From FAMILY:

“We’re proud to introduce ‘Hope Gallery’ in Echo Park, jointly run by us and the record label ‘Teenage Teardrops’!

The first show is ‘TABLEAU YA MIND’ Artwork by Sumi Ink Club

Join us for the opening party!

Thursday, March 27, 7:30pm – April 27 1547 Echo Park Ave 90026

Sumi Ink Club is a Los Angeles-based drawing collective founded in 2005 by Sarah Anderson and Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons, Glaciers of Nice). The duo execute topsy-turvy, detailed, collaborative drawings, using group drawing as a means to open and fortify social interactions that bleed into everyday life.

‘Tableau Ya Mind’ includes a round table for making round drawings, a zoetrope-bucket for people to stick their heads in, and floor to ceiling ‘obelisk drawings’. Fishbeck and Anderson will perform on opening night as Lucky Dragons – the communal music experiment that links sound to video, dance, and interactive technology.”

myspace.com/hopegallery

Diplomats Told to Take Cover in Baghdad
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 27, 2008

Filed at 3:34 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has instructed all personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad not to leave reinforced structures due to incoming insurgent rocket fire that has killed two American government workers this week.

In a memo sent Thursday to embassy staff and obtained by The Associated Press, the department says employees are required to wear helmets and other protective gear if they must venture outside even in the heavily fortified Green Zone and strongly advises them to sleep in blast-resistant locations instead of the less secure trailers that most occupy.

”Due to the continuing threat of indirect fire in the International Zone, all personnel are advised to remain under hard cover at all times,” it says. ”Personnel should only move outside of hard cover for essential reasons.”

”Essential outdoor movements should be sharply limited in duration,” the memo says, adding that personal protective equipment ”is mandatory for all outside movements.”

”We strongly recommend personnel do not sleep in their trailers,” it goes on to say, offering space inside the Saddam Hussein-era palace that is the embassy’s temporary home as well as room at an as-yet uncompleted new embassy compound and a limited supply of cots.

The memo was sent after a second American citizen was killed by a rocket attack in the Green Zone on Thursday. A U.S. citizen military contractor died of his wounds on Monday after being severely injured with four others in an attack.

One explosion from a rocket launched by suspected Shiite militiamen on Thursday ignited a fire in the central area of the zone that sent a massive column of thick, black smoke drifting over the Tigris River.

Military and diplomatic officials would not say what had been hit inside the Green Zone. A U.S. military statement said one civilian was killed and 14 wounded ”in the vicinity” of the protected district.

The first wave of rockets this week came on Easter Sunday. The Green Zone — and areas nearby — have barely had a breather since.

On Sunday, at least 12 Iraqis were killed that day outside the Green Zone, apparently by salvos that went astray.

“The book was initiated by the artists group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.

“Essays by ten writers cover a wide cross-section of activity, from new approaches to intellectual property and the implications of the free/open source software movement to political activism and the de facto self-organisation embodied in informal architecture and the so-called black economy.

“Self-organisation/Counter-economic strategies is not a comprehensive overview or an attempt to unify these diverse interpretations. It is intended as a toolbox of ideas, situations and approaches, and includes many practical examples.

“Commissioned texts include Will Bradley on Guarana power, Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder on fan fiction and intellectual property, Bruno Comparato on the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, Mika Hannula on self-organisation and civil society, Alfonso Hernandez on the barrio of Tepito in Mexico City, Susan Kelly on What is to be done?, Lawrence Lessig on problems with copyright law, Marjetica Potra on parallelism and fragmentation in the Western Balkans and the EU, and Tere Vaden on the future of information societies, plus interviews with Craig Baldwin (A.T.A. Gallery, Other Cinema), Brett Bloom (Temporary Services, Mess Hall), Sasha Constanza-Chock (Indymedia), Adrienne Lauby (Free Speech Radio News), and Nigel Parry (Electronic Intifada).”

[Rasmus Nielsen of Superflex was interviewed at length in Arthur No. 14.]

Music by Justice, visuals by So-Me, Yorgo Tloupas and Machine Molle.

Photo by Chris Goss

March 24, 2008 6:42 – Time Magazine

The Internet Effect on News
Posted by Michael Scherer

Here is a basic shift that has occurred in the news business: Because of the Internet, you, the reader, no longer have to buy information in pre-fabricated packages like “newspapers.” You can just go online and individually select the articles you want to read. And there are lots of websites and blogs to help you out. Every day, Matt Drudge, the Huffington Post, Yahoo, Google, Swampland, or a hundred other different bloggers, will pre-select articles for you and provide links. You choose your own adventure.

There is a corollary effect here: As the value of the package declines, the value of the individual article increases. Online, news organizations charge advertisers based on the number of hits they can get on a site. And since the hits are often coming for specific stories, and not the entire site, a blockbuster story that gets linked to, say, Drudge, is money in the bank.

