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martes, 28 de diciembre de 2010

CNN+ Close


According to reports the Spanish daily El Pais ended after midnight CNN + emissions after 11 years on the air. It was the first private television which broadcast information 24 hours a day and its way of doing journalism "rigorous and independent, consolidated a mark reached an ideological balance where everyone could" in the words of one of its founders, Francisco Basterra. A brand also helped create such an innovative way to communicate and their recognized areas of debate.

The end of this adventure takes place after the TV PRISA (group editor of El País) quit producing the channel following the merger between Telecinco and Cuatro. PRISA had the option of renting a channel for a maximum of three years. To give it up the chain will be operated by its new owner, Telecinco, which has confirmed that initially devoted to reality show Big Brother. PRISA Group plans to create a new global news channel to new platforms.

CNN + resulted in the alliance between the main group of Spanish-language media, PRISA and the global network of reference news, CNN. "It was a good idea and has shown a balanced way of doing journalism in a time not long ago this for civic culture. With closure, the Spanish media loses," said Basterra.

Ending 11 years in which the canal passed through different business models but never found economic viability. CNN + was born in January 1999 as part of the platform Sogecable's satellite television and from the start, according to its leaders, was deficient. In 2008 the channel became widespread in open DTT, implying financed exclusively by advertising revenue. To this was not sufficient for a hearing that was 0.2% in 2008 and 0.3% in 2009. This resulted, according to a spokesman said yesterday PRISA TV, "a poor advertising revenue to the channel leading to significant losses."

In early 2010 introduced significant changes in programming, which went from the traditional news conference revolve around a series of major programs in the morning, afternoon and evening. This, together with the full deployment of DTT, resulted in a significant rise from the audience (from 0.3% to 0.6%) and an increase in turnover, but according to spokesman PRISA TV was not enough to prevent the channel again to close the year with heavy losses and "no prospect of profitability in the medium term."

In the past three years, since the issues in open, CNN + accumulated losses in excess of 40 million and more favorable projections calculated similar data in the next three years. "Unfortunately we have a problem operating margins or reduce costs, but not viable in the chain, even if we wanted to continue to provide quality service as coming by CNN +," the spokesman said.

"Separation of Four, string to CNN + has shared structure and wording, aggravate the situation. In fact, throughout the world, these channels survive with difficulty in large public or private television structures that operate multiple channels and optimize the exploitation of them. The model is not sustainable in itself and less in the current economic times, "added the spokesman. "But also, the profound transformation that is underway in the audiovisual dispute that, as expensive as a DTT with a model as irrational as shown in Spain, is this the right way to develop a current channel" .

In PRISA TV show that it is not viable under the current system may be through a platform supported on new technologies, which allow to produce and distribute content in a less costly and more responsive to the preferences of users in Spain and global market of Spanish. "It that's what we will devote our efforts to explore the possibility of launching a channel with a global current, supported PRISA brands are the international reference, like the country, or those that already have a strong presence in the Spanish market. " For this project, carried on CNN + over these 11 years is a benchmark of quality and good craftsmanship. "It was a channel that, perhaps more than any other in Spain, has been closely following the pulse of the political, cultural and social aspects of our country. Without any doubt, has been a window to the world for a decade. quality work that merits recognition by the company to journalists, technical staff, collaborators and all professionals who have made this possible, as well as viewers and advertisers who have supported this project, "said spokesman PRISA TV .

The Federation of Journalists in Spain (FAPE) yesterday issued a statement regretting the loss of this chain, which represented "a space for debate, to exchange ideas, for reflection and training criteria." "Society", he adds, "is more helpless before the power and weaken democracy." The FAPE reported that the journalistic profession has lost 3,496 jobs since November 2008. Closing CNN + also has led to protests from the Works of Sogecable.

