We were talking about this Wikileaks bunker the other day, have a look:http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26095/?nlid=3838

This blog is a great source for info on alt economics and the environment that you should look at:http://triplecrisis.com/

WOW this one is for real:Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors
| from the tree-of-attribution dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday November 26, @22:33 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/0117252/Googles-New-Meta-Tags-For-News-Story-Authors?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EreIamJH writes "Google News is [0]experimenting with meta-tags in an
effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an
article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that
breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the
story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article
that sources information from other articles would include an
original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article.
While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger
fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as
an original source."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/27/0117252&from=newsletter

Links:
0. http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html

How do you like this for the future of Journalism??:Digital Domain
When the Software Is the Sportswriter
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 27, 2010
ONLY human writers can distill a heap of sports statistics into a compelling story. Or so we human writers like to think.

The StatSheet site for Ohio State men's basketball. One recent story on the site had 10 sentences and 156 words — written entirely by software.

StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, thinks otherwise. The company, with nine employees, is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games.

Established in 2007, StatSheet.com provides statistical analysis of college football and basketball, Nascar and other sports. It dices data in more ways than any fan could possibly absorb. But charts, graphs and rankings alone cannot replace words that tell a story. We humans love stories; a craving for narrative seems part of our nature.

This month, StatSheet unveiled StatSheet Network, made up of separate Web sites for each of the 345 N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball teams. Beyond statistics galore, each site has what the company calls “automated content,” stories written entirely by software, including write-ups of the team’s games, past and future. With a joking wink, StatSheet’s founder, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as the “Robot Army.”

Each team’s StatSheet Web site is located at a freestanding Web address, conveying the sense that it is wholly invested in the interests of that school’s fans. (To find a domain name, a fan first visits http://statsheet.com/#websites.)

The software is imbued with the smarts to flatter each particular team. The same statistics, documenting the same game, produce an entirely different write-up and headline at the opposing team’s page.

A team like No. 1-ranked Duke — whose StatSheet Network Web site is at BlueDevilDaily.com — does not lack for attention from human sports writers. But StatSheet expects that the sports programs of smaller schools will appreciate the advent of robot journalism.

“There are at least 200 Division I schools that the large sports media companies give no attention to,” says Mr. Allen at StatSheet. “Once we have the algorithm in place, there’s no cost to adding the Lamars and Elons to the Dukes and U.N.C.’s.”

Small schools are less likely to have large alumni bases and to draw significant traffic, Mr. Allen said, so he is knocking on their doors to explore licensing partnerships.

Mr. Allen explains that his story-writing software does not perform linguistic analysis; it just uses template sentences and a database of phrases that numbers about 5,000 for now.

“My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human,” he says, “and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”

In the battle between human writers and robots, I’m not a dispassionate observer: I own up to rooting for the home team. So I asked Michael W. White, an assistant professor of linguistics at Ohio State and a specialist in the field of natural language generation, for his professional opinion of the quality of the robot army’s writing.

We visited the StatSheet site for Ohio State’s team —BuckeyesBeat.com — and looked at the write-up of its Nov. 12 season opener, written expressly for Buckeyes fans: ”Ohio State Gets 102-61 Monster Win Over North Carolina A&T.” “Ohio State has already started living up to monumental expectations with a good first game,” it began. “On November 12th on their home court, the Buckeyes waxed the Aggies, 102-61.”

The story had 10 sentences and 156 words. Over all, Professor White said, it read “pretty well.” He praised the first sentence as very good and said the use of “waxed” in the second was a nice touch.

Then he pointed out some glitches. In one passage, the software lost track of who had beaten whom and forgot to use “the” when referring to Ohio State’s supposed victory “over Buckeyes.” A note that followed the write-up was a bit overeager to show that Ohio State was undefeated so far this season, when its record was still just 1-0.

The Statsheet Network’s Web sites are plainly labeled “beta,” and these minor bugs can easily be eliminated with tweaks. The bigger problem, the professor said, is that StatSheet’s software lacks the awareness of linguistic structures that would let it generate more complex sentences: “Getting from remarkably good to human level is very hard. The more you cram into a sentence, the more difficult it is to do it well.”

The StatSheet software avoids those difficulties by using simple sentences and swapping in particular details. “This makes it perfectly readable, but it also can make it seem stilted,” he said.

Mr. Allen of StatSheet says he believes that what some readers regard as “stilted” will be appreciated by others who say “‘ I don’t like personality — I just want the straight facts.’”

He sees opportunities to extend robo-journalism not only to other sports but also to other subject areas — like financial news — in which there is an abundance of readily available data.

Will StatSheet’s robo journalists replace business columnists? Not a chance: we humans are undefeated.

Only problem is, just like the Buckeyes two weeks ago, we’re just 1-0.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.

