fourteen furn: August 2012

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Everything changing for convention coverage

NEW YORK (AP) ? On the surface, television networks will cover the upcoming Republican and Democratic national conventions much like they have the past few election cycles ? generally an hour each night on the big broadcasters, more or less full time with the cable news networks.

Below the surface, things are dramatically different.

The Internet will give people more access to convention halls and a greater opportunity to become part of the political conversation. The popularity of social media and people experiencing big events on TV with tablets and smartphones has driven up TV ratings, most dramatically and recently for the Olympics, and television executives are curious to see if the trend continues in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C.

"It is possible that social media and the discourse we can see there can help transform the conventions into something more dynamic again, something that involves the public," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, PBS and C-SPAN are live streaming the convention online pretty much from start to finish, besides what is being offered on television. ABC News' online feed will mimic a television newscast for three hours prior to the network coming on the air. Bloomberg will stream economy-focused panel discussions that it holds with convention figures. PBS is stationing live webcams at the convention halls and surrounding areas. NBC News will host "hangouts" with some of its correspondents on Google Plus. C-SPAN's TV and online coverage is commentary-free.

The activity reverses a decades-long trend of television networks compressing coverage on the theory that the conventions have become stage-managed events largely free of news.

Yet they are important to candidates, offering the best filter-free way to reach the public along with the presidential debates. For three nights over two weeks in 2008, more than 40 million people watched convention speeches by candidates Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin on television.

Twitter and Facebook were barely a speck on the horizon in 2008. Their growing influence speaks directly to the reasons people follow big events: Asked by Pew two years ago why they keep up with the news, the largest percentage of Americans ? 72 percent ? said it was because they enjoy talking with friends and family about what is going on.

"Social media adds a new layer to this gigantic nonevent," said Jeff Jarvis, a media critic who writes the Buzzmachine.com blog. "It's becoming fascinating. We could all be there. We don't all want to be there but we can talk about it, and that can be more newsworthy than the actual event."

The Olympics were NBC's eye-opener to the power of social media. Others have their own stories. When Mitt Romney proposed a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry in a December debate, it was barely noticed at the debate hall, but exploded on Twitter and influenced ABC's decision to emphasize it in debate sum-up, said Marc Burstein, senior executive producer at ABC News in charge of convention coverage.

The challenge for networks comes in harnessing social media for effective use in their coverage.

"I can't say anybody has found the secret sauce yet but there's a lot of great experimenting going on," said Mark Lukasiewicz, producer in charge of NBC's convention coverage. "One of the fantastic things about this is you do get real-time feedback about what you do on the air."

NBC is trying several different approaches, including flashing Twitter messages at the bottom of its TV screen, setting up several hashtags to gather tweets and give both viewers and correspondents a destination to share thoughts, streaming speeches on Facebook and hiring a company to measure the sentiment of online commentary.

ABC, by contrast, is keeping its social media plans quiet in advance.

"You'd be a fool to ignore social media," Burstein said, "and we don't plan to do so."

Current TV is trying a bold new approach, devoting half of its screen to a real-time Twitter feed divided into dozens of categories. Viewers can see what mainstream media figures are tweeting, what politicos attached to Obama or Romney are saying, and even voters in key swing states. The tweets will take up more screen space than pictures from the convention or commentators like Al Gore.

On TV, Current producers choose the Twitter feeds that run on the air. Online, viewers can choose what feeds to follow.

"There's a swirl of conversation going on right now in the country, and TV has never found a way to tap into it," said David Bohrman, who runs Current.

The different online approaches also speak to the spirit of experimentation. NBC is offering an unadorned gavel-to-gavel feed because it is also providing a network summary (except for Wednesday, Sept. 5, when it is pre-empted by a football game) and full nights of coverage anchored by the left-leaning anchor team on MSNBC. CBS is preparing online specials for both directly before and after its television coverage, the latter anchored by Scott Pelley. PBS will have presidential historians on hand for analysis of convention speeches.

The online specials allow CBS a chance to reach an audience that doesn't normally follow the network regularly, said Susan Zirinsky, who is producing the network's coverage.

"It affords us an opportunity on exciting new platforms to spread our original reporting, our seasoned veterans and coverage that can give you a wide perspective," she said. "I think that's way cool."

Lead anchors on the network coverage include Pelley on CBS, Brian Williams on NBC, and Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos on ABC. The Republicans meet next week in Tampa, with the Democrats meeting the following week in Charlotte.

With the dynamic media landscape, the media's long-held role as agenda-setters is changing, too. The convention coverage will be much watched to see who can best take advantage of them and rule a world where tablets, smartphones and laptops are as much a part of many people's big-event experience as flat-screen TVs.

