Reuters) - ProPublica, in an historic first for online journalism, won a coveted Pulitzer Prize on Monday for investigative reporting about controversial deaths at a New Orleans medical center following Hurricane Katrina.
The chronicle of decisions by doctors caring for patients stranded by the flood, written by Sheri Fink of ProPublica in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine, marked the first time an online service won a top journalism award given annually by the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University.
The nonprofit ProPublica is considered by some to be a new model for journalism as struggling for-profit outlets have fewer resources to put toward investigative reporting. The Times magazine published the Hurricane Katrina piece.
"This is something we're going to see more of in the years ahead as there's more and more collaboration of news entities when it comes to enterprise journalism," Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, said in announcing the winners.
In another online first, www.sfgate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, won for editorial cartooning. The award for the animated cartoons by Mark Fiore marked the first time an Internet-based entry won in that category.
A second Pulitzer for investigative reporting went to Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News for their expose of a rogue police narcotics squad.
"WATCHDOG JOURNALISM"
Reporter Michael Moss and New York Times staff won in the explanatory reporting category for writing about contaminated hamburger and food safety issues. Reporter Matt Richtel and Times staff won the national reporting award for writing about the hazards of using cell phones and computers while driving.
"The watchdog function of journalism is heavily underscored," Gissler said. "Watchdog journalism is still a vibrant force.
"It's been a tough time for newspapers the last few years," he added. "But amid the gloomy talk, the winners and the finalists are encouraging examples of the high quality of journalism across the nation."
In the public service category, the Bristol, Virginia Herald Courier won for writing about the "murky mismanagement" of natural gas royalties owed to landowners, the board said.
The Washington Post won four prizes. The newspaper's Anthony Shadid, now with The New York Times, won for international reporting for his articles from Iraq, and Gene Weingarten won in feature writing for a story about parents who accidentally kill their children by forgetting them in cars.
The Post's columnist Kathleen Parker won in the commentary category and dance writer Sarah Kaufman won for criticism.
Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie of The Dallas Morning News won in editorial writing for their work exploring social and economic disparities in the city.
The prize for breaking news photography went to Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register for a picture of a rescuer trying to save a woman trapped in water. The prize for feature photography went to Craig Walker of The Denver Post for his portrait of a teenager joining the U.S. Army.
Among the prizes for letters, drama and music, "Tinkers," a debut novel by Paul Harding, won for fiction. In drama, the winner was "Next to Normal," music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, a rock musical about mental illness in a suburban family.
Country music's Hank Williams won a posthumous special citation. The board said his "poignant and simple songs ... played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major force." Williams died on January 1, 1953.
Source: http://newscri.be/link/1070058
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Google boss tells newspapers he feels their pain
'Charge readers, not me'
"We're all in this together," Schmidt was quoted by the Associated Press as having told the ink-stained wretches gathered at the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), aka the NewsNow: 2010 Ideas Summit, in Washington DC.
Grouping himself with the worthies who actually gather and publish the news, and not merely aggregate it as does Google, Schmidt said: "We have a business model problem. We don't have a news problem."
Google, of course, doesn't have a business model problem when it comes to providing online news - it lets actual reporters working for actual news services do the legwork, then publishes links to those stories on its Google news site.
Free content - not a bad business model, and one that News Corp's Rupert Murdoch just last week referred to as "a river of gold" in remarks at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Murdoch was blunt in his criticism of aggregation: "I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting."
By "them," Murdoch was referring to Google and Microsoft's Bing.
But Schmidt's relationship with ASNE's members isn't entirely parasitical - he did bestow upon them some free advice. According to the AP, he recommended that news publishers "reach out" to their readers by focusing on mobile devices such as the iPad and Kindle. Oh, and on Android-based phones.
News publishers, Schmidt said, should be able to remain viable through a combination of advertising and subscriptions - the latter, perhaps, based on the "we'll let you in free, but just for a taste" model used by the Financial Times and currently being readied by The New York Times.