This means that the competition on the level of the individual story is more intense than ever before, and there is enormous pressure to distinguish yourself from the pack. Assume, for instance, that 12 news organizations do the same story on the same day about how Hillary Clinton has a tough road ahead of her to get the nomination. Which story is going to get the most links and therefore the most readers? Is it the one that cautiously weighs the pros and cons, and presents a nuanced view of her chances? Or is it the one that says she is toast, and anyone who thinks different is living on another planet?

I ask these rhetorical questions because I just finished reading Marc Ambinder’s detailed rebuttal to the Politico story from Friday (which I previously blogged about). That article, by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, effectively declared Clinton toast, and suggested that anyone who thinks different is living on another planet. Most of Ambinder’s critique is based in the merits of the actual situation, and he notes repeatedly his belief that the Politico authors did little more than repackage the conventional wisdom. But he also glances across something really important about the dynamics of the news business:

“Indeed, the authors’ own publication, the Politico, is as responsible as any single publication for printing the type of horse race coverage that, in the eyes of the authors, are overstating the relative odds of the horses. The Politico has two excellent bloggers who provide moment-by-moment coverage of the race. Thanks to the newspaper’s magical pathway to Matt Drudge’s inbox and attention span, the Politico’s horse race coverage often disproportionately influences how editors and producers assess the day in political news.”

Left unsaid in this is something which the Politico’s editors and writers (not to mention everyone else in the news business, including me) know well. If you say something provocatively, in a new way, or with an unexpected spin, you will succeed online. If you play it safe, you will not. So we see the difference in style between the Politico story and, say, Adam Nagourney’s more nuanced story on the same topic a day earlier or again in another story today. Suffice it to say, Friday’s Politico story earned a Drudge link over the weekend, and Nagourney’s did not. That’s money in the bank for Politico.

This trend towards story-by-story competition, and away from package-by-package competition, is a blessing and a curse. It is forcing better writing, quicker responsiveness, and it is increasing the value of actual news-making and clear-eyed thinking. But it is also increasing pressure on reporters to push the boundaries of provocation. I am not sure that the Politico story crossed any boundaries, or distorted the truth. I do believe that what Allen and VandeHei did is very much the future of news.

Remembering Walter Bowart
by Paul Krassner

Whenever my parents vacationed in Las Vegas, they always brought back silver dollars for my brother, my sister and me. When they celebrated their 40th anniversary in the late 1960s, I had an idea for a gift. On a round wooden tray the size of a large pizza, taken from an old lamp, there would be caricatures of us siblings, each with a silver dollar for our heads.

I called my friend Walter Bowart–editor of a radical New York underground paper, the East Village Other, who was also a fine artist. I asked if he would draw those three figures. He said yes and invited me to his home. Later he told me he had been depressed and contemplating suicide, but that, karmically, his perception of the round wooden tray symbolized the Wheel of Life, so he had an epiphany and changed his mind.

There are a couple of 1960s myths about Bowart that I’d like to clear up, just for the sake of accuracy in countercultural history.

One was about the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a network of underground papers formed–according to a manifesto written by its founders–to “warn the civilized world of its impending collapse.” Of course, “underground” was technically a misnomer, since it was well known who published those papers and where more copies could be obtained. (A true underground paper was the Outlaw, secretly published and distributed inside San Quentin Prison by anonymous inmates and guards.)

Eventually, 600 publications in the U.S. and abroad were included in UPS which, said Art Kunkin, publisher of the Los Angeles Free Press, “was the way the news about the oppositon to the Vietnam War was circulated, and also about ’60s culture, music and so forth.” UPS had a policy of allowing its members to freely reprint each other’s material, which gave readers the sense of a national movement. UPS also helped papers defend themselves an increasing number of legal assaults.

The myth is that Bowart came up with the name of the syndicate when an interviewer asked him what it was called. At that moment he saw a United Parcel Service truck go by, prompting him to tell the reporter that the organization was called UPS. I’ve heard that same tale about HIGH TIMES founder Tom Forcade, though he came to UPS after it had been named. But here’s what John Wilcock, co-founder of the East Village Other, tells me:

“It seems impossible to correct Bowart’s wise-crack about the UPS truck. I guess it’s funnier than the true story, which is that as we all sat around in the EVO office, me at the typewriter typing up the manifesto that we collectively produced, I–with memories of the French maquis [a secret army consisting predominantly of rural guerrilla bands in the French resistance during World War II]–suggested ‘Underground’ which then became Underground Press Syndicate.”

The other myth has to do with the Great Banana Skin Hoax. An obituary in the Los Angeles Times stated that EVO editors “were intrigued by the idea that a substance common to LSD and bananas could trigger sensations in the brain.” Here’s the actual event:

The office of the East Village Other was across the street from my magazine, The Realist. I dropped by one time when the editors–Bowart, Alan Katzman and Dean Latimer–were discussing a book, Morning of the Magicians, in the context of learning that LSD released serotonin in the brain and wondering if it could be found in nonchemical substances. Mistaking serotin, which is found in bananas, for serotonin, they inadvertently launched the notorious prank. The Berkeley Barb picked up the report, UPS and then the mainstream wire services spread it around the country.

