As the situation in Japan continues to deteriorate in the wake of Friday's massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the need for assistance has spurred a number of stars to reach out to fans to enlist their help.
Just days after announcing the initial dates of his first tour, the My Violent Torpedo/ Defeat Is Not an Option Show, troubled actor Charlie Sheen announced that he will be donating $1 from each ticket sold to the Red Cross Japanese Earthquake Relief Fund.
Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda has also gotten into the game quickly, designing T-shirts to benefit his band's Music for Relief charity. One shirt features the image of a paper crane-like white butterfly above the LP logo, and the other one reads "Not Alone" in a red, white and blue font. Donations of $10 can be made by texting "MFR" to 85944.
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Dawnmarie Souza's comments on her Facebook page didn't win her any points with the boss, but the rest of us owe her a debt of gratitude. In a rare test of old law on a new medium, she helped us understand just how little the online world differs from the land of bricks and mortar.
Souza's career as a paramedic at American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. may not have been too bright even before she called her boss various genital parts in a November 2009 Facebook posting. She had been hauled on the carpet for several incidents of allegedly rude behavior and had further rankled the emergency-response company by asking to have a union representative present when she was to be questioned about one particular customer's complaint that she had been rude, according to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) investigation of the case. The company denied the request, and that, in turn, set off her colorful Facebook flurry. American Medical fired her 23 days later. ...
Shortly after christmas, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog service that, like Twitter, allows users to share short messages of up to 140 characters. Kristof began testing what topics would be censored. He found out quickly. One of his first messages was "Can we talk about Falun Gong?" — a reference to the spiritual movement banned by Beijing. Within an hour of his first post, Kristof's account was canceled.
At first glance it would seem that China's new Internet is a lot like its old Internet. Overseas sites that are deemed sensitive — including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, among thousands of others — are blocked, part of a network of control sometimes called the Great Firewall of China. Inside the wall, Chinese search engines won't, for example, link to content to do with the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or Tibetan independence; also, domestic Internet companies are required to delete any material that the authorities find objectionable. Even as China's Netizens have rushed to embrace Web 2.0, an Internet in which users are more closely and quickly linked by social-networking services, microblogs and free video hosting, those rules have still applied. ...
BEIJING — In another era, China’s leaders might have been content to let discussion of the protests in Egypt float around among private citizens, then fizzle out.
But challenges in recent years to authoritarian governments around the globe and violent uprisings in parts of China itself have made Chinese officials increasingly wary of leaving such talk unchecked, especially on the Internet, the medium some officials see as central to fanning the flames of unrest.
So the arbiters of speech sprang into action over the weekend. Sina.com and Netease.com — two of the nation’s biggest online portals — blocked keyword searches of the word “Egypt,” though the mass protests were being discussed on some Internet chat rooms on Monday. Searching for “Egypt” has also been blocked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter....
The medical intern started her presentation with an eye roll. "The patient in Room 3 had some blood in the toilet bowl this morning and is here with a pile of Internet printouts listing all the crazy things she thinks she might have."
The intern continued, "I think she has a hemorrhoid."
"Another case of cyberchondria," added the nurse behind me.
In the end, the patient did, indeed, have a hemorrhoid. She was safe to go home with a treatment plan and some reassurance. But I wasn't so sure if what doctors call the "Google stack" (the printouts listing all the potential and worrisome diagnoses) was really such a problem. After all, her symptoms were scary — she may very well have come to the ER regardless of her Web search. The real problem was with my team: we weren't well equipped to deal with her online homework — and it became a distraction. ...