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Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Keanu Reeves spent five years on his latest film: Why?
Keanu Reeves directs and stars in 'Man of Tai Chi,' due out later this year. He spent five years developing the storyline, based loosely on 'Matrix' stuntman Tiger Chen, whom Keanu Reeves befriended while filming the trilogy.
Keanu Reeves (l.) bows to Hong Kong director John Woo during the Beijing Film Festival's award ceremony in Beijing, April 23. Keanu stars in 'Man of Tai Chi,' which also marks Reeves's directorial debut.
AP / File
EnlargeKeanu Reeves played a science-fiction hero, an LAPD cop, and even Hamlet. But now actor Keanu Reeves is taking on a new role: director of a contemporary martial arts movie ??aimed at both Chinese and Western audiences.
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Keanu Reeves has stepped behind the camera to make his directorial debut with "Man of Tai Chi", a trilingual film loosely based on the life of a stuntman, Tiger Chen, whom he befriended while working on the sci-fi "Matrix" trilogy.
At the Cannes film festival to promote his new movie, due out later this year, Reeves said he knew he had always wanted to try directing and spent five years developing the script.
"It was also tied to getting older," admitted the long-time Hollywood heartthrob, in an interview with Reuters Television at a hotel on Cannes' palm-lined waterfront.
He said the main character of the film, played by Chen, is a stuntman and martial arts expert who is struggling to maintain his traditional values and beliefs against the pressures of modern society.
Reeves plays the villain who lures him into underground fighting with promises of money, glamour, and power.
The film, made in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin and filmed in China and Hong Kong, is meant to appeal to both the huge market in China, where Reeves won fans with "Matrix" and for having a Chinese great-grandparent, and in Western countries.
"Man of Tai Chi" was co-produced by the China Film Group, Wanda Media, Village Roadshow Pictures Asia, and Universal Pictures and will be distributed internationally by Universal, which is owned by Comcast through its subsidiary NBCUniversal.
Clips from the movie suggested there would be big fight sequences and high-speed car chases along Chinese highways, as could be expected from the star of "Speed," a 1994 action movie.
"I loved the responsibility of telling a story," said the Canadian-born Reeves. "I hope I get the chance to do it again."
(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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Flashback: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet
In the wake of Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of beloved social platform Tumblr
Yes, Yahoo's a different company now, especially with Marissa Mayer at the helm. And Tumblr, along with its price tag, are an order of magnitude larger than Flickr was when Yahoo bought it. There are differences. But the story of how Yahoo assimilated and then eroded a beloved property (first published on Gizmodo almost exactly one year ago) remains the cautionary tale for how acquisitions can go wrong. And if anything, a blueprint for what not to do if Yahoo wants to get it right this time. -BB
Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.
This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.
Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement.
Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.
Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.
Even the notion of Flickr as an archive?as the place where you store all your photos as a backup?is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.
The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.
It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn't share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.
Here's how it all went bad.
In the Beginning
Flickr famously began as a feature of another product. Husband-and-wife development team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake had created a photo sharing feature for another product they were working on, Game Neverending. Butterfield and Fake were old-school Web types. The kind with low Metafilter user numbers and WELL accounts.
And because they knew the Web so fluently, they soon realized that their real product wasn't the game: It was this secondary feature, the ability to share photos online. This was 2003, and photo sharing was still very much a novel problem for people. Flickr was born.
It was a hit. Bloggers especially loved it, as it solved an age-old photo hosting problem. (This was during the hoary old days of the Web when storage actually cost money.)
Two years later, in 2005, Butterfield and Fake sold their company to Yahoo, whose deep pockets promised great things for Flickr's users. It upped the monthly storage limit to 100MB for free users, and removed it altogether for pro accounts, for example. Yahoo had bandwidth and engineering to burn. Things were going to be great; things are always going to be great the first time you embrace a new corporate mother.
When Startups Become Successes
Very few people manage to build successful startups. But when the one hits, it can change the status quo in an instant. Suddenly, those two elemental ingredients?people and code?become very valuable to the established companies that seem to reside on an untouchable corporate Mount Olympus. It would have to be an overwhelming compliment and sense of validation. How would you handle it? What if you made something beautiful and useful that changed the status quo? Would you sell it? Would you sell yourself?