The presenters of the various programs have been firing on the air one after another in recent days. So did Iñaki Gabilondo, José Antonio or San José María Calleja, among others, praising all the good work of a team "that could be fitted with another TV right now," said Basterra yesterday. "There can be no sense of closure because something was done wrong, it is economic conditions. This channel was necessary and leave a gap of journalism," he concluded.

domingo, 26 de diciembre de 2010

Elijah Wood Sexy

viernes, 10 de diciembre de 2010

I don't think I could have drawn a more perfect little Grammar Nazi.

jueves, 9 de diciembre de 2010

domingo, 14 de noviembre de 2010

domingo, 7 de noviembre de 2010

jueves, 4 de noviembre de 2010

martes, 2 de noviembre de 2010

lunes, 1 de noviembre de 2010

domingo, 12 de septiembre de 2010

sábado, 10 de abril de 2010

How to Make Glass Invisible?

Revenge of the Nerds: How Barbie Got Her Geek On


Serious career aspirations aren't the first thing most people associate with Barbie, the impossibly thin, high-heel-loving fashion doll.
Still, Barbie's maker, Mattel Inc., thought it would be interesting to ask young girls who visited the Barbie.com Web site to vote on what the doll's next career should be. Mattel gave them a choice of architect, anchorwoman, computer engineer, environmentalist and surgeon. All told, more than 600,000 votes were cast during a four-week period this past winter.
Girls the world over overwhelmingly cast their ballot for anchorwoman Barbie—"not a surprise, as girls see Katie Couric and a lot of other female anchors," says Stephanie Cota, senior vice president of marketing for the Barbie brand.
But what happened next, she says, "blew us away."
The voting was open to anyone, and nobody could vote more than once. But by the end of the first week, a growing flood of adult votes for computer engineer Barbie trumped the popular choice. Female computer engineers who learned about the election launched a viral campaign on the Internet to get out the vote and ensure Barbie would join their ranks.
"Please help us in getting Barbie to get her Geek on!" came the appeal from the blog GeekGirlCamp.com.
As Mattel puts it: Computer engineer Barbie "won the popular vote" and anchorwoman won the girls' vote.
Barbie landed her first gig as a teenage fashion model in 1959. Since then she's been an astronaut, a surgeon and a presidential candidate. Her latest career choice? Computer engineer.
The result is a ponytailed doll in black leggings and a top decorated in binary code that spells Barbie, and lots of pink accessories—geek-chic glasses, Bluetooth headset and shoes.
Why grown women felt so strongly about having themselves represented by a doll—especially one that feminists have always loathed—speaks volumes both about the power of the iconic Barbie doll and the current state of women who work in computer and information sciences. Their ranks have declined in the past two decades. In 2008, women received only 18% of computer science degrees, down from 37% in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
Barbie was designed to be a teenager and was an instant sensation when she was created in 1959, tapping into children's desire to emulate older girls. She remains the No.1-selling doll in the world, with annual sales of the doll and related merchandise of more than $1.3 billion.
In Mattel's "I Can Be…" line of Barbie dolls, the first career was teenage fashion model. But Barbie went on to have 124 other professions, frequently mirroring or even anticipating societal change. She was an astronaut in 1965, four years before a man walked on the moon and more than a decade before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
[BARBIE]
Mattel got into hot water in the early 1990s when it unveiled a talking Barbie doll that uttered the line, "Math class is tough." After the American Association of University Women attacked the math comment in a report on how schools shortchange girls, Mattel promptly apologized and deleted the phrase.
Regardless, Barbie remains enduringly popular among young girls. In 2000, Marie Wilson, president and founder of the White House Project, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase women's leadership roles, teamed up with Mattel to create a President Barbie, much to the consternation of many of her colleagues. Ms. Wilson admits she had reservations about using Barbie, because of "her body shape" and the design of her feet, which allows her to wear only towering high heels.
"But if you really want to change things, you have to go where the people are—the little people," she argues.
On Jan. 7, Mattel launched a month-long voting campaign for Barbie's next career on Barbie.com, Barbie's Twitter and Facebook pages, plus a bus and billboard campaign in New York.
After several popular technology Web sites wrote about the election, female computer engineers began encouraging colleagues to cast their ballot. During January, a total of 1,840 tweets discussed it.
Alice Merner Agogino, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, got several emails urging her to vote from members of different organizations that encourage girls to enter the field.
After learning about the election from the National Academy of Engineers, Erin Fitzgerald, a science and technology fellow in the U.S. Department of Defense, helped get out the vote. "There is a perception that an interest in math, science and computers means being socially awkward and boring and sacrificing the opportunity to be creative and fun," she says. The Society of Women Engineers, based in Chicago, alerted its 20,000 members in a weekly email newsletter. Nora Lin, its president, said she hoped the doll would inspire girls to become engineers.
By the end of January, computer Barbie was clearly the frontrunner and Mattel began soliciting input on her design from groups of computer scientists. " 'Make us look cool and hip.' 'Don't put us in lab coats.' 'Don't make us look like nerds,' " says Nathan Kahl, a spokesman for the National Academy of Engineering, recounting the comments from women members that he submitted to Mattel.
Mattel announced the winner and displayed a prototype of computer engineer Barbie at the International Toy Fair in New York Feb. 11.
Veronica Belmont, a San Francisco resident who has an online-technology video show and who says she snubbed Barbie as a girl in favor of toys she could take apart and reassemble, thought Barbie's sparkly leggings and pink accessories "were over the top."
"I found the pink condescending," Ms. Belmont says, "but if it will get little girls' attention and get them to play with computers, it's a good start."
Computer engineer Barbie will hit stores in the fall. So, will an anchorwoman Barbie. Mattel thought that was only fair.
SOurce WSJ

