Bo's shared items in Google Reader

Did Obama Make Bibi Sweat?

2009-11-11T06:30:44Z

Shared by Bo
If this were France and not Israel, we'd be "disillusioning our allies"...

Aluf Benn has a point: He writes that the delay in scheduling a meeting between Obama and Netanyahu in Washington this week was a reflection of the near-constant tension between the two leaders:

The White House wanted Netanyahu to sweat before being granted an audience with the president, and wanted everyone to see him perspire. The delays in finding a time to meet, and pushing it to a late hour - after the news programs on Israeli television - make Netanyahu look as if Obama threw him a bone. In such circumstances, it is no longer important what will be said at the meeting, and the extent to which there will be an attempt to present it as an achievement. The prime minister of Israel was humiliated before all. ... Netanyahu may be an experienced diplomat and politician, and Obama may be a novice, but Obama is the president of a superpower, and Netanyahu represents a small country that depends greatly on the United States.

The Racism In China

2009-11-09T17:37:00Z

Reihan wonders whether ethno-centrism, which is a polite way of saying racism, will be the deepest obstacle to Chinese success in the next generation. The fast-aging, gender-imbalanced society needs younger people to keep its economy going, and immigrants are the obvious solution. But culture stands in the way:

China is not terribly hospitable to ethnic outsiders, including members of non-Han minorities native to China. Observers tend to overstate the level of ethnic homogeneity in China, not least because the Han category masks tremendous cultural diversity. "Hanness" is as broad and contingent a category as "whiteness."
But as Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong argued in his brilliant 1992 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China, traditional notions about culturally inferior "barbarians" intermingled with Western forms of scientific racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century. The "yellows" were locked in a struggle with their equals, the "whites"--and both were superior to the "blacks," "browns" and "reds." The dislike and distrust of Europeans was always mixed with envy and admiration. The disdain for dark-skinned foreigners, in contrast, was and remains relatively uncomplicated.

Maoist China railed against Western imperialism, and saw itself as a leader of the global proletariat of Africans and Asians.
Now, as China emerges as an economic and cultural superpower, those notions of Third World solidarity, always skin deep, seem to have vanished. It is thus hard to imagine China welcoming millions of hard-working Nigerians and Bangladeshis with open arms. This could change over the next couple of decades as China's labor shortage grows acute. I wouldn't bet on it.
If China remains culturally closed, the Chinese Century will never come to pass. Instead, the United States--a country that has struggled with race and racism for centuries, and in the process has become more culturally open and resilient--will dominate this century as it did the last.

It can be hard to see developments like the civil rights movement for African-Americans, or the fight for women's or gay equality, as engines of economic growth. But they are; and they remain one of the West's core advantages, unless we too succumb to atavism and xenophobia.

The New Guinness World Ad - Bring it to Life

2009-11-11T06:26:48Z

Shared by Bo
Great commercial for a male audience

Rhe ad shows a group of men bringing "a world to life.", Cool!

Steven Tyler Breaks Up with Aerosmith via Blog Posts [Divorces]

2009-11-09T20:54:59Z

This is not how rock bands are supposed to die. Bands are supposed to go out in a blaze of charred hotel suites, blood feuds and drug overdoses. Instead, Aerosmith's end came in a blog entry.

In a story the media is still trying to wrap its head around, guitarist Joe Perry told the Las Vegas Sun that all he knows about the end of his band is what he's read on the web, which is telling him that after decades together, Aerosmith is no more. After playing a show in Abu Dhabi last week, Perry said he returned home to Boston and read an interview Tyler had given to the website of Classic Rock Magazine in which in said he was done with the band.

"I don't know what I'm doing yet, but it's definitely going to be something Steven Tyler: working on the brand of myself –- Brand Tyler," Tyler told Classic Rock.

