By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Nov 26, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
John
Ashcroft: Keep Big Brother's hands off the Internet: Five
years ago, the future attorney general wrote,
"On-line communications technology is akin to the Wild West of
the 19th century. To best settle this new frontier, we should unleash
American know-how and ingenuity. The government's police-state policy
on encryption is creating hindrances and hurdles that will eventually
injure our ability to compete internationally. Government's role should
be to break down barriers, to allow everyone to excel to their highest
and best. " -- USIA Electronic Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4, October
1997
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'E&P'
Names Features Of the Year: That's Editor & Publisher, and
their choices are,
Jerry Scott entertainingly focuses on teens and tykes in his widely
syndicated "Zits" and "Baby Blues" comics, helping
America's dailies attract these age groups -- not to mention their parents.
"Tell Me About It" writer Carolyn Hax particularly appeals
to the young-adult readers many newspapers crave, and is also one of
several advice columnists who found larger audiences after Ann Landers'
death. Finally, both editorial cartoonist Tom Toles (successor to another
late legend, Herblock) and columnist/economist Paul Krugman put into
practice a journalistic maxim that's not quite dead: "Afflict the
comfortable, and comfort the afflicted."
And then they go on to honor each with a laudatory essay.
Clap, clap, clap.
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If
TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight is the
strange headline on a funny Wall Street Journal story by Jeffrey Zaslow
on TiVo's attempts to record TV shows it "thinks" you will like.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious
shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button
on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving
three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his
TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles
like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator
in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films.
He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I
don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says. ...
Dawn Freeman, 23, is a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., and...
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she
says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it
personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers
saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Several readers also mention Amazon.com, which suggests books to you
based on your past patterns. At Christmastime, you can sure confuse
that sucker!
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WiFi in the air: Paul
Andrews was mostlly offline this fall, but he's back now. In
his Seattle Times column yesterday, he complains about the lack of
wireless access at the recent Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, then discovers,
The future is here. I rode around town in an RV while music and video
files downloaded over a high-speed, 3 megabit-per-second connection
from a cell site atop a Vegas hotel. Anyone with the right PC card or
modem (and a password) could have logged on to this network for ubiquitous
broadband connectivity. IPWireless,
based in San Bruno, Calif., put together the demo to illustrate the
effectiveness of cell-based, mobile broadband technology.
The beauty of the IPWireless approach is that it can use existing networks
(assuming the company can work deals with network providers). Its range
is 20 to 500 times greater than the limited reach of Wi-Fi. It's also
comparatively easy to expand the network by adding cells.
If IPWireless can get rolling, and if Comdex survives to live another
year while adding Wi-Fi "hot spots," Las Vegas could become
the wireless showcase that convention denizens deserve.
Mike
Goldfein of Belo Interactive apparently took the same van trip, with a
TV camera. He concludes,
The company expects systems to begin showing up all over the country
next year... The modems will cost about 150 dollars...and the service
should be 30 to 40 dollars a month.
this simple service may also give high-speed cable and dsl providers
a run for their money....since you could connect from home without any
installation hassles.
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Academy
seizure of computers a big step: Drastic response to fears of piracy
on the Internet. Ariel Sabar continues his Baltimore Sun report on
Naval Academy's seizure of midshipmen's computers:
Details about the seizures remain hazy, with officials at the military
college confirming little beyond the existence of an internal investigation.
But sources said that academy officials ordered the school's 4,000
students to turn on their dorm-room computers and log on to the school's
network before leaving for class Thursday. When students returned, almost
100 found their computers gone. Notes were left behind informing them
of the investigation, said an alumnus who spoke with a half-dozen midshipmen
about the issue.
Reaction:
"To seize their entire computer is a drastic step," said
Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, a research and advocacy group. "This is a type of step
you use against mob bosses."
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Bootcamp
was tougher the second time around: An Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reporter's report on the first media boot camp conducted by the Defense
Department. Bob Dart was 22 when he did it the first time, 34 years ago.
via Romenesko
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RadioShack
ends asking for customer info: "Customers tell us the practice
of asking them for names and addresses is time consuming and annoying
and is not something that endears them to us," Leonard Roberts, chairman
and CEO of Fort Worth-based RadioShack, said in a statement. "Asking
for names and addresses was a barrier to building superior customer relationships."
Let's hope it starts a trend.
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Counting
snowflakes: Darryl Macer, associate professor at the Institute
of Biological Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, plans to
create a human mental map -- a database that would contain a log of every
human idea.
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Kidnapped
lawn gnomes return home: "We even had five of the seven dwarfs
at one time," said Debbie Speciale, (Bartlett, Ill.) police records
supervisor. "Apparently two escaped capture."
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Nigerian
style reporter faces fatwa:
A north Nigerian state has issued an Islamic fatwa calling for the
death of a journalist who wrote an article on the Miss World pageant
that sparked riots.
More than 200 people died after riots broke out following the publication
of a newspaper article which suggested that had the Prophet Mohammed
been alive, he would have wanted to marry one of the beauty queens.
The religious decree was issued against Isiome Daniel on Tuesday.
Mamoudu Shinkarfi, the deputy governor of Zamfara state, said on national
television: "Any true Muslim would make sure that this woman's
blood is spilled wherever she is."
