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divimg alt=""
src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/49712?ns=guardianpageName=UK+news%3A+They+drugged+her%2C+hid+her%2C+then+waited+to+claim+%26pound%3B50%2C000+rewardch=UK+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Shannon+Matthews+kidnap+%28News%29%2CCrime+-+UK+%28News%29%2CUK+newsc5=Unclassified%2CNot+commercially+usefulc6=Martin+Wainwrightc7=2008_12_05c8=1129198c9=articlec10=GUc11=UK+newsc12=Shannon+Matthews+kidnapc13=c14=h2=GU%2FUK+news%2FShannon+Matthews+kidnap"
width="1" height="1" //divpThe mother of Shannon Matthews was told she faced a substantial jail
term yesterday after she was found guilty of kidnapping her daughter, holding her drugged in a
relative's flat, then calling police and making a series of tearful TV appeals./ppKaren Matthews,
33, will be sentenced after Christmas with her co-defendant, Michael Donovan, 40, who was found
hiding with the nine-year-old in his flat 24 days after she failed to return from a school swimming
trip in Dewsbury in February./ppThey triggered a pound;3.2m police hunt, the largest operation by
West Yorkshire police since the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry./ppHaving acted out a plan which police
believe may have been inspired by the search for Madeleine McCann, both were found guilty at Leeds
crown court of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice./ppBefore sending
them down, Mr Justice McCombe told both that they faced "substantial custodial sentences".
/ppOutside court, neighbours and police condemned the cruelty and waste of resources caused by a
scam aimed at stealing pound;50,000 in reward money for finding Shannon. Julie Bushby, chair of the
residents and tenants association on the Moorside estate where Matthews lived with her partner,
Craig Meehan, said: "She's let us down. The tears she cried when she did those appeals on TV and
when she gave evidence in court were crocodile tears. As for Michael Donovan, he's just
weird."/ppDetective Superintendent Andy Brennan, who led the investigation, said: "Karen Matthews
is pure evil. She started deceiving those closest to her from the very moment that Shannon was
kidnapped. /pp"It is difficult to understand what type of mother would subject her own daughter to
such a wicked and evil crime. She is a manipulative individual who has demonstrated a remarkable
ability to lie. /pp"Michael Donovan is an accomplished liar. Following his arrest and during this
trial, he has attempted to portray himself as a weak-willed individual who only acted under duress.
We have never accepted this as an accurate reflection of his involvement in Shannon's
kidnapping."/ppThe pair will be sentenced after psychiatric and social services reports which are
likely to include events before the fake kidnap. The trial heard forensic evidence that Shannon had
been given the sedative temazepam and the travel sickness tablets Traveleeze, both used to drug her
at Donovan's flat, as early as May 2006 and on at least three occasions prior to the kidnap./ppFor
24 days, the hunt for Shannon Matthews was a repeat of the search for Madeleine McCann. Detectives
abandoned murder inquiries to join the team and hundreds of local people took part. /ppThen, to the
astonishment of even the hardened murder specialist heading the police inquiry, the woman at the
heart of it turned out to be the kidnap's organiser. "Get Karen down here!" yelled Donovan as
police dragged him from his flat in Batley Carr, a mile and a half from Shannon's home, after
finding the girl hidden under a bed. "We'd got a plan. We're sharing the money -
pound;50,000."/ppAt that moment, in Leeds, a mobile beeped for Brennan, who was explaining the lack
of progress to members of the police authority. "We've found Shannon," was the message from
Detective Constable Paul Kettlewell, one of five officers who broke down Donovan's door./pp"Where's
the body?" asked Brennan, a veteran of more than 20 murder inquiries./pp"No, we've found her alive
and we're on the way to the station," said Kettlewell./pp"It stopped me in my tracks," says
Brennan. "I had to get straight over to Dewsbury to see her physically to reassure myself." He
walked into a room where Shannon was playing with some toys, and she smiled and said hello. Brennan
recalls: "I smiled back and said hello myself. That was all that needed to be said. We'd rescued a
kidnapped, nine-year-old child and police work doesn't get any better."/ppDuring questioning, Karen
Matthews and Donovan came up with six contradictory explanations and were branded, respectively, a
"consummate liar" and a "pathetic inadequate" by QCs in court./pp"Basically, we've had two prolific
liars who are giving wildly different views. Which one do you believe?" says Brennan. "But in the
end, they've either got to knock down our evidence or blame one another. Blaming is what they
did."/ppDonovan's wild cries as he was bundled into a police van by officers - who found a
