Category: News-esque

News that doesn’t fit anywhere else

The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology

Seth Anderson0 comment

Artifactual Nonchalance

Ah, the sounds of my youth. Vinyl record scratches, dial tones, busy signals, typewriter keys clacking, modems squawking even. I’m with David Pogue, and will miss these sounds as they join previously vanished sounds, horses clomping on cobblestone streets, ship masts creaking, and steam rail engines.

Then there’s the record-scratch sound, still used frequently in ads and comic scenes to indicate someone’s train of thought going off the rails. Isn’t it weird that we still use that sound? For the most part, the last 20 years’ worth of viewers and listeners have never even heard that sound in real life! (In a 2008 NPR segment, the host asked some teenagers if they could identify the sound. They couldn’t. “I have no idea…. I know I saw it on TV.”)

And then there’s the rewind/fast-forward gibberish sounds — of TAPE. What will they do in the movies, now that random-access digital video formats deprive producers of that audience-cueing sound?

What about modem-dialing shrieks? Sure, we’re all thrilled to have always-on Internet connections. But wasn’t there something satisfying, something understandable, about that staticky call-and-response from our computers to the mothership?

We’re losing the dial tone, too. Cellphones don’t have dial tones. Only landlines do, and those are rapidly disappearing. And without the dial tone, how will movie producers ever indicate that someone’s hung up on a character? (Even though that was an unrealistic depiction to begin with.)

Funny thing is, we’re replacing these sounds mainly with… nothing! What’s the sound of broadband? Of rewinding a CD?

(click here to continue reading The Fading Sounds of Analog Technology -David Pogue – NYTimes.com.)

 

Roger Ailes possibly to be Indicted

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Daily News

Wouldn’t this be sweet? Roger Ailes to be indicted for lying to federal investigators?

Here’s what I learned recently: Someone I spoke with claimed that Ailes was scheduled to speak at their event in March, but canceled. It appears that Roger’s people, ostensibly using a clause in his contract, said he “cannot appear for legal reasons.”

I asked “What, precisely, does that mean?”

The response: “Roger Ailes will be indicted — probably this week, maybe even Monday.”

(click here to continue reading Roger Ailes to be Indicted | The Big Picture.)

Newstand on State Street circa 1996

I had read the NYT article yesterday about Judith Regan’s troubles with News Corp., but I didn’t think much of it1 I don’t trust federal prosecutors to tackle cases with bold-face names, even if they are bald-faced liars like Roger Ailes.

It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary. Enlarge This Image

Ms. Regan had once been involved in an affair with Mr. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner whose mentor and supporter, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in the nascent stages of a presidential campaign. The News Corporation executive, whom she did not name, wanted to protect Mr. Giuliani and conceal the affair, she said.

Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik.

It is unclear whether the existence of the tape played a role in News Corporation’s decision to move quickly to settle a wrongful termination suit filed by Ms. Regan, paying her $10.75 million in a confidential settlement reached two months after she filed it in 2007.

Depending on the specifics, the taped conversation could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime, but prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and a former federal prosecutor.

(click here to continue reading Fox News Chief, Roger Ailes, Urged Employee to Lie, Records Show – NYTimes.com.)

Delicious, no? Of course, victory celebrations should not be scheduled until Ailes actually appears in court, which could be never.

Pippen Peruses the Newspaper

David Corn adds:

On Thursday, The New York Times broke one of those deliciously dishy New York political-media exposés involving bold-face names. According to legal papers filed in a civil suit, in 2004 Roger Ailes, the pugilistic head of Fox News, encouraged Judith Regan, a flashy publisher, to lie to federal investigators about an affair she had had with Bernard Kerik, the former NYC police chief nominated by George W. Bush to be the secretary of homeland security. Ailes’ motive: to protect Rudolph Giuliani, a close pal of Ailes’ and a mentor and supporter of Kerik. Giuliani was at that time looking toward a presidential run in 2008, and any scandal involving Kerik, his close associate, would be bad news for him.

In 2006, after she was fired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns Fox News, Regan (who had proposed publishing O.J. Simpson’s hypothetical confession of the murder of his ex-wife) publicly claimed that a senior exec at News Corp. had asked her to lie about her affair with Kerik, who was married. (Reportedly, Kerik and Regan used an apartment near Ground Zero — which had been donated for recovery and rescue workers — as their love nest.) But Regan did not ID the News Corp. honcho who had encouraged her to hush up. In a lawsuit filed against News Corp. in 2007, Regan said this executive had told her that if she disclosed information about her tryst with Kerik, it “would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign.”

There’s more to this twisted tale — including accusations of anti-Semitism, a $10.75 million settlement for Regan, a novel that portrayed baseball great Mickey Mantle as a lascivious drunk, and Kerik’s indictment on tax fraud and other charges. (Kerik was sent to the slammer last year.) But let’s keep the focus on Ailes. The Times scoop, based on legal filings in a case in which Regan’s former lawyers are suing her for not paying them (oy!), reveals that Regan taped the phone call during which Ailes pushed her to lie to the feds about a sexual matter.

This tape is Ailes’ blue dress.

