New election low: distorting the fact-checking
The Sept. 11 memorial bells chimed with beautiful clarity Thursday, from Shanksville, Pa., to ground zero and beyond, a reminder of tragedy and our nation’s real enemies.
What a welcome respite, that serene sound, after days of presidential politics that roared and sputtered with a cacophony of distortion, innuendo and outright lies.
It got so bad the day before the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that FactCheck.org — one of the nonpartisan journalism websites heroically trying to strain truth amid all the sound and fury — had to put out an extraordinary news release.
It chastised John McCain’s campaign for — now get this — distorting FactCheck’s debunking of distortions.
News organizations and these admirable truth-squadding outfits, including PolitiFact.com, do not collaborate. But in independent news reports and commentaries this week, they seemed to reach a consensus to say “enough” to the McCain camp’s efforts to demonize Barack Obama.
I’m not saying that Obama hasn’t told a few whoppers — like suggesting McCain’s proposed corporate tax breaks are tailored specifically for oil companies or that his opponent seriously believes anyone making under $5 million is middle-class.
But it’s McCain and his foot soldiers who have really fouled the election airwaves in recent days, provoking the first flickerings of a backlash from the media.
Give credit to PolitiFact.com — an online endeavor operated by Florida’s St. Petersburg Times along with Congressional Quarterly — for unequivocally knocking down one of the McCainites’ biggest fabrications in recent days. You know, the one where Obama supposedly called Republican V.P. nominee Sarah Palin a pig.
For the half-dozen of you who haven’t heard about this kerfuffle: It began this week when Obama belittled McCain’s suggestion that McCain would bring change to Washington.
“That’s not change,” Obama told a responsive audience. “That’s just calling something — the same thing — something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.”
McCain operatives puffed themselves up with outrage about Obama’s “sexism.” Then they released a Web advertisement, disingenuously flashing text on the screen — “Barack Obama on: Sarah Palin” — while cutting to Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark.
As noted on PolitiFact, the ad gives no context for Obama’s remark — context that made it clear the Democrat was belittling McCain’s claim that he is an agent of change.
PolitiFact rated the McCain ad “Pants on Fire” (as in “liar, liar”) on its Truth-O-Meter. “If anyone’s doing any smearing,” the site concluded, “it’s the McCain campaign and its outrageous attempt to distort the facts.”
Outrageous, but just a warmup for the smarmy untruth the McCain camp uncorked next –that Obama voted in his home state of Illinois to foist detailed sex education on kindergartners.
Often in the past, journalists who were confronted with such a lie opted for on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand reporting. That allows one politician to launch a fabrication, while another tries, often in vain, to swat it down.
McClatchy Co. newspapers (publisher of the Sacramento Bee and other papers) and reporter Margaret Talev admirably cast aside the wishy-washy approach. Looking at Obama and the Illinois sex-ed legislation, Talev concluded that McCain’s charge was “deliberately misleading.”
“As a state senator in Illinois, Obama did vote for, but was not a sponsor of, legislation dealing with sex ed for grades K-12,” the reporter explained. “But the legislation allowed local school boards to teach ‘age-appropriate’ sex education, not comprehensive lessons to kindergartners.”
That probably would have meant, at most, classes to help the youngest children fend off sexual predators.
Talev flagged the McCain ad for “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
The truth-tellers in this campaign have not throttled McCain alone. PolitiFact, for example, has slapped Obama more than once, including for his false claim that McCain promised to continue the war in Iraq for 100 years. (McCain said the United States might need to keep military bases there for that long.)
It was the McCain team, however, that plumbed new depths this week by distorting a fact-checking outfit that had come to its aid.
It happened when FactCheck (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center) shot down rumors flying around the Internet about Alaska Gov. Palin.
FactCheck rejected claims that Palin cut special education in Alaska, endorsed Pat Buchanan for president and joined the secessionist-leaning Alaskan Independence Party. (Her husband, Todd, was an AIP member.)
The McCainites tried to attribute anonymous Internet falsehoods to one individual: Surprise! Barack Obama.
Superimposing FactCheck’s “completely false, or misleading” finding over a photo of Obama, the Republicans suggested the Democrat had trumped up the charges.
FactCheck, however, found “no evidence” tying Obama to the anonymous Internet attacks. The muckrakers announced Wednesday that McCain & Co. had been “less than honest.”