restraining leash in his flat and a set of "kidnap rules" to keep Shannon quiet - were soon borne
out by events. Shannon was offered the chance to see her mother after her rescue, but turned it
down. For her part, Karen told the officer who broke the good news to her: "I like the ringtone on
your mobile" - then went shopping./ppMatthews was arrested after breaking down during a routine car
trip with a police support officer, and babbling that she had asked Donovan, who is Meehan's uncle,
to look after Shannon as part of a plot to get away from his nephew, but "everything went
wrong"./ppIn court, the prosecuting counsel, Julian Goose QC, made effective use of film clips of
Karen Matthews' tearful TV appeals, which he contrasted with evidence from neighbours and police
liaison officers of her nonchalance when the media were not watching. In the middle of more than
three hours of evidence punctuated by sobs, Matthews was read details of how she laughed and joked
with her boyfriend immediately afterwards. It was, said Goose, a cruel charade./ppDonovan's
defence, Alan Conrad QC, was equally scathing, urging the jury to draw the obvious lesson from
Matthews' style in both the witness box and during the long search for her daughter. After the
court had watched a TV appeal where she begged a supposed abductor: "If anyone has got my daughter,
my beautiful princess daughter, let her come home", Conrad turned on her. "You can play for the
cameras and play for the court, can't you?" he said, to more tears./ppThere were major weaknesses
in the prosecution case: no forensic evidence to link Matthews to the flat where Shannon was
imprisoned, and police doubted that Donovan had the wit to carry out a kidnap. But there was
evidence the kidnappers desired a reward./ppDonovan spoke of planning to release Shannon and then
"find" her in Dewsbury market, and a copy of the Sun with the reward money edging up to
pound;50,000 was carefully folded in his flat./pp"I believe that they were going to hold out until
they got to pound;50,000," says Brennan. "And though there's no direct evidence that this case
mirrored the McCann one, you can see the possibility. Madeleine was still fresh in everyone's
minds. A young, pretty girl was being looked for in Portugal, and Shannon was a photogenic girl
missing here in Dewsbury. You can see why two and two was put together."/ppDonovan evaded the
police search for three weeks because of his web of aliases. It was an extended family member who
alerted the inquiry team, after Donovan rang him to ask if he had been interviewed by detectives.
"Yes," he said. "Well don't put them on to me," said Donovan. The man rang the police who were,
naturally, instantly suspicious./pp"We'd just got Donovan on our list, at 18th in the tally of
suspects, some of whom were family members but the vast majority not," says Brennan. "We'd have
called on him in the next few days but after that call, he became Friday's priority. Friday was
March 14, the day that Shannon was found."/ppIn court, Karen Matthews sprayed allegations at her
family, particularly Meehan's relations, suggesting that they were the real plotters. She was just
the chosen fall-guy, she claimed, because unlike most of them she had no criminal record and "would
get off lightly" if the scam failed./ppBrennan doesn't hide his scepticism, but says: "If any
evidence comes to light suggesting others are involved, we will pursue it. If we discover anything
more, we will deal with it, you can be sure." /ppThe story of Shannon Matthews may not be over
yet./ph2Stranger than fiction?/h2pWidespread rumours that an episode of the TV series Shameless
might have inspired the kidnap plot were dismissed by the head of the police inquiry, Det Supt Andy
Brennan. "I'd have picked up that straight away," he said. "I was born in Gorton in Manchester
where Shameless is made." /ppAn episode shown a month before Shannon disappeared involved the fake
kidnap of a young boy, Liam Gallagher, in an attempt to claim a pound;500,000 ransom. The child was
hidden a few doors away from his home, with a friend of his sister. Links between the programme,
which attracted 2.5 million viewers, never came up in evidence either during the trial or in
statements to police. Neither did the case of Madeleine McCann, which dominated headlines for
months before Shannon disappeared./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom:
10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/shannon-matthews-kidnap"Shannon Matthews
kidnap/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ukcrime"Crime/a/li/ul/diva
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of
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It’s been awhile since I put together a list of random stuff I’ve found on
the web and cool tips that have made their way into my inbox. So today I’ll try to make
amends with an extra-long list:
Forbes is offering up its take on the Cogent-Sprint peering fight story I broke a few weeks
ago.
