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Find out where to go, “Protest Do’s and Don’ts”, what to bring, how you can help if you are Occupying or at home, and other helpful information and media.
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The demonstration was an outgrowth of a New York event focused on what the protesters called social and economic inequality and corporate greed. It began at 8:30 a.m at Market Square Park with about 150 protesters — many carrying placards and chanting — who then marched to the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank Tower before moving on to City Hall.
The crowd grew to more than 200 by midmorning, according to a police officer at the scene.
“We have officially occupied Hermann Square Park,” a speaker told the crowd, referring to the reflecting pool area on the east side of City Hall. “We are not going anywhere until the people are heard.”
A movement of what exactly is the question many are asking. Change is on the plate for sure but those changes seem to vary depending on who you`re talking to.
The protesters were well prepared, with Houston Police Department escorts to block traffic, legal observers in fluorescent caps prepared to help if anything got out of line, and an Ustream channelbroadcasting the march for those who couldn’t make it in person.
The group marched first to theJ.P. Morgan Chase tower, directed by mounted police at every stop light and encouraged by honking downtown drivers. On the plaza outside of the skyscraper, the protesters yelled and complained about corporate greed, explaining instances in which it says the company spent dollars stolen from the people of the United States.
The dozen or so Chase employees sipping coffee outside of the glass doors didn’t seem phased by the hundreds of angry protesters.
We will add more as time goes on, so check back soon…
It looks like the tagline “Chris Brown album in stores everywhere on December 8th” was a bit of an overstatement - at least in his opinion. The R&B singer is accusing Walmart of intentionally not selling his new album, Grafitti. It all started two weeks ago when fans of the 20-year-old singer claimed that they were having difficulty finding the album at mainstream CD retailers. To investigate what he determined as “major retailers blackballing his album”, Brown visited a Walmart store in Wallingford, Connecticut last weekend and found that the store did not have his album on shelves and also did not have any copies of his CD in stock. Read the full story
Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.
Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter’s “firehose” of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.
Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called “Latest results” on the main search results page for a topic that’s guaranteed to produce results. Google used “Obama” as its example, and searches for that query place a new box that automatically scrolls through recent “real-time” results associated with that topic from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Google News, as well as new Web pages–such as this story–as they are created.
What’s less clear, however, is how useful this technology will be unless Google and others working on the problem can bring the same degree of relevance and trust to real-time results that it brings to regular search results. Google News can already confuse the casual user who wonders how and why those particular headlines were singled out, so how will relevancy work when a stream of news can knock a particularly authoritative result off your screen in seconds?
“It’s a very hard problem. Language understanding is still an unsolved problem,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and one of the key players in developing this product. “Not only do we have to understand what someone is saying, but we have to get to the deeper semantics of what is indeed true. We have to work through many issues. Truth ends up being a rather vague notion.”
In a way, this challenge is right up Google’s alley. The company is obsessed with speed when it comes to presenting results, agonizing over whether design changes that add tenths of seconds to page-loading times are worth the effort.
That’s why it’s a bit surprising that Google, the world’s leading search engine by a wide margin, hasn’t necessarily been a leader in this area. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google, admitted Monday the company could have moved more quickly to organize the vast amount of data produced by services such as Twitter. Anyone who has tried to use Twitter Search knows that real-time search at the moment is like the regular Internet was 10 years ago: a blast of information that’s impressive in its scope but overwhelming in its usefulness.
But what Google is trying to do is leapfrog the notion of Twitter as the vanguard of the real-time content explosion. Twitter is undeniably hot at the moment, but new Web pages are generated constantly, especially as traditional media companies move online. One need only to think back to this summer when news reports of Michael Jackson’s death sent millions online looking for confirmation, staggering services such as Google and Twitter under that load.
Google said it plans to display all kinds of Internet content in its “Latest news” box. Google didn’t pay Twitter an undisclosed amount of money for access to its feed for no reason, however; the speed at which real-time content is generated can be harnessed much easier if search providers such as Google have that information pushed to them, rather than having to pull it out of the Web itself.