That's the choice successful startup founders are faced with. Build something good, and the buyout offers start rolling in. But while selling out in most other fields of creative endeavor is frowned upon, it's a given on the Web.
Maybe it shouldn't be. For every YouTube, there are horror stories of great people with great products, squandered in the yawning maws of uncaring corporate integration. Dodgeball gets lost in Mountain View. Beloved bookmarking services like Delicious become fields of information left fallow.
Some upstarts take an independent path. Consider Foursquare. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Each spurned buyout offers, and none has ever been stronger. All managed to find a business model over time. Or even StumbleUpon, which only found its feet after its founder re-purchased his company from eBay and spun it off again as an indie.
It's no secret that for many entrepreneurs, the exit is always the goal. It's about the sellout before the first line of code is written. But for a select group, products are meant to be art. They are meant to literally change the world. And for those, selling out can be especially problematic.
Flickr falls into that camp.
Integration Is The Enemy of Innovation
"Yahoo was a good fit initially," says Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the company in 2008. "We had offers from various companies, including Google, and I honestly think that Yahoo was a great steward. It was a great steward of the brand. It was allowed to flourish. In the subsequent two years after the acquisition, Flickr blossomed."
Yet even early on, there were signs that the transplant?which had seemed so successful at first?was going to fail. That the DNA didn't match. This was largely due to how this new appendage was grafted on by Yahoo's CorpDev department.
When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning corporate strategy?where a business will grow or shrink, the markets it will enter or exit, and what kind of contracts and deals it may strike with other companies. It often oversees acquisitions. It plans them. Approves them. And then it sets the terms.
When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, often only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It's similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.
Corpdev sets these milestones. They reflect the reason for the acquisition, and how the company?in Flickr's case, Yahoo?can leverage them. They're baked into the deal, and an acquisition integration team begins working immediately to make sure they are met. Typically, they're very engineering-based, designed to integrate the smaller company's product into the enormous corporate machine.
And because payment schedules are based on achieving those CorpDev terms, it means both companies have a vested (pun intended) interest in putting those milestones ahead of new features. They are a sledgehammer applied with great force to the feet of nimble development. Worse, they often completely ignore what made the smaller target valuable in the first place.
Take Upcoming, the calendaring site Yahoo bought not long after Flickr. It was a play to get local listings. Local data?especially in smaller cities or for smaller events?can be very hard to come by. Everyone ends up having the same stuff. But Upcoming's data was user-generated. It was different. Unique. Valuable.
The milestones for that acquisition were all based around integrating that local event data into Yahoo. Yahoo didn't care about Upcoming's users?the community that created the data. Yahoo's approach turned out to be completely backwards. The value of the the company was determined by the index itself, rather than how the index was built?which is to say, by the community.
It was a stunning failure in vision, and more or less the same thing happened at Flickr. All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn't care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.
"We spent a lot of time in meetings with CorpDev just defending the product and justifying our decisions," said a former Flickr team member.
And so when Flickr hit the ground at Yahoo it was crushed with engineering and service requirements it had to meet as per demands of the acquisition integration team. Those were a drain on resources, human and financial. Even though many of the resources came from Yahoo, they were debited against Flickr. This created an untenable cycle that actively hampered innovation.
"The money goes to the cash cows, not the cash calf," explains one former Flickr team member. If Flickr couldn't make bucks, it wouldn't get bucks (or talent, or resources).
Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn't given the resources that were dedicated to other products. That meant it had to spend its resources on integration, rather than innovation. Which made it harder to attract new users, which meant it couldn't make as much money, which meant (full circle) it didn't get more resources. And so it goes.
As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social?the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.
The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation. This played out in two key areas.
Socially Awkward
Flickr's best feature isn't what you think. It's not photo-sharing at all. Just as photo sharing was a feature hidden within a game, there was another feature hidden within photo-sharing that was even more powerful: social networking. Flickr was, nearly a decade ago, building what would become the Social Web.
