Current_Events: November 2005 Archive Page

Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they'll become even more relevant as their popularity grows.

"We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes," said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. "We would be able to use them, not so much as evidence, but more for investigative leads." --Catherine Donaldson-Evans --Today's Gumshoes Dust for Fingerprints, Then Read Blogs (Fox News)

Suggested by Megan Ritter.

--Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic] (Tribune-Review [Online])

Dear Santa,

For Christmas, what I need most of all is a good copyeditor.

Love,

Pittsburgh Live.com

Okay, okay... To err is human.

I shouldn't be so harsh on whoever typed the headline. It's gloating blog entries like this that annoy professioal professional journalists and make them think of bloggers as "the enemy." But as I deal with the final crush of rough drafts from my students, I've been upbeat and constructive and positive as much as humanly possible, and that takes its toll on a guy.

So I've briefly unleashed the unflinching grammar bastard who dwells within. That felt good.

Now it's time to go back to being Professor Helpful.

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

How does it taste when your credibility melts in your mouth, not in your hands?

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Games Industry)

Via Bobby Kuchenmeister, a former student of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Hooray!

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be "off his game" at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors. -- Locked doors thwart Bush's bid to duck question (Reuters | MyWay)

In Bush's defense, that was a rather hostile, extremely biased question, along the lines of, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

Because Bush himself supplied the verb "escape," the POTUS has probably supplied humorists with enough material for weeks.

Real life is rarely as good as The Onion (See "Clinton Escapes Through Air Vent"), but this comes close.

--2005 IF Comp Results

Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games!

I'm back! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid the bill on time.

During this time, I was able to access my files via ftp and SSH (geekier ways of accessing files, not involving web browsers), so I knew the site was still there and the data files were safe.

About a half hour ago, I noticed that my site was still accessible under a different URL -- the URL my ISP first gave me, before the domain name servers picked up "jerz.setonhill.edu" and started pointing web surfers to hosting company's computer.

SHU's webmaster Jess Turner did his webmasterful magic, found that our ISP has moved to a new IP address (the sequence of numbers that identifies each individual unique connectio to the internet).

So now I'm back in business. Hurrah for Jess!

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed or called me to let me know the site was down.

My student weblogs were unaffected by this problem, which was a good thing, since this is a stressful time of year and I would hate to give them one more thing to worry about.

From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish.

Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary.

With the advent of news on the web and new design technologies, who will carry on that tradition?

Washingtonpost.com is looking for the next star of cartoon satire - a "Herblock" for the digital age.

We're proud to announce the 2005 Washingtonpost.com "Editorial Shorts" Digital Animation Competition.

Can you use the emerging tools of digital animation to be the new voice of American satire? --Editorial Shorts: Digital Animation Competition (Washington Post)

A computer-generated reconstruction of the man's face bears a strong enough resemblance to portraits of Copernicus to convince the scientists. --'Body of Copernicus' identified (BBC)

See Wikipedia for more about Copernicus , the 16th-century priest whose astronomical hobby provided evidence to support the theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system. This part of the story is not as well known as the church's opposition to Gallileo, whose support of the Copernican system irked church authorities.

Gallileo had enemies among secular professors of philosophy (some of whom reportedly refused to look through a telescope), and allies among Jesuit astronomers. The Wikipedia article on Gallileo does a good job explaining the complexity of the case, though it's not exactly a thrilling read in its present format.

The late Pope John Paul II, who famously built bridges by making humble statements admitting past church wrongs against Jews and fundamentalist Christians, similarly exonerated Gallileo in the 1990s. Around that time, Joseph Ratzinger wrote in defense of the Church's proceedings against Gallileo. Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI. I don't think we need to worry about the church hunting down and excommunicating scientists. In light of the cultural rift created by the doctrine of intelligent design, held by some fundamentalist Christians, the Vatican has recently released a statement asserting that science and religion have their own proper spheres of influence. A cardinal invoked the atomic bomb and human cloning as examples of scientific progress that proceeded without influence from ethical and moral principles.