Category: Media

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Worth a Look: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Earth Intelligence, Media, Worth A Look
Home Page
Home Page

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is a collaboration of some of the world's top investigative reporters. Launched in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity, ICIJ globally extends the Center's style of watchdog journalism, working with 100 journalists in 50 countries to produce long-term, transnational investigations.

  1. Tobacco Underground Tobacco Underground

    The illicit trafficking of tobacco is a multibillion-dollar business today, fueling organized crime and corruption, robbing governments of needed tax money, and spurring addiction to a deadly product. Drawn by profits rivaling those of narcotics, smugglers move cigarettes by the billion, making tobacco the world's most widely smuggled legal substance.

  2. Collateral Damage Collateral Damage

    Post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and military aid and assistance had a huge impact in nations around the world — and at home. This award-winning project includes 20 articles from four continents.

  3. Divine Intervention, U.S. AIDS Policy Abroad Divine Intervention, U.S. AIDS Policy Abroad

    A year-long investigation of President Bush’s initiative to fight AIDS abroad finds that conservative ideology hinders its real benefits by insisting on abstinence-only programs over promoting condom use.

  4. Windfalls of War, U.S. Contractors in Afghanistan & Iraq Windfalls of War, U.S. Contractors in Afghanistan & Iraq

    A comprehensive examination of companies that won contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan — and of their campaign contributions, led by General Electric and Vinnell Corporation (the former Northrup Grumman).

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Journal: Baffling Patterns Form in Scientific Sandbox

Academia, Analysis, Earth Intelligence, Media, Methods & Process

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Brandon Keim

October 28, 2009

NOTE: Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

With nothing more than beads in a glass box, physicists have revealed yet another mysterious property of granular solids, now recognized by scientists as a unique state of matter, like solids or gases.

When the box was filled to the brim and rotated, the beads moved in patterns known from convection clouds — another system whose basic physical dynamics are only dimly understood.

The experiment, displayed in a video posted Monday to arXiv, was a variation on one performed 70 years ago by Japanese physicist Yositsi Oyama, who observed that beads of different sizes placed in a rotating circular drum would eventually self-sort by size.

That intriguing result set in motion the study of granular solids, which behave in ways that can’t be predicted with known physical laws. And though research has accelerated in the last decade, scientific understanding of granularity is roughly akin to that of fluid dynamics in the 18th century.

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Worth a Look: Reporters for a Free Press

Media, Worth A Look
Official Web Site
Official Web Site

Somewhat tongue in cheek, since none of the major figures actually try to report the truth in a useful context, we point today to The Reporters Committee for a Free Press, which is hosting an event this Sunday (11 October) in Washington, D.C. Most of these people are what are called “courtiers” whose livelihood depends on accepting all of the censorship that comes with access in Washington, D.C.

We note with interest that the Justices appear willing to allow the Executive to block photos of dead U.S. troops and tortured detainees, but feel strongly that photos of animal cruelty are totally necessary and in the public interest.  That pretty much sums up the state of our not so free press–a circus, not a service.

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Journal: 9-11 Truth Movement–Hanging Fire, Still Explosive

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Media
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

THE STORY BEHIND 9/11: HIT OR MYTH? TAKING ON THE TRUTHERS

By MAXINE SHEN August 28, 2009

Read Full Story Online First.  Then below Response (provided here because original is behind a Facebook Password Access page).:

The 9/11 Official Story Runs Out of Steam?

NY Post's Best
NY Post's Best

by Sander Hicks (pictured in insert by Post at right)

(NEW YORK) You know the world is really coming to an end when the New York Post lets this reporter, a leading 9/11 Truth investigator, be the lead source in their review of the new anti-Truther documentary.  The National Geographic Channel’s “9/11: Science and Conspiracy” debuts tonight, Monday, August 31. It is so pathetic, it should be scored a victory for the truth movement.

“9/11 Science and Conspiracy” is fundamentally-misconceived, half hearted, poorly planned, slapped together, badly written, mis-cas, and self-defeating. It contains four scientific “experiments” pulled off in the New Mexico desert by a bunch of pyrotechnic geeks, the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC).

Continue reading “Journal: 9-11 Truth Movement–Hanging Fire, Still Explosive”

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Journal: You Tube Pulls Hundreds Of Ron Paul Videos–Popular C-Span Junkie user channel suspended, 6400 videos gone

Media
Shame, Shame, Shame

If you post videos about people eating each other’s vomit or clips of plastic bimbos with their breasts hanging out then you’ll be left alone, but God forbid should anyone try to give the country a window on what’s actually happening in Congress and what their own Representatives are talking about – in that case your thought crimes will immediately be censored and removed.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

You Tube has expanded its zealous copyright crusade by suspending the popular C-Span Junkie user channel, and in doing so has pulled hundreds of viral Ron Paul videos, which are now completely dead.

The C-Span Junkie user channel, a non-partisan archive of short clips taken from C-Span broadcasts of events in the Congress and the Senate, has been the home of the vast majority of You Tube videos you have seen of Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others being confronted in Congress, as well as Ron Paul’s speeches on the House floor. A total of more than 6400 videos in all have been pulled, hundreds of which featured the Texan Congressman.

Whether or not C-Span itself requested that You Tube pull the channel is not known, but it is clearly in the public interest and constitutes fair use to show a clip less than 10 minutes in length of what the people who are supposedly our Representatives are saying in Congress on our behalf.

As we have highlighted before, You Tube arbitrarily suspends accounts based on flimsy copyright claims that aren’t even properly investigated.

Click on image above for full story.

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Journal: Diller calls free web content a ‘myth

Media
Full Story
Full Story

Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.

The media and technology executive, whose company runs the Ask.com search engine and the Match.com dating service, said it's “mythology” to view the Internet as a system of free communications.

“It is not free, and is not going to be,” Diller said Friday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena. In addition to IAC, he is chairman of Expedia, the online travel service, and Ticketmaster Entertainment.

Diller joined a group of media chiefs, from Liberty Media's John Malone to Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger, who are challenging the accepted model that consumers pay for Internet access and then content is free. Diller predicted there will be three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and transactions.

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Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment:

These guys are both desperate, and dinosaurs.  They are precisely analogous to the secret intelligence mandarins convinced that the American taxpayer will continue to pay for secret sources & methods that do not yield results (see story on “Losing the Long War.”

NEWSFLASH: Epoch A top-downunilateral “command & control” era is OVER.  Epoch B, bottom-up multinational social network collaboration and consensus content creation is here now.  These folks may have read the books (see our Reviews) such as Wealth of Networks, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, Army of Davids, Smart Mobs, Infinite Wealth, Revolutionary Wealth…the list grows every day, but they have not understood the point.  The cell phone, text messages, Rapid SMS aggregators, and “free” content sense-makers that monetize the back-endrather than the front end are the future.

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