Apparently inter-band communications are not what they could be, so reading rumors and quotes online seems to be Aerosmith's only source of news about each other. The Sun quotes:

"Steven quit as far as I can tell," Perry said from his Boston home. "I don't know anymore than you do about it. I got off the plane two nights ago. I saw online that Steven said that he was going to leave the band. I don't know for how long, indefinitely or whatever. Other than that, I don't know."

Part of the problem, he says, is that Tyler doesn't return his phone calls.

"He's notorious for that," Perry said. "That's one thing I've learned to live with. I try to overlook it. I like to pick my battles. Frankly, the last few months I've been wanting not to rock the boat. I don't want him canceling any more gigs. We really wanted to do these last four. We just kind of didn't want to call him out or anything and get him anymore pissed off, for whatever reason. So we just let things lie. So we did the gigs and, like I said, I got off the plane and saw this online. That's how I know about it."

And apparently, the band as a whole is believing what it reads. The group posted on its own website a link to a Boston Herald story about the Classic Rock story about the break-up.

[Via Hitfix]

The Go Programming Language

2009-11-11T01:03:33Z

New systems level programming language from Google (but, judging from the copyright statements, not an official Google project). Go has built-in garbage collection, a simpler syntax than Java or C++, fast compilation times and excellent performance — and it was designed with concurrency in mind. Interesting and ambitious, to say the least.

Among many interesting details, it ships with a utility named gofmt, which formats Go source code according to a standardized style — which standardized style uses tabs, not spaces (hooray). Go uses a Pascal-style “:=” assignment operator for initializing values (hooray). And, regarding my own tiny sliver of expertise, the Regexp library offers only a crude regular expression syntax (boo).

Update: Some amazing names are behind Go, including Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

★

Google Latitude Now Tells You Where You’ve Been

2009-11-11T00:41:32Z

Don’t you sometimes wish you had a map of every place you’ve ever been? Well, if the concept of such detailed self-tracking doesn’t creep you out, you can now do that with Google Latitude, the mobile app that lets you broadcast your location to your friends.

Google Latitude just turned on Location History as a new feature in Google Latitude. Whenever Google Latitude is on, it records your location, and you can go back to see where you’ve been. To mitigate some of the obvious privacy issues this brings up, only you can see your location history, not your friends. And you can delete any location from your history, like that Dunkin Donuts you tried to stick up last night when you had the munchies.

Another new feature is location alerts. You can now get an alert anytime a friend of yours who allows you to see their location on Google Latitude is nearby. To cut down on constant alerts every time you go to the office or home, it tries to learn where you go every day, and only gives you an alert when you are in a place it deems to be “unusual.” In order for the alerts to work, your location history needs to be enabled, so the two features go hand in hand.

Geo streams such as the ones produced by Google Latitude are becoming increasingly common. In fact, we are devoting an entire panel to Geo Stream sat eour Realtime CrunchUp on November 20. Steve Lee, the group product manager for Google Latitude, will be on that panel.

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TEDxSV 2009

2009-11-10T15:25:28Z

I’ll be at the TED event at Stanford on Dec 12, 2009.

You should too!

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

2009-11-10T23:15:00Z

Here at Google, we believe programming should be fast, productive, and most importantly, fun. That's why we're excited to open source an experimental new language called Go. Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Want to write a server with thousands of communicating threads? Want to spend less time reading blogs while waiting for builds? Feel like whipping up a prototype of your latest idea? Go is the way to go! Check out the video for more information or visit golang.org.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team

If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic

2009-11-11T00:14:02Z

Shared by Bo
Interesting that their stock didn't seem to be effected by these remarks.

Whenever Rupert Murdoch goes back to his home country of Australia, he loosens up and says things to the press (usually his own outlets) that he might not say in the U.S. Of course, everyone in the U.S. picks up on it and it becomes a big story, as it did today after Murdoch told his own Sky News that he might start blocking Google and other search engines from giving searchers full access to articles on the Wall Street Journal’s website, WSJ.com. Asked whether he realized that Google was sending his news site a ton of traffic, Murdoch responded, “”We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Websites, but paying.”

