Short Takes: News From All Over: February 26, 2004

Staff Utne.com

My Big Fat Obnoxious Prank
The Lawless and Ever Expanding World of Hidden-Camera TV
By Joy Press, The Village Voice
You're infuriated by a crazy cab driver who circles your destination over and over again while asking you belligerently offensive questions. It might be an everyday altercation -- and then again, you might have become the fall guy of a hidden-camera reality show on TV. As Joy Press writes, privacy is an expensive commodity in the post-September 11 world. Big Brother lurks around every corner -- for surveillance, entertainment, or both. -- Jacob Wheeler
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0407/tv.php

Patrolling Professors' Politics
By Sara Hebel, Chronicle of Higher Education
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, is leading a national campaign for an 'Academic Bill of Rights,' enumerating principles for colleges to promote 'intellectual diversity' on campuses. The bill comes as a response of conservative students and educators who feel there's a liberal bias in the classroom. -- Kyle Cohen
http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i23/23a01801.htm

Living With the Legacy of 'Racial Hygiene' in Michigan
By Daniel Sturm, Lansing City Pulse
Sturm exposes Michigan's nasty history of eugenics, the science of picking and choosing human genetic traits to produce 'a new and improved race of men.' Beginning in the 1920s, the eugenics movement ultimately led to the sterilization of over 67,000 'feeble-minded' or otherwise sub-standard Americans, and Michigan is the last state that hasn't offered a public apology. -- Andi McDaniel
http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/040114/040114cover.html

The Global Ideas Bank
Sure, we're all glad for sliced bread and the wheel and the internet, but who says inventions have to be primarily technological? Since 1985, the UK-based Institute for Social Inventions has been collecting ideas aimed at solving social problems. Anyone can submit ideas and they're all catalogued at the Institute's website, globalideasbank.org. Some of the best recent ideas include the Phoenix Commotion project, which builds houses from waste and recycled material and Streetwise, an opera company which aims to involve homeless people. -- Eric Larson
http://www.globalideasbank.org/

The Big Promise of the Small
By Carolyn McConnell, Yes! Magazine
After more than 100 years of large-scale, worldwide effort to redirect and redistribute the world's water, it may be that the best answers to global water woes are much smaller, simpler, and less expensive. People in the Israeli desert and in Nepal have used drip irrigation (as opposed to wasteful flood irrigation) to increase food production. In the 1980s, Potters for Peace devised a simple method that used ceramics to filter water in Nicaragua. And in Chile, a system for extracting water from fog has yielded up to 144 liters of water per day. -- EL
http://www.futurenet.org/28water/mcconnelltech.htm

'We Don't Support That'
By Kyle Killen, Salon.com
'When we pick up the phone we're lying.' So begins the workday of your average computer tech-support person. Kyle Killen reveals the myriad ways in which he and his colleagues fulfill their real mission. In Killen's words: 'We're not here to help fix your computer. We just want to get you off the phone.' -- KC
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/index_np.html