Fox News, founded in 1996, went to town during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment crusade. That saga made Ailes’ network. I doubt anyone kept track, but there must have been at least 17 million occasions when a Fox host or guest said that lying about sex in a legal proceeding (to prevent political embarrassment) was a high crime deserving impeachment — or worse.

Yet that’s what Ailes encouraged Regan to do. And this might have been illegal: conspiring to lie to federal gumshoes is a crime. But prosecutors don’t usually bother with such cases. (Remember all those high-minded Fox Newsers who fiercely dismissed the argument that Clinton ought not be prosecuted or impeached for this sort of lie because prosecutors rarely chased after this kind of perjury case?)

(click here to continue reading Roger Ailes’ Sex-and-Lies Tale: There Is Something Different About Fox.)

Evening Newspapers at Monument Station

And I wonder what’s happening with the other legal case against Rupert Murdoch’s empire, namely that various News Corp employees hacked into cellphones and voicemail boxes of hundreds of folks. Mostly in the U.K., as far as we know, but I assume the New York Post was educated and encouraged to do the same.

As Scotland Yard tracked Goodman and Mulcaire, the two men hacked into Prince Harry’s mobile-phone messages. On April 9, 2006, Goodman produced a follow-up article in News of the World about the apparent distress of Prince Harry’s girlfriend over the matter. Headlined “Chelsy Tears Strip Off Harry!” the piece quoted, verbatim, a voice mail Prince Harry had received from his brother teasing him about his predicament.

The palace was in an uproar, especially when it suspected that the two men were also listening to the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne. The eavesdropping could not have gone higher inside the royal family, since Prince Charles and the queen were hardly regular mobile-phone users. But it seemingly went everywhere else in British society. Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out.

AS OF THIS SUMMER2, five people have filed lawsuits accusing News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire that includes News of the World, of breaking into their voice mail. Additional cases are being prepared, including one seeking a judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the investigation. The litigation is beginning to expose just how far the hacking went, something that Scotland Yard did not do. In fact, an examination based on police records, court documents and interviews with investigators and reporters shows that Britain’s revered police agency failed to pursue leads suggesting that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers was routinely listening in on its citizens.

(click here to continue reading The British Tabloid Phone-Hacking Scandal – NYTimes.com.)

That case continues, but slowly.

Footnotes:
  1. actually tweeted a link to the story Friday night [↩]
  2. 2010 [↩]

Through My Eye, Not Hipstamatic’s

Seth Anderson0 comment

Robot, living in the future

Damon Winter ((warning: Flash based portfolio)) got some flack for his award-winning photos of soldiers in Afghanistan, photographed with Hipstamatic, and first published for the Sunday New York Times. He has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

What has gotten people so worked up, I believe, falls under the heading of aesthetics. Some consider the use of the phone camera as a gimmick or as a way to aestheticize news photos. Those are fair arguments, but they have nothing to do with the content of the photos.

We are being naïve if we think aesthetics do not play an important role in the way photojournalists tell a story. We are not walking photocopiers. We are storytellers.  We observe, we chose moments, we frame little slices of our world with our viewfinders, we even decide how much or how little light will illuminate our subjects, and — yes — we choose what equipment to use. Through all of these decisions, we shape the way a story is told.

Let’s look at how the images have been processed by the application. This is not a case of taking an image and applying a chosen filter later. A photo is taken and then you must wait up to 10 seconds, while the image is processed, before you can take the next one. In processing, every image receives what seems to be a pretty similar treatment: a color balance shift, the burning of predetermined areas of the frame and increased contrast.

These are all fairly standard parameters in Photoshop. And they can be done on a color enlarger. The problem people have with an app, I believe, is that a computer program is imposing the parameters, not the photographer.

“No content has been added, taken away, obscured or altered. These are remarkably straightforward and simple images.” — Damon Winter But I don’t see how this is so terribly different from choosing a camera (like a Holga) or a film type or a processing method that has a unique but consistent and predictable outcome or cross-processing or using a color balance not intended for the lighting conditions (tungsten in daylight or daylight in fluorescent, using the cloudy setting to warm up a scene).

(click here to continue reading Through My Eye, Not Hipstamatic’s: Damon Winter Discusses the Use of an App – NYTimes.com.)

I’m of the firm opinion is that what matters is the artist, not the tool the artist chooses to use, or use incorrectly, or even ignore. Critics have a right to their opinions, but complaining about the tools the artist uses is a weak, meritless criticism.

Full disclosure: I love Hipstamatic, and have taken hundreds of photos ((if not more. 546 have been uploaded to Flickr, so I’m probably in the thousands by now)) with the photo app.

Via

Curveball Shocked That His Story Led to Iraq War

Seth Anderson0 comment

Correction Required

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney1 were either gullible, or duplicitous. Or perhaps both. No matter, they are war criminals now. How many civilian deaths resulted from this little fiction? 100,000? 1,000,000? more? Plus the lives of soldiers, and the near bankruptcy of the United States!

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi’s claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell’s landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

 

(click here to continue reading Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war | World news | The Guardian.)