If Murdoch wants fewer people coming to the WSJ.com and other news sites he controls, blocking Google from indexing those sites is the perfect way to achieve that goal. Just over 25 percent of the WSJ.com’s traffic comes directly from Google or Google news, according to estimates by Hitwise. About 12 percent of that comes from Google News, and another 15 percent from Google search directly.

About 44 percent of visitors to the WSJ.com are new to the site, so Google is doing a good job of introducing new readers to the WSJ. But Murdoch clearly would rather have loyal readers than those delivered by search engines. Or at least that is his story, and he is sticking to it. Never mind that in order to get people to pay for content, they first have to be able to find it.

Meanwhile, the WSJ.com still has a deal with Google which allows the search engine to bypass the paywall and show readers the full text of articles when they click through. Perhaps the WSJ is learning that there it can’t be half-pregnant. Either you charge everyone for content, or you make it free, because if there is back door everyone will find it. All the strange arrangement with Google is doing is training people to search on Google News for stories on the WSJ, rather than go directly to the WSJ. But I digress.

Here is the full video interview with Murdoch below:

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Mobile Opportunity: A web guy and a telecom guy talk about net neutrality

2009-11-11T00:12:35Z

A web guy and a telecom guy talk about net neutrality

It was a nondescript bar in the American Midwest, the sort of place where working men drop in at the end of the day to unwind before they head home. You wouldn't expect to find two senior business executives there, and as I sat in the empty bar at midday I wondered if maybe my contact had given me a bad lead. But then the door opened and a general manager from one of the leading web companies walked in, followed by a senior VP from one of the US's biggest mobile network operators. I hunched down in the shadows of a corner booth and typed notes quietly as they settled in at the bar.

Bartender: What'll you have?

Telecom executive: Michelob Light.

Web executive: I'll have a Sierra Nevada Kellerweis.

Bartender: Keller-what?

Web executive: Um, Michelob Light.

Telecom executive: Thanks for coming. Did you have any trouble finding the place?

Web executive: All I can say is thank God for GPS. I've never even been on the ground before between Denver and New York.

Telecom executive: I wanted to find someplace nondescript, so we wouldn't be seen together. The pressure from the FCC is bad enough already, without someone accusing us of colluding.

Web executive: No worries, my staff thinks I'm paragliding in Mexico this weekend. What's your cover story?

Telecom executive: Sailboat off Montauk.

Web executive: Sweet. So, you wanted to talk about this data capacity problem you have on your network...

Telecom executive: No, it's a data capacity problem we all have. Your websites are flooding our network with trivia. The world's wireless infrastructure is on the verge of collapse because your users have nothing better to do all day than watch videos of a drunk guy buying beer.

Web executive: Welcome to the Internet. The people rule. If you didn't want to play, you shouldn't have run the ads. Remember the promises you made? "Instantly download files. Browse the Web just like at home. Stream HD videos. Laugh at an online video or movie trailer while travelling in the family car."

Telecom executive: That was our marketing guys. They don't always talk to the capacity planners. Besides, who could have known that the marketing campaign would actually work?

Web executive: Don't look at me. I've never done a marketing campaign in my life. I think you should just blame it on A--

Telecom executive: You promised, no using the A-word.

Web executive: Sorry. But I still don't see why this is a problem. Just add some more towers and servers and stuff.

Telecom executive: It's not that simple. The network isn't designed to handle this sort of data, and especially not at these volumes. Right now our biggest problem is backhaul capacity -- the traffic coming from the cell towers to our central servers. But when we fix that, the cell towers themselves will get saturated. Fix the towers and the servers will fall over somewhere. It's like squeezing a balloon. We have to rebuild the whole network. It's incredibly expensive.

Web executive: So? That's what your users pay you for.

Telecom executive: But most of them are on fixed-rate data plans. So when we add capacity, we don't necessarily get additional revenue. It's all expense and no profit. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll end up losing money on mobile data.

Web executive: Bummer.

