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...

D.C. Law May Cause Close of Gay Adult Businesses

Some people won't pay attention to the laws your city / state / country enacts. These same people are often suprised when years later there is a law hurts them or the ones they love in a way that was never considered. I've seen this with zoning issues and entertainment issues. People's rights are in effect taken from them, including the places they can live, work, and shop. Here is one example of old-not-considered laws omcing in and essentially forcing a business out of existence...

from Xbiz...

By Kat Kahn

Monday, January 2, 2006

WASHINGTON — Various gay adult businesses are slated to be pushed out of a six-block radius in Washington, D.C., by a new baseball stadium – but they may not be allowed to move to another part of town, due to a little-noticed provision in a 2001 city law regulating the zoning for adult entertainment businesses.

The law, introduced by Councilwoman Sharon Ambrose, was intended to lift a restriction that barred such establishments from moving to a different location. However, one of its provisions appears to prevent such businesses from moving outside the zone of its current location.

"As I have been saying for nearly a year, the law needs to be changed to allow gay businesses to move to another part of the city," gay activist Frank Kameny said.

Due to the efforts of Kameny and other activists, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams postponed the vote on the stadium lease after it became clear that a majority of the D.C. Council would vote against it.

Williams already has invoked the city's eminent domain law to evict the clubs from their O Street location as early as Feb. 1, though that date may be postponed if the council refuses to approve the stadium lease by Jan. 2.

"As far as I'm concerned, they can delay it as long as they want," Cliff Witt, a manager at the gay bar Secrets, said. "I hope they delay it to death."

Secrets is one of six gay businesses that have operated in the O Street area for more than 20 years, in what Kameny and other activists have referred to as a unique "gay" entertainment district. Gay businesses located in the area include two nightclubs, a bathhouse, an adult movie theater and an adult video arcade.