Jerk City

and from the NYT:

The strange case of “Curveball” has become one of the most infamous episodes in the Bush administration’s case for war. Mr. Janabi’s claim about the mobile laboratories was featured prominently in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s address to the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the administration’s case that Mr. Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, and eventually determined that Iraq did not have any such weapons. It later became clear that the Bush administration had relied heavily on bogus information from unreliable exiles like Mr. Janabi.

Even before the invasion, there was strong evidence that Mr. Janabi was an unreliable source, evidence which critics now say the Bush White House and the C.I.A.’s top leadership ignored.

Mr. Janabi, who defected to Germany in the 1990s, met repeatedly with German intelligence officials beginning in 2000. They refused to allow C.I.A. officials to meet directly with him, instead providing the Americans only with reports of what he had said.

Eventually, though, the Germans grew doubtful of their informer and passed on their suspicions to American intelligence officials.

(click here to continue reading Iraq Bioweapons Claim a Lie, ‘Curveball’ Says – NYTimes.com.)

Monument, homage to the firemen who died in the London Blitz

Carne Ross of the Guardian, U.K., adds, in a follow up article, that the U.S. and U.K. wanted very much to justify going to war, and didn’t examine the evidence very carefully on purpose:

Each piece of evidence, whatever its source, was first subjected to rigorous cross-checking before inclusion in overall analyses. All sources of intelligence suffered from particular deficits: Iraq knew that its signals were monitored and thus limited its communications traffic; it also hid any WMD activity under roofs in military and civilian sites, thereby limiting the value of overhead reconnaissance. So, all evidence had to be tested by the simple method of seeking corroboration from other sources. This method was used across Whitehall, and in the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office in particular, and was the basis for the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments of the WMD threat, several of which I contributed to. In the years I worked on the subject (1997-2002), the picture produced by this method was very clear: there was no credible evidence of substantial stocks of WMD in Iraq.

And it was this method – clearly – that was abandoned in advance of the war. Instead of a careful cross-checking of evidence, reports that suited the story of an imminent Iraqi threat were picked out, polished and formed the basis of public claims like Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN security council, or the No 10 dossier. This was exactly how a false case for war was constructed: not by the deliberate creation of a falsehood, but by willfully and secretly manipulating the evidence to exaggerate the importance of reports like Curveball’s, and to ignore contradictory evidence. This was a subtle process, elaborated from report to report, in such a way that allowed officials themselves to believe that they were not deliberately lying – more editing, perhaps, or simplifying for public presentation.

 

(click here to continue reading Curveball and the manufacture of a lie | Carne Ross | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.)

Footnotes:
  1. and their little hand puppet, George W. Bush [↩]

Lupercalia

Seth Anderson2 Comments

A Velvia Kiss

Thought by many to be the genesis of St. Valentine’s Day, and thus Hallmark’s Day1, Lupercalia was a fertility orgy celebrated today.

Lupercalia was an ancient pastoral festival, observed on February 13 through 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Lupercalia subsumed Februa, an earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February its name. The Lupercalia by name was believed in antiquity to have some connection with the Ancient Greek festival of the Arcadian Lykaia (from Ancient Greek: λύκος — lykos, “wolf”, Latin lupus) and the worship of Lycaean Pan, the Greek equivalent to Faunus, as instituted by Evander.

In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a god sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus, who is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan.

Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins. The 2nd-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr mentions an image of “the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus,”] nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, on the Ides of February, a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt.

Plutarch described Lupercalia:

Lupercalia, of which many write that it was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.

…

The festival began with the sacrifice by the Luperci (or the flamen dialis) of two male goats and a dog. Next two young patrician Luperci were led to the altar, to be anointed on their foreheads with the sacrificial blood, which was wiped off the bloody knife with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and laugh.

The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the victims, which were called Februa, dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran round the walls of the old Palatine city, the line of which was marked with stones, with the thongs in their hands in two bands, striking the people who crowded near. Girls and young women would line up on their route to receive lashes from these whips. This was supposed to ensure fertility, prevent sterility in women and ease the pains of childbirth. This tradition itself may survive (Christianised, and shifted to Spring) in certain ritual Easter Monday whippings.

 

(click here to continue reading Lupercalia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Sounds like fun! If it wasn’t so cold in Chicago, I might gird my loins with a goatskin and wander the West Loop whipping young lasses…

Footnotes:
  1. as I call Valentine’s Day [↩]

Climate Scientist Sues Skeptic for Libel

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sitting in the Clouds

Wonder if any interesting evidence will be unearthed during discovery? Like oil corporation involvement, or Koch Industry payments to Tim Ball? Curious to see what happens.

A prominent Canadian climate scientist is suing a leading climate skeptic for libel, arguing that an article published online in January contained false and malicious claims.

Andrew Weaver, a climate modeler at the University of Victoria, filed the lawsuit against Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg and a vocal critic of the science linking man-made emissions to global warming, over an article published by the Canada Free Press, a conservative Web site.

The article described Dr. Weaver, who was lead author for the 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as lacking a basic understanding of climate science and incorrectly stated that he would not take part in the next I.P.C.C. panel because of concerns about its credibility. Dr. Weaver is already involved in the preparation of the next report from the panel and has never said that he was ending his involvement with it.