"I have five screens at my desk right now," Lukasiewicz said. "That's kind of where I max out."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/everything-changing-convention-coverage-125440214.html

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Curiosity adds color to Martian mountain

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

This mosaic was assembled from pictures taken by the Curiosity rover's navigation camera over several days (in black and white) as well as its Mastcam 34 camera (in color, with contrast enhanced to bring out detail). Gaps in the Martian sky have been filled based on the shading in existing imagery.

By Alan Boyle

Over the past few days, we've been tracking the assembly of a giant jigsaw puzzle from Mars, delivered piece by piece by NASA's Curiosity rover. Today, image-processing wizards are adding more of the key pieces to fill out the picture of the 3-mile-high mountain that the car-sized rover is facing.

Newly available full-color pieces of the puzzle show the mountain, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, as seen by Curiosity's Mastcam imaging system. Previous versions of the Martian panorama have been in black and white, or "colorized." What we're seeing now are Mount Sharp's true colors, tinged in the red dust of Mars.

In the image above, Ken Kremer, a New Jersey-based journalist, Ph.D research chemist and photographer, fits the color imagery inside a bigger black-and-white jigsaw puzzle that's been provided by the rover's navigation camera system. (We featured the Navcam panorama a couple of days ago, and a couple of puzzle pieces have been added since then.) The color contrast has been bumped up to bring out more of the detail on the mountaintop.

If you were to see the scene with the rover's eyes, the shades of color would be much more muted, due to the lighting conditions and the presence of dust in the Martian air.?In the image below, British educator-astronomer Stuart Atkinson's presentation of the puzzle pieces closer to the "true" colors.?

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Stuart Atkinson

This true-color view shows the Mastcam view of Mount Sharp's peak in color. The colors are more muted than they would be on Earth, due to lighting conditions.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Stuart Atkinson

An enhanced-color version of stitched-together Mastcam imagery provides a closer look at the mesas and buttes on the flanks of Mount Sharp.

These images provide just a taste of the view captured by the Curiosity: Each of the frames that make up the Mastcam mosaic measures 1,200 by 1,200 pixels, and as you can see in this sample frame, each full-size puzzle piece shows rock layering that you can't possibly make out in the larger overall puzzle pictures. The geologists and planetary scientists who are working on the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission will be poring over pictures like this for months to come, in order to plot the six-wheeled rover's route up the mountainside.

Eventually, Curiosity will be snapping full-color pictures at much closer range, and perhaps even capturing video of its exploits at 5 frames per second. But even now, the Mastcam views are giving Mars fans plenty to ooh and ahh over?? whether they're members of the Curiosity team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or watchful wizards of image processing from across the globe.

To get in on the wizardry, click on over to UnmannedSpaceflight.com, where folks such as Kremer and Atkinson regularly hang out. (Some of the forum's habitues already have filled in even more pieces of the puzzle.) For more about what Kremer's up to, check out KenKremer.com or the Adirondack Public Observatory's website. And to check in with Atkinson's activities, click on over to The Gale Gazette or The Road to Endeavour.

More visuals from Mars:

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Source: http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13439494-curiosity-adds-color-to-martian-peak?lite

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Wolstat: Blazers Assistant Jay Triano Named Canada's Coach

Wolstat: Blazers Assistant Jay Triano Named Canada's?Coach

Ryan Wolstat of the Toronto Sun reports on Twitter that new Portland Trail Blazers assistant coach Jay Triano has officially been named as the head coach of Canada's national basketball team by Canada Basketball's new GM, Los Angeles Lakers guard Steve Nash.
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Worst-kept secret, Triano officially back as Canada coach. Nash says Triano being coach was a requirement for his taking Canada job.
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Triano played for Canada from 1978 to 1988 and was the team's captain during the 1984 and 1988 Olympics.

In 1998, Triano was named Canada's head coach, a job he held until 2005.

Last week, Triano, 53, was added as an assistant to the staff of Blazers coach Terry Stotts. Triano had been serving in a scouting role for the Toronto Raptors, a team that he coached from 2008 until 2011.

-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter

Source: http://www.blazersedge.com/2012/8/23/3263087/wolstat-blazers-assistant-jay-triano-officially-named-canada

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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Toshiba / Samsung joint venture hit with lawsuit by LG over DVD+RW/RAM patents

LG Electronics has found itself at the center of quite a few patent lawsuits in recent years (both as a plaintiff and defendant), and it's now kicked yet another one off. As Bloomberg reports, LG has today filed suit against Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, alleging that the Toshiba / Samsung joint venture violated a number of patents related to DVD+RW and DVD-RAM technology. In the complaint, LG further alleges that TSST is knowingly infringing on the patents as they were previously licensed to Toshiba itself (and TSST as an affiliate company) as part of a deal that expired in 2010. LG is asking for a jury trial to sort things out, and demanding that TSSC pay "no less than a reasonable royalty" along with some unspecified damages. You can find the complaint in full at the link below.

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba / Samsung joint venture hit with lawsuit by LG over DVD+RW/RAM patents originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/4FDHSkUdlB0/

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