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Pencil is an advanced drawing and animation tool that creates traditional, hand-drawn 2D animations and static sketches. Think of this animation/drawing application as an Etch A Sketch with colored sand on steroids.
Pencil creates both bitmap and vector images. Finished animations can be exported as a PNG image. Animated sketches can be exported in several handy Flash or Movie file formats.
Pencil is a very impressive drawing tool. It imitates hand-drawn animation techniques, is easy to use and produces high-quality output. However, getting it installed was no easy task.
This particular open source project does not appear to be actively supported. Its current version, 0.4.4b, is a beta package released on January 21, 2008. Despite that, it is very stable and usable.
Steady Hand
Trying to do justice to the hand-drawn images for which Pencil is capable is a fool's errand, at least for me. I can only assess the performance of this software. I lack the artistic skills required to produce sketches by moving the mouse pointer around Pencil's virtual canvas.
Don't think so? Take a gander at my hand-crafted letters scratched around the image drawn by the developer and imported into a Pencil frame I created for this review.
Clearly, a talented hand created the multicolored cartoon image. My rickety hand added the pencil scratchings to form a new single image.
Regardless of my personal lack of sketching skills, Pencil has functionality far beyond the tools in simple computerized drawing applications. Its tool set includes the ability to add multiple layers for bitmap, vector, sound and camera.
Daunting Downloads
Sometimes reviewing Linux software can involve high intrigue and mystery. That was the case in tracking down and installing this software.
Several websites host packages bearing the Pencil name or something very similar. Not all were the same software, and some versions of the intended package failed to install.
For example, when I first began my quest for an advanced hand-drawn animation package, I found Pencil Animation references and tracked it down to the les-stooges.org web site. I also found the same program — based on displayed screenshots — at the Sourceforge web site here. Other searches led me to the Pencil-Animation.org web site that seemed to have similar, if not the same Linux packages.
Then I found the Pencil Project. This web site asserts that it has the latest version of Pencil — 2.0.3 offered in packages for Fedora and Arch Linux (RPM format) as well as Linux Debian strains (.DEB format). It is listed as the open source GUI prototyping tool for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac.
While the screenshots were similar, the feature sets were not. It was not the same Pencil project as the beta software I ultimately sought and finally tested.
Inane Installation
Initially, the two web sites for the Pencil Animation package I sought were clearly distinct locations, not mirror sites. The downloadable Pencil package, though named the same, did not install from one of them. When I doubled back more recently to recheck the anomalies, both URLs brought me to the same web site — Pencil-animation.org
Both web sites display a link to Sourceforge.net for a mirror download of Pencil-Animation. Only the package on Sourceforge.net, which bears the identical file name, failed to install due to unresolved dependency issues. Depending on the computer hosting the installation, the developer's Pencil-Animation.org download produced the same failed results.
The .deb package installer reported that the Libming0 library was not available. Yet the only related library I could find from numerous software repositories was Libming1. However, this library was already installed on the three computers on which I attempted the installation. The installation program did not recognize it and stopped.
Software Solution
The only way I could solve the problem was to install the Pencil package I originally downloaded from the les-stooges site. The package on the Sourceforge and Pencil-animation.org sites had the dependency issue. After these two sites linked to the same location, that problem persisted on some of my subsequent installation attempts.
The version available in the Ubuntu and the Linux Mint software centers initially had the same dependency issues. The package in both of those locations is called Pencil, so don't look for it as Pencil-Animation even though it is called that elsewhere.
When I doubled back and tried to install Pencil several days later, the Ubuntu and Linux Mint software centers completed the installation on some but not all of my test attempts.
Convenient Canvas
The user interface has a familiar look and feel to it. It you have used any of the common drawing applications, Pencil's appearance fits right in. You can grab the mouse and start creating cartoon characters, doodles of all sorts and even letters and numbers to augment your sketch.
Pencil excels in what else you can do with it. However, this is the part of the app that requires practice and skill. Creating cartoon scenes with the mouse to drive the pencil point separates the wannabe from the accomplished user.
There is an incomplete user document available here that provides some useful directions on how to use the layering tools and various drawing tools. But this unfinished document (linked from the current version of Pencil's Help menu) was written for version 0.4.3 on July 21, 2007.
The drawing canvas is in the center of the app window. Along the left side of the window are groups of icons for drawing tools and other display options. Down the right edge of the app window are the color palates and slide bars for saturation levels. Along the bottom of the app window are controls for layering options, sound and animation playback.
Artistic Tools
Pencil comes with a collection of built-in shapes for different drawing purposes. These include general-purpose shapes, flowchart elements and much more.
Pencil also supports connectors which can be used to wire shapes together in a diagram. It includes a collection of flowchart shapes for drawing diagrams.
Whether creating a single caricature or a moving scene, you can incorporate multiple layers. Each layer can be either bitmap or vector format.
There is one proviso, however. A vector layer here means that the layer is drawn with vector curves. Pencil does not incorporate vector animation as in Adobe Flash or the free Synfig animation studio.
Animating Animation
The biggest strength in this nearly abandoned project is the focus on creating hand-drawn 2D animation. A timeline control at the bottom of the screen makes it simple to step through individual frames.
To create an animated sequence, draw on each individual frame as if it were a single animation cell. The program itself maintains consistency between frames by using the onion skin feature. This renders adjacent frames semi-transparently, as if you were drawing on tracing paper.
Step through the frames or run through entire the sequence with built-in playback controls. During playback you can loop the animation and adjust the frame rate as desired.
Bottom Line
If you while away the hours doodling on paper with a pencil, this well-designed application is ideal. Use it to draw at any scale and to any size. Its cross-platform design allows you to use it in most Linux distros as well as on the Windows and Mac platforms.
Pencil was a promising Linux package when it was still in its infancy. However, with this well-oiled beta version now five years old, it is doubtful that developers Pascal Naidon and Patrick Corrieri will move the project along.
Want to Suggest a Linux Application for Review?
Is there a Linux software application you'd like to suggest for review? Something you love or would like to get to know?
Please send your ideas to me at [email protected], and I'll consider them for a future Linux Picks and Pans column.
And use the Talkback feature below to add your comments!


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DISEASE: Tomato spotted wilt
PATHOGEN: Tomato spotted wilt virus
HOSTS: Over 1000 species in over 85 families, including many vegetables, peanut and tobacco.
AuthorsJohn L. Sherwood, University of GeorgiaThomas L. German, University of Wisconsin-MadisonJames W. Moyer, North Carolina State UniversityDiane E. Ullman, University of California-Davis
The "spotted wilt" disease of tomato was first described in Australia in 1915 and was determined to be of viral etiology in 1930 (Figs. 1,2). The Tomato spotted wilt virus (genus Tospovirus; family Bunyaviridae) (TSWV) was thought to be the sole member of the tomato spotted wilt virus group until 1989 when Impatiens necrotic spot virus was characterized. The genus Tospovirus now contains TSWV as the type member and more than a dozen other distinct viruses whose identification has been facilitated by the use of serological and molecular techniques. The tospoviruses are transmitted by thrips (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) and replicate in both the thrips vectors and the plant hosts. There are significant differences in tospoviruses and their relationship with specific thrips species, so what is presented herein on TSWV is not applicable to all tospovirus-thrips interactions.
TSWV infects over 1000 plant species and causes significant economic damage to many agronomic and horticultural corps. In some areas the virus has been found to be ubiquitous in the environment as it can infect many weeds, landscape plants, and native plants. Symptoms of tomato spotted wilt differ among hosts and can be variable in a single host species. Stunting is a common symptom of TSWV infection, and is generally more severe when young plants are infected (Figure 3). Chlorotic or necrotic rings form on the leaves of many infected hosts (Figure 4), and may also appear on the fruits of some hosts (Figure 1). Necrosis may develop in the foliage of some hosts, making diagnosis based on symptoms alone difficult (Figure 5). Although TSWV is not seed transmitted, it may cause the discoloration of seed produced on infected hosts (Figure 6). Hence, tomato spotted wilt may affect both the quantity and quality of plant products. Additionally, movement of infected plant material may result in TSWV being introduced into a new setting.
Virions of TSWV are complex compared to many plant viruses. There are three RNAs in the virus genome that are individually encapsidated, and are collectively bound by a membrane envelope that is of host origin (Figure 7). This complex virion structure is a characteristic that distinguishes TSWV from most other plant viruses. TSWV virions are roughly spherical and are 80-110 nm in diameter (Figure 8). Two virus proteins processed during replication to contain sugars, i.e. glycoproteins (GPs), are dispersed throughout the surface of the viral envelope. These proteins are called glycoprotein C (GC) and glycoprotein N (GN) and differ slightly in size (Figure 7). Inside the viral envelope is each of the three viral RNAs, individually bound by multiple copies of a nucleocapsid protein. The three RNAs differ in size and are called Large (L), Middle (M) and Small (S) (Figure 9). Also inside the envelope are several copies of a virus-encoded "replicase" protein that is required to initiate virus replication in a new host.
The GPs in the envelope function in the maturation and assembly of virions, and appear to play a role in the acquisition of TSWV by thrips. Envelope-deficient isolates of TSWV, generated by serial mechanical passage in plants, are infectious in plants but are not transmitted by thrips. This is evidence that the GPs are not required for replication in plants, but are required for virus infection of thrips leading to subsequent virus replication in and transmission by thrips.
