Boing Boing » students

Minneapolis SkepTech conference, coming April 5/6

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:09:03 +0000

Next week, I'll be speaking at the SkepTech Conference, a new gathering put together by University of Minnesota students. The lineup features some great folks from the science and skeptic communities, including bloggers PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta, and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoonist Zach Weinersmith. Registration is free. Come check it out!

University of Georgia wants student newspaper to stop catching people doing bad things

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:45:23 +0000

Top editors and much of the staff at the University of Georgia's student newspaper have resigned en-masse following managerial changes, and proposed content guidelines, that undermined editorial independence. Student newspapers like this one are independent entities: Students run them from top to bottom and faculty/consultants operate as advisers, not editors. Students have the final word. The University of Georgia hired a non-student manager and gave him veto power over editorial decisions. Meanwhile, the paper's editor-in-chief says she felt pressure to not publish certain content, and a leaked memo showed non-student board members wanted the paper to stop covering so much negative or "bad" news, such as "content that catches people or organizations doing bad things."

Quebec cops kettle and mass-arrest demonstrators

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:23:08 +0000

In the Globe and Mail a Canadian Press report by Nelson Wyatt on the mass-kettling and arrest of protesters in Montreal last night. A long-running and hard-fought student strike over tuition hikes led to the passage of a shameful law that limits the rights of protesters. Quebeckers are out in force to protest this law, and often in sympathy with the students' demands. The police have responded with "kettling," the tactic of cordoning off a large area and declaring the resulting space to be a civil-rights-free zone, such that anyone caught inside is arbitrarily detained without access to shelter, food, health services, or toilets. (Above, a photo of Montreal police pepper-spraying demonstrators at a march last week).

Riot officers stood impassively around the corralled demonstrators, feet planted and batons clutched in gloved hands. On a nearby street, a Quebec provincial police officer was seen snapping a rod topped with the flag of the hardcore anti-capitalist Black Bloc and tossing it between two parked cars.
Police on horseback also provided reinforcement as officers sorted out the crowd.
Emmanuel Hessler, an independent filmmaker who had been following the march for a few blocks, said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press from inside the police encirclement that he was surprised by the action, saying, “Suddenly, there were police all around us.”
While the crowd waited to be led away one by one to be handcuffed and sent for processing at a police operational centre – a procedure expected to take several hours – a man started reading poetry and the crowd hushed to listen. Someone else sang a folk song. At one point a woman called out the phone number of a lawyer which the mob took up as a chant.
Mr. Hessler, 30, was able to tweet to friends, “We are about to get cuffed and off in a bus. Don’t know what happens after. Wish me luck.”
Some demonstrators who had escaped the police cordon continued to march elsewhere while others milled about beyond the police lines and cheered as buses took the detainees away.

400 arrested as Montreal police kettle demonstrators (Thanks, Mom!)

(Image: IMG_6450, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 79393030@N04's photostream)

Robot band performs "Come Together"

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:31:50 +0000

I'm having flashbacks to childhood visits to Showbiz Pizza, but this robot band, put together by researchers at Drexel University for an Engineering Week exhibition, is a bit more impressive than the animatronic animals that entertained people over plates of bad pizza.

For one thing: These musical bots aren't just going through the motions, performing pre-programmed movements in time to a tape of music.

Produced by the Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory, the HUBOs are operating autonomously (not human-controlled). Their movements are directed by student-developed software to perform the gestures necessary to produce the appropriate notes and beats as dictated by a musical score. Every sound in the video was performed by the robots.

MET-lab student Matthew Prockup created the musical arrangement for drum kit and three "Hubophones", novel percussion instruments designed and constructed by the lab for this performance.

Video Link

CUNY police bully peaceful Baruch College students during OWS protest over unfair labor practices, tuition hikes

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:41:45 +0000

Photographer and Boing Boing reader Timothy Krause shares the photos and videos above and below in this post, and says,

Here are some videos of police violence and beatings that occurred around 5:15 at Baruch College, CUNY, in response to an Occupy CUNY OWS protest about tuition hikes, unfair labor practices targeted toward adjunct and other faculty, and the privatization of the public CUNY system. Protesters had planned to attend a public trustees meeting, but we were not permitted to voice our grievances, in contravention of CUNY's policies and the rights belonging to a free people.
The first (below) is CUNY security and the order to disperse (protesters are occupying the building's lobby.
The second (further below) is CUNY security staff pushing and hitting protesters with nightsticks.

More shots by Krause. Here's a livestream. Related reporting at the Baruch college newspaper with more video from another POV, and here's a related item in the New York Times.

Carlos Pazmino, 21, a City College student who helped organize the protest, said that after students began opening doors to the auditorium where the meeting was taking place, CUNY police officers surrounded the entrances and pushed back, using their batons. When students formed a line to push past, he said, the officers began hitting the students with the batons. “I saw two people knocked down by cops,” Mr. Pazmino said. “They were arrested, and one guy’s head was bleeding.”

Update: Here's another video shot by "MichaelGouldWartofsk" at the front of the riot, which shows the violence more clearly (thanks, @bendoernberg).

Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 04:35:45 +0000

[Video Link, by terrydatiger, and Video Link 2, by jamiehall1516].

At the University of California at Davis this afternoon, police tore down down the tents of students inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and arrested those who stood in their way. Others peacefully demanded that police release the arrested.

In the video above, you see a police officer [Update: UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike] walk down a line of those young people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all with pepper spray at very close range. He is clearing a path for fellow officers to walk through and arrest more students, but it's as if he's dousing a row of bugs with insecticide.

Wayne Tilcock of the Davis-Enterprise newspaper has a gallery of photographs from the incident, including the image thumbnailed above (larger size at davisenterprise.com). Ten people in this scene were arrested, nine of whom were current UC Davis students. At least one woman is reported to have been taken away in an ambulance with chemical burns.

This 8-minute video was uploaded just a few hours ago, and has already become something of an iconic, viral emblem accross the web. We're flooded with eyewitness footage from OWS protests right now, but this one certainly feels like an important one, in part because of what the crowd does after the kids are pepper-sprayed. Watch the whole thing.

Occupy UC Davis has a Facebook here. There's a related post on the Occupy Cal blog.

Thanks to the numerous Boing Boing readers who @'ed or emailed this one in. It's hard to come up with an alternate narrative that explains away the impression one gets from watching this, which is "pure awful brutality."

[Photos: Wayne Tilcock/Davis-Enterprise ]

UPDATE: Here's how much the police officer in this video, John Pike, earned in 2010. He's been an employee for a few years. And here is an open letter by UC Davis Assistant Professor Nathan Brown calling for the UC Davis Chancellor's resignation. Compare the assistant professor's pay with that of the police officer who sprayed the students. You can share your thoughts with the Chancellor here. And I've updated the post above with a second video that shows an alternate POV (thanks, Michael Van Veen). As others have noted, it's harder to enforce a media blackout when there's a wall of cellphones and digital cameras aimed at you. And here are some of the arrestees, in jail.