Saggy baggy pants ban

The legal questions surrounding the prohibition of saggy pants are quite interesting:

RIVIERA BEACH – Drop that ordinance — and your pants if you consider it fashionable, Palm Beach County Judge Laura Johnson ruled Wednesday.

The judge overturned Riviera Beach’s saggy pants ordinance, which had prohibited anyone from wearing pants below the waist exposing skin or underwear.

A referendum endorsing the ban was supported by 72 percent of city voters in March 2008. Riviera Beach began enforcing the ordinance in July but it was ruled unconstitutional by Johnson, city spokeswoman Rose Anne Brown said.

Offenders were cited with a $150 fine for the first offense and $300 for the second offense, considered a misdemeanor. Brown estimates fewer than 20 people were caught with drooping pants since the ordinance was enacted.

This will surely be appealed. And Atlanta and many other cities will be watching. (I don’t think Atlanta is actually enforcing its ban.)

So, the legal question is — Is showing your underwear a form of political expression, and therefore protected by the First Amendment? I’d think that would be an uphill argument — but we’ll see.

Three Rules of Social Media for Business

There’s a big, unfilled niche in the PR/Marketing industry for people with knowledge of social media — i.e., Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here’s a good primer on using social media for business.

Photosynth demonstration

Incredible technology.

Cell phone interruption

It’s the end of the semester — time for one of my class videos.

Google News Timeline

Check out Google’s News Timeline — news in a handy calendar format. That’s what I’ve been missing — a new way to keep up with the news.

Good reporting on the deficit

Link:

Here’s some great reporting — particularly from ABC’s Jake Tapper. The president’s spokesperson is explaining that $100 million in savings will ad up. Tapper pointed out that last week $8 billion in an earmark was too small an amount to worry about.

Big salary

Wow. The president of the Boys and Girls club of America made nearly $1 million last year. Thanks to Atlanta Unfiltered for posting this public record.

Is it bad to expand the DNA database?

This presents an interesting ethical quandary:

Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.

Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.

The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.

Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.

But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.

“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.

I have a knee-jerk reaction to this expansion of a DNA database — it’s not good because it’s a loss of civil liberties and our right to privacy. It feels like we’re heading down a Philip K. Dickian path toward government domination via technology. (Remember in “Minority Report” when the government tracked all citizens via their retinas. To escape monitoring, you had to get eyeball transplants!)

But, there’s a Utopian futurist in me who wants to see the good in this development. After all, DNA evidence is rather conclusive. So, I don’t see much risk to the innocent in widening this database. The only people who will suffer are people who are committing crimes. It would be great to see a generation of potential criminals grow up in a society where rapists are almost always caught — because of a cross-listed, national DNA database. Perhaps we should embrace this technological advance as a blessing, not a curse.

AJC moves editorial board toward the center

Atlanta Unsheltered is reporting that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial board no longer features Jay Bookman or Cynthia Tucker. That’s a pretty huge move — removing, as Ken Edelstein puts it, the “two most important liberal voices in the state for the last two decades.”

This move represents AJC Publisher Julia Wallace’s stated intention to create more balance in the paper. She noted earlier this year that reader’s had complained “that our editorial pages are too liberal,” and removing Tucker and Bookman answers those complaints pretty effectively.

I think this is a good move. Where is it written that a newspaper’s editorial board must sit on the far left end of the political spectrum? We can assume that the new board will be closer to the middle and won’t automatically alienate a large number of its readers. Thoughtful editorial writing, not beholden to one political ideology, will better serve the city of Atlanta.

As newspapers seek to hold on to their readership in this new media environment, perhaps more will purge their editorial boards in an attempt to make a product more palatable to both sides of the political spectrum.

True/Slant Tests Web Journalism Model

Here’s an interesting journalism innovation:

This week, a new Web news site is entering the fray, with a novel approach to journalistic entrepreneurship, new forms of advertising, and an effort to blend journalism and social networking.

The site, called True/Slant, at trueslant.com, is opening its doors via an odd preliminary status it calls an ‘open alpha.’ This means it’s rough around the edges, and not yet taking in revenue, but hopes to attract enough participation to hone its design and operation.

True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

A few interesting stories on the site already, including this one about a Gitmo detainee who called Al-Jazeera.