Categories
Social Media

If the lynching crowd

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Could be persuaded to put down their tar, feathers, pitchforks, and torches, perhaps they might listen to the details coming out about Megan Meiers and the Drews and might want to consider that they acted thoughtlessly, recklessly, and without all the facts.

For six weeks, Josh and Megan traded “innocuous” messages, Banas said, with no sexual suggestion and no “demeaning or disrespectful” language sent by either.

On Oct. 15, 2006, the day before Megan committed suicide, a friend of Drew’s daughter was given the password to the Josh Evans account. The friend sent Megan a message as Josh saying he had heard Megan was mean to her friends.

The next day, the messages flew back and forth and became heated, Banas said. Other kids, who may not have known Josh was fake, began writing. They called each other names.

Josh said the world would be better off without Megan.

In the aftermath, bloggers, neighbors and leaders blamed the Drews for Megan’s death.

But on Monday, Banas said it’s unclear who created the fake MySpace profile.

Grills told lawyers that Drew wanted her to set up a fake profile.

Drew, however, said her daughter and Grills came to her with the idea. Drew agreed but told the girls they should only speak to Megan “in polite terms and not say anything disrespectful,” Banas said.

Drew told the FBI she let her daughter write Megan when she was present — only once or twice.

There is no evidence that Drew wrote a single message, Banas said.

On the day Megan hanged herself, it was Grills who wrote the final message, Banas said.

Until now, the story told was that Grills told a lawyer representing Megan’s parents that Drew was present and that she was telling Drew what she was typing.

But according to an FBI report, Drew said she wasn’t even home when the “heated exchange” between Josh and Megan took place, Banas said.

And that same report shows that Grills had changed her story: It wasn’t Lori Drew at home, but her husband, Curt Drew.

Curt Drew said he was home, Banas said, but unaware.

Grills, Banas said, was later hospitalized for psychiatric care as a result of the case. She threatened to harm herself, he said.

“That young lady and most of these people had no idea that this would happen to a young girl the way it did,” Banas said.

The account was set up because Drews daughter believe Megan was saying stuff about her, and wanted to find out what she was saying. It was childish, and Lori Drew should not have agreed, but there was no intent to callously push this child into suicide. It was only later, when in typical MySpace fashion, a pile on had occurred and brought in people totally unrelated to any of the people that things got ugly.

Lori Drew was guilty of nothing more than making a mistake in judgment. A bad mistake in judgment, but not unlike mistakes all parents make. Now, her daughter has been forced to drop out of school, her business has been destroyed, her husband has been fired from his job, and they’re being forced from their home and their neighborhood. The same people going after Lori Drew have now started going after Grills. Trying for two suicides, eh?

These are two families and a local tragedy, made global. These are two families, both with parents who did not have the sense to keep their kids away from MySpace. This was a tragic event made even more ugly via the same ‘social networking’ that led to the tragedy in the first place.

As for whether Lori Drew created this Blogger weblog think rationally: do you really believe this weblog was created by Lori Drew? When the grief counselor came to our school last year and spoke to us… Seriously?

I have to wonder at all of those people, sitting in the comfort of their homes, making their value judgments and issuing their own form of vigilante justice–at what point in time, do facts start mattering to you when it comes to your search for justice?

However, I gather that most webloggers don’t consider that they need facts. Facts are for other people. Not webloggers.

Here is a perfect example, though, of putting adult tools into the hands of children (age notwithstanding). Kids can be cruel, but in the past, such cruelty was limited to neighborhood and school. Now, cruelty’s scope is worldwide, and rather than adults acting to balance the cruelty with calm and consideration, they join in.

update

I am astonished–absolutely astonished–that danah boyd would believe the “Megan had it coming” weblog was written by Lori Drew. And then to perform some form of analysis based on this belief. Absolutely astonished.

While there is no lack of criticism in the weblogging world, there certainly seems to be a lack of critical thinking.

Categories
Stuff

Stuff

  • Cranberries are the canary in the mine for global warming.
  • If the RDF Triple is a fairy tale, is reification the wicked witch? Possible beginning to new series on RDF.
  • Snow in the Puget Sound area. We missed the ice rain bullet, ourselves.
  • On The Golden Compass:

    Earlier this fall, many Catholics began to receive e-mail messages warning of the “agenda” behind a “new Children’s movie out in December called ‘The Golden Compass.’ ” The film, these e-mails claimed, was intended to serve as bait for the novel on which it is based, the first in a fantasy trilogy collectively titled “His Dark Materials.” Kids intrigued by the film, the e-mails went on, would be tempted to read the trilogy and might thereby fall into the ideological clutches of its author, Philip Pullman, who seeks nothing less than “to bash Christianity and promote atheism.”