Telecom executive: More like mortal threat. Fortunately, we've figured out how to solve the problem. The top five percent of our users produce about 50% of the network's total traffic. So we're just going to cap their accounts and charge more when they go over.

Web executive: Woah! Hold on, those are our most important customers you're talking about. You can't just shut them down.

Telecom executive: The hell we can't. They're leeches using up the network capacity that everyone else needs.

Web executive: Consumers will never let you impose caps. You told them they had unlimited data plans, that's the expectation you set. You can't go back now and tell them that their plans are limited. They won't understand -- and they won't forgive you.

Telecom executive: First of all, the plans were never really unlimited in the first place. There's always been fine print.

Web executive: Which no one read.

Telecom executive: Off the record, you may have a point. On the record, the fact is that you can retrain users. Look, you grew up in California, right?

Web executive: What does that have to do with anything?

Telecom executive: Once upon a time, there weren't any water meters in California. Now most of the major cities have them, and they'll be required everywhere in a couple of years. Something that was once unlimited became limited, and people learned to conserve.

Web executive: The difference is, I can read my water meter. You make a ton of money when people exceed their minutes or message limits, and you don't warn them before they do it. If you play the same game with Internet traffic, it'll scare people away from using the mobile web -- or worse yet you'll invite in the government. Look what happened with roaming charges in Europe.

Telecom executive: Jeez, don't even think about that. Okay, so we'll need to add some sort of traffic meter so people will know how much data they're using when they load a page.

Web executive: Great, that'll discourage people from using Yahoo.

Telecom executive: Huh?

Web executive: Oops, did I say that out loud?

Telecom executive: Then there's the issue of dealing with websites and apps that misuse the network.

Web executive: Not this again.

Telecom executive: I'm not talking about completely blocking anything, just prioritizing the traffic a little. Surely you agree that 911 calls should get top priority on the network, right?

Web executive: Of course.

Telecom executive: And that voice calls should take priority over data?

Web executive: I don't know about that.

Telecom executive: Oh come on, what good is a telecom network if you can't make calls on it?

Web executive: (sighs) Yeah, okay.

Telecom executive: So then what's wrong with us prioritizing, say, e-mail delivery over video?

Web executive: Because when you start arbitrarily throttling traffic, I can't manage the user experience. My website will work great on Vodafone's network but not on yours, or my site will work fine on some days and not on others. How do you think the customers will feel about that?

Telecom executive: Not as angry as they will be if the entire network falls over. Listen, we're already installing the software to prioritize different sorts of data packets. We could be throttling traffic today and you wouldn't even know it.

Web executive: But people will eventually figure it out. They'll compare notes on which networks work best and they'll migrate to the ones that don't mess with their applications. Heck, we'll help them figure it out. And if that's not enough, there's always the regulatory option. The Republicans are out of office. They can't protect you on net neutrality any more.

Telecom executive: You think you're better at lobbying the government than we are? We've been doing it for 100 years, pal. Besides, we have a right to protect our network.

Web executive: You mean to protect your own services from competition!

Telecom executive: Parasite!

Web executive: Monopolist!

Telecom executive: That's it! It's go time!

They both stood. The telecom guy grabbed a beer bottle and broke it against the bar, while the web guy raised a bar stool over his head. Then the bartender pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at both of them.

Bartender: Enough! I'm sick of listening to you two. Telecom guy, you're crazy if you think people will put up with someone telling them what they can and can't do on the Internet. The Chinese government can't make that stick, and unlike them you have competitors.

Web executive: See? I told you!

Bartender: Shut up, web guy! You keep pretending that the wireless network is infinite when you know it isn't. If you really think user experience is important, you need to start taking the capabilities of the network into account when you design your apps.

Web executive: Hey, he started it.

Telecom executive: I did not!

Bartender: I don't care who started it! Telecom guy, you need to expose some APIs that will let a website know how much capacity is available at a particular moment, so they can adjust their products. And web guy, you need to participate in those standards and use them. Plus you both need to agree on ways to communicate to a user how much bandwidth they're using, so they can make their own decisions on which apps they want to use. That plus tiered pricing will solve your whole problem.