It is worth a read.
Yahoo
may have sold Kelkoo off for $57 million, much less than the $126 million sale previously
reported. Damn, they spent $600 million buying France-based Kelkoo in 2004.
Sarah Tavel of Bessemer has some excellent analysis as to how, much in the same way Wal-Mart
and “category killers” like Staples have shuttered mom-and-pop stores, the same is
happening online. Her story,
“The Staples 2.0 Effect,” is one to bookmark.
My friend David Isenberg is ready to rock with the 2009 edition of F2C: Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, D.C., in March
2009.
3G be damned, the wireless industry is printing money with SMS. About $190 billion in 2008,
according to Portio
Research. That number is going to surge to $330 billion by 2013, they say.
There were 174 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names
(TLDs) at the end of the third quarter, up three percent over the second quarter and 19 percent
higher than the same quarter last year. More on the VeriSign web site.
The State of Spam and Internet Security Threats by Messagelabs is available here.
i've put together a promo video in FCE HD 3.5 and exported as an MPEG-4 and posted on my website
and would like people to stream it or download and watch later. many people are having trouble
viewing it, however, even after installing Quicktime. i would love some advice on what settings to
use for export that will:
-allow most people to watch it
-maintain good quality
-keep file size reasonable
Here's a cool story I came across today. How did the makers of Iron Man put together that
montage detailing the rise of Tony Stark, Obadiah Stane, and Stark Industries? Apparently they did
it at least in part by looking for nifty photos on the internet.
Jeremy Keith is "just" a web designer with a website and a Flickr account. This week, he posted a
fun account of how team Iron Man found one
of his Flickr photos -- a picture of his friend in NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building -- decided they
wanted to use it, and set about getting his permission. The best part: he ignored them for
weeks. But apparently they really liked the photo, and hounded him for it. The second best
part: they didn't know it was a photo taken in one of NASA's most famous facilities -- which is
obviously a great fit for the film's subject matter. They thought it was "just some warehouse or
something."
Anyway, good story, and I didn't see it around the movie blogs, so there you go. People do insane
things for internet fame, but sometimes it just happens by accident, after a fashion. Remember this
next time you put up a photo album and make it public.
You may recall, just about a year ago, there was suddenly a bunch of news over the possibility of
Canada introducing its a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071210/134616.shtml"own version/a of
the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To the surprise of both the entertainment
industry (who helped craft the law) and the politicians who were pushing it, the a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071213/105615.shtml"opposition/a to this law was incredibly
successful in getting its message out. Starting with calls on various blogs and Facebook groups,
kicked off by law professor Michael Geist, the issue became a big one throughout the media. The
politicians who promised the entertainment industry that they would pass this law tried to a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20071210/134616.shtml"delay/a the introduction, assuming that
the opposition, while loud, was thin and would fade away. They were wrong. The issue continued to
get attention, and when the law was finally a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20080612/1017381387.shtml"introduced/a, the opposition, across
the board, was widespread and strong. It wasn't just a fringe issue among "internet activists." It
was something that people from all over the economy saw as a fundamental issue worth fighting for.