    The messages had the breathless, marginally literate quality of rumors about spider eggs in bubble gum. Perhaps that’s why the controversy promptly earned itself a page at www.snopes.com, that venerable Internet clearing house for urban legends. Snopes lists this particular rumor as “true,” presumably because the e-mails use a few genuine, if cherry-picked, quotations from Pullman’s writings and press interviews. But that doesn’t keep the whole thing from being fundamentally ridiculous.

  • This Tasmania writes on problems with invasive species and their destruction of native species on Tasmania’s Macquarie Island. An Alaskan island known as ‘rat island’ is facing the same problem, but with rats, not rabbits. However, efforts are underway to eradicate the rats though not everyone approves.
  • Color me astonished. Six Apart sells LiveJournal to the Russians. So much for “in the neighborhood”.
Categories
Social Media

Cyberstalking of free speech

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This state has gone nuts since the release of the Megan Meier story. If you hadn’t heard of it, Megan was a young girl, 13 going on 14, who killed herself after receiving cruel taunts on her MySpace account. It later came out that the ‘person’ who participated in sending the taunts was fictitious, a persona created by the mother of a former friend of Megan’s.

The weblogging environment, being what it was, ‘outed’ the mother who generated the account, as well as calling for her punishment. Some have called for her death–though, as usual, those demanding such an accounting write anonymously. Others are attempting to destroy the family’s business.

A group of people actually picketed outside of the mother’s house, trying to drive the family out of the community.

Two smaller towns have passed ordinances against ‘cyberbullying’ so far, including the town where Megan lived. Thankfully, some calm is being urged before foolish laws are passed by foolish politicians.

Megan’s story is incredibly sad, but there’s a whole lot more to it than meets the eye. First, Megan was too young for a MySpace account and it was irresponsible of her mother for helping her to set it up. It was also irresponsible for her parents not to monitor it more closely, or to interject some caution when a boy named ‘Josh’ appears out of nowhere at a supposedly private MySpace account.

Secondly, it was an abysmally stupid thing to do for the mother of the former friend of Megan’s to set this account up. However, contrary to the stories going round, she didn’t do so to humiliate Megan, nor was she the one who wrote the taunts that finally pushed Megan to hang herself. It was young kids, the same age as Megan, who either had access to the account, or who were MySpace ‘friends’ of the fictitious boy who wrote the amazingly cruel statements–as kids, in a group, without supervision, are wont to do. Megan, herself, responded with taunts back, written more in hurt and a desperate rejection than anything else, but that subtlety does not translate across networks.

MySpace, also, has to be held responsible. The site should not be accessible by kids under 16, and it needs to provide a way to ensure that access is as restricted as it can be. No child under 16 is secure enough to put themselves into the banshee world of ‘social graphs’. Such networks can attract, equally, the callous and the caring. Adults can usually deal with this, younger teens cannot.

As for Missouri and the hot button item of cyberbullying:

In coming weeks, St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles, O’Fallon, Mo., and St. Charles County are expected to consider similar measures targeting online harassment.

But, those measures are weak and “100 percent symbolic,” said St. Louis attorney J. Bradley Young, an Internet and computer law expert.

“People are jumping on the bandwagon because it’s good politically,” Young said. “But I do see the Dardenne Prairie and the Florissant ordinances as instigators for state, and perhaps federal legislation.”

…

Legal experts warn against an emotionally-driven response to Megan’s death. Regulating rapidly-evolving technology is difficult, they say, and targeting communication over the Internet is especially troublesome.

“Harassment runs squarely into First Amendment rights, particularly over the Internet,” Young said. “Where does free speech end and where does harassment begin? That is an ill-defined concept.”

Categories
Graphics/CSS SVG

Experiments: SVG Clock

I thought I would go into some detail on some of the experiments I’ve been trying out on the site, starting with the SVG clock in the sidebar.

A major advantage of SVG is that you can actually see how something is created. Try that with a Flash file.

The SVG clock in the sidebar is an adaption of a very simple SVG clock created by Jason Davis. I modified it by creating specific second tick actions, and then altering the appearance. I also added code so that it would reflect my time, not yours. I figured you had your computer clock and didn’t need me repeating it.

The clock is LGPL so you can copy the SVG file directly into your own space, set the width of the container, and even alter the coloring if you wish. I’m using linear gradients to create a clock highlight, interior shadow, and silvery frame. I also added a Gaussian blur as shadow, but this only shows up in Firefox 3, Opera, and Safari.

The function to change to your time zone is:

setInterval("setClock(calcTime(-6))", 1000);

The value to change is “-6”, which states that my timezone is currently 6 hours behind GMT.

It’s just a frill, true, but after seeing some of the crap I’ve seen in sidebars, you could do worse. It takes up less CPU than most animated ads, and requires no external load times. From a browser performance perspective, Safari requires less CPU to run the clock than Firefox or Opera. If you load the clock directly, it will be quite large, but will also eat up considerable CPU. Leave it up for a while and I guarantee your computer’s fan will come on.

