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January 16, 2012 at 12:46
As I pause this year, to reflect on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am wrestling with the notion that many Americans still hold: that today is primarily a African American or “black” holiday. While Dr. King’s struggles were rooted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, his words can be read in any context for inspiration. His message of opposition to injustice through non-violence and civil disobedience, coupled with his optimism for humanity, spans all colors, religions and cultures.
It can seem easy to look back with disdain on now defunct institutions of injustice such as legalized segregation in the United States or apartheid in South Africa. However, there are many such unjust institutions that persist today which continue to strip dignity and rights from vast groups of people be it blacks, gays, Hispanics and even women. In the context of these modern injustices, we are often afraid as individuals to sound too political or divisive and so we as a society allow these inequities to continue.
If we do not teach our children the wider value of this holiday and we fail to impart the same fervor for justice for all people that Dr. King preached for the races divided in the 1960s, we ignore the context of what his words mean in the present. When we focus strictly on Dr. King’s speeches as they relate to segregation 45 years ago, we ignore what he would most definitely say about the injustices that persist today.
As we celebrate Dr. King’s legacy this year, let us not forget that his dream is not realized until all people, not just blacks and whites, have come together as brothers and sisters.
November 9, 2011 at 19:46
TV stations across the nation each handled the EAS test differently, with some opting to voluntarily suspend programming with informative test screens.
The first nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) occurred today at 2:00 PM EST. While we wait for the final word from broadcasters and cable companies and the subsequent compiled report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), anecdotal reports are streaming in online from across the nation with mixed reports of the effectiveness of the test, with many TV viewers and radio listeners reporting that the media outlet they were tuned to either failed to deliver the entire test message (both on-screen textual data as well as audio) or failed to switch to alert mode at all. DirecTV viewers claim to have heard pop music instead of a test message, while others (including me) had a very difficult time getting TiVo and other DVRs to tune back to regular programming after the “end of message” tones.
According to CNN, viewers in major markets like New York, Washington, Atlanta and California all reported failures. In Rhode Island I have first-hand reports from individuals tuned to WWLI-FM, the primary EAS station for Providence, who heard static and garbled audio followed by some discernible voices exclaiming “Jesus Christ, this isn’t working!” It is unknown if these voices originated at WWLI or from another station “upstream” in the EAS chain.
As far as Full Channel’s participation, it receives its primary information from WWLI-FM and passed exactly what was broadcast over FM on every analog channel and force-tuned digital set-top receiver (customers watching on digital set-tops are automatically tuned to analog version of TV Guide channel to ensure the message is received properly from the analog-based EAS system). Given that the audio channel was garbled, the system’s receiver was unable to decode the digital message normally encoded in WWLI’s broadcast.
In Santa Barbara, I was tuned to cable, over-the-air digital TV as well as three radio stations. All five outlets broke programming at some point a few minutes after 11:00 AM PST with KVMM-CD (a digital Class A TV station on channel 41) passing the on-screen textual message apparently as intended with information indicating that it had received the alert from KRUZ-FM. KEYT-TV, viewed through cable, broke programming with its own branded slate, but apparently did not pass any textual message from EAS on-screen.
On the radio side of things, I was monitoring KCSB-FM, KTYD-FM, as well as KCLU’s Santa Barbara translator K272DT. All three stations broke programming at different times, with KCSB being the first (in fact the DJs were talking about the test in the minutes leading up to it in anticipation). KCSB’s alert audio was garbled and static-filled. By the time KTYD and KCLU had activated their alerts, KCSB was returning to regular programming. All three stations appeared to pass poor quality low audio alerts along with static.
Although the FCC has scoffed at the idea that this test was a failure, saying that it was intended to uncover and address weaknesses in the system, it is discouraging that it took 50 years since the inception of the post-WWII CONELRAD system to coordinate the first nationwide test (albeit without the next generation CAP compliance yet) of broadcast media just as the once-ubiquitious stations themselves are stepping aside to make room for broadband and digital mobile technologies which are left out of the EAS loop altogether. It would seem that following this schedule, we will have the EAS problem licked just in time for the advent of telepathic entertainment!
