Recently in the Current_Events Category

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.

High-profile ports columnist Jay Mariotti, who dramatically quit the Sun-Times, saying newspapers are a dying industry, seems to have fallen in love with the Web. His former old media comrades aren't buying it.

Roger Ebert:

You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit.".... The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

[...]

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you go to work for television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that's for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches and players didn't agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

Chris Deluca:

And now Mariotti says the printed page is a dinosaur. He has embraced the Internet as his new forum.

We're talking about a columnist who detested bloggers -- mainly because he was easy fodder for their biting humor. He acted as if he stood on a level above bloggers. Most of the better bloggers have the kind of wit he couldn't touch.

Are bloggers bad? Absolutely not.

But those of us who work at newspapers have one edge over the blogging world. We have access to the players, coaches, managers and front-office executives. We can talk to key figures on and off the record to get insight unavailable to others. It's a privilege most of us don't take lightly. To not use it to our advantage is a waste -- of our energy and the readers' time.

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me -- via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

"Move over, mainstream media, it's the voter's turn," says the blurb for an event called: "Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of Voter Generated Media."

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. --Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment.

By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics -- students and teachers alike -- a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it's surprising that Biden's record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama's consideration.

Joe Biden, you will remember, ran for president in 1988. He delivered a speech that presented the thoughts of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock is if they were his own, and was slow to explain or apologize for this transgression. The ensuing scrutiny of Biden's record revealed that he had also plagiarized in law school, failing a course for doing so. Shortly after these revelations, he dropped out of the race. -- Jonathan Beecher Field

Boston.com:

A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon.

A good lesson in journalistic humility. FoxNews.

One morning, there was a fatal accident. One person died. One lived. As always, I dutifully jotted down the information from the report. And a few hours later, I announced to all of Ohio who died and who survived this crash.

But I was wrong. See, the police transposed the names of the victim and the survivor on the report. So you can only imagine the feeling in my stomach when the survivor's family called to tell me I had it wrong.

But I'd done due journalistic diligence. My saving grace? I attributed the report of the death to someone. An all important line that said, "Police say so-and-so died last night in a wreck..." And that's all journalism is: not reporting your own conclusions, but what others are saying.

The latest Pew report:

Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially more people regularly get news online than regularly watch one of the nightly network news broadcasts (37% vs. 29%).

Since 2006, daily online news use has increased by about a third, from 18% to 25%. However, as the online news audience grows, the educational divide in online news use - evident since the internet's early days in the mid-1990s - also is increasing. Currently, 44% of college graduates say they get news online every day, compared with just 11% of those with a high school education or less.

Net-Newsers and Integrators take advantage of a range of web features to get the news. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) Net-Newsers - and about a third of Integrators (32%) - have gotten a news story emailed to them in the past week. And while 30% of Net-Newsers regularly watch news online, 19% regularly listen to news on the web.

Net-Newsers and Integrators also rely on news and political blogs as a part of their news diet. Roughly a quarter of Net-Newsers (26%) and somewhat fewer Integrators (19%) say they regularly read blogs on politics or current events. Overall, only 10% of the public regularly reads political and news blogs.

Other tidbits...

• " Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources. "
• "Most of the loss in [newspaper] readership since 2006 has come among those who read the print newspaper; just 27% say they read only the print version of a daily newspaper yesterday, down from 34% in 2006."
• "About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998."

I've gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I'm surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed.  I'd really rather see all this information in a table, and of course I'd want to see the actual questions, but it looks like that sort of thing is reserved for paying customers.

Even Democrats say hands-off the Internet though but by a far smaller margin than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.

So that means that almost half of the Democrats who resonded are in favor of government regulation of the content of blogs. Did the question differentiate between personal blogs and professional ones?  What about discussion forums or social networking sites?  How net-savvy were the people who were polled? Was it a telephone survey that only called people with land lines? There are too many unanswered questions to make any sort of conclusions (which isn't stopping the folks at slashdot, of course).

