Current_Events: September 2008 Archive Page

Kotaku reports:

Is it finally game over for Florida lawyer and violent video game opponent Jack Thompson? Judgment has been entered in the case that started last year and came to a head when Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for the bombastic, showboating law man. The court has approved the report and has ordered that JT is officially disbarred as of 30 days from today.

During the Great Depression, Americans flocked to the movies to escape the harsh realities of their daily lives. As the stock market tumbled and loved ones went off to war, Americans disappeared into dark theaters, where Shirley Temple sang and tap danced her way into their heavy hearts.

Now, as the nation faces arguably the worst financial crisis since the Depression, video games may be playing the role movies once filled in hard economic times. (NPR)

Students in my "Media Projects" class are getting practice learning complex, new systems quickly. We've learned Blender 3D, we've started on Inform 7, and later we'll move to Flash. My sister (or possibly her husband, who sometimes uses her e-mail address) sent me a link to an editorial on what it's like to learn a new software system while you're also dealing with the daily deadlines that define the news business.  I hope that my New Media Journalism students will be well-prepared to excel in an environment where their ability to do their job depends so heavily on their ability to adapt to new tools.

Many of you can relate to the learning curve and butterflies that come with switching over to ever more complex and powerful work technology. All of that comes with a few added wrinkles in this business.

Because we create our products entirely anew seven days a week, we can't ease the transition by working ahead or catching up when things settle down. Every day brings a new race against the clock.

Someone at our place likened it to changing a tire on a car while it's hurtling down the highway. I like to think of it in terms of the movie "Speed": The bus doesn't blow up if you don't slow down.

But many of us have been through this drill before, nearly a decade ago when the system we're getting ready to junk was the next big thing. And while the new system we're going live on requires increasingly fine-tuned skills, the circumstances last time were more challenging. (Pat Howard, Erie Times-News)

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

I haven't seen the ads in question, but thought this InformationWeek commentary was blogworthy.

"Some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software," Microsoft concedes. No, probably everyone who watched the ad is wondering what shoes and Seinfeld have to do with software.

The answer, Microsoft says, is nothing. Oh, right -- that's so very Seinfeld.

The deliberate obscurity shows just how sclerotic Microsoft has become. It's a form of brand-first advertising that says, "Never mind our products, hooking up with Microsoft is a gas." It's just like hanging out with Jerry, Elaine, and the rest of the gang at the coffee shop.

(Apologies to readers under 30 who don't get these references, but you can catch reruns on Fox after the nightly news. Sorry, "nightly news" was a form of broadcast journalism where highly paid anchors once ... never mind.)

A financial researcher comes across a six-year-old article about United Airlines. Thinking it is a current news story, he summarizes it, then republishes the summary out of context. Within 10 minutes, a mass panic hits shareholders who are responding to his summary. More than a billion dollars evaporates into thin air.

Tribune Co. said Wednesday that the confusion over a 2002 article on UAL Corp. started because Google Inc.'s automated search couldn't separate breaking news from older stories on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's website.

Tribune said it identified problems with the search engine months ago and had asked Google to stop using the function to find stories on its newspaper websites. Google continued to pull articles from the Sun-Sentinel's website, where a link to the old story on United Airlines parent UAL appeared last weekend, according to Tribune. (LA Times)

See also Forbes, Slashdot.

Great news for those interested in the first draft of history. (Not-so-great news for those worried about Google's increasing control over so many kinds of information.) C|Net

Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.

Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said.

Great little vignette highlighting the perils of live TV reporting.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell demonstrates the perils of live television as she gamely tries to report from the Republican National Convention during the midst of a major balloon drop in this clip that's amusing the chattering class the day after the two-week convention marathon has come to an end.