?
Gas drillers have implausibly claimed that the famous flaming tap water of Dimock, Pennsylvania is a natural phenomenon, unrelated to fracking – a result of the “natural migration” of methane.
“Oh I was so scared. It just was a huge explosion — the entire sink up to the ceiling,” said Debby [Kline]. It started just weeks ago, when they noticed their water was fizzing. Then, when Debby lit a candle near the sink, the water lit up.
“We’re putting our kids in the bathtub every night in this explodable water,” Debby said.
Turns out, there’s highly-flammable methane gas in their well water.
And near the Klines’ house, it just so happens a natural gas company was drilling.
Before they started, the company paid to test the family’s water. Methane levels were 9, just within safe limits.
But months into the drilling, tests show, the methane levels had skyrocketed — reaching 22 — more than twice the acceptable level.
National Geographic has a detailed overview of the ways fracking fluid endangers drinking water, by Duke University professor Bill Chameides.
A typical fracking operation uses between one and eight million gallons of water — that’s as much as 12 Olympic-sized pools. [...]
After water is introduced during the fracking stage, a portion of that is returned to the surface over the next days and weeks. [...]
For a typical well, daily produced water volumes range [pdf] from about 80 to 1,200 gallons [...] Its composition is determined by the chemistry of the shale from whence it came. If there are toxic elements in the formation, there are likely to be toxic elements in the produced water. [...]
For fracking to be safe water-wise, you gotta dispose of flowback and produced water without allowing it to mix with surface or drinking water. [...] Recycling the water, which preserves the local water supply and helps minimize the amount that must be disposed of, can have its own drawbacks — recycling creates a highly concentrated sludge which is often unregulated and without proper disposal can pose a risk to drinking water.
Most problematic of all is when flowback and produced water are spilled or the selected disposal method has the potential to impact drinking water aquifers or surface waters. How often does this happen? Data from Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection show that roughly 50 spills have occurred in the Marcellus through August of this year, some prompting evacuations and others shuttering operations.
You cannot safely, confidently, sequester millions of gallons of contaminated water, underground, forever.
(Duh.)
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water. [...]
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth’s geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
“There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,’ said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. “You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don’t know how it will behave.”
A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine.
From Orion: An evocative piece set in Sand County, Wisconsin – which has sand.For now.
Basically, Sand County is being loaded into rail cars and hauled away, metric ton by metric ton. Bluffs, hills, coulees. They’re all going.
Every day, at least one full train of mined sand leaves Wisconsin for gas fields in Pennsylvania or oil fields in North Dakota. The number of operating sand mines in the state has doubled over the past five months. Each one is five hundred to one thousand acres in size, which is ten to twenty times larger than the average gravel pit. [...]
Meanwhile, Sand County streams are filling with silt, rural roads are filling with 24/7 truck traffic, and rural air is filling with the noise of loading rail cars and crystalline silica. [...]
By 2008, Wisconsin sand had become a highly prized quarry. The Samson of silica, its grains were the ideal size, shape, and strength for propping open cracks a mile or more below the earth’s surface. And that’s how the nation’s Devonian bedrock became the new destination spot for Sand County. That’s how Aldo Leopold’s farm in central Wisconsin could end up fracking Rachel Carson’s childhood home on the Marcellus shale of western Pennsylvania.
From sand quarries to salt-chemical fluid, from the Earth’s depths to your drinking water, from geologic destruction to greenhouse gas emissions: from beginning to end, fracking is a fucking tragedy.
Aaron Swartz, an activist and web-developer, who conceived and built tools for online political organizing, took his own life last Friday.
Swartz was just 26. His rich life cannot be reconciled with his sudden death: after a decade serving others by building tools for collaborative decision-making, he made an impulsive, egotistical decision that left a lifetime of work undone.
To understand the sense of loss that many are feeling, please read this moving remembrance from Swartz’s friend Cory Doctorow.
At the time of his death, Aaron Swartz was facing prosecution: For breaking the law, and for following his conscience.
JSTOR is a digital database of millions of academic articles – a fathomless archive of highly-developed, specialized knowledge.
But access to JSTOR is limited to a relatively small group of people – those affiliated with university libraries.
Aaron Swartz tried to steal JSTOR’s collection, and release it on the Internet.
Swartz [sought] to liberate academic articles from the JSTOR database. He logged onto the network of MIT, which has a JSTOR subscription, and began rapidly downloading articles. When MIT cut off access to its wireless network, Swartz snuck into an MIT network closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.
This last stunt led to his indictment on federal computer hacking charges. All told, the charges against him could have led to decades of prison time. Swartz’s trial was scheduled to start in the spring.
If Aaron Swartz had been successful, centuries of human learning – representing a shared legacy that transcends any narrow conception of property rights – would have been made available, finally, to most humans.
It’s true that this would have undermined the “intellectual property rights” of the papers’ authors, and JSTOR’s “right” to control the papers’ distribution.
But that cost is minuscule compared to what could be gained by massively expanding access to human knowledge.
Of the millions of people – from every country, speaking every language, rich and poor – who could have accessed JSTOR’s stolen archive, not just one but thousands would have used that knowledge to benefit humanity.
Aaron Swartz’s death was a tragedy. Another tragedy, which he fought against, is the hoarding of propriety information to make a profit, at the expense of the common good.
Listen to the chant (behind an interview I conducted with protester Earl Kimmich):
Cordoned behind ribbons, patrolled by police, a mass of activists gathered body-to-body and spoke in unison, with extraordinary, collective urgency – an appropriate sentiment, seeing as Governor Cuomo is prepared to okay fracking next month, without completing a health review.
In the same way he’s ignored countless protests, Governor Cuomo ignored fracking in his speech: he didn’t even mention it.
The governor shirked his duty to explain himself to his constituents, who will face the consequences of his decision – a patronizing insult.
Below the fold: more pictures from the protest, interspersed with quotes from a few protesters. Check them out – the signs are great!