Telecom executive: Signaling capacity too. Don't forget signaling.

Bartender: That's exactly the sort of detail you shouldn't confuse users with. Work it out between yourselves and figure out a simple way to communicate it to users. Okay?

Web executive: I guess.

Telecom executive: Yeah, okay.

Bartender. Good. Now sit down and start over by talking about something you can cooperate on.

Telecom executive: All right. Hey, what's that guy doing in the corner? Is that a netbook?

Web executive: He's a blogger!

Bartender: There's no blogging allowed in here!

Telecom executive and web executive: Get him!

I ran. Fortunately, the bar had a back door. Even more fortunately, the web guy and the telecom guy got into an argument over who would go through the door first, and I was able to make my escape.

So I don't know how the conversation ended. But I do know that I wish that bartender was running the FCC.

Posted byMichael Maceat7:32 PM Permalink. 6 comments. Click here to read post with comments.

Google’s Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++

2009-11-10T23:00:15Z

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.

Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:

Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.

For more details check out Golang.org.

To get things started the right way, here’s Go’s rendition of Hello World!:

05 package main

07 import fmt “fmt” // Package implementing formatted I/O.

09 func main() {
10 fmt.Printf(”Hello, world; or Καλημέρα κόσμε; or こんにちは世界n”);
11 }

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Justice Dept. Asked For News Site's Visitor Lists - Taking Liberties - CBS News

2009-11-11T00:00:44Z

Shared by Bo
Whoa.

November 10, 2009 12:01 AM

Justice Dept. Asked For News Site's Visitor Lists

Posted by Declan McCullagh

(AP / CBS)

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward "promoting social and economic justice" and "social change.")

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

"I didn't think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention," Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.

Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that "no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media" without "the express authorization of the attorney general" – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be "directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter."

Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: "We have no comment." The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, replied to the Justice Department on behalf of his client in a February 2009 letter (PDF) outlining what he described as a series of problems with the subpoena, including that it was not personally served, that a judge-issued court order would be required for the full logs, and that Indymedia did not store logs in the first place.

Morrison replied in a one-sentence letter saying the subpoena had been withdrawn. Around the same time, according to the EFF, the group had a series of discussions with assistant U.S. attorneys in Morrison's office who threatened Clair with possible prosecution for obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the already-withdrawn subpoena -- claiming it "may endanger someone's health" and would have a "human cost."

Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of The Press, said a gag order to a news organization wouldn't stand up in court: "If you get a subpoena and you're a journalist, they can't gag you."

Dalglish said that a subpoena being issued and withdrawn is not unprecedented. "I have seen any number of these things withdrawn when counsel for someone who is claiming a reporter's privilege says, 'Can you tell me the date you got approval from the attorney general's office'... I'm willing to chalk this up to bad lawyering on the part of the DOJ, or just not thinking."

Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there's no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded.

EFF's Bankston wrote a second letter to the government saying that, if it needed to muzzle Indymedia, it should apply for a gag order under the section of federal law that clearly permits such an order to be issued. Bankston's plan: To challenge that law on First Amendment grounds.

But the Justice Department never replied. "This is the first time we've seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site," Bankston said. "That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights."

This is not, however, the first time that the Feds have focused on Indymedia -- a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism. In 2004, the Justice Department sent a grand jury subpoena asking for information about who posted lists of Republican delegates while urging they be given an unwelcome reception at the party's convention in New York City that year. A Indymedia hosting service in Texas once received a subpoena asking for server logs in relation to an investigation of an attempted murder in Italy.

Bankston has written a longer description of the exchange of letters with the Justice Department, which he hopes will raise awareness of how others should respond to similar legal demands for Web logs, customer records, and compulsory silence. "Our fear is that this kind of bogus gag order is much more common than one would hope, considering they're legally baseless," Bankston says. "We're telling this story in hopes that more providers will press back and go public when the government demands their silence."