In addition to the GPs, the M RNA segment encodes a non-structural protein (NSm). The NSm is unique to tospoviruses in the family Bunyaviridae, and is thought to be an adaptation of tospoviruses to plants to facilitate tospovirus movement from cell to cell through plant cell walls via the plasmodesmata. Because enveloped particles are too large to be transported through plasmodesmata, the role of NSm is to form tubules that facilitate movement of nucleocapsids (RNA plus protein) from cell to cell (Figure 10). In addition to the nucleocapsid protein, the S RNA segment encodes a non-structural protein (NSs). Crystalline-like structures of NSs are produced in infected insect cells (Figure 11) and plant cells. The NSs protein has RNA silencing suppressor activity, and may play a role in post-transcriptional gene silencing or RNA metabolism.
TSWV is one member of the dozen or so different viruses in the genus Tospovirus. One striking difference in these viruses is the variation in their host ranges. TSWV is renowned for having an extensive host range, whereas other members of the genus Tospovirus such as Peanut yellow spot virus or Iris yellow spot virus have narrow host ranges. The genetic diversity in this virus group may be fostered by their replication in both different species of plants and different species of thrips. Although genes to confer resistance to TSWV have been found in some germplasm lines and used to develop new cultivars, there has been rapid adaptation of new forms of the virus to cultivars that have been released. Thus, there are virtually no cultivars of major crops with significant levels of resistance to TSWV that have remained resistant in the field for more than a few years.
Thrips deposit their eggs into plant tissue and the eggs hatch after 2-3 days, depending on the temperature and the plant host species (Figure 12). There are two feeding larval stages that are followed by two non-feeding pupal stages. The life cycle takes about 20-30 days from egg to adult, again depending on the temperature. Thrips disperse over long distances by wind. TSWV must be acquired by thrips during the larval stage of their development to be transmitted. Thus, only immature thrips that acquire TSWV, or adults derived from such immatures, transmit the virus. The ability of thrips to acquire TSWV decreases as the thrips age. Although the time in development that thrips can acquire the virus is limited, the wide host range for both virus and thrips facilitates development of epidemics. Once acquired by the larvae, the virus is passed transtadially, i.e. TSWV persists through insect molts from larval to adult stages. The virus replicates in thrips, and the thrips can transmit the virus during their entire life. There are at least ten species of thrips that transmit tospoviruses. Frankliniella occidentalis, the western flower thrips (WFT) (Figure 13), is considered to be the most important vector species because it is globally distributed and can transmit most tospoviruses.
The acquisition of TSWV by thrips larvae is an area of continuing study. Some evidence indicates that the viral glycoproteins (GPs) bind to the midgut epithelium and have a role in the process of virus uptake in the midgut (Figure 14). The virus then moves to other cells and organs, and becomes well established in the muscle cells (Figure 15). Another perspective is that the temporary association between the midgut, visceral muscle and salivary gland complex in the larval stage provides the avenue for the virus to become systemically established in the thrips. Eventually, the virus enters the salivary glands. Although the route to the salivary glands still needs to be determined, virions are excreted with the saliva (Figure 16) into host plants during thrips feeding.
The epidemiology of the diseases caused by TSWV remains poorly understood. It was only in 1993 that it was confirmed that TSWV multiplies in its vector. The wide host range of TSWV and the occurrence of at least ten species of thrips that transmit TSWV make eliminating the sources of primary inoculum of the virus impractical. Additionally, viruliferous thrips may overwinter in the field. The population of viruliferous thrips and the stage of crop development appear to be crucial in disease development. For lettuce grown in Hawaii, it was found that the earlier the crop is infected with the virus, the more severe the loss. An elegant model developed to demonstrate the potential economic impact of TSWV in lettuce helped growers determine if they should continue to grow the crop once virus infection was confirmed.
The usual approaches to management of diseases caused by viruses are host resistance, vector control or avoidance. While natural plant resistance to TSWV and other tospoviruses has been identified in a number of agronomic and horticultural crops, virus isolates capable of overcoming host resistance have readily appeared. Considerable effort has been expended to develop transgenic plants that have virus-derived genes to confer resistance to tospovirus infection. Transgenic tospovirus-resistant plant species that have been developed include chrysanthemum, peanut, tobacco, and tomato (Figure 17). To date, these have not been used commercially.
Use of insecticides alone to control thrips populations in the field is often ineffective. Contact insecticides generally do not reach where the thrips are located on the plant, and systemic insecticides do not act rapidly enough to prevent virus transmission. As more is learned about thrips feeding, treatments that deter feeding or induce host resistance mechanisms to deter thrips feeding may be used. Some success in this approach has been achieved in lettuce. Reflective mulches placed over plant beds prior to planting can disorient thrips or impair thrips feeding. Mulches have shown some utility in disease management, but results have not been consistent between different crops. Although elimination of thrips in the field is not practical, it is possible to reduce thrips populations in greenhouses. Screening air intakes and using double-door entries have helped reduce incidence of TSWV by preventing the entry of viruliferous vectors into the greenhouse. While avoidance or exclusion of thrips may be feasible in a greenhouse, it is generally not viable as a sole management practice in the field because of the wide host range of TSWV and the number of thrips species that transmit the virus. However, in some areas timing of planting to avoid major thrips migrations during critical early plant growth periods is feasible to reduce disease.
An integrated approach that addresses many parameters that affect tomato spotted wilt development has been successful in mitigating tomato spotted wilt in peanut in the Southeastern United States. Peanut variety, planting date, plant population, insecticide application, disease history, row pattern and tillage were identified as factors affecting disease development. These factors are weighted to determine a "risk index" for TSWV in the crop. The grower obtains a low, moderate or high risk value that can be considered when implementing crop production practices (Figure 18; https://tswv.caes.uga.edu/peanut.html).
Indicator plants have been useful as an early warning system for the presence of infective thrips in certain ornamental crops. This strategy was most useful in identifying significant sources of infective thrips that could be removed as a preventive measure. In one California cut flower operation, the identification and removal of TSWV sources using indicator plants resulted in a reduction of virus incidence from 74% to 1%. Thus, crop specific integrated approaches for spotted wilt management will likely have to be developed. Continuing to elucidate the epidemiology of TSWV and to develop and deploy crops with natural and genetically engineered resistance may result in more effective management of tomato spotted wilt in the future.
Best, R.J. 1968. Tomato spotted wilt virus. Advances in Virus Research 13:66-146.
Mound, L.A. 2005. Thysanoptera: Diversity and Interactions. Annual Review of Entomology 50:247-269.
Moritz, G. http://www.biologie.uni-halle.de/org/thripsnet/
Moritz, G., S. Kumm, and L. Mound. 2004. Tospovirus transmission depends on thrips ontogeny. Virus Research 100:143-149.
Sin, S-H., B.C. McNulty, G.G. Kennedy, and J.W. Moyer. 2005. Viral genetic determinants for thrips transmission of Tomato spotted wilt virus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102:5168-5173.
Takeda, A., K. Sugiyama, H. Nahgano, M. Mori, M. Kaido, K. Mise, S. Tsuda, and T. Okuno. 2002. Identification of a novel RNA silencing suppressor, NSs protein of Tomato spotted wilt virus. Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) Letters 532:75-79.
The Complete Tospovirus Resource Page http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/tospovirus/
Thrips Biology and Management http://thrips.ifas.ufl.edu/
Ullman, D.E., R. Meideros, L.R. Campbell, A.E. Whitfield, J.L. Sherwood and T.L. German. 2002. Thrips as vectors of tospoviruses. Advances in Botanical Research 36:113-140.
Virus databases on-line http://image.fs.uidaho.edu/vide/genus049.htm
Whitfield, A.E., K.K.N. Kumar, D. Rotenberg, D.E. Ullman, E.A. Wyman, C. Zietlow, D.K. Willis, and T.L. German. 2008. A soluble form of the tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) glycoprotein GN (GN-S) inhibits transmission of TSWV by Frankliniella occidentalis. Phytopathology 98:45-50.
Whitfield, A.E., D.E. Ullman, and T.L. German. 2005. Tospovirus-Thrips Interactions. 2005. Annual Review of Phytopathology 43:459-489.
Yudin, L.S., B.E. Tabashnik, J.J. Cho and W.C. Mitchell. 1990. Disease prediction and economic models for managing tomato spotted wilt virus diseases in lettuce. Plant Disease 74:211-215.

subset: commoncrawl


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I have uncles and cousins who married non-Jewish women but had their boys have brit-millah when they were babies. Are they considered Jewish under orthodox Judaism?
3Hi Ari. Welcome to Mi Yodeya and thank you for bringing your question here. I look forward to your participation in the site. Dec 2, 2012 at 15:15
2 Answers
No they are not Jewish.
Judaism is inherited from the mother. Having or not having a bris has no effect on if a person is Jewish.
I'm a little surprised the child had a brit - usually the mohel (person doing the circumcision) checks first if the child is actually Jewish to avoid situations like this. Perhaps it was a medical circumcision not a brit?
Also, you ask "under orthodox Judaism", but I believe this is true under most branches. (With the notable exception of Reform - but even they require that the child be a continual part of the Jewish community, which I suppose, is their version of conversion.)
