12 PM | 25 Jun

Doubts over Cervical Cancer vaccine

“Every year, 9,700 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed in the U.S., and 3,700 women die of the disease. Gardasil’s makers claim that 70 percent of those cases could be prevented by the vaccine, but a May issue of the New England Journal of Medicine raised several questions about Gardasil’s effectiveness. Among other things, the vaccine may be unsafe to give with other childhood vaccines, and it may be 10 to 15 years before scientists know whether booster shots are needed. Later that month, a watchdog group released FDA documents detailing 1,637 adverse reactions to the vaccine in the year since it was approved. While most of the reported reactions were not serious, they did include three deaths, 16 miscarriages, and numerous cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), an immune disorder that can result in paralysis.” – Jeneen Interlandi, Shots In The Dark

12 PM | 25 Jun

Call for toons and animations

Festival theme: Toon! Toon! – art cartoons and animated narratives

After the successful launch of CologneOFF – Cologne Online Film Festival and the organisation of the first two editions in 2006 CologneOFF I – Identityscapes, CologneOFF II – Image vs Music

VideoChannel is preparing now edition III of CologneOFF to be launched in October 2007 & to be presented in cooperation with divers festivals in sequence.

—> Toon! Toon! art cartoons and animated narratives

VideoChannel invites artists and directors for submitting animated films/videos telling a story in form of a cartoon or other forms of narratives by using the new digital technologies.

Rules:

. Deadline: 1 August 2007 . The subject can be chosen freely. . The films/videos may originate from the years 2002-2007. . The duration max. 10 minutes, exceptions possible. . Max 3 films/videos can be submitted. . Productions using language and/or text other than English need English subtitles.

. The preview copy should be made available online for review and/or download as Quicktime . mov, Windows Media .wmv, Flash video .swf or.flv or Real Media .rm minimum size 320×240.

. After selection the artists/directors will be invited to send a hardcopy of the selected video on DVD in best screening quality.

All entry details and the submission form can be found on netEX – networked experience http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=23

11 AM | 25 Jun

In Your Facebook!

Excerpt from Christopher Beam’s Slate Article — How Facebook could crush MySpace.

For all the hype about Second Life, Facebook and MySpace are already the closest things we have to “virtual worlds.” Sure, Facebook doesn’t have large-breasted 3D avatars and a sky and buildings and its own currency. But the whole point of the Internet is that you don’t need all that stuff. If I want to buy something, I go to Amazon, not some virtual store. Even before Facebook allowed outside applications, it had millions of users who basically lived inside their profile pages. The typical Facebooker spends hours each day sending messages, posting “notes” or blog entries, and uploading photos, along with trolling for freshmen girls who love the Decemberists. Facebook Platform simply expands this world. (According to the Wall Street Journal, the site’s user base has jumped from 24 million to 27 million since Platform launched.) Now you can check the local weather, feed and nurture a virtual pet rabbit, and see what music your friends are listening to. With just a few more additions—e-mail, an instant-messaging program, RSS feeds—Facebook obsessives will become total shut-ins. Users wouldn’t have to venture out into the Internet; the Internet would come to them.

If Facebook does decide to become an all-encompassing portal, it would be a bit late to the party. Customizable homepages like My Yahoo! and iGoogle already let you cram your favorite Web stuff onto a single page; there’s also the trendy start-up NetVibes, which Slate‘s Reihan Salam called “the ultimate mashup.” But a Facebook homepage would have a huge intrinsic advantage: The social network is already built in. Sure, the other portals incorporate Gmail and BBC headlines and YouTube searches and podcast directories. By adding a social context to all of this content, however, Facebook would immediately trump its main competition. With Facebook’s News Feed, it’s elementary to see when your friends sign up for a new product or service. That means the best add-ons become viral instantly—Platform’s biggest success story so far, a music sharing app called iLike, started growing at the rate of 200,000 users a day.

It’s a certainty, too, that outside developers will fall over themselves to deliver great content to Facebook users. The site’s growing audience, sterling reputation, and clean look are catnip for corporations.

What kind of stuff will companies offer to Facebook users? Every major corporation, it seems, is trying to add social networking to their core services. Netflix, for example, allows you to keep tabs on what your “friends” are watching. But it makes much more sense to peddle your services on a huge, prebuilt network—no wonder Netflix users can now check their buddies’ queues on Facebook. And we’re not only talking about businesses: Just look at Barack Obama’s campaign. Thousands of users have downloaded the Obama Facebook application since late May, and hundreds of thousands more have joined Obama-themed groups. Compare that to the relatively paltry 70,000 registered users on the candidate’s custom-made social network, My.BarackObama.com. Using the Facebook network as a delivery system, it seems, is easier and more productive than creating the system yourself.