The AP also reported that although Schmidt said that Google would help to bring such models to fruition, his promise was bereft of specifics.
Schmidt was equally advisory and equally vague when he spoke at last year's ASNE conference. At that gathering said: "It's obvious to me that the majority of the circulation of a newspaper should be online, rather than printed. There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there's no distribution cost."
But at that gathering he also offered no specifics as to how news organizations might pay for the gathering, analyzing, writing, and editing of news, nor about how Google be of assistance.
Actual news-gatherers will understandably hope that any Google support will be more successful than Living Stories, an experiment in real-time news-mongering that Mountain View launched in December 2009 with The New York Times and The Washington Post. Living Stories was
Posted in Music and Media, 13th April 2010 06:02 GMT
http://newscri.be/link/1070483
Monday, 12 April 2010
IBM debuts new Power 7 iron this week
looks like IBM is getting ready to roll out some more Power7-based systems this week, as well as an update to its proprietary midrange operating system, formerly known as OS/400 and now called i for Business, or i for short.
The details are a bit thin, but resellers downstream from master distributor Arrow Electronics' Enterprise Computing Solutions group were briefed last Thursday on the long-expected i 7.1 operating system. While a tweaked version of the current OS/400 kicker, known as i 6.1, can run on three of the four the Power7-based servers announced in early February and kicking off an aggressive server upgrade cycle for 2010, the i 7.1 version is expected to more fully exploit the underlying hardware and get even higher performance than the i 6.1.1 release that is required on the Power7 can.
The new version of the IBM midrange OS is also expected to support native XML formats within the DB2 for i relational database that has been embedded in System/38 and AS/400 minis for more than thirty years now and also allow for encryption of databases. A new feature, to be called Open Access for RPG, will allow for programmers to circumvent the proprietary 5250 green-screen protocol that is used to drive application screens and create custom ones more suitable for handheld devices like iPhones without having to emulate the 5250 screen on the device or scrape those screens and rejigger them back on the server.
This Open Access for RPG feature may also include features to allow RPG applications to kick out XML documents for SOA-style hybrid applications. The i 7.1 OS is also expected to leverage the single-level storage architecture of the AS/400 to more fully and transparently exploit solid state disks used in Power System iron, moving hot data to flash and off disks without the intervention of system administrators as workloads change.The details are a bit thin, but resellers downstream from master distributor Arrow Electronics' Enterprise Computing Solutions group were briefed last Thursday on the long-expected i 7.1 operating system. While a tweaked version of the current OS/400 kicker, known as i 6.1, can run on three of the four the Power7-based servers announced in early February and kicking off an aggressive server upgrade cycle for 2010, the i 7.1 version is expected to more fully exploit the underlying hardware and get even higher performance than the i 6.1.1 release that is required on the Power7 can.
The new version of the IBM midrange OS is also expected to support native XML formats within the DB2 for i relational database that has been embedded in System/38 and AS/400 minis for more than thirty years now and also allow for encryption of databases. A new feature, to be called Open Access for RPG, will allow for programmers to circumvent the proprietary 5250 green-screen protocol that is used to drive application screens and create custom ones more suitable for handheld devices like iPhones without having to emulate the 5250 screen on the device or scrape those screens and rejigger them back on the server.
Exactly what IBM has in store for server announcements is less clear. Last week, Big Blue previewed some enhancements to its Smart Analytic System clusters - appliances aimed at making data warehouses and analytical engines out of mainframe, Power, and x64 clusters, which we are calling Smartie clusters - as well as saying that it would deliver a database cluster appliance based on the new Power 770 servers and the PureScale clustering extensions for its DB2 V9.8 database. That appliance, which we are calling Pizzazz clusters (a play on the acronym for PureScale Application System, or PSAS), will not be ready until June, which is presumably when DB2 V9.8 is coming out.