sábado, 3 de abril de 2010

Abuse hotline set up by Catholic Church in Germany melts down on first day as 4,000 people phone in


An abuse hotline set up by the Catholic Church in Germany melted down on its first day of operation as more than 4,000 alleged victims of paedophile and violent priests called in to seek counselling and advice.
The numbers were far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could cope with.  
In the end only 162 out of 4,459 callers were given advice before the system was shut down.
Andreas Zimmer, head of the project in the Bishopric of Trier, admitted that he wasn't prepared for "that kind of an onslaught'.   

mass st peters basilica vatican
Defence: The Pope celebrates Mass at the Vatican yesterday. The abuse hotline was set up as part of the Church's attempt to win back trust in the face of escalating abuse claims that threaten Benedict's papacy

The hotline is the Church's attempt to win back trust in the face of an escalating abuse scandal that threatens the papacy of German-born Pontiff Benedict XVI in Rome.
Earlier this week it was alleged that an ally of the Pope, Bishop Mixa, beat children - a charge he has subsequently denied.
Former girls and boys testified that he beat them with fists and a carpet beater which screaming; 'The devil is in you and I will drive him out!'
Also, the bishopric of Trier reported that 20 priests are suspected of having sexually abused children between the 1950s and 1990s. 
Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who was appointed last year, said on Monday that three of the cases had been passed on to public prosecutors, with two more soon to follow.
German media are calling the scandal 'the hour of the children'. Silent, often for decades after pressure was applied to both them and their families by the Church, they are now finding the courage to speak out.
The effect on the Catholic Church in Germany has been profound; people are leaving in droves, de-registering with the government department that levies an annual tax of 800 pounds each on worshippers to fund it.
A quarter of Catholics in Germany said in a recent survey they had lost faith in the  Church leadership.
Pope Benedict XVI allegedly knew about one particularly disturbing paedophile case in the United States. 
The Rev. Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican many years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action.
The pope made no mention of the scandal during his pre-Easter mass at the Vatican yesterday.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1263108/Abuse-hotline-set-Catholic-Church-Germany-melts-day-4-000-people-phone-in.html?#ixzz0k2TmBUfF

One Of These Things Doesn’t Belong



With the world seemingly drowning in fears of global warming, it is always nice to see people taking their bike out for a ride, rather than starting up their car and injecting our air with even more unnecessary fumes. A picture like this is evidence of a good start towards cleaning up our air, but wait...
What the hell is with the stationary bike?
Okay, so this guy clearly did not ride his bike here. He probably stuck it in the back of his pickup (which likely has poor emissions), drove it over and dumped the piece of garbage in this not-so-obvious area. I hope there isn't a time limit for parking, because it doesn't look like that bike will be moving anytime soon, if you know what I mean.

domingo, 21 de marzo de 2010

domingo, 7 de marzo de 2010

Today is the Birthday of Valentina Tereshkova



Today we celebrate 73 birthday, Valentina Tereshkova, who was the first woman to travel into space aboard Vostok 6.
En route, turned 48 times around the earth for 71 hours.
In the photo, but smiling Valentina Tereshkova, visiting the telescope Croce del Nord in Bologna, Italy (1968). To his left, Guido Fanti, Mayor of Bologna, though in smoke with the left picture, often take the watch on his left wrist and right hand notes, so it will possibly right-handed. To his right, Prof. Giuseppe Longo, a professor of General Physics Department of Physics, University of Bologna.

