Photo by Sal Ingram

A typical play in basketball is when teammate one dribbles the ball, sending teammate two into a cut toward the basket before screening teammate three, who flashes past teammate four into the post, while teammate five cuts hard to the three-point line.

Sound complicated? Now picture this play in math.

When the Santa Cruz Warriors officially relocated last October, fans wanted to see dunks, blocks and steals. Behind the scenes, however, few casual fans could expect the amount of data needed to run a professional basketball team.

“I have one guy who puts together spreadsheets of efficiency metrics [for players]” said Santa Cruz Warriors general manager Kirk Lacob. “We’re looking for a guy who has one elite skill that can translate to the next level.”

The team keeps figures not just on it’s own play, but for every team and player in the league. So far, this method has been reliable: The Santa Cruz Warriors have only lost one home game as of last Monday, the best home winning percentage in the D-league.

“It sounds crazy, but this our version of keeping up with other teams,” Lacob said. “We want to know them better than they know themselves when we make our moves.”

Statistical analysis usage has multiplied the past 12 years in professional basketball and is coming to the forefront with the Warriors organization. While the stats originally have roots in 1980s sportswriters like Bill James, their sophistication has accelerated with time and interest from professional sports teams.

These statistics are collectively known as Association for Professional Basketball Research Metrics, or APBRmetrics. Their focus varies, but many of the newer statistics are about how efficient a player is or how well a player plays in a team setting, as opposed to their individual accumulation of blocks or points.

New technology has made efficiency statistics data more frequent. Lacob spoke of the Stats Inc. cameras released late in 2012 which take pictures and video of any spot on the court, slow the action down and then export raw data back as an Excel spreadsheet.

While these cameras have not yet marked the rafters of downtown’s Kaiser Permanente Arena because of their expense, Lacob believes the capabilities of these cameras to examine how players play may be too great to pass up on in future seasons.

“We could measure anything we want,” Lacob said. “The shot arcs of guys from the first to fourth quarters, how they play defense in specific sets — the possibilities feel endless, but nobody really knows what to do with them just yet.”

Lacob centers much statistical work on five man lineup analysis, a complicated mode which looks to find the most efficient lineup possible on the court in a given situation. This type of statistical analysis can often explain the difference between winning and losing succinctly.

Lacob mentioned his office’s interest in offensive rating and defensive rating stats, a pace adjusted stat which calculates the total number of points scored or allowed over the number of possessions in a game before being multiplied by 100.

The margin between the two numbers is called points margin per hundred possessions, a number many general managers find strongly correlated with winning, according to Golden State of Mind — a blog devoted to all things Warriors.

Lacob said that these numbers can be deceiving at times, without mentioning any of the other metrics his office calculates.

“It’s too easy to get tricked by a big jump or an outlier,” Lacob said. “We have to use a bunch of them, really.”

Taylor Griffin sinks a free throw in Sunday’s win.

Lacob is the youngest general manager not just in the NBA developmental league, but in all of American pro sports at 24-years old. The recent Stanford alum believes his youth and education grants him an interest in taking risks some of his elder peers aren’t inclined to make.

“I grew up in the ‘Moneyball’ era of sports in the Bay Area,” Lacob said. “I’ve been fortunate to grow up when I did because technology has revolutionized the industry around me. That book was extremely influential.”

Fans have flocked to efficiency metrics as they become more popular. RealGM.com — a San Francisco based new media sporting news site —has found that hoops heads prefer their hard stats to go along with their daily digestion of dunks.

“We’ve contributed to an intelligent and in-depth discussion among very committed sports fans,” said RealGM.com chief operating officer Todd Essman.

The site began as a startup on internet message boards and grew as a place where fans could check out which NBA trades were possible under the rules of the salary cap. However, the site has grown to include a wide variety of specialized basketball news and statistics, including D-league analysis and a blog devoted to testing out stat calculations and theories.

Lacob said RealGM.com is a good place to find smart analysis of the evolving statistics. Santa Cruz Warriors head coach Nate Bjorkgren believes Lacob  sends a strong message with his interest in finding better math equations to explain what goes on in a game.

“Most of Kirk’s statistic match up to what I see on the court, but i’m inclined to listen to him when he shows me that a guy is producing really efficiently in a more limited role,” Bjorkgren said. “Usually, that’s when we have the best basketball conversations.”

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

In the original print version of this story, Mary-Claire King’s name was spelled Mary Clair King. This was corrected for this online version.

When UC Santa Cruz researchers and graduate students published on July 7, 2000 the first record of a person’s whole DNA sequence, or genome, the field of genomics was still young. Utilizing a UCSC designed online DNA database, this international effort cost over $100 million and was known as the Human Genome Project (HGP).

That project changed the world.

“[The HGP] is the first time that humanity got its glimpse of the DNA message that had been passed on for so many aeons,” said David Haussler, UCSC professor of biomolecular engineering and director of The Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering. Haussler introduced “Genomics Gets Personal: Property, Persons, and Privacy,” a recent panel on genomics which took place at UC San Francisco on Sept. 27.

Hosted by UCSC, panelists discussed the use of genetic information and its effects on society today.

Haussler was at the center of UCSC’s research in the HGP and its success in providing free genomic information online. Since then, the speed and cost of sequencing, or decoding, the human genome code of four proteins — A, T, C and G — has improved exponentially.

“The field of genomics and personalized medicine is moving at an extraordinary rate,” Haussler said. “What cost 12 years ago [an] excess of $100 million next year will cost $1,000. One hundred thousand times improvement in little over a decade … the social implications of that are enormous.”

Since the HGP, which was officially completed in 2003, UCSC has continued its renowned work in genomics, coming out with world famous research and technology including the Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a database developed by Haussler to store genomes of cancerous tumors to better understand what causes different types of cancer and how to treat them.

“Genomics is a huge subject at UCSC,” said Brandon Allgood, UCSC alumnus and director of computational science at Numerate Inc., a drug design and technology company. “It is a world leader in some respects.”

Allgood said one of the reasons for the university’s leading role in the field is its commitment to interdisciplinary studies, especially between the sciences and social sciences. Jenny Reardon is at the forefront of connecting those subjects.

Reardon is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE) and the creator and co-director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC, a community dedicated to bridging the gap between the sciences, social sciences and humanities. She is the author of “Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics,” which covers the history and controversies that encircled one of the most controversial social issues in genomics’ past, the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP).

Separate from the HGP, the HGDP aimed to record the genetic variation within the human species by sampling genetic information from isolated human populations. By researching isolated populations, researchers hoped to track humanity’s early movements and settlements to learn more about the origin of the human species, develop drugs specific to diseases affecting certain populations and to study the enormous amount of diversity that exists among humans.

The project was quickly challenged by indigenous groups who were concerned that their genetic information, separated and categorized, would be misused in a way that would have a negative impact on indigenous communities. Justified by a history of past oppression and inequality, many indigenous peoples were concerned with the HGDP’s overall mission, communication efforts, as well as other concerns.

“In the long history of destruction which has accompanied western colonization we have come to realize that the agenda of the non-indigenous forces has been to appropriate and manipulate the natural order for the purposes of profit, power and control,” wrote members of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, a meeting of indigenous leaders from the United States, several Central and South American countries and Canada, according to the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism’s website. “We particularly oppose the HGD Project which intends to collect, and make available our genetic materials which may be used for commercial, scientific, and military purposes … We hold that life cannot be bought, owned, sold, discovered or patented, even in its smallest form.”

Reardon said the project came under scrutiny for, among other things, biocolonialism and racism.

“It was called the vampire project, a project interested in sucking the blood of indigenous people more than it was interested in their livelihood,” Reardon said, acknowledging the painful history of colonialism and eugenics, the widely rejected practice of promoting certain people or traits and rejecting, sometimes violently, less desirable people or traits. “The trauma of the past has been strong.”

Reardon said this was not the intention of the scientists involved and that the scientific community has worked hard to address these concerns.

“These well meaning scientists, many of whom, like Mary-Claire King, were committed to issues of human rights. Bob Cook-Deegan was a member of Doctors Without Borders,” Reardon said.

Illustrations by Christine Hipp

Robert Cook-Deegan is a research professor in genome ethics and law and policy at Duke University and author of “The Gene Wars: Science, Politics and the Human Genome.” When the HGDP first began, Cook-Deegan played a major role in the project and in one of its first controversial encounters with society.

“We made one pretty big mistake in the original paper that proposed doing what became known as the HGDP,” Cook-Deegan said. “I think I’m the person who put the term ‘vanishing opportunity’ into the title of that paper, and in retrospect that was a pretty stupid turn of phrase.”

Cook-Deegan said it was unintentional that the term implied that collecting data from dying populations was more important than actually helping them survive.

“The foreseeable consequence of that terminology ‘vanishing opportunity,’ was that [people thought we believed] it was more important to study human origins than to right the wrongs and to focus on human rights. And of course we don’t believe that, but we didn’t explicitly say that, and we should have,” Cook-Deegan said. “I did view that as a mistake.”

Even as the field of genomics still reels from its controversial past, it continues to pervade society and bring to light new concerns.

With the completion of the Human Genome Project, the cost of sequencing genomes dramatically decreased as technology became cheaper, faster and better. This has allowed more and more data to pour in, but one of the biggest questions posed at the panel and that genomics faces today is: who gets to look at all that information? Should it be exclusive to the experts or be open to everyone?

“There are two philosophies,” said Cook-Deegan, who was one of the four panelists. “One is, share only the stuff that we kind of know how to interpret now, and that is under the framework of ‘this is a great big genetic test’ … People who are used to the way of the web, and the way that we think about information now don’t like that because there is an intermediary there who is deciding what information is shared with the individual.”

Ryan Phelan, another panelist and the creator of DNA Direct and founder of Direct Medical Knowledge, what became the backbone to the online medical site, WebMD, said people have never had open access to information in such a way.

“What has happened is the internet. What took 30 years to get WebMD to be ubiquitous, it is now going to take us 5–10 years to get genomic information ubiquitous,” Phelan said. “There’s a whole continuum here of information to the patient, to the doctor, for decision making or for research.”

Panelist Gail Jarvik, the head of the department of medical genetics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said in her experience, access to uncertain or unknown genetic information can be harmful to patients.

“I have had very unhappy experiences with just giving people variants of uncertain significance back for breast cancer and having their doctor decide to take off their breast,” Jarvik said. “Even though I very specifically said, this is likely to be benign, I don’t think this is a breast cancer causing mutation, the doctors say well you have breast cancer, you have a mutation in your breast cancer gene, off with your breast.”

However, John Wilbanks, a panelist who runs the Consent to Research Project, which gives people an easy way to donate their health data to a database for researchers to use and analyze, said although there will be mistakes as genomics moves forward, the data will be public with or without the consent of experts.

“As people who are sick or have family members who are sick can access these technologies outside of the institution, they’re going to,” Wilbanks said. “A lot of bad decisions are going to be made as a result of that but if you are not part of the existing clinical research system anyway, this is a ray of hope.”

More progress can be made by making genomic data easy to donate and available to the public on free databases, Wilbanks said, than by allowing only a select few scientists to access it.

However the information is accessed, there is money to be made in the future of genomics. Drug companies are already scrambling to get ready to provide customers with sequencing technology and drugs developed to be effective for genomes.

Phelan spoke about the Chinese genome sequencing company BGI–Shenzhen’s acquisition of Complete Genomics, another genome sequencing company based in Silicon Valley. He said corporations are already bracing for the future of genomics.

“These are companies, large companies making big plays in the translation of these technologies into the consumer market,” Phelan said.

As far as the future of personalized genomics goes, Cook-Deegan said he is cautious about making predictions. People will get their genomes sequenced, but why? And what will happen to that information? That, he said, remains to be seen.

“We’ve got all these reasons [for getting our genes sequenced]. We’ve got pharmacogenetics as a reason, we’ve got ancestry as a reason, we’ve got genetic risk of a foreseeable condition as a reason to get your genome done, and you’ve also got the fact that it’s a cool thing to talk about at cocktail parties,” Cook-Deegan said. “That’s what’s driving it right now, but we’re going to move beyond that.”

As for the social issues, Haussler said there will continue to be important debates about how genomics can best be integrated into society.

“I can only do my research in the context of society,” Haussler said. “It is absolutely necessary that we have a social contract — that society understands the value of the research so that it is maintained, funded and enabled. A lot of this, from a society’s point of view depends on what the benefits of genetic research are. As those grow, I think that a compromise will become more obviously necessary. When personal genomes are really saving lives and really helping people live fuller, longer, better lives, healthier lives, compromises will be made on some of these social issues.”

On Friday night, 35 pitches were made, which were later narrowed down to eight demos with multiple members, including UCSC students. These demos formed teams to meet their objective: to create a portion of a larger idea by the end of the weekend and present it to colleagues at the symposium on Sunday.

“We were overwhelmed,” said Margaret Rosas, a member of TechRaising’s founding group. “[The event] exceeded our expectations.”

The teams had help from expert entrepreneurs who provided consultation on startup law, user experience, management, publicity and several other subject areas, according to the website. Then on Sunday, all the teams regrouped and presented their innovations.

Rosas said she spoke with many people at the event about expanding further on the student population from UCSC’s relationship with mentors in the Santa Cruz area.

“That’s definitely what we want to see more of in the future,” Rosas said. “There were students who were able to take advantage of our mentors and that’s the kind of thing that we want to promote and encourage.”

The eight pitches presented on Sunday included a “client and website project management tool” called “All Together Now,” an “augmented reality shooting game” called “blam — Boys Like Augmented Mayhem,” and a “clothing brand sizing app for Facebook” called “Sizemyc.”

Rosas said she was pleasantly surprised with the success of the event.

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

The world is rapidly developing. Everything from microwaves to iPads has been developed within the last 50 years. New gadgets have appeared, including new methods for dealing with crime. Police now have the potential to curb crime by shooting a GPS tracker at any suspicious car via laser-guided handgun, and track a person’s whereabouts for days or even weeks, something that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago.

As of April 28, a three-judge panel upheld in the Seventh Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals — comprising the states of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin — that this practice is legal, and it is unnecessary for police to obtain a warrant in this situation.

Disregarding the ill-fitting notion of using James Bond tactics to curb real-life crime, the most upsetting thing about this case is the secrecy of the tracking or “search,” and the idea that it is unnecessary for police to produce a warrant or inform the suspicious person of their audit.

This case’s legality means that it is up to police to decide what is suspicious. One wonders, what factors do the police weigh before they choose to track a car?

It sounds oddly reminiscent of Arizona’s SB1070 bill, which would have allowed police to ask drivers they suspected to be illegal immigrants to produce documentation papers and proof of residency or citizenship, all without a warrant.

But the resounding difference between these two cases is that a federal judge blocked some controversial provisions of SB1070 from ever taking effect, arguing the potential for broad misuse, whereas the majority of judges of the Seventh Circuit panel upheld the GPS tracking decision in U.S. v. Juan Cuevas-Perez.