But, I'm glad you asked - these differing definitions are a cause of some huge problems in the Jewish community, especially when someone becomes a Ba'al Teshuvah and then wishes to get married.
Reform says that to be considered Jewish, a person has to have at least one Jewish parent AND be raised as a Jew, or they have to convert. c.f. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/…– בלדנרDec 14, 2013 at 23:52
To sum up some previous conversation, Jewish status is matrilineal, so the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother is not Jewish.
There are mohels who will do a circumcision on such a baby with a panel of three rabbis observing, stating "this is a first step towards conversion if they choose to go that way." That means at some point in the future, if this child grows up and wants to be considered Jewish according to the Orthodox definition (or if the parents decide they want to move towards more Orthodox affiliation), all they need is a dunk in the mikvah -- bloodless, hooray!
It's even been suggested that as long as the circumcision was done by a Jew with proper technique and with the intent of "following Jewish law" (without explicitly stating "this is for conversion", e.g. the mohel just assumed this was a Jewish baby), that would suffice as a step towards conversion.


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What is a Telescope?
Have you ever looked up and wished that you could take a closer look at the Moon or see the rings of Saturn? You have probably seen photographs of distant galaxies, exploding stars, and glowing nebulas. Did you wonder how those photos were taken?
For the past 400 years, telescopes have helped us see into space. There are many types of telescopes, but they all do pretty much the same thing. A telescope is an instrument designed to collect light in order to see distant objects. The word "telescope" comes from the Greek words tele=far and skopein=to look or see.
The first telescope was built by Hans Lippershey in 1608. Word of this invention spread quickly and by 1609, Galileo Galilei built one and began looking at the sky. Galileo discovered many things, such as the craters of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus. He also used his telescopes to study sunspots.
Telescopes have been placed in the middle of deserts, on top of mountains, and even at the South Pole! The Hubble Space Telescope was placed in outer space and there are even a few neutrino "telescopes" that are built underground.


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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 20, 2013 -- Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced it will collaborate with the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research in Brisbane, Australia, to increase understanding of the genomic differences between young and older patients with oral cancer and between progressive and non-progressive oral potentially malignant lesions.
Oral cancer is part of a group of cancers commonly referred to as head and neck cancers. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, under the U.S. National Institutes of Health, oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer worldwide. Over 275,000 new cases are diagnosed per year, resulting in nearly 125,000 deaths annually1. Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) was once considered a disease affecting older, high-risk men2, but the past decade has shown an increase in the number of cases in younger, low-risk patients.
Oral potentially malignant lesions (OPMLs), which are visible, morphologically altered precursors of many OSCCs, are important cancer prevention targets. The underlying reason for progression of OPML to OSCC is not fully understood. By implementing next-generation sequencing and data analysis, scientists can unravel the molecular genetic basis of these diseases, potentially leading to the development of targeted preventive therapies.
"Our collaboration and support from Agilent will accelerate our work in this important area of clinical research," said associate professor Camile Farah, head of the Oral Oncology Research Program at UQCCR.
DNA obtained from OPML and OSCC from both young and older patients and sequential biopsies from patients with OPML will be followed for at least seven years from initial clinical diagnosis. Protein-coding regions for the DNA will be selectively enriched using Agilent's SureSelect target enrichment system (SureSelect Human All Exon V5) followed by DNA sequencing on the SOLiD5500 (Life Technologies). The data will be analyzed at the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics, which will compare3 DNA alterations at different stages of carcinogenesis.
"SureSelect has been successfully used by researchers to discover the genetic basis of a wide range of diseases," said Agilent's Dr. Russell McInnes, general manager for Genomics Solutions, South Asia Pacific and Korea. "Now, working with Professor Farah, we will enable greater understanding of the genetic changes that characterize oral cancers. Agilent is delighted to be a partner in this clinical research project."


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One of the greatest days ever on a bike. I've dreamed of doing Gavia forever, one of the most famous climbs in Italy (and Europe) – and it didn't disappoint.
I am staying in Bormio, which is at the bottom of the easier, less famous side. Who knows if I'll ever be here again, so the plan was to do both sides. Yep, I had a huge breakfast. 🙂
It's cold here. Really cold. So I wore booties, leggings, full-fingered gloves, warm hat, sleeves, etc. And carried balaclava, glove liners, jackets, etc. Yep, I over-dressed again – but barely.
I started up the Bormio side before 9 am, and it took me a while to get warmed up – cold but sunny and clear – perfect day. Luckily the easiest climbing of the day is the first part of this side. It's a lovely ride, so quiet and beautiful that I laughed out loud a couple of times.
A climb of three parts: flat to start, then steeper with hairpins through the woods, finally above the tree line — in the high mountains – awesome.
Near top is a great WW1 memorial (I deciphered the Roman Numerals, ha!) – my Italian is non-existant – perhaps a battle here?
The last couple of kms before the summit are easy ….. what a great feeling to be flying to such a famous Pass. Just short is a beautiful lake:
It was freezing at the top, and I congratulated myself as I put on 2 jackets and a couple of Dutch guys in shorts looked on longingly.
The descent of the south side is a little crazy. Steep, narrow, beautiful, occasionally badly surfaced. A few % grade signs including a 16% and a 14%. The tunnel 3 kms from top is truly terrifying. Dark, steep, gravelly, scary – I held my breath when a car passed me. I wasn't looking forward to climbing it (see below for my elegant solution).
The only thing going through my head as I raced downhill was "this will be hard work on the way back!"
The south side is legendary, the site of several snow filled Giro stages – the restaurant at the top has a great set of pics of various Giro visits (photo at left).
I took my time climbing it – but was pleased at how my legs responded on the narrow, fun(!?) 14% and 16% stretches.
As I approached the much-feared tunnel, I noticed the old cliff road on the left. Collapsed cliff roads replaced by tunnels are a fairly common thing in the Alps, but they are usually fenced off. This looked open, so I explored.
A terrible surface, so I pushed my bike. But unbelievable cliff views. As I continued I came upon several memorials for a military truck that fell off the road in 1954 killing 20 or so young soldiers.
Amazingly the road was still passable. And as I neared the main road, three mountain bikers came flying down:
Above the tunnel, the last 2+ kms are steep, but superb. Hairpins, views, cliffs, etc. How can one not enjoy suffering here?
One of the greatest days ever on a bike. I've dreamed of doing Gavia forever, one of the most famous climbs in Italy (and Europe) - and it didn't disappoint.
Quiet / No Traffic
Fun Factor


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Net neutrality is one of those topics we've been hearing more and more about in recent years. The basic idea of net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated equally no matter what. It shouldn't matter if it's email, web sites, or streaming video. It shouldn't matter if the traffic is coming from Wikipedia, Netflix, Youtube, etc. It shouldn't matter which Internet Service Provider you choose. This is the way the Internet has worked since it's inception. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is how things should stay. We didn't always have the technology to filter and classify traffic. Now that it's here, some believe that we should be able to classify internet traffic and treat it differently based on that classification.
It seems like much of the tech savvy community argues that net neutrality is a "given right" of the Internet. They believe that it's the way the Internet has always been, and always should be. The other side of the argument is generally lobbied by Internet service providers. They argue that ISP's have the right to classify Internet traffic that flows through their equipment and treat it differently if they so choose. As for everyone else, just about everyone these days relies on the Internet for business, banking, and entertainment but many of those people have no idea how the Internet works, nor do they really care. It's like the electricity in their home or the engine in their car. As long as it's working properly that's all that matters to them. If they can check Facebook on their phone while watching Breaking Bad on Netflix in full HD, why should they care how that stuff gets prioritized? It work's doesn't it? Continue reading "Net Neutrality: FCC Hack Is A Speed Bump On The Internet Fast Lane"


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With comparative ease, just given the chance
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I wait for the worth, digging for just one chance
As prospects diminish, as nightmares swell
Some pray for Heaven while we live in Hell" - E&TB


text:
First Person
Day in the Life of a Linguist
Department of World Languages and Cultures Linguist in Residence Robin Barr always has linguistics on her mind. Barr holds a PhD in linguistics from Harvard, with concentrations in both Indo-European and psycholinguistics. Her research on morphology involves the relationship between language learning and language change, and she is always happy to hear of new irregular verbs or refinements for wug-tests. Below is an account of her day on Thursday, September 5.
7:30 a.m.
Breakfast at Plato's Diner in College Park. Mmmmm, waffles with a side of linguistics. Discussed the role of the internet in false etymologies. For example, if you Google "Vatican Cameos," you will find that it was used in Season Two of the BBC drama "Sherlock" as a code phrase for "Hit the deck!" You will also find many references to its use by British forces in WWII, on sites such as Urban Dictionary. It turns out, however, that all the claims about a WWII origin of this phrase are dated after the "Sherlock" episode aired, and can be traced to a single authoritative-sounding (but completely invented) comment on a fan forum. In fact, the phrase comes instead from Conan Doyle's original 'Hound of the Baskervilles' story, where Sherlock Holmes refers in passing to the affair of the Vatican Cameos. Conclusion: Fake!
9:30 a.m.