br /br / But why? br /br / For years, copyright (and wider intellectual property) law has been
considered to be sort of inside baseball, something that only lawyers and the entertainment
industry cared about. But that's been changing. There are a variety of reasons for why this
happened and why copyright is considered a a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081111/0327252799.shtml"key issue/a for so many people in so
many parts of the economy. Michael Geist has now put together a film that tries to examine that
question. After first discussing how the issue became such a big deal, Geist interviews a number of
Canadian copyfighters to get a sense of iwhy/i copyright is an issue worth fighting about: center
embed src="http://blip.tv/play/AdzqIovtag" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500"
allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"/embed /center Not surprisingly, Geist has also
made the movie available in a variety of different formats so people can do what they want with it,
including remixing or re-editing it. There's the a href="http://blip.tv/file/1513205/"full
version/a (seen above), an a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTFEwXi1Pnk"annotated version/a,
a a href="http://dotsub.com/media/cdd2f6d7-d101-4142-b18c-3ad11ba79193"version for subtitling/a, or
you can download the full movie via BitTorrent at either a
href="http://www.mininova.org/tor/2054674"Mininova/a or a href="
http://www.vuze.com/details/2OQKU47Y56JSCE6RXQ2W5JNDSL3KBEM7.html"Vuze/a. Unless, of course, you
live somewhere where they claim that BitTorrent is evil and must be blocked.br /br /a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081203/1826493010.shtml"Permalink/a | a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081203/1826493010.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a
href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081203/1826493010op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br
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style="border: 0;" border="0"
src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1c14b7e79411174ec5ad8a1ed278b03fp=1"//a img
src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1c14b7e79411174ec5ad8a1ed278b03f" style="display:
none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a
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src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/474606566" height="1" width="1"/
Recently Evan Roth from GRL put together a short video with
his idol Jay-Z for (RED). The video, shown above is for a new Kanye West produced Jay-Z song for
RED & the Global Fund
to Fight AIDS in Africa. It launched earlier this week on World AIDS Day at red.msn.com.
The entire video is composed only of the letters from the word BROOKLYN, and as far as we know
it's the first rap video to ever be released with open source code.
Back in October, we heard about yet another a
href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081031/1107122702.shtml"peering dispute/a concerning
internet backbone connections, reminding us that these sorts of battles seem to http
://www.techdirt.com/articles/20010606/1639203.shtml"happen like a
href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030124/1021238.shtml"clockwork/a reminding everyone that
the internet is basically held together with a
href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051007/1633212_F.shtml"handshake/a agreements. br /br /
The details on the Cogent/Sprint fight quickly became muddy, as both sides spun great stories for
the media, each blaming each other. Sprint claimed that it wasn't actually a peering dispute at
all, as Cogent wasn't a "peer" since it had agreed to pay a fee to connect (typical peering
arrangements involve no payments -- just two networks agreeing to connect). Cogent claimed that
Sprint was going against an agreement, and the whole thing blew up in the media. Cogent played the
media card first, blaming Sprint, and it worked: Sprint came out looking like the bad guy, and
quickly reconnected the network. br /br / Now, Forbes has put together a great a
href="http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/12/01/cogent-sprint-regulation-tech-enter-cz_sw_1202cogent.html"
target="_new"detailed look at what actually happened/a. Apparently, Cogent had asked Sprint for a
peering agreement many years ago, but Sprint refused -- fearing that Cogent would send a lot more
traffic than Sprint, making it an unfair deal. After back and forth haggling, the two companies
agreed to a trial, where Cogent would pay Sprint nearly half a million dollars to test out a
connection. If Cogent did not send significantly more traffic, then the two would establish a
peering relationship. And, Cogent claims, it lived up to its end of the bargain. The amount of
traffic was about equal. Sprint, however, claimed that Cogent still didn't meet the terms of the
agreement, but for a totally different reason: complaining that Cogent didn't send ienough/i
traffic. This seems pretty questionable, as the supposed fear was that Cogent would send too much.