The U.S. v. Juan Cuevas-Perez case was upheld because ultimately, the judges decided that information gathered from this GPS tracking device, which was used on Cuevas-Perez’s car for 28 days, could also be gathered by police who simply follow what they consider a suspicious car.

In her dissenting opinion, Judge Diane P. Wood said, “The technological devices available for such monitoring have rapidly attained a degree of accuracy that would have been unimaginable to an earlier generation. They make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, “1984,” seem clumsy and easily avoidable by comparison.”

Judge Wood maintains that as new technologies like the GPS tracking device appear, the margin for error disappears. Police following a suspicious car cannot be as accurate as the GPS devices that are now going to replace them. And by comparing the device to the mass surveillance depicted in “1984,” Wood suggests the new GPS tracking represents a serious invasion of privacy.

And where are Fourth Amendment protections in all of this? Instead of new world uses of the Fourth Amendment that would address new technologies like the GPS tracker, old world applications of it and strict interpretation lead to decisions like U.S. v. Juan Cuevas-Perez, and to the lessening of Fourth Amendment protections for citizens in the United States.

The Fourth Amendment must not remain stagnant, unable to face rising challenges of the modern world.

It is now up to the Supreme Court to invalidate this decision, and broaden protections of the Fourth Amendment to address new technologies in the modern world.

There is a gray cat with a pop tart for a body on the computer screen.

Its pixilated body is flying through animated space, leaving a rainbow trail in its wake. A grating but catchy tune plays over and over.

“Nyan, nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan nyan nyan, nyan nyan.”

“The appeal is that it’s just nonsense,” said Joel Johnston, a sophomore broadcasting major at San Francisco State University. “There are some people who like the song.”

This is Nyan Cat, a recent example of an Internet meme, which is an image, video, or saying that spreads virally over the World Wide Web.

The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact.

As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.”

Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together, and taking on different meanings along the way.

Moulds says he has “been plugged in to the Internet before most people knew there was an Internet.” He was online during the days of purely text-based message boards, called USENET newsgroups, where he says he experienced his first meme: a message board with the address “Alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork.” The name references the Swedish Chef, a character on the Muppets.

“That was the first really well-known, completely whimsical thing [on the Internet],” Moulds said.

As often happens with memes, the message board spurred imitators and variations, such as “Alt.wesley.crusher.must.die.die.die,” this time poking fun at Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This was happening in the mid-1980s, but most of the memes Moulds can remember are from the last decade. Today, the Internet is much more sophisticated, though memes operate mostly the same way: an absurd or relatable concept takes form, usually in an image, and is released onto the Web, where just about anything can happen. They can remain in obscurity, or they can take over an entire section of the Internet — at least for a couple of days.

The last huge medium to take hold before the Internet was television, which brought mass culture into the home in a way it had never been before. The “Idiot Box” had the potential to be a voice for and of the people, but commercial interests outweighed realistic representations and varying viewpoints.

It’s widely acknowledged that the Internet is in some ways replacing television, and thus memes are poised to rival television as a form of mass entertainment. The popular meme database website Know Your Meme currently has 5,525 memes catalogued total, and that doesn’t count all the variations that come about within each meme.

Compare that to the 70-something channels that come with most cable packages for television. Some would say that you can’t look at TV shows and viral Internet images the same way, but what it all boils down to is the influence of ideas, and in numbers, memes have a lot more ideas, and a growing influence. Johnston spoke about the inevitability of encountering memes in today’s world.

“It eventually just happens,” he said. “If you’re on the Internet, you’re eventually just going to get exposed to memes. My mom isn’t really into the Internet — she just uses it for email, but even she knows about some of them.”

The Internet currently has less corporate control than other mediums. Because of this, memes are a form of entertainment that is actual popular culture in the purest terms: a culture of the people. They imitate TV’s instant-gratification format, but project a voice that is really from the masses, for the masses. Advertisers are constantly trying to produce an inauthentic copy of this, and many criticize meme culture for its anonymous, anything-goes approach. But the populist entertainment ventures on — for better or worse.

“Friday,” that infamous Rebecca Black music video, was inescapable for two weeks in March of this year, and even surpassed Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” in hits on YouTube. The song was originally produced and promoted by label Ark Music Factory, but what made the fervor so intense was the work of millions of people on their computers, posting links wherever they could.

And it wasn’t just the video itself that caught on. Different memes dissecting and analyzing small parts of the video, and comparing it to other parts of popular culture, were all over different sites.

One popular image had two panels: in the first, Rebecca Black is smiling, with a caption that reads “Which seat should I take?” a line from the popular song. In the next, the character Gretchen from the popular teen movie “Mean Girls” grimaces, and the caption is a line from the movie: “You can’t sit with us!”

There were hundreds more like it, and thousands of other memes take the Internet by storm every single day. It is a mass medium that, thanks to the omniscience of the Internet, is constantly evolving, an ever changing and growing set of inside jokes and references upon references upon references.

By taking apart Rebecca Black’s cheesy, generic pop song, the masses used humor to reject the disintegration of the music industry. Memes aren’t important because they make stars out of 13-year-old girls — they’re important because they allow the public to speak, and to decide what’s valuable. They are, in a way, a re-appropriation of American popular culture.

And this re-appropriation has concrete results. On April Fool’s Day of 2008, YouTube linked all featured videos on its front page to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” copying a popular practice from Internet pranksters known as “Rickrolling.” The song shot to number 77 on Amazon’s online store.

The meme site ICanHazCheezburger, which bought Know Your Meme in March for an undisclosed seven-figure amount, receives around 2000 submissions a day alone. The site focuses on LOLCats, a type of meme that takes humorous images of cats and imposes absurd text laden with purposefully poor spelling and grammar.

For much of the 2000s and still today, LOLCats were and are inescapable. Their signature “I can haz [insert thing here]?” has become an acceptable way to request something, and people are expected to know what is being referenced. Emily Huh, editor-in-chief of ICanHazCheezburger, explained why she thinks certain memes take off so much.

“It has to have some entertainment value, whether it’s funny or whether it’s so horrible that it is funny,” she said. “Like Rebecca Black. It was so horrible that you just had to laugh at it. You don’t necessarily have to relate to it, but just understand it.”

San Francisco State student Johnston, who can spend an hour or two going through different memes in one sitting, echoes Huh’s opinion.

“I think the absurd nature of a lot of [memes] definitely make them entertaining because you just can’t really expect them,” Johnston said. “They’re all very accessible. A lot of people can see them and understand them, and a lot of people can use them in their own way.”

“People come to our sites because they get to connect and share with people what they have made or seen,” Huh said. “People get a few minutes of fame. They get really excited when they make a submission and it gets to the home page.”

An example of a relatable meme is Rage Comics, four-panel comics that always end the same way: with a stick-figure man looking upwards, his face contorted, mouth agape, with the text “FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU.” The situations leading up to the almost-expletive are always everyday annoyances — the sort of things that happen to everyone at some point, but that are so mundane that most people never talk about them, like being too lazy to tie your shoelaces and then tripping over them.

The “fffuuu” guy is one of a cast of characters in the meme-verse. Also present are Forever Alone and the Troll, different unattractive faces that have their own comics and followings.

These memes, like many others, originated on 4chan, an anything-goes message board site which grants users complete anonymity. Wade Hastings, a student at Cabrillo College, has been using the site for about five years now. He first looked at it after he repeated a joke he had heard someone else tell, only to be told that the joke originated on 4chan.

“I read that thread [rage comics] when it first happened,” said Hastings. “It was just some guy, he made a four-panel comic, and it ended with the ‘fffuuu’ guy.”

4chan is known for having no boundaries or limits for what is acceptable to post. That means a lot of awful stuff, like child pornography and extremely racist, sexist, and homophobic posts, pop up. This is the price that is paid for a democratic, populist form of entertainment — all democracies depend on free speech.

“I do think the anonymity of the Internet has inspired creativity without traditional boundaries, and much of what’s been created seems like a response to the those traditional boundaries,” said UCSC professor Moulds in an email. “Some of what is created is small-minded or mean, and maybe much of it wouldn’t be out there if every creation were clearly linked to its author. But it would also chill free expression immensely if people thought that every off-color joke or juvenile Photoshop could be tied to their real names forever.”

And alongside the offensive material, memes that later take hold of the entire Internet start on 4chan. For Hastings, the limitless atmosphere is key for creativity free from judgment.

“It’s almost completely anonymous, which is a huge helper, because people aren’t afraid to post a word,” he said.

After a meme pops up on 4chan, it takes a while to spread to other sites, like Reddit, a more policed message board, and Tumblr, a popular micro-blogging site. Once there, in the mainstream, the memes can blend together with each other to create a sort of pop cultural society and language. Christopher Price, editorial director of Tumblr, spoke about this phenomenon.

“I think that the graphical Internet memes are almost like hieroglyphics [because] you couldn’t express that sentiment any simpler than that,” Price said. “And so it’s just a guy saying ‘fuuuuuck,’ you know, that’s a pretty clear, basic sentiment. We all get that. We all have been there before.”

Price also talked about a recent trend on Tumblr, which has been to essentially tell stories using different memes to express emotions. In a world that is becoming more and more wired, things like body language and facial expressions are being replaced by animated images called Graphics Interchange Formats, or GIFs.

“They have their GIF folder on their computer, and they pick the best animated GIF from Harry Potter or something to express how they feel. And that’s rather an amazing way to communicate. It’s bizarre,” he said. “There are so many references, so there’s really a lot to be communicated there, but the person doesn’t necessarily do any of the communicating.”

Because memes are a form of entertainment that is easily manipulated and created by anyone, the potential for cross-sectional references are infinite. GIFs depicting the movie “Inception” and the show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can be placed right next to each other, creating a completely new hybrid. In yet another Rebecca Black meme, 50 Cent and Elmo can ride in the same car, both of them laughing at the tween singer. It’s a pop culture junkie’s dream come true.

But entertainment isn’t the only world memes can comment on. Almost immediately after Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced, images were circulating with the text “America! Fuck Yeah!” and pictures of Bin Laden made to look like the lead character in “Black Swan” saying “I was perfect” also made the rounds. The nation wanted to celebrate the death of a man widely regarded as evil, and they turned to GIFs and Photoshop to do so.

But there are still drawbacks. Because memes rely on catchphrases and single images, patience for anything longer is running low. A UCSF study released in April showed that extreme multitasking associated with the Internet can limit the brain’s attention span.

“There’s very much simplicity, and short is important. And sometimes I get a little scared about that,” UCSC professor Moulds said.

He tells a story of receiving an email with a link to a video, and after seeing how long it is, thinking to himself, “A minute and a half, that’s forever!”

But perhaps more threatening than length is the possibility of being monetized. Viral marketing tries to synthesize the organic way memes can spread, creating ads with the goal of having amused Internet users doing the publicity for them.

“I think it doesn’t become a meme, usually, for money,” Moulds said. “In terms of the memes becoming popular, that seems to happen purely by accident. There are attempts to replicate that, of course. ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was introduced as viral marketing.”

Movies like “Snakes on a Plane” and “Cloverfield” are famous for viral marketing campaigns, as are brands like Skittles and Burger King.

Wade Hastings remembers seeing a supposed feud between Lady Gaga and Weird Al played out on the pages of Reddit surrounding Al covering one of Gaga’s songs. He suspects it was really all viral marketing.

“All of a sudden, these two people had huge bursts of publicity. Hundreds of thousands of people saw that on the front page of Reddit,” he said. “It’s viral PR firms. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but it’s kind of like mind control in a way. It’s manipulation.”

But despite these worries, Christopher Price from Tumblr has an optimistic outlook for the future of memes.

“I think there will always be an element of Wild West, anything-goes, because it’s just the nature of the Internet,” he said. “It’s a platform that encourages you to use it and create your own stuff for it. There are always going to be these people in their basements making really weird stuff that nobody understands. And I think that’s great, because it’s that weird stuff that gets refined and refined and refined, and then it somehow makes sense to people.”

For Hastings, memes have nowhere to go but up. He waved his hands around and opened his eyes wide as he spoke about their future.

“I think it’s going to be like the next Beatles. I mean, that’s kind of a weird reference, but the Beatles were huge,” he said. “Meme culture is going to explode. I’m really excited. Ten years from now there’s going to be an Internet culture class at prestigious universities.”

Maybe that will happen someday. But for now, memes are still in their own world, what San Francisco State student Johnston calls the “subconscious” of the people. And maybe the people don’t want to turn over their own mass medium to the established media just yet. Maybe they want to keep memes weird.

After all, that pop tart cat is still on the screen, reblogged on Tumblr by Topherchris, also know as Christopher Price, a day after we spoke. And the caption underneath is as follows:

“I almost attempted to describe Nyan Cat to a reporter yesterday, but decided against it because I didn’t want to sound batshit crazy.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

The Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD) recently released a new iPhone application to the Santa Cruz community. It is the first consumer-based iPhone application released from any city police department across the nation.

From 2009 to 2010, homicides and other crimes like burglary, robbery and aggravated assault saw a noticeable rise. With this new application, the SCPD seeks to curtail the rise in crime in Santa Cruz by giving users a mobile option to report crimes, making tip submission easy and mobile.

After downloading the free application from Apple’s App Store, users have access to the SCPD’s scanner feed, crime maps, new departmental blog, crime alerts and mug shots. Users are able to submit anonymous tips when they see a crime committed by simply sending a direct email to the police department through the application.

“This mobile application will give our community a remarkable amount of information in the palm of their hand,” said Santa Cruz police chief Kevin Vogel.

With over 50 million iPhones sold as of March 2010, the iPhone is one of the most popular cellphones on the market.

“I see tons of iPhones everywhere every day on campus,” said Kelly Watson, a Porter College second-year and iPhone enthusiast.

Watson said she feels more able to help the community with SCPD’s new iPhone application, since she can now submit anonymous tips and see photos of suspected criminals at all times.

Many people on campus have iPhones. The iPhone makes up 18 percent of the cellphone market, and a whopping 38 percent of the smartphone market in the US. Santa Cruz has no fewer than nine cell phone stores in the immediate area. Students can even buy an iPhone at the UC Santa Cruz campus’ Bay Tree Bookstore.

The application was produced by EZ Axess, Inc. CEOs Kushyar Kasraie and Jamieson Johnson, both recent UCSC alumni, have been creating community-based applications together since they were students. Other applications created by EZ Axess include UCSC’s campus map application, Kasraie and Johnson’s first creation.

“When we first started reaching out to UCSC, the idea of iPhone apps was still something very new to people,” Kasraie said.

Cody Delaney, a Porter second-year, said he is most impressed by the forward thinking of the SCPD and the city of Santa Cruz.

“This could be cool,” Delaney said upon viewing the application. “This could be helpful.”

The SCPD has expressed an interest in open communication with the Santa Cruz community to successfully enforce the law.