Dr. Ball’s article has been removed from the Canada Free Press site, which published a long retraction and apology to Dr. Weaver after being contacted by the scientist’s lawyer.

The article contained “untrue and disparaging statements,” the site’s editors wrote, adding that the attacks on Dr. Weaver’s scientific credibility were unjustified. “We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.”

 

(click here to continue reading Climate Scientist Sues Skeptic for Libel – NYTimes.com.)

As an internet wag said somewhere, this must mean that we can discredit all of the climate deniers now since they acknowledge committing an error, right?1

Footnotes:
  1.  Reached by phone, Dr. Ball acknowledged that he had made “one small mistake” with his statement that Dr. Weaver was bowing out of the I.P.C.C. process, [↩]

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp launches The Daily app for the iPad

Seth Anderson0 comment

Topic of the Day

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp1 has released a new iPad only news-esque app with great fanfare. The Daily, as it is called, is going to charge a daily subscription of 99¢ a week2 but is free for the first two weeks3.

I’ve only used it for ten or so minutes, but wasn’t impressed so far. The articles seem to be targeted at high school students, the average word count less than an USA Today article, and of course, much less than a New York Times article or even a Wall Street Journal article. Also more gossip-heavy than I like: in fact the second section (after News) is called straight out: Gossip. So 1/6 news, 1/6 is opinion by right-wing stalwarts like Bjorn Lomborg, 4/6 various lifestyle/celebrity gossip/sports/and games. Not a mix targeted to someone like me.

The Chicago Tribune has published a version of their paper called Red Eye, targeted at kids and college kids, and it seems similar (minus the iPad bells and whistles). I never read it. Well, flip through the pages, reading isn’t quite the right verb, as usually there aren’t too many words to read. The Daily seems an updated version.

The Daily also crashed twice in the five minutes I browsed the app. Though to be fair, the NYTimes App took several iterations before it became stable, and the Daily is only version 1.0. I also found The Daily to be fairly sluggish sometimes when jumping between sections.

So would I buy it, once the two week trial ends? Probably not. But I’ll use it for a few more days and see if it gets better.

 

—

Update: if you want to read a the first couple days worth of articles, you can via this Tumblr blog, even if you don’t have an iPad.

Pip and his iPad

Some reactions from various competitors:

But with bureaus only in New York and Los Angeles, backed up by freelance contributors elsewhere, not only is meaningful local coverage impossible but even regional coverage will be selective at best.

…

Reading the Daily can involve a certain amount of sluggishness. The “carousel” interface that greets you when you launch it lags behind your gestures, and some turns of an onscreen page also leave you waiting for a moment.

I also noticed one outright bug: With the Daily open, an iPad would not shut off its screen automatically, quickly draining its battery.

…

It also includes an opinion section. Editor Jesse Angelo dodged a question about whether it would mirror the right-leaning ideological tilt of other News Corp. outlets, saying only, “We are patriotic, we love America … we believe in free ideas, we believe in free people.”

(click here to continue reading Rob Pegoraro – News Corp. launches its tablet-only the Daily app for the iPad.)

That doesn’t sound like a dodge to me, but something that would said on Fox New most days of the week. Uggh.

NYTime’s Media Decoder blog:

The Fox News Channel suspended coverage of the violence taking place in Cairo Wednesday to present the news conference introducing The Daily, a new business venture controlled by Fox’s corporate owner, the News Corporation.

Both of the channel’s news competitors, CNN and MSNBC, continued to telecast the growing tension in Cairo, which included clashes in the streets involving Molotov cocktails and fire hoses.

At the same time Anderson Cooper on CNN was reporting on fires breaking out in the streets from incendiary devices, Fox News had continuing coverage of the press event surrounding The Daily, including a speech by Mr. Murdoch and editors of the online paper, as well as demonstrations of what the paper would look like on iPads.

At one point in the Fox coverage, the business anchor Neil Cavuto appeared to respond to comments from viewers who were suggesting that Fox was only covering this because this was a business owned by their own boss.

“That might have something to do with it,” Mr. Cavuto said. He then offered arguments for why this news spoke to “cultural events beyond a given company,” suggesting that it was a “crucial stage” in the future of news because so many more people were getting their news and information online

(click here to continue reading The First Look at News Corp.’s ‘The Daily’ – NYTimes.com.)

I Pee Free Daily

Macworld:

But we’ve seen most of this before. Every major newspaper Website features videos these days, and a number of them even make great use of big and panoramic photos. The Economist’s app beat The Daily to the punch in offering audio transcripts of the written stories. All in all, the app isn’t quite as innovative as Murdoch and Apple would have you believe.

Having built a kinda-new wineskin, Murdoch’s wine seems awfully familiar … and underwhelming. With its breezy, pointed headlines—“Here we snow again, America”—The Daily strongly resembles News Corp.’s own New York Post. With its energetic coverage of sports, it is reminiscent of USA Today. With its emphasis on graphics and photos of beautiful people, The Daily seems like People or Us Weekly.

