Click makes photo BiG.

1:33:27 AM     leave/read comments []

Click makes photo BiG.

1:31:58 AM     leave/read comments []

OK, not.

The false consequences of sex. A congressional report criticizes "abstinence-only" programs, finding that most are giving children inaccurate information. [Salon.com]

12:23:00 AM    

Frank Rich in NYT: Anchorman, Get Your Gun. Xeni Jardin: This one really nails it. Frank Rich on the new red-state-panderin' mood washing over mainstream media at the moment. Some interesting thoughts on the role of blogs.

[N]etwork news still counts. The idea, largely but not exclusively fomented by the right, that TV news might somehow soon be supplanted by blogging as a mass medium may remain a populist fantasy until Americans are able to receive blogs by iPod. (At which point they become talk radio.) The dense text in the best blogs often requires as much of a reader's time and concentration as high-end print journalism, itself facing declining circulation. Since blogging doesn't generate big (if any) profits, there's no budget for its "citizen reporters" to reliably blanket catastrophic and far-flung breaking news. (There are no bloggers among the 36 journalists thus far killed in the Iraq war.) Bloggers can fact-check documents (as in the Rather case), opine, organize, talk back, leak early exit polls and publish multimedia outings of the seemingly endless supply of closeted gay Republican officials. But if bloggers are actually doing front-line reporting rather than commenting upon the news in a danger zone like Falluja, chances are that they are underwritten by a day job on the payroll of a major news organization.

Kevin Sites, the freelance TV cameraman who caught a marine shooting an apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque, is one such blogger. Mr. Sites is an embedded journalist currently in the employ of NBC News. To NBC's credit, it ran Mr. Sites's mid-November report, on a newscast in which Mr. Williams was then subbing for Mr. Brokaw, and handled it in exemplary fashion. Mr. Sites avoided any snap judgment pending the Marines' own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is "rife with uncertainty and confusion." But loud voices in red America, especially on blogs, wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites like freerepublic.com Mr. Sites was branded an "anti-war activist" (which he is not), a traitor and an "enemy combatant." Mr. Sites's own blog, touted by Mr. Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. That communal message board has since been shut down because of the death threats by other Americans against Mr. Sites.

Link (Thank you, J. Muller)

[Boing Boing]

Killing the messenger? How.....feudal.

12:19:15 AM     leave/read comments []

Giant pouched rats sniff out landmines. Mark Frauenfelder:

Tom sez: "Who needs an electronic nose to sniff out buried landmines? The Belgians prefer African giant pouched rats. And no, the rats do not get blown to bits."

The idea of using rats for the detection of landmines came up through a search for a cheap and efficient mine detector tool, which would be able to detect both metal and plastic landmines.

"Added bonus: the rats can detect tuberculosis from sputum samples!!" Link

[Boing Boing]

OK, you caught me, I got nothing this week.

12:15:30 AM     leave/read comments []

Google reveals Iraqi prison abuse photos on photosharing site. Xeni Jardin: The Associated Press found what appear to be new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US military personnel -- by Googling for them, then paying 29 cents a copy for reprints through on-line photo sharing service smugmug.com. The images appear to date from May 2003, which may make them the earliest evidence of such alleged abuse. Snip:

[The AP] reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished copies to get comment for this story.

These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo and others show debris and upturned furniture.

(...) The images were found through the online search engine Google. The same search today leads to the Smugmug.com Web page, which now prompts the user for a password. Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page. "I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said Smugmug spokesman Chris MacAskill. Before the site was password protected, the AP purchased reprints for 29 cents each.

Link to AP news story, and link to the smugmug.com photosharing site (the images referenced are no longer publicly accessible through that photo-sharing website). The AP report says:

Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page.

Any 1337 BoingBoing readers who sleuth the url for Google's cache of the smugmug gallery in question are invited to let us know.

[Boing Boing]

Sad. I am sad.

12:09:24 AM     leave/read comments []