“Law enforcement needs to make their information as transparent and readily accessible as possible to meet the expectations of our communities,” Vogel said. “It is an essential part towards ensuring greater access to our department. This easy-to-use interface will provide an unprecedented amount of information to the consumer, regardless of where they are in the world.”

The next move will be for the application to support the Droid platform as well other smartphone application networks. EZ Axess plans to release this version over the coming months.

Kasraie praised the SCPD’s efforts to connect with the community.

“We genuinely believe that SCPD has set a new standard in terms of transparency and community engagement.”

Tyler Wardwell, KZSC’s music director, picks out some of his favorite records. KZSC’s library holds an extensive vinyl collection that is constantly growing. Photo by Molly Solomon.

Reach into your pocket.

It’s likely your hand is now in contact with a music player or audio storage device. Whether it is an MP3 player, a multimedia phone or a flash drive, music is incredibly compact and portable in the 21st century.

However, in the age of digital sound there are still those who opt for the smooth, black disc that has charmed audiophiles for decades — the vinyl record.

While CD sales and digital downloads constitute the majority of music purchases today, vinyl has made its way back from relative obscurity to be the chosen medium of a significant portion of listeners.

National vinyl record sales reached 2.8 million in 2010, more than tripling from the 858,000 sold in 2006, according to Nielsen Soundscan, a sales tracking system that has been tabulating music sales since 1991.

While the company does not track some small music vendors, the sales leap reported by 14,000 participating businesses indicates a changing music culture.

Daniel Munoz, a Ph.D. student in cross-cultural musicology at UC Santa Cruz, is currently doing field work for his dissertation on noise music in Los Angeles.

He said in an email that vinyl has a special connection to the human condition, which makes it attractive.

“To make a vinyl record [is to] put a physical object back in the hands of the consumers,” Munoz said. “It also says tacitly that this music is going to die over the years. It will not live forever, just like we won’t live forever. Vinyl and magnetic tape (cassettes, 8-tracks, etc.) deteriorate over time, while digital technologies don’t.”

In their recent history, vinyl records have been subject to a cycle of popularity that is influenced by new audio technologies and the subcultures that react to them.

Vinyl made a comeback in the 1980s when DJs sampled records to rap over or to combine into a new song. CDs gained popularity in the 1990s, but critics claimed their compressed audio files produced a different, more metallic sound.

Munoz said some youth embraced vinyl records as an alternative to CDs that flooded the music market.

“Some kids rebelled against CD distribution on the grounds that records were cheaper, cooler, sounded better, and that the cover art on vinyl records was superior since there was a larger space for the art,” Munoz said.

Most vinyl records were cheap in the 1990s. Often you could find vinyl records at flea markets or at Goodwill being sold for change. Vinyl record stores were stagnant, and the music world prepared for a digital overload.

The illegal music pirating boom beginning in the late 1990s produced a generation with access to a multitude of MP3s. Many old vinyl singles never made it to MP3 format, and some music buyers scoured newly reemerging record stores and eBay to collect them.

KZSC music director Tyler Wardwell said the unavailability of some recordings in digital format has led UCSC’s radio station to covet vinyl copies accumulated over the years.

“A lot of the material that we have was acquired or sent to the station in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “A fair amount of it is hard to find digitally. It wouldn’t make sense for us to get rid of this vinyl because a lot of it isn’t being pressed anymore.”

By 2006, music giant Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and was forced to close its doors after more than 45 years at the forefront of music distribution, though it still maintains an online presence.

The early 2000s saw a rise of British and American indie rock, which has been marketed by labels that press vinyl. Recently, a whole youth culture has sprung from the “indie movement” that has commercialized the novelty of vinyl records.

Munoz said the recent vinyl revival is reminiscent of the youth CD resistance two decades prior.

“Fast-forward to contemporary hipsters pressing vinyl,” Munoz said. “This is much the same phenomenon that started in the 1990s, with a twist of course. Digital technologies that are shared using a computer take the object-hood out of the process of listening to music. In other words, there is no longer a physical object to hold in the hands.”

Nostalgia for a medium that provides a tangible representation of music has enchanted young music buyers. For a sample of commercialized “indie” culture, go to Urban Outfitters on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

You’ll find a small display of vinyl records on the left side of the store. Roughly 125 vinyl records, the vast majority of them still in cellophane, sit in the store.

“Urban” has framed “Pet Sounds” by The Beach Boys and put it on display above the rest, indicating that the aesthetic value of older vinyl record covers fascinates some consumers.

Other artists represented in the store include She & Him, Belle and Sebastian, the MC5 and re-pressings of Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane albums.

This new generation of record collectors is not generally looking for the authenticity of an original pressing. Most of these albums can be easily found digitally so access isn’t the draw either; it is the novelty of the vinyl record that entices them.

Of course, there is a market for vinyl beyond the trendy “Urban” consumer. It is one that marks up older albums that once lived in the 10-cent bin at De Anza Flea Market in Cupertino, Calif. just over a decade ago. It produces indie rock, metal and pop, among other genres.

Why do Labels Press Vinyl?

New vinyl records are comparable in cost to CDs. Metavinyl Records, a store on Cedar Street, is entirely dedicated to vinyl records. Within its walls, new vinyl is mixed with the old and alphabetized by genre.

On the right when you walk in there is a wall for $1 albums, a new arrivals bin to your left, and a classical bin in the far left corner.

The owner, Jonathan Schneiderman, said he buys vinyl records from over 40 distributors internationally. Some are locally owned in the Bay Area and others are operated overseas.

Similarly, local radio stations receive and purchase albums internationally. Indie rock labels like Matador and Merge press singles and full-length albums on vinyl and send them around the world.

KZSC music director Wardwell said the station frequently receives indie rock vinyl singles.

“We get sent new vinyl from artists and labels,” Wardwell said. “A fair amount of new vinyl is from indie rock artists and they will send us 7 inches with one song on each side.”

While indie labels may be best known for pressing vinyl records, consumer demand has encouraged labels that had seemingly moved on from the medium to return to it. Schneiderman said small labels aren’t the only ones cranking out vinyl.

“Even the major labels are pressing vinyl,” he said. “There’s nothing that’s not available right now.”

Some music lovers note a difference in intentions between small and large labels.

Zachary Watkins, a lecturer in the UCSC music department, teaches History of Electronic Music and lower division studio courses. He writes for Foxy Digitalis, an online music site where he reviews albums. Watkins said money is a great influence on large labels.

“Independent labels are more interested in putting out music than profit,” Watkins said. “Major labels don’t care about music. They care about money.”

Watkins said choosing vinyl gives labels an edge in the music market by setting themselves apart from other mediums.

“Right now there are so many labels out there, and it’s kind of hard to break out of the noise of the output being created,” he said. “Sometimes it takes spending money, meaning putting effort into the design, packaging and creation of the object. Vinyl is the apex of that.”

The quality of new vinyl records is highly regarded. Often pressed at 180 grams, thick, new vinyl plays cleanly.

However, records deteriorate as the stylus, or needle, wears down the grooves that hold information about the sound. Cross-cultural Ph.D. student Munoz described the process in terms of geologic erosion.

“For example, think about the Grand Canyon,” Munoz said. “The grooves in a record are like a canyon, and the needle reads the depths of the canyon, and then that information is outputted to a speaker (or is amplified and outputted to a speaker). But the needle itself erodes the grooves. Thus, records deteriorate over time each time the needle reads the information of the grooves.”

As Munoz points out, new vinyl records cannot stay perfect forever if you play them frequently. Many new record players have USB capability, allowing for transfer of records to digital format.

“The old technology is so prevalent that manufacturers have capitalized on it by making the integration between analog and digital media ever more easy,” Munoz said.

Many labels include MP3 downloads of the vinyl record purchased to increase appeal and provide a similar access to turntables with USB ports.

Metavinyl Records owner Schneiderman said the practice of including an MP3 download code is strategic to appealing to a variety of consumers.

“Labels figure that if you’re going to buy it then you should only just have to buy it once,” he said. “If you buy the record you should get a free digital copy because then there’s really no reason not to buy it.”

Why do we Love to Consume Vinyl?

Labels produce vinyl to meet demand from music buyers. DJs, radio stations and listeners with private collections note many reasons why vinyl is a great option.

Wardwell said vinyl records are an important part of KZSC’s library.

“We maintain a vinyl collection because we play it,” he said. “Music purchases are split between CDs and vinyl. We also get donations, so our vinyl collection is always expanding.”

For Wardwell, the experience of watching a vinyl record spin into music is an enjoyable aspect of the medium.

“I like the physicality of vinyl, and that it’s all done in open space,” he said. “The CD plays behind a plastic shield and you don’t really get to see what’s going on. With vinyl, there’s a human attraction where you lift that tone arm and drop the needle down into the groove, and as the plate spins the disc, the 33 or 45 RPM, you can experience that visual cue of seeing motion become sound.”

Wardwell said the station’s DJs sometimes bring in vinyl records from their “really extensive personal collections” to play on air.

Musicology student Munoz said DJs of live events often prefer vinyl, and have turned the vinyl record into an instrument.

“DJs in the dance music scene (and other genres) still tend to prefer vinyl to spin at live events, especially for scratching and other purposes,” he said. “In this way, vinyl records are more than just a recording medium, but are actually musical instruments.”

Mark Augustine, aka DJ Swift, is co-founder of a music promotion group based in Redwood City called Abide Productions. He DJs at weddings, events, dances and birthday parties.

Augustine emphasized the importance of gauging the audience’s idea of “the classics” in terms of artists and songs. He said he keeps anything considered a classic of its genre.

“As a DJ, I’m always having the audience in mind. I don’t know exactly who I come across, so if it’s a record that I think someone will want to hear in the future I’ll keep it. You have to keep the classics.”

While he does use MP3s often, Augustine said vinyl records are the most respected medium to play among DJs. He said there is nothing like the feeling of a record under your fingers.

“The sound that vinyl has is clean, raspy and gritty,” he said. “Although digital is crisp, vinyl is clean. DJing is my drug. It’s my addiction. And it’s a positive addiction.”

The unanimous complaint about vinyl records is their stationary status. Large and heavy to pack around, vinyl records are meant for in-home listening.

The Future of Vinyl

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Many think vinyl will never go out of style. Augustine said nostalgia and appreciation for predecessors will keep vinyl in people’s collections.

“I think the record will always be around,” he said. “Vinyl will be the classic thing that people have.”

Munoz predicts that vinyl records’ appeal will end sooner or later.

“My personal prediction, which is really more of a gut feeling, is that eventually vinyl records will go out of style,” he said. “Vinyl records are already too big and heavy. Their one sonic advantage, quality — that the sounds are continuous rather than discreet — will eventually fade as MP3s are replaced by smaller files with broader frequency responses.”

Some say they will always want vinyl because it’s the best of its kind. Watkins doesn’t foresee anything getting in the way of vinyl’s popularity.

“Culturally, people respect vinyl as a medium and will always seek vinyl, I think,” he said. “It’s the best analog mass-media that we have.”

Digital recordings have surpassed vinyl in convenience and size. However, the warm vinyl sound is still a priority for many. For some serious audiophiles, the further products get from the physical mechanics of producing sound, the worse music is going to translate on a recording.

Metavinyl Records owner Schneiderman said as long as vinyl is top quality there will be a demand for it.

“Vinyl will always have a cult following,” he said. “Unless a better format comes along and surpasses its quality.”

The Daily has been getting a lot of attention lately for being the first newspaper produced solely for tablets.

Here’s what the Daily does right: It uses links, videos, and graphics to enhance the reading experience, as well as provide more information. It also maintains its own staff of professional writers, meaning it isn’t just feeding off more legitimate sources to make a profit.

Speaking of profits, it charges readers 99 cents per issue. The method of each issue being “delivered” to tablets is far more seamless than that of news websites, which try to charge for reading certain stories but not others.

But it also has its fair share of problems. For starters, it is only available on iPads, the most expensive tablet on the market, which means it promotes the idea of news as an elitist commodity. And behind all the bells and whistles, the content is more lifestyle than news. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, except that it brands itself as a newspaper.

The recent merger of AOL and Huffington Post, which coincided with the leaking of documents revealing that AOL placed website traffic far above quality reporting, shows that in the Web’s free-for-all environment, serious content is too often missing — even in supposedly serious news outlets.

But just because the Daily has drawbacks does not mean there is nothing to learn from it. The future of journalism is in new technology, and there’s no reason not to use all resources that are available to give readers the most information and insight. The ideal would be a tablet newspaper with the functionality and sleekness of the Daily and the investigative and intensive reporting of the New York Times. According to online user reviews, the NYT’s iPad app has problems with crashing and isn’t very intuitive or user-friendly, but hopefully it can work towards being improved.

Just because the physical newspaper might soon be a thing of the past doesn’t mean journalism will be, too. With the rise of newspaper apps, the future is looking a little brighter — and well-informed.

Students gathered for the third annual speed dating event. The event, put on by the Colleges Nine and Ten Community Programs office on Feb. 4, drew in over 200 people throughout the night. Photo by Ryan Tuttle.

Photo by Ryan Tuttle.

“At speed dating: male, black hair. You were No. 17. You are so my type. So cute and interesting. Kinda shy, but you know how to open up. Hehe, I really hope we meet again. ^_^”

This submission joined hundreds of other posts on the new website Like a Little on the afternoon of Feb. 5. The site has recently gathered a following at UC Santa Cruz.

Similar to the missed connections page on Craigslist, Like a Little is a way for people to anonymously post about someone who has caught their eye around campus. Evan Reas, creator of the site, launched Like a Little in October 2010. He saw the website as a way for shy people to put themselves out there more without having to identify themselves.

“[Like a Little] lets people break the ice and flirt with people around them in an extremely easy way,” Reas said in an e-mail. “Because it is anonymous, it gets rid of all the awkwardness, and there is no downside of telling somebody how you feel.”

Like a Little is just one example of some of the new ways in which people look to find a significant other, a date or just a friend. People have branched out from the usual small talk at parties to anonymous posts on the Internet and dozens of first dates at the College Nine and Ten speed dating event.

Every two minutes a bell chimes over the sound of hundreds of voices at the Colleges Nine and Ten Multi-Purpose Room. Over 200 people got to experience multiple first dates in one night as they circled the 30 or so tables that filled the room. Each table, which seated six, was adorned with a little candle surrounded by chocolate kisses and sugar sweethearts.

Jessa Rabanal, an undeclared first-year from College Nine, was one of the 209 people who attended. In the line of women crowding the entrance waiting to be seated, Rabanal’s hopes were not exclusively to look for romance, but to meet new people as well.

“[My hopes are] to probably find someone at least to say, ‘I hope to see you around sometime,’” Rabanal said. “Maybe an add on Facebook.”

These kinds of connections are what Nick Margarite had in mind when he started this event at UCSC three years ago. Margarite, a class of 2010 alumnus, worked at the Colleges Nine and Ten programs office and decided to bring speed dating to UCSC after hearing about it at a conference for residential advisors.