That raises the question of just how Google will index and rank real-time results. The company needs to develop the real-time equivalent of PageRank, which evaluates Web pages by the number of other pages that are linking to that page. That’s something Google “is beginning to experiment with,” Mayer said in a question-and-answer session following Google’s presentation.
There’s definitely some way to do that, but it certainly is not a simple problem. Someone with 15,000 Twitter followers is not necessarily as authoritative in one area as they are in another, and Google will have to figure out some way to evaluate this information to make it truly useful.
Until then, however, news junkies can entertain themselves watching the Latest results section spin with updates on Tiger Woods’ latest paramour or the glacial progress of Congress’ attempt to pass health-care reform legislation.
In a roughly 10-second period Monday afternoon on Google’s Trends page, where it is testing out the real-time service, the feed for “Pearl Harbor Day”–the second most popular trend on the Internet Monday behind the aforementioned Tiger Woods–produced a tweet about a Pearl Harbor Day poem, a news story on people who were in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and a gentleman celebrating Ruby Diner’s 27th anniversary with a $2.70 Rubyburger. (He also happened to note in his tweet that it was Pearl Harbor Day.)
When it comes to digital embarrassment, celebs are apparently just stupid
By Helen A.S. Popkin
msnbc.com
updated 7:59 a.m. CT,Thurs., Dec . 3, 2009
Not since Prince Charles of Wales told then-mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles of his desire to be her feminine hygiene product has an adulterous celebrity been so humiliated by a telephone communiqué. We’re talking about Tiger Woods here, and the voice mail message he left to an alleged mistress, released earlier this week by Us Weekly. In review:
“Hey, it’s, uh, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone. My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you. If you can, please take your name off that and, um, and what do you call it just have it as a number on the voice mail, just have it as your telephone number. That’s it, OK. You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”
Undoubtedly by now you’ve heard about Tiger Woods’ car crash. Early reports had him in serious condition (which remember, is better than critical condition) after he apparently hit a fire hydrant and a tree while leaving his home in his SUV. The latest reports say he has been released from the hospital and is “fine.” But I’m not going to speak to any of that because that’s not what we do (you can find out more here). Read the full story
That social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.
It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren’t tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks. Read the full story
The operators of the Large Hadron Collider have successfully sent a beam of protons around the ring of the world’s largest particle collider.
It is the first time the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has been operational since September 2008, when an electrical connection in the collider’s magnets melted, causing a tonne of super-cooled liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the success on Twitter on Friday afternoon ET.
“We have completed the ring!” read the post on the social networking and microblogging site. Read the full story
There has been a lot of talk about a deal between Twitter and Microsoft. This morning it was reported that Microsoft would in fact announce to the world that a deal to integrate real-time status updates into bing has been reached not only with Twitter, but Facebook as well.
Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, has made official the integration of Twitter and Facebook into Bing. However, the Twitter integration has gone live first today, you can access it at Bing.com/Twitter, Facebook will follow later. Read the full story
Social media site explodes with toxic waste scandal
(Newser) – The Guardian has been slapped with an unprecedented gag order forbidding it from reporting on a question in the British parliament, as well as who asked the question and why it’s being gagged. The paper says constitutional rights are being infringed upon and it’s already suing—but meanwhile, the suppressed story is already the talk of Twitter. Three of this morning’s top trending topics relate to the energy company Trafigura allegedly dumping toxic waste in Africa, which the Guardian revealed last month. Read the full story
That was the double-barreled announcement Tuesday from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who thanked the site’s users for helping its online community cross the 300 million threshold. There are about 307 million people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
On Google’s homepage today, the search giant swapped out its normal logo for a UFO-themed Google doodle. The illustrated flying saucer carved out “Goog e” in the corn field, and a little green tractor finishes off the “l.” Read the full story
ABC News reported that a bomb threat forced Tea Party planners to evacuate their building last night:
On the eve of what organizers call a ‘Big Ol’ TEA Party’, the Washington, D.C., offices of FreedomWorks were evacuated by DC Metro police on Friday afternoon after the conservative organization reported to authorities at 3:42 pm ET that it had received a bomb threat. Read the full story
iTunes 9 was announced today at this year’s annual music event from Apple. Named the “It’s Only Rock and Roll event,” Apple didn’t disappoint with the return of Steve Jobs, upgraded (and cheaper) iPod Nanos and Shuffles, and plenty of new iPhone app demonstrations from third-party developers. As many predicted, iTunes 9 (Mac or Windows) was also on the agenda and it received a number of cool new feature enhancements to make navigation and syncing to your devices easier. iTunes 9 is available today, but has not yet been added to Apple’s software update service.