July 8, 2011 at 10:30
July 8, 2011
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
Washington, D.C.
Re: H.R. 1981 – Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011
To The Honorable Members of Congress:
I would like to take this opportunity to submit my thoughts and concerns on H.R. 1981, Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. I was contacted by committee staff on this matter so that I could provide the perspective of a small, family-run, cable business as my family runs Full Channel here in Rhode Island. Full Channel was started in 1965 by my grandfather John Donofrio. His vision for an expansive landscape of information delivered to the living rooms and fingertips of ordinary Americans was groundbreaking. In 1982, after nearly 20 years of preparations and government hearings, he was the only individual businessperson to be awarded a cable television franchise in the State of Rhode Island. By the turn of the millennium, Full Channel remained as the only independent cable and broadband provider in the state and continues to serve the local needs of its three communities, employing local residents and supporting schools, charities and local governments.
Today Full Channel remains a valued local provider, serving homes and businesses in Bristol County, Rhode Island, by delivering digital television, broadband Internet and phone services. The company employs more than 20 local residents as sales and service representatives, technicians and engineers. Public access personnel deliver municipal government meetings, community events and other public service programming through Full Channel’s three local television channels allocated to the communities. In 2009 the company was lauded as a “Top Operator” by the industry trade publication CableFAX. This summer, the Town of Bristol’s council chairman thanked Full Channel in a written statement for bringing “greater transparency to government” by delivering local meetings to the TV sets of residents.
To be perfectly clear, I personally, and Full Channel as an organization, are champions of protecting children from all forms of abuse and exploitation, and we support the very reasonable ideals of H.R. 1981. There is no doubt that protecting our children online continues to provide a challenge in every family, and it is timely and appropriate for Congress to consider what role the Federal government can play in that effort. However, I have serious doubts about the proposed language in that it may open a wide door to conducting electronic surveillance on every Internet-subscribing American citizen in a manner that is redundant to other statutory requirements such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), may prove too costly to small businesses implement and may expand the data that companies are compiling in ways that go beyond child pornography and really touches upon broader privacy issues.
H.R. 1981 is a bill aimed at the distribution of child pornography, a sin that is on the short list of the most heinous offenses in our modern society. Intelligent, well-respected individuals may argue the merits and dangers of gun control, net neutrality, same-sex marriage and even abortion and come out unscathed relative to a witness emerging from a testimony even remotely tainted by the topic of the exploitation of children.
In 2007, Full Channel and the rest of the nation’s Internet service providers began to implement CALEA, which codified the implementation of modern day digital wiretapping. CALEA gives Federal and local law enforcement protocols for the speedy access to live data from a suspect’s digital connections with proper court documentation (i.e., a warrant or subpoena). When a provider is subpoenaed by a law enforcement agency to retain electronic records under CALEA they must comply.
The systems to support CALEA were expensive for small companies like Full Channel to implement; however, they have functioned seamlessly when called into action. Since its inception, Full Channel has had very few requests for information relating to crimes against children. Using these existing CALEA protocols, our staff is able to quickly respond to a subpoena and provide data. However, these instances are clearly infrequent. Adding a new statutory obligation for small businesses that will result in new costs doesn’t seem merited with this in mind. I am not sure where the “problem” with existing data collection and wiretapping law exists.
With that in mind, it concerns me that this bill asks that we collect our customers’ historical personally identifiable information for 18 months on the remote chance that they may have engaged in the transfer or distribution of child pornography. This seems to be an impingement on the privacy of everyday citizens.
Furthermore, H.R. 1981 discriminates between service providers, applying to those who deliver communications services via landline, but not to those who do so wirelessly, leaving gaping holes in this new so-called “security” system. In fact, the bill provides a full exemption from the data retention requirements for wireless providers like cellular giants AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, publically-accessible WiFi hotspots (i.e., Starbucks, college campuses and libraries) and new WiMax installations popping up throughout the U.S. If all of the nation’s providers – wireline and wireless alike – are not held to the same standard of data retention, the burden borne by small companies like Full Channel to implement these systems will be in vein because criminal predators will easily connect to nearby cellular data networks or a neighboring resident’s or business’ open WiFi connection, which are all exempt from the proposed requirements.