From The Washington Post:

It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn't cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie.

Last week, he and another college student, Allison Routman, were expelled from the Semester at Sea program for violating the University of Virginia's honor code. The expulsions raised questions for some students about whether the school's more than 150-year-old tradition is too harsh -- and for others, whether students have a different understanding of plagiarism and research now that online resources make it easy to find information.

The headline is misleading. The problem here isn't that the students didn't cite Wikipedia enough... they included direct quotations from their sources without using quotation marks or paraphrasing. This has little to do with online sources, other than the simple notion that because so many facts are available in a few mouse clicks, a new generation of students devalues the work that goes into attaining (and verifying, and documenting) those facts.

An Associated Press article repeats the three sentence fragments that student Allison Routman says she included in her paper without citation.  They're not deep, meaning-laden passages, but they're all from the same source, and as I see it the paper was intended to be a reflection paper -- students were supposed to watch a movie and then relate the movie to their experience during their travels. Not an intellectually heavy task, but Routman says nobody had ever defined "paraphrasing" for her before (which, even if true, suggests she was too helpless to find the definition on her own), and Gruntz, in an interview from the airport in Greece, told the Washington Post "I got in trouble for not citing it enough, I guess" and "I think I was supposed to put quotations around it" and "I don't really think I did anything wrong" (and this is after the students have spent at least a full year at their home college, before signing up for Semetser at Sea; and after a librarian on the ship gave a presentation on proper academic research methods, and after the guilty students sat through a meeting with a panel of five faculty members that picked his paper apart... somewhere along the line, I'm sure all the students were told exactly what's expected in an academic essay).

Yes, the University of Virginia's single-sanction honor code is strict, but it's supposed to have bite. I remember having to write an essay about the honor code when I applied to U.Va., and I remember every year some students would start a motion to lighten up the honor code by instituting a wrist-slapping punishment, but if it ever made to a student body vote, the students would always vote to keep the honor code as-is.

If U.Va. is sponsoring Semester at Sea, and students from other schools who sign up for the program have to agree to abide by the U.Va. honor code, which is clearly explained in the Semester at Sea handbook (PDF).

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

When you die, would you rather be remembered as a technology hack who annoyed millions and forced them to waste time by weeding through torrents of junk e-mail, or a brilliant teacher who inspired millions to treasure every moment of the time they have left?

According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.

According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.

Thanks, Becca, for forwarding this link about how the American newspaper has changed in the past three years.  Last semester my journalism students did a unit on community journalism, and they wrote long features that were destined for our new summer-orientation and fall welcome-back issues. So I was aware of some of the changes observed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's report on the status of today's newspaper, though I didn't know science journalism had taken a hit. Plenty other details to think about, too.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Former editors protest and lament the discontinuation of a literary staple:

The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section.

To be sure, no section of any newspaper can remain hostage to past ways of covering the news of the day. We are convinced, however, that the way forward is to increase coverage of our literary culture -- a culture that every day is more vibrant and diverse in the thriving megalopolis of Los Angeles.

Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.

Fascinating stuff... according to CNN, the story is, in order to secure the release of 15 hostages, the Colombian military set up a fake website that borrowed heavily from a real organization's identity.

The organization's logo -- a stylized red bird on a white background in the centermost of three concentric circles, with blue leaves on white in the middle circle and the organization's name on a blue background in the outermost circle -- is featured prominently throughout the site.

That same logo was pasted on the side of a helicopter used on the rescue mission that brought former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers back from the jungle, according to unpublished video shown to CNN by a military source who had been looking to sell the material.

The emblems can't be seen in the heavily edited video released by the Colombian Defense Ministry. CNN declined to purchase the unpublished material. 

But Mision Humanitaria Internacional doesn't exist. Although the site said the group was registered with the Spanish Interior Ministry and the regional Department of Justice, Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman Alvaro Pena said the organization was not registered with the ministry and was not in its records.

http://misionhi.org is turning up 404 now, but there are a few pages left in the Google cache.

Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign's tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what's unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is now a tool being employed by the campaign itself.

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

From the New York Times blog, The Lede:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Latest update at 3 p.m. Eastern Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as "apparently digitally altered." More developments at the bottom of the post.

As news spread across the world of Iran's provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

Google's version of Second Life, as explained for the benefit of an audience that isn't expected to know anything about virtual worlds (NYT).

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog -- its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional -- they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Editor and Publisher:

The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, "WMD," "iPhone" and "anti-virus" are in, while "barmaid," "blue blood" and "malarkey" are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of describing the Sept. 11 attacks, and a different rule for use for "African-American."

Via the Reeves Library weblog, which recently also announced the discovery of a bit of journalism history and a letter found on what should have been a dark and stormy night.

From a University of Minnestoa press release:

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential."

Greenhow said that the study's results, while proving that social networking sites offer more than just social fulfillment or professional networking, also have implications for educators, who now have a vast opportunity to support what students are learning on the Web sites.

"Now that we know what skills students are learning and what experiences they're being exposed to, we can help foster and extend those skills," said Greenhow. "As educators, we always want to know where our students are coming from and what they're interested in so we can build on that in our teaching. By understanding how students may be positively using these networking technologies in their daily lives and where the as yet unrecognized educational opportunities are, we can help make schools even more relevant, connected and meaningful to kids."

Interestingly, researchers found that very few students in the study were actually aware of the academic and professional networking opportunities that the Web sites provide. Making this opportunity more known to students, Greenhow said, is just one way that educators can work with students and their experiences on social networking sites.

This one makes the o'l head spin... here's the background. NBC journalist Tim Russert dies at work; NBC holds off on reporting the news until the family can be notified.  Someone who works for the company that supplies internet access to NBC updates the Wikipedia entry for Russert before NBC breaks the story. Scandal? Innocent mistake? Just cause for termination? (Silicon Alley Insider)

According to the NYT, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates. IBS says a "junior-level employee" changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry--and freaked out about it--someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back. And then IBS took care of the employee. NYT:

An I.B.S. spokeswoman...added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC." NBC News said it was told the employee was fired."

Fired?

If the employee learned the news because NBC was officially distributing it to affiliates under embargo, that's one thing (the firing would be appropriate). If the employee heard about it unofficially, however, from friends at NBC or I.B.S., then the firing was outrageous.* UPDATE: An NBC exec disputes the NYT report, and says the IBS employee was merely suspended, temporarily. We'll update if we can confirm.

It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

NYT:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

In contrast to the way things are going in the outside world, our print newspaper has been growing steadily since I arrived.  The quality of the articles, the physical size of the paper, and the number of issuses per year have all increased.  The traditional journalism skills the students learn while producing the print paper translate well into academic studies, but the end result is that they're being prepared for the jobs that are disappearing as journalism continues to move online.

That's not to say that students aren't exposed to new media. They blog in every one of my English/journalism classes, we've had students interning with web CMS and video production,  and I teach at least the basics of Flash.  But so far, each time I have presented students with the opportunity to expand either the print or the online publication, the momentum has ended up favoring the print side. 

I'm hoping to be more active in the online paper this fall, tying more class assignments into the technical and conceptual work that goes into maintaining the online paper, so that the small online staff can focus on innovation and quality improvement, rather than simply duplicating the print paper online.

New media skills continue to be in demand, there's a strong market for editors and technical writers, and journalism is not disappearing.  I'm hoping this fall to make the Setonian Online more central to the students' perception of what counts as valuable professional development.

Wish me luck!

Inside Higher Ed:

Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers -- sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable staff members -- have found themselves losing their jobs. (High school newspaper advisers are even more vulnerable.)

"All you have to do is look around the country to see how many conflicts there are," said Mark Goodman, the Knight Chair of Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University and former executive director of the Student Press Law Center. "This has really gained steam."

