Media

I must have been 12 or 13 when my father suggested I go downtown with him to get some money from the bank. It was a Saturday afternoon, and, although he was a senior executive at the “Multibanco” in Chihuahua, I doubted he was going to be admitted on the weekend to help himself to some pesos. So I kept watching soccer on TV. My team, Atlético Español, was finding a new way to lose; that’s what they did.

Growing up in the South, my friends and I had a unified theory of beauty: the more blue eye shadow you were wearing, the better you looked. We used as many shades as we could, buying big discount-store palettes and layering the stuff from lashes to eyebrow. I don’t know how this look got started or why it has such a regional flavor.

At 6 p.m. Taipei time on Friday, June 1, Ho Tsung-hsun was suddenly shut out of his Facebook account. When he tried to log back in, a message in a red box announced: "This account has been disabled." Ho, a veteran activist and citizen journalist on environmental and social issues in Taiwan, immediately took a picture of the message, then wrote an angry blog post on a Taiwan-based citizen journalism platform. He insisted that he had not violated any of the site's community guidelines.

Remember how the Internet community stopped SOPA?

Come on out to Irish Whiskey this Thursday at 8pm for the official launch of the Internet Defense League (IDL), a network of people and organizations committed to defending the open Internet. The goal of IDL is to sound the alarm quickly to millions of users whenever the Internet is in peril.

Memo to Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican presidential candidate who lost on July 1 by six percentage points: Losing is bad; not accepting your defeat is worse.

Losing well is an underappreciated virtue. Whether we’re talking about a family game of Monopoly, a summer softball league, or an intense firm whose associates vie for a promotion to be partner, the ability to lose gracefully, and concede defeat in a manner that isn’t destructive, is essential to community well-being.

The Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition (“PIPAC”) strongly opposes the National Association of Broadcasters (“NAB”) petition for stay pending judicial review of the Federal Communications Commission rule requiring that broadcast television stations post the contents of their public inspection files on a website to be maintained by the Commission. NAB has failed to meet any of the criteria necessary for a stay.

The open data movement is taking root at the local level. Since President Barack Obama’s 2009 memorandum on transparency and open government, datacatalogs.org has reported that more than 40 state, county, and local governments in the United States have put data catalogues online. Open data policies typically define open data as structured standardized data in machine readable formats published for the public. This means that government data can be downloaded in such formats as CSV, KML, XML, and even XLS. Sharing information is not new.