Drapetomaniac

I’m sure some will chalk google’s censorship of certain words in their new instant search up to “political correctness“, but those same people cry the same phrase when they stub their toe and the world doesn’t bow down to them to confirm their toe was entitled not to be stubbed.

I chalk it up more to the attitude of schools who censor religion in violation of the law, because they are afraid of the law. They buy into rhetoric about what the law actually says instead of reading anything basic on it, and end up trampling on freedoms and losing their shirts in lawsuits over it.

The Huffington Post had a slide show showing the most ridiculous words censored and I noticed Latina was among the words instant search on Google would not return results for.  It is included among “other” profanities.

Some might think this is automatic, but most machine learning requires a level of human intervention.

I’m uploading to HuffPost the following slide, showing Google censoring the word Negro but not Jungle Bunny.

Google censors negro but not jungle bunny

Google is in the information business and inserted itself into the middle of moral decisions in the search for information.

Instead of adding value as a business or information partner, they make a global display of their incompetence to monitor morality or information.

One of my favorite classes in school included the text “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks” about Black image in film.  All of those terms, by the way, come with suggestions and spelling corrections in Google.

I could read into the fact they will not search Negro, whiel offering to finish spelling variations of mulattos with results – but I won’t.

So, if you’re looking for Jungle Bunnies and Coons, Google is your tool.  Otherwise, Bing can help you with Latina (like the magazine) and Negro like the League).

You can press enter and search on Google, of course, but they are trying to train us to prefer the instant search.  The alternative is they don’t want us to prefer the feature…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Which Words Does Google Instant Blacklist? [LIST] (mashable.com)
• Google Publishes Censorship Map (yro.slashdot.org)

Creative Commons recently offered catalyst grants to help spur awareness and use of Creative Commons.

Two grants have been proposed from Austin, one studying the music scene and one promoting the literature scene.

You can support either of the projects in the dicusssion part of the page describing the full project.

Mapping Austin’s Music Ecosystem

The following proposes the examination of Creative Commons (CC) licensing and its adoption among musicians in the Austin area, often called the live music capital of the world. The study attempts to answer the following question: What considerations determine whether musicians adopt CC licenses for their work? While there are a handful of related works and case studies that bring to light, “how many use CC licenses”, there remains a considerable gap in volume and quality of content. We propose to expand the research and to examine the local music ecosystem in-depth

Full Description and Discussion

Common Quill

This project would produce a web site hosting CC and public domain fiction allowing derivative works. Inpiduals will be able to borrow a character, place, creature, thing or theme from a story and create a derivative work. You will also be able to view the creative DNA of a work, much like CC Mixter, by seeing where a character or work originated and who has remixed it.

Full Description and Discussion

Booooooom has a couple of images showing simialrities between various animated movies.
http://www.booooooom.com/2010/07/02/artist-oliver-laric/

It’s from the visual essay, here, by Olver Laric.

Besides the awesome footage of various animated films mimicking each other frame for frame to get the ame result from the audience, the essay also discusses general imagery, sculpture and other mediums.  It starts to show how modern images rely on past images to evoke the same  basic response or build on past memories.

Building on the past.