Caught! Packer buys into daily deals site

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23 May 2011
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In Business, Technology
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After almost a month of speculation, James Packer, along with a prominent hedge fund, has moved to invest in daily deals sites Catch of the Day and Scoopon.

Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings and New York-based Tiger Global Management teamed up with Andrew Bassat, co-founder of Seek, and Glenn Poswell of Gannet Capital in a consortium bid to pick up a massive stake in the daily deals sites.

The consortium is set to control 40 per cent of the deals business, owned by Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, with the investment pegged at $80 million — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Modern Chicken Coop / Nicole Starnes Taylor

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22 May 2011
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In Design, Wildlife
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Modern Chicken Coop / Nicole Starnes Taylor

Check out this lively, modern chicken coop by Nicole Starnes Taylor of MAKE Design Studio. Taylor designed it for three chickens and their owners in urban Seattle. With a screen floor and castors, the mobile hen house fertilizes the underlying ground. Also, the coop has a hinged door for easy access and can be used as a chicken tractor if need be. Taylor built the 15 square-foot coop with salvaged framing lumber — via Jetson Green

3M launches e-book library lending service for tablets

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22 May 2011
42 second read
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In Technology
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3M Library Systems announced it will launch an e-book lending service that will let iPad, Nook and Android tablet owners borrow e-books from local libraries. The service, called 3M Cloud Library, will include software, hardware and content accessible from special apps or in libraries via touch-screen terminals. Publisher partners include Random House and IPG, with more expected to arrive soon — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Early Bronze Age battle site found on German river bank

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22 May 2011
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In History
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Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.

Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC.

The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers.

The paper, published in the journal Antiquity, is based primarily on an investigation begun in 2008 of the Tollense Valley site, which involved both ground excavations and surveys of the riverbed by divers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

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21 May 2011
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In Technology
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For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, spamalytics, to describe their work.

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

The hope, the scientists said, was to find a choke point that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Californoia, they will report that they think they have found it — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Fair and balanced?

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20 May 2011
2 min read
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In Politics
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One of the most rewarding — and most deeply frustrating things about being a news junkie is that you get to see a lot more than the few soundbites that make the evening bulletins. Rewarding, because you get to hear what politicians say in context, and in full, when you watch the media conferences. Frustrating, because you also become rapidly aware that the treatment given to politicians is astonishingly uneven.

Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, Prime Minister Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott all gave media conferences this morning, and the contrast between how the media treated Senator Brown, and how it treated the two leaders, could not have been more marked.

…

That was the turning point. From then, the questioning became increasingly aggressive. Now, there’s nothing wrong with aggressive questioning in itself. It’s one of the ways the media can force a politician to answer. That’s not what happened here. Several times journalists attempted to interrupt Brown in his answers, and one journalist repeatedly interrupted Brown, describing his answers as political gobbledygook. She didn’t preface this with the phrase, With respect, Senator …, which usually accompanies a criticism — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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