BP digitally alters press photo, confesses it's a fake

Amateurish use of Photoshop causes yet another BP embarrassment

The image on top is an altered image of BP's Houston command centerThe image on the bottom is the photo that BP released AFTER the alteration was uncovered by a blogger, who spotted it due to poor Photoshop handiwork.
It's been a long season of embarrassment for BP, but leaking oil isn't what the blogosphere is ripping the company for today. A site called Americablog spotted a press photo of BP's Houston command center, ostensibly taken on July 16. The image had quite visibly been Photoshopped — badly — to include more on-screen camera action.

Once word got out — the story was picked up by the Washington Post, where it was then spotted by the tech blog Gizmodo and others — BP 'fessed up. A spokesman admitted that the image was altered, said that a photographer had inserted shots where the TV screens were blank, and provided the original image.

"We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future," said the spokesman in an e-mail to the Washington Post.

Though the command center alteration doesn't seem to be an attempt to hide facts or confuse the public, it heightens skepticism for the company at a time when it should be trying to build trust. As the Americablog reporter John Aravosis wrote, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center."

As it happens, the command center shot isn't the end of the issue. Today, Aravosis published evidence of another altered press photo, this one depicting a meeting from the failed "top kill" maneuver. "How many other crisis response photos from BP have been faked?" wrote Aravosis. "Did they fake any videos?"

Please don't tell us that the people in those sucking-it-up-and-taking-responsibilty ads are actually paid models!

Catch up with Wilson (the author of this story) on Twitter at @wjrothman. Fourth-grade Photoshop skills required.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38333456/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/?gt1=43001

"How porn is warping a generation of men"

Today’s porn is not your father’s Playboy. Type porn into Google and you won’t see anything that looks like the old pinups; instead, you will be catapulted into a world of sexual cruelty and brutality where women are subject to body-punishing sex and called vile names.

It’s not surprising how little women really know about porn today, since most women avoid looking at these sites. Not true for the men I meet, especially the college-age and even high-school boys. They have grown up with porn and, for them, this has been their major form of sex education.

In porn, sex is not about making love. The feelings and emotions we normally associate with such an act — connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection — are missing, and in their place are those we normally associate with hate — fear, disgust, anger, loathing and contempt. In porn, the man “makes hate” to the woman, as each sex act is designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation. Whether it be choking her or violent intercourse, the goal of porn sex is to illustrate how much power he has over her. Yet the women are still portrayed as enjoying these scenes. It is images like these that are now commonplace all over the Internet and are shaping the way men think about sex, relationships and intimacy.

The size of the industry today is staggering. Though reliable numbers are hard to find, the global industry has been estimated to be worth around $96 billion in 2006, with the US market worth approximately $13 billion.

Each year, more than 13,000 films are released, and despite their modest budgets, pornography revenues rival those of all the major Hollywood studio films combined. According to Internet Filter Reviews, there are 420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn websites, and 68 million daily porn search engine requests.

A recent study from Optenet, an online security firm, found that approximately 37% of online pages contain pornographic content. Meanwhile, the number of porn sites increased 17% from last year.

Without a doubt, a key factor driving the growth of the porn market has been the development of technologies allowing users to buy and consume porn in private, without embarrassing trips to seedy stores or video rental shops. These technologies also enable pornography to be viewed anywhere, anytime; even the global cellphone market for porn is expected to reach $3.5 billion this year, according to the Britain-based Juniper Research.

This is a business with considerable political clout, with the capacity to lobby politicians, engage in expensive legal battles, and use public relations to influence public debate. Like the tobacco industry, this is not a simple matter of consumer choice; rather the business is increasingly able to deploy a sophisticated and well-resourced marketing machine, not just to push its wares but also to cast the industry’s image in a positive light. Indeed, one of the key myths that the industry promotes is that porn is harmless fun: that it is all about fantasy and play, and that we should not take it too seriously.

My interviews with college-age men tell a very different story. When I talk to men about their experiences with porn, it is clear that not all are affected in the same way, but affected they are. Remember, this is the generation that grew up with Internet porn, and some studies put the first age of viewing porn at 11 years. Unlike previous generations, these boys and men have an unlimited supply of hardcore porn 24 hours a day.

Many of the men I talk to believe that porn sex is what women want, and they become upset and angry when their sex partner, perhaps their wife, girlfriend or a one night hook-up, refuses to look or behave like their favorite porn star. The women often refuse to perform the sex acts the men have routinely enjoyed watching, and next to the screaming orgasms and sexual gymnastics of porn sex, real sex with real women starts to feel boring and bland.

One student told me that “I love porn and I try out the sex on my girlfriend, but she isn’t interested. I dumped the last girl I was with because she wanted to keep the sex straight. That’s not for me. If women don’t want to try different things, then I am not interested.”

