Teacher fired for blog posts and data mining amazon wish lists...

From the Chronicle - Wired Campus blog a teacher is fired for her blog posts.....

Banished For Blogging

A professor at Devry University in Westminster, Colorado, has been fired, she says, for some "water-cooler kvetching" about the institution on her blog.

Meg Spohn, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Denver, served as department chair of communications and composition at the Westminster campus until mid-December. On her Web site, Ms. Spohn had critiqued the university's online training seminars and hiring practices -- complaints, she argues, that were fairly antiseptic.

But campus officials evidently saw something a bit more sinister in her online musings. And Ms. Spohn may have a difficult time if she chooses to fight the firing: Colorado is an "at-will" state where companies are allowed to dismiss employees for any reasons not prohibited by federal law. (The Denver Post)

and then a kind-a-scary, easy to use, data mining script for finding subversive Americans - originally found via Boing Boing...

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
Frequent Make contributor Tom Owad just published a mind-blowing how-on on his website explaining how to mine Amazon's wish list database to uncover "subversives."

Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.

I downloaded all the files to an external 120 GB Firewire drive in UFS format. The raw data occupied little more than 5 GB. I initially wanted to move all the files into a single directory to facilitate searching, but as the directory contents exceeded 100,000 items, the speed became glacially slow, so I kept the data divided into chunks of 25,000 wishlists.

Next comes the fun part – what books are most dangerous? So many to choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism.

Link to read more about this crazy thing...