Hi I thought that you should read this from the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. If you are not familiar with the issues here ask me about it in the next class and we can talk about it. It's important. Clark

Kids, don't fall for 'free press' hype


July 8, 2005

BY CAROL MARIN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
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Just about every week, the phone rings with an earnest, young journalism student at the other end asking what he or she needs to do to become a reporter. Some have already given it a great deal of thought. Most have not.


For a while now, I've toyed with the notion of one day writing a book, a kind of road map for would-be reporters on some of the obstacles ahead. I'm not sure what I'd call it. Maybe, Hey, Kid, So You Wanna Be A Reporter? I was forced to abandon my original title, News Reporting For Dummies, after a media-bashing friend of mine sneered that it was redundant.

Lesson No. 1: Even your friends will despise you.


Reporters have long since lost the luster of the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. Journalists, in the eye of the public, have gone from swashbuckling to scum-sucking. Some of our wounds are self-inflicted. The Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times and the CBS/Dan Rather case of questionable documents are just two of too many.

But don't for a second doubt that genuine, hard news reporting is under siege. It is. Just ask Judith Miller, who was jailed Wednesday for refusing to reveal her sources for a story she never even published. Or better yet, ask the Bush administration, which has no compunction about recruiting public relations people to pose as reporters in taxpayer-subsidized video news releases that were peddled as "news reports." That's the same Bush administration that is classifying documents at breakneck speed to keep actual vs. manufactured information out of the hands of the public and the press.

Lesson No. 2: Judith Miller


Anybody who thinks they want to be a reporter should be required to read every single word of the opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 04-3138. That's the one that ordered Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to reveal their confidential sources to a federal grand jury.

Pay particular attention to pages 72 through 78. Why? Because they're blank, that's why. Even experienced constitutional lawyers are flabbergasted by this. But at the request of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor assigned to this inquiry, his most powerful arguments for why Miller and Cooper should break their promises to sources are too sensitive for any of us to see.

As one respected First Amendment expert was heard to say, "What is this, freakin' Albania?"

Lesson No. 3: Reporters are not above the law


Not you. Not me. But civil disobedience holds a crucial place in our history. From the fight for civil rights to anti-war protests to reporters protecting the identity of their sources, there are those who have always defied the law on principle and paid the price. Miller is in jail because in a society of laws, good ones and bad ones, there are consequences. She has accepted the consequences.

Any aspiring reporter who thinks there is a martyred romanticism to her incarceration needs to think again. Nobody, including Miller, wants to have their hands and feet shackled, go to the bathroom under the gaze of a security camera, or lose even a minute of their liberty. Think early and often about what you will do when a subpoena arrives with your name on it. Take it from me, it will.

There are, young would-be journalists, risks involved in this work. It's true for political reporters confronting government, for business reporters taking on corporate interests, and for sports reporters uncovering the darker side of the game. Covering the news can win you a lot more enemies than friends. That's true when you get the story right as well as when you get the story wrong.

Miller has mostly gotten things right in her distinguished career, but not everything. Her most notable error was a big one, believing that Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi actually knew what he was talking about when he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

There are some who believe Miller's current fight is a way to redeem that failure. I don't buy it. Not exactly known as Miss Congeniality in the New York Times newsroom, Miller admits to having "sharp elbows." I don't think she's suddenly worried about her image. I think she's standing for a vital principle. Not to mention giving aspiring journalists the hardest of lessons.

Hi as your assignment for next week is a science related article I thought you might like a look at this one:
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Fingernails store personal information

6 July 2005

Japanese researchers are using femtosecond laser pulses to write data into human fingernails.

Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced. (Optics Express 13 4560)


Fingernail storage

"I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," Hayasaki from Tokushima University told Optics.org. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger."

The team's approach is simple: use a femtosecond laser system to write the data into the nail and a fluorescence microscope to read it out. The key to reading the data out is that the nail's fluorescence increases at the point irradiated by the femtosecond pulses.

Initial experiments were carried out on a small piece of human fingernail measuring 2 x 2 x 0.4 mm3. The writing system comprises a Ti:Sapphire oscillator and Ti:Sapphire amplifier. Pulses of less than 100 fs at 800 nm are then passed through a microscope and focused to three set depths (40, 60 and 80 microns) using an objective lens.

Each "bit" of information has a diameter of 3.1 microns and is written by a single femtosecond pulse. A motorised stage moves the nail to create a bit spacing of 5 microns across the nail and a depth of 20 microns between recording layers.

An optical microscope containing a filtered xenon arc lamp excites the fluorescence and reads out the data stored at the various depths. "We regulate the focus with the movement of the microscope objective," explained Hayasaki. "The distance between the planes is set to prevent cross-talk between data stored at different depths."

Hayasaki adds that the same fluorescence signal is seen 172 days after recording.

Although the initial experiments have concentrated on small pieces of nail, the team is now developing a system that can write data to a fingernail which is still attached to a finger. "We will develop a femtosecond laser processing system that can record the data at the desired points with compensation for the movement of a finger," said Hayasaki.

Author
Jacqueline Hewett is technology editor on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.