iTunes 9 has been cleaned up for easier navigation, redesigned with a new layout and a new black tabbed-menu system across the top of the iTunes Store interface. These new tabs replace the old left-side navigation to choose between categories like music, apps, movies, and podcasts. The layout for new content in the iTunes Store has been improved as well, with more browsable content in every category.
Along with the iTunes Store interface enhancements, Apple announced newly packaged digital content it referred to as “LPs.” According to Apple, buying the full album will now give you new content, kind of like extras on a DVD. You can show songs with lyrics, explore bonus content, and check out extra content created by the musicians themselves. Additionally, you get the same new content for movies, with extras, bonus content, chapter selection, character details, and more.
The way you interact with apps on the iPhone and the iPod Touch has also been improved. Now your home screen can be interacted with visually, right inside the iTunes window, letting you drag apps wherever you want before syncing to your device. Apps can be dragged from page to page and within pages, and when you’re done you can apply the changes to sync them to your device. iPhone syncing has been improved as well, with the ability to selectively sync specific artists or playlists, or sync your photos by specific albums or faces.
The new interface buttons across the top act as pull-down menus so you can drill down to the content you want.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)
Steve Jobs also announced that iTunes now offers Home Sharing. This new feature will let you share purchased songs across a home network. As long as all the computers on the network are on the same iTunes account, you can drag to copy songs to other computers. iTunes 9 also will automatically sync new purchases across your computers.
Overall, with new interface enhancements to the iTunes Store, a better way to organize apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch, and improvements to syncing, the new iTunes update offers plenty of improvements for iTunes users. As a free update, iTunes 9 is a no-brainer for those who use the program.
Today is Apple’s Rock and Roll keynote, where the company is expected to announce a range of new products and software upgrades. One of new products has leaked a little early though: iTunes 9.
While iTunes 9 is not yet downloadable, we were able to gaze over Apple’s promotional feature list. We’re still processing all of the new features, but here are the basic additions to the new version of Apple’s music software:
- Easier iTunes Store browsing and navigation (which was a sorely needed upgrade)
- Previews of any song, TV show, album, or movie from the Apple Store
- iTunes LP, which allows you to download a digital version of specific albums with animations, videos, and other visual items.
- iTunes Extras: It essentially turns movie downloads into true DVDs, with the video commentary, cast interviews, and photo galleries in-tacty
- Genius Mixes: It turns your playlists into something akin to a radio station. It knows what songs just go together.
- More detailed and improved syncing
- App management: Yes, you can finally manage your iPhone apps in a clean way. This is something we’ve been dying for.
As for the rumored integration with Facebook (), Twitter (), and Last.fm, we haven’t heard or seen anything about it, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Stay tuned for more.
A.Smith grew up from humble beginnings in Los Angeles, California. As a child A.Smith secluded himself from his peers. He found solace in video games. Somewhere along the way he discovered his talent for singing and has never looked back. In 1999 Smith joined a vocal group called Next Edition. After a few years of performing as a group A.Smith decided to branch out as a solo artist in 2004. During this time A.Smith went on hiatus to focus on developing his own style of music. In 2006 A.Smith signed with Brown Gyrlz Entertainment with a new vision for his music.
The new interface buttons across the top act as pull-down menus so you can drill down to the content you want.
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