IBM has already launched its midrange Power 750 (four socket) and Power 770 and 780 (eight socket) servers, and an entry Power 720 and a high-end Power 795 are still expected this year. It is hard to say which one might come first next. Both could come this week. And of course, IBM also needs to get two-socket and four-socket blade servers into the field using the new Power7 chips, and midrange and high-end disk arrays with lots of brains and software features based on the same iron too. As El Reg already reported, IBM is expected to launched a kicker to the high-end DS8700 this week.
Whatever IBM is up to, there's a big Smarter Systems shindig online on April 15, which will have some of the top brass from IBM's Systems and Technology Group as well as the marketeers from its Power Systems and Storage Systems divisions on hand to talk about new servers, storage, virtualization, and management tools.
The two things that are not expected this week are the System z11 mainframes and a new version of AIX, both of which are slated for later this year. ®
Posted in Servers, 12th April 2010 06:48 GMT
http://newscri.be/link/1069320
How dire is the threat of nuclear terrorism?
While the administration of U. S. President Barack Obama has named nuclear terrorism a major threat to the United States, experts differ over the likelihood of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil.
The matter will see much debate next week, as Obama is expected to host the Global Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in a bid to find international consensus on how to secure vulnerable nuclear materials worldwide and keep them out of the hands of groups such as al-Qaeda.
Some experts paint the threat as dire, pointing out that the know-how to build a weapon and the materials are out there, and contending that that is why Obama is taking the possibility of attack very seriously.
Others downplay the threat, arguing that while an attack would be devastating, the odds of radicals obtaining nuclear materials, constructing a bomb and setting it off are low.
For one thing, building a deployable nuclear device is difficult even for states, in spite of access to universities, teams of scientists, huge facilities and large state budgets all aimed at creating a nuclear weapon. A terror organization not backed by a national government and without access to the full panoply of resources, would be hard pressed to launch a successful nuclear attack, some experts believe.
Purchasing a weapon of mass destruction would also pose a hurdle to militants, some experts said, as the United States spends hefty sums -- around 1 billion dollars per year -- to track and buy fissile material in a bid to keep it off the market.
Still, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told CNN that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a militant group such as al-Qaeda were the biggest threat to the United States.
"The biggest nightmare that many of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction," she said.
Clinton said al-Qaeda remained "unfortunately a very committed, clever, diabolical group of terrorists who are always looking for weaknesses and openings."
Indeed, the possibility of attack by a "dirty bomb" -- a crude radiological weapon -- came to light in 2002 after the arrest of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen accused of plotting an attack on the United States, although the case was dropped and Padilla was instead convicted of conspiring to kill people in an overseas jihad.
In November 2006, British intelligence warned that al-Qaeda was plotting to mount a nuclear attack against British cities by acquiring chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.
In June 2007, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation released the name Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah, the alleged al- Qaeda operative said to be in charge of developing plans to simultaneously launch attacks against several U.S. cities.
The Fissile Materials Working Group, an organization collaborating in a series of meetings designed to create consensus on controlling fissile materials, called nuclear terrorism the number one threat the international community faces. And with enough materials worldwide to build 120,000 nuclear bombs, the possibility that a terrorist network could buy or steal such material is far too high, as not all the world's nuclear materials are secure, the organization said in a statement.
Worldwide there are roughly 1,600 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 500 metric tons of plutonium stockpiled and in weapons. The majority of these materials are in weapons, but some are also used in civil applications, the group said.
The largest stockpiles are in Russia and the second largest is in the United States. The United Kingdom, France and China also have significant stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and the United Kingdom, France and Japan have considerable stockpiles of plutonium both for civil and military (excluding Japan) purposes, the group said.
There are now more than 400 commercial nuclear power reactors operating in 30 countries, which provide 15 percent of the world' s electricity, the group said.
Experts said militants need not break into a facility to obtain nuclear materials, as theft could be carried out by an employee of a facility that uses them.
Source:Xinhua
http://newscri.be/link/1069167The matter will see much debate next week, as Obama is expected to host the Global Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in a bid to find international consensus on how to secure vulnerable nuclear materials worldwide and keep them out of the hands of groups such as al-Qaeda.
