Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live

By KATE MURPHY
Published: August 11, 2010

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program “MythBusters,” posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was “Now it’s off to work,” potential thieves knew he would not be at home. ...

... The Web site ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices. A person’s location is also revealed while using services like Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos. ...

... By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3905/) or Opanda IExif for Internet Explorer (opanda.com/en/iexif/), anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map. Moreover, since multimedia sites like Twitter and YouTube have user-friendly application programming interfaces, or A.P.I.’s, someone with a little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way. For example, they can search for those accompanied with text like “on vacation” or those taken in a specified neighborhood. ...

... Protecting your privacy is not just a matter of being aware and personally responsible, said Mr. Sommer, the researcher. A friend may take a geotagged photo at your house and post it. ...

Click the post's title to read the entire article at The New York Times.

Ringo at 70: 'I'm Not Hiding From It, You Know'

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: July 5, 2010

Ever since Ringo Starr vowed, on a well-known cover of Buck Owens’s hit “Act Naturally,” that he’d become “the biggest fool to ever hit the big time,” the renowned rock ’n’ roll drummer has done all right for himself. As a member of the Beatles and as a solo artist, Mr. Starr has sold more than a few records, won some Grammy Awards and even had a minor planet named for him. But on Wednesday Mr. Starr will reach a very special milestone: he turns 70 years old.

As you’d expect, he plans to mark the occasion with a little help from his friends, and anyone else he can round up. Finding himself in New York on the big day, he is celebrating with a private event in the morning at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square; Hard Rock International is honoring the day at locations around the world. (Details are at ringostarr.com.) ...

... Mr. Starr spoke recently with Dave Itzkoff about hitting the big seven-O and some other recent accomplishments. Here are excerpts from the conversation. ...

Q. How are you feeling about the number 70?

A. As far as I’m concerned, in my head, I’m 24. That’s just how it is. The number, yeah, it’s high. But I just felt I’ve got to celebrate it. I’m on my feet and I’m doing what I love to do, and I’m in a profession, as a musician, where we can go on for as long as we can go on. I’m not hiding from it, you know. ...

Q. You’re using the occasion of your birthday to give a message back to your fans.

A. Yes, I want to spread the word that at noon, wherever you are — in New York, in L.A., in Paris, in London — I just pray that you’ll put your fingers up and say, “Peace and love.” I did it two years ago, it was the first time, and I did it out of Chicago because I was on tour. This year, we’re playing Radio City, so we’re doing it in New York. In Japan there were little get-togethers and it went worldwide, so that was great

Q. Do you think we’ve got a good chance at getting peace and love this year?

A. I think the more we promote it, the more chance we have of getting it.

Click the photo for an enlargement. Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

At Yahoo, Using Searches to Steer News Coverage

By Jeremy W. Peters
Published July 4, 2010

Welcome to the era of the algorithm as editor.

For as long as hot lead has been used to make metal type, the model for generating news has been top-down: editors determined what information was important and then shared it with the masses.

But with the advent of technology that allows media companies to identify what kind of content readers want, that model is becoming inverted.

The latest and perhaps broadest effort yet in democratizing the news is under way at Yahoo, which on Tuesday will introduce a news blog that will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media. ...

... Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers. ...

... The Yahoo model, which flies in the face of a centuries-old approach to disseminating the news, is certain to be viewed suspiciously by journalism purists. ...

Click the post's title to read the complete article at The NY Times.

Whom Goes There?

May 4, 2010
By Philip B. Corbett

Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.)

We try, but we still haven’t quite mastered the whole who/whom situation.

At the risk of stating the obvious yet again, “who” is used as the subject of a relative clause; “whom” is used for an object.

For many speakers and writers, the common mistake is using “who” as an object, when traditional usage calls for “whom”: “I told her who I had invited.” Since this colloquial use of “who” is common in speech, it tends to slip into writing as well.

But for us, it seems that the opposite error is just as common — using “whom” when “who” is correct. This often occurs when an intervening attribution phrase throws us off track, or when the relative pronoun follows a preposition. Some recent examples, with help from a careful reader: ...

Click the post's title to read all of NY Times' article.

Who should I give the keys to? To whom should I give the keys?

The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain

In "The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain." Tara Parker-Rope, begins,

After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?

Parker-Rope then asks the book's author, Barbara Strach, several questions, among them:

Q. So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain?

Q. So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?

Q. What about activities like learning to play an instrument or learning a foreign language?

Q. What was the most surprising thing you learned about the middle-aged brain?

Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

Twenty Most Visited Nat'l Monuments - Slideshow

Click the post's title to see the slideshow

Big Brother Is Watching!

From an Amazon.com webpage, "Most popular Kindle hightlights:"

(click to enlarge)

And from that webpage's What's this? link:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.

