University of California – Law Street https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com Law and Policy for Our Generation Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:46:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8 100397344 UC Berkeley Lectures Removed After Disability Discrimination Complaints https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/education-blog/uc-berkeley-lectures-discrimination/ https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/education-blog/uc-berkeley-lectures-discrimination/#respond Fri, 24 Mar 2017 14:08:55 +0000 https://lawstreetmedia.com/?p=59765

But a website called LBRY will still share about 20,000 videos for free.

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"UC Berkeley" Courtesy of Charlie Nguyen License: (CC BY 2.0)

UC Berkeley used to provide thousands of free lectures and podcasts to anyone who was interested. But now, the school has decided to bar the public from accessing 20,000 videos and podcasts in response to complaints that the content did not meet the needs of vision or hearing-impaired students. Last August, the Department of Justice found that UC Berkeley had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires public universities to provide equal education access to students with disabilities.

Officials say that their decision to restrict access to the videos will allow them to focus their resources on creating newer and more accessible material. In a statement, the university’s vice chancellor for undergraduate education Cathy Koshland said:

This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit without consent.

The DOJ’s review, prompted by complaints from two Gallaudet University employees and members of the National Association of the Deaf, found incomplete or inaccurate closed captioning on videos that would pose challenges for those with hearing disabilities. Low color contrast in some videos would make them difficult to watch for vision-impaired viewers as well.

Berkeley isn’t the only institution where lectures have presented difficulties for disabled students. Two years ago, Harvard University and M.I.T. both faced discrimination lawsuits from advocates for the deaf for not including closed captioning on their online lectures.

But other universities say that removing content altogether isn’t the answer. Inside Higher Ed reached out to the University of Minnesota, M.I.T., Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin, almost all of which replied that their lectures meet accessibility standards and that they have no intentions to keep the public from viewing their content.

But the UC Berkeley videos are not lost forever, thanks to one website’s decision to make them available to the public again starting in April. LBRY, a “digital marketplace” where users can publish their content and set a price for other users to view their content, announced the site would re-publish the lectures and make them viewable for free.

LBRY CEO Jeremy Kauffman wrote that uploading the files would be legal because they are under a Creative Commons license that permits non-commercial redistribution with attribution. This means LBRY will not charge for the access to the material or make a profit, and will give credit to UC Berkeley. He told UC Berkeley’s campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, that he is open to collaborating with someone who could add subtitles to the videos that LBRY will publish.

“What motivated our community is that we saw information disappearing that shouldn’t disappear, and our technology is designed to keep information around,” he told the paper.

Victoria Sheridan
Victoria is an editorial intern at Law Street. She is a senior journalism major and French minor at George Washington University. She’s also an editor at GW’s student newspaper, The Hatchet. In her free time, she is either traveling or planning her next trip abroad. Contact Victoria at VSheridan@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Scientists Want To Create Chimeras: Part-Human, Part-Animal Embryos https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/weird-news-blog/scientists-want-create-chimeras/ https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/weird-news-blog/scientists-want-create-chimeras/#respond Thu, 26 May 2016 16:10:24 +0000 http://lawstreetmedia.com/?p=52742

From mythology to real life.

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"Bio Lab" courtesy of [Amy via Flickr]

It’s like the “X-Files,” but in real life! Researchers at the University of California, Davis want to create part-human, part-animal embryos, also known as chimeras, for the purpose of medical research.

The concept is that having access to an animal with certain human cells would allow for more accurate results when researching how different illnesses progress. The term “chimera” comes from Greek mythology–it’s a monster made up of several animals, for example a goat with a lion’s head and a snake’s tail. But actually creating chimeras in real life raises some important ethical questions. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has refused to fund the project, due to its controversial nature.

One of the possible end results would be to breed farm animals with human organs so that they could be donated to terminally ill people. But New York Medical School professor Stuart Newman thinks this is taking it a step too far: “You’re getting into unsettling ground that I think is damaging to our sense of humanity,” he told Boise State Public Radio.

Rob Stein, a Boise State Public Radio reporter, actually got a firsthand look at how the chimeras would be produced, by accompanying biologist Pablo Ross to his lab in California. They discussed a procedure that involved creating a human pancreas in a pig that could be eventually transplanted into a diabetes patient; it involves inserting human stem cells into pig embryos, and then implanting them in the pig.

These kinds of processes are where chimera critics worry things could go awry. Newman points out that if something were to go wrong, it could actually result in a pig with a human-like brain and some sort of human consciousness. Or an even weirder result–a pig giving birth to a part-human baby! As chimeras become a more likely reality, the question is if we really are willing to take that risk and cross those ethical lines.

Emma Von Zeipel
Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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