Grading problem sets from Principles of Linguistics. Let's see – since this is the first problem set, I'll avoid using red pen because sometimes students freak out if their returned papers look as if they're bleeding....
11:30 a.m.
Whew – 8 down, 13 problem sets to go. Time to take a break for another etymology. Where does 'twerk' come from? I find several options:
- a blend of 'jerk' and some word beginning with tw-. Twist? Twirl? Tweak? This meaning has the earliest citations, but doesn't seem to fit the more recent usage describing Miley Cyrus's gyrations.
- onomatopoetic – imitative of a bird call. I think we can safely rule this out.
- a shortening of 'footwork'. This one doesn't fit either the meaning or the syntax of 'twerking.'
- an alteration of 'torque'. I like this one – it incorporates the necessary gyrations. However, can I show that the coiners of this usage were aware of the word 'torque'?
- If 'torque' can't be supported, I think I'll go with a variant of 'work' – the earliest usages in this meaning are parallel: "Work it, baby" and "Twerk it, baby" are both cited. Maybe a blend of twist + work?
Conclusion: more research needed.
2:00 p.m.
Head to AU for TESOL Program faculty meeting. Very exciting! I meet the new professors and realize we are getting close to a critical mass of linguists in the program. Today – TESOL, tomorrow – the world! We share course information and exercises, and discuss exciting developments in on-line courses. Talking shop is so much fun; I rarely get to see my colleagues since my class meets on Tuesdays and I don't ordinarily overlap with anyone.
4:00 p.m.
Hang out in my office, working on updating the Workbook for my class. I was unpleasantly surprised earlier when I discovered that the main text for my course had come out in a new edition in which the main difference from the old edition was that all the chapter and exercise numbers had been changed. Randomly. So now I'm trying to coordinate my assignments with the new edition.
4:30 p.m.
Several students stop by to discuss the class and ask questions about the readings. I've got a great bunch of students this term – very interested and enthusiastic!
5:15 p.m.
Some undergraduate students meet with me to find out what other linguistics courses are available, and how to go about creating their own minor in linguistics. We also discuss applying to graduate schools, and internships and careers in linguistics.
6:00 p.m.
More shop talk with other professors. I stick up for my Chicago accent.
7:00 p.m.
Finally finish revising my Workbook and leave it for copying. Head home.
8:00 p.m.
Sign up to present again at Fulbright FLTA meeting in December – I will have to order more kazoos. I think I can safely say that my presentations are the noisiest: imagine 75 or so Fulbright fellows singing, marching, clapping, and playing kazoos as they learn about psycholinguistic tricks for teaching pronunciation.
8:30 p.m.
Don my other hat as instructor at the Washington Literacy Council, and work on getting certified as a Wilson method trainer.
10:00 p.m.
Put on yet a third hat to work on season programming for two of my orchestras: Trinity Chamber Orchestra and Montgomery Symphony Orchestra. Looking for: Czech composers, music about Shakespeare, with harp. Eureka! Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote a suite for "As You Like It," and I think I hear a harp. Now to find out where we can get the score and parts.
And so to bed.


text:
On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq's prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so. Al-Suwaida expected that between seven and ten thousand Jews would leave out of a community of about 125,000, but a mysterious bombing in Baghdad on the last day of Passover, near a café frequented by Jews, caused panic, and the numbers registering soon outstripped his estimate. The position of the Jews in Iraq had been deteriorating with alarming speed ever since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948: they were seen as a stalking horse for the Zionists in Palestine, and were increasingly rewarded for their expressions of loyalty to Iraq with suspicion, threats and arbitrary physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure.
For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East's most ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo (né Selim) Hillel, an Iraqi-born Mossad agent; NEAT was secretly owned by the Jewish Agency; and Israel, not Cyprus, was the refugees' ultimate destination. It's unlikely that al-Suwaida and the minister of the interior, Saleh Jabr, were fooled. Hillel claimed to be the 'swarthy-skinned son' of a British colonial official who'd worked in India, but he didn't look much like an Armstrong. And he'd been arrested a few years earlier in Baghdad, where, under the alias Fuad Salah, he'd been training Zionist militants in attics and cellars. But if the Iraqis knew who he was, they didn't call his bluff: they owned shares in the tourism agency in Baghdad through which NEAT had chosen to operate, and stood to benefit from the deal. 'We parted on the most cordial terms,' Hillel remembered in his memoir, Operation Babylon. By the end of 1952, almost all of Iraq's Jews had fled, in what Mossad called Operation Ezekiel and Nehemiah.
The exodus of Mesopotamia's Jews, who traced their origins back to the destruction of the first temple in 587 BCE, would have seemed unthinkable at the beginning of the 20th century. As Violette Shamash writes, Babylon was the home of 'our patriarch Abraham Abinou'; the place where the Talmud was written and Jewish law codified. And if distant memories weren't enough to bind Jews to their ancestral home, something more tangible did: security and the promise of a good life. Of all the Jewish communities in the Middle East, the Mesopotamian Jews were the most integrated, the most Arabised, the most prosperous. Not only had they freely practised their faith under the Ottomans, they had become the country's most powerful economic group. And there was hardly an area of Mesopotamian culture on which Jews had not left their imprint, from the style of music performed in Baghdad's cafés to the wafting amba, a mango pickle that Baghdadi Jews working in India brought home with them.*
Recent polemics – and pro-Israeli websites – have made much of the indignities of Jewish life under Ottoman rule, seeking to expose the 'myth' of Muslim tolerance. This tolerance, it's argued, is a euphemism for dependence on the goodwill of capricious, if not cruel Muslim overlords. The memoirs of Iraqi Jews, however, tell a very different story: Shamash, who was born in 1912 and spent the last twenty years of her life recording her memories of 'my Baghdad, my native land', is not alone in describing her family's life before the arrival of British troops in World War One as 'paradise'. Memories of Eden provides as sumptuous an account of the world of the Baghdadi Jewish elite as we're likely to get. It's a portrait of the city as seen from inside a qasr, the palace her merchant father built on the banks of the Tigris, facing what is now the Green Zone. Shamash's extended family lived in the qasr's separate wings, connected by maslak, ground-floor corridors. The fragrance of walnut and apricot trees pervaded the garden; kebabs were grilled in a tanoor, a wood-burning clay oven. Europe exerted a strong attraction: the family shopped at Orosdi-Beck, the country's first Western department store, and Shamash was sent to a school run by the Alliance Israëlite Universelle, a French network established throughout the Middle East. But local traditions held their ground: women wore amulets to protect themselves from the Evil Eye and Muslim healers were consulted when children fell sick. As in most memoirs by wealthy exiles, life seems idyllic until things go bad. 'All the communities lived together peaceably, teasing each other good-naturedly and without inhibition about their religion,' Shamash writes, until 'the poison of Arab nationalism and Nazism entered the bloodstream'. Now it all seems a little unreal, even to her: 'I feel as if I am telling you a dream and that it will be very hard for you to join the pieces together.'
Jewish life under the Ottomans wasn't without its hardships: few Jews lived in palaces like the Shamash family, and as members of a non-Muslim 'millet' community they were obliged to pay a discriminatory tax, but they were mostly left to look after their own affairs, and further advance seemed inevitable. The vast majority lived in cities, apart from a handful of Kurdish Jews. As bankers, traders and money-lenders the wealthier members of the community had made themselves indispensable: so much so that Baghdad's markets shut down on the Jewish Sabbath, rather than the Muslim day of rest. By the 19th century, Baghdad was famous for its Jewish dynasties – the Sassoons, the Abrahams, the Ezras, the Kadouries – with their empires in finance and imports (cotton, tobacco, silk, tea, opium) that stretched all the way to Manchester, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Rangoon, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
When Balfour announced Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, leaving Mesopotamia for the kibbutz was the furthest thing from the minds of Baghdad's Jews. 'The announcement aroused no interest in Mesopotamia, nor did it leave a ripple on the surface of local political thought in Baghdad,' Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner in Baghdad, reported to the Foreign Office after a meeting with a group of Iraqi Jewish notables. Palestine, they had said, 'is a poor country and Jerusalem a bad town to live in':
Compared with Palestine, Mesopotamia was paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, said one; it is from this country that Adam was driven forth – give us a good government and we will make this country flourish. For us Mesopotamia is a home, a national home to which the Jews of Bombay and Persia and Turkey will be glad to come.
Baghdad's Jews failed to grasp that the rules of the Ottoman game, with its special protections for non-Muslim minorities, no longer applied in the British-ruled provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, where a mandate was established in 1919. Shamash writes that Baghdad's Jews and the British felt an 'instant connection': 'the British saw that there was much to gain from befriending us, with whom they had already had contact during a century of trade under colonial rule in India.' True: but the wealthier members of the community expected more from this friendship than the British could offer if they hoped to maintain peaceful relations with the Muslim majority of what, in 1921, would become the Arab kingdom of Iraq.
Jewish fear of majority rule led, early on, to fateful miscalculations. When the British conquered Baghdad in 1918, the president of the Jewish lay council and the acting chief rabbi appealed for direct British rule, on the grounds that their Muslim neighbours weren't ready 'to undertake with success the management of their own affairs'. After this was rejected, a group of Jewish notables petitioned for British citizenship, giving the distinct impression that they regarded themselves as separate from and superior to the emerging national community. The British, seeking to harness – and neutralise – the energies of Arab nationalism, were in no position to grant this request. 'The Jews of Baghdad were defeated from the start,' Elie Kedourie, a British historian of Baghdadi Jewish origin, concluded in 1970 in The Chatham House Version. 'The situation was completely beyond their understanding.'
