NewsScan Daily, 15 December 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 December 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       U.S. and Time Warner: Let's Settle Up
       Sprint and Nextel Plan Merger
       Concerns About Google's Online Reading Room
       Hollywood Sues "Parasite" BitTorrent Users
       Wireless Access on Jets?

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Grant Wood

U.S. AND TIME WARNER: LET'S SETTLE UP
     Time Warner has agreed to settle with the government in two separate
cases:  the Justice Department's investigation of whether AOL's advertising
deals with smaller Internet companies were used to exaggerate AOL growth,
and the SEC's investigation into accounting irregularities at the company.
Time Warner is expected to pay $500-600 million to settle all civil and
criminal accusations with the two agencies. (New York Times 15 Dec 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/business/media/15media.html>

SPRINT AND NEXTEL PLAN MERGER
     Sprint and Nextel plan to merge into a new company called "Sprint
Nextel" (but there are separate indications that Verizon Wireless may be
making Nextel a better offer). Sprint Nextel, which would have a combined
total of more than 35 million subscribers and a combined market value of $70
billion, would become the third-largest wireless company, behind Cingular
Wireless and Verizon Wireless. (Washington Post 25 Dec 2004)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A800-2004Dec15.html>

CONCERNS ABOUT GOOGLE'S ONLINE READING ROOM
     Google's new plan to digitize the collections of leading research
libraries to establish a massive online reading room causes some librarians
to fear the commercialization of their institutions. Duane Webster,
executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, explains,
"There is anxiety about whether the student researcher, scholar or citizen
will be guided into the free public access rather than being lured into a
purchasing relationship with the publisher." Webster suggests that to allay
those fears, free, open access must remain an option. However, he also makes
clear that the greater good of expanding the public's access to resources
outweighs the eventual possibility that ads would be attached to library
materials. Brewster Kahle, founder and president of the Internet Archive,
comments: "The public domain belongs to the public and should be publicly
accessible without running only into commercial interests. There's room for
both, and I hope that we do not evolve into an either-or situation." (AP/San
Jose Mercury News 15 Dec 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10416638.htm>

HOLLYWOOD SUES "PARASITE" BITTORRENT USERS
     Hollywood movie studios have filed copyright infringement lawsuits
against the operators of computer servers that BitTorrent software to relay
digital movie files across online file-sharing networks. John Malcolm of the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) says:
"Today's actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and
operate computer servers and Web sites that, by design, allow people to
infringe copyrighted motion pictures. These people are parasites, leeching
off the creativity of others. Their illegal conduct is brazen and blatant."
However, Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, warns: "By bringing these suits, the MPAA runs the risk of
pushing the tens of millions of file sharers to more decentralized
technologies that will be harder to police." (AP/USA Today 15 Dec 2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-12-15-bittorrent-suits_x.htm>

WIRELESS ACCESS ON JETS?
     The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering a plan that
would allow air travelers wireless high-speed Internet access. David
Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, says the changes under
consideration would "make business travelers more efficient and while away
the time for a lot of other passengers. This is all the wave of the future
here." (AP/Los Angeles Times 15 Dec 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology10dec15,1,7695579.story?coll=sns-ap-toptechnology>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."
(Grant Wood)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: GRANT WOOD
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American regionalist painter Grant
Wood (1891-1942), who has earned both popular and critical acclaim for his
elegant, meticulously composed canvases.
     Wood's two most famous paintings are American Gothic and Daughters of
Revolution:
     His Daughters of Revolution is a satirical representation of three
unattractive ladies looking distrustful and posing in front of the Emmanuel
Leutz painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. Wood painted it after
quarrelling with the women in charge of a memorial for the veterans of the
First World War, in which he had served.
     American Gothic, his unquestioned masterpiece, pictures a farmer and
his daughter standing in front of a five-room house built in a style known
as Carpenter Gothic, readily identified by the Gothic Window placed in the
gable. Wood dressed his sister and his dentist in period clothing to pose as
models for the painting. Today the painting hangs in the Art Institute of
Chicago, and is one of the most widely recognized paintings in America.
     Wood was born to Quaker parents on a small farm near Anamosa, Iowa.
After the death of his father in 1901, he moved to Cedar Rapids. He studied
at the Minneapolis School of design between 1910 and 1911 and then while
working as a professional designer he took night courses at the University
of Iowa and at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1915 he gave up designing
and returned to Cedar Rapids. After his military service he taught painting
and drawing at the public school of Cedar Rapids. During the 1920s he made
study visits to Europe, spending two years attending the Académie Julian in
Paris and also visiting the Italian town of Sorrento.
     Wood was by nature a meticulous craftsman, and was inspired by the
clear, miniaturist detail of fifteenth-century Flemish masters, such as Hans
Memling, and at home in the porcelain designs of Willow Ware. From about
1928 until his death, he developed a stylized, hard-edged realism perfectly
blended with his observant and sometimes wry characterizations of rural
life. He became particularly interested in Stone City, a boomtown gone bust,
located on the Wapsipinicon River near Cedar Rapids. He painted Stone City,
Iowa as his first major landscape to celebrate the area's return to animal
grazing and crop growing after it had gone bust when its limestone quarries
were shut down by the invention of Portland cement. The village of Stone
City became the site of a summer artist's colony operated by Wood in 1932
and 1933.
     In 1934 Wood was appointed head of the Iowa WPA Federal Arts project.
He also taught at the University of Iowa. As the modernist movement gained
momentum in the late 1930s, Wood and the other Regional American Landscape
painters were slowly overshadowed, but did continue to be exhibited. Pained
by the growing indifference to his chosen art form, Wood died at age 50.
Today his works command prices between $100,000 and $1,500,000.
                    ***
[To find a library copy of "Artist in Overalls: A Life of Grant Wood" by
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-- or to purchase go to
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811812421/newsscancom/ref=nosim>
Note: We donate all revenue from our recommendations to adult literacy
programs.]

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