The British newspaper industry is on the verge of an historic schism, a fundamental split in beliefs that will set one part of the business on a collision course with the other. Far greater than the ideological differences that have traditionally set apart the great national titles, this divergence in opinion - over whether the written word should be a free commodity or one that is charged for - will set the news industry at each other's throats. The battle lines became clearer last week, as Rupert Murdoch's senior executives proclaimed from the ramparts, or at least from the luxury hotels of western Europe, their determination to erect a pay wall around the content of News Corp websites. James Harding, editor of The Times, stood up in the Radisson at Stansted airport to tell the Society of Editors conference that his site would begin charging in the spring, with subscription offers that included access for a single 24-hour period. A date had been set.
The British newspaper industry is on the verge of an historic schism, a fundamental split in beliefs that will set one part of the business on a collision course with the other.
Far greater than the ideological differences that have traditionally set apart the great national titles, this divergence in opinion - over whether the written word should be a free commodity or one that is charged for - will set the news industry at each other's throats.
The battle lines became clearer last week, as Rupert Murdoch's senior executives proclaimed from the ramparts, or at least from the luxury hotels of western Europe, their determination to erect a pay wall around the content of News Corp websites. James Harding, editor of The Times, stood up in the Radisson at Stansted airport to tell the Society of Editors conference that his site would begin charging in the spring, with subscription offers that included access for a single 24-hour period. A date had been set.
The BBC has today said it has "no intention" of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet.Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has "no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online" as he outlined the areas director general Mark Thompson's ongoing strategic review will cover.
The BBC has today said it has "no intention" of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet.
Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has "no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online" as he outlined the areas director general Mark Thompson's ongoing strategic review will cover.
Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it "incredibly difficult" for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news. "It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it," he said.
"It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it," he said.
But you can choose not to pay it by not owning a TV, and still get the benefit of the BBC's web and radio output.
Apparently part of Darth Rupert's plan is to get money from Microsoft, which is willing to pay content creators who put their wares on sale via Bing.
Which seem like a double fail to me - one of those brilliant corporate dotcom ideas that only highly paid but fundamentally clueless executives could think up, and which will lead to billions in losses a few years down the line.
Or by owning one and not living in the U.K. (or in any other country with a compulsory license fee). I'm glad the U.S. doesn't have such a fee, or they'd try to get it from expats as well....
Couldn't happen to a nicer couple than News Corp and Microsoft. Talk about two birds with one stone! As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
When Roger Avary, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Pulp Fiction, was last month sentenced to a year behind bars for his role in a fatal car crash, it seemed that a promising writing career had come to an abrupt end.But a string of posts on social networking site Twitter has revealed that he is apparently still chronicling the underbelly of American culture.
When Roger Avary, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Pulp Fiction, was last month sentenced to a year behind bars for his role in a fatal car crash, it seemed that a promising writing career had come to an abrupt end.
But a string of posts on social networking site Twitter has revealed that he is apparently still chronicling the underbelly of American culture.
The budget airline easyJet has been forced to withdraw almost 300,000 copies of its in-flight magazine because of protests over its use of Holocaust memorial sites as a backdrop for a fashion feature.An eight-page spread in the November edition of the magazine, easyJet Traveller, depicted models posing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and leaning against the pillars of the Holocaust memorial.
The budget airline easyJet has been forced to withdraw almost 300,000 copies of its in-flight magazine because of protests over its use of Holocaust memorial sites as a backdrop for a fashion feature.
An eight-page spread in the November edition of the magazine, easyJet Traveller, depicted models posing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and leaning against the pillars of the Holocaust memorial.
Exclusive The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record. His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files. The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.
Exclusive The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.
His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.
The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.