These men have become so accustomed to porn sex that some are disappointed by their own sexual performance. When they compare themselves to Viagra-fortified actors, the guys I talk to often admit to feeling like sexual losers and worry that something is wrong with them. Adam grew up watching his father’s porn and felt that “porn taught me all I know about sex. My parents never mentioned the word sex at home, and sex ed in school was a . . . joke. I had this image of how great sex would be, both of us going at it for hours. So it was kind of a shock the way the real thing turned out . . .”

What troubles many of these men most is that they need to pull up the porn images in their head in order to be satisfied with their partner. They replay porn scenes in their minds, or think about having sex with their favorite porn star when they are with their partners. Dan was concerned about his sexual performance with women. He told me that “I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last scene I watched.” I asked him if he thought porn had in any way affected his sexuality. He said, “I don’t know. I started looking at porn before I had sex, so porn is pretty much how I learned about sex. It can be a kind of problem to think about porn as much as I do, especially when I’m with my girlfriend. It means I’m not really present with her. My head is somewhere else.”

Porn has become so violent and degrading that we ignore it at our peril. We are now bringing up a generation of boys on cruel, violent porn and given that images shape the way people think and behave, this is going to have a profound effect on their sexuality and on the culture as a whole. Porn use is one of the major public health issues of our time and one that needs to be tackled now before we bring up a new generation of boys on even harder images.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Parents face a daunting technical challenge to keep porn from their children. With education and growing awareness, we can only hope that eventually society will rebel, to make it socially unacceptable for there to be such easy access to porn, for men to spend so much time looking at it, for our ideas about sexuality to be so warped.

Gail Dines is the author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality” (Beacon Press), out this week.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/how_porn_is_warping_generation_of_dRhzBsl8CJFGS3ytfeMAqI/1#ixzz0tQQgMvs4

Source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/how_porn_is_warping_generation_of_dRhzBsl8CJFGS3ytfeMAqI

Who Is 'Oakland Riots'?

As the jury deliberates the fate of ex-BART cop Johannes Mehserle, and Oakland braces for potentially disastrous consequences, we've got an interesting little story for you.

About three weeks ago, a Twitter account called "oaklandriots" mysteriously popped up and quickly built a following of several hundred users. The page's design featured a policeman in riot gear, and the content of account -- news stories about potential violence following the trial -- suggested that the creator was ready to rumble.

One of the first stories featured on the Twitter page was an announcement posted on Indybay.org. "Courts are not where we win victories, streets are!" it said.


But it turns out that Mr. Oakland Riots would rather you stay off the streets -- and respect the courts. After all, he's a lawyer. Turns out, the account was created by a tech-savvy attorney from "deep east Oakland." Like most Oaklanders, Kevin Thomason is actually petrified by the the idea of riots -- but not for the usual reasons. He wants to make sure that, should mayhem hit the streets, he can get home in time to care for his dogs -- Sam (German Shepherd) and Blanca (Dogo Argentino).

"I have two dogs that are like my kids," Thomason, told SF Weekly. "I don't want them to get stuck without food and water."

Three weeks ago, Thomasson became seriously concerned about the riots and what it would mean for getting to and from work (and his dogs). He does the marketing for a small law firm in downtown San Francisco, and usually drives a motorcycle to work. He wanted to know immediately if it looked like rioters might shut down the routes to Oakland.

Ideally, he wanted to receive a text message alerting him about potential riots. When he couldn't figure out how to make that happen, he used his technology background to create an alert system for himself via Twitter. First he used the Google search function to collect all stories related to Oscar Grant or Johannes Mehserle or Oakland riots in an RSS feed.

"Then I took that feed, ran it through twitterfeed.com, and linked it to my Twitter account," he said. Presto. He had created a log of everything going on with the trial and possible riot situation.

Thomason had no intention of amassing any followers, but now that he has them, he wants to educate them about what riots really look like. (He witnessed the Oscar Grant riots in 2009, and believes the media failed to relay the extent of the damage.) If violence does erupt, he plans to feed and walk his dogs, then ride into the heart of the chaos to take photographs, which he will post on the feed.

"I just really hope that nothing happens," he said. "I love Oakland. Most of the people in Oakland are good, decent people. All a riot does is destroy Oakland's infrastructure and its reputation on a national stage."

Source: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/07/oakland_riots_twitter_account.php

South African doctor invents female condoms with 'teeth' to fight rape

South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.

"She looked at me and said, 'If only I had teeth down there,'" recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. "I promised her I'd do something to help people like her one day."

Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born.


Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man's penis during penetration, Ehlers said.

Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it -- a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

"It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it's on," she said. "If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter... however, it doesn't break the skin, and there's no danger of fluid exposure."

Ehlers said she sold her house and car to launch the project, and she planned to distribute 30,000 free devices under supervision during the World Cup period.