The Most Highlighted of All Time passages have been highlighted by the most distinct customers. The Most Highlighted of All Time books are ranked based on a combination of number of highlighting customers and number of highlights. For Heavily Highlighted Recently passages and books the ranking is done in a similar fashion, but with a much greater emphasis on highlighting that was done recently over highlighting that was done a longer time ago.

Does the information gathered help Amazon sell more books? If so, how?

All the Picassos in the Cupboard

By Holland Carter
Published April 29, 2010

When in doubt, haul the Picassos out. There have already been several such haulings-out this year, and now comes the biggest of all, “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a display of nearly every scrap in the Met’s scrappy Picasso collection: 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics, along with 200 of the museum’s 400 prints. ...

... In the long run the museum is doing a smart thing by going public with its deficiencies. The results make for a disappointing exhibition, but they also serve as an open call to collectors to pony up with gifts, fill in those blanks, be another Gertrude Stein. If the ploy works, maybe the next time the museum hauls out its Picassos, it will have not just a popular hit, which this show is sure to be, but also a great event.

“Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” remains on view through Aug. 1 at the Met; metmuseum.org.

Click on the post's title to read the entire review at The New York Times.

Walking in Holden Caulfield's footsteps through Manhattan

Nearly 60 years after the publication of 'The Catcher in the Rye' you can still see much of the New York that he saw.

By David L. Ulin
April 24, 2010 | 4:02 p.m.

Reporting from New York

Holden Caulfield was a flâneur. That's not generally how we think of him, this archetype of adolescent alienation, this detester of phonies, this poor little lost boy whose voice — by turns knowing, childlike, cynical and bereft — drives J.D. Salinger's iconic 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." Yet, from the moment, about a quarter of the way through the book, he arrives by train at Manhattan's now-demolished original Pennsylvania Station building, he is our guide on one of the 20th century's great literary walking tours. ...

... You can walk Holden's Manhattan in one long afternoon, starting at Penn Station (or perhaps I should say the new Penn Station) and working your way north up Broadway through the theater district to the park. From there, you can check on the ducks in the lagoon, then wander over to the museums, before heading south, past the Central Park Zoo, and down through midtown to Grand Central Station. There are a few hidden landmarks, but for the most part, it's a city saunter, New York as New Yorkers know it, an insider's take on the streets. ...

Click the title to read the article, which includes a map and a slideshow.

Can't Stand to Sit Too Long? There's a Desk for That

Click the post's title to read the entire NY Times article.

Plan for Greener, Pedestrian-Friendly 34th Street

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: April 22, 2010

From the city that has banned cars from broad swaths of Broadway and put picnic tables in Times Square, here comes another great reshaping of New York’s streetscape.

The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street, the Midtown thoroughfare that is home to Macy’s — and some of the city’s most congested traffic.

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building.

The result would be a street effectively split in two.

On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.

Click on the post's title to read the entire article.

Making a BMW commercial

The commercial (From BMWBlog):




The camera platform:

Click on the post's title to read the story at BMWBlog.

A New $100 Bill

In a bid to make counterfeiting of the bill more difficult, a new $100 bill goes into circulation next February.

The coming bill's new security features include, according to The Wall Street Journal, "a blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the note that contains images of bells and 100s, which move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note, according to joint release from the agencies. Another security feature is the 'Bell in the Inkwell' image that changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it appear and disappear within the inkwell. "

The New $100 Note: Know Its Features. Know It's Real is an informative website with video and interactive features.

Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley

By Claire Cain Miller
Published April 16, 2010

CANDACE FLEMING’S résumé boasts a double major in industrial engineering and English from Stanford, an M.B.A. from Harvard, a management position at Hewlett-Packard and experience as president of a small software company.

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

Read the entire, interesting, informative article by clicking the post's title.

Drawn To A Larger Scale

By Alex Williams
Published April 14, 2010

HOW did a 32-year-old college dropout from the bayou of Louisiana, with no formal training in art — well, to be frank, no training at all — end up with a one-man show in a New York gallery and a client list that includes Robert Downey Jr. and Orlando Bloom?

For Scott Campbell, it all started at a tattoo studio in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. “I’m just the dirty kid who snuck in the back door,” said Mr. Campbell, who said that he got the bulk of his art education tattooing teenage gang members in San Francisco in the 1990s. ...

... Last April, Mr. Campbell’s solo show at OHWOW, a gallery in Miami, sold out, said Al Moran, its director. It was evidence that Mr. Campbell had the stature needed to carry a solo show on April 29 at the gallery’s new space in Manhattan, on Crosby Street — its first since moving to the city. “All sorts of people were coming” to the Miami show, Mr. Moran said. “Tattoo kids were coming in, and museums were coming in.”