That's why Cogent claims Sprint never intended to set up a real peering arrangement in the first
place. br /br / The end result was a standoff, where Sprint just started billing Cogent, as per the
terms of the contract if the test period was a failure. Cogent then ignored the bills, pointing out
that the test wasn't a failure, and by the terms of the contract, the two had a peering arrangement
where it owed no money. After arguing about it in court, Sprint went a step further and
disconnected the links, which ended up backfiring. The whole thing is not yet resolved, but
apparently the two sides are talking, and say they're intent on working out a reasonable deal. No
matter what, as Forbes notes, it's an interesting look into the behind-the-scenes agreements that
keep the internet running./httpbr /br /a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081202/1938163000.shtml"Permalink/a | a
href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081202/1938163000.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a
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style="border: 0;" border="0"
src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=09c279868a2ec8915efb8e9ce8f036dbp=1"//a img
src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=09c279868a2ec8915efb8e9ce8f036db" style="display:
none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a
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p!-- google_ad_section_start --/p pimg class="float_right"
src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/12/custom_1228345833606_Picture_920.png" border="0"
width="477" height="857" /Believe it or not, there's no definitive ranking of media properties on
the web. a
href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003918425"The
latest list of top news sites/a put together by emEditor Publisher/em is ridiculously
newspaper-centric and makes use of Nielsen's notoriously erratic pageview numbers (rather than the
monthly visitor numbers that advertisers instead rely on)./p pNielsen's own news and information
rankings include miscellaneous weather and directory sites. Neither includes entertainment sites
such as People.com. So I've taken the media research outfit's latest audience numbers for the top
50 online properties-whether they're brands that began in print (gray), on television or radio
(dark gray) or are native to the internet (red). It's as good a guide as we have to the new media
landscape./p pConclusions? First of all, internet-born properties such as Yahoo! News, emThe
Huffington Post/em and Gawker Media-with 14 of the top 50 properties-do not dominate./p pSecond:
television-with 20 of the top 50-is holding its own. Sure, TV networks have a smaller share of the
online audience than they do of all media consumption; but they have a future./p pThird, no
surprise, newspapers and magazines are struggling. They have 16 in the top tier-but it's
astonishing that established print giants such as Cox Newspapers and Time Inc haven't yet squashed
the internet insurgents with which they compete in these rankings./p pimg class="float_left"
src="http://static.10gen.com/www.alleyinsider.com/~~/f?id=47a93c754b543772005f9d06" border="0"
alt="nickdenton.jpg" title="nickdenton.jpg" width="100" height="87" /emNick Denton is the CEO of
Gawker Media. This post is reprinted with his permission from a
href="http://nickdenton.org/5083616/a-2009-internet-media-plan"nickdenton.org.img
class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.58.1/t.gif" border="0" style="border:
0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px;
min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-family: trebuchet ms
,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; float: none; position: static; left: auto; top: auto; line-height:
normal; background-image: url(http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.58.1/theme/silver/palette.gif);
background-color: transparent; visibility: visible; width: 14px; height: 12px; background-position:
-1128px 0pt; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display:
inline;" //a/em/p pa
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pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/etc/" rel="tag"Etc./a, a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/videos/" rel="tag"Videos/a/pp align="center"a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-digital-drifters-show-off-sideways-skills-in-forza-motors/"img
vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1"
src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/forza2drifting2.jpg" alt="" //abr
/strongemsmallClick above to watch the Project Blackjack team tandem drift in Forza
2/small/em/strong/p pThis particular blogger happened to be searching for any news on Forza
Motorsport 3 (coming sometime in 2009!) when I came across this incredible video. It appears the
art of drifting has entered the digital realm, and a group of digital racers named 'Project
Blackjack" have put together an extensive video showcasing their talents. This is their seventh
film entitled "The Rising Storm", compiled completely from Forza 2 footage, many times with with
"camera cars" placed at certain location to capture the action. You can see tandem drifting on
tracks like Laguna Seca, Road Atlanta and even the Nurburgring. As you can imagine, figuring out
how to correctly film the drifting, getting two to five cars to make a good run together, and then
finally compiling the footage took quite a while. You can read more about how they did it on the a
href="http://forzamotorsport.net/news/forzacommunity/spotlight_project_blackjack.htm"Forza 2
blog/a, and check out the video a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-digital-drifters-show-off-sideways-skills-in-forza-motors/"after
the jump/a. /p p[Source: a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAKxsHe8l0g"YouTube/a via a
href="http://forzamotorsport.net/news/forzacommunity/spotlight_project_blackjack.htm"Forzamotorsport.net/a]/ppa
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-digital-drifters-show-off-sideways-skills-in-forza-motors/"
rel="bookmark"Continue reading emVIDEO: Digital drifters show off sideways skills in Forza
Motorsport 2/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-digital-drifters-show-off-sideways-skills-in-forza-motors/"VIDEO:
Digital drifters show off sideways skills in Forza Motorsport 2/a originally appeared on a
href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:58:00 EST. Please see our a
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Two of the biggest challenges facing our society — economy and climate
change — are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to solve one
problem without fixing the other. To eternal optimists, these challenges also offer opportunity
and we are seeing that with major investment interest in alternative energies from folks as
diverse as energy baron T. Boone Pickens to former Vice President Al Gore.
