Author: wlerik

email discuss Pat Aufderheide & Jessica Clark

Download full report

Communicating
about shared issues—whether it’s traffic congestion in the
neighborhood, lower wages for women, or the concerns of the families of
soldiers not receiving adequate body armor—builds a group’s awareness
of itself as a public. In this context, public media are media that aim
to increase public knowledge and cohere and mobilize audience members.

Not just limited to PBS or NPR broadcasts, such media can range from
print publications to documentary films, from community radio
broadcasts to international social networks and beyond. More and more,
as participatory technologies and practices engage audience members to
become media creators, public media projects are not only directed at,
but generated by, their publics.

Want to learn more? Read our new Frequently Asked Questions
document, by Director Pat Aufderheide and Research Fellow Jessica Clark.

Check out Rob’s Social Media tutorials!

New Blip.tv Player Is Good

There’s so much buzz over free video hosting sites that sometimes my head hurts. Blip.tv continues to cut through the buzz by honing the features available via their video publishing service.

They announced a new show player
yesterday as part of a scheduled upgrade of the service. I learned this
info while I was in the midst of creating an archive there for my social media lessons.

The new player has a few simple configuration options and allows the
user to watch the most recent show while also being able to go back and
watch previous shows. This is a big step forward from the single player
format because the latest show will be available anywhere your player
is positioned on the web.

The flexibility of this player, combined with the already advanced
(and very simple) publishing tools continues to distance Blip.tv from a
pack of competitors that includes Brightcove, Google Video, YouTube and others.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/NatureChallenge/at_Home/default.asp

 We’ve researched the best actions you can take to protect nature and improve your quality of life for the future. The good news is that simple changes can make a real difference! Sign up for the Nature Challenge and see how many of the following actions you can do!

1. Reduce home energy use by 10%
An energy-efficient home will lower your utility bills and reduce your environmental impact. Heating accounts for nearly 60% of energy use in the average Canadian home.

2. Choose an energy-efficient home and appliances
R-2000 homes use 30% less energy than standard homes. Modern appliances are better for the environment.

3. Don’t use pesticides
Small children and pets are especially vulnerable to the dangers of chemicals.

4. Eat meat-free meals one day a week
The production and processing of grains requires far less water and land than does meat.

5. Buy locally grown and produced food
Try buying local food for one month a year. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from food transportation.

6. Choose a fuel-efficient vehicle
A typical SUV uses almost twice the fuel of a modern car, although both seat the same number of passengers.

7. Walk, bike or take transit to work
The air we breathe inside our cars can be up to 10 times more polluted than the air outside.

8. Choose a home close to work or school
If you live in a convenient location, you’ll lower your emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

9. Support alternative transportation
Transit lines and bike paths mean less pollution, less gridlock and urban sprawl.

10. Learn more and share with others
We can inspire our elected leaders to incorporate environmental conservation into public policy.

New Center Report: Foreign Guestworkers Routinely Exploited by U.S. Employers March 12, 2007 — Guestworkers who come to the United States are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries, according to a new report released by the Center today.The report — Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States — comes as Congress is about to begin debating immigration legislation that could greatly expand guestworker programs to cover hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new temporary foreign workers.”Congress should reform our broken immigration system, but reform should not rely on creating a vast new guestworker program,” said Mary Bauer, director of the SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project and author of the report. “The current program is shamefully abusive in practice, and there is almost no enforcement of worker rights.”The 48-page report, based on interviews with thousands of guestworkers and dozens of legal cases, describes the systematic abuse of workers under what is known as the H-2 system administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The program was created in 1943 to allow the sugar cane industry to bring in temporary workers and was revised by Congress in 1986 to include non-agricultural workers.Employers in 2005 “imported” more than 121,000 temporary H-2 guestworkers — 32,000 H-2A workers for agricultural work and 89,000 H-2B workers for jobs in forestry, seafood processing, landscaping, construction and other non-agricultural industries.”Guestworkers are usually poor people who are lured here by the promise of decent jobs,” Bauer said. “But all too often, their dreams are based on lies, their hopes shattered by the reality of a system that treats them as commodities. They’re the disposable workers of the global economy.”Hugo Martin Recinos-Recinos, a former guestworker from Guatemala, borrowed thousands of dollars to pay recruiting fees for a forestry job in the United States. “I had to leave the deed to my home,” he said. “When I got to the U.S., I was always underpaid, living in small hotel rooms and working 10-hour days. The debt from my recruitment and travel to the States made the low pay even harder to bear. When I filed a lawsuit about the conditions, my family and I were threatened. The guestworker program was abuse from beginning to end.”The most fundamental problem with the H-2 system is that employers hold all the cards. They decide which workers can come to the United States and which cannot. They decide whether a worker can stay in this country. They usually decide where and under what conditions workers live and how they travel.Guestworkers are typically powerless to enforce their rights. “If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation,” the report says.”Guestworkers don’t enjoy the most basic protections of a free labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are cheated or abused by their employer,” Bauer said.The rights that H-2 workers do have exist mostly on paper. The federal government has failed to protect them from unscrupulous employers, and most cannot obtain private legal assistance to enforce their rights through the courts.The report concludes that the H-2 guestworker program should not serve as a model for immigration reform, but in fact should be overhauled if allowed to continue. It offers specific recommendations to remedy the worst abuses.”The mistreatment of temporary foreign workers in America today is one of the major civil rights issues of our time,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen. “For too long, we’ve reaped the economic benefits of their labor but have ignored the incredible degree of abuse and exploitation they endure.”Congress now has an opportunity to right this terrible wrong. As part of the reform of our broken immigration system, Congress should eliminate the current H-2 system entirely or commit to making it a fair program with strong worker protections that are vigorously enforced.”

SPLCenter.org: New Center Report: Foreign Guestworkers Routinely Exploited by U.S. Employers