Good Editor Journalist here: RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Trouble
| from the who's-to-blame dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 24, @22:24 (Music)
| https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/2336248/RIAA-Now-Blames-Journalists-For-Its-Piracy-Trouble?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

adeelarshad82 writes "RIAA executives have [0]written a letter to PCMag
expressing 'deep disappointment' for publishing an article on [1]Limewire
Alternatives. While the article includes a disclaimer from PCMag that it
does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material, RIAA
executives believe that 'PCMag is slyly encouraging people to steal more
music.' The letter goes on to ask PCMag to retract the article from their
website. PCMag's [2]Editor in Chief has responded to the letter by
stating that music industry's charges remain groundless and that it reeks
of desperation. He points out that PCMag covers all aspects of
technology, which includes the products, services and activities that
some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. He defends
publishing the article by saying 'We covered these Limewire alternatives
because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand
that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot
encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the
existence of these services does neither.' PCMag has also refused to
retract the article."

Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/24/2336248&from=newsletter

Links:
0. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f9f4fb80d8c7ba149
1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371590,00.asp
2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp

Some of you might be interested in this:
Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration

■ Friday, January 21 – Tuesday, March 15
　　Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo

Some fifty years ago, the small community of Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking. James Houston, then a government employee, introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in 1957. To learn more about printmaking himself, Houston travelled the next year to Japan to study for three months with Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the world's leading masters of the art. Houston went back to the Arctic in 1959 to share his knowledge and his collection of Japanese prints with the fledgling printmakers of Cape Dorset.

"Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration" will feature exquisite and historically significant works of art from Japan and the world-renowned Cape Dorset print studio. By juxtaposing the works, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which the Cape Dorset artists creatively "localized" Japanese influences.

We have talked about flash crowds and here is something else that might be useful for Journalists Crowd sourcings:http://gigaom.com/2010/11/17/can-you-crowdsource-fact-checking-truthsquad-says-yes/
Can You Crowdsource Fact-Checking? Truthsquad Says Yes
By Mathew Ingram Nov. 17, 2010, 9:36am PDT 2 Comments

*
*

NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success, and NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year. Among the things NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:

* Game mechanics work. NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave 10 times more answers per quote than reviews per story; over half the participants read linked stories; and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
* Pros and amateurs can work together. Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
* Crowdsourcing takes effort. Florin said despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.

Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking; MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking-oriented site. MediaBugs is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.

Like most blog-focused sites, GigaOM gets plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it’s a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we aren’t perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.

NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it’s hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.

We talked about flash mobs in this weeks class. Here is an example of a possible non political beneficial one, what do you think? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE&feature=youtube_gdata

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HAPPENING IN JOURNALISM TODAY:
WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing
The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.


The structure of Wikileaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPA
By Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010

Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.

However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.

Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.


Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.

PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs

Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.

He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.

Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.

After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities.

Wow, here is something else to talk about:

Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010


CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.

This book review from Mantex is maybe a little long for you, however important enough for me to post and you to read.
Here Comes Everybody

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.


Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

Hi just a reminder that I will check and mark your blogs on the 28th of this month...they can have a pass or fail affect on your grade..so give it all you've got

Some people take living on this planet seriously and they put them selves on the line always. Take a look at these posters from wiki leaks:>http://picasaweb.google.com/AoC4WL/WikiLeaksPosters?ref=nf#
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.

Here is another try at making newspapers viable again:
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010


The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
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The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.

The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.

“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.

The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.

The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.

But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.

The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.

The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.

When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.

Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.

But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.

Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.

“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.

Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.

Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.

I would like to analyze the following very good, long story running in the New York Times:
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010

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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.

There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.

All five of them.

The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.

“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”

Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.

Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.

Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?

“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”

A bit.

For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.

Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)

Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.

“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”

“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.

Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.

Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.

“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”

Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.

“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).

Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.

Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.

“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”

But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.

“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”

Don't believe it until you see it is down the tube, again: Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time
| from the no-more-wires-visible dept.
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 13, @08:09 (Graphics)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/13/0525245/Erasing-Objects-From-Video-In-Real-Time?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smoothly [0]interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive
enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from
Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of [1]on-the-fly erasure of
selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image
synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then
increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40
milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."

Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/13/0525245&from=newsletter

Links:
0. http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/25/1835256/Content-Aware-Image-Resizing
1. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/video-voodoo-software-removes-objects-live-video

Assignment for last week was a audio news report sent to me as an e-mail attachment. Trying to get background noise for the audio report to increase the drama of the event.

This is an example of how Journalism may work after the sigularity.
The Science of Truthiness |
| from the look-it-up-in-your-gut dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 03, @08:17 (The Internet) |
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/10/03/033241/The-Science-of-Truthiness |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

E IS mC(Square) writes "Researchers at Indiana University have [0]just
launched Truthy.indiana.edu, which they humbly declare 'a sophisticated
new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network
analysis and crowdsourcing to [1]uncover deceptive tactics and
misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.' According to [2]their
FAQ, they define 'truthy' thus: 'A truthy meme relies on deceptive
tactics to represent misinformation as fact. The Truthy system uses
Truthy to refer to activities such as political smear campaigns,
astroturfing, and other social pollution."