Obama blew off the lies with a shrug and a smile when he visited David Letterman this week. But I suspect that many Americans’ reaction comes closer to sadness. Or anger.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: 2008, action, AK, America, American, APP, att, bed, blogs, FF, first, Flash, hot, javascript, launch, looks, men, money, MOST, NEW, online, pic, SEX, sites, sports, TED, TOP, web
Planned Parenthood defends Obama, attacks McCain
Planned Parenthood Action Fund has a tough new ad responding to McCain’s attack on Obama’s support for some sex-ed for kindergartners. The ad defends Obama, and suggests McCain is indifferent to the plight of sexually abused children.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: 2008, action, AK, APP, att, bed, download, FF, Flash, game, Games, javascript, MAC, men, name, NEW, Phone, SEX, student, TED, test, TOP, youtube
Top 5 javascript frameworks ,Top 5 Interface Library
5) Yahoo! User Interface Library
The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.
Features
Two different types of components are available: Utilities and controls. The YUI utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh.
utilities available:
- Animation: Create “cinematic effects” on your pages by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements. These effects can be used to reinforce the user’s understanding of changes happening on the page.
- Browser History Manager: Developers of rich internet applications want bookmarks to target not just pages but page states and they want the browser’s back button to operate meaningfully within their application’s screens. Browser History Manager provides bookmarking and back button control in rich internet applications.
- Connection Manager: This utility library helps manage XMLHttpRequest (commonly referred to as AJAX) transactions in a cross-browser fashion, including integrated support for form posts, error handling and callbacks. Connection Manager also supports file uploading.
- DataSource Utility: DataSource provides an interface for retrieving data from arrays, XHR services, and custom functions with integrated caching and Connection Manager support.
- Dom Collection:The DOM Utility is an umbrella object comprising a variety of convenience methods for common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.
- Drag & Drop: Create draggable objects that can be picked up and dropped elsewhere on the page. You write code for the “interesting moments” that are triggered at each stage of the interaction (such as when a dragged object crosses over a target); the utility handles all the housekeeping and keeps things working smoothly in all supported browsers.
Controls available:
- AutoComplete: The AutoComplete Control allows you to streamline user interactions involving text-entry; the control provides suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality based on a variety of data-source formats and supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
- Button Control: The Button Control provides checkbox, radio button, submit and menu-button UI elements that are more impactful visually and more powerful programmatically than the browser’s built-in form widgets.
- Calendar: The Calendar Control is a graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
- Container: The Container family of controls supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog and SimpleDialog. The Module and Overlay controls provide a platform for implementing additional, customized DHTML windowing patterns.
- DataTable Control: DataTable leverages the semantic markup of the HTML table and enhances it with sorting, column-resizing, inline editing of data fields, and more.
- Logger: The YUI Logger provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the FireBug extension for Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console. Debug builds of YUI Library components are integrated with Logger to output messages for debugging implementations.
- Menu: Application-style fly-out menus require just a few lines of code with the Menu Control. Menus can be generated entirely in JavaScript or can be layered on top of semantic unordered lists.
Download and more information: here
4) Prototype
Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.
Features
- Easily deploy ajax applications: Besides simple requests, this module also deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling.
- DOM extending: adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $(’comments’).addClassName(’active’).show() to get the element with the ID ‘comments’, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).
- Utilizes JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is a light-weight and fast alternative to XML in Ajax requests
Download and more information here
3) Rico
Designed for building rich Internet applications.
Features
- Animation Effects: provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on
- Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.
- Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.
- AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.
Download and more information here
2) Qooxdoo
qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source multipurpose AJAX frameworks, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL. It includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.
Features
- Client detection: qooxdoo knows what browser is being used and makes this information available to you.
- Browser abstraction: qooxdoo includes a browser abstraction layer which tries to abstract all browser specifics to one common “standard”. This simplifies the real coding of countless objects by allowing you to focus on what you want and not “how to want it”. The browser abstraction layer comes with some basic functions often needed when creating real GUIs. For example, runtime styles or positions (in multiple relations: page, client and screen) of each element in your document.
- Advanced property implementation: qooxdoo supports “real” properties for objects. This means any class can define properties which the created instances should have. The addProperty handler also adds getter and setter functions. The only thing one needs to add – should you need it – is a modifier function.
- Event Management: qooxdoo comes with its own event interface. This includes event registration and deregistration functions.Furthermore there is the possibility to call the target function in any object context. (The default is the object which defines the event listener.) The event system normalizes differences between the browsers, includes support for mousewheel, doubleclick and other fancy stuff. qooxdoo also comes with an advanced capture feature which allows you to capture all events when a user drags something around for example.
Download and more information here
1) Dojo
Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”.