Update 1:59pm E.T.: A Justice Department official familiar with this subpoena just told me that the attorney general's office never saw it and that it had not been submitted to the department's headquarters in Washington, D.C. for review. If that's correct, it suggests that U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison and Assistant U.S. Attorney Doris Pryor did not follow department regulations requiring the "express authorization of the attorney general" for media subpoenas -- and it means that neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor Acting Attorney General Mark Filip were involved. I wouldn't be surprised to see an internal investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility; my source would not confirm or deny that.

COLUMBIA PROFESSOR PUNCHES WOMAN IN ARGUMENT OVER “WHITE PRIVILEGE:” A prominent Columbia archite…

2009-11-10T14:56:17Z

COLUMBIA PROFESSOR PUNCHES WOMAN IN ARGUMENT OVER “WHITE PRIVILEGE:”

A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges.

McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school’s theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

You can’t make this stuff up. (Via JWF, who wonders if it would be treated differently were the races of the parties reversed).

UPDATE: Related: Gallup: U.S. Waiting for Race Relations to Improve Under Obama. Sounds like Columbia has a ways to go yet . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Chuck Allen writes: “I would say that it is time for another ‘beer summit’, but it seems that was what they were having, and it all went horribly wrong!” Yeah, Ivy League profs who can’t hold their liquor? This country really has gone to the dogs. . . .

MORE: Reader Grayson Hill writes: “What’s the matter with these people? Grade school boys know better than to punch women.” Grade school boys know a lot of things they forget by the time they have Ph. D’s.

Man Punching Woman Fails to Make Ivy League Edgy [Higher Learning]

2009-11-10T16:44:23Z

Shared by Bo
I'd say its time for another one of Barack Obama's 'teaching moments,' but I'm pretty sure thats only for when white people screw up.

It took a punch to the face to make newspapers edgy again. Could a drunken punch to the face (of a woman), after an argument about racism, make the Ivy League edgy, too? One Columbia prof is testing that theory!

Meet Lionel McIntyre (pictured), an "Associate Professor in the Practice of Community Development and the Founding Director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project at Columbia University." According to the Columbia Spectator and the NY Post, he went out to a bar on 125th St. last Friday night with Margaret Davis, a white female colleague, and practiced community development by technically assisting her with a sucker punch in the face:

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white...McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said.

Dude Lionel McIntyre we hope you were really drunk, for your own sake. Judging by all the sources cited, this is an accurate report of what happened. Professor McIntyre is a veteran of the civil rights movement but appears to have descended into either a serious drinking problem or total bitchassness.

The Ivy League Punch-Edginess hypothesis has failed.

Prof busted in Columbia gal 'punch'

2009-11-10T16:38:01Z

Shared by Bo
What a disgrace.

Prof busted in Columbia gal 'punch'

By PERRY CHIARAMONTE, BETH STEBNER and JEREMY OLSHAN

Last Updated: 4:54 AM, November 10, 2009

Posted: 2:57 AM, November 10, 2009

A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges.

McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school's theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said.

"The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise," bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. "I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me."

The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, "You don't hit a woman!"

"He knocked the glasses right off my face," said the man, who would only give his first name as "Shannon." "The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it -- apparently I wasn't doing enough."

McIntyre had squabbled with Davis several weeks earlier over issues involving race, witnesses said. As soon as the professor threw the punch Friday, server Rob Dalton and another employee tossed him out.

"It was a real sucker punch," Dalton said. "Camille's a great lady, always nice to everybody, and doesn't deserve anything like this."

Davis was spotted wearing sunglasses yesterday to conceal the black eye. Reached at her Columbia office, she declined to comment on the alleged attack.

McIntyre was released without bail at his arraignment last night.

"It was a very unfortunate event," he said afterwards. "I didn't mean for it to explode the way it did."

Additional reporting by Sarah Makuta

Google Offers Free Airports Wi-Fi During the Holidays [Free Wi-Fi]

2009-11-10T16:35:53Z

Shared by Bo
Priceless.

