Last week we did a story about a work of art called The Transparency Grenade, a grenade-shaped sculpture that will collect wireless information and audio when "detonated" and then post all of that information to the internet. While the grenade is a one-of-a-kind object, creator Julian Oliver said he had plans to make an Android phone app that would emulate the functionality of the grenade. Oliver said in our interview that he would be surprised if technology like this didn't already exist. Well, it turns out it does. Enter the Pwn Plug.

It's time again for a few of our favorite things. Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

It's pledge week at On the Media's parent station WNYC. Hosting this website and our podcast costs our producing station a sizeable chunk of change each year. If you’d like to contribute to WNYC to help keep us online and available to you whenever you want to listen, now is the time to do it. For a one time pledge of $60 you can get our popular ON [CAFFEINE] coffee mug which host Brooke Gladstone can be seen modeling below – follow this link to get the mug or to pledge at any level to WNYC (you can also see the other great thank you gifts on offer).

Normally for our pledge shows, Bob and Brooke spend the hour recalling some of our favorite segments, and talking about how great we are. But instead of tooting our own horns this time around, OTM decided to go to some of our favorite public radio personalities and ask them to tell our listening audience just how amazing, wonderful, and worthy of support we are. First up, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me's Peter Sagal!

On this week’s show, we have a few stories exploring the subject of transparency. Inspired by the story of a woman who discovered the FBI had a 436-page report on her after sending in a bunch of personal FOIA requests, I decided to make the government get transparent with me as well.

Brooke appeared on the CBC show George Stromboulopoulos Tonight yesterday to talk about her comic The Influencing Machine. Check out the full interview below.

The boycott of academic publisher Elsevier that we reported on earlier this month seems to be having an effect: On Monday, the media giant dropped its support of the Research Works Act, a bill that would have limited public access to federally-funded health research by ceding control to commercial publishers. Hours later, the bill's sponsors pulled the plug on the legislation. Elsevier also released an open letter to math scholars -- who were among the first and highest-profile academics to join the boycott -- stating that the firm would "create a scientific council for mathematics, to ensure that we are working in tandem with the mathematics community to address feedback and to give greater control and transparency". The boycott continues; nearly 7,600 academics had signed on as of Tuesday afternoon.

It's time for a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

On the Media has followed legal standards around warrantless GPS tracking since October of 2010. In January of this year, the Supreme Court decided a case called US v. Jones, which dealt specifically with this subject. The Supreme Court decision was pretty nuanced, but George Washington University professor and Volokh conspiracy blogger Orin Kerr told us that the decision was a victory for privacy advocates.

Barney Rosset died yesterday.  Rosset never met a fight he didn’t like and his longest, most protracted fight was over freedom of speech in the U.S. and what he could lawfully publish.  Starting in the early 1960’s, with Grove Press, Rossett deliberately set out to test the limits of U.S. obscenity laws, first with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover and then with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Winning the right to publish and distribute both he went on to introduce Americans to a whole new generation of writers and filmmakers – Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, William Burroughs, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, Allen Ginsberg and Frederick Wiseman.  Brooke spoke with Rosset in 2008 about his life and love of literature.

The staff of OTM pick a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below.

Last week, reporter Anthony Shadid of the New York Times died in Syria of an asthma attack. Brooke remembered him on the show this week with a snippet from an interview we did in April of 2011 about the American media's short attention span for international crises and the dangers inherent to foreign crisis reporting. You can listen to the entire story here. Transcript below. 

Way back when we re-launched our website in July of this year, we did a Q&A with director Kirby Ferguson. Ferguson has been working on an ongoing series of videos called Everything is a Remix, about the culture of remixing that permeates just about every creative endeavor out there. Ferguson uses a couple of very famous examples (Star Wars, the ouvre of Quentin Tarantino, the innovations in the graphical interfaces in modern computing) to demonstrate that innovation is at least partly appropriation.

It's Monday and time again for a few of our favorite things.  Please post comments below and enjoy!

The staff of OTM pick a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

(This was originally printed in The Guardian.)

We should all of us, media consumers, applaud the management of the Sacramento Bee, which this weekend courageously fired photographer Bryan Patrick for high crimes against journalism.

This article was originally posted on the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, www.impatientoptimists.org

We’ve all heard the old saw that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” It’s the guiding principle of public relations for those engaged in building support for humanitarian causes. In fact, it’s more than a principle; it’s an inescapable truth.

It's Superbowl weekend, and for non-football fans who've been coerced into watching the game by social pressure of geological magnitude, there's always the ads to look forward to. (Although advertisers are ruining the fun by leaking their ads ahead of time.)

There's almost no chance any of those ...

As part of Facebook's initial public offering yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter that was included in Facebook's registration statement with the Security and Exchange Commission. Wired's Epicenter blog has an interesting breakdown of Zuckerberg's letter, but there was one section that stood out to us - Zuckerberg's pontifications on hackers and the term "hacker" itself.

A few weeks ago we spoke with former Federal Communications Commission adviser Steven Waldman about the FCC's proposed regulation that would require local television stations to disclose political ad buys online. Although the information is technically available to the public (interested citizens can physically view the file at the station), the move to online would make it far more accessible. But the National Association of Broadcasters didn't seem too enthusiastic about the proposed changes.

In a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Waldman discusses how the local broadcasters reacted to the FCC proposal:

A comment filed by the stations owned by the major TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and Univision) suggested that researchers should not expect their task to be made easier by the Internet. “Research by its nature requires the expenditure of effort,” they wrote. And for reporters, “a certain amount of leg work is eminently practical.” (One almost expects them to next blurt out, “in my day, we didn’t have no new-fangled Intertubes; we had to go to the damn library and they should too!)

It’s almost as if these companies—did I mention that they’re news organizations?—believe their first obligation is to offer creative character-building obstacles to getting information, not to better inform the public.

You can read Waldman's full article here.