The few brief lines in H.R. 1981 that address digital communications not only serve to create gaping holes in the bill’s objective, but also serve to create a competitively unfair environment where landline providers, especially small businesses like Full Channel, are at a distinct economic disadvantage by being held to a higher standard than wireless providers. In an era when the federal government is scrambling to repurpose much of the citizens’ wireless spectrum for the deployment of wireless broadband, it only seems prudent to hold traditional landline and wireless broadband providers to the same level of accountability and responsibility. To do otherwise hurts small business and will have a chilling effect on the deployment and expansion of broadband, especially in underserved and rural areas. By forcing only landline providers like Full Channel to shoulder these new regulatory burdens, it is effectively a regressive tax. This tax may be spread across millions of subscribers in larger organizations; however, small businesses like Full Channel will be hit especially hard by these financial constraints, with the profound effect of having to pass along the government implemented costs to consumers.
I urge the committee to reconsider the data retention requirements in H.R. 1981 because they are inequitable and ineffective on a number of fronts. The tools to apprehend predators are already in the hands of law enforcement under CALEA. I would argue that more resources should be devoted directly to the men and women of law enforcement dedicated to protecting children, rather than on the implementation of carte blanche data collection on the entire population of American landline Internet users.
Respectfully submitted,
Levi C. Maaia
Vice President
Full Channel TV, Inc.
May 31, 2011 at 12:22
Anacapa Near Space Exploration Club
AAHAB-1 Team Members
814 Santa Barbara Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Dear AAHAB-1 Team Members:
I am still floating from the major success of the balloon launch. I hope you all know how much of an achievement this project was. Each one of you contributed in a major way to its success and it was obvious to everyone in attendance for your debriefing presentation at Breakfast Club on Thursday. Congratulations! This is just the beginning of many great things to come. I hope that the AAHAB-1 near space probe project has demonstrated to everyone that ingenuity is not dead. Just as Franklin flew a key on a kite in a thunderstorm, we used (somewhat) ordinary materials to make and discover some truly awesome things. Our efforts and dedication as “makers” and “hackers” (good hackers who hack together technology to work for them) paid off in a big way.
Suzie has asked that I get you all together one last time to help me document the project for posterity in your own words. As the pioneers of the Anacapa Near Space Exploration program you are among the first high school students in the world to create a project like this. Others have done this at the university level and with much help and many failed attempts. You must recognize that AAHAB-1 was truly an achievement for makers of any level and you are trailblazers for future near space explorers both at Anacapa and beyond. The data we collected and the design we used to collect it is important to preserve for the future.
Sincerely,
Levi C. Maaia
ANSEC Faculty Advisor
May 25, 2011 at 17:37
Students capture photos and environmental data from 90,000 feet above Earth’s surface
AAHAB-1 reached an altitude greater than 90,000 feet overlooking the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo Bay and the Pismo Dunes.
The Anacapa School’s Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC) successfully recovered its high-altitude balloon after a weekend flight, which returned stunning photos and environmental data from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
On Saturday, May 21, 2011, at 9:43 a.m., ANSEC members Julio Bernal, Aubrey Cazabat, Christian Eckert and Connor Proctor along with faculty advisor Levi Maaia launched the club’s first near space balloon probe, AAHAB-1, from a site east of Paso Robles in the small community of Shandon, Calif. The group’s mission was to gather photos and environmental data as the balloon passed through the stratosphere.
The ANSEC team calculated the balloon's lift in order to ensure the craft would climb quickly.
After the probe’s two-hour and 10-minute flight over the California Central Coast, the team recovered the payload in rural Kings County, Calif., twenty miles northeast of the launch site.
“We worked so hard on this project,” said senior Aubrey Cazabat. “It was such an amazing feeling to see the capsule back on the ground and to know that we had done it!”
