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Stand-by-my-statement-on-the-word-sexy-NCW-chief

Posted: Apr 22, 2012 at 2051 hrs IST Bhopal NCW chairperson Mamta Sharma, whose remark that the word 'sexy' should not be taken in a negative connotation sparked a controversy, today said she had not withdrawn her statement and "stands" by it.

"I have not withdrawn my statement and I stand by it.

With time, the meaning of such words also changes," Sharma told reporters on the sidelines of a programme organised by an NGO here.

"Today nobody can watch television programmes at home with his/her family, but nobody said anything about it," she said.

Sharma also said she did not endorse West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's announcement of launching a news channel and a newspaper.

The NCW chief had drawn the ire of women's rights activists over her remark at a function in Jaipur in February, that the word "sexy" meant "beautiful and charming" and should not be taken in a negative sense.

"I was positive in my approach so I said that. One should take it in a positive sense," she said.

Earlier, referring to rising instances of crime, Sharma said that Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are the only states in the country where "maximum" atrocities are committed against women.

The state government's ignorance on this issue was "highly unfortunate", she said. About the programme, she said about 400-500 women have highlighted the various crimes, including rape, committed against them and NCW had taken a cognisance of the same.

The National Commission for Women will write to the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, chief secretary and the DGP asking them to ensure that appropriate action is taken in this regard, she said.

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Stand-by-my-statement-on-the-word-sexy-NCW-chief

Word order

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Word order By Lewis H Lapham

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse. - Emperor Charles V

But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data streams out of which we've learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect - from Google, YouTube, and Facebook - the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan's noticing 50 years ago the presence of "an acoustic world", one with "no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis", a new "information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever". He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that "we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Media were to be understood as "make-happen agents" rather than as "make-aware agents," not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.

To account for the transference of the idioms of print to those of the electronic media, McLuhan examined two technological revolutions that overturned the epistemological status quo. First, in the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of moveable type, which deconstructed the illuminated wisdom preserved on manuscript in monasteries, encouraged people to organize their perceptions of the world along the straight lines of the printed page. Second, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the applications of electricity (telegraph, telephone, radio, movie camera, television screen, eventually the computer), favored a sensibility that runs in circles, compressing or eliminating the dimensions of space and time, narrative dissolving into montage, the word replaced with the icon and the rebus.

Within a year of its publication, Understanding Media acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed him "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov." Although never at a loss for Delphic aphorism - "The electric light is pure information"; "In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin" - McLuhan assumed that he had done nothing more than look into the window of the future at what was both obvious and certain.

Floating the fiction of democracy In 1964, I was slow to take the point, possibly because I was working at the time in a medium that McLuhan had listed as endangered - writing, for The Saturday Evening Post, inclined to think in sentences, accustomed to associating a cause with an effect, a beginning with a middle and an end. Television news I construed as an attempt to tell a story with an alphabet of brightly colored children's blocks, and when offered the chance to become a correspondent for NBC, I declined the referral to what I regarded as a course in remedial reading.

The judgment was poorly timed. Within five years The Saturday Evening Post had gone the way of the great auk; news had become entertainment, entertainment news, the distinctions between a fiction and a fact as irrelevant as they were increasingly difficult to parse. Another 20 years and I understood what McLuhan meant by the phrase, "The medium is the message," when in the writing of a television history of America's foreign policy in the twentieth century, I was allotted roughly 73 seconds in which to account for the origins of World War II, while at the same time providing a voiceover transition between newsreel footage of Jesse Owens running the hundred-yard dash at the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, and Adolf Hitler marching the Wehrmacht into Vienna in the spring of 1938.

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Word order

Festival of Books: Kids roll the word dice to create poetry

While many L.A. Times Festival of Books attendees retreated to the shade to listen to readings at the Poetry Stage on Saturday afternoon, others, many of them children, were making their own poetry in a nearby booth hosted by Kaya Press.

You can roll the dice to make poems, Michelle Detorie of Eohippus Labs explained to one of the girls who was attracted to the craft table set up in the back of the booth. Detorie showed her dice with words on them and showed her how to play.

Detorie also explained how to make a poem scape by using small figurines to create a scene and then translating it into a poem.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

Kaya Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher of Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic literature that recently relocated to USC. Being new to the campus and the community, Patricia Wakida of Kaya Press said the organization used its booth to make as many friends as possible. They invited many local independent publishers, including Eohippus Labs and Les Figues Press, to share their booth space in providing activities at the festival.

Kaya Press also asked them to provide pages of their publications to use in an activity where people can collect the pages they like and take them to the binding station in the back of the tent to make their own anthology. Other publishers represented include Boxcar Poetry Review, Dancing Girls Press, Siglio, Corollary Press and Sur + Press.

