Internet Overtakes Newspapers As News Outlet

This from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news.

Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007.
For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently. This mirrors a trend seen earlier this year in campaign news consumption...

Hat tip to the Rural Blog.

At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.” ...

This from the New York Times.

Internet fuelling extreme food fighting, police warn

MONTREAL — The Internet is fuelling an extreme version of the high-school food fight, threatening innocent teachers and students with ham sandwiches, eggs and rotten tomatoes.

Police raised alarm bells on Thursday following an incident one day earlier at a high school in southwestern Montreal in which more than 20 baton-wielding officers needed three hours to quell a food fight that turned into a riot.

Three people were injured and two students were arrested and face assault charges.

Montreal police said that students are using the Internet to prepare for the fights, then posting videos on websites such as YouTube.

They say Wednesday’s incident was the third food fight at a Montreal-area high school in a week.
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Here's a sample:


This from the Chronicle-Herald, by way of This Week in Education.

A "map" of the internet

The Internet may be referred to as the "information superhighway," but a better analogy might be an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop. So how Many Licks Does it Take To Get to the Center of the Internet?

Check out this colorful new Internet map from physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and you’ll see what we mean. It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web.

At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs.

This from Popular Science.