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/03/033241

Links:
0. http://truthy.indiana.edu/
1. http://www.fastcompany.com/1692072/truthy-colbert-twitter-swift-boat
2. http://truthy.indiana.edu/faq

This is a magazine project from Scandinavia which has one of the best records on democracy and human social service:

Projects
Italian Journalism in the Age of Silvio Berlusconi

What's happened to Italian news media in the last two decades, and what was it like before?
Reporting China

Chinese journalism after market reforms: the possibility and dangers of investigation.
Russian News is Good News

The remaking of Russian journalism, and Russian journalists, in the age of Vladimir Putin.
Independent Journalism in Post-Independence States

The perils and possibilities of holding power to account in different African countries.
The Pipers and the Tunes

A comparative perspective on the power of proprietors, public service and people to influence the content and limits of journalism.
The Peripheral Vision of Central Issues

How good is the coverage of matters essential to public welfare and the public interest? And who cares about it?

Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy
Submitted by Janice Winter on September 9, 2009 - 9:39 AM
journalist.jpg

The Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy began in June 2009, born out of the perceived need for a comprehensive study of the relationship between journalism and democracy in the contemporary - and rapidly transforming - media landscape.

Two main issues frame the programme:

* how should journalism serve the public?
* what effect will the changing nature of journalism have on its ability to hold power to account?

The programme consists of a range of projects, based in different parts of the world, which address these issues in differing ways. These include, or will include, projects in China, Russia, Italy, the European Union, Sweden, the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.

In each case the projects will develop an accessible narrative. The aim is to combine a rigorous approach to research with the ability to tell a vivid and illuminating story. The end product of this three-year programme will be a unique, world-wide story of the way in which journalism, democracy and power affect each other.

The Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy is funded by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. Its director is John Lloyd.

We invite our readers to submit blogs similar to those posted on the website by our researchers. If you have strong views about journalism and politics that you'd like to share, submit your writing to us by emailing janice.winter@axessjournalism.com
Comments (9)
To all involved in this project

Good luck! It's a huge undertaking, but should prove to be extremely interesting and of immense value.

Posted by Simon Winter on October 8, 2009 - 3:33 PM
Hello -

What a great initiative, it will be interesting to follow.

Wait a minute - good heavens! Where is your RSS feed?

If you really want to chart the "development of the internet" which "is revolutionising the ecology of journalism" you might want to show some grasp of its fundamentals.

Please inform your webmaster about RSS feeds, the most important web technology of the past ten years. And please ask your webmaster to implement it.

Sincerely,

C.L.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 15, 2009 - 6:01 PM
Thank you for the encouragement! We are already onto our webmaster about an RSS feed, so it should be implemented soon!

Posted by Janice on October 16, 2009 - 12:56 PM
Thank you for your quick response. I am looking forward to subscribing to some probing and daring analyses.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 19, 2009 - 2:30 PM
And there it is. Thank you.

Now all you need to do is to provide full-text coverage and image inclusion in your RSS feed - and your site will climb even higher on the accessibility mountain.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 28, 2009 - 5:02 PM
The quality of democracy depends on the quality of the political communication - where mmedia is important. In Stockholms Community PopVox.info is an organization developing a new relation between poltiics and media.

Posted by Peter Ahlm on November 17, 2009 - 4:49 PM
Hi,
How long have you been in this field? You seem to know a lot more than I do, I'd love to know your sources!

Posted by cheap printer ink on Janurary 29, 2010 - 7:16 AM
The quality of democracy depends on the level of education of the constituents. Communication is important, of course, but the more educated voter will be far more capable of reading between the lines in the verbal play that is journalism and politics. A reporter's job, initially, was to report the facts, just the facts, all of it, unpleasant or not and the reader was left to make up his own mind as to the circumstances or intentions of those involved. Then the newspaper industry became big business and started hobnobbing with politicians and other businessmen and these days, it seems, the reporter's job is to sell the paper, paying lip service to readers. The real problem starts when journalists start taking the game of politics so serious that they figure they are best qualified to become politicians. That is when the reader, who is also the voter, will start getting the news the politicians and businessmen want them to know. I recommend reading Terry Pratchet's "The Truth" for his history of the journalist and press. Well worth the real perspective on life.

Posted by X Cepting on February 15, 2010 - 2:09 PM
Democracy depends on communication...do we have to educate ourselves to know how we want to live???? You might need education to understand how educated people is trying to justify their ideologies (religions)!

Posted by Peter Ahlm on February 16, 2010 - 11:51 AM