A group of students at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus are conducting an investigation on the demographics of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, focusing on the Hispanic participation.

If you or anyone you know, have participated in an New York City OWS event, especially if you identify as a Latino/Hispanic, the students would appreciate your help with their project.

They have established an on-line survey en Español and in English.

The links go to an established survey site, but I always use ‘private browsing’ [Firefox] or an ‘incognito window’ [Chrome] to complete surveys. The survey takes about 10 minutes, and individual surveys are identified only by a number. There is a complete explanation before the survey starts.

If you can help them out I’d appreciate it because I did this kind of thing when I was taking classes, but I didn’t have on-line surveys to use. [If you think it’s tough getting people to take surveys on-line, try getting them to sit with a bubble sheet and a booklet of questions …]

I’ll make this sticky for a few days.

Thers mentioned this silliness from the New York legislature, and Time picked up on it too: The New York Bill that Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech.

As with all abridgements of fundamental rights, it is ‘to protect children’ and stop ‘cyber-bullying’, and not to identify whistle-blowers and disgruntled employees [just so you know].

First off, congratulations to the NY lege for finally investing in a spelling checker, as there are many fewer errors in recent laws than was once common in revisions of the Penal Law. There as still some problems with your command of the alphabet for subsections, but the spelling improvement is a positive step.

Tell you what, first pass a law requiring all statements by elected officials and government employees used by the news media to be accompanied by the name and position of the individual, and then we can talk about what private citizens get up to. As long as ‘unnamed sources’ and ‘senior administration officials’ can con people into wars, the voters have a real problem deciding who should be hanged for these lapses. Let government at all levels in New York give up its anonymity in the press first to prove that there are no conflicts with the Constitution in such a policy.

In case no one has told them, the owners of web sites get to establish their own policies on who can comment, just like the ‘letters to the editor’ policies of newspapers.