It was with several recent such controversies in mind, and numerous instances of censorship at high schools in California, that the state's Legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation this month that would prohibit a college or school district from firing, suspending or otherwise retaliating against an employee for acting to protect a student's free speech. Last week, with the measure, SB 1370, sailing for passage and a trip to the governor's office for Arnold Schwarzenegger's hoped-for signature, the University of California quietly revealed its opposition to the bill.

In a letter to State Sen. Leland Yee, the legislation's sponsor, a lobbyist for the university system "respectfully" warned Yee that the university did not expect to abide by the requirement if it was enacted.

Although the First Amendment doesn't apply to Seton Hill because we are a private institution, I'm happy to work under an administration that upholds the principle of academic freedom.

I was busy at the Hypertext '08 conference these past few days, so only now am I following up on the AP vs. Bloggers story. According to NYT blogger Saul Hansell:

one key issue is the A.P. wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its articles. He suggested that this will put The Associated Press in direct conflict with bloggers. "If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use," Mr. Cadenhead wrote on his blog.

Although The A.P. wouldn't talk to me, several people I interviewed who have spoken to A.P. executives this week said the organization appears to be internally conflicted and has not yet been able to come up with a clear fair-use position.

But unless something changes, Mr. Cadenhead's experience indicates that The A.P. is going to assert a much stricter interpretation of fair use than most people on the Internet are used to.

Best evidence of ice on mars:

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

Want to quote 5-25 words from an AP story? That'll be $12.50.  ($7.50 for non-profit or educational use.)  The AP has published a form that details the cost of an "Excerpt for Web Use" license.

The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or I retain the copyright to our own writing (unless we explicitly give those rights away).  But to charge money even for brief quotations is to reject the Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- known as the "Fair Use Exception." 

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Note that copying an entire book (or song, or movie) in order to avoid purchasing it is not "fair use."  Showing a clip from a movie in class, or posting quotations from a novel to back up a review or literary research paper, are all covered by "fair use."

Access to the words of public officials, as reported from various news sources, is an important part of the democratic process.  A candidate being interviewed on ABC should be able to quote from what an opponent said on NBC, and someone who calls in on a CBS show should be able to quote from what a guest said on CNN. The Fair Use Exception recognizes that anyone engaging in "criticism" or "comment" should have the same the ability to quote brief passages from published materials.

"Florida, Florida, Florida," wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election.  In know the news cycle is moving on to other stories by now, but it's a shame we'll never know what he would have done for Election 2008. (Previously.)

From NASA:

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

From a distance of about 310 kilometers (193 miles) above the surface of the Red Planet, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed its HiRISE obliquely toward Phoenix shortly after it opened its parachute while descending through the Martian atmosphere. The image reveals an apparent 10-meter-wide (30-foot-wide) parachute fully inflated. The bright pixels below the parachute show a dangling Phoenix.

Good news from the NYT:

Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here received a radio signal from the Phoenix on the ground in the icy plains north of Mars' Arctic circle.

I just took the kids outside to watch the International Space Station fly overhead. It was visible for about five minutes, and at its brightest I thought I could see some details (the solar panels?), but it was mostly just a bright dot. It rose from the southwest, went by almost overhead, and disappeared to the northeast.

As soon as we came back inside, my wife presented us with a book, The Amazing International Space Station, and now Peter is excitedly reading it aloud to Carolyn at the dinner table.

I got the tracking information from heavens-above.com.

The open-source 3D design too, Blender, has just been updated. I was up until well past midnight last night checking the website every half hour or so, waiting for this release... now I notice it's up just as I'm on my way out the door. Oh well, I can look forward to using it tonight after the kids are in bed.

This version supports a new particle system with hair and fur combing tools, fast and optimal fur rendering, a mesh deformation system for advanced character rigging, cloth simulation, fast Ambient Occlusion, a new Image browser, and that's just the beginning. Check the extensive list of features in the log below... have fun!