But in its overall mix—light on news, heavier on celebrities and jocks, every item short and punchy—The Daily most reminds me of two other attempts to save daily newspapers from hemorrhaging young readers: Red Streak and RedEye, two free tabloids that appeared in Chicago a decade ago, aimed at twentysomething commuters who, it was thought, weren’t interested in news unless it was chopped up and dumbed down. There wasn’t much there there, and the same seems to be the case with The Daily: Murdoch’s reinvention of journalism looks a lot like the one before it.

(And, it should be noted, the “legacy” newspapers behind the RedEye and Red Streak—the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively—have both been in bankruptcy in recent years. So much for reinvention.)

One of the clearest indications that The Daily is tied to old-school ways of thinking, though, is the presence of sudoku and crossword puzzles in the app. There are plenty of iPad offerings in both genres for dedicated puzzle-players, so it’s perplexing to see The Daily duplicate those efforts instead of concentrating on what it should do best: news.

The Daily isn’t a total disappointment. It seems most promising as a platform for advertisers: ads are quite easy to overlook on newspaper and magazine Websites, but on The Daily they fit into the natural flow of reading, and can grab your attention with eye-popping graphics. There is some promise here.

 

(click here to continue reading The Daily: New technology, but old news? – Business – Macworld.)

The Guardian U.K.:

Some have written it off as dead on arrival, thanks to its fusion of old and new media. It will be fully digital, but published every night in time for the subscriber to read over morning coffee. “Wonderful! Slower news – and at a higher price,” wrote Scott Rosenberg of Salon before the launch.

As ever, Murdoch has dismissed the naysayers with a flick of his ample cheque book. He has sunk $30m (£19m) into developing the Daily and said it would cost $26m a year to cover its costs, including those of 100 staff. He is targeting the 50 million people expected to own an iPad by the end of next year. Analysts project that he can cover costs if 2% of them could be persuaded to subscribe to the Daily at 99 cents a week – no mean task, considering that there are already 9,000 other news apps for the iPad on the market. “It will all come down to content,” said Alan Mutter, blogger and former editor of the Chicago Daily News. “He’s going to have to make something very compelling to get people to pay.”

The first edition of the Daily had a conventional news front on Egypt under the headline “Falling Pharaoh”. It gave high billing to its gossip section, with features on Natalie Portman and Rihanna, and a column by Richard Johnson, formerly the doyen of the Page Six gossip column of the New York Post. It also showcased several digital bells and whistles, including photographs that can be scanned through 360 degrees, a “carousel” of stories that can be spun with a finger, and stories that you can listen to like a radio.

Asked by the Guardian whether the Daily would be more centrist in its politics than other parts of News Corporation, which, particularly in America, have been accused of being caustically rightwing, Murdoch was noncommittal, saying its editor, Jesse Angelo, would decide.

“We are patriotic,” Angelo replied. “We love America, we are going to say what we think is right for this country.” How would he measure success, Murdoch was asked. “When we are selling millions,” he replied.

(click here to continue reading Rupert Murdoch unveils next step in media empire – the iPad ‘newspaper’ | Media | The Guardian.)

There’s more if you want to find more

Footnotes:
  1. Fox News, Wall Street Journal, eats babies, yadda yadda [↩]
  2. $40 a year [↩]
  3. actually sponsored by Verizon [↩]

Bad LSD trip: Who’s to blame

Seth Anderson0 comment

Under cover

What a great headline…

All stranded motorists have now been rescued from Lake Shore Drive – but they probably shouldn’t have attempted to travel on the major thoroughfare in the first place, city officials said.

Hundreds of motorists and CTA passengers were trapped on the drive for six hours or more Tuesday night. Many were not rescued until early this morning, as rescue workers battled white-out conditions, 70 mph wind gusts and waist-high drifts to provide help.

City officials, however, said they had cautioned people in news conferences earlier Tuesday to avoid using the drive and had repeatedly warned that massive waves along the shoreline could cause extremely icy conditions. Authorities, however, did not officially close the road until 8 p.m., nearly an hour after a series of accidents caused motorists and several CTA buses to become stuck.

“As reported in (Tuesday’s) press conference we knew that the lakefront and Lake Shore Drive would be hit especially hard,” said Ray Orozco, Mayor Richard Daley’s chief of staff. “Nonetheless, it was clear that people leaving the Loop were relying on it as a major artery to get home that night.”

While acknowledging the Lake Shore Drive standstill was “particularly troublesome,” officials said they would not apologize for keeping the road open as the storm intensified. Without a series of accidents shortly after 7 p.m., the ordeal might not have happened, they said.

(click here to continue reading Bad LSD trip: Who’s to blame? – Chicago Breaking News.)

Being on LSD for eight hours probably not the best way to spend the Blizzard of 2011 though

Potentially life-threatening blizzard

Seth Anderson0 comment

Arched

Hmm, what are the odds it snows at all? Last time the media and the NWS freaked out about a snow storm hitting the Chicagoland area, we got about an inch of snow where I live. So keep that salt handy (cum grano salis.)1

The National Weather Service has issued an unusually dire blizzard watch, calling a storm expected to arrive Tuesday afternoon over much of northern Illinois and Northwest Indiana “dangerous, multifaceted and potentially life-threatening.”