Mesopotamia's Jews resigned themselves to becoming Iraqis only when it was made plain to them that the alternative was not to become British subjects but to remain Ottomans and be treated as foreigners in their own country. For the first decade of Iraq's existence, they fared well under the protection of the country's new king, Faisal, the former ruler of Syria and son of Hussein, the sharif of Mecca. Shortly after being installed by the British, the king met a group of Jewish leaders at the chief rabbi's home. 'There is no meaning in the words Jews, Muslims and Christians in the terminology of patriotism,' he assured his audience, 'there is simply a country called Iraq and all are Iraqis.' Another powerful ally of the Jewish community was Nuri al-Said, Britain's man in Baghdad, who served as Iraq's prime minister a total of 14 times, until the overthrow of the monarchy – and his assassination – in 1958.
Urbane, Western-educated, often fluent in both Arabic and English, Jews staffed the civil service, ran the economy and helped lay the foundations of the modern Iraqi state. Yet they were to suffer increasingly from their association with Faisal and al-Said. As Kedourie noted, the Iraqi political class disdained the monarchy as 'a make-believe kingdom, built on false pretences and kept going by a British design and for a British purpose'. That design and that purpose found expression in a series of humiliating 'agreements' in which the country's sovereignty was signed away, and British dominance guaranteed, before the mandate came to an end. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, for example, concluded three years after oil was discovered in Kirkuk, allowed the British to keep control of Iraqi foreign policy, itself partly directed by British advisers who stayed on after independence, notably Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, a severe Arabist who had attracted T.E. Lawrence's awe and Gertrude Bell's unrequited love.
As friends of the British, Iraq's Jews were an easy scapegoat for anti-colonial fury. As if one mandate weren't enough of a burden, they were identified with the British mandate – and with Jewish colonisation – in Palestine. In fact, they were indifferent, and often hostile, to Zionism: whatever pride some took in the creation of a Jewish 'national home' was more than offset by the worry that it would endanger them in Iraq. But the Zionists in Palestine claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and thus in their name as well. Already resented for their enormous economic power – 2 per cent of the population, Jews handled 75 per cent of imports – they were twice guilty by association. Nothing they said or did to oppose Zionism – even donations to Palestinian fighters – protected them from being portrayed in the Iraqi press and radio as a fifth column, especially after the death of King Faisal in 1933. Faisal's son and successor, King Ghazi, who styled himself a Pan-Arabist and dabbled in Nazi doctrine, imposed a tax on Jews whenever they left the country, and befriended Hitler's assiduous ambassador to Baghdad, Fritz Grobba. The Germans had their eyes on the country's oil, and shrewdly cultivated Arab nationalists in the Iraqi army by playing on anti-British and anti-Zionist sentiments, as they were also doing in Jerusalem and Cairo. The Futuwaa, a paramilitary brigade modelled on the Hitler Youth, began to threaten Jews in the streets. As Shamash recalls, 'our men started coming home early, worried about staying too long in the city.'
Jewish nerves were calmed somewhat when, in 1939, Ghazi was killed in a car accident – possibly an assassination engineered by Nuri al-Said and the British – and replaced by his pro-British uncle, Emir Abd al-Ilah. (Ghazi's four-year-old son was too young to serve as king.) That same year, however, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, took refuge in Baghdad after the defeat of the Arab revolt in Palestine. The mufti launched a campaign of incitement against the Jews, and became a key adviser to the Golden Square, a group of pro-German, pan-Arab colonels led by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. For the Golden Square, Iraq was part of a larger Arab nation, in which Jews were an irremediably foreign element. In April 1941, the Golden Square overthrew the regent and concluded a secret treaty with the Axis that would have allowed them oil and pipeline concessions, the lease of ports, and the right to build naval and military bases. In May the British invaded to restore the regent. Had they not done so, Iraqi oil might have fuelled Operation Barbarossa.
The British invasion, however, led to the worst assault on Jewish life and property in the history of Iraq, the farhud ('breakdown of law and order') of June 1941. Despite threats from al-Gailani's supporters that the Jews would be punished for 'treason', the British refused to secure the capital. 'There will be many people killed if our troops do not enter,' one intelligence officer warned, but Cornwallis ordered British soldiers to remain on the outskirts of Baghdad when the regent returned. The presence of British bayonets, he argued, would be 'lowering to the dignity of our ally'. To preserve the fiction that Britain had not so much occupied Iraq as restored its legitimate government, defeated but fully armed Golden Square soldiers were permitted to enter Baghdad, singly rather than in formation. It was 1 June, the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.
As these soldiers crossed the Khir Bridge to the western side of Baghdad that morning, they passed small groups of Jews walking in the opposite direction after prayer services to welcome the regent. They were furious to see the Jews in all their finery, and since it was Sunday, not the Jewish Sabbath, they assumed they had dressed up for the regent. The Jews were set upon, first with fists, then knives. The farhud continued for two days, an orgy of murder, rape and arson that left two hundred Jews and a number of Muslims dead. Most Jews hid in their basements; some, like Shamash's family, were given shelter by Muslim neighbours. No help came from the British, who remained on the right bank of the Tigris, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty.
After the farhud wealthy Jews began to leave Iraq; some, like Shamash and her family, joined relatives in India, where there were entire communities of Baghdadi Jews. Yet Sasson Somekh insists that the farhud was not 'the beginning of the end'. Indeed, he claims it was soon 'almost erased from the collective Jewish memory', washed away by 'the prosperity experienced by the entire city from 1941 to 1948'. Somekh, who was born in 1933, remembers the 1940s as a 'golden age' of 'security', 'recovery' and 'consolidation', in which the 'Jewish community had regained its full creative drive'. Jews built new homes, schools and hospitals, showing every sign of wanting to stay. They took part in politics as never before; at Bretton Woods, Iraq was represented by Ibrahim al-Kabir, the Jewish finance minister. Some joined the Zionist underground, but many more waved the red flag. Liberal nationalists and Communists rallied people behind a conception of national identity far more inclusive than the Golden Square's Pan-Arabism, allowing Jews to join ranks with other Iraqis – even in opposition to the British and Nuri al-Said, who did not take their ingratitude lightly.
Somekh grew up in a mixed neighbourhood of Baghdad known as the Lettuce Beds. He studied Arabic under a Shia cleric from the al-Sadr dynasty and began writing Arabic poetry in his teens; his literary mentors, to whom he pays tribute, were also Arabs. His subtitle is 'The Making of an Arab Jew', and though he doesn't shy away from the strains of Arab-Jewish relations in Iraq, his wry, wistful memoir is an elegy for an experiment in coexistence, rather than a Zionist parable about its impossibility. Baghdad, Yesterday evokes a world in which Arab and Jewish writers met in cafés on al-Rashid Street, browsed in the same bookshops and dreamed of an independent, secular, modern state; a world in which it would be possible for a young man like Somekh to consider himself both a Jew and an Arab. He has written a gentle book about one of the least gentle of historical relationships.
Many of the writers Somekh knew in Iraq were in the orbit of the Communist Party, which became the most powerful opposition force in the 1940s, leading protests against the British and strikes in the oil industry, and developing an Iraqi civic identity that transcended sect. Until 1948, according to Somekh, the Communists succeeded in 'channelling popular anger against "imperialism" and "Zionism" rather than specifically towards the Jews'. In 1946, a group of Jewish Communists formed the League for Fighting Zionism, which braved threats from the Zionist underground and would later, absurdly, be accused of being a Zionist front itself by Nuri al-Said, who felt betrayed by Jewish involvement in the Communist opposition. The league published a newspaper that had a readership of six thousand, larger than the entire Zionist movement in Iraq. And Jews marched in the demonstrations of February 1948 known as the Wathba, or 'leap forward', in which Iraqis of all sects protested against the Portsmouth Treaty, which ensured Britain's dominance over Iraq's economy and foreign policy for the next 25 years.
Jewish integration was doomed by the war in Palestine. On 15 May 1948, three months after the Wathba, the state of Israel was proclaimed, the Arab armies invaded, and al-Said imposed martial law. A week later, newspapers in Iraq were calling for a boycott of Jewish shops, to 'liberate' Iraqis from the 'economic slavery and domination imposed by the Jewish minority'. This suspicion of Jews was encouraged by a weak and reviled government for whom Arab nationalism was a crude but effective weapon, distracting attention from its colonial docility, and from its poor military performance in Palestine.
The freezing of Palestinian assets by the Israeli government and the arrival in Iraq of eight thousand Palestinian refugees in the summer of 1948 did nothing to calm things. Responding to a wave of popular anger, the Iraqi government declared Zionism a capital offence, fired Jews in government positions and, invoking Stalin's support of partition, found another pretext to round up Communists of all sects. Among the Jewish victims of anti-Communist repression was the brother of one of Somekh's friends, who was hanged in Baghdad's main square. Somekh remembers his terror when, after answering an exam question about Iraq's recent history with a Marxist analysis of the country's subordination to British interests, he found 'three official-looking men' waiting for him outside the classroom. They praised his essay, but the next day the principal warned him to 'avoid such opinionated displays because they put both you and the school at risk'.