From the top of the balloon’s 91,122-foot ascent above 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera had a view as far as 400 miles in all directions under a black, near space sky. The capsule’s GPS radio tracking signal was heard by amateur radio stations as far away as San Diego and Mendocino Counties.
After beginning this project in the late fall, the Anacapa students quickly learned that they had a steep learning curve ahead as they tackled challenges from wind and flight path prediction to engineering a sturdy but lightweight capsule that could survive brutally cold conditions and hurricane-force winds. Despite these hurdles, the club achieved all of its goals and retrieved extensive environmental data, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and radiation exposure levels, along with stunning photos of Earth’s curved surface.
“We picked up some ice on the camera window, which can be seen in a few of the higher level shots,” said senior Connor Proctor. “Other than that, all of our critical systems worked flawlessly.”
Data from the flight, including photos, a map of the flight path and environmental data, can be found at the school’s Web site www.anacapaschool.org.
Anacapa School is an independent, co-educational, WASC–accredited, college preparatory day school for junior high and high school students in grades 7-12. Founded in 1981 by Headmaster Gordon Sichi, Anacapa enjoys the best student-teacher ratio of any school, public or private, in Santa Barbara at its historic campus located in the heart of the Santa Barbara civic center.
May 19, 2011 at 19:22
Yesterday, Lance Orozco from the NPR affiliate station in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties came to the Anacapa School to interview my students and me about our plans to launch the Anacapa Amateur High Altitude Balloon 1 (AAHAB-1) on Saturday. His story aired this morning on KCLU.
Listen to KCLU’s radio news story (mp3 | 6m 31s)
May 17, 2011 at 00:22
T-minus four days, nine hours until lift off of AAHAB-1, Anacapa School’s first near space probe! What is a near space probe? Never mind that … what is “near space?”
Over the past few years the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices, as well as compact and light-weight digital photography, has helped give bloom to a burgeoning movement of amateur balloonists. These are not the Around the World in 80 Days-types that hope to circumnavigate the globe in a luxury appointed airship, but rather groups of hackers and makers who combine smart phones and Arduinos to create sophisticated weather balloons for a fraction of the cost traditionally spent by the National Weather Service and the U.S. military to explore the upper atmosphere. Near space, specifically the region of the Earth’s atmosphere between 65,000 and 100,000 feet above sea level (MSL), is the destination of choice for these amateur explorers.
Just about six months ago, four high school students from Anacapa School and I began planning to launch a high altitude balloon. Anacapa School is not the first educational group to attempt a flight like this (college-age MIT students from the 1337arts group claim to have done it for $150 in 2009), but we are certainly the first high school club in this region to organize a student-run flight. Our group, the Anacapa Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC), decided that its radiosonde should contain the typical digital camera as well as a number of additional instruments to measure barometric pressure, temperature, humidity and even radiation levels in the environment both inside and outside of the four-pound foam cooler.
Few Earth-bound objects ever find their way up to the thin air of 100,000 feet MSL, the altitude at which we expect our balloon will burst and begin its return to the surface. A typical jet airliner tops off below 40,000 feet and even the most powerful military jets are just now finding their way above 60,000 ft. At its apex over Central California, AAHAB-1′s onboard camera will be able to see (assuming clear skies and high visibility) from San Francisco to Mexico to Las Vegas, over 400 miles in all directions, while the barometer will measure less than one percent of the atmospheric pressure found at sea level (99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere will be below the probe at this height).
The launch, weather permitting, is scheduled to take place Saturday May 21, from one of several predetermined launch sites on the Central Coast of California. Over the next couple weeks I will continue posting information here on Maaia.com, including a complete project report and instructions to teachers and other individuals who wish to replicate a similar flight. For those interested in tracking the progress of the flight, we are using the amateur radio Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) to track AAHAB-1 using amateur radio call sign K6LCM-11. The onboard APRS unit will send frequent position reports to amateur radio stations across the region which will, in turn, map the flight on APRS.fi in real-time. Click here to follow along on Saturday morning using a Google Maps-based APRS system.