All told, forecasters expect at least a foot of snow over much of the watch area. White-out conditions are expected at times Tuesday night, with snowfall rates of at least 2 to 3 inches per hour possible with northeast winds of 25 to 40 mph and even stronger gusts.

Localized totals in excess of 18 inches are possible, especially near the lake.

Conditions are expected to deteriorate from north to south across the region Tuesday afternoon with travel becoming “virtually impossible” at times Tuesday night into early Wednesday morning, according to the weather service. Plows will be unable to keep up with the downfall.

“The last storm of this potential magnitude to hit Chicago was in Jan. 2, 1999,” said Richard Castro, a meteorologist at the weather service. That day, he said, 18.6 inches of accumulation were measured in the city.

The all-time Chicago record was set on Jan. 26 and 27, 1967, when 23 inches of snow fell on the city, Castro added.

(click here to continue reading Forecast: ‘Potentially life-threatening’ blizzard – chicagotribune.com.)

Not In My Backyard Syndrome

A major blizzard the National Weather Service is calling “life-threatening” is on its way to the Chicago area, also bringing along strong winds that could send 18-foot Lake Michigan waves onto Lake Shore Drive Tuesday night into early Wednesday.

The blizzard watch remains in effect from Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday afternoon in several counties, including Kane, DuPage, Cook, Lake, McHenry and DeKalb. The watch is also in effect for Porter, Lake, Newton, Jasper and Benton counties in Indiana, the National Weather Service said.

The snow will begin to come in from the Southwest about noon Tuesday, with the heaviest snowfall expected to hit the Chicago area in the evening into overnight, National Weather Service meteorologist Samuel Shea said.

“The heaviest snowfall will be from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on Wednesday and that will be a combination of snow and strong winds that will create potential hazards,” Shea said.

The National Weather Service is calling the pending blizzard life-threatening.

“You figure if you are out traveling and you do end up going off the road, having to be rescued and you aren’t prepared for the conditions, things could be life-threatening,” Shea said.

As of Monday morning, satellite images showed an 85 percent chance of at least 8 inches of snow heading into the Chicago area and a 65 to 70 percent chance of it becoming more than 12 inches, Shea said. Totals of 18 inches are possible near Lake Michigan.

“It could very easily be measured in feet,” he said.

 

(click here to continue reading ‘Life-threatening’ blizzard on its way to Chicago area – Chicago Sun-Times.)

As much of its strength, the system’s immense size sets it apart. As of Monday evening, the National Weather Service had posted winter storm warnings, watches or advisories in at least 29 states in a 2,000-mile space stretching from the Southwest to the Northeast. “A storm of this size and scope needs to be taken seriously,” said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The worst conditions are expected in parts of seven states where blizzard warnings were in effect Monday night. The Monday night forecast of fierce winds, strong snow and minimal visibility covered an area as far south and west as Oklahoma, as far north as Wisconsin and as far as east as Indiana. Several inches linked to the system had fallen by 7 p.m. Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a winter storm warning extended throughout the state. A similar warning was in effect as far away as Boston, where snow could start Tuesday and continue through Wednesday night.

Still, some of the biggest concerns entering Tuesday were in cities like Chicago.

“This storm could be one of the top 10 biggest snowstorms ever in the city,” said CNN meteorologist Sean Morris. According to the National Weather Service, snowstorms that drop over 15 inches of snow occur about once every 19 years in Chicago. The last time this happened was in January 1999, when 21.6 inches of snow was recorded in the city. Officials have added 120 garbage trucks with specially attached snow plows to the city’s fleet normal of 274 trucks in expectation of heavy snowfall, said Jose A. Santiago, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Snowfall could reach a rate of two and three inches per hour with northeasterly winds of 25 mph to 40 mph, creating dangerous “white-out” conditions across the entire Chicago metropolitan area, the weather service reported.

(click here to continue reading Massive winter system spans 2,000 miles, threatens Midwest cities – CNN.com.)

Footnotes:
  1. translated usually as “with a grain of salt”. History from Wikipedia: The phrase comes from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, regarding the discovery of a recipe for an antidote to a poison. In the antidote, one of the ingredients was a grain of salt. Threats involving the poison were thus to be taken “with a grain of salt” and therefore less seriously. An alternative account says that the Roman general Pompey believed he could make himself immune to poison by ingesting small amounts of various poisons, and he took this treatment with a grain of salt to help him swallow the poison. In this version, the salt is not the antidote, it was taken merely to assist in swallowing the poison. [↩]

Cocoa Exports Banned From Ivory Coast

Seth Anderson0 comment

Cacao Beans - Blommer Chocoalte

[Cocoa beans being unloaded at Blommers]

Even as a ban on cocoa exports was declared Monday in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, the largest cocoa ship ever to sail from there to the United States was in Camden, unloading 18,600 metric tons of the beans destined to become succulent chocolate, creamy icings and cakes.

The effects of the one-month ban are unclear, but officials say the maiden voyage of the Atlantic Tramp still bodes well for the Camden and Philadelphia ports, which receive 70 percent to 80 percent of all U.S. cocoa bean imports from Ivory Coast – the world’s largest cocoa producer – Ghana and Indonesia.