Some experts paint the threat as dire, pointing out that the know-how to build a weapon and the materials are out there, and contending that that is why Obama is taking the possibility of attack very seriously.
Others downplay the threat, arguing that while an attack would be devastating, the odds of radicals obtaining nuclear materials, constructing a bomb and setting it off are low.
For one thing, building a deployable nuclear device is difficult even for states, in spite of access to universities, teams of scientists, huge facilities and large state budgets all aimed at creating a nuclear weapon. A terror organization not backed by a national government and without access to the full panoply of resources, would be hard pressed to launch a successful nuclear attack, some experts believe.
Purchasing a weapon of mass destruction would also pose a hurdle to militants, some experts said, as the United States spends hefty sums -- around 1 billion dollars per year -- to track and buy fissile material in a bid to keep it off the market.
Still, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told CNN that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a militant group such as al-Qaeda were the biggest threat to the United States.
"The biggest nightmare that many of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction," she said.
Clinton said al-Qaeda remained "unfortunately a very committed, clever, diabolical group of terrorists who are always looking for weaknesses and openings."
Indeed, the possibility of attack by a "dirty bomb" -- a crude radiological weapon -- came to light in 2002 after the arrest of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen accused of plotting an attack on the United States, although the case was dropped and Padilla was instead convicted of conspiring to kill people in an overseas jihad.
In November 2006, British intelligence warned that al-Qaeda was plotting to mount a nuclear attack against British cities by acquiring chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.
In June 2007, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation released the name Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah, the alleged al- Qaeda operative said to be in charge of developing plans to simultaneously launch attacks against several U.S. cities.
The Fissile Materials Working Group, an organization collaborating in a series of meetings designed to create consensus on controlling fissile materials, called nuclear terrorism the number one threat the international community faces. And with enough materials worldwide to build 120,000 nuclear bombs, the possibility that a terrorist network could buy or steal such material is far too high, as not all the world's nuclear materials are secure, the organization said in a statement.
Worldwide there are roughly 1,600 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 500 metric tons of plutonium stockpiled and in weapons. The majority of these materials are in weapons, but some are also used in civil applications, the group said.
The largest stockpiles are in Russia and the second largest is in the United States. The United Kingdom, France and China also have significant stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and the United Kingdom, France and Japan have considerable stockpiles of plutonium both for civil and military (excluding Japan) purposes, the group said.
There are now more than 400 commercial nuclear power reactors operating in 30 countries, which provide 15 percent of the world' s electricity, the group said.
Experts said militants need not break into a facility to obtain nuclear materials, as theft could be carried out by an employee of a facility that uses them.
Source:Xinhua
Google CEO says newspapers can make money online
WASHINGTON - Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told a group of editors Sunday that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the Internet.
 California Attorney General Jerry Brown, left, who is running for governor, shakes hands with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, right, during a talk to Google workers at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Friday, April 9, 2010. [Agencies] |
Media executives have accused Google of draining readers and advertising from newspapers' Web sites. But in a speech to open the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors, Schmidt said Google recognizes that newspapers are vital to democracy and provide a critical source of online content.
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Schmidt predicted that the news business will find a new model, based on a combination of advertising and subscription revenue. He said Google hopes to facilitate that, but he offered no specifics.
"We have a business model problem. We don't have a news problem," Schmidt said. He added: "We're all in this together."
Schmidt encouraged his audience to experiment with everything from social media to personalized content to engage readers.
"Technology allows you to talk directly to your users," he said.
He also said the news business needs to reach out to readers using mobile technology, delivering content through wireless devices such as Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle, Apple Inc.'s iPad and Google's own Android smart phones.
Reaction to Schmidt's speech was mixed.
Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of The Miami Herald, said that even though Google drives a lot of traffic to his newspaper's site, he remains unconvinced that Google sees newspapers as true partners. "We really are going in different directions," he said.
Still, Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of The Detroit News, said he was "heartened to hear the Internet geniuses talk about newspaper content as an essential ingredient."
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