The Times article isn’t especially thoughtful about the controversy. It names some issues that have been in contention, but doesn’t explore that the relationship should be between a church and a…
"Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model."
From the NYTimes:
In many ways, it is Al Jazeera’s moment — not only because of the role it has played, but also because the channel has helped to shape a narrative of popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its founding 15 years ago. That narrative has long been implicit in the channel’s heavy emphasis on Arab suffering and political crisis, its screaming-match talk shows, even its sensational news banners and swelling orchestral accompaniments. “The notion that there is a common struggle across the Arab world is something Al Jazeera helped create,” said Marc Lynch, a professor of Middle East Studies at George Washington University who has written extensively on the Arab news media. “They did not cause these events, but it’s almost impossible to imagine all this happening without Al Jazeera.”
It bears noting that the reason Al Jazeera can create a “narrative” about oppressive pro-American Arab governments is precisely because we’ve consistently sold out democratic movements to back oppressive strongmen. The most obvious example was our long-standing political and military support of the Shah of Iran. It’s hard to imagine what Middle East politics would look like today if we had encouraged the student protesters in 1979.
NYTimes profile of a brave candidate challenging the one-party system that Russia’s become:
Up against this colossus went Ms. Safronova, 53, a former Kremlin supporter who grew increasingly frustrated with the country’s political stagnation and decided to do something about it this year. She mounted her campaign for regional assembly, and worked to transform A Just Russia in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city.
The NY Times has an interactive feature today on Bike Lanes, 1894 to Now, claiming that nation’s first bike path was located in Brooklyn. Wrong. Two years earlier, in 1892, the Smithville Bicycle Railroad opened near Mt Holly in South Jersey. It’s an absolutely fascinating story.
Annals of modern data-mining: Using Facebook Updates to Chronicle Breakups (NYTimes).
In a recent TED Talk discussing the project, Mr. McCandless explained that most breakups occur three times in the year — in the weeks leading up to spring breaks, right before the start of the summer holidays and a couple of weeks before Christmas. His research also found that people tend to break up with their significant others on Mondays, presumably after a weekend grapple.
The archive is the second cache obtained by the independent organization WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations. The Iraq documents shed new light on such fraught subjects as civilian deaths, detainee abuse and the involvement of Iran
"Long hair is not the appropriate choice of grown-ups. It says rebellion. Hillary Rodham Clinton softens her do, and sets off a bizarre Howl of Angry Inches, as if she had betrayed some social compact. Well, my long hair is indeed a declaration of independence. I am rebelling, variously, against Procter & Gamble, my mother, Condé Nast and, undoubtedly, corporate America in general. Whereas it used to be short hair that was a hallmark of being a liberated woman — remember the feminist chop? I do; I did it — these days, long hair is a mark of liberation."
"Certain numbers have magical properties. E, pi and the Fibonacci series come quickly to mind — if you are a mathematician, that is. For the rest of us, the magic numbers are the familiar ones that have something to do with the way we keep track of time (7, say, and 24) or something to do with the way we count (namely, on 10 fingers). The “time numbers” and the “10 numbers” hold remarkable sway over our lives."
It’s eerie to get posthumous glimpses into tragedies like this from online forums. It’s almost Clementi’s last words: “I ran to the nearest R.A. and set this thing in motion. We’ll see what happens.” It seems too thin a line between the determination to seek help and the decision to jump off the bridge.
Wow, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in awhile: the “Straddling Bus”:
Though it is dubbed the “straddling bus,” Huashi’s invention resembles a train in many respects — but it requires neither elevated tracks nor extensive tunneling. Its passenger compartment spans the width of two traffic lanes and sits high above the road surface, thanks to a pair of fence-like stilts that leave the road clear for ordinary cars to pass underneath. It runs along a fixed route. (NYTimes)
I’ve often wondered why there’s no creative public transport happening. Can’t we find ways of making light-rail pillars en masse to put them along roadways? But this Hong Kong train makes the on-the-ground infrastructure more minimal, takes up almost no space on the street and doesn’t create the blight of the ever-darkened valley under a elevated rail line.
The only thing I’d worry about is terrorism. It seems like it’d be easy to take one of these down. What if that SUV in the picture was full of fertilizer? This thing is set to carry 1200 passengers. That’s a big target indeed.
"Some of the ancestral waters that made the planet’s oil still exist, like the Gulf of Mexico, while others have long vanished, like the ocean that produced the massive oil fields of the Middle East. The bodies come and go because the earth’s crust, through seemingly rigid, actually moves a great deal over geologic time, tearing apart continents and ocean basins and rearranging them like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle."
The New York Times thinks Tumblr’s some new site and that we’re all early adopters. Egads.
Since Tumblr is currying favor among a young crowd, it could prove valuable for traditional companies and media outlets that are trying to build a relationship with that audience. And those companies are no doubt aiming to win points by being early adopters of a site that is on the rise.
Today when a patient comes with memory problems, doctors might say that the person has a chance of developing Alzheimer’s in the next decade, a chance of not getting much worse for several years, and a chance of actually getting better. Tests like brain scans, Dr. Petersen said, “will allow us to be much more definitive.” If the tests show changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, a doctor can say, “I think you are on the Alzheimer’s road.” That can be a difficult conversation, but it can allow patients and their families to plan. “At least it’s a conversation the physician can have with the patient,” Dr. Petersen said.
Apple Acknowledges Flaw in iPhone Signal Meter - NYTimes.com
“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple said in the letter. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”
Apparently this is true for older models and has “gone undetected for at least two years if not more.” Apple, the obsessive Apple, hasn’t noticed that it’s gimmied the signal meter for years to make it look like reception was better than it really is. Yeah right.