"I consulted engineers, gynecologists and psychologists to help in the design and make sure it was safe," she said.

After the trial period, they'll be available for about $2 a piece. She hopes the women will report back to her.

"The ideal situation would be for a woman to wear this when she's going out on some kind of blind date ... or to an area she's not comfortable with," she said.

The mother of two daughters said she visited prisons and talked to convicted rapists to find out whether such a device would have made them rethink their actions.

Some said it would have, Ehlers said.

Critics say the female condom is not a long-term solution and makes women vulnerable to more violence from men trapped by the device.

I's also a form of "enslavement," said Victoria Kajja, a fellow for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the east African country of Uganda. "The fears surrounding the victim, the act of wearing the condom in anticipation of being assaulted all represent enslavement that no woman should be subjected to."

Kajja said the device constantly reminds women of their vulnerability.

"It not only presents the victim with a false sense of security, but psychological trauma," she added. "It also does not help with the psychological problems that manifest after assaults."

However, its one advantage is it allows justice to be served, she said.

Various rights organizations that work in South Africa declined to comment, including Human Rights Watch and Care International.

South Africa has one of the highest rape rates in the world, Human Rights Watch says on its website. A 2009 report by the nation's Medical Research Council found that 28 percent of men surveyed had raped a woman or girl, with one in 20 saying they had raped in the past year, according to Human Rights Watch.

In most African countries, rape convictions are not common. Affected women don't get immediate access to medical care, and DNA tests to provide evidence are unaffordable.

"Women and girls who experience these violations are denied justice, factors that contribute to the normalization of rape and violence in South African society," Human Rights Watch says.

Women take drastic measures to prevent rape in South Africa, Ehlers said, with some wearing extra tight biker shorts and others inserting razor blades wrapped in sponges in their private parts.

Critics have accused her of developing a medieval device to fight rape.

"Yes, my device may be a medieval, but it's for a medieval deed that has been around for decades," she said. "I believe something's got to be done ... and this will make some men rethink before they assault a woman."

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/06/20/south.africa.female.condom/

David Livingstone letter deciphered at last

LONDON – The contents of a long-illegible letter written by famed 19th century explorer David Livingstone have finally been deciphered, a British university said Friday, nearly 140 years after he wrote of his despair at ever leaving Africa alive.

Researchers say that the letter — which required state of the art imaging techniques to decipher — helps round out the picture of a man traditionally cast as an intrepid Victorian hero, revealing the self-doubt that tormented the missionary-explorer in one of his darkest hours.

"I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only," Livingstone wrote to close friend Horace Waller in the newly revealed correspondence. "Doubtful if I live to see you again."

Livingstone was a national hero when he set off to find the source of the River Nile in 1866, but by the time he composed his four-page missive he was at the lowest point in his professional life, according to Debbie Harrison, a researcher at Birkbeck University of London.

The explorer was stuck in the village of Bambarre, in present-day Congo, in February of 1871. He was a long way off from his intended goal, most of his expedition either died or deserted him, and he was still suffering the effects of pneumonia, fever, and tropical eating ulcers — a nasty condition that consumes skin and flesh.

Adding insult to injury, Livingstone, a crusading abolitionist, had been forced to seek help from Arab slave traders while he waited for outside support. Bedridden for weeks on end, Livingstone had read the Bible several times over and started hallucinating.

"He'd gone slightly mad by this point, to be honest," Harrison said.

Back home, Livingstone's supporters were going mad with worry. No one had heard from him in years, and as Livingstone recovered, search parties set out into the interior to discover his fate. He was eventually located near the eastern shore of the massive Lake Tanganyika by journalist Henry Morton Stanley, whose memorable quip, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" immortalized their encounter.

But Livingstone refused to leave Africa, continuing his obsessive quest for the source of the continent's longest river. His warning to Waller was prescient: He finally succumbed to illness in May 1873, at Chitambo in what is now Zambia.

It's not clear how Livingstone's letter ever left the continent, although presumably Stanley took it back to Waller. The document disappeared from view for nearly a century before surfacing again at auction in 1966.

By then it was indecipherable. Out of paper and low on ink, Livingstone tore pages from books and newspapers and wrote with a pigment improvised from the seeds of a local berry. A century later, the makeshift ink had nearly faded to invisibility, a problem compounded by the brittle paper and Livingstone's chaotic handwriting.

A team of scientists and academics — including spectral imaging specialists from the United States — analyzed the fragile paper, carefully drawing out Livingstone's original text.

The university said the newly revealed letter projects an image at odds with the fearless hero depicted by Waller, who heavily sanitized Livingstone's writings before they were published posthumously.

"It's an opportunity to rewrite history," said Harrison of Birkbeck, which announced the find. "It's giving us a new way of looking at Livingstone. He got depressed, he did think he'd failed at times. But he never gave up ... It makes him human."