Delayed flights and hold-overs won't tempt you with $10-a-day Wi-Fi this holiday season. That's because Google has bought out web service at 47 airports through Jan. 15, 2010, and offers it free, assuming you don't mind a little soft advertising.

As with Google's free Wi-Fi offering on Virgin America flights, those who log in through Google's Wi-Fi largess will likely get a few prompts to change their home page to Google or try out Google Chrome. There will also be chances to donate to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation, or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Other than that, it's free Wi-Fi for laptops and mobile devices, offered through providers like Boingo, Advanced Wireless, and the other usual suspects.

Hit the link to see if you're city's on the list. If it's not, there's a good chance your Wi-Fi could be picked up by Microsoft's Bing search engine, which foots the bill if you perform one search on Bing.

Free WiFi - A 2009-2010 Holiday Gift from Google [via Gizmodo]

[Sponsored]

National Geographic Channel - Expedition Week

Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers
Sunday 9P e/p

They say that shrinking heads is no longer practiced. We’re going to ask the experts. Premieres Sunday at 9P e/p on Nat Geo. Learn more at
www.natgeotv.com/expeditionweek

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TSA doesn't understand what "random" means

2009-11-10T07:31:01Z

Deirdre Walker, the 24-year police veteran and former Assistant Chief of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police who wrote up a sharp, professional critique of the TSA's checkpoint procedures, has written a follow-up, showing a huge flaw in the "random" screening process used at the BWI airport:

I asked, "How are people selected for secondary searches?. She replied "It's random."
I asked "Is there a mark on my boarding pass?" She replied, "We used to do that, but we don't do it anymore." She did not know why that practice had been discontinued.
I stated "So you look at people as they are entering the metal detector, you make some type of assessment, and then you select people for secondary searches, right?"
...At this point, I turned to look over my shoulder and observed a Caucasian woman in her late thirties or early forties standing inside the whole-body imager. I called my screener's attention to this and said. "Look over there. There's a woman in the scanner. You all picked me for a search, and then the very next person you select is a woman. Why didn't you pick a white guy? Where are all the white guys?"
She replied, helpfully, "We are understaffed today and we don't have enough male screeners to do pat downs. We are not allowed to do opposite sex pat-downs so we are only selecting women for secondary screening."
By this point, I was seated and she was patting down the bottom of my feet. The secondary search, more thorough than the last search I had been subjected to in Albany, but equally ineffective, was nearing completion. I said "If you are only selecting women, how is that random?"
She said, "You're done. You can collect your belongings, Have a nice day."

"Where are all the white guys?" -- Update on "Do I have the right to refuse this search."

Previously:

Police veteran critiques TSA procedure - Boing Boing

TV Finds That a Mortal Foe, the DVR, Is Really a Best Friend - NYTimes.com

2009-11-10T15:52:25Z

November 2, 2009

DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings

By BILL CARTER

In what may seem a media business version of the Stockholm syndrome, television network executives have fallen in love with a former tormentor: the digital video recorder.

The reason is not simply that more households own DVRs — 33 percent compared with 28 percent at this point in 2008 — helping some marginal shows become hits. It is also that more people seem content to sit through the commercials than networks once thought.

These factors combined mean DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue.

“The DVR was going to kill television,” said Andy Donchin, director of media investment for the ad agency Carat. “It hasn’t.”

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?

The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.

And those passive viewers are watching in numbers big enough to turn some hits (“House” on Fox) into even bigger moneymakers, some middling successes (“How I Met Your Mother” on CBS) into healthier profit centers, and some seemingly endangered shows (“Heroes” on NBC) into possible survivors.

Two years ago, in a seismic change from past practice, Nielsen started measuring television consumption by the so-called commercial-plus-three ratings, which measure viewing for the commercials in shows that are watched either live or played back on digital video recorders within three days. This replaced the use of program ratings.