…The Tramp brought 283,360 140-pound burlap bags of cocoa worth $60 million and representing 150,000 small farms in the Ivory Coast.

It docked Saturday night and will be unloaded over seven days by more than 100 longshoremen, dock and warehouse workers.

“We have three gangs working 10-hour days on this vessel because of the size and the amount of cargo,” said Michael Billups, vessel operations manager for Delaware River Stevedores. “This ship is three times bigger than a typical cocoa bean ship.”

Jeffrey Wheeler of Camden International Commodities Terminal, the warehouse distribution operator, said, “Every bag will have two people touching it. The supply chain itself is pretty amazing.”

(click to continue reading Chocolate port; cocoa ship unloads in Camden | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/24/2011.)

Discarded Burlaps at Blommer Chocolate

[cocoa bean sacks, piled up at Blommer’s]

Meanwhile, political tension in the Ivory Coast threatens to disrupt future shipments, after the president-elect Monday ordered a ban on cocoa and coffee exports for a month – to cut off funds to the incumbent president, who refuses to step down. There was no guarantee that growers would comply, but cocoa climbed in New York Monday to its highest price in almost a year.

“We don’t expect any interruption,” Camden International’s Wheeler said. “The cocoa we are dealing with in our next few ships was already bought and paid for. They are saying they will load anything that’s been contracted. But new contracts, they won’t.”

… All cocoa on the Atlantic Tramp has been bought by Blommer Chocolate, North America’s largest cocoa processor. “The majority of the cocoa on board comes from local farmers and farmer cooperatives in the region that Blommer has direct relationships with,” said Kip Walk, director of Blommer’s cocoa department.

What happens if the embargo continues long enough to shut down production in America? Will it effect the situation in Ivory Coast? And just last summer, a guy by the name of Anthony Ward tried to purchase all the cocoa beans he could, remember?

Blommer

From the NYT 1/24/11:

The bank1 governor, Philippe-Henri Dacoury-Tabley, had allowed Mr. Gbagbo2 to withdraw as much as $200 million despite the ban, according to a spokesman for the man the world recognizes as the winner of Ivory Coast’s presidential election, Alassane Ouattara.

Late Sunday, Mr. Ouattara called for a one-month halt to coffee and cocoa exports, the main source of revenue for the government, which draws about $1.6 billion a year in taxes and duties from cocoa alone. “Those who violate this measure will be considered as financing the activities of the illegitimate administration of Mr. Laurent Gbagbo,” said a statement from Mr. Ouattara’s government, which operates from a hotel in Abidjan.

It was unclear how Mr. Ouattara intended to enforce the measure, as state institutions — the military, the civil service and the ports — are in the hands of those loyal to Mr. Gbagbo, and cocoa companies have so far not halted their business. Still, the price of cocoa shot up on Monday.

Last week, the European Union imposed a ban on doing business with the country’s ports, as well as the freezing of the European-held assets of various Ivorian firms and banks, including the ports, the state broadcasters and the national oil company.

(click to continue reading Call for Tougher Measures Against Gbagbo in Ivory Coast – NYTimes.com.)

Footnotes:
  1. Central Bank of West African States [↩]
  2. Laurent Gbagbo who lost a presidential election in Ivory Coast last year but refuses to step down [↩]

1986 Privacy Law Inadequate For 2011 Digital Society

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Popo Starry Pants

The mentality of law enforcement is that since there is information available about suspects, law enforcement officers should have free reign to sift through it, no matter what. However, if one is a suspect, and a warrant is executed for one’s home, the officers are usually limited to certain areas as precisely described by the warrant, they are not1 allowed to look through every single nook and cranny, unless the warrant has been constructed this broadly. Why isn’t digital data treated the same way?2

SAN FRANCISCO — Concerned by the wave of requests for customer data from law enforcement agencies, Google last year set up an online tool showing the frequency of these requests in various countries. In the first half of 2010, it counted more than 4,200 in the United States.

Google is not alone among Internet and telecommunications companies in feeling inundated with requests for information. Verizon told Congress in 2007 that it received some 90,000 such requests each year. And Facebook told Newsweek in 2009 that subpoenas and other orders were arriving at the company at a rate of 10 to 20 a day.

As Internet services — allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents — have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement. That phenomenon became apparent over the weekend when it surfaced that the Justice Department had sought the Twitter account activity of several people linked to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group.

Many Internet companies and consumer advocates say the main law governing communication privacy — enacted in 1986, before cellphone and e-mail use was widespread, and before social networking was even conceived — is outdated, affording more protection to letters in a file cabinet than e-mail on a server.

(click to continue reading Privacy Law Is Outrun by Speed of Web’s Progress – NYTimes.com.)

For some reason, The New York Times didn’t actually link to this Google tool, I’m not sure why. Anyway, after a few minutes of searching3, found it.

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. This map shows the number of requests that we received in six-month blocks with certain limitations.

(click to continue reading Google Transparency Report: Government Requests.)