The cleantech movement is vital for our little corner of the world. If today’s broadband
pipes are the 21st century highway system, electric power is the engine that keeps the traffic
moving. From expensive data centers and large central offices, to routers and switches and all
the way down to our iPhones — every single device depends on electricity. If
we want our technical nirvana, we need to figure out ways to reduce our energy footprint.
We will explore some of these themes at Green:Net our one-day conference that
will be held in San Francisco’s Golden Gateway Club on March 24, 2009. At the conference we
will look at how software, the web and communication networks will help companies shape the
future of our electrical system, deliver transportation infrastructure, create social movements
and help reduce carbon emissions.
A team led by Katie Fehrenbacher, editor of our Earth2Tech
blog, has helped put together the agenda for this conference. Here are some of the topics we are
going to be exploring at the conference:
Dotcom to Greenboom
The Green Web Effect
Green Data Centers: Low Carbon Diets for Your Data Center
The New Networked Car
Power Grid 2.0
Among our scheduled keynote speakers are:
Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet, General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners and proponent
of Enernet, the energy network.
Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist
Other confirmed speakers include:
Saul Griffith – Co-founder of Makani Power, Squid Labs, Potenco and
Wattzon, and MacArthur Prize Winner
Jonathan Koomey – Professor, UC Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory
Dr. Albert Esser – VP of Data Center Infrastructure Group, Dell
Rob Aldrich – Principal, Energy Efficient Solutions, Cisco
Bill Vogel – CEO, Trilliant
Andy Tang – Director of Smart Web, PG&E
Sunil Sharan – Smart Grid Director, GE
Erin Carlson – Director, Yahoo for Good, Yahoo!
In days to come we will be updating the list of speakers and will update the conference web site
accordingly. The event will also include a startup launch
session, which will introduce 10 up and coming startups that are leveraging digital
technologies for green aims. Speakers from companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Cisco,
Mohr Davidow Ventures, Foundation Capital, JP Morgan, GE and Pacific Gas & Electric have also
been added to the event schedule.
Instructables has announced an amazing contest they're running with Sears. Called "The Craftsman
Workshop of the Future Contest," all you have to do to be eligible is post an Instructable that
uses tools! The grand prize winner will get a $20,000 Sears gift card (no, that's not a typo).
Ten runners up will each get a $500 gift card. Here are the basics of what they're looking for in
the entries:
Show us your skills and your passion for building in an amazing Instructable and be sure to
provide plenty of details and tips to help others out. We want to see what tools you use and how
you use them. We also want to see enough instruction that others can follow in your footsteps to
make it themselves.
There's also an additional "Show Your Space" sub-contest:
You can enter a slideshow or a video of your current workshop to show off what you've got OR
you can put together a rendering or a drawing of the workshop you wish you had! Be specific and
show us what you would want and where you would put it so that you could easily knock out all those
projects you've been dying to work on!
This sub-contest will be running for four weeks, and at the end of each week, they'll randomly
choose a winner from all entries. Winners can choose either a C3 Craftsman remote control car,
the Auto hammer, the Nextec Drill, or the C3 19.2 volt powered caulk gun.
We hope our faithful MAKE readers will go for the gold (and if you do, share some of the booty
with us!). The deadline for the main contest is Jan 4, so fire up those tools and get crackin'!
Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of
all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, the
editors of MAKE magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection
of home, craft, food and technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1
includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips,
tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else.
Highlights from the book:
* 336 pages, 6-5/8 x 9-3/8, same dimensions as The Best of
MAKE and MAKE magazine.
* Over 120 projects!
* Projects cover everything from food hacking and making home furnishings from junk to building
robots and CNC milling machines. And in-between you'll find projects on arts, crafts,
costume-making, tool tips, themed photo galleries, and tons more.
* There are also the results of the Community Choice contest winners (the best of Instructables
as voted by its members) and links to their projects.
* There are key user comments from the site throughout, called User Notes, and even a section in
the back for you to keep your own User Notes as you build the projects.