Is the clock worth the extra burden on the client’s machine? Yes, and no. As a demonstration of what you can do with SVG and simple animation, I think it’s a valuable tool. There is a Catch 22 about SVG: we don’t use SVG because browser support is incomplete or inefficient; effort to better incorporate SVG is of secondary importance because SVG is little used. The only way to break this cycle is to actually start using the specification, and pushing a bit at the edges while we go about it.

As for the contents of the clock, how much do your web page readers really care about what time is it where you’re at? I would have thought probably not a whole lot, but I find that I’m not particularly good at understanding what particular bits of minutia interest people. I’m told people want to know you bought chewing gum–the brand, the flavor, the date and time when purchased. What time it is where you live must seem monstrously important in comparison.

Categories
Graphics/CSS Programming Languages

Experiments in Color

I’ve written about this previously, but worth repeating. CSS can be dynamically created using a PHP application, as long as the content type is set to CSS:

<?php // declare the output of the file as CSS header('Content-type: text/css'); ?>

The style sheet can then be used directly or imported into another:

@import "photographs.php"; I use this feature to randomly assign a background image for my header and also to access the color of select pixels in the image in order to colorize the theme based on image. I based the points on the photographer’s “rule of thirds”, which puts the focus on the photo along an imaginary line, either along the top or bottom horizontal third, or the left or right horizontal third. I also pick a pixel directly in the middle of the image. I could test all pixels and find the most common colors used, but the amount of processing is prohibitive. I’ve haven’t seen this algorithm fail when it comes to creating a compatible color set, yet.
fishie.jpeg (JPEG Image, 818x195 pixels)

I use the built-in graphical GD functions in PHP to pick the color points, as well as find the size of my background image, and adjust the header accordingly. I could also have used IMagick, the PHP-based wrapper for ImageMagick, but GD is almost universally available on web hosts, while IMagick is not.

// create a working image 
$im = imagecreatefromjpeg($imgname);

// get image height and width
$height = imagesy($im);
$width = imagesx($im);

// sample five points in the image, based on rule of thirds and center
$rgb = array();

$topx = round($height / 3);
$bottomx = round(($height / 3) * 2);
$lefty = round($width / 3);
$righty = round(($width / 4) * 2);
$centerx = round($height / 2);
$centery = round($width / 2);

$rgb[1] = imagecolorat($im, $topx,$lefty);
$rgb[2] = imagecolorat($im, $topx, $righty);
$rgb[3] = imagecolorat($im, $bottomx, $lefty);
$rgb[4] = imagecolorat($im, $bottomx, $righty);
$rgb[5] = imagecolorat($im, $centerx, $centery);


// extract each value for r, g, b
$r = array();
$g = array();
$b = array();

$ct = 0; $val = 5000;
// process points
for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; $i++) {
   $r[$i] = ($rgb[$i] >> 16) & 0xFF;
   $g[$i] = ($rgb[$i] >> 8) & 0xFF;
   $b[$i] = $rgb[$i] & 0xFF;

   // find darkest color
   $tmp = $r[$i] + $g[$i] + $b[$i];
   if ($tmp < $val) {
       $val = $tmp;
       $ct = $i;
   }

}

   printf(".color1 { fill: rgb($r[1],$g[1],$b[1]); stroke: rgb($r[4],$g[4],$b[4]); }\n");
   printf(".color2 { fill: rgb($r[2],$g[2],$b[2]); stroke: rgb($r[3],$g[3],$b[3]); }\n");
   printf(".color3 { fill: rgb($r[3],$g[3],$b[3]); stroke: rgb($r[2],$g[2],$b[2]); }\n");
   printf(".color4 { fill: rgb($r[4],$g[4],$b[4]); stroke: rgb($r[1],$g[1],$b[1]); }\n");
   printf(".color5 { fill: rgb($r[5],$g[5],$b[5]); }\n");

   printf("stop.begin { stop-color: rgb($r[1],$g[1],$b[1]); }\n");
   printf("stop.middle   { stop-color: rgb($r[5],$g[5],$b[5]); }\n");
   printf("stop.end { stop-color: rgb($r[4],$g[4],$b[4]); }\n");
   printf(".nameExpanded, .nameCollapsed { background-color: rgb($r[4],$g[4],$b[4]); } \n");
   printf(".column-post h2, .column-post h2 a, .firstpost, 
                .firstpost a { color: rgb($r[$ct],$g[$ct],$b[$ct]); } \n");

To ensure that the title and title bars contrast strongly enough to be viewable, I test the selected colors for the ‘darkest’, ie the less saturated of colors. Adding up the RGB separate values does the trick: a value of RGB(0,0,0) totals to 0, while one for RGB(255,255,255) totals to 765. Everything else falls in between.

Again, the reason for doing this type of adjustment is not only to add an interesting, and changing element, to the site interface, but also to demonstrate what can be done with both images and CSS. Neither is static, and none of the modifications requires scripting on the client, and many of the modifications aren’t impacted by browser type.

For more details on the processing, access the viewable copy of the PHP program.