Comeback of the day: The New York World’s digital makeover

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Joseph Pulitzer’s baby gets a digital makeover: The New York World, a newspaper that initially published from 1860 to 1931, is an important historical paper. And now, thanks to Columbia University, it’s making a comeback in the form of a digital news project. How so? We’ll let the university explain: “New York World will serve both as a site, where citizens can learn more about how services are allotted and tax dollars are spent, and as a news service, providing stories, data and other information to local news providers.” So in other words, kinda like an East Coast version of the Bay Area News Project. Neat. source

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05 Dec 2010 11:59

Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
A message from Columbia University’s Office of Career Services • Offering a word of advice to its School of International and Public Affairs that reading the Wikileaks data dump and talking about it could endanger their chances of ever working with the State Department. The recommendation was forwarded to them by an alumnus now working at the State Department. Meanwhile, the State Department itself claims it hasn’t made an official statement on anything like this. But by us posting about this, we’ve hurt our future job chances. Damn. source

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This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger • Making the argument that journalism needs to find a happy medium between “freedom of the press” and “ability to survive capitalism.” Bollinger admits that the idea makes people uncomfortable, but notes that in the academic field, the most likely counterpart to a potential government-driven press, “there have been strikingly few instances of government abuse.” He even argues that corporate interests may prove even more dangerous than the government. Interesting take. source

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A virus linked with animal cancer was found in humans. Researchers at the University of Utah and Columbia University recently spent a lot of time looking at prostate cancer cells recently. (Which doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, by the way.) In the 200 cancerous prostates they studied, they found that 27% had XMRV (Xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus), a retrovirus that copies itself into the cancerous cell’s DNA. (In other words, it works just like AIDS.) This is significant, because it’s the first human link to XMRV that scientists have found. source

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