Friday, January 8, 2010

Almanacs “The Almanac - Jan. 8 - Post Chronicle” plus 4 more

Almanacs “The Almanac - Jan. 8 - Post Chronicle” plus 4 more

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The Almanac - Jan. 8 - Post Chronicle

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 05:17 AM PST

Today is Friday, Jan. 8, the eighth day of 2010 with 357 to follow.

The moon is waning. The morning stars are Saturn, Mercury and Mars. The evening stars are Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Capricorn. They include financier Nicholas Biddle in 1786; educator and hymn writer Lowell Mason ("Nearer My God To Thee") in 1792; James Longstreet, Confederate general in the Civil War, in 1821; publisher Frank Doubleday in 1862; reading teacher Evelyn Wood in 1909; actor Jose Ferrer in 1912; comic actor Larry Storch in 1923 (age 87); comedian Soupy Sales in 1926; newsman Charles Osgood in 1933 (age 77); rock 'n' roll legend Elvis Presley in 1935; singer Shirley Bassey in 1937 (age 73); Bob Eubanks in 1938 (age 72); actress Yvette Mimieux in 1942 (age 68); physicist and author Stephen Hawking in 1942 (age 68), and singer David Bowie in 1947 (age 63).

On this date in history:

In 1790, U.S. President George Washington gives the first State of the Union address.

In 1815, the forces of U.S. Gen. Andrew Jackson decisively defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans, the closing engagement of the War of 1812.

In 1867, the U.S. Congress approved legislation that, for the first time, allowed blacks to vote in the District of Columbia.

In 1916, Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, ending a disastrous invasion of the Ottoman Empire that resulted in 250,000 Allied casualties.

In 1976, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai died in Beijing.

In 1987, Kay Orr was inaugurated in Lincoln, Neb., as the nation's first woman Republican governor.

Also in 1987, the Dow Jones industrial average closed at more than 2,000 for the first time.

In 1991, one person was killed and 248 injured when a London commuter train crashed into the buffers at a station.

Also in 1991, Pan American World Airways filed for bankruptcy.

In 1993, thousands gathered at Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn., to purchase the first issue of a stamp honoring the "King of Rock 'n' Roll" on what would have been his 58th birthday.

In 1997, a report by University of Texas scientists concluded that exposure to a combination of chemicals was linked to Gulf War Syndrome, responsible for the various ailments reported by veterans of the 1991 conflict.

In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush signed a major education bill that mandated annual testing for students in grades 3-8 and called for tutors for poor schools. The bill is known as the No Child Left Behind Act.

In 2004, the U.S. Defense Department announced it had designated former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war.

In 2005, the U.S. military said an airstrike in Mosul, Iraq, hit the wrong target, demolishing a civilian home and killing 14 people.

In 2006, a fire swept through a one-story wooden orphanage in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and killed 13 disabled children. Seventy-one others escaped.

Also in 2006, a reported 12 U.S. military personnel were killed when a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Iraq.

In 2007, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced he would nationalize the nation's telecommunications and electric power industries controlled by U.S. companies.

Also in 2007, more than 17,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently since July, three times as many as in the first half of 2006, officials said.

In 2008, a series of winter tornadoes caused by record-breaking temperatures killed at least six people, destroyed houses and flooded roads in Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Also in 2008, U.S. troops opened a major offensive in Iraq to drive Sunni insurgents from strongholds in Diyala province.

In 2009, the death of a U.N. convoy truck driver on a humanitarian mission in the Gaza Strip where Israel and Hamas militants are engaged in a war prompted a suspension of food deliveries. Israel had ordered a three-hour bombing halt to allow Gazans to buy food and get medical help. The U.N. has called for a cease fire.

Also in 2009, signs of a worsening of the British economy led the Bank of England to cut a key interest rate to 1.5 percent, lowest level in the bank's 315-year history.

A thought for the day: William Feather said, "Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go." (c) UPI

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HDTV Almanac - CES 2010: Do We Need 3DTV Content? - HDTV Magazine

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 05:46 AM PST


As I mentioned yesterday, we will need a sufficient quantity of 3D content in order for 3D channels and 3D television sales to succeed, but only a limited amount is available at this point. But maybe that's not the obstacle that it would appear to be.