The event that shook Iraq's Jews most profoundly was the show trial and execution in 1948 of a businessman with strong connections to the monarchy, on charges of supplying British army scrap to Israel. Shafiq Adas, who was hanged outside his Basra mansion before cheering crowds, was by all accounts an apolitical man: if he wasn't safe, no one was. The Jewish population grew more receptive to the overtures of Mossad, which had become increasingly active in Iraq since the Golden Square took power, some agents entering the country as volunteers with the British army during the 1941 invasion. Mossad's objective was not to improve the position of the Jews in Iraq, but to hasten their departure. Pamphlets appeared discouraging Jews from mixing with Arabs, and arguing that any attempt to do so 'leads to butchery'.
The Israeli government circulated stories about Iraqi 'pogroms' and 'concentration camps' and denounced the hanging of seven Jews charged with Zionist activism in March 1949 – executions that Mossad's own agents in Baghdad insisted had never occurred. Unless Iraqi Jews were allowed to emigrate, Israel warned, it would back armed resistance to al-Said's government, or find itself unable to prevent Iraqi Jews already in Israel from killing Palestinians in revenge. The Israelis also began to promote the idea of a 'sorting out' of populations, involving a swap of Iraqi Jews for an equal number of Palestinian refugees, an idea quietly encouraged by the Foreign Office: 'National exuberance is a phenomenon which is going to last a long time in the Middle East. On the whole, elimination of awkward minorities is likely to cool rather than fan the flames.' If Israel was a sanctuary for Iraq's Jews, it was also among the reasons they were in such desperate need of one.
By 1950, thousands of Jews had fled; many crossed into Iran on horseback with the help of Arab and Kurdish smugglers. Embarrassed by this 'wildcat immigration', the Iraqi Chamber of Deputies decided to take matters into its own hands with the Denaturalisation Law of 4 March 1950. The US Embassy in Baghdad agreed with Tawfiq al-Suwaida that mass emigration was unlikely, so long as Israel 'pursues a policy of moderation and agrees to a peace settlement considered not too unreasonable by the Arabs'. But the 'ingathering of the exiles', not a peace settlement, was Israel's goal, for strategic as much as sentimental reasons. Israel had conquered 20 per cent more territory than it had been allotted under the partition agreement, and it needed more Jews to settle the land, particularly along the border. As Kedourie bitterly remarked, Israel 'set out to help the Iraqi government to achieve its national unity; it was one of these tacit, monstrous complicities not entirely unknown to history.' The Foreign Office learned of the agreement between al-Suwaida and 'Richard Armstrong' of Near East Air Transport through its channels in Tel Aviv, not Baghdad.
'Why didn't someone come to see us instead of negotiating with Israel to take in Iraqi Jews?' the chief rabbi of Baghdad, Sasson Khedourie, wondered. 'Why didn't someone point out that the solid, responsible leadership of Iraqi Jews believed this to be their country – in good times and bad – and we were convinced the trouble would pass?' Iraq's Jews, who had tended to wait for trouble to pass, had to be pushed into leaving. And pushed they were, in a series of attacks which began with the Abu Nawas bombing in April 1950 and resumed in 1951, as the deadline to register to leave Iraq approached. It's long been rumoured – and many Iraqi Jews fiercely believe it – that Israeli agents orchestrated these bombings in order to drive the Jews to emigrate, though there is no proof of Mossad's responsibility, or of anyone else's.
By 8 March, when the deadline was due to expire, more than one hundred thousand Jews had registered. The next day the Iraqi Chamber of Deputies froze Jewish assets, fearing that neither the economy nor the state itself could survive the transfer of capital to a country that had expelled most of its Arab population. Jews would be allowed to leave with only 50 dinars. The British and the Americans weren't pleased about this decision, but saw no way of protesting the Jews' expropriation when Israel had refused to compensate Palestinian refugees.
About six thousand Jews chose to remain in Iraq. Their lot improved fleetingly in the late 1950s under the revolutionary government of General Abdel Karim Qassem, who abolished the monarchy and espoused a cosmopolitan vision of Iraqi identity. But soon after the Baath Party seized power in 1963, in a CIA-backed coup, Jews were forced to carry yellow identity cards. The Arab defeat in 1967 led to an 'anti-Zionist' campaign that culminated in the 1969 hanging of eight Jewish 'spies' in Liberation Square. Saddam Hussein urged listeners to Baghdad Radio to 'come and enjoy the feast', and hundreds of thousands duly turned out. About a dozen Jews remain in Iraq today.
Somekh flew to Israel on 21 March 1951 with two hundred other Jews. Their 'exile' had ended, but he 'saw no one kneeling down to kiss the sacred ground'. Before they could leave the plane, passengers were told to remain seated while a man sprayed them with DDT – a greeting none of them forgot. They landed in Lydda, where, on 13 July 1948, Israeli forces led by Yitzhak Rabin had driven more than thirty thousand Palestinians from their homes in one of the largest, most brutal expulsions of the war. Scores of refugees from Lydda and the neighbouring town of Ramleh died of hunger and thirst on the forced march eastwards to Ramallah. The towns were looted afterwards, their homes occupied: scenes with which the Jews who remembered the farhud were all too familiar.
Somekh was temporarily held at an absorption camp on the coast near Haifa, while immigration officials decided which transit camp he would be sent to – a process known as siddur. He hated the word, since it 'sounded very much like the Arabic tasdir, which means "the exporting of goods". We angrily protested the fact that overnight we had been transformed from people into goods, imported and exported by Yiddish-speaking clerks.' The transit camps were open-air holding centres with tents made of corrugated tin: 'We lived in palaces and they put us in tents,' the novelist Samir Nakkash recalls in Forget Baghdad, an arresting documentary about Iraqi-Jewish writers in Israel. But it wasn't the conditions that caused the Iraqi Jews to despair so much as the denigration of their culture in Ashkenazi-dominated Israel. That Abraham and Jonah had lived in Mesopotamia was irrelevant to Ben-Gurion: 'we don't want Israelis to become Arabs,' he said with his usual bluntness, and the Iraqi Jews were dangerously close to being Arabs in Israel. An elite in their own country, they were now cast as a 'primitive', inferior people, requiring tutelage from Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of the despised Ostjuden, who were now determined to erase any trace of the East. And though many Iraqi Jews, bitter at their treatment at the hands of Arabs, became supporters of the political right in Israel, the racism they encountered made it impossible for them to identify fully with the movement that brought them 'home'.
In the early 1990s, Somekh tried to establish a solidarity association with the Iraqi people with the aim of documenting 'the co-operation and good neighbourliness between the Jews and other Iraqis, so that the coming generations would know about this wonderful connection that had characterised Jewish life in the Arab world for 1500 years.' His application was rejected by the Registrar of Non-Profit Associations in Jerusalem, which thought it unwise to revive such memories, a potential 'source of Saddamist subversion'.
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By using a model, researchers at the University of Montreal have identified and "switched off" a chemical chain that causes neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and dementia. The findings could one day be of particular therapeutic benefit to Huntington's disease patients. "We've identified a new way to protect neurons that express mutant huntingtin proteins," explained Dr. Alex Parker of the University of Montreal's Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and its affiliated CRCHUM Research Centre.
A cardinal feature of Huntington's disease -- a fatal genetic disease that typically affects patients in midlife and causes progressive death of specific areas of the brain -- is the aggregation of mutant huntingtin protein in cells. "Our model revealed that increasing another cell chemical called progranulin reduced the death of neurons by combating the accumulation of the mutant proteins. Furthermore, this approach may protect against neurodegenerative diseases other than Huntington's disease."
There is no cure for Huntingdon's disease and current strategies show only modest benefits, and a component of the protein aggregates involved are also present in other degenerative diseases. "My team and I wondered if the proteins in question, TDP-43 and FUS, were just innocent bystanders or if they affected the toxicity caused by mutant huntingtin," Dr. Parker said. To answer this question, Dr. Parker and University of Montreal doctoral student Arnaud Tauffenberger turned to a simple genetic model based on the expression of mutant huntingtin in the nervous system of the transparent roundworm C. elegans. A large number of human disease genes are conserved in worms, and C. elegans in particular enables researchers to rapidly conduct genetic analyses that would not be possible in mammals.
Dr. Parker's team found that deleting the TDP-43 and FUS genes, which produce the proteins of the same name, reduced neurodegeneration caused by mutant huntingtin. They then confirmed their findings in the cell of a mammal cell, again by using models. The next step was then to determining how neuroprotection works. TDP-43 targets a chemical called progranulin, a protein linked to dementia. "We demonstrated that removing progranulin from either worms or cells enhanced huntingtin toxicity, but increasing progranulin reduced cell death in mammalian neurons. This points towards progranulin as a potent neuroprotective agent against mutant huntingtin neurodegeneration," Dr. Parker said. The researchers will need to do further testing this in more complex biological models to determine if the same chemical switches work in all mammals. If they do, then progranulin treatment may slow disease onset or progression in Huntington's disease patients.
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Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."
In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton's drunken-driving case.
Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison. Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.
"Social networking sites are just another way that people say things or do things that come back and haunt them," said Phil Malone, director of the cyberlaw clinic at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "The things that people say online or leave online are pretty permanent."
The pictures, when shown at sentencing, not only embarrass defendants but also can make it harder for them to convince a judge that they're remorseful or that their drunken behavior was an aberration. (Of course, the sites are also valuable for defense lawyers looking to dig up dirt to undercut the credibility of a star prosecution witness.)
Prosecutors do not appear to be scouring networking sites while preparing for every sentencing, even though telling photos of criminal defendants are sometimes available in plain sight and accessible under a person's real name. But in cases where they've had reason to suspect incriminating pictures online, or have been tipped off to a particular person's MySpace or Facebook page, the sites have yielded critical character evidence.
"It's not possible to do it in every case," said Darryl Perlin, a senior prosecutor in Santa Barbara County, Calif. "But certain cases, it does become relevant." Perlin said he was willing to recommend probation for Lara Buys for a 2006 drunken driving crash that killed her passenger ??" until he thought to check her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing.
The page featured photos of Buys ??" taken after the crash but before sentencing ??" holding a glass of wine as well as joking comments about drinking. Perlin used the photos to argue for a jail sentence instead of probation, and Buys, then 22, got two years in prison.
"Pending sentencing, you should be going to (Alcoholics Anonymous), you should be in therapy, you should be in a program to learn to deal with drinking and driving," Perlin said. "She was doing nothing other than having a good old time." Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met his client Jessica Binkerd, a recent college graduate charged with a fatal drunken driving crash, he asked if she had a MySpace page. When she said yes, he told her to take it down because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light.
But she didn't remove the page. And right before Binkerd was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney said he was "blindsided" by a presentencing report from prosecutors that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash. One showed Binkerd holding a beer bottle. Others had her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses. Binkerd wasn't doing anything illegal, but Balash said the photos hurt her anyway. She was given more than five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.
"When you take those pictures like that, it's a hell of an impact," he said. Rhode Island prosecutors say Lipton was drunk and speeding near his school, Bryant University in Smithfield, in October 2006 when he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies hospitalized for weeks. Sullivan, the prosecutor, said another victim of the crash gave him copies of photographs from Lipton's Facebook page that were posted after the collision. Sullivan assembled the pictures ??" which were posted by someone else but accessible on Lipton's page ??" into a PowerPoint presentation at sentencing.
One image shows a smiling Lipton at the Halloween party, clutching cans of the energy drink Red Bull with his arm draped around a young woman in a sorority T-shirt. Above it, Sullivan rhetorically wrote, "Remorseful?" Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said the prosecutor's slide show influenced his decision to sentence Lipton. "I did feel that gave me some indication of how that young man was feeling a short time after a near-fatal accident, that he thought it was appropriate to joke and mock about the possibility of going to prison," the judge said in an interview.
Kevin Bristow, Lipton's attorney, said the photos didn't accurately reflect his client's character or level of remorse, and made it more likely he'd get prison over probation. "The pictures showed a kid who didn't know what to do two weeks after this accident," Bristow said, adding that Lipton wrote apologetic letters to the victim and her family and was so upset that he left college. "He didn't know how to react." Still, he uses the incident as an example to his own teenage children to watch what they post online.
"If it shows up under your name you own it," he said, "and you better understand that people look for that stuff."
Source: Associated Press


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This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows Aelia crater, which is the small crater roughly in the center of the image. There is a larger, more degraded crater to the left of Aelia. Dark and bright material crops out from Aelia's rim and slumps towards its center and also extends in rays outside of the crater's rim for up to approximately 7 kilometers (4.4 miles). This dark and bright material is concentrated into bands, each of which is less than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in width. One particularly striking band originates on the left side of Aelia's rim and then slumps down into the neighboring, degraded crater. This band consists of a central band of bright material that is flanked by bands of dark material on either side.
This image is located in Vesta's Lucaria Tholus quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 23, 2011. This image was taken through the camera's clear filter. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 700 kilometers (435 miles) and the image has a resolution of about 63 meters (207 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.
More information about the Dawn mission is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.


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*** This post has been originally published in ACRL TechConnect on Feb. 11, 2013. ***
*** Update: Several references and a video added (thanks to Brett Bonfield) on Feb. 21, 2013. ***
Who was Aaron Swartz?
If you are a librarian and do not know who Aaron Swartz is, that should probably change now. He helped developing the RSS standard, was the co-founder of Reddit, worked on the Open Library project, downloaded and freed 20% (2.7 million documents) of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database that charges fees for the United States federal court documents, out of which about 1,600 had privacy issues, played a lead role in preventing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and wrote the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
Most famously, he was arrested in 2011 for the mass download of journal articles from JSTOR. He returned the documents to JSTOR and apologized. The Massachusetts state court dismissed the charges, and JSTOR decided not to pursue civil litigation. But MIT stayed silent, and the federal court charged Swartz with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, Swartz could be sentenced to up to 35 years in prison at the age of 26. He committed suicide after facing charges for two years, on January 11, 2013.
Information wants to be free; Information wants to be expensive
Now, he was a controversial figure. He advocated Open Access (OA) but to the extent of encouraging scholars, librarians, students who have access to copyrighted academic materials to trade passwords and circulate them freely on the grounds that this is an act of civil disobedience against unjust copyright laws in his manifesto. He was an advocate of the open Internet, the transparent government, and open access to scholarly output. But he also physically hacked into the MIT network wiring closet and attached his laptop to download over 4 million articles from JSTOR. Most people including librarians are not going to advocate trading their institutions' subscription database passwords or breaking into a staff-only computer networking area of an institution. The actual method of OA that Swartz recommended was highly controversial even among the strongest OA advocates.
But in his Guerrilla OA manifesto, Swartz raised one very valid point about the nature of information in the era of the World Wide Web. That is, information is power. (a) As power, information can be spread to and be made useful to as many of us as possible. Or, (b) it can be locked up and the access to it can be restricted to only those who can pay for it or have access privileges some other way. One thing is clear. Those who do not have access to information will be at a significant disadvantage compared to those who do.
And I would like to ask what today's academic and/or research libraries are doing to realize Scenario (a) rather than Scenario (b). Are academic/research libraries doing enough to make information available to as many as possible?
Too-comfortable Internet, Too-comfortable academic libraries
Among the many articles I read about Aaron Swartz's sudden death, the one that made me think most was "Aaron Swartz's suicide shows the risk of a too-comfortable Internet." The author of this article worries that we may now have a too-comfortable Internet. The Internet is slowly turning into just another platform for those who can afford purchasing information. The Internet as the place where you could freely find, use, modify, create, and share information is disappearing. Instead pay walls and closed doors are being established. Useful information on the Internet is being fast monetized, and the access is no longer free and open. Even the government documents become no longer freely accessible to the public when they are put up on the Internet (likely to be due to digitization and online storage costs) as shown in the case of PACER and Aaron Swartz. We are more and more getting used to giving up our privacy or to paying for information. This may be inevitable in a capitalist society, but should the same apply to libraries as well?
The thought about the too-comfortable Internet made me wonder whether perhaps academic research libraries were also becoming too comfortable with the status quo of licensing electronic journals and databases for patrons. In the times when the library collection was physical, people who walk into the library were rarely turned away. The resources in the library are collected and preserved because we believe that people have the right to learn and investigate things and to form one's own opinions and that the knowledge of the past should be made available for that purpose. Regardless of one's age, gender, social and financial status, libraries have been welcoming and encouraging people who were in the quest for knowledge and information. With the increasing number of electronic resources in the library, however, this has been changing.
Many academic libraries offer computers, which are necessary to access electronic resources of the library itself. But how many of academic libraries keep all the computers open for user without the user log-in? Often those library computers are locked up and require the username and password, which only those affiliated with the institution possess. The same often goes for many electronic resources. How many academic libraries allow the on-site access to electronic resources by walk-in users? How many academic libraries insist on the walk-in users' access to those resources that they pay for in the license? Many academic libraries also participate in the Federal Depository Library program, which requires those libraries to provide free access to the government documents that they receive to the public. But how easy is it for the public to enter and access the free government information at those libraries?
I asked in Twitter about the guest access in academic libraries to computers and e-resources. Approximately 25 academic librarians generously answered my question. (Thank you!) According to the responses in Twitter, almost all except a few libraries ( mentioned in Twitter responses) offer guest access to computers and e-resources on-site. It is to be noted, however, that a few offer the guest -access to neither. Also some libraries limit the guests' computer-use to 30 minutes – 4 hours, thereby restricting the access to the library's electronic resources as well. Only a few libraries offer free wi-fi for guests. And at some libraries, the guest wi-fi users are unable to access the library's e-resources even on-site because the IP range of the guest wi-fi is different from that of the campus wi-fi.