Mr. Campbell said he is nervous to show in New York. But added, philosophically, “If the art world shuns me, I can still do tattoos.”

Scott Campbell's show in New York.

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The New York Times.

Richard Wagner's cycle has made its mark on comic books

David Ng, writing in the LA Times, says,

... Los Angeles Opera is producing the complete "Ring" for the first time beginning in May. Although this avant-garde staging isn't for neophytes, its emphasis on spectacle and visual effects (light sabers play an important role) could make it the ideal "Ring" for superhero geeks. ...

... Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" is regarded by many as an important genetic mother ship for today's fleet of action heroes. ...

... Even those who have never experienced Wagner's epic should have little trouble recognizing the names of some of its chief protagonists such as Wotan and Brünnhilde and her fellow Valkyries. That's partly because Wagner himself borrowed from a number of well-known myths and legends -- the 12th century Germanic poem the "Nibelungenlied" was his primary source. But it's also because pop culture has taken Wagner's creations over the years and liberally repurposed them into a multitude of hit incarnations.

Perhaps the most popular of the "Ring" characters are the Valkyries -- the airborne female warriors of the cycle's second opera, "Die Walküre," who carry slain soldiers from the battlefields to their final resting places in Valhalla. ...

... On TV, the most recognizable offspring of Wagner's Valkyries was the title character in the cult series "Xena: Warrior Princess." In the sixth and final season, which aired in 2000-2001, viewers learned that Xena ( Lucy Lawless) was once an evil Valkyrie who presided over a reign of terror in the show's pan-mythological universe. ...

Click on the post's title to read the entire article.

A promotion for LA Opera's production -- with audio and photos -- is here.

Alas, poor Shakespeare

Conspiracy theories about the authorship of his plays has gone mainstream.

By James Shapiro
April 11, 2010

Film director Roland Emmerich, whose last effort was the apocalyptic "2012," has begun shooting "Anonymous." It won't be another disaster movie -- except perhaps for English professors. According to Emmerich, the film is "about how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays," which, he says, turn out to have been written by the "Earl of Oxford." ...

... In a literary culture swamped by memoirs, many now take it for granted that most writing -- of the past no less than the present -- is confessional or at least experiential, and that you had to live it to describe it. (The Elizabethans would have found such notions bizarre.) By that logic, the Earl of Oxford, who in reality was captured by pirates and had three daughters, has a stronger claim to have written "Hamlet" and "King Lear" than a professional playwright from Stratford who never set sail and only had two daughters.

Since no external documents link the Earl of Oxford to the plays (in contrast to Shakespeare himself, for whom there is plenty of contemporary linking evidence), those convinced that he wrote them are stuck arguing, in circular fashion, that circumstantial evidence is to be found in the works, and that these works are necessarily autobiographical, a portrait of an aristocratic author's life, loves and thwarted political ambitions.

"Anonymous" capitalizes on the desire for a more exciting story than one in which a young man from the provinces moves to the big city and fashions out of old stories and a powerful imagination great plays and poems. And the democratization of knowledge on the Internet, a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, has been a boon for those who believe that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. It certainly hasn't helped that literary scholars have mostly dodged this fight, even as they've lost their cultural authority. ...

Click on the post's title to read the complete article at The Los Angeles Times.

Cowboys of the Silver Screen

On April 17, 2010, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Postal Service™ will issue a 44–cent, Cowboys of the Silver Screen commemorative stamp in four designs in a pane of 20 stamps and a booklet of 20 stamped postal cards, both designed by Carl T. Herrman of North Las Vegas, Nevada.

With the issuance of the Cowboys of the Silver Screen stamps, the U.S. Postal Service® honors four extraordinary performers who helped make the American Western a popular form of entertainment. Film stars from the silent era through the singing era are featured on the stamps: William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers.


Images and text courtesy of the USPS.


Hat tip to The Los Angeles Times, which made mention of The Autry National Center.

When Half a V-8 Is Enough

By RICHARD S. CHANG
Published: April 8, 2010

SCARSDALE, N.Y.


JACKIE SARIL’S nickname is Marisa Tomei, not that the two look much alike. For starters, Ms. Saril, who co-owns a public relations firm, has red hair. But her broad knowledge of vintage American cars reminds her friends of Mona Lisa Vito, Ms. Tomei’s caricature of a fast-talking, gum-chewing, surprisingly car-smart New Yorker in the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinny.” [more ...]

Henri Cartier-Bresson - The Modern Century

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: April 8, 2010

Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large — though surely not anywhere near large enough — retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday. ...

... “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century” runs from Sunday through June 28 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. It travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (July 24 to Oct. 3); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 30 to Jan. 30); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Feb. 19 to May 15).

Click on the post's title to read the entire article at The NY Times.

The exhibit will also appear in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta.