Almost seven years ago in Lima, Peruvian Luis Fernandez arrived home after a long day of high stakes gambling. He felt like he was the worst person in the world when his daughter asked him to take her out to eat grill chicken at one of his favorite places and he had nothing to give her. Fernandez had spent his whole salary.
“Daddy, do not worry if you don’t have money now,” Fernandez’s daughter said, “you can take me out another day.”
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As the immigrant population on Long Island has increased over the past two decades, so has racial tension and hate crimes.
In 2004, 15 cases of hate crimes were reported against Latinos in Suffolk County, according to statistics of the Hate Crimes Unit of the Suffolk Police Department. In the 4 years that followed, including 2008, the complaints were reduced to slightly less than half. In 2009, 12 crimes were reported. And this year, until September, 10 were the alleged crimes.
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Almost fifteen years ago in Lisbon, Portugal, a seven year-old child sat in front of the television set. He was watching “The Lion King”, a Disney movie, for hours. It was the seventh time he rewound the tape of his new Blaupunkt VCR.
“Diogo, where are you?” his mother shouted from another room.
“I’m here,” he said.
“It’s time to go to sleep. It’s almost 8.00 pm.”
“Please, let me finish the movie. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”
“Ok, I’ll give you half an hour more. That’s it.”
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After one year away from home, I couldn’t wait to see my family and friends again. Finally, Christmas time had arrived and I was going home. Leaving the cold of Long Island was a Christmas gift within itself.
It was a long, eight-hour flight, but thanks to the man next to me, I was able to sleep because he gave me his window seat.
When I arrived in Spain my friends were excited to see me after a long year away.
Nothing changed, they welcomed me home with open arms and tears of joy.
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When it comes to recycling, Mark Roytman, 21, has better things to do. Roytman represents the battle that Stony Brook University, New York, is fighting against the reduction of its environmental footprint on campus.
“I never recycle, not at all”, said Roytman, a biology student at Stony Brook. “Part of it is because I’m too lazy and also because I don’t see a reason to do it.”
Across the nation, universities such as Stony Brook are trying to trim down the amount of waste that they produce each year. In its efforts to reduce solid waste output, Stony Brook faces an uphill challenge due to the large student population, student apathy, a large infrastructure and surrounding community resistance.
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This seems to be the end of a class that has taught me a lot of things about the news business. I didn’t have an idea about how the news industry works until we started the class at the end of August. Although the first week I was freaking out because I didn’t understand some of the things that Prof. Selvin was saying, I soon started to get familiar with the terms she used.
Furthermore, I found this class very interesting and creative. The blogs and the business news were the best. The only thing I didn’t really enjoy was the amount of presentations. I would have liked for Prof. Selvin to have lectured more instead of having so many presentations.
In this class, I have learned that because of the information society in which we are immersed, it’s evident that the news organizations have to adapt faster than other industries to the new technologies in order to not die out.
I think it is sad that print is disappearing. Even though I am aware that computers and other devices are really useful and necessary in our daily lives, I love books. I get really tired of being in front of a computer the whole day and it gives me a headache.
Finally, I would like to add it that has been a nice experience taking this class and I hope to have time next semester to keep posting on this blog.
Happy Christmas!
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I found an article in the New York Times in which Apple is planning to buy Lala,
a four-year-old start-up based in Palo Alto, California.
Lala offers users to play the music they own from the Web. This is a way to store and play digital music.
According to Lala’s engineers, Lala examines the hard drives of its users and allows them to have their musical library online that matches the user’s collection. It is an simple and free way for people to get their music in the Internet.
In this way, people will be able to sync their iPods from any Internet source without constantly downloading the music to their computers.
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The entire week, I have been reading many articles regarding the Comcast-NBC Universal deal. They talk about how this merger represents a danger for our democracy. I have found this article written by Marvin Ammori, a Law Professor and Advocate in Cyberlaw, who explains how these kinds of company consolidations may hurt our democracy in many ways.
As we all know, Comcast is the biggest owner of cable systems in the country. With this merger, it will hold the most important cable television assets in the world and also it will get NBC, which is a broadcast network.
Furthermore, Comcast has always had interest in owning content. Consequently, thanks to the deal NBC Universal would support Comcast digital media presence in the market. With this deal it will combine content and distribution, which is called vertical integration.
According to Ammori, putting so much power in the hands of one company is bad for democracy because of three main reasons (which I completely agree with):
The first reason is how these giant media companies can censor any idea that they oppose by not covering them or covering them unfairly. This reason clearly affects the public’s right to know. Media companies are supposed to present information to the audience and then, the audience makes its own decision.
The second reason is that this consolidation may affect gravely independent networks. These independent networks claim that Comcast is going to discriminate against them and therefore obliging to renounce some ownership of their company. The ideal structure would be cable channels owned by many independent networks.
The third reason is that the merger will support one-way communications over open two-way communications. Comcast has less incentive to support wide open two-way communications available on an open Internet. So, the audience won’t be able to have different views of the same issue.
Finally, for these reasons, many associations like the Free Press want to block this merger, which endangers our democracy. I am not sure if they may block it, but maybe Obama or the FCC may do it.
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Last week, the government of Spain declared that will require service providers to have broadband with speeds of at least 1 Mbps at regulated rates to residents living anywhere in the country by 2011.
The Spanish telecommunications minister, Miguel Sebastián, declared on Tuesday , in the “Foro Internacional de Contenidos Digitales (Ficod),” that broadband would be added to the country’s so-called “universal service,” which guarantees to citizens of the country an affordable price on telephone service.
The service providers that get universal service funds will have to include broadband services as part of their services offered to any home in the country.
Finland has announced a similar plan, which offers the Finnish the right to have a 1 Mbps connection by July 1, 2010.
The goal of this plan is to encourage service providers to offer a faster broadband because at the moment the service providers offer an expensive and slow broadband in the country.
On the other hand, in U. S. we can see a similar policy because the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is designing a national broadband policy to provide universal broadband to every American. The plan will be presented to Congress in February 2010.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10402643-266.html?tag=mncol;txt
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Facebook declared on Tuesday that is going to form two classes of stock. They are going to convert its current shares into Class B shares, which will have 10 votes each. This means that the boarding directors will have voting rights and will control the board.
With regard to their current Class A shares, the company has the intention of selling them in an initial public offering, which will carry one vote. But the company said that it has no intention to go public at the moment.
Apparently Facebook is introducing a dual-class stock structure because current shareholders want to maintain control over voting on certain issues while selling shares to the public. Companies such as the New York Times and Ford use this kind of structures. This a way to ensure that the company will continue growing and will remain a profitable business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/technology/internet/25facebook.html?scp=2&sq=Facebook&st=cse
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