Margarite started the event hoping that it would create a safe and inclusive space for students to meet new people in a less intimidating environment.

“It gives them an opportunity to meet people that they’re comfortable with,” Margarite said. “They don’t have to feel shy.”

Tables labeled “Boy Meets Boy,” “Girl Meets Girl” and “Boy Meets Girl” provided an opportunity for speed-daters to interact with whomever they wanted to.

It’s useful to have the chance to meet people outside of the typical college lifestyle of beer pong parties every Friday night, or classes every Monday morning, Krystinne Maica said. Maica, the current advisor for the Colleges Nine and Ten community programs office, advocates for speed dating as a way for people who choose to abstain from the stereotypical college lifestyle to go out and meet people.

“There are not a lot of outlets for people to meet that don’t involve drinking and that kind of stuff,” Maica said.

The speed dating event brought together both students looking for romance and those looking to get out of their rooms and meet new people.

These unconventional ways of meeting people have become more popular in recent years. In 2006 Charles Whyte started the CruzDate website, an exclusive UCSC dating site. Whyte, a class of 2006 alumnus, started the site after hearing about other students’ idea to potentially start a dating club. The dating club had all the elements of an online dating website, but was being conducted by hand, so Whyte had the idea to expand it exponentially through the Web.

Whyte is an advocate of online dating, as he sees how the average ways in which people meet can be troublesome.

“I feel good about the increased popularity of online dating, as it’s a great way to meet new people without having to feel too awkward,” Whyte said in an e-mail.

Ultimately, these means of meeting new people are picking up steam because people enjoy the combination of a wide selection and a less intimidating environment. Sites like CruzDate and Like a Little as well as events like Speed Dating create a space for all students with a variety of intentions to seek out new friends and possible suitors.

His sentiments, as well as those of the organizers of speed dating and the users of Like a Little can be summarized in a short statement seen on the home page of CruzDate:

“The campus is big, and it is sometimes hard to meet the right people.”

Illustration by Muriel Gordon.

They did their best to suffocate their countries.

Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak blacked out the Internet when nearly a million Egyptians demanded he step down from his 30-year rule. Conservative leader of Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, clamped down on Twitter and Facebook after thousands of protestors used it to organize against him. Two of China’s largest news sites kept people from searching “Egypt,” earlier this week, in order to prevent people from getting ideas about how they might take out leader Hu Jintao.

Since the inception of the Internet, control over this worldwide communication tool has been a key way for dictatorships to maintain power. In the United States, the president, who already has the power to declare war as commander in chief, may also soon come to possess the ability to turn off the Internet.

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Protecting Cyberspace as a Natural Asset Act, also known as the “kill bill,” gives the president the power to declare a “cyber emergency.”

If the bill passes the many committees of Congress, ­the president would have the absolute power to shut down the Internet.

Today, over 300 million people in the United States use the Internet for news and social networking. Without having access to information, our ability to make well-informed decisions — the very core of democracy — would be threatened.

Giving the president the power to turn off the Internet is a violation of our First Amendment rights, primarily the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.

The language in the “kill bill” is strikingly similar to that of the Patriot Act, which has greatly reduced restrictions on law enforcement to search property, e-mails and phone lines. Obama recently extended this act, which claims to monitor Americans in the name of national security. The “kill bill” is another step in this frightening direction, where government control wipes out the rights of the people.

Furthermore, giving the president the power to strike down the Internet could have highly negative repercussions on U.S. companies and the entire economy.

The Chinese government’s attack on Google was certainly a bust to those holding Gmail accounts, but that incident does not warrant the president having the right to hijack the Internet.

The FBI and Internet providers have already adapted cyber security and spend millions a year on cyberspace security, so the U.S. federal government has no absolute need to award the president a new means of increasing security.

Our leaders know this. Just last Wednesday, the White House press secretary made it clear: “We support the universal rights of the Egyptian people, including the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly.”

This statement is available for any one who has Internet access.

Illustration by Bela Messex.

If you’ve ever watched the TV show “Cops,” you’re familiar with how this scene plays out. A suspect is found, arrested upon reasonable suspicion of a crime and taken away. This is standard procedure for criminals across the United States.

But what if the picture is much broader than that? What happens when the police need more evidence to convict you after arrest? In recent years, it’s become extremely easy to get that extra evidence, no further effort required.

Three years ago, a man was pulled over for being involved in an ecstasy drug deal in Ventura County. He was arrested and interviewed, and his personal belongings were taken from him, including his cell phone. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department then proceeded to search through the phone and came upon an incriminating text message that officers showed to the man, causing him to admit his guilt in the drug deal.

The police claimed that this was not an invasion of privacy. But Gregory Diaz, under the defense that a warrantless search of his cell phone violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, took his case to trial. This amendment says a person has the right to be guarded against unfair searches and seizures.

Appealing to higher courts did not do Diaz much good either. On Jan. 3, the Supreme Court of California upheld the lower court’s ruling, which means statewide police forces can continue to search cellular devices without a warrant. Diaz was convicted of selling a controlled substance and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Diaz’s case raises the long-debated question of what makes an acceptable balance between liberty and protection in the United States, and how this relates to new technology. The Patriot Act of 2001 was a prominent and controversial example of how an individual’s private life can intersect with the public sphere of the government, and now the issue of public versus private is finding its way not just into legislation but also to the judicial branch. With the increase in information younger generations put on the Internet and cell phones, the meaning of privacy itself may be redefined in coming years.

In her dissenting opinion of the case, Associate Justice Kathryn Werdegar said, “The potential impairment to privacy if arrestees’ mobile devices and handheld computers are treated like clothing, … fully searchable without probable cause or warrant, is … great.”

People v. Diaz is not the only well-known case that has dealt with governmental control versus privacy in an age of new technology. A recent case that set precedent for Diaz’s is United States v. Kyllo. It held that the use of thermal imaging to monitor movement inside a person’s home when the party under surveillance is in public view did not violate the Fourth Amendment, as it was not considered an unreasonable search.

Additionally, the Patriot Act, enacted under former President George W. Bush, has continued to broaden the scope of protections under the Fourth Amendment through wiretapping and other, otherwise illegal activities during a state of emergency.

Steve Clark, captain of Santa Cruz Police Department, said that his force has been searching cell phones after arrest without warrant for “quite some time,” and that it is difficult for the department to track how many of those types of searches have happened since the case was upheld. He said, however, that the amount of cases was numerous.

“We have an interest in collecting all the relevant evidence and keeping it from being destroyed or somehow slipping through our fingers,” Clark said. “We find it particularly useful with drug dealing.”

Clark said that now relevant evidence is extended to cell phones. His department has found that cell phones include a large amount of information about crimes people commit, such as in text messages, photos and contacts.

“It helps us put together a better case and to find people who might be associated with illegal activities,” Clark said. “Especially when it involves some more major crimes.”

Linda Parisi, 30-year criminal defense attorney and professor at Lincoln Law School in Sacramento, said the court was concerned with what “containers” are subject to search.

“I would submit that a cell phone should be kept private and subject to the warrant requirement,” Parisi said in an e-mail.

Clark said that his department does not “push the envelope,” or consistently use warrantless evidence in the event of arrest, while adding that it has an interest in gathering all the information necessary to build good cases for victims of crime.

“We’re more interested in putting together cases that are solid, cases that are going to be credible in court,” he said. “We don’t want to have the reputation in court where they think we’re playing fast with the rules.”

Clark said that in some cases, the SCPD is able to conduct complete forensic examinations of cell phones to use as evidence without search warrants, which means using specialized software to recover data from that phone, including anything that has ever been deleted. They are then able to use that information as evidence.

“Once it’s digital, it never really goes away,” Clark said.

Generally, however, the police department will obtain a search warrant for that more intrusive search, he said, but it still leaves the door open for another department to take advantage of the forensic examination mechanism.

UC Santa Cruz sociology professor and local American Civil Liberties Union member Craig Reinarman said that this “next step” of overstepping privacy boundaries has already been taking place within police departments across the country.

“For instance, [the police] say to you, ‘You don’t have anything in your pocket, do you? Because when I search you, I’m going to find it, so just tell me now,’ and kids are scared and confused and they don’t want to go to jail, so they pull out the roach or the joint, and then they’re in trouble,” Reinarman said. “Then they get busted for something like having marijuana in public view. The police have abused this privacy power up one side and down the other, particularly with regard to drugs.”

This is precisely the reason that some notable Santa Cruz residents are critical of warrantless searches. Mayor Ryan Coonerty expressed concern over the case and its implications for the future of Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

“I’m surprised by the [Diaz] ruling,” Coonerty said. “It would obviously help police investigations, but like anything it’s about balancing civil liberties with public safety. It’s a very difficult line to draw.”

Illustration by Bela Messex.

Coonerty, who is also a politics lecturer at UCSC and licensed attorney, said that problems concerning emerging technology continue to be an issue. Although laws have been enacted to address issues of new technology, including false impersonation, identity theft and cyber-stalking, continual development widens the scope of problems that need to be tackled.

“When I teach my classes on civil liberties at the university, I always make the point that your rights to privacy are set by what is a reasonable expectation of privacy,” he said. “I think the younger generation is lowering that expectation of privacy with everything they’re putting online and their sharing of data.”

Student Union Association chair Tiffany Loftin said it is the individuals’ responsibility to filter their online personalities and be in charge of their own privacy especially on social networking websites, she said.

“Whatever you put on the Internet or Facebook or Twitter, you put it on there because you choose to do that,” Loftin said. “Is it lowering the expectation of privacy? I say no. It’s up to you.”

She related the situation to UCSC’s recent graffiti threat scare.

“If [the perpetrator had] put up their status as something silly like, ‘I did that, everybody on campus is stupid,’ we would know who did it and get them in trouble,” Loftin said, “and then classes wouldn’t have gotten cancelled.”

Police captain Clark said that the SCPD has dealt with similar incidents with some arrestees.

“You’d be surprised what people are willing to post on their Facebook page,” Clark said. “We’ll have certain people tell us, ‘No, we’re not a part of that gang’, and then we pull up their Facebook page, and there it is.”

Clark said that new technologies make it easier to incriminate people.

“We find a lot of very useful information that has helped us on occasion put together some very complex cases, including homicide,” he said.

Loftin said that so far, there has not been a reasonable expectation of privacy with Facebook.

“Everything I put up on Facebook is up there because I choose to put it up there,” Loftin said. “And if I don’t want people to see it, then it gets taken down.”

Head of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter and former mayor Mike Rotkin said that police convenience should not come before privacy rights, for precisely this reason. He opposes further violation of the Fourth Amendment in the face of new technologies.

“I don’t buy it,” Rotkin said. “Is the Constitution inconvenient? Yeah, because you have to spend time, and you have to argue that there’s a valid state interest in something. It’s a pain in the butt.”

He said that it was absolutely necessary that there be a search warrant in Diaz’s case.

“I’m hoping that higher courts find it unconstitutional,” Rotkin said. “I think it’s a total invasion of people’s privacy.”

Linda Parisi said the court went “too far” in this case.

“The phone is not the person,” Parisi said. “And in today’s world, a cell phone is more like a diary or journal that contains personal information.”

Reinarman is hopeful that if appealed, the case will be found unconstitutional. Rotkin said that the police do have valid reasons for searching arrested persons for dangerous weapons or potentially harmful items, but he does not think cell phones come under this category and that he does not want this ruling to lead to further, more invasive rulings in the future.

Rotkin said the Fourth Amendment faces constant pressure, as under the Patriot Act, enacted in 2001. The act permitted warrantless searches through people’s computers and personal mail and let law enforcement listen in on private phone conversations.

“If it’s absolutely necessary that [the police] get evidence without a warrant,” Rotkin said, “I want to hear what the argument is. I don’t see any valid argument here other than convenience.”

Clark said that warrantless searches were only conducted in his department in cases in which it was obvious to the police that the suspect was guilty. He said that although his department does not, the current situation gives leeway for police to conduct searches only based on inconvenience.

Reinarman said he was disappointed that some Bush policies like the Patriot Act, which falls along the same lines of privacy infringement, have not been repealed by a new administration.

“I find it disturbing, because of the long history of constitutional protection against those sorts of things that were written into the very fabric of the legal blueprint for our country, the Bill of Rights,” he said. “It’s a further narrowing of the Fourth Amendment. The framers made the point to say that citizens have the right to be free of these sorts of unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Reinarman said it was “worrisome” that the highest court in the most populous state in the country has upheld that cell phones can be searched without a warrant in the event of an arrest because the state has no business knowing what movies you watch on your phone or what you just texted your girlfriend or boyfriend.

“This case removes the necessity of probable cause,” Rotkin said. “It opens up a slippery slope. Now we want to search your house without a warrant, now we want to search the cell phones of all the people we found doing an investigation on your phone, now we want to search the houses [of your cell phone contacts.] We’re totally obliterating any type of privacy rights, and I’m not being extreme in my view.”

On the syllabus for one of his classes, Reinarman includes a particularly pertinent quote from William Douglas, former member of the Supreme Court.  Reinarman said the quote exemplified the idea that just one case can have the power to chisel away at the structure of privacy in the United States. He searched through the papers surrounding his desk and finally came upon the quote, reading it aloud:

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must all be most aware of the change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

Illustration by Patrick Yeung.

We live in the age of the smartphone. A time when more and more Americans walk around with the history of the world in the hip pocket of their jeans. An era when the space between cutting-edge and out-of-date is constantly shrinking.

The Internet has changed the way that people shop, communicate and learn. The way that countries interact. Really, the way in which people exist within the world.

But until the Blackberry and iPhone made smartphones the norm, the Internet was something you only accessed at home. Now, it is everywhere.

This progress does not come without sacrifice.

Merriam-Webster defines faith as “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” Now I’m not going to go so far as to claim that the smartphone has weakened our faith in God. But it has chipped away at the art of casual argument, the ability to make another believe that which cannot be firmly proven.

The beauty of banter, the magic of myth, fades when too much truth is too readily available. We’ve become addicted to facts, and sadly, in our obsession, we have lost something. We have lost the tall tale. We have lost faith in our storytellers.

I used to be the guy who resisted the smartphone. I had my flip phone with the scratched screen and broken camera, and I was damn content to keep it. I was of the belief that “I don’t need to always be online. I’m fine with sitting around and watching the world go by.”

But a couple months ago, my flip phone cracked, and on the trip to the Verizon store, I cracked as well. I’m not proud to admit it, but I went down to the crossroad and sold my soul for a Blackberry Bold.

The first few weeks, I was hooked. I loved it. Bus rides would melt away as I escaped into my New York Times app. The long lectures went by like a breeze. I used one app to scoreboard-watch and another to read anything and everything about the San Francisco Giants.

It’s not that I didn’t realize I was being dragged out into the deep sea of information — I just saw no reason to struggle against the 3G undertow. I viewed my old self as stubborn, thought I was just being idealistic and gruff.