It quickly became public knowledge that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins. In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and one entrepreneur started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce. Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping and grinding thirty pounds of bananas, following the recipe in the underground press. For three weeks the Food and Drug Administration utilized apparatus which “smoked” the dried banana peels.

The Los Angeles Free Press in turn promoted yet another hallucinogenic–pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted. All over Southern California, heads were sticking vegetables up their asses. And, at a benefit for the San Francisco Diggers, I mentioned on stage that the next big drug would be FDA. Sure enough, Time magazine soon reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.” Silly me, I thought I had made that up.

Anyway, I’ll miss Walter Bowart and his twin towers of awareness–mysticism and conspiracy–but he has spun off the Wheel of Life into what he believed would be another level of consciousness.

Paul Krassner is the author of “Porn Soup” and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available only at paulkrassner.com.

The New York Times – March 20, 2008

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
By SAM DILLON

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.

“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”

Furthermore, although the law requires schools to make only minimal annual improvements in their rates, reporting lower rates to Washington could nevertheless cause more high schools to be labeled failing — a disincentive for accurate reporting. With Congressional efforts to rewrite the law stalled, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has begun using her executive powers to correct the weaknesses in it. Ms. Spellings’s efforts started Tuesday with a measure aimed at focusing resources on the nation’s worst schools. Graduation rates are also on her agenda.

In an interview, Ms. Spellings said she might require states to calculate their graduation rate according to one federal formula.

“I’m considering settling this once and for all,” she said, “by defining a single federal graduation rate and requesting states to report it that way. That would finally put this issue to rest.”

In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation’s schools were losing more students than previously thought.

Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.

Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.

As an example, New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

Daniel J. Losen, who has studied dropout reporting for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he once pointed out to a state official that, at that pace, it would take California 500 years to meet its graduation goal.

“In California, we’re patient,” Mr. Losen recalled the official saying.

Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.

No study has documented that the law has produced such an effect nationwide. Experts say they believe many low-scoring students are prodded to leave school, often by school officials urging them to seek an equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma.

“They get them out so they don’t have them taking those tests,” said Wanda Holly-Stirewalt, director of a program in Jackson, Miss., that helps dropouts earn a G.E.D. “We’ve heard that a lot. It happens all over the system.”

After several research groups questioned graduation rates, the federal Department of Education in 2005 published an estimated rate for each state, to identify those that were reporting least accurately. The figures suggested that nine states had overstated their graduation rates by 10 to 22 percentage points.

Part of the discrepancy is because many states inflate their official rate by counting dropouts who later earn a G.E.D. as graduates or by removing them from calculations altogether.

The undercounting of dropouts can be striking.

In Mississippi, the official formula put the graduation rate for the state’s largest district, Jackson Public Schools, at 81 percent. Mr. Bounds, the state schools superintendent, said the true rate was 56 percent.

At Murrah High School, one of eight here, the official graduation rate is 99 percent, even though yearbooks show that half of Murrah’s freshmen disappear before becoming seniors. Even Murrah’s principal, Roy Brookshire, expressed surprise.

“I can’t explain how they figured that, truly I can’t,” Mr. Brookshire said.

Governors also stepped in, worried that schools were not preparing the work force their states need. In December 2005, all 50 agreed to standardize their graduation rate calculations, basing them on tracking individual students through high school.

Fifteen states have begun to use the formula, said Dane Linn, director of the education division at the National Governors Association. And it has produced some stunning revelations.

In North Carolina, the rate plummeted a year ago to 68 percent from 95 percent. The News & Observer in Raleigh likened the experience to the shock of hearing a doctor diagnose a terrible illness.

“But now doctors can start treatments that can lead to a cure,” the paper said in an editorial.

Mississippi is among the states that have become the most serious about confronting their dropout problem, Mr. Linn said.

The state has been building a record system capable of tracking student data from year to year, and in 2005 used it to estimate a graduation rate of 61 percent, 24 points below the official rate.

Mr. Bounds took office that fall and was initially consumed with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But he eventually had time to pore over the data.

“It was time to boldly confront the facts,” he said.

Mr. Bounds has used the new figures to persuade the Mississippi Board of Education to require school districts to prepare dropout prevention plans. Last month he told 2,000 community leaders that the state’s dropout crisis was like “a Katrina hitting our schools every year.”

The state will eventually report the lower rate to Washington but has set no schedule, Mr. Bounds said. One problem, he said, is that when Mississippi sends revised rates for its more than 200 high schools, their success levels will appear to plummet and many schools could be exposed to sanctions.

“It’ll look like everybody has dropped, when actually everybody’s doing a better job,” Mr. Bounds said. “But we’re capturing the right score on the scoreboard.”