As of the current moment, Google has received 4287 requests for information in the United States alone4 from law enforcement in the last six months (an average of 714.5 requests a month, or nearly 24 requests a day).

Footnotes:
  1. officially [↩]
  2. I am not a lawyer, and all my information comes from stupid television shows, so don’t laugh too loudly if I’m wrong [↩]
  3. longer than I thought, actually [↩]
  4. that Google is allowed to mention – perhaps not including some alleged participants in the War on Terror [↩]

Caboodle Ranch – Colbert Show

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Stephen Colbert had a funny exposé on Craig Grant’s Caboodle Ranch, in Lee, Florida

In Lee, Florida, Craig Grant trains his 650 cats to take over America’s government, law enforcement and failing schools. (05:32)

 

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Enemy Within – Caboodle Ranch
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

If the video won’t load, go to the Colbert Show’s website directly, it might work better there

Craig Grant tells how he started the Caboodle Ranch

I was renting a two bedroom condo by the beach with my son. It had all the comforts and conveniences of home. Nice furniture, a short walk to the beach and close to work. Then my son moved out on his own for the first time. He left his cat, Pepper, with me because he couldn’t take it with him. I didn’t like cats but I agreed to keep him. I wasn’t used to being alone and I guess Pepper wasn’t either.

We slowly began to get along. A couple months went by and I found out Pepper was pregnant. Oh great, now what? She had five kittens. I wanted to give them away because I didn’t want my beautiful home destroyed, but my son told me they had to stay with their mother for 8 weeks. Over that time I learned that every cat had his own unique personality and it wasn’t long before the kittens were swinging from my curtains. I didn’t care. Something had changed… I didn’t want to give them up.

But with six cats, complaints started from the condo owner and the neighbors. I knew I had to look for other places to go. They weren’t safe in the neighborhood. I found a B.B. lodged in the side of one of my cats and another was bitten by a pitbull that I know was set loose on purpose. Something had to be done. I wasn’t sure what to do at first, so I built a shed in my son’s yard and lived in it for a while. Then I found an advertisement in the paper from a realtor offering five acre partials on a tree farm; owner financing, low money down and low monthly payments… the problem was that it was 100 miles west of Jacksonville. I drove out to see it and I loved it.

Over the next months I bought five more partials. I now have 25 acres. I cleared a small area and bought an office trailer as a shelter for my cats. I put in a pet door and padded shelves for them. We moved out there in November of 2003, the day after Thanksgiving. By that time I had 11 cats. I had taken in abandoned and stray cats from the neighborhood and areas that I work as a contractor. I had 22 cats by the spring of 2004. I moved the shed out to the property and made a little cabin out of it. I thought it would be for me, but many of my cats wanted to sleep next to me… so I moved back into the office trailer where we had more room.

(click to continue reading Caboodle Ranch: About Us.)

DNA Sequencing for the Masses

Seth Anderson0 comment

Slightly Past Its Prime - oil

I’m on record as being supportive, interested, and enthusiastic about DNA sequencing, though not to the extent of purchasing my own DNA sequencing machine, simply of having more research being done.

Jonathan M. Rothberg fancies himself the Steve Jobs of biotechnology. While much less known than the Apple leader, Dr. Rothberg is also a wealthy entrepreneur with a reputation as a visionary, a masterful promoter and a demanding boss.

But what Dr. Rothberg really means is that he wants to do for DNA sequencing what Mr. Jobs did for computing — spread it to the masses.

Dr. Rothberg is the founder of Ion Torrent, which last month began selling a sequencer it calls the Personal Genome Machine. While most sequencers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are at least the size of small refrigerators, this machine sells for just under $50,000 and is the size of a largish desktop printer.

While not intended for the general public, the machine could expand the use of DNA sequencing from specialized centers to smaller university and industrial labs, and into hospitals and doctors’ offices, helping make DNA sequencing a standard part of medical practice.

(click to continue reading Rothberg Seeks to Make DNA Sequencing Common – NYTimes.com.)

 

Hospital Loses Catholic Affiliation

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Sin will find you out

Sad, doctrinaire rulings judged to be more important than human life to the Church; the mother’s health weighed as less important than her fetus. At least St. Joseph’s Hospital had the strength of its convictions

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix announced on Tuesday that St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center could no longer identify itself as Roman Catholic because it violated church teachings by ending a woman’s pregnancy in 2009. Hospital administrators said the procedure was necessary to save her life, and stood by their decision even after Bishop Olmsted excommunicated a nun on the hospital ethics committee. The hospital, which receives no money from the Phoenix diocese, can no longer hold Masses.

(click to continue reading Arizona – Hospital Loses Catholic Affiliation – NYTimes.com.)

links for 2010-12-20

swanksalot0 comment
  • Hullabaloo- Suck Ups And Lies – Wikileaks and Michael Moore
    How many of these cables, rather than being the unvarnished facts which reveal the public lies are actually another layer of lies from bureaucrats trying to appease their bosses? It’s funny how transparency can reveal all sorts of unexpected things isn’t it? If only there were professional people who gather facts and research issues and interview subjects who could be called upon to investigate such things.
    (tags: media wikileaks)
    Facts_are_fulsome_Vegas.jpg