Ninjas, News and Politics
Iran has suspended Reuters’ accreditation in Iran over a story the news agency ran on Iranian women practicing the art of ninjutsu.
At issue is wording in the Reuters report that called the women “ninja assassins” with the perceived implication that they’re training to protect the country from Western infidels.
In a statement, Reuters writes:
The story’s headline, “Thousands of female Ninjas train as Iran’s assassins”, was corrected to read “Three thousand women Ninjas train in Iran”.
Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance subsequently contacted the Reuters Tehran bureau chief about the video and its publication, as a result of which Reuters’ 11 personnel were told to hand back their press cards.
“We acknowledge this error occurred and regard it as a very serious matter. It was promptly corrected the same day it came to our attention,” said editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler.
Meantime, some of the women are suing Reuters for misrepresenting them.
“Reuters has introduced us as assassins to the whole world,” says one. ”The truth must come to light and everyone should know that we are only a group of athletes. We are supervised by the Ministry of Sports and the federation of martial arts.”
Background via The Atlantic.
Image: A Ninjutsu practitioner performs a split as members of various Ninjutsu schools showcase their skills to the media in a gym at Karaj, near Tehran. By Caren Firouz, via Reuters.
How a book is made today, using traditional printing methods – lovely short vignette from The Daily Telegraph. Also see how books were made over the ages, from the middle ages to today, and the fascinating Books: A Living History.
this is flaweless victory
ObscuraCam!
It’s well documented that authorities successfully review photos and videos created by activists and journalists from protests in order to circle back and arrest those who were present.
Now, the Guardian Project and Witness.org have released and Android app to do something about it.
It’s called ObscuraCam and it automagically locks in on people’s faces, processes the information and then pixelates the image of those you want “obscured”.
As Witness, a human rights advocacy network focusing on video use, describes it, ObscuraCam “aims to protect the identity of those filming and those being filmed, protect relevant metadata, and integrate human rights standards of consent and intent into mobile video. Rather than rely on post-production editing, it will allow near real-time annotation of consent, and anonymization. It will integrate human rights considerations and practices into the work flow of filming with a mobile device.”
ObscuraCam is part of a larger “SecureSmartCam” project that helps activists protect themselves and those that they are taking video and photos of with a growing suite of Open Source tools allow the camera owner to, for example, instantly delete all content on the phone if arrested.
Or, the User can add more metadata — such as geolocation, timestamp and current cell ID — to images and videos. Important data for activist networks that need to know where people producing media actually are.
The Guardian Project ObscuraCam with screencast | ObscuraCame in the Android Market | Source code from GitHub
Remember when debating…
Frustro is a display typeface inspired by an impossible object called the Penrose triangle.
The Life and Death of Words
Words, like plants and animals, fight for survival and an international group of scientists studying English, Spanish and Hebrew believe that many — in general — are dying off.
Their killer? Editors.
Via Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death (PDF):
The modern era of publishing, which is characterized by more strict editing procedures at publishing houses, computerized word editing and automatic spell-checking technology, shows a drastic increase in the death rate of words. Using visual inspection we verify most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10–20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words.
The Guardian clarifies this a bit by killing off some difficult words of their own and getting straight to the point about how words live and how words die:
But it is not only “defective” words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. The word “Roentgenogram”, for example, deriving from the discoverer of the x-ray, William Röntgen, was widely used for several decades in the 20th century, but, challenged by “x-ray” and “radiogram”, has now fallen out of use entirely. X-ray had beaten off its synonyms by 1980, speculate the academics, owing to its “efficient short word length” and since the English language is generally used for scientific publication. “Each of the words is competing to be a monopoly on who gets to be the name,” [Joel] Tenenbaum told the American Physical Society.
The phrase “the great war”, meanwhile, used for a period to describe the first world war, fell out of use around 1939 when another war of equal proportions hit the world.
Takeaway: Language is a giant Darwinian battle for linguistic supremacy. Choose yours selectively.
Video: MIT’s Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel illustrate what we can learn from analyzing 500 billion words via Google Books and its related Ngram Viewer which gives us the ability to enter words and phrases into a search engine in order to view their frequency over time.
this is fantastic
Supermarket scanner recognizes objects without barcodes
Toshiba Tec has now created the Object Recognition Scanner, which reads items without the use of barcodes.
(via Springwise)
lolol