We tried to involve the Instructables community as much as possible in the creation of the book
(we were in direct communication with several hundred authors!). We hope the results do this
maker community proud. It was a thrill ride to be sure.
a
href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/incredible_instructablesc.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890"
/Read more/a | a
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/ Permalink/a | a
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/Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/instructables/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read
more articles in Instructables/a | a
href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F12%2Fincredible_instructablesc.htmltitle=Instructables%2FCraftsman%20contestbodytext=%20Instructables%20has%20announced%20an%20amazing%20contest%20they%26apos%3Bre%20running%20with%20Sears.%20Called%20%26quot%3BThe%20Craftsman%20Workshop%20of%20the%20Future%20Contest%2C%26quot%3B%20all%20you%20have%20to%20do%20to%20be%20eligible%20is%20post%20an%20Instructable%20that%20uses%20tools%21%20The%20grand%20prize%20winner%20will%20get...topic=tech_news"
/Digg this!/a
I've put together a website for a friend's business, http://www.proformcalgary.com/ it displays
fine on IE but when I looked at it on Safari (via http://www.browsrcamp.com/) an image, Bootcamp!,
in the left column was left-aligned and not centered (as displayed on IE). I am a begginer to HTML
and can't figure out how to resolve this. I've tried align="center" in the anchor tag and
everywhere else, and text-align: center in the css, but to no avail. If someone could help it would
be much appreciated! It's annoying the hell out of me and I can't find a solution online.
The html code is:
<td class="leftcolumn"><a href="contact.html"><img src="images/bootcamp.gif"
alt="Boot Camp!" width="130" height="179" border="0" style="margin-top: 40px;"></a>
The css is:
.leftcolumn {
background-color:#9e9e9e;
text-align:center;
}
Editor's Note: We welcome a new regular feature and contributor here today. The MediaShift
Innovation Spotlight will look in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or
multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at
major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs. Web journalist
extraordinaire Megan Taylor will be your guide to these regular bi-weekly spotlights.
What It Is
St. Petersburg Times' Neighborhood Watch is a
database application that tracks weekly house sales in Pinellas and Pasco counties, Florida.
Readers can search for home sales by county, ZIP code or neighborhood. Median price and sale
count trends are tracked and graphed at one year, six month, three month, and one month
intervals. On a neighborhood level, the site plots geographical data on Google Maps and suggests
listings to prospective buyers by ZIP code. The application also generates
neighborhood-by-neighborhood trend stories by querying the database. The Times plans to expand
Neighborhood Watch to cover more counties in the future.
Why It's Innovative
Every paper has to do these kinds of real estate stories once or twice a year: The housing market
has gone up, it's gone down, it stayed the same, etc. It's not big journalism, but it is
important to the community and it takes a lot of time and resources to put together individual
stories for different neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Watch not only provides weekly data on the housing market, but includes an instant
story for each neighborhood -- a computer program analyzes sale trends to generate a short
synopsis of a neighborhood's market.
This frees up real estate reporters to focus on bigger stories with context and depth. Given the
current state of the market, freeing up a reporter's time to work on big stories is becoming more
and more important.
The data is even appearing in the print St. Petersburg Times neighborhood sections; the paper has
begun to reverse publish information that originally appeared on the web.
Who's Behind It
Matt Waite, the St. Petersburg Times News Technologist, is the brains behind Neighborhood
Watch.
A Django evangelist and data hound, Waite worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times for
almost eight years. He is also the mastermind behind PolitiFact, a popular site where statements from
U.S. presidential candidates were fact-checked and rated (including the "Pants on Fire" logo for
worst offenders).
In 2004, Waite created maps to compare prices while he was house-hunting; those maps eventually
became the seed for Neighborhood Watch.
Waite explained that even though newspapers only have the time and resources to cover broad,
flashy stories, it was really the small, local details that interested readers. The same is true
in regards to real estate stories:
I give this speech at various journalism conferences about crime. There are two crimes I care
about: There's the crazy dude with the machete who hacks his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's head
off and mounts it to his car and waits for the police to show up; and my neighbor's lawn mower
getting stolen out of his garage.One of those you'll find in the pages of the newspaper,
guaranteed, the other is the opposite: you'll never, ever, in a million years read about my
neighbor's lawn mower getting stolen out of his garage in the pages of the St. Petersburg Times.