I was only 21: How could I already be the grumpy old man reminiscing on a simpler past?

But now, two months after my entrance into the new age, the glow has started to fade. I look at my beautiful smartphone and feel dirty. Was it really worth trading away exaggeration and fiction for access to cold hard facts?

Bar banter is the modern day tall tale: more about passion and color than truth. Taverns ring with harmonies of historical fictions, fighting tales and dramatic renditions, all too enthralling to be tethered down by truth. But unfortunately, the smartphone is the antidote to myth.

Before the smartphone, on a Friday night in a smoky tavern, someone with the right amount of passion, reason and social lubrication could convince a group of patrons of anything. He could face the hazy-eyed masses and confidently claim something as far-fetched as the familial connection between Aretha and Ben Franklin.

Sure it would strike some as unlikely. Perhaps the facts were not always perfectly in order. Maybe the arguer’s claims rested too heavily on Ben’s penchant for extra-marital affairs and Aretha’s line “Let yourself be free.” But hey, for that one night, the patrons really could have faith, really could believe in the knowledge and expertise of another.

Nowadays, if that argument began, someone would quickly pull out an iPhone, Google the topic and end the conversation.

As Aretha Franklin, the alleged great-granddaughter of Ben, once said, “You had better stop and think before you think.”

So next time you’re about to take your smartphone out to fact check, stop. Think about why we now need to know everything with absolute certainty. Think about why the word of our fellow patron isn’t truth enough anymore. Think about what the smartphone really gives us.

And, more importantly, think about what it takes away.

Illustration by Kristian Talley.

Let’s just be honest with ourselves. If we’re not on our phones, we’re on our laptops. If we’re not on our laptops, we’re on our phones. We’re texting, e-mailing, communicating, searching, downloading or uploading somebody or something at all hours of the day.

Our obsession with all things digital means more of ourselves exist in gigabytes. But now our right to protect those files, secure that data is compromised. We face a continuous loss of our civil liberties. The most recent problem, to be filed next to “full-body scans,” is the confiscation of mobile electronic devices by federal agents — without a warrant or even “reasonable suspicion.”

In essence, the federal agents can confiscate anything from your computer’s hard drive to the contacts within your phone, as they dance ontop of the gravesite of your civil rights.

From October 2008 to July 2010, there were 6,600 cases of such search and seizures, 3,000 of which happened to U.S. citizens. This isn’t anything new, either — this has been going on since President George W. Bush was in office. The Bush administration was the first to allow federal agents to search through laptops, smartphones and other electronics that copy or share data.

So why is the policy still around? Why is it not apparent that this blatant disregard for our digital privacy is just as terrible as wire-tapping or searching a house without a warrant? During these digital times the ability to move, share and copy data has become both easy and necessary.

Everything you do both privately and possibly publicly (Twitter, Facebook etc.) is connected to electronic devices. Your bank account information, the 100,000 websites you visited within the past week, or even your private medical history. Homeland Security agents can take all the phone numbers you have in that iPhone 4 of yours and not have to give a reason. Not a reason, not a probable cause, not reasonable suspicion. Nothing.

In some of the cases reported, people did not get their items back for weeks or even months.

Enough was enough a long time ago. This is just out of hand, out of control. President Barack Obama needs to restore our civil liberties lost after the post-9-11 hysteria that has plagued our borders for several years now.

We took our shoes off, we listened to the paint-by-number excuse of a terror alert system, and now we’re even letting you scan our bodies.

We don’t have privacy within the real or digital world anymore — it’s been stripped away from us. Many of us don’t even know an America without Homeland Security at the airport: an America without fear, an America with civil liberties.

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

The UC Online Instruction Pilot Project will allow individual faculty members to propose an online course for the project and decide how the class should run. How exams will be proctored and how grades will be given depends in large part on the faculty members.

Jessica Fiske-Bailey, assistant vice provost for Undergraduate Education, mentioned that technology could help the UC reach more people.

“As state funding gets limited and costs increase, [the UC system] feels a great responsibility to provide accessible education,” Fiske-Bailey said. “There is a real commitment to provide education to people.”

According to the UC Online Instruction Pilot Project’s website, the project will test whether online instruction can use technological tools to give undergraduates educational opportunities comparable to the quality classroom instruction offered at a UC.

Students will be able to take a course from the comfort of their own dorm room or favorite coffee shop, rather than an overcrowded lecture hall.

“If you have a virtual classroom, you may not be limited by location space,” Fiske-Bailey said. “The theory behind it is that you won’t be limited to taking classes at the location you’re located in.”

UCSC students who cannot get into a class because it has reached its full capacity can instead take it as an online class at another UC. For example, if a legal studies class is already full at UCSC, but not at UCLA, a student can instead take it online from UCLA.

Sophia Zeng, a UCSC third-year, was unaware of the efforts the UCs are making to introduce online classes, but thinks that online classes are a great idea.

“[Online classes will allow] students who want to get ahead in their education or even students who don’t want to leave their house or dorm room to receive [an] education,” Zeng said. “It might even encourage students to ‘attend’ class without physically being there.”

Jim Phillips, director of Learning Technologies at UCSC, mentioned that the university’s system is currently a hybrid, with a combination of online web-based tools and in-class experience.

This new project will make UCSC’s current system available online — with virtual classrooms where students can interact with other students and the professor, Phillips said.

However, certain hands-on classes will not be available online. These classes range from chemistry labs to studio drawing courses.

Ideally, the project will allow students to see the lecture online, as the professor is giving it. Also, students will be able to key in questions during the online lecture. All lectures will be available on demand after the official lecture date.

Although other institutions have already implemented programs like this successfully, there are some concerns that have yet to be addressed.

Zeng worried that online classes might not work for all types of students.

“Online classes could be [disadvantageous] for people who don’t have strong self-motivation and negatively affect a student’s ability to develop punctuality or good study habits,” Zeng said.

At the recent regents meeting at UCSF, Regent Eddie Island advocated for distance education as a way to save money. He questioned whether this form of education was being looked at seriously as an alternative to increasing student fees.

“There is no reason to use distance learning when the student fee pots remain available,” Island said.

Opponents of the program are concerned that the loss of personalized instruction may affect students and faculty members negatively, if not planned out well.

Zeng, an environmental studies major and education minor, said that if online classes are not planned out right, the inability to meet new people and friends in these kind of classes would be detrimental to the overall college experience.

“Online classes should be introduced. However, [the UC system] needs to realize that there will be positive and negative outcomes with such classes,” Zeng said. “This situation depends on each person’s learning ability and pace.”

Phillips, director of Learning Technologies, does not doubt that the UC system will have online education.

“We will have online education at the UCs,” Phillips said. “It’s just a question of if it will happen now or later.”

If the project succeeds, students will be no longer restricted by classroom location, but will instead have a virtual classroom they can access from any location in the world, Fiske-Bailey said.

“The world is so much bigger than we thought,” Fiske-Bailey said. “Our location should not limit us.”

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

I dutifully work through 10-page articles about foreign aid agencies, get lost in short stories that I forget are actually fictitious, read about uptown gallery openings that I will never be cool enough to go to, and smile at the subtle yet smug humor of its famous cartoons.

My affinity for The New Yorker is indicative of a particular attitude of mine. The belief that yes, technology is great, but no, I don’t need any more of it in my life. Often, it makes me feel like somewhat of a luddite, putting me at odds with my more tech-savvy peers.

But there’s something about my New Yorker exercise that brings me a kind of satisfaction that cannot be replicated in any other format. Turning the text-laden pages with the knowledge that I really should be reading for a class, wiping the crumbs off the page as I eat my burned toast, and, most of all, reveling in the unmistakable pleasure of taking the time to read something that’s actually in print.

Yes, I use Gmail and Facebook, and I’ve gained an unquantifiable amount of knowledge from the Google search box. I am aware of the incredible impact that the Internet has had on my social developmental and educational life, as well as my status as what my father calls a “digital native.” But no, I don’t like it when my friends are searching something on their iPhone while we’re having a conversation, I don’t want to know every thought that exits in your head via Twitter, and I do think it’s sad that an over-reliance on spell-check has diminished my peers’ ability to spell words like “conscientious” and “maintenance.”

It’s not surprising that our generation has developed this dependency on technology, as it echoes the consumer culture we grew up in.This idea — that more is more, bigger is better and instant gratification trumps delayed satisfaction — reigns supreme. But with this ever-increasing stream of global data, we’re simultaneously losing some things: a familiarity and appreciation for simpler pleasures, an awareness of local knowledge, and perhaps even a portion of our common sense.

It’s not that there isn’t room for both the print and digital media in the modern world. The quality of a piece of journalism remains intact regardless of the format. But technology’s offer of unlimited options and immediate access to any publication or information source doesn’t supersede the value of reading something in print. There is a tactile and time-tested value attached to this activity that technology simply can’t replace.

When was the last time you used intuition and a good sense of direction to find your way around or talked to a living, breathing librarian while researching a paper? How about taking the time to write a note to send to a friend, or making yourself unreachable for an entire day? These activities may seem blasé in a world of e-mails, tweets and apps, but they’re all things that have been done by human beings long before there was a place known as Silicon Valley.

Technological progress is good. I am not advocating a life of Internet abstinence or a reliance on the Dewey Decimal System for all of our informational needs. But the benefits we accrue from these technologies are not unlimited. There is a point at which one more iPhone app that calculates the number of steps until your next latte is not making your life better — but rather, making you duller. How about looking at a real map, or reading a real book, or buying a real newspaper in which you might actually stumble upon a whimsical or thought-provoking piece of local journalism that can’t be found on the Huffington Post?

For now, I will stand in a crowd of a few. And when I see that smug person sitting next to me and my New Yorker, who appears unable to complete a full article because his or her iPad/Kindle/fill-in-the-blank device provides too many options, I will smile to myself and do a quiet, though revolutionary act: turn the page.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

What scares you more about a bomb being under a dinner table? Not knowing it’s there and having it blow? Or knowing about it and waiting anxiously for it to detonate?

Existential quandaries like these aren’t typical for a pre-teen. They’re also not politically wise for a Middle Easterner. But growing up, I was surrounded by films that served as some bizarre window into the “real world” — or at least my vague perceptions of it. Because of this, I’ve adjusted to view these questions as being just as, if not more, important than what to eat for dinner, or when my deadline is for a column.

These questions came from the movies, but these movies came from the video store. And the video store is slowly going the way of the dodo — but that’s the price you pay for convenience.

From battle wounds to Communist take-overs, red has always been a color of cultural dread. Now, the Redbox and the red Netflix envelope bring about a new threat. This past September, Blockbuster Video filed for bankruptcy, and the company has closed a reported 1,061 stores since 2008. Hollywood Video finds itself in a worse situation. Mom-and-pop video stores — even deeper down the hole.

So then is the only way to preserve these places to remember them? Are these stores really even worth remembering? The video store can be a cold place. Vast, often harshly lit and constantly air-conditioned, but they offered us something that few places could: escapism and enlightenment in unison.

And while film can often bask in elitism, a video store was an equalizer, a place to peruse the latest and greatest the film world had to offer, or the cream of the crap that the industry tried its best to forget. The video store was the fun of film made tangible.

I’ve written many times about this vague concept of “connection.” Of how we relate to one another through vessels we never really pay attention to. So allow me to double-dip this chip and declare that the video store is, perhaps, one of the foremost examples of locations as the catalyst for connection. Record stores can be exercises in pretension. Book stores only operate in hushed tones. But video stores provide release.

This is personal, of course. My mother, who raised me as a single mom for a good nine or so years, used to take me with her to the café she once owned. But, as is the case for most young ones, a carbonated beverage or two could only hold my interest for so long. And it wasn’t long until I found myself spending inordinate amounts of time at the video store next door, which became a daycare of sorts. There, I was sheltered. I made friends with the regular customers. Chad, the man most often behind the counter, would talk to me not as a kid, but as a fellow fan. We would talk about movies. We would watch movies. He took me seriously because he saw what I see now: that regardless of our age gap, we were both products of the video store. It held the same wonder for him as it did for me. We were the same: We were fans. He would restock shelves — I would wander the endless aisles of cardboard slipcases, each adorned with a larger and larger floating head, always culminating in Sandra Bullock’s hilariously bloated face on the cover for “The Net.”

Those covers were art pieces in a museum. Of course, that is an exaggeration. This, however, is not an exaggeration: Video stores are museums. Both preserve relics, and both offer us shelter when it’s raining. Honestly, what else is a museum good for?

So should we keep the video store because every time I walk in, I feel like a kid again? Because I remember Chad? No, that would be foolish — but it’d be very kind of the general public.

What video stores do — did — is bridge the gap between art and consumer. This is its gift. We have the chance to experience any film at any time. Consider some of our generation’s most well-established filmmakers — the Scorseses and the Tarantinos. They are the by-product of the video store, the prime examples of its notable alumni. The people who rented movies also started making them.

There are also, of course, the practicalities. What to do when you want to spontaneously rent a movie without the hindsight of having added it to your queue two days prior? True, instant streaming has taken the world by storm, but partaking in escapism by using the very tool that you should be escaping from negates the experience. It’s like if your parents started listening to rap music.

But, since the overwhelming desire for convenience killed the video store, I refuse to let inconvenience be the reason for its demise. We should love the video store in spite of its insistence on late fees. In spite of its requirement that we be physically present in order to interact. In spite of its tendency to judge us for a bizarre urge to rematch that Katherine Heigl movie that we’ve already seen.

We should love it because it loves us.

Because a recommendation from a stranger can lead to something else. Because we are what we watch, and a film watched separately or together affects us, and when we want a break from film, we require flesh, and the other way around as well.

There could be a moment at zero hour, right before the final store doors shut, that we change our minds. That the owner of the store turns around after locking up one last time to find the entire town standing there, ready to rent, save his business and reconnect with each other. This is possible. Unlikely, but possible. I’ve seen it happen.

I saw it at the movies.

McHenry Library now offers five iPads for student checkout. The touchscreen computers were bought in June with end-of-the-year discretionary funds, a decision that has raised criticism in light of budget cuts and limited library hours. Photo by Prescott Watson.

Pressing a dime-sized button at the bottom of the 10-by-8-inch touchscreen platform lights up the iPad and its applications, and with it, the newest gadget at McHenry Library.

Jenesis Bonilla, a fourth-year Oakes student, heard from a friend about the library’s new acquisition, and went to see for herself.

“I did not know they had iPads,” Bonilla said. “[I checked it out] just to actually play with it. I’ve never actually been able to use it or experience it.”

Virtual pages with application icons slide from left to right with the touch of a finger across the tablet computer’s smooth screen. 3D Brain, Amazon Kindle, New York Times’ Editor’s Choice, NPR, Pulse Newsreader, the Elements, Wall Street Journal and World Factbook are among the 41 applications equipped in the iPads. Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, Brushes and Virtuoso are included as well. An application to annotate directly on PDF files was also added, per the request of a student user.