Daniel, who has resigned from ThisDay, left the country and went to
the United States, according to the newspaper's publisher.
Miss
World fallout envelops two lives: Miss Canada and a Nigerian journalist
feel the effects of religious uprising
Analysis:
Why do Muslims issue fatwa?
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Get
creative:
On 16 December, Creative
Commons machine-readable licenses will be available to the public
free of charge. Learn creative ways to distribute your works and find
pointers to all sorts of licensed content you can use right away. ...
You're probably familiar with the phrase, "All rights reserved,"
and the little (c) that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to
help copyright holders send a different message: "Some rights reserved."
For example, if you don't mind people copying and distributing your
online image so long as they give you credit, we'll have a license that
helps you say so. If you want people to copy your band's MP3 but don't
want them to profit off it without your permission, use one of our licenses
to express that preference...
Very, very cool. I 'm gonna have to get one for my
personal site, at which blogging might resume this weekend, since
I'm outta here till Monday.
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Happy turkey, Patriots and first snowfall, southern New
England! Give thanks... and thank you for reading my blog.
Nov 25, 2002 -
 Marion
Carpenter of St. Paul, Minn., spent much of her time at Goodwill,
sitting on the used furniture reading old National Geographics. Carpenter,
82, lived in a cold house -- she had shut off the hot water and turned
down the thermostat to save money -- so cluttered that a path led from
her front door to her couch, where one day last month she lay down with
her Rottweiler, Karl, and died. Her body is still in the morgue, because
her son, Mjohn, with whom she hadn't spoken in over 30 years, cannot be
found.
But once Marion Carpenter was a groundbreaking photographer, a member
of the White House Press Corps during the Truman administration. What
happened?
Helluva
story at the Pioneer Press.
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Webcam in your coffin? The New
York Times gives the background on Necrocam, a Dutch documentary
about documenting one's physical disintegration after death. You can watch
Necrocam here.
Most ingenuous part of the story:
For the record, installing a Webcam in a coffin in the United States
is not likely to occur. Robert Fells, general counsel for the International
Cemetery and Funeral Association in Reston, Va., said that next of kin,
not the deceased, are responsible for the final disposition of a family
member's remains and that most people would probably balk at such a
scheme.
Mr. Fells added: "People have always had strange ideas —
either for laughs, or morbid humor or just bizarre thinking —
of how they would like the ultimate final disposition of their remains,
only to be overruled either by family members or legal authorities.
This just sounds like a high-tech version of that."
Mr. Fells underestimates the Internet generation that will make such
decisions. And Mr. Mirapaul, the NYT reporter, seems to believe him.
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Afterlife
telegrams: For those who believe the body dies but the spirit
persists, you can try to send a telegram to someone in the Great Beyond
via a courier who's traveling that way anyway:
For a fee of $10 per word (5 word minimum), a customer can have a telegram
delivered to someone who has passed away. This is done with the help
of terminally Ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing
away, and then deliver the telegrams after they have passed away. We
call this an "afterlife telegram."
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Midshipmen's
computers seized in Internet inquiry: My former projo colleague
Ariel Sabar's byline shows up over this tale of the Naval Academy's response
to an earlier RIAA letter.
The Naval Academy has seized the desktop computers of almost 100 midshipmen
as part of an internal probe into whether students at the military college
are using the Internet to illegally download copyrighted movies, music
and software, a source said yesterday.
Academy officials confiscated the computers while midshipmen were in
class Thursday, a month after entertainment industry groups sent a letter
to colleges and universities nationwide, including the academy, requesting
a crackdown on Internet piracy.
The midshipmens' laptops are government property.
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Roswell
Incident Had Victims, Program Says:
July 3, 1947, something crashed in Roswell, N.M. The Santa Fe New
Mexican reports,
While he told the world that a weather balloon went down
in Roswell, an Army general had in his hand a memo telling Pentagon
brass of a UFO crash with "victims," according to a new television
documentary.
A computer analysis of that memo, held by Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey during
a July 1947 press briefing, is the "smoking gun" of the Roswell
Incident, researchers say in the documentary being broadcast today on
the Sci-Fi Channel.
Using a digital photo scanner to enlarge and enhance words printed
on the folded piece of paper Ramey held, and using another computer
program to select the most likely words, researcher David Rudiak, who
has a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, found two key phrases: "the
victims of the wreck" and "in the 'disc' they will ship."
I was born July 3, 1947. Could I be... an alien body snatcher?
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"Paint" by number: Segmation:
The Art of Pieceful Imaging invites you to click up your own O'Keeffe,
wild flowers or currency. Cute idea -- but it's tedious to do. and you
still can't blend the "brush strokes."
Hint: Look at the palette to see how boring it will be. I did Van Gogh's
Starry Night, which seemed far darker than the original, and got
mired in grays. via Infomaniac.
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"Only Thieves Block Pop-Ups": Anti-leech.com
offers to protect your site from browsers blocking pop-ups (or 'theft
tools' as they call them). Of course, I don't know this for sure, since
popup-blocking is Mozilla's default, so all I see is
Makes me want to go away. via Slashdot
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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