But I and my other neighbors were very interested when that happened. So the trick is to find a way
to deliver that kind of information to people in a compelling fashion that doesn't involve having
to pay a massive army of reporters to cover every single thing that moves. And the beauty of apps
like this is that you might not care, but the guy in the apartment next to yours may REALLY care.
But it didn't cost anything to provide that information to whoever might want it, at whatever scale
you want it at.
Listen to Waite talk about the origins of Neighborhood Watch:
Our pal Christopher Campbell has put together a pretty cool top ten list over at Spout Blog. Inspired by
the frenzy surrounding Paramore, who has been fortunate enough to land two songs on the Twilight
soundtrack, he's put together a list of one hit wonders made by the movies. As memorable (and
impossible to eradicate from easy listening stations) as Lookin' For Love, King of Wishful
Thinking, and Stay (I Missed You) are, they're really just that one song from that one movie -- you
know the one ... yeah, that movie! (By the way, the above three are from Urban Cowboy, Pretty
Woman, and Reality Bites, respectively.)
The best thing about these lists is the debate they inspire. I disagree that Chris Isaak's Wicked
Game fits the mold, as I think it's associated less with Wild at Heart than with a sandy and sexy
Helena Christensen. In coming up with nominations of our own, Scott Weinberg and I immediately
disagreed on whether Peter Cetera and Glory of Love from Karate Kid II qualified, or if Cetera
being in Chicago was an automatic pass. (I say no, Scott says yes.) But we did manage to nominate
Better Than Ezra's Circle of Friends from Empire Records, Gerard McMann's Cry Little Sister from
The Lost Boys, and Chris DeBurgh's Lady in Red from Working Girl. Campbell, with his vast
knowledge, could veto all three. What about you, readers? Give us some of your nominations, debate
the popularity of Chris Isaak, or at least help us decide whether Glory of Love qualifies.
pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/motorsports/" rel="tag"Motorsports/a, a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/videos/" rel="tag"Videos/a/pa
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-george-lucus-and-peter-brock-in-i-1-42-08-i/"img
vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1"
src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/lotus-23-lucas.jpg" alt="" //abr / div
align="center"emstrongsmallClick above to watch video a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-george-lucus-and-peter-brock-in-i-1-42-08-i/"after
the jump/a/small/strong/embr //div br /Before landmark films emAmerican Graffiti/em and emStar
Wars/em, George Lucas was just another film student at the University of Southern California.
During his time at USC, Lucas and 13 other film students put together an eight-minute-long film
called span style="font-style: italic;"1:42:08/span. The title contains no words, and the film has
no dialog. What does appear on the screen is racing legend Peter Brock as he speeds through Willow
Springs Raceway near LA. The movie's sound track? The sound of a Lotus 23 race car at full
throttle. a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-george-lucus-and-peter-brock-in-i-1-42-08-i/"Hit the
jump/a to see Lucas' 1966 short film for yourself. It's no Empire Strikes Back, but it's damn good
cinematography. If you aren't a big Lucas fan, there's still Peter Brock and a Lotus 23. It's a
win-win.br /br /[Source: a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsBZEYqBW5o"YouTube/a]pa
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-george-lucus-and-peter-brock-in-i-1-42-08-i/"
rel="bookmark"Continue reading emVIDEO: George Lucus and Peter Brock in i1:42:08/i/em/a/pp
style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/video-george-lucus-and-peter-brock-in-i-1-42-08-i/"VIDEO:
George Lucus and Peter Brock in i1:42:08/i/a originally appeared on a
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)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
It’s been awhile since I put together a list of random stuff I’ve found on
the web and cool tips that have made their way into my inbox. So today I’ll try to make
amends with an extra-long list:
Two of the biggest challenges facing our society — economy and climate
change — are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to solve one
problem without fixing the other. To eternal optimists, these challenges also offer opportunity
and we are seeing that with major investment interest in alternative energies from folks as
diverse as energy baron T. Boone Pickens to former Vice President Al Gore.