The new gadgets allow students the chance to use these applications for both schoolwork and entertainment.

“I’m going to play with it for a bit, and then I have o­nline articles that I have to read, so might as well just read them off of here,” Bonilla said.

Calling it an experiment to see how popular iPads are among students, Greg Careaga, the head of teaching and learning services at McHenry, confirmed in an e-mail that for the past three and a half months the five iPads together have circulated 274 times, averaging out to 17 times per day.

The iPads have been available since late June for four-hour checkouts by students, and late fee charges apply as they do to other books or electronics.

On the UCSC Libraries’ Facebook page, a post informing students about the new iPads received two “likes” and one comment by fourth-year Kresge student Samuel Corbin.

“Students have to levy a fee against themselves in order to get slightly more reasonable hours because the library budget is so tight,” Corbin said on the Facebook post, “but the library is buying IPADS?”

In response to Corbin’s statement, the UCSC Library Facebook account wrote, “We wanted to continue our recent experience with small scale projects that offer students access to technologies they might not otherwise have.”

An estimated $2,800 was spent on the five iPads, which included the cases and some software, university librarian Ginny Steel said.

“[The iPads] were bought with a small amount of year-end discretionary money that we had last year after scraping and saving all year long,” she said. “We got the iPads in June. The [fees charged to increase library hours] weren’t paid until the fall. We are very clear that we are using that funding to restore the library hours.”

College Nine fourth-year Clare Angami compared the utility of iPads against the laptops that McHenry already rents out to students.

“A lot of things, such as the iPad, are new innovations to technology,” Angami said. “But … given the context that we were overcharged for library hours, I feel that whatever the iPad can bring, we have already fulfilled those needs for the students in renting laptops and having computer labs.”

From a scale of one to 10, Subhas Desa, professor and undergraduate director of the Information Systems and Technology Management Program, would give the necessity of iPads a two or a three.

“Is it necessary? I would say probably not,” Desa said. “I think the world would still go on and people would be doing what they have to without the iPads.”

An iPhone 4 displays the new UCSC iPhone application. Photo by Prescott Watson.

In their T-shirts and jeans, Kushyar Kasraie, 24, and Jamieson Johnson, 22, certainly don’t look like CEOs of their own company. Kasraie, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in business management and economics in spring 2009, and Johnson, who is currently a part-time senior also majoring in business management, are the co-creators of UCSC’s own iPhone application. Their company, aptly called EZ Axess, is aimed at creating iPhone apps for colleges in order to make campus life a little easier for students and also to keep alumni and parents up to date on school news. The app was officially released by the iTunes App Store Sept. 21.

Kasraie and Johnson met in an economics class they shared together. It was Kasraie who first brought up the idea of a UCSC iPhone app to Johnson as the two were in the library studying together.

“We had a midterm that day,” Kasraie said. “I was sitting in the library and Jamieson walks in. That’s when I brought up the idea of creating a UC Santa Cruz app. Jamieson goes home, and that evening he e-mails me back and says, ‘I thought about the idea. It’s great. Let’s do it.’”

Thus, the UCSC iPhone app was born — well, at least the idea.

“We had a prototype running within the first four months,” Kasraie said, “and we started engaging the school sometime in February 2009.”

The process, however, was not simple. In fact, UCSC was reluctant to approve the idea at first. Also, in addition to the valuable amount of time and hard work they put in, Kasraie and Johnson had to contribute a fair amount of money to buy tools and equipment, incorporate the company, make contracts and pay legal fees. It took a sum total of 16 months for the app to go from concept to reality.

“When we first went to the administration, there were only two schools that actually had apps,” Kasraie said. “The idea was really new to them, and they hadn’t done anything like that before, so they didn’t know exactly how to approach it.”

“It was such a new idea on campus, they didn’t have a precedent for who should be in charge,” Johnson said about the 16-month process. “We went to IT, and they told us to go to public affairs. Then public affairs told us to go to the registrar, then we were told to go to marketing, then back to IT. It took a while to get the right people in one room to even advance it to a real stage.”

The app itself has a simple and easy-to-use design. As it starts, a smiling, bespectacled banana slug welcomes app users. The main menu — with a background of a photograph of the Porter Squiggle at sunset — features news, a campus map that marks the user’s exact location, photos of the campus, a link to the UCSC YouTube page, upcoming events and an emergency RSS feed.

Avid iPhone user first-year Gerald Knoble is a fan of the app. He said he uses it often in his day-to-day campus life.

“I primarily use the map feature. It helps me from getting lost all the time,” Knoble said. “The only thing that I think could improve it is if they could add a compass feature. I have it on my iPhone 4 map, and it’s great.”

The app will not permanently stay in its current form, however. Kasraie and Johnson are already in the planning stages for its further development and improvement. The more feedback flows in, the more ideas the pair gets. Some of these ideas include the ability to search for classes, as well as an advanced map that has a feature allowing students to look up a campus location by its student-known name, and not just the school-given name.

“We’re already doing a lot of new stuff,” Johnson said. “We’ve had a lot of feedback so far, from both students and alumni. It’s awesome, because then we get an idea of what people want. We want as much feedback as we can get.”

Illustration by Ramille Baguio.

UC Santa Cruz graduate Rula Al-Nasrawi illegally downloaded 1,500 songs from the time she was in high school to the end of her sophomore year in college. By then, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave her a choice — pay a $3,000 settlement, or go to court, hire a lawyer and potentially pay upwards of $1 million.

Al-Nasrawi is just one of 3,000 UCSC students since 2001 who received notices from various entertainment companies alleging copyright infringement for downloading media illegally using the Internet provided by the university. She is also one of many college students who grew up having the Internet at her fingertips.

As much as Al-Nasrawi felt the financial repercussions of her actions, the music industry as a whole has had to deal with significant economic loss as a result of piracy. Global music piracy costs the music industry $12.5 billion every year, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Paddy Spinks, vice president of international sales and marketing for Concord Records, has witnessed firsthand the shifts within the industry.

“The music industry is currently in a state of transition, or reinventing itself, basically, and this has been going on for several years now, and will continue for several years more,” Spinks said. “Big corporations change slowly.”

Reap what you sow

The Internet has caused many problems for the entertainment industry, which has had to fight against the illegal distribution of copyrighted material since the dawn of Napster in the late ’90s.

Since those days, corporations such as Electric & Musical Industries (EMI) and Sony Music Entertainment have done what they can to fight back against the rising tide of illegal downloading. In 2000, the music industry took on the legendary Napster, which at the time was the leading source for digitally downloadable content. In A&M Records Inc vs. Napster, Napster was found to be in severe violation of copyright laws, forcing the shutdown of its website and leading it to file for bankruptcy two years later.

Illegally downloadable music is still easy to get a hold of. Although Napster is now dead, from its carcass peer-to-peer clients such as eDonkey and BitTorrent have risen to power.

BitTorrent is a form of peer-to-peer file sharing that allows large amounts of data to be transferred between Internet users without exceedingly high bandwidths. Users of BitTorrent are separated into seeders and leechers. A seeder is someone who has a copy of a torrent and offers it up to leechers, who are looking to obtain the file. The more seeders there are, the better the download speed the leechers will experience. When a leecher has fully obtained the torrent file, the leecher becomes a seeder, and the cycle continues. eDonkey, though, is based upon a network system that a user connects to in order to search and find the specific files he or she is looking for.

BitTorrent and eDonkey make up 90 percent of copyright infringements on the Internet, according to a one-year study in 2008 by BayTSP, a firm that specializes in tracking piracy and where copyrighted content appears. Overall, it found 306,227,001 cases of copyright infringement, and those are the numbers for just their clients.

First-year Kresge student Andy Stine is one of the many individuals who choose to download music through peer-to-peer file sharing. Despite the potential financial risk that accompanies this decision, Stine believes the convenience outweighs the cost.

“Well, when you compare the accessibility of torrenting and online downloading, buying music on iTunes is just sort of obnoxious,” Stine said.

Stine wrestles with his justification of such acts, though.

“The way I tackle that issue is that by considering whom it is exactly I’m stealing from. For me it doesn’t really strike me as an issue when I’m illegally downloading music from large artists, because they are backed by huge labels, and I don’t really care much for huge record labels,” Stine said. “But it’s when I’m downloading a local or underground artist that I start, morally, feeling in the red.”

Illustration by Ramille Baguio.

The price you pay

The UC system is known for categorically following federal law. This is no different in the case of copyright infringement. A hard-nosed approach to the situation is to be expected.

“We don’t monitor the networks for the purpose of finding illegal activity, so what I know about the status of copyright infringement is based on the number of notices we get from copyright holders,” said Janine Roeth, director of client services and security for Information Technology Services at UCSC.

Starting this coming July, UCSC will be required by the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) to enact a plan that will further crack down on students who pirate copyrighted material, Roeth said. ResNet currently allows a maximum download of two gigabytes in a 24-hour period.

“Although using P2P file-sharing technology is not in itself illegal, if you share copyrighted material without permission — even unwittingly — you are breaking both the law and UC policy and could be subject to university, civil and/or criminal sanctions,” according to the ResNet website.

Roethe said that although ITS does not monitor the networks “for the purpose of finding illegal activity,” once a student receives notice of a copyright infringement, ResNet staff begins tracking those individuals.

First-time offenders are notified by the university that their Internet access has been blocked for a two-week period and will remain so until completion of a copyright education quiz. On the second offense, the same process happens, but the student is also required to meet with the student judicial officer, and access is restored after a four-week period and completion of the meeting and the same quiz. For third-time offenders, all of the above occurs, but Internet access is blocked off for the remainder of the year.

UCSC graduate Rula Al-Nasrawi was taken aback when she received a letter from the university courtesy of the RIAA regarding her infraction.

“It’s kind of ridiculous because pretty much everyone I know downloads music, or has downloaded music, or doesn’t even buy music at all, not a single song,” Al-Nasrawi said.

Al-Nasrawi received one of the 514 notices from UCSC that were sent out during the 2007-08 academic year. The previous year, 895 letters were sent out to students, which was the peak number from the period of 2001 through the start of this year.

“The RIAA had a well-publicized campaign throughout 2006-07 and 2007-08, which contributed to our higher numbers in those years,” Roeth said. “They are also responsible for a large number of the notices we received thus far this year.”

Third-year Stevenson student Hannah Kreiger disagrees with the tactics of the music industry. She often uses a website that that makes music videos on YouTube accessible to rip as MP3 files.

“I just feel like the transition to digital music could have been handled a little bit better,” Kreiger said. “It’s really unfair to the people who get prosecuted and get their asses handed to them in lawsuits for downloading a few songs. That’s honestly why I don’t download all that often.”

Illustration by Ramille Baguio.

Change on the horizon

In the two years since Al-Nasrawi paid her $3,000 copyright infringement fine, the RIAA has spent less energy prosecuting individuals who have illegally downloaded copyrighted material. Instead it has switched its focus to people sharing copyrighted material. This has allowed the RIAA to hone in on peer-to-peer sites that host and share the content throughout the Internet.

The music industry could very well win, thanks to a group of bipartisan senators that wrote up S.3804, also known as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The bill was proposed Sept. 20, and it is currently in the process of being referred to the Senate judiciary committee.

In layman’s terms, the bill gives specific powers to the U.S. attorney general that would allow the attorney general to go after websites that are “dedicated to infringing activities,” such as copyright and trademark infringement. The bill also allows for the attorney general to create two lists: “required to block” and “suggested to block.” Sites that appear on the list would be blocked from viewing.

Spinks said that this bill is a common one in a world of technological expansion and free distribution.

“Bills just like this proposed one have already been passed in France,” Spinks said. “This is an idea that already has some traction in other parts of the world.”

The industry is trying to adapt to these changes in two ways, Spinks said. First, at the top end of the business, the four major corporations, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, are all becoming smaller companies, and are dealing with a narrower group of artists. At the same time, they all maintain a back catalogue that keeps them alive.

Second, there has been an uprising of “middle-class musicians, who are basically doing it all for themselves, or doing it all on a much smaller level,” Spinks said, “whereby touring becomes very important, whereby they are in business with themselves, and they are building their own databases through the use of new media like Facebook or Myspace.”

Some artists have already tried to adapt to these new ways. In October 2007, Radiohead released its critically acclaimed seventh album, “In Rainbows,” as a free digital download. The band allowed its fans to decide what would be a fair price for the recording, and while it was not available for free from, fans could pay as little as 45 pence, equivalent to 45 cents.

Literature graduate student Trevor Schack wishes the music industry could look at bands like Radiohead and licensing distributors like Netflix and Art Store for guidance.

“I really think that there’s going to be a reliable online licensing network for probably everything,” Schack said. “We’re going to see a good one come out for music — I mean, you could almost say that Pandora is it right now. But at some point, for a nominal monthly fee you’re going to be able to access all the music you could want.”

Hannah Kreiger said that everyone should be afforded the right of institutionalized protection of unlimited Internet access.

“You should be able to look at whatever the hell you want,” Kreiger said. “I don’t think that it’s necessarily right to say, ‘You can’t look at this, whatsoever.’ You should have the freedom to look at whatever you want.”

On the other hand, Spinks has no sympathy for those who break the law.

“At the end of the day, if you’re stealing something, you should be stopped. It’s as simple as that, really,” Spinks said. “And you are stealing something if you go to BitTorrent, or wherever, and download some music for free.”

On Friday, June 18, just when people were bouncing off for the weekend, ITS announced a new update to the online campus directory, the web-based application used for looking up publicly available student and staff directory information. Depending on how much you care about the online directory, this update is either kinda nifty or really boring.

The new system sports a unified directory and search system for both students and faculty. The biggest change of all, though, is the ability to modify and add to your online entry using your CruzID and Gold password.

There’s a pretty extensive listing of biographical information you can add, including other email addresses, departments you’re affiliated with, your websites, awards, honors, and your personal interests. If you’re looking for a convenient way to control the publication of your academic life at UCSC, it’s a welcome feature.

For the privacy-minded out there (yes, I’m looking at all of you with your pitchforks still pointed at Facebook), you can get your information removed from the campus directory by changing your privacy settings in… uhh… MyUCSC? Well, that’s a weird jump between applications, but at least there’s an FAQ. You’ll want to look for “Release to Campus Directory” and set that option to “no” to opt out.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in setting up your web profile, we’ve got a step-by-step walkthrough over this way.

So, you heard about the recent changes to the online campus directory and were totally like “Sweet, dude! I always wanted a UCSC profile! It’s like Facebook, but all academic and stuff!” then we’re here to help. This how-to tells you how to set up your Campus Directory page, as well as lets you know of a couple of pitfalls to look out for. Without adieu, here goes…

Setting Up Your CruzID Gold Password

A snapshot of the CruzID Manager.

Unless you’ve printed something in the library, you probably don’t have a CruzID Gold Password. The most common CruzID password is a Blue password, used with SlugMail, ResNet, CruzNet, and in the computer labs. Practical uses for your CruzID Gold Password (for now, at least) include printing in the library and… well… editing your campus directory entry. So, yeah….