Features
- Multiple Points Of Entry: A fundamental concept in the design of Dojo is “multiple points of entry”. This term means that Dojo should work very hard to make sure that users should be able to start using Dojo at the level they are most comfortable with.
- Interpreter Independence: Dojo tries very hard to ensure that it’s possible to support at least the very core of the system on as many JavaScript enabled platforms as possible. This will allow Dojo to serve as a “standard library” for JavaScript programmers as they move between client-side, server-side, and desktop programming environments.
- Unifies several codebases: builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, and f(m)).
Download and more information here
Categories: top Tags: Dojo, frameworks, javascript, TOP, yahoo
Top 10 Hip-Hop Songs for 2008. Hip-Hop Songs Top ten
Top 10 Hip-Hop Songs for 2008. Hip-Hop Songs Top ten
10. G-Unit – “The Mechanic”
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© G-Unit They may have been coasting on rusty wheels lately, but 50 Cent and co prove that there’s plenty of gas left in their tank. This gritty joint is taken from G-Unit’s latest mixtape, Return of the Body Snatchers. |
9. Estelle feat. Kanye West – “American Boy”
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© Atlantic Sure his verse is unsurprisingly conceited, but Kanye’s double-edged contribution here makes for one highly addictive music. |
8. Sheek Louch – “Good Love”
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The message is positive and the tough-love expedition is delivered with a splash of confidence and a beat you can surely dance to. |
7. Lupe Fiasco – “Paris, Tokyo”
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© Atlantic Give Lupe credit for his uncanny sense of beat selection. This jazz-influenced soundtrack, courtesy of Soundtrakk, goes a long way in making Fiasco’s job on the mic a bit easier. |
6. 9th Wonder & Buckshot – “Go All Out”
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© Duck Down If you don’t concentrate too much on Buckshot’s lyrics, the slow-fast-slow pace of this 9th Wonder concoction makes it suitable for interval training. |
5. The Roots – “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)”
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© Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images The Roots frontman Black Thought has shown time and time again that he doesn’t know how to waste a verse. Every line in this 75-bar epic is delivered with a masterful sense of direction. |
4. Snoop Dogg – “Neva Hafta Worry”
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© Estevan Oriol/Geffen Wistful. Mature. Reflective. Just what you like to hear from Snoop Dogg every now and then. |
3. Rakim – “It’s Nothin’”
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© Henry Adaso There’s nothing that can be said about the great Rakim that hasn’t already been said. “It’s Nothin’” reaffirms that Ra can still kick it in an era of hip-hop different from the one he emerged from. |
2. The Roots feat. Peedi Peedi & Jazzy Jeff – “Get Busy”
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Last time Black Thought collaborated with fellow Philly MC Peedi Peedi (“Long Time,” from 2006’s Game Theory), magic happened. So, the Roots invited Peedi for another go-round on “Get Busy.” The song also enjoys the midas touch of DJ Jazzy Jeff. Also from Philly. |
1. Young Buck feat. Outlawz – “Driving Down the Freeway”
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© Interscope While the the debate over Buck’s separation from G-Unit continues, there’s no arguing who holds this week’s No.1 title. Buck and his cohorts enjoy a second consecutive tip to the top. |
Categories: top Tags: 2008, AK, America, American, APP, Dance, fast, FF, free, game, hot, javascript, pic, TED, test, TOP, Top 10, top ten, youtube
Top 10 downloads of the 2007
Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years
By Kelly Green Morrison and Karen Whitehouse, Download.com
When CNET Download.com opened its doors in 1996, it was home to 3,000 small shareware and freeware applications. Online software distribution was still in its infancy. What a difference a near-decade makes! Since 1996, we’ve watched the rise of instant messaging, digital audio and the MP3 format, file sharing, spyware and antispyware, and the open-source movement, just to name a few. And we’ve watched as online software distribution has gone from pipe dream to reality. These 10 applications best represent the top trends in downloading over the past decade.
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 ICQ
Today instant messengers are ubiquitous, but when ICQ (“I Seek You”) was first released in 1997, it was truly the first of its kind. Though competitors such as Yahoo Instant Messenger and AIM have since encroached on ICQ’s territory, this chat client remains enormously popular with international users, and it has remained one of Download.com’s most popular applications since its launch. |
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Who doesn’t remember this controversial file-sharing kingpin? Developed by Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning, Napster was a groundbreaking application that enabled users to share MP3s painlessly for the first time through a peer-to-peer network. Napster has since been sued, shuttered, and reborn as a subscription music service, but its legacy remains.
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