At the press conferences at CES on Wednesday, two companies — Toshiba and Samsung – both announced that they will be shipping LCD TVs this year that will be able to convert standard 2D content to 3D on the fly "in real time". While there are certainly plenty of visual cues that provide depth information in a 2D image, it still takes a lot of processing power and sophisticated computing algorithms to do the job. Is it practical to expect that a television controller can do an adequate job of this complex task?

Well, yesterday I went to find out for myself. I went to both the Toshiba and Samsung booths to view the converted 2D content first hand. And I'm surprised to report that my skepticism was erased by what I saw. In both cases, the 3D effects made a noticeable difference on the 2D source content. The depth effects were not overdone, and at no time did any part of the image extend out "in front" of the screen (minus-Z in 3D parlance), which resulted in a very attractive and watchable image.

This is a critical time for 3DTV. If companies come out with sets that produce images that don't look good, it could slow the adoption rate severely. A poor job of converting 2D to 3D in real time could be worse for the industry than no conversion at all. But in both cases, the demonstrations looked really good to me. In fact, I would prefer to watch the content in the "simulated" 3D than in the original 2D, because it somehow looked more natural.

The real time conversion of 2D to 3D content has enormnous implications for the 3DTV market, as it could remove the absence of 3D content as a barrier to adoption. And I might be buying a 3D-capable TV a lot sooner than I have been planning to this point.

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My view: how to cope in the post-Copenhagen era - Minnpost.com

Posted: 08 Jan 2010 06:15 AM PST

Introduction

Day 1: Climate change conference sets sail on uncertain seas of diplomacy

Day 2: Power dynamics, power players take center stage

Day 3: Business as usual? Poorer nations worrying about possibility of a 'back-room deal'

Day 4: Patience please! Media busy chasing 'hiccups' while waiting for initial negotiation phase to wrap up

Day 5: There's progress -- and pressure to produce -- as we await arrival of world's leaders

Day 6: Second week of climate change negotiations starts with a mix of drama and overreaction

Day 7: End Game time: more security, intense pressure, negotiation maneuvers and a crucial 48 hours

Day 8: Climate change summit: A slippery mess of snow and protesters

Day 9: With the COP15 clock ticking, world awaits results

Day 10: Two weeks of grueling debate ... and then the big letdown

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 09:18 PM PST

 On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2010 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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Weather continues to break records - StJoenews.net

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 09:18 PM PST

Yet another record should fall today as temperatures are forecast to dip to minus 17 degrees. The low for this date was minus 12, set in 1979.

And though it's forecast to be slightly colder today than Thursday's low of minus 13, the winds are easing up, keeping the wind chill between minus 25 and minus 35. The high today is expected to reach zero.

"That's getting into frostbite territory," said St. Joe Now Meteorologist Justin Gesling of the wind chill.

A weather pattern known as El Niño is bringing moisture into the area, which combined with the jet stream pushing cold air over the Midwest, causes heavy snowfall. Mr. Gesling said the prolonged cold snap is due in part to the 13 inches of snow on the ground that acts like a mirror, bouncing heat from the sun into the sky.

According to the National Weather Service, the warmest winter for St. Joseph in recent decades was in 1991-1992, when the average temperature was 36.3 degrees. The coldest winter was in 1978-1979, with an average of 19 degrees. The coldest temperature recorded in St. Joseph was on Jan. 12, 1974, when the mercury dipped to minus 25. Temperatures that cold would create wind chills of 50 degrees below zero with gusts as strong as they were Thursday.

Those who read the "Farmers' Almanac," which predicted a "frigid" winter, might be saying "I told you so" to those who scoff at the publication. Jeffrey Bradley, a geography instructor at Northwest Missouri State University who has an interest in climatology and teaches a meteorology course, said he doesn't use the almanac in his classes, but students do ask about it.

"Some people look at it like it's folklore or an old wives' tale," he said. "It's more scientific than that."

Mr. Bradley said the almanac is based on historical climate records and cycles, and it can be "right on the money," but said it can have off years too.

According to the Almanac's Web site, the weather predictions are created up to two years in advance using a "top-secret mathematical and astronomical formula, taking sunspot activity, tidal action, the position of the planet, and many other factors into consideration."

Jimmy Myers can be reached

at jimmym@npgco.com.

***

One more snow day

The St. Joseph School District has canceled classes today, due to severe weather conditions.

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