At the time, network executives fiercely resisted the change, fearing that they would never get credit for recorded shows because viewers would skip through all the commercials. But the figures show otherwise.

“It’s completely counterintuitive,” said Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC. “But when the facts come in, there they are.”

Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing. The best preseason estimate for the current season, said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer for CBS, was about a 1 percent increase from playback over the live program for the networks combined. Instead, many are in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

“It’s the magnitude that’s really surprising us,” Mr. Poltrack said.

In the 18-to-49 group of viewers — the one prized by networks because most ad sales are directed there — Fox has the biggest percentage increase, from an average rating of 2.39 (which translates into about 2.5 million viewers) for its live programs to a 2.71 rating (about 3.1 million viewers) when the three-day DVR playback results are added in.

The numbers for ABC were a 2.5 rating live (2.87 million viewers) to a 2.81 (3.27 million) after three days. CBS had a 2.62 live (just over three million) and a 2.79 (3.2 million) after three days. NBC had 1.79 live (2.05 million) and 1.91 (2.19 million) after three days.

Individual shows have gained substantially. “House,” second among all shows in its live program rating (to “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC), became the top show in terms of commercials viewed within three days with a 5.68 rating (about 6.53 million), gaining almost 18 percent. NBC’s comedy “The Office” had one of the single biggest gains — 26 percent from its live program rating — to 3.92 (4.5 million) for its rating including playbacks.

The supposedly struggling NBC drama “Heroes” jumped 22 percent, as did another apparently flagging drama, “Fringe” on Fox. And a new ABC drama, the appropriately named “Flash Forward,” looks even more like a hit than it did with its original rating because its rating increased 14 percent with playbacks.

“Nobody knew the commercial ratings would be as robust as they are,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

Networks initially opposed the commercial-plus-three system because 6 percent to 8 percent of commercials were already being avoided during live broadcasts because people switched channels. With the explosive growth of the DVR, which clearly promoted skipping commercials, the whole network business model looked to be headed for cancellation.

“This was going to spell the demise of the network TV model,” said Mr. Adgate of Horizon. “Now they seem to be reveling in it.”

Success has not been universal. NBC, has seen a significant fall-off year to year in ratings with playbacks, Mr. Wurtzel said. “The Leno effect is the reason.”

When NBC added the “The Jay Leno Show” at 10 each weeknight, it boasted that the show would be “DVR proof,” meaning that because the humor was topical, viewers were more likely to watch it live, avoiding much of the commercial-skipping that was expected to plague recorded shows.

Now being “DVR proof” looks like a disadvantage. Mr. Leno’s shows were among the few with three-day commercial ratings lower than their live ratings. Not enough people have been recording the show and playing it back to overcome the commercial-skipping being done by a percentage of its live viewers.

Mr. Donchin said that many commercials are being made better. Preston Beckman, the executive vice president for strategic program planning at Fox Broadcasting, said, “We’re getting smarter about keeping people engaged.”

The Fox series “Bones” has experimented with inserting into the middle of a group of commercials a segment with the show’s main characters discussing the story so far. That can induce a sudden stop in the playback.

Mr. Beckman suggested a simpler reason why viewers do not zip through the commercials: “Sometimes you just forget.”

The system even builds in a bonus for advertisers. Although the commercials are rated for only three days, networks receive program ratings for playback over seven days — and the numbers go up again. All that incremental viewing is free to the advertisers.

At least for now: with viewing by time-shifting growing, the system is bound to get tweaked.

“The networks are a little like the airlines: they want to charge for everything,” Mr. Donchin of Carat said.

NASA FAQ 2012

2009-11-10T12:05:00Z

NASA scientists are frequently being asked questions concerning 2012 and for this reason they have created a web page to answer these questions and reassure the public. e.g.

Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?

A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Sigh.... I too fear for our planet.

It’s just a Pontiac. Not really a loss.

2009-11-10T12:00:22Z

Tire Change Fail

If you think that’s bad … (Via There, I Fixed It)

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