I am not sure how many academic libraries consciously negotiate the walk-in users' on-site access with e-resources vendors or whether this is done somewhat semi-automatically because many libraries ask the library building IP range to be registered with vendors so that the authentication can be turned off inside the building. I surmise that publishers and database vendors will not automatically permit the walk-in users' on-site access in their licenses unless libraries ask for it. Some vendors also explicitly prohibit libraries from using their materials to fill the Interlibrary loan requests from other libraries. The electronic resource vendors and publishers' pricing has become more and more closely tied to the number of patrons who can access their products. Academic libraries has been dealing with the escalating costs for electronic resources by filtering out library patrons and limiting the access to those in a specific disciplines. For example, academic medical and health sciences libraries often subscribe to databases and resources that have the most up-to-date information about biomedical research, diseases, medications, and treatments. These are almost always inaccessible to the general public and often even to those affiliated with the institution. The use of these prohibitively expensive resources is limited to a very small portion of people who are affiliated with the institution in specific disciplines such as medicine and health sciences. Academic research libraries have been partially responsible for the proliferation of these access limitations by welcoming and often preferring these limitations as a cost-saving measure. (By contrast, if those resources were in the print format, no librarian would think that it is OK to permanently limit its use to those in medical or health science disciplines only.)
Too-comfortable libraries do not ask themselves if they are serving the public good of providing access to information and knowledge for those who are in need but cannot afford it. Too-comfortable libraries see their role as a mediator and broker in the transaction between the information seller and the information buyer. They may act as an efficient and successful mediator and broker. But I don't believe that that is why libraries exist. Ultimately, libraries exist to foster the sharing and dissemination of knowledge more than anything, not to efficiently mediate information leasing.  And this is the dangerous idea: You cannot put a price tag on knowledge; it belongs to the human race. Libraries used to be the institution that validates and confirms this idea. But will they continue to be so in the future? Will an academic library be able to remain as a sanctuary for all ideas and a place for sharing knowledge for people's intellectual pursuits regardless of their institutional membership? Or will it be reduced to a branch of an institution that sells knowledge to its tuition-paying customers only? While public libraries are more strongly aligned with this mission of making information and knowledge freely and openly available to the public than academic libraries, they cannot be expected to cover the research needs of patrons as fully as academic libraries.
I am not denying that libraries are also making efforts in continuing the preservation and access to the information and resources through initiatives such as Hathi Trust and DPLA (Digital Public Library of America). My concern is rather whether academic research libraries are becoming perhaps too well-adapted to the times of the Internet and online resources and too comfortable serving the needs of the most tangible patron base only in the most cost-efficient way, assuming that the library's mission of storing and disseminating knowledge can now be safely and neutrally relegated to the Internet and the market. But it is a fantasy to believe that the Internet will be a sanctuary for all ideas (The Internet is being censored as shown in the case of Tarek Mehanna.), and the market will surely not have the ideal of the free and open access to knowledge for the public.
If libraries do not fight for and advocate those who are in need of information and knowledge but cannot afford it, no other institution will do so. Of course, it costs to create, format, review, and package content. Authors as well as those who work in this business of content formatting, reviewing, packaging, and producing should be compensated for their work. But not to the extent that the content is completely inaccessible to those who cannot afford to purchase but nevertheless want access to it for learning, inquiry, and research. This is probably the reason why we are all moved by Swartz's Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in spite of the illegal implications of the action that he actually recommended in the manifesto.
Knowledge and information is not like any other product for purchase. Sharing increases its value, thereby enabling innovation, further research, and new knowledge. Limiting knowledge and information to only those with access privilege and/or sufficient purchasing power creates a fundamental inequality. The mission of a research institution should never be limited to self-serving its members only, in my opinion. And if the institution forgets this, it should be the library that first raises a red flag. The mission of an academic research institution is to promote the freedom of inquiry and research and to provide an environment that supports that mission inside and outside of its walls, and that is why a library is said to be the center of an academic research institution.
I don't have any good answers to the inevitable question of "So what can an academic research library do?" Perhaps, we can start with broadening the guest access to the library computers, wi-fi, and electronic resources on-site. Academic research libraries should also start asking themselves this question: What will libraries have to offer for those who seek knowledge for learning and inquiry but cannot afford it? If the answer is nothing, we will have lost libraries.
In his talk about the Internet Archive's Open Library project at the Code4Lib Conference in 2008 (at 11:20), Swartz describes how librarians had argued about which subject headings to use for the books in the Open Library website. And he says, "We will use all of them. It's online. We don't have to have this kind of argument." The use of online information and resources does not incur additional costs for use once produced. Many resources, particularly those scholarly research output already have established buyers such as research libraries. Do we have to deny access to information and knowledge to those who cannot afford but are seeking for it, just so that we can have a market where information and knowledge resources are sold and bought and authors are compensated along with those who work with the created content as a result? No, this is a false question. We can have both. But libraries and librarians will have to make it so.
Videos to Watch
"Code4Lib 2008: Building the Open Library – YouTube.â€
"Aaron Swartz on Picking Winners" American Library Association Midwinter meeting, January 12, 2008.
"Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors.â€
"Aaron Swartz.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.aaronsw.com/.
"Aaron Swartz – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR.
"Aaron Swartz on Picking Winners – YouTube.†2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BvJqXaoO4FI.
"Aaron Swartz's Suicide Shows the Risk of a Too-comfortable Internet – The Globe and Mail.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/aaron-swartzs-suicide-shows-the-risk-of-a-too-comfortable-internet/article7509277/.
"Academics Remember Reddit Co-Founder With #PDFTribute.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/01/14/aaron_swartz_death_pdftribute_hashtag_aggregates_copyrighted_articles_released.html.
"After Aaron, Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry | TechCrunch.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/the-future-of-the-scientific-journal-industry/.
American Library Association, "A Memorial Resolution Honoring Aaron Swartz.†2013. http://connect.ala.org/files/memorial_5_aaron%20swartz.pdf.
"An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy – NYTimes.com.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?_r=1&.
Bonfield, Brett. 2013. "Aaron Swartz.†In the Library with the Lead Pipe (February 20). http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/aaron-swartz/.
"Code4Lib 2008: Building the Open Library – YouTube.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV-P2uzzc4s&feature=youtu.be&t=2s.
"Daily Kos: What Aaron Swartz Did at MIT.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/13/1178600/-What-Aaron-Swartz-did-at-MIT.
Dupuis, John. 2013a. "Around the Web: Aaron Swartz Chronological Link Roundup – Confessions of a Science Librarian.†Accessed February 10. http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/01/20/around-the-web-aaron-swartz-chronological-link-roundup/.
———. 2013b. "Library Vendors, Politics, Aaron Swartz, #pdftribute – Confessions of a Science Librarian.†Accessed February 10. http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/01/17/library-vendors-politics-aaron-swartz-pdftribute/.
"FDLP for PUBLIC.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.gpo.gov/libraries/public/.
"Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/freedom_to_connect_aaron_swartz_1986.
"Full Text of 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto'.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt.
Groover, Myron. 2013. "British Columbia Library Association – News – The Last Days of Aaron Swartz.†Accessed February 21. http://www.bcla.bc.ca/page/news/ezlist_item_9abb44a1-4516-49f9-9e31-57685e9ca5cc.aspx#.USat2-i3pJP.
Hellman, Eric. 2013a. "Go To Hellman: Edward Tufte Was a Proto-Phreaker (#aaronswnyc Part 1).†Accessed February 21. http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2013/01/edward-tufte-was-proto-phreaker.html.
———. 2013b. "Go To Hellman: The Four Crimes of Aaron Swartz (#aaronswnyc Part 2).†Accessed February 21. http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-four-crimes-of-aaron-swartz.html.
"How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture – NYTimes.com.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/technology/how-mit-ensnared-a-hacker-bucking-a-freewheeling-culture.html?pagewanted=all.
March, Andrew. 2013. "A Dangerous Mind? – NYTimes.com.†Accessed February 10. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/a-dangerous-mind.html?pagewanted=all.
Peters, Justin. 2013. "The Idealist.†Slate, February 7. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/aaron_swartz_he_wanted_to_save_the_world_why_couldn_t_he_save_himself.html.
"Public Access to Court Electronic Records.†2013a. Accessed February 10. http://www.pacer.gov/.
"Publishers and Library Groups Spar in Appeal to Ruling on E-Reserves – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://chronicle.com/article/PublishersLibrary-Groups/136995/?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en.
Rochkind, Jonathan. 2013. "Library Values and the Growing Scholarly Digital Divide: In Memoriam Aaron Swartz | Bibliographic Wilderness.†Accessed February 10. http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/library-values-and-digital-divide-in-memoriam-aaron-swartz/.
Sims, Nancy. 2013. "What Is the Government's Interest in Copyright? Not That of the Public. – Copyright Librarian.†Accessed February 10. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/copyrightlibn/2013/02/what-is-the-governments-interest-in-copyright.html.
Summers, Ed. 2013. "Aaronsw | Inkdroid.†Accessed February 21. http://inkdroid.org/journal/2013/01/19/aaronsw/.
"The Inside Story of Aaron Swartz's Campaign to Liberate Court Filings | Ars Technica.†2013. Accessed February 10. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/the-inside-story-of-aaron-swartzs-campaign-to-liberate-court-filings/.
"Welcome to Open Library (Open Library).†2013. Accessed February 10. http://openlibrary.org/.
West, Jessamyn. 2013. "Librarian.net » Blog Archive » On Leadership and Remembering Aaron.†Accessed February 21. http://www.librarian.net/stax/3984/on-leadership-and-remembering-aaron/.