But we’re not here to debate why on Earth there’s two passwords; we’re here to get you hooked up with a Gold password, because you’ll need it to access the campus directory.

Head on over to the CruzID Identity Manager at cruzid.ucsc.edu. You’ll be prompted to log in with your CruzID Blue password. Once you’ve logged, you’ll see a selection of options, but the one we’re looking for is “Set CruzID Gold Password.” Click that link, enter the last four digits of your SSN and your new password, and submit the form. Assuming all goes well, you’ll get a message saying your new password has been set. Huzzah!

If you’ve set up your CruzID Gold Password before, you’ll see a link that says “Change CruzID Gold Password.” As the link suggests, click that to change your Gold password. You’ll need to know your current Gold password to change it, though. If you forgot your password and didn’t set up security questions, you’re going to need to contact ITS to get that fixed.

Setting Up Your Directory Entry

The Edit Entry screen of the Campus Directory, featuring lots and lots and lots of fields.

Now that we’ve got our CruzID Gold Password, let’s go set up our campus directory profile. To begin, go to campusdirectory.ucsc.edu. You’ll see a link that’s labeled “Update Your Directory Information Online.” Click that link and log in with your CruzID Gold Password. If all goes well, you’ll see a long page with fields you can fill in with your information.

There are a couple of pitfalls worth noting that you’ll want to take into account when creating your profile. First, many fields in the form have length restrictions, some as tiny as 255 characters, with others as large as 5000 characters. The system won’t cut you off while you’re typing if you go over the limit, but if you attempt to submit the form with a given field over the character limit, it will reject your submitted information and ask you to edit the offending field. To give yourself some time to write your responses (and so you can have a convenient word count), try writing your responses in a word processing application first, then copy and paste it into the web form.

Arguably the more annoying pitfall is you can’t edit any information whatsoever without adding a department affiliation in your profile. The system will reject your entry if it doesn’t include a selection for “Department,” and once you add it, you’ll be able to change your department affiliation entry, but you won’t be able to remove it completely. Probably not a big deal (it’s not like it’s your SSN or anything like that), but it’s something you should be aware of going in.

Okay, so once you’ve entered all of your information, don’t forget to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page or your information won’t be saved.

And that’s it!

But Why Would I Want to Do This?

Of course, it’s always up to you to decide how much information you’d like to share on the internet, and the best rule of thumb I’ve followed is not to share anything online you wouldn’t want public. Or, at the very least, check a website’s Privacy Policy before submitting information to it. If you don’t want any trace of your enrollment at UCSC online, you’re best off restricting the publication of your info to the campus directory (here’s an FAQ on how to do that).

There is something to be said, though, about being active in controlling one’s web presence. With the new features, you can kinda think of the new campus directory as a mini-resume of your work at UCSC. Best of all, it’s now a public entry you can edit and control. If you don’t have a presence on the web already and want to create one, this could work well as a basic starting point. For the more adventurous, you can set up a small personal website for your academic work on your UCSC account, then link to it from your campus directory entry.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a simple tool for creating a public academic profile, the new campus directory is here for you to use. And while it’s basic, it gets the job done.

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Illustration by Megan Laird.

While flying over the spanning greenery of Pandora’s forest for the first time, viewers were mesmerized by the dark green vines and trees and the soft blue of the spores, close enough to touch. The jungle paradise of the three-dimensional blockbuster “Avatar” sucked the audience in, as millions worried about the plight of the planet Pandora, where the film takes place. As I watched, I found myself transfixed, transported to a world that — until 2009 — existed only within James Cameron’s imagination.

And yet, leaving the theater, not a single line from the film stuck with me.

“James Cameron, generally, isn’t all that worried about poetic dialogue,” Caetlin Benson-Allott, assistant professor of film and digital media, said. “He’s never going to win best original screenplay.”

For years, though, dialogue has been just one of the aspects that make for a popular film. Neither “Terminator” nor “True Lies” relied upon mind-bending conversation, but both still succeeded in their goal — to be entertaining and visually-gripping films.

In an Oct. 26, 2009 New Yorker profile, Cameron admitted, “It’s all just an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls.”

For Cameron, visual stimulation took precedence over mentally-gripping drama. And Cameron’s 3-D epic has made an astounding $2.7 billion, making it the highest-grossing film in cinematic history.

3-D movies saw moments of popularity in the 1950s and 1980s. Whether they are contributing to the improvement or a degradation of American cinema, the trend is back again, and it’s more technologically advanced than ever.

This year’s 2010 summer lineup will feature many 3-D titles, including “Toy Story 3,” “Shrek Forever After” and even a 3-D Playboy Playmate of the year — the only thing still popping for Hef without pills. One wonders how the new technology will change the course of film. Is 3-D the next logical step in the artistic progression of film, or does it mark the end of the emotionally-stirring drama as we know it?

Benson suggests Hollywood has shifted its focus from emotional stimulus to a visual one.

“I think Hollywood has been on that road for a long time,” Benson-Allott said. “Since ‘Jaws,’ Hollywood has learned that giving people an adrenaline thrill will get more butts in more seats than developing character.”

Transcending the Screen

While watching “Avatar,” you cannot help but realize — this is not your parents’ 3-D experience. Gone are the days of the cardboard glasses and ketchup-colored blood flying out at an astonished audience.

With the latest and more lightweight 3-D camera, a more maneuverable camera that can shoot simultaneously in 2-D and 3-D — which Cameron challenged visual equipment designer Vince Pace to develop — the 3-D film can now create alternative universes with arresting realism.

The technology allows for more enticing action sequences than were possible with the previous generation of 3-D cameras, which weighed up to 450 pounds. In the same Oct. 26 New Yorker profile, Cameron recounts that stuntmen had to run half speed during the filming of a 3-D short for the “Terminator” ride at Universal Studios theme park, to allow the camera to keep up.

With Pace’s new camera, 3-D has become a much more practical technology. And while film has always allowed people to enter an alternate reality, the realism and spanning widescreen of the new style of 3-D, dubbed RealD, makes escape through film far easier.

“Even though film is already a medium that you can’t really separate yourself from, because the lights are off and you get so absorbed in this world, there was still the division of screen,” third-year film studies major Rachel Forman said. “3-D takes that division away.”

Film can now connect with the audiences in ways it never has before, according to Forman. Leo Neldiav, a fifth-year art major, thinks directors will continue to find ways to traverse the division.

“I think it is a turning point in film,” he said. “Film will change and take hold of this new form of art.”

But what will the change leave behind?

The Threat of Demystification

As early as the 1910s, filmmakers were attempting 3-D film. The genre had waves of success in the 1950s and 1980s — but both times, audiences’ interest in the new style of film faded, and Hollywood looked for other strategies to fill seats.

Based on the history of cinema, the power that the new technology holds over the audience may prove to be temporary, according to Forman, who is applying for a concentration in production.

“Film goes in waves,” she said. “The things that were revolutionary in 1960 and 1970 are not so revolutionary today. 3-D is revolutionary right now, but who knows where it will go.”

“Star Wars” was released in 1977 and changed the way films were made forever. Suddenly, there was a new focus upon special effects that has only grown in the 33 years since.

History lecturer Bruce Thompson, whose research includes film history, gazes into the distance and gets starry-eyed when reminiscing about the silver-screen icons of the past, like Laurence Olivier and Grace Kelly.

He said that while the film was instrumental in the course of cinematic history, it was not its story line or screenplay that grabbed audiences.

“If you go back to ‘Star Wars,’ which was tremendously influential and popular, the story was extremely conventional, a recycling of other genres,” he said. “The real emphasis was on the special effects and what you could do with those.”

Cameron has mystified viewers with “Avatar” the same way that George Lucas grabbed a generation’s imagination with stunning special effects despite formulaic dialogue, according to Thompson.

But as the magic of a style of special effects begins to dissipate, dialogue and storyline must return to the forefront of cinematic focus.

The Maturation of 3-D

Michael Taylor, senior vice president of business development for ActiVideo Network, believes that filmmaker Cameron has laid the groundwork for using the new technology.

He says other directors will now begin to find intriguing ways to fully realize the 3-D film’s potential.

“When movies first came out, they really just took a stage play and put it on film,” Taylor said. “But eventually, the creative community got really behind it and realized it was a whole new medium with lots of advantages.”

Thompson said that early film maker Georges Méliès began using camera tricks and special effects to transform the visual reality through film as early as 1896. Méliès, who was a magician before becoming a filmmaker, helped introduce special effects to cinema, which has become Cameron and many other directors’ bread and butter.

Taylor said that as with any new medium, it will take some time before creative minds get behind the 3-D technology.

While some directors have attempted to use cheap tricks to cash in on the public intrigue with 3-D, Professor Benson-Allott credited Cameron and Henry Selick, the director of “Coraline,” with beginning the visual maturation of the 3-D film.

‘“Coraline’ is all about these long tunnels, falling down passageways, spider webs opening out, wells,” she said. “And ‘Avatar’ really wants to open up the vista of the widescreen, quite effectively, I think.”

By understanding the depth of field and how utilizing the special relationships upon the screen can completely revolutionize the viewing experience, these directors have used 3-D for more than just a gimmick.

Art major Neldiav has been working on a 2-D film installation that generates the feeling of a 3-D film. With a fan and loud speakers, Neldiav’s piece mimics the sensory experience of being in a subway, while a webcam and green screen technology allow the viewer to see himself in the subway.

“I’m working to incorporate senses rather than just viewing,” he said. “It’s a different way of thinking of 3-D — to be involved in the space.”

In Neldiav’s opinion, theaters should begin integrating sensory stimuli into 3-D films. He says that incorporating the other senses would create an even more engaging viewing experience.

Cashing in on the Cultural Climate

In the midst of two wars, the threat of terrorism, and an economic recession, last Christmas weekend was the highest-grossing weekend in the movie industry’s history, according to Bloomberg.com. Hollywood made $278 million during that one weekend to cap off its first ever $10 billion year in 2009.

“Obviously the more problems we have in our world, the more people look for escapist entertainment,” Thompson said.

However, lecturer in Psychology Ralph Quinn thinks that defining 3-D film’s success as a hunger for escapism is an oversimplification.

“We could definitely justify the interpretation that in hard and trying times, our need to escape into the mythic or be replenished by the mythic is probably stronger, but I prefer to think it was a more synchronous event,” Quinn said. “James Cameron’s story and the technology of 3-D wedded and produced a film that would have knocked our socks off at any time.”

Quinn admits that watching a film is inherently passive, but he believes there is something greater than escape at work in the viewing of a RealD film.

“How do we enter the mythic? Most often it involves a story, either a story we’re told or a story we read or a story we experience through film,” Quinn said. “It allows us to suspend disbelief and through our imaginative process enter into a mythic realm.”

The Changing Industry

Since the creation of cinema, Hollywood has asked the audience to suspend disbelief while watching film. In the 1970s, suspending disbelief for the mechanical movement of the model shark in “Jaws” took some effort. The characters in Cameron’s epic are easier to believe in, with strikingly anthropomorphic movement and features.

Yet the Na’vi and their Avatars, for all their life-like features, are still computer-generated animation, and the movie still takes place on a mythical planet. The trend toward special effects in film, which the popularity of RealD has hastened, has made it extremely difficult for important real world dramas to get made, according to history lecturer Thompson.

“It’s harder and harder to make a film like ‘The Hurt Locker’ or any serious subject, because all of the money goes to the big blockbusters with the special effects,” he said. “If you no longer have a market for real, serious films, I think that is very regrettable.”

Though professor Benson-Allott thinks it is too early to predict whether storyline and dialogue will become more of a focus in the RealD film once the initial wonder begins to fade, she does believe that “Coraline” bodes well for the future of the 3-D cinema.

“Henry Sellick had already demonstrated with ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ that he wanted to use animation to tell good stories, which is different than just blowing things up,” she said.

But if the film industry continues to take a drastic move toward animated RealD films, as it will this summer, the premium on great acting in film could begin to fade.

Looking back on a favorite sliver screen actor, Thompson said that would be a great shame.

“Who the hell wants to see a bunch of movies with actors doing voice-overs for computer generated images all the time?” he asked. “I want to see Laurence Olivier — I don’t want to see special effects.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

GIIP Interns learn from Paul Lubeck that designing a project plan for social change is not an easy task. GIIP students have interned in countries from Keyna to Malaysia, India to El Salvador, teaching technology skills learned in the classrooms of UCSC. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Photo by Rosario Serna.

Photo by Rosario Serna.

Located on the corner of the third floor of Social Sciences 1, the Global Information Internship Program’s (GIIP) office is small and easy to miss. The office, a single room about half the size of a small classroom, is filled with old swivel chairs and computers. On the wall hangs a topical world map with little red stickers jutting out, marking where GIIP’s members have traveled.

The room is a hub for student interns involved in a new era of activism, one that combines the passion of a community organizer with the know-how of savvy tech-junkies. New technological innovations have allowed nonprofits to expand their support and fundraising across the globe. And GIIP interns at UCSC are leading the way.

Pronounced “jeep,” GIIP is an internship and class for UC Santa Cruz students that teaches students about global developmental inequality, and then sends them out in the world to solve a pressing problem. Some students have trained nonprofits in Africa in useful technological skills, while others worked in central California building links through digital storytelling between first-generation American children and their immigrant parents.

“It takes internships to an entirely new level,” said co-chair of GIIP’s Global Advisory Board Dana Priest, a UCSC alumni and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post.

“You’re creating your own program, you’re responsible for finding money,” she added.

GIIP is the brainchild of Paul Lubeck, a sociology professor and the current director of GIIP.

“We try to show the interconnectedness of global social networks and technology networks,” Lubeck said, explaining the organization’s mission, “and how the two can work together.”

Lubeck, who has sandy grey hair, a goatee, and square glasses, explained that the organization stemmed from student complaints about a sociology class that he was teaching in 1998, World Society.

“The student evaluations for the class said ‘This is a great class. It changed my life, but it’s so depressing. Lubeck should provide Prozac,’” Lubeck said. “Others said I was a hypocrite for not suggesting an alternative [solution] for students.”

Lubeck reacted and formed the idea of getting students involved in order to address these changes using technology. “In ‘98-’99, we began to imagine a civil society project to train students to use information technology to democratize globalization, to advance social justice,” he said.

After 12 years, GIIP has transformed from an idea to a full-fledged academic program. Last summer, GIIP became a major and a minor. The sociology department now includes an honors major and minor, Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES), that is modeled after GIIP. Lubeck said that this program was lucky to come into existence, as it was approved right before the beginning of the large budget cuts across the University of California.

After spending time in the program, many GIIP students take a leadership role in the organization, becoming what GIIP calls “Fellows.”

“Fellows … are selected by existing Fellows, and commit five hours [a week] of unpaid labor to building GIIP,” Lubeck said. They hold office hours, organize the program’s administrative tasks, and some teach the tech skills they have learned to other students.