C. Sue Carter of the University of Illinois at Chicago, a pioneer in the study of oxytocin, suspects that the association between the hormone and childbirth long kept scientists from taking it seriously. "But now that it's been brought into the world of economics and finance," Dr. Carter said, "suddenly it's very hot." <...> ... In a series of papers that appeared in Nature, Neuron and elsewhere, Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich, and his colleagues showed that the hormone had a remarkable effect on the willingness of people to trust strangers with their money. In the Nature study, 58 healthy male students were given a single nasal squirt of either oxytocin or a placebo solution and, 50 minutes later, were instructed to start playing rounds of the Trust Game with each other, using monetary units they could either invest or withhold. The researchers found that the oxytocin-enhanced subjects were significantly more likely than the placebo players to trust their financial partners: whereas 45 percent of the oxytocin group agreed to invest the maximum amount of money possible, just 21 percent of the control group proved so amenable. Moreover, the researchers showed that the oxytocin boost didn't simply make subjects more willing to take risks and throw their money around. When participants knew they were playing against a computer rather than a human being, there was no difference in investment strategy between the groups. Trust, it seems, is a strictly wetware affair. Yet the hormone doesn't turn you into a sucker. In the Nov. 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, Simone Shamay-Tsoory of the University of Haifa and her colleagues reported that when participants in a game of chance were pitted against a player they considered arrogant, a nasal spritz of oxytocin augmented their feelings both of envy whenever the haughty one won and of schadenfreudian gloating when their opponent lost. ...
<...>
... In a series of papers that appeared in Nature, Neuron and elsewhere, Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich, and his colleagues showed that the hormone had a remarkable effect on the willingness of people to trust strangers with their money. In the Nature study, 58 healthy male students were given a single nasal squirt of either oxytocin or a placebo solution and, 50 minutes later, were instructed to start playing rounds of the Trust Game with each other, using monetary units they could either invest or withhold.
The researchers found that the oxytocin-enhanced subjects were significantly more likely than the placebo players to trust their financial partners: whereas 45 percent of the oxytocin group agreed to invest the maximum amount of money possible, just 21 percent of the control group proved so amenable. Moreover, the researchers showed that the oxytocin boost didn't simply make subjects more willing to take risks and throw their money around. When participants knew they were playing against a computer rather than a human being, there was no difference in investment strategy between the groups. Trust, it seems, is a strictly wetware affair.
Yet the hormone doesn't turn you into a sucker. In the Nov. 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, Simone Shamay-Tsoory of the University of Haifa and her colleagues reported that when participants in a game of chance were pitted against a player they considered arrogant, a nasal spritz of oxytocin augmented their feelings both of envy whenever the haughty one won and of schadenfreudian gloating when their opponent lost. ...
Three giant telescopes, many times stronger than any existing today, will allow scientists to study the processes that created the cosmos.
Scientist Bill Hubler monitors the polishing of a mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. The telescope's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf today's largest telescopes. (Ray Bertram / Steward Observatory / November 23, 2009) Reporting from Tucson - If there were a Guinness world record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen would likely win it. Colleagues boast that the onetime Iowa farm boy has ground and polished more square footage of optics than any human being alive. "It used to be a mysterious thing that hunch-backed people in white coats did," the 55-year-old technician said while taking a break at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. "Now we use machines to grind the glass. They've taken a lot of the black arts out of it." Maybe so. But Ketelsen can't help being as proud as a soccer parent of his latest achievement. Resting behind him in the laboratory under the university's football stadium was the first of seven huge mirrors being made for the Giant Magellan Telescope. One of a new generation of super-large, ground-based telescopes being constructed around the world, the Giant Magellan's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf the largest telescopes in the world.
Scientist Bill Hubler monitors the polishing of a mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. The telescope's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf today's largest telescopes. (Ray Bertram / Steward Observatory / November 23, 2009)
Reporting from Tucson - If there were a Guinness world record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen would likely win it. Colleagues boast that the onetime Iowa farm boy has ground and polished more square footage of optics than any human being alive. "It used to be a mysterious thing that hunch-backed people in white coats did," the 55-year-old technician said while taking a break at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. "Now we use machines to grind the glass. They've taken a lot of the black arts out of it."
Maybe so. But Ketelsen can't help being as proud as a soccer parent of his latest achievement. Resting behind him in the laboratory under the university's football stadium was the first of seven huge mirrors being made for the Giant Magellan Telescope. One of a new generation of super-large, ground-based telescopes being constructed around the world, the Giant Magellan's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf the largest telescopes in the world.