And while we are in astrophysics, the old joke Martian
Enter a Martian in a roadside bar. The owner of the bar as he looks away and looks at their appearance: greenish skin with brown freckles on the size of a coin of five dollars, seven large mauve eyes reticulated spread over the top of the head with a big mouth Retractable jaw and full lips of a purplish color with sharp teeth, ears and nose cone-shaped, webbed hands with eight fingers with spatulate phalanges, 35 tentacles like a foot and a stomach-shaped outer intestine fuchsia pink finish toothed sucker. He approaches the bar and tells the owner "Do I put a Movskoskaya with orange?". The owner looks up and down and says, 'With Fanta? ". "Can it be orange juice, if you please?" He responds the Martian. "But you have to be orange juice bottle," he tells the owner while a glass with a dry flannel gray. "Yes, yes, perfect boat orange juice is good," replied the Martian. "I have no Movskoskaya" he tells the owner. "Then why has" asked the Martian. "Smirnoff and Absolut" replied the owner. "Well, absolutely," replied the Martian. The owner puts the Absolut bottle with orange and Martian asks "What is that?". "Fifteen euros," replied the owner. The Martian extends a tentacle back, fumbles in one of his intercostal bags, takes out a blue leather purse shaped scrotum, opens it, rummages around and gets a ten euro and five euro coins on the counter. The owner collects the money and the ticket and puts it in the cash register. The Martian grasps the glass with one of his webbed hands, he puts in his mouth and takes the Absolut bottle with orange in one gulp. When about to leave, the landlord says "Hey!" "What?" He responds the Martian. "A question" You what? ". "Me? I am a Martian, "replied the Martian. "What Murcia?" Asked the owner. "No, no, Mars, Mars, Mars ',' said the Martian. "Aaaah, is that there are many Martians in this bar," says the owner. "No wonder, with these prices," he responds the Martian.

Source Cambio Radical Blog

sábado, 27 de febrero de 2010

sábado, 30 de enero de 2010

miércoles, 13 de enero de 2010

Twitter Jail


Twitter Jail

Term used to describe the account suspension of overly loquacious Twitterers.
Commenting on Twitter’s horde of “twilebrities” (those who have gained notoriety though tweeting), Vanessa Grigoriadis noted in Vanity Fair:
Even Twitter has started to put the brakes on the culture of twilebrityby suspending the accounts of those who Twitter too excessively (more than 1,000 tweets per day) – a punishment commonly known as going toTwitter Jail.

Hedonometer


An online happiness gauge that searches blogs and tweets for mood-indicative words such as “proud” and “lonely.”
American scientists have pioneered a method of taking the emotional temperature of the blogosphere, Reuters reported:
Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist from the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created a “sensor” to mine 2.3 million blogs and gather sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” Each sentence is then given a happiness score from 1 to 9 depending on a point system allocated to 1,034 words. For example, “triumphant” averages 8.87 points, “paradise” 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, and “suicide” 1.25.
They said this “hedonometer” showed that the U.S. election day last November was the happiest day in four years with a spike in the word “proud” while the day of the “King of Pop’s” death was one of the unhappiest.
Discovery News quoted Peter Dodds who said:
We wanted to capitalize on the explosion of blogs and now Twitter to build an instrument that would give us some measure of the emotional signal from a large collective of people.
According to Reuters:
The scientists said that although blog writers tend to be younger and more educated than average, they were broadly representative of the U.S. population.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the hedonometer found that teenagers were the unhappiest group in the blogosphere, making disproportionate use of words such as: “sick,” “hate,” “stupid,” “sad,” “depressed,” “bored,” “lonely,” “mad,” and “fat.”