acroyear | in the news this week...

Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen - Yahoo! News:

Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the
New York Stock Exchange yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet.
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At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by Samsung and LG.

Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs 400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it, you'll want professional installation.

He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an even bigger screen before long.

Putting the Cat Back in the Bag - New York Times:

Documents wind up missing from public archives for many reasons. Sometimes they're shelved or labeled incorrectly, or lost, and sometimes they're even stolen. But at the National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950's, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

Enemy of the Planet - New York Times:

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.

But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.

I'm O.K., You're Biased - New York Times:

VERIZON had a pretty bad year in 2005, but its chief executive did fine. Although Verizon's earnings dropped by more than 5 percent and its stock fell by more than a quarter, he received a 48 percent increase in salary and compensation. This handsome payout was based on the recommendation of an independent consulting firm that relied on Verizon (and the chief executive's good will) for much of its revenue. When asked about this conflict of interest, the consulting firm explained that it had "strict policies in place to ensure the independence and objectivity of all our consultants."

Please stop laughing.

That last one is interesting, but has a couple of significant flaws in its conclusions. The biggest one is that it cites studies of single-instance, anonymous altruism by psychologists and tries to use it to support an opinion that politicians and doctors aren't necessarilly as influenced by the donations that come their way. This is a flawed connection because there is a significant difference between not doing something *once* regardless of the "no strings attached" bribe, and stopping the flow of regular income by suddenly deciding against the wishes of the people supplying the money. You can accept a donation and vote against the request *once*, but once you become dependent on the money, you don't "bite the hand that feeds you" and none of the studies the author referenced addressed that more realistic situation.

Its second one is implying that maybe because people are more truthful than they are perceived to be, we should give Cheney the benefit of the doubt when he says he had nothing to do with Halliburton getting the benefits (well, handouts, really) its gotten from the current administration. I'm sorry, but evidence about anonymous people and truth is nearly irrelevant when compared to that man's extensive and well documented history of lies, deceptions, and greed. You don't assume an instance is part of a general trend when the evidence for the instance himself goes against the trend statistics. You can only apply a general statistical trend on an instance when you *don't* know the instance's own history.

oh, and they found a really big killer (in more ways than one...and in more numbers than one) dinosaur...