In the early '70s I hired a post-doc to analyze the optical chain of a product belonging to the company for which I was working. He did a great job technically, showing a first order design problem in the folded optics chain the resolution of which, unfortunately, was not economically feasible. Having been the interface and having written the report, I got the "credit" for killing the product line. :-) As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
ALMA First Fringes at Chajnantor
A team of astronomers and engineers at ALMA have made interferometric measurements of radio signals from an astronomical source from the observatory's "high site", which is at an altitude of 5000 meters. These observations used the full suite of the production equipment that has been developed for ALMA, including two high-precision 12-meter diameter antennas and sophisticated electronic systems for receiving and correlating the signals. This is the first time that all these complex items, almost all of which are at the leading edge of technology, have been used together as a complete system. AOS (Array Operations Site) Interferometer© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alvaro Quintana and Jose Olivares (ALMA)
A team of astronomers and engineers at ALMA have made interferometric measurements of radio signals from an astronomical source from the observatory's "high site", which is at an altitude of 5000 meters. These observations used the full suite of the production equipment that has been developed for ALMA, including two high-precision 12-meter diameter antennas and sophisticated electronic systems for receiving and correlating the signals. This is the first time that all these complex items, almost all of which are at the leading edge of technology, have been used together as a complete system.
AOS (Array Operations Site) Interferometer© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alvaro Quintana and Jose Olivares (ALMA)
Submillimetric astronomy may not make as pretty pictures as optical astronomy, but it is scientifically important too !
(And one of the people working on the project is my father, too...) Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
Chatacama desert, the driest air you can find, at an altitude of 5000 m... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
driest air you can find, at an altitude of 5000 m
Another benefit of Chili is that there is only the Pacific ocean upwind, so there is very little turbulence in the air above the telescopes. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
The first thing you hear as you wander through the sodden streets of Cockermouth is the sound of laughter. The second thing that hits you is the stench. The cobbled lanes and stone cottages are awash with stinking, contaminated sludge: shop windows are shattered and cars are upturned by the force of the flood water that raged through these streets only days ago.
This is the Britain that I once knew. I thought it had gone forever.
"There's a really great spirtit among us all and a lot of good banter," said Philip, 67. "In fact, one group of shopowners were told not to look so jolly by a TV crew who were filming nearby yesterday. They were laughing and cracking jokes, and it wasn't the tragic image this TV crew wanted to get across."
It was that very absence of outreach that angered Carrasco, who told AL that the library board was "left completely out of the loop" by city management, which made the decision without first consulting with trustees and notifying him by phone after the fact. "We didn't advise because they didn't solicit our input," he asserted. As for library staff, Carrasco said that city officials "showed up at the library and basically told our library manager [Ruth Martinez] that she was out of a job with no previous warning." That harsh announcement came hard on the heels of CPL's five full-time staff members having received furloughs of 50 hours, he noted. Characterizing the decision as "a last resort," Deputy City Manager Bill Smith told AL the sudden library closures and layoffs were actions "we did not take lightly." He explained that the city would realize a savings of $500,000 by dismissing all 17 Colton library workers and shuttering the libraries until June 30, 2010, when FY2010 comes to an end, "or longer." He also said that an additional 43 municipal employees from other general-fund departments were laid off in an effort to close $4 million of a revenue shortfall projected at $5 million for the current fiscal year. According to the November 13 Walnut Creek Contra Costa Times, the city was also looking to win salary concessions of 15% from unionized municipal workers, some of whom had agreed October 29 to 10% pay cuts. Interim City Manager Bob Miller had given the unions until November 17 to respond before issuing more layoff notices, the Times reported.
It was that very absence of outreach that angered Carrasco, who told AL that the library board was "left completely out of the loop" by city management, which made the decision without first consulting with trustees and notifying him by phone after the fact. "We didn't advise because they didn't solicit our input," he asserted. As for library staff, Carrasco said that city officials "showed up at the library and basically told our library manager [Ruth Martinez] that she was out of a job with no previous warning." That harsh announcement came hard on the heels of CPL's five full-time staff members having received furloughs of 50 hours, he noted.
Characterizing the decision as "a last resort," Deputy City Manager Bill Smith told AL the sudden library closures and layoffs were actions "we did not take lightly." He explained that the city would realize a savings of $500,000 by dismissing all 17 Colton library workers and shuttering the libraries until June 30, 2010, when FY2010 comes to an end, "or longer." He also said that an additional 43 municipal employees from other general-fund departments were laid off in an effort to close $4 million of a revenue shortfall projected at $5 million for the current fiscal year.
According to the November 13 Walnut Creek Contra Costa Times, the city was also looking to win salary concessions of 15% from unionized municipal workers, some of whom had agreed October 29 to 10% pay cuts. Interim City Manager Bob Miller had given the unions until November 17 to respond before issuing more layoff notices, the Times reported.
