An Aiken, SC middle school teacher won't face criminal charges after reading to his class from Orson Scott Card's classic sci-fi novel Ender's Game, which a 14-year-old student's mother described as "pornographic" in complaints to the school district and police.

Investigations by police and the district apparently didn't turn up any pornographic material in Ender's Game, but the teacher may still have violated district policy by reading from three books -- the Card novel, Agatha Christie's Curtain and Victoria McKernan's The Devil's Paintbrush, a young adult novel set in the Old West -- without getting them approved by the administration.

"One of the things that teachers are supposed to do is preview material for appropriateness for any questions that may come up," said Joe Shealy, the district's academic officer for middle schools.

School district officials said they expect the issue to be resolved quickly, and they're also looking into whether the school's staff "followed district policy in a timely manner" in their handling of the complaint.

An earlier report suggested that the teacher may have been suspended for reading pornographic material from the Internet in class, but neither the school district nor Aiken police have confirmed that accusation.

[aikenstandard]

Chinese bloggers have developed an extensive collection of slang terms used to get around a government censorship measure that targets "vulgar content." It's named after a mythical beast called "the grass-mud horse," which sounds almost the same in Chinese as "f**k your mother."

The grass-mud horse has become popular since it first appeared in 2009. The creature has become an unofficial mascot for freedom of expression by critics of the government, including popular artist Ai Weiwei and his supporters.

Some grass-mud horse slang has become so widely-adopted that it was included in the latest edition of the Oxford Chinese Dictionary, but China Digital Times has put together a much more thorough lexicon.

Important terms include "river crab," the natural enemy of the grass-mud horse. The Chinese translation sounds like "harmony," which is what the government claims its censorship rules are designed to achieve. Bloggers whose sites are censored say that they've been "harmonized."

The Chinese Communist Party-controlled Global Times has become The Muddled-Sh*t Times, the anti-subversive Domestic Security Department is the "national treasure," and the Ministry of Railways is "the Ministry of Bullying."

The lexicon contains dozens more coded terms used to escape censorship, and China Digital Times intends to keep growing the project as the language of the Chinese blogosphere evolves.

As the Digital Times points out, a lot of these terms originated as humorous memes, but they've come to serve a serious purpose in the country's online political discourse.

[atlantic]

Blogger Jonathan Corbett, who recently exposed what he claims is a serious weakness in the TSA's nude body scanners, says that the TSA is now "strongly cautioning" journalists against covering the story. Corbett has gotten multiple emails from journalists who received the TSA's warning, and is encouraging media outlets to cover the story anyway.

The TSA has posted a response denying that Corbett's trick for beating the scanners -- placing a metal object on your side, where it will disappear against a dark background -- actually works, because the body scanners are just one of "20 layers of security" in place at airports.

Interestingly, a paper published in 2010 in the Journal of Transportation Security seems to support Corbett's claims. The authors wrote that "an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible" to the backscatter scanners.

[slashdot]