jan11index_ff.indd C&RL News January 2011 68 Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@ email.unc.edu G a r y P a t t i l l o GIS bibliography In 1991, Professor Duane Marble of Ohio State University began to build a GIS Master Bibliography to make GIS literature accessible to the public. In 1999, Esri became curator of the bibliography and incorporated it into the GIS Bibliography. This free and growing database indexes books, journals, conference proceedings, magazines, reports, audiovisual materials, newspaper articles, and theses. There are references from as early as 1946. Full text is included where available. Esri training library: GIS bibliography, training.esri.com/campus/library/index.cfm (retrieved November 10, 2010). Racial gap in suspensions of middle school students In a national sample of more than 9,000 middle schools, 28.3 percent of black males, on average, were suspended at least once during a school year, nearly three times the 10 percent rate for white males. Black females were suspended more than four times as often as white females (18 percent vs. 4 percent). “As the number of suspensions for kids of all races and all grades has risen dramati- cally, the gap between suspension rates for blacks and whites has more than tripled—from about 3 percentage points in the 1970s to more than 10 percentage points today,” said Daniel J. Losen of the Civil Rights Project, UCLA. Daniel J. Losen and Russell J. Skiba, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” The Civil Rights Project/ Proyecto Derechos Civiles, September 13, 2010, civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/school-discipline /suspended-education-urban-middle-schools-in-crisis (retrieved November 15, 2010). Open standards and net neutrality Tim Berners-Lee, credited with creating the World Wide Web warns that the Web as we know it is being threatened in different ways. “Some of its most suc- cessful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.” According to Lee, the Web “is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a commu- nications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.” Tim Berners-Lee, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Scientific American, November 22, 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web (retrieved December 1, 2010). Online privacy (or lack thereof ) A company called BlueCava Inc. wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cell phone and TV set-top box in the world. It has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged 1 billion of the world’s estimated 10 billion devices. Marketers are spying on Internet users by observing and recording people’s online behavior, and building and selling detailed profiles of their activities and interests without their consent. BlueCava also is seeking to use a controversial technique of matching online data about people with catalogs of offline information about them, such as property records, motor-vehicle registrations, income estimates, and other details. Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries, “Race Is on to ‘Fingerprint’ Phones, PCs,” The Wall Street Journal, Novem- ber 30, 2010, online ed., online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646704100959546.html (retrieved December 2, 2010).