The first media release we sent out about the project from Anacapa School explains some more details about the flight as well. Stay tuned for more followup information.
Update May 21, 2011: Listen to the public radio story about the launch!
May 2, 2011 at 00:05
Steve Jobs claims “we haven’t been tracking anybody,” but the Apple CEO sure seems to have been collecting quite a bit of information about me! Having heard all of the media buzz about location information being stored in a secret iPhone file, I decided to run a Mac OS application called iPhone Tracker. Running the program on the same Mac that runs the iTunes library that is synced with my iPhone 3GS resulted in the graphic below.
As you can see, I have spent a time in California, New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Hawaii over the past year and my iPhone has recorded the whole escapade! Even a couple quick connections through Denver International Airport have been recorded (I had to think about how that spot got on there, I’ve never really spent any time in Colorado other than to change planes).
The location data that iPhone Tracker was able to pull only went back one year. I am not certain if more back-data exists in the hidden iPhone file. The program is very basic and has few options but it gets the data and visualizes it, which is impressive. I would not have a problem with this information being stored if I had opted into it. It concerns me, however, that Apple is gathering this data in a hidden file that we are only now discovering and know little about. With reports of Michigan State Police using forensic data downloaders to extract the contents of citizens’ phones without a search warrant during ordinary traffic stops, it is troubling to think about what else we carry around each day might end up in the wrong hands.
Apple claims that all will be fixed in an upcoming update to its mobile operating system iOS. How Apple will address the data collection issue, either through an opt-in process or its total elimination is unknown. The implications of the full-data-download by law enforcement also remains to be seen. The ACLU is suing the Michigan State Police, charging the department violated data collection laws.
April 29, 2011 at 01:12
After extensive research, negotiations and technical preparations, Full Channel has made Bristol County, R.I. the fourth U.S. cable TV market to offer Al Jazeera English to its viewers. The Qatar-based news outlet launched an Arabic-language channel in 1996 and for years Al Jazeera was widely misunderstood by western audiences. After 9/11, many Americans falsely associated Al Jazeera with Osama Bin Laden and other Middle Eastern terrorist outfits. This reputation is due in a large part to remarks made by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who claimed Al Jazeera was “inexcusably biased.”
In 2003, the BBC signed an agreement with Al Jazeera for sharing facilities, information and news footage. And in 2006 Al Jazeera launched an English-language network targeting the Western world. This year in particular, Al Jazeera English has received accolades and praise from politicians and journalists alike who applaud the network’s propensity to report the under-reported as it provided often exclusive coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa. During testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called AJE “real news” as she criticized U.S.-based news networks for spending too much time on trivial news items such as Charlie Sheen’s breakdown and American Idol winners.
As of this week, Full Channel joins the three only other U.S. TV markets to provide Al Jazeera English: Washington D.C., Ohio and Burlington, Vt. The story has been covered by Providence Business News, WPRI-TV and Multichannel News.
Full Channel viewers will find AJE on channel 168. If you don’t live in one of these four markets you can watch a live feed of AJE online on YouTube or AlJazeera.net.
April 10, 2011 at 20:27
One evening in Hawaii, we decided to journey up to the top of Mauna Kea, the highest point in Hawaii. Standing at the top nearly 14,000 feet in elevation above sea level and above 40% of the Earth’s atmosphere, left me short of breath but not short on views. The vista from the top looking over the persistent cloud deck made for a storybook sunset. And the lack of atmosphere above coupled with the remoteness of the location (2,400 miles from the U.S. mainland) revealed stars that would make even countryfolk blush.
Mauna Kea, in addition to being the most important spiritual place for native Hawaiians (in ancient law, only kahunas were allowed to visit the peak), is also home to 13 deep-space telescopes from highly-acclaimed research institutions around the country, including the University of Hawaii. While I did not have my tripod with me at the summit, I was able to capture a few decent shots just before the sun went down. This image of the Canada-France-Hawaii (left) and the Gemini North (right) observatories is my favorite.