The booth's Smokin Hot Indie Lit Lounge is a space for people not just to buy literature, but where people can make literature explained Detorie, as another young girl asked if she could use the typewriter setup for an activity.

FULL COVERAGE: Festival of Books

The literary activities in the booth also include a pinned-up Los Angeles literary road map, where people can pin see their homes' proximity to many independent presses; a station to make poetry bracelets; and a station to make poetry paper airplanes.

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Festival of Books: Kids roll the word dice to create poetry

Extole Selected as Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Based on Proven Ability to Build Facebook Apps

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Extole (www.extole.com), the leading Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Social Marketing Platform, today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD). To be selected, Extole went through a rigorous application process and was selected based on its proven ability to build integrated Facebook apps for its C2C Social Marketing Platform.

Extole C2C Social Marketing solutions power social referrals, promotions and analytics for over 200 brands and agenices across Retail, eCommerce, Media, Technology, Entertainment, Automotive, and more. The Extole platform enables brands and agenices to tap into the power of their brand advocates and gain deep social insights with a cross-channel approach to social marketing that ties into leading social networks, including Facebook.

Consumer sharing on Facebook is more than doubling annually, making it all the more important for brands to harness the power of their consumers to help influence advocacy. At Extole, we are dedicated to ensuring our platform seamlessly integrates with Facebook, while offering the best solutions to power C2C Social Marketing, said Brad Klaus, CEO of Extole. Were thrilled to be a part of Facebook PMD program and look forward to giving brands and agencies new and exciting ways to engage and interact with their consumers.

The mission of the Facebook PMD program is to help developers build products that make social marketing easier and more effective. Facebook recognized Extole for its work in the Apps category for services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations customized or self service. Extole was previously a part of the Preferred Developer Consultant Program (PDC), which was merged with the Marketing API Program (MAP), to create the new PMD program to better represent the various technologies in the Facebook ecosystem and to recognize companies that develop holistic solutions.

About Extole

Extole is the leading Consumer-to-Consumer Social Marketing Platform, enabling brands and agencies to turn their customers into social advocates. Extole powers social referral programs, promotions, testimonials, and robust social analytics for more than 200 brands, helping them grow sales, increase traffic and awareness, and gain critical insights. Customers include Kate Spade New York, J. Hilburn, AAA, Shutterfly, New York Times, and SkyMall. Extole is a privately held company based in San Francisco, California. For more information, please visit http://www.extole.com

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Extole Selected as Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Based on Proven Ability to Build Facebook Apps

Anonymous claims Pastebin censorship, creates alternative

Summary: The hacktivist group Anonymous has gotten so pissed off at Pastebin and its censorship plans that it has created its own alternative: AnonPaste. Its currently in alpha though, so dont expect much.

Earlier this month, the hacktivist group Anonymous complained that Pastebins plans to monitor the sites content for sensitive information was censorship. Now Anonymous has put its money where its mouth is, teaming up with the Peoples Liberation Front (PLF), and launching AnonPaste.

AnonPaste features the basic functionality youd expect, including the ability to expire a paste after 10 minutes, one hour, one day, one month, one year, or never. Theres one big problem though: the pastes are hosted on PLFs website.

While you can paste your content on anonpaste.tk, you get redirected to peoplesliberationfront.net when you hit the Send button. For example, heres a paste I made: peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/index.php?308913c82f300cd3#aweRz3sHi72hC0s/VsyXCncwQ3Epg7BTaq9KvMr+FWs=.

Thats a ridiculously long URL. Theres a Shorten URL button, but it just redirects you to snipurl.com. This is a pain. The good news is that this is AnonPaste Alpha 0.11 so maybe the two groups will eventually host everything on the anonpaste.tk domain.

Pastebin, which has over 200,000 members and 17 million unique visitors per month, has been the de facto choice for hackers who want to publicly post data they have stolen from their targets. Hacker pastes ranges from something simple, like a list of sites that have been hacked, to very detailed information, including administrator credentials for website servers, credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses with corresponding passwords, and even home addresses.

Heres how the two groups announced the new site, on AnonPaste of course:

As many might be aware, PasteBin has been in the news lately for making some rather shady claims as to what they are willing to censor, and when they are willing to give up IP addresses to the authorities. And as a recent leak of private E-Mails show clearly, PasteBin is not only willing to give up IP addresses to governments - but apparently has already given many IPs to at least one private security firm. And these leaked E-Mails also revealed a distinct animosity towards Anonymous. And so the PLF and Anonymous have teamed up to offer a paste service truly free of all such nonsense.

AnonPaste is built using open source software called ZeroBin, a minimalist online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data, according to the two groups. To improve on it, they are asking for donations via BitCoins or WePay.

The duo wants to emphasize the following five AnonPaste features:

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Anonymous claims Pastebin censorship, creates alternative