Harrison said that while the explorer was "very politically incorrect in his writings and his ramblings," his friend was "very concerned to maintain that image of Livingstone as a saintly martyr and to suppress anything that might have offended Victorians."

The letter published Friday is part of an 18-month project to produce a new — and unvarnished — edition of the diary Livingstone kept between 1870 and 1871.

___

Online: http://emelibrary.org/livingstoneletter/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_britain_livingstone_letter

Grad Sues Father for College Tuition and Wins

Arguing over money is nothing new for most families, especially when recent college graduates with massive student loans start looking to their parents for economic assistance in today's tough job market. And things can get tense when parents try to decide how much of that debt they're willing to help out with.

Most of the time, though, that decision isn't decreed in a court of law.

But that's exactly what happened when Dana Soderberg sued her father to force him to fulfill their agreement to pay for her education at Southern Connecticut State University.


Dana didn't take a lawsuit against her own father based on a mere promise, however—she had a legal document to back her up.

When Howard and Deborah Soderberg divorced in 2004, Howard—a property developer—agreed to pay for the education of their three children.

Apparently Dana foresaw that his word wouldn't be enough. In 2005, she convinced her father to sign a written contract that would require him to pay for her college tuition until she turned 25, as well as cover related expenses such as textbooks and car insurance. For her part, she agreed to apply for student loans that her father would cover if she received them.

But Howard stopped paying her tuition just before her senior year, forcing Dana to take out a $20,000 student loan (co-signed by her mother). After graduating as an art major, Dana filed a breach of contract lawsuit against her father with the aid of family attorney Renee C. Berman.

Representing himself in court, Howard contended that his daughter nullified their contract first when she—supposedly—didn't try hard enough to apply for student loans. He even filed a counterclaim alleging that she dropped a few classes and kept the money for herself. In Dana's defense, Berman pointed out that Dana was forced to drop some courses due to the continued tardiness of her father's tuition payments.

"They just don't have a relationship," Berman said about Dana and Howard. "It has to be weak to begin with if you enter into that agreement."

Berman also noted how unperturbed Dana's dad seemed throughout the trial. "Here his daughter's bringing him to court and there's no sadness, no remorse that his daughter was in this situation having to sue him."

After two-day trial, the judge ruled that Dana had indeed fulfilled her part of the contract and awarded her about $47,000 in damages, which covered the initial loan, interest and attorney fees.

If a daughter successfully suing her father for nearly $50,000 to recoup the cost of her college loans sounds unusual, Dana's attorney would be the first to agree. "Nothing that I've researched has shown any cases like this and hopefully there won't be any more, because it's a sad situation," Berman admitted.

As an art major-turned-teacher facing a grim economy (liberal arts majors' salaries' dropped 8.9 percent in the last year), Dana's legal victory should ease some of her monetary concerns. But most college grads can't turn to the legal system to relieve them of their student loan woes. Unlike other types of debt—such as mortgage or credit card—student loans aren't wiped away by declaring bankruptcy.

That means grads who can't afford to make ends meet can end up defaulting on their loans, which effectively ruins their credit. What's worse, defaulting means being turned over to a collection agency—and the fee that incurs can turn an already imposing amount of debt into downright terrifying numbers.

Dr. Michelle Bisutti, for instance, finished medical school in 2003 with $250,000 in student loans. Today, she owes $555,000—and $53,000 of that is just a fee for being turned over to a collection agency.

The New York Times recently shared the story of Cortney Munna, a college grad who was convinced her NYU degree was worth the approximately $97,000 in loans she took out to pay for it. Now almost a third of Munna's income goes to covering the federal and private loans she took out to nab that NYU degree.

While most college grads don't owe money in excess of $100,000 (10 percent of the 2007-08 class owes more than $40,000), at least two-thirds of those who complete a four-year program end up owing an average of $23,000 in student loans.

And that's bad news for people who are slowly finding out a college degree isn't necessarily as profitable as they have been led to believe.

Recent studies indicate that while having a college degree tends to ensure a higher salary than those with a high school diploma, the increase in pay scale isn't as large as society often assumes. According to a study conducted for Bloomberg Businessweek, most of the people who recoup the cost of their higher education and out-earn high school grads by over a million dollars (over the course of their lives) primarily come from elite private schools.

For the majority of Americans who can't afford an Ivy League education, there are plenty of state schools that offer competitive academics at much more reasonable prices. The University of North Carolina recently topped Kiplinger's "Best Value in Public Colleges" list, and UNC grads don't seem to be hit as hard by the student debt crisis. The average UNC grad ends up with $14,936 worth of debt—a full $8,000 less than the national average.

So, for those whose parents aren't legally bound to cover the cost of their education, there's still hope for earning back the money you invest in your education.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109991/college-grad-sues-dad-to-cover-student-debt?mod=edu-continuing_education