All UCSC students are eligible to get involved with GIIP, not just those who desire to become Fellows or students who declare the GISES major or minor.

Every year, GIIP offers a three-quarter class series called Sociology 30A, 30B, and 30C, which are taught by faculty members and GIIP Fellows.

“Each quarter, we teach something a little different,” said Cat Priestly, a second-year politics major from Cowell College and GIIP Fellows coordinator.

Students learn about the different types of social activism, how to write project proposals, and tech skills like web design and managing mass text messaging campaigns.

“The first quarter is mostly the theory of social entrepreneurship and the sociology behind helping people,” she said. “There is so much more that goes into it than showing up and giving someone a computer.”

After studying global economic underdevelopment and examining its causes, GIIP students are required to write their own plan to implement social change using technology.

Plans can be based anywhere in the world, and students spend the next two quarters refining and developing it. They then learn the practical skills to implement this project by writing a detailed project plan, heavily critiqued by GIIP faculty and Fellows. The next step is writing grants to fund their project.

“If you work in any organization, you have to learn how to write in this really concise way to get your point across to funders, and have to learn how to use their language and their framing and structure,” said Cat Priestly, describing the technical details of a grant proposal.

To finance their projects, students can receive some money from GIIP, but also must pitch their ideas in the form of grants to other nonprofits or foundations.

Each quarter, classes meet twice a week. In one class, students work in a tech lab, learning skills like website design, organizing computer data, and digital story telling. On the other day, students learn the empirical approaches to social activism, flesh out their proposals, and learn grant-writing techniques.

“I feel like I’m getting something done and doing something important,” said first-year GIIP Fellow Anna DeChant one afternoon while holding her office hours. DeChant is currently designing a project to help set up online medical records.

“The classes give you tools that are actually useful,” DeChant, a health sciences major from Merrill College, added.

Text-knowledge-y

GIIP is a model for training a new generation of social activists. While carrying the same passions for justice and sustainability, these new community organizers do not hold a clipboard or hand out pamphlets. Instead, they communicate through text messages and e-mail, and connect through websites, blogs, and Twitter. Now, an iPhone or an Android phone can do what mass mailings or a telephone drive could only dream of. An online presence for nonprofits like a website or social networking page can allow for possible donors and followers worldwide to stay tuned in.

This new community organizer is not only passionate, but technologically sharp, able to create websites, use social networking tools for mass communication, and then blog about the work.

Ian Anderson, a third-year GISES and mechanical engineering major from Cowell College, is a GIIP Fellow and co-teaches a GIIP class about text messaging and other communication strategies. Last summer, he traveled to Nigeria on his GIIP-sponsored project to teach nonprofits how to utilize new technologies. While in Nigeria, Anderson collaborated with several other nonprofit organizations, including the Santa Cruz-based International Health Program.

“I used different technologies, and showed what technologies they could get online for free or with minimal costs,” he said.

“Many nonprofit organizations in Nigeria had little or no money,” Anderson added.

By using the internet, these organizations could download programs cheaply to build a web presence for an organization, organize a mass text messaging campaign for medical care, or create electronic medical records systems for the local Nigerian communities.

“[I taught] blogging with WordPress, or, more generally, how to set up a Web site and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook,” Anderson said.

Anderson also taught these organizations how to mass communicate through cell phones, using a similar lesson plan to the one he is currently teaching to other GIIP members.

In many developing countries, cell phones have become an inexpensive way to communicate. In most countries, there are no cell phone plans, like in the United States, but many people can buy calling cards that are relatively cheap. In 2008, the New York Times reported that there were over three billion mobile phone users in the world, and the number is rapidly growing. Much like the ones used by college students in the United States, many of these phones have an essential function: text messaging. This source of almost instant communication is beginning to be utilized by organizations and governments to distribute information to vast quantities of people.

“There is a whole group of mobile applications — [like] FrontlineSMS — tools to help you manage text messaging campaigns for education,” Anderson said.

He continued, “You can send out information to AIDS patients, telling them when to take their drugs, send text messages to everyone in a certain area saying this is what services a clinic offers.”

Anderson credited GIIP with opening his eyes to a world of activism. “I didn’t even know this kind of world existed of tech-related nonprofit,” said Anderson, who has been in GIIP since he came to UCSC.

“GIIP gave me the foundations. Either through the classes or through the connections I made at GIIP, I learned everything,” he said.

The Price of Going Global

Sending students across the globe is not easy, and it sure isn’t cheap. On April 29 in Washington D.C., GIIP will launch its first endowment campaign. The kickoff event is a speech by Dana Priest at the University of California’s Washington D.C. campus about emerging technologies in politics and journalism.

“I’m going to be talking about the nexus between technology and social change in Washington,” she said. “I hope to talk about my own work in journalism and how 2.0 investigation tools help print journalism.”

“It’s definitely a Washington view of social change,” Priest added.

The endowment campaign is an effort to raise $10,000, which will be matched, in full, by a donor.

“It’s our big deal right now,” said Cat Priestly, the GIIP Fellows coordinator. “[The campaign] would make us sustainable — we’re all about being sustainable,” she said.

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign is the most recent and successful example of the melding of social activism and technology. The campaign used text messages and e-mails to raise millions of dollars and to excite its supporters.

“[Obama] had a spectacular model of community organizing and a very storing network base of fundraising at a micro level,” said Professor Lubeck.

This model has proven that it works well, but it has also enthralled those involved in it.

“It’s kind of addicting,” said class co-teacher Anderson, in GIIP’s small, out-of-the-way office.

“Once you start spending your time on social causes, it’s almost hard to justify not doing it,” he added. “I could be going to these classes and try to get a job making a lot of money, but how would that be more successful than doing something that’s going to help other people?”

For Santa Cruz, the revolution has begun.

With CrimeMapping.com, a website that the Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD) began partnering with about two weeks ago, current information that was once more difficult to attain is now available to the public with the click of a mouse.

“We’ve had crime-mapping for a couple of years, but the maps were static,” SCPD spokesperson Zach Friend said. “We were receiving requests for more updated information or the ability to search by address.”

CrimeMapping.com allows users to view individual occurrences of specific crimes — like burglary, assault, and DUIs, for instance — as well as observe trends over time.

“Every 24 hours, agencies upload their data … once it’s set up, it requires zero effort,” said Talal “Trip” Albagdadi, Director of Marketing for The Omega Group, a privately owned company that launched the site.

Although CrimeMapping.com is barely two years old, The Omega Group has been providing crime solutions and working with law enforcement agencies for much longer.

“We’ve been doing this for 18 years,” Albagdadi said. “We never, ever scrape data from other sites.”

Albagdadi considers CrimeMapping.com powerful, both as a source of information and as a preventative tool against crime.

“Keeping the public informed is going to prevent crime,” Albagdadi said.

Multiple police departments nationwide have caught on and begun partnerships with the website — like Fort Worth, TX, and Sarasota, FL — but numerous large cities like Los Angeles and New York City remain absent from the list of viewable agencies, making Santa Cruz one of the pioneering cities.

Between March 29 and April 5, there were 11,000 unique people visiting CrimeMapping.com from California, said Albagdadi. Of that number, 2,218 of them were from Santa Cruz, a large portion for a relatively small city.

In response to these requests from the community, the SCPD began to look for new services that would provide these features.

“This was the easiest to integrate in our records management system,” SCPD spokesperson Friend said.

For the community of Santa Cruz, CrimeMapping.com is making waves because it instantaneously extracts data from police department records. A process that was once time-consuming for the department is now automatic.

“People didn’t recognize the workload of the department or the amount of crimes occurring in the neighborhood,” Friend said.

“[CrimeMapping.com is] an incredibly great tool because it’s real-time,” said Deborah Elston, a founder of the nonprofit organization Santa Cruz Neighbors. “The moment a crime is committed and has a crime number assigned to it, it makes it to this map.”

Representing a collection of neighborhoods in the city, Santa Cruz Neighbors provides resources for community members interested in local organization and also partners with other institutions — like the SCPD, for instance — to provide a voice for the community.

“The police cannot be everywhere,” Elston said. “The neighbors are the eyes and ears to keep the community safe.”

Elston added that the high concentration of crime in some areas of the map, particularly in downtown Santa Cruz, should not turn people away from the affected areas.

“If you feel like you want to help make a difference and help crime go away, you don’t go away from it; you go toward it,” she said. “The more residents and neighbors are engaged in the community, the more involvement the community has in high-crime areas, [the more] that crime will go down.”

For Friend, CrimeMapping.com provides an important reality check.

“Sometimes one of the most difficult things to provide [residents] is the reality they’re living in. With the website, you can judge for yourself whether there are issues in the community,” Friend said. “If the community has the knowledge, then they have the power.”

Illustration by Kenny Srivijittakar.

If we had a penny for every time our respective mothers told us not to talk to strangers, I’m pretty sure we’d have none. Our mothers were never the type to embrace American turns-of-phrase, or in this case, warnings — which might be why we are the ideal audience for Chat Roulette, the new craze hitting the web with the force of a hundred blogs and the power of a thousand chat rooms.

Created in November 2009 by a 17-year-old Moscow high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy, ChatRoulette.com is a website where once you arrive, you’re greeted by a cesspool of sexy singles, a plethora of bored teenagers, and far too many college students looking for a new medium of procrastination.

Once you click “play” — curious terminology that tips the site more in the direction of game-playing than networking — you spiral down a rabbit hole of characters that you can see and hear with the help of a mic and webcam.

But of course they’re not characters, they’re real people. That’s the allure of a site that requires no registration, no log-in, no password, nothing but a cam and mic and a desire to immerse yourself in random connections.

The suspense builds each and every time you push the “next” button, which disconnects you from your current camera partner and connects you with a new stranger: will I meet a group of 12-year-olds, or will I run into a Jonas Brother? Am I looking at a flesh-colored body suit, or is that a… oh, never mind. In the world of Chat Roulette, anything is possible.

A masquerade of people throw all inhibitions — and underpants — out the door because they know that with the click of a mouse, they will probably never see you again. Within two weeks the estimated user count skyrocketed from 5,000 to 50,000. The chances of running into a Roulette-ex are slowly getting lower and lower.

Yet the site has an odd feeling of faddishness embedded in its digital bloodstream — a flash-in-the-pan quality that just feels as if it’s teetering on an expiration date. Some have called it the future of networking, but that title, meaningless in a rapidly evolving techno-society, is ill-deserved.

What it does do is speak to our desire for simplicity. In an era of mechanical overhaul, when even books are becoming obsolete, the myth of the digital frontier and its ability to unite us from across the country — hell, the globe — not only still exists, but also is oddly exciting.

Most people have no idea what they’re getting themselves into — a labyrinth of people, places, and penises from all over the world that will keep you glued to the computer screen for hours on end. One minute you’re making eyes at a handsome Brazilian and the next, you are suddenly acquainted with a weathered bratwurst in Germany. With no moderator and no filter, it truly feels as if anything goes — the first rule of Chat Roulette is you don’t talk about Chat Roulette.

Yet we still find ourselves curiously fascinated by a website that has been manifested out of our sudden desire for voyeurism at a mass level. At times, the rawness of what you’re witnessing is overwhelming. We had a short conversation once with a man in orange. It wasn’t until we spotted an armed guard in the background that we realized the man was in jail.

But that realness is what makes Chat Roulette endlessly fascinating. Its goal isn’t to oversimplify our “interests” or “activities,” dumbing our personalities down to a few tag-able anecdotes. Maybe our goal for the digital revolution was never to friend our friends, or limit our thoughts to 140 characters. Maybe all we ever wanted was a good conversation.

Illustration by Kenneth Srivijittakar.

It was the turn of the millennia, the first decade of the 21st century. No one knew what to expect or what was coming. And just like that, as quickly as the Y2K scares began, the decade is coming to a close with 2010 right around the corner. But before we welcome in the new year, the past decade deserves a quick overview.

In the past 10 years, Steve Jobs has changed the way we hear and buy music with the birth of the iPod and the iTunes store in 2001 and 2003. Mark Zuckerberg gave the world a revolution in social networking with Facebook in 2004. In 2006, Jack Dorsey gave us live updates by the second with Twitter. Amazon ignited the e-book industry with the Kindle in 2007.

However, in the midst of all the pokes, tweets and white earbuds, we, as a people, lack a certain something — an element that seems to have disappeared altogether in this past decade: substance.

Today, all you have to do is click, scroll and type to buy a song, watch a movie, read a book, write a paper or a letter or view a photo. The means of instant accessibility that digital formats bring are, more often than not, blindly pegged as an extraordinary advantage. But people are missing the point. There is something that you cannot find in downloaded music, e-books or text files.

That something is personality. In every book, CD and vinyl album, every letter written with pen and paper and in every printed photograph exists a certain unique identity. There is a story behind each and every one of them, ranging from the damaged spines of a book to its folded pages, from the scratches and fingerprints on a CD to the yellowing of old paper, from the fade of old photographs to the ink smudges on a handwritten thank you note.

Where is the unique story behind an MP3, m4p, txt or doc file? To us they are just one in a million created files, sorted and stored by the date modified, the extension type and the number of bytes required to support it.

Digital formats lack substance — the personality and timelessness of a dusty Mark Twain novel sitting on a bookshelf or a vintage Sugarhill Gang album resting in a record crate are all too often lost in this digital age.

With the press of a certain key on the keyboard or a right click on the mouse, one can delete a file in a matter of seconds, never to see it ever again. And it is in this way, in this ability to erase — or create — something in an instant, that we threaten the intimacy we share with such personal items. We disconnect from them on a personal level and, consequently, they lose their value.

Take the traditional written letter for example. Gone are the days when a carefully written letter was seen as a work of art. Penmanship used to be a mastered skill. Nowadays we butcher the English language with acronyms and vowel-less vernacular digitally scrawled into e-mails and text messages.

We rip, burn, share, download, stream and torrent files, tossing them around like they have no importance and no value. We may value the one-hundred-and-sixty gigs of songs on our iPod, but that amounts to nothing compared to the way books and CDs and vinyl records used to be treated as personal treasures.

And once we lose our value for such items, our connection with each other is equally lost. The digital era is causing us to disconnect from our fellow humans. There is no intimacy in today’s digital trends. Our relationships with others are no longer tied together with tangible items like handwritten letters, printed photographs and music albums. And with the advent of all of this technology, the intimacy we share on a person-to-person level has become virtually nonexistent.

Some will call it the decade that changed the world. To others, it will be the decade that made all things digital. It will be known as the iPod decade. The decade of social networking.

And though we have made great technological strides in this past decade, and as we welcome in the new year, we mustn’t completely shun progression, but instead remember the importance of preserving these non-digital items, whether it be in the form of paperback, hardcover or the classic album. If we don’t, then our world will dive headfirst into the very future that a certain 2008 Pixar movie portrayed — one where technology dominates a very one-sided lifestyle.