Day: February 18, 2004

Asimov’s Responds to Wood TV 8 Piece

Asimov’s Science Fiction today posted a response to that Wood TV 8 hit piece on them that I mentioned the other day (see In Which I Discover My Wife’s Adult Magazine Collection) that claims Wood TV 8 distorted and outright lied about several key parts of its story on Asimov’s.

Reporter Kristi Andersen and the News 8 anchors portrayed the QSP magazine drive as children buying and selling magazines. As a matter of fact, in this fundraising drive, students sell magazines to their family, their neighbors, and their parentsÂ’ coworkers. We reviewed the QSP catalog with the reporter and showed her that many of the magazines are for adults, including Esquire, Vogue, GQ, and Elle. As we showed the reporter, the QSP catalog has a section specifically geared to children, and indicates age-appropriate titles. AsimovÂ’s was correctly listed in the catalog, not under “Children,” but under “Science/Technology/Environmental.” The reporter chose not to include this information in her report, and, in fact, said that we “did not know it was on the school magazine list.”

In Ms. AndersenÂ’s report, she stated that QSP dropped AsimovÂ’s as a result of the parentÂ’s complaint and News 8Â’s subsequent investigation, saying the “magazine has now been pulled from the list,” and that “since 24 News 8 started this investigation, QSP has permanently severed its relationship” with Asimov’s. In fact, we provided Ms. Andersen with documentation showing that our relationship with QSP ended several months earlier over remit rates (the amount of money the publisher receives from the agent for each subscription the agent sells), not as a result of this incident.

. . .

News 8 should have allowed AsimovÂ’s Science Fiction the opportunity to respond to their characterization of our magazine, and our disappointment in their distortion of the facts is profound. In our opinion, Ms. Andersen and the News 8 channel are not practicing journalism, but sensationalism. They know, better than most, that “sex sells.”

As I said in my first post on this issue, the area Wood TV-8 covers is very conservative. The last big story on Grandville I can remember was during the last election cycle about whether or not Grandville should keep its ban on Sunday alcohol sales, so this kind of reporting plays well around here. This is a part of the state where you can get suspended from school for wearing a Korn t-shirt.

This sort of sensationalistic reporting tends to go over well and shows up a lot on this Wood TV 8.

Uganda Supreme Rules in Favor of Journalists Prosecuted Over LRA Story

The Ugandan Supreme Court this month agreed with the arguments of two journalists who claimed they had been unconstitutionally prosecuted under an Ugandan law making it illegal to report “false information.”

The Supreme Court decisions led to the dropping of some charges against three journalists who had reported in 2002 that the Lord’s Resistance Army downed a government helicopter. The journalists are, however, still being prosecuted for “publishing articles that are contrary to national security.”

Source:

Threats to Press Freedom Remain Despite Striking Down of Repressive Legislation, Says CPJ. Press Release, Committee to Protect Journalists, February 13, 2004.

International Criminal Court Will Target Lord’s Resistance Army

At the end of January the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court announced that the court would take on leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in its first cases.

ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that the court would collective evidence and issue arrest warrants against leaders of the Ugandan rebels who have kidnapped as many as 20,000 children during the last two decades.

Source:

First International Criminal Court Case Targets Uganda’s Rebels. UN Wire, January 30, 2004.

Kevin Werbach on the Future of Mobile Storage

Kevin Werbach has an article about one of my tech obssessions — storage, in this case portable storage.

As Werbach note, the rise of (relatively) cheap, high capacity storage for mobile devices is already changing what we use such devices for and that trend is going to accelerate to the point where we begin to use mobile devices for applications that would have traditionally been performed by desktop or laptop computers. According to Werbach,

Mobile devices are about to become much more powerful, and storage is the reason. There have been three waves of evolution in portable storage, each of which has produced new product categories. The first development was affordable flash memory, allowing handhelds to carry hundreds of addresses and user-installed applications. That was enough to launch the PalmPilot, which created the market for personal digital assistants. The second wave was removable storage, using the Secure Digital, CompactFlash, or MemoryStick standards. Without the ability to pop data into and out of a device, we wouldn’t have digital cameras. And the same basic technology, sealed into devices, powered the first generation of handheld MP3 music players. The third wave of portable storage was tiny hard drives, beginning with the 1.8 inch-wide Hitachi drives in Apple’s iPod.

Every stage in portable storage so far has involved more capacity. From the kilobytes on the original Palm (text and simple applications) to the megabytes in digital cameras (still photos) to the gigabytes on an iPod (music), increased storage space has brought new forms of media into play. The next evolution will be different. With the current-generation iPods topping out at 40 gigabytes, comparable to a desktop computer, there is enough space to store just about anything. The next challenge is to make portable storage elements smaller and more affordable. Storage creates new markets when it gets cheaper, even without adding capacity. For example, USB “keychain” storage devices wouldn’t be selling like crazy if they weren’t available for $50 or less.

I prefer to think of this as a PDA w/phone rather than phone w/PDA (most cell phone form factors are far too small to be useful multipurpose information appliances IMO), but that’s a chicken/egg sort of distinction.

The weird thing is that mobile storage is already dirt cheap — it’s just not as cheap as laptop/desktop hard drives are. For example, I was reading a Slashdot thread on e-books the other day in which someone complained about the high price of flash memory cards these days.

Well, a 1 gb compact flash card can be had for about $255 on Amazon.Com. Now clearly, that’s expensive compared to the sort of 3.5″ HD you could by. On the other hand, just looking around my house I noticed that the bookshelves I bought at $250/unit hold about 200 books each. OTOH, a 1 gb compact flash card will hold about 1,500 e-books (based on the average size of the dozens I’m carrying around my PDA). So, IMO, flash memory is actually a pretty good bargain even now — and, of course, it is only going to get cheaper.

Werbach also points to companies like Cornice, which is marketing a tiny 1.5 gb HD which supposedly will be available in bulk at the wholesale level for $70 or so and can run in portable devices for 12 hours or more using power management features.

Regardless of whether that, or other mini-HDs or flash memory (or, more likely, some combination thereof) wins, I can’t wait to have an iPaq with as much storage as an iPod.