The first point in Flickr's two point mission statement is to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. Flickr had?and still has?excellent tools for this. Flickr was an early site that let you identify relationships with fine grained controls?a person could be marked as family but not a friend, for example?instead of a binary friend/not friend relationship. You can mark your photos "private" and allow no one else to see them at all, or identify just one or two trusted friends who may view them. Or you can just share with friends, or family. Those granular controls encouraged sharing, and commenting, and interaction. What we are describing here, of course, is social networking.
It's hard to remember, but back in 2005, Yahoo seemed like it had its game on. After losing out on search dominance to Google, it snapped up a bunch of small-but-cool socially oriented companies like Flickr (social photos), Delicious (social bookmarking), and Upcoming (social calendaring). There was a real sense that Yahoo was doing the right thing. It was, to some extent, out in front of what would come to be widely known as Web 2.0: the participatory Internet.
But Yahoo's social success in those years was almost accidental. It wasn't (and isn't) a company with vision. Its founders Jerry Yang and David Filo's great contribution to the Internet? They built a directory of links and then sold ads on those pages.
It was a gateway, nothing more. This was hardly an innovative idea, or technically complicated to pull off. You don't have to write algorithms to build a portal. Yahoo was little more than an electronic edition of Yellow Pages.
The founders' influence on a company's culture is enormous, and Yang and Filo cared about business, not products or innovation. They didn't foster a culture of computer scientists, like Google's founders did, or cultivate hackers like Facebook. They grew a business culture. For many years that worked quite well?until Google came along. Suddenly nobody needed directories anymore. Why browse a hierarchy when you can jump directly to what you're looking for with a simple query?
Yahoo's CEO Terry Semel had failed to buy Google in 2001, when he had the chance. Now Yahoo was so focused on winning search that it essentially surrendered social. In 2005, Flickr had far and away the best social connection and discovery tools on the Internet. Remember, back then Facebook was still very much a fledgling service, one that didn't even let you upload pictures other than the one in your profile. Yahoo, meanwhile, had existing internal social products, like Address Book and Messenger. Social was clearly the future. What Yahoo wanted, however, wasn't the future. It was to re-fight an old battle from the past. It was to beat Google.
"By the time we were looking at Flickr, Yahoo was getting the shit kicked out of it by Google. The race was on to find other areas of search where we could build a commanding lead," says one high ranking Yahoo executive familiar with the deal.
Flickr offered a way to do that. Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable.
"That is the reason we bought Flickr?not the community. We didn't give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."
And that was the problem. At the time, the Web was rapidly becoming more social, and Flickr was at the forefront of that movement. It was all about groups and comments and identifying people as contacts, friends or family. To Yahoo, it was just a fucking database.
The first community problems became evident when Yahoo decided all existing Flickr users would need a Yahoo account to log in. That switchover occurred in 2007, and was part of the CorpDev integration process to establish a single sign on. Flickr set it to go live on the Ides of March.
From Yahoo's perspective, there was no choice but to revamp the login. For one, Flickr had grown internationally, and it had to localize to comply with local laws. Yahoo already had tools to solve this, because it had already expanded into other countries. It offered a ready-made solution.
But moreover, Yahoo needed to leverage this thing that it had just bought. Yahoo wanted to make sure that every one of its registered users could instantly use Flickr without having to register for it separately. It wanted Flickr to work seamlessly with Yahoo Mail. It wanted its services to sing together in harmony, rather than in cacophonous isolation. The first step in that is to create a unified login. That's great for Yahoo, but it didn't do anything for Flickr, and it certainly didn't do anything for Flickr's (extremely vocal) users.
Yahoo's RegID solution turned out to be a nightmare for the existing community. You could no longer use your existing Flickr login to get to your photos, you had to use a Yahoo one. If you did not already have a Yahoo account, you had to create one. And you did not even log in on Flickr's home page, upon arriving, you were immediately kicked over to a Yahoo login screen.
Although Flickr grew tremendously with the huge influx of Yahoo users, the existing community of highly influential early adopters was infuriated. It was an inelegant transition, and seemed to ignore what the community wanted (namely, a way to log in without having to sign up for a Yahoo account). This was the opposite of what people had come to expect from Flickr. It was anti-social.
And it very much delivered a message, to both users and to the team at Flickr: You're part of Yahoo now.
That message was also going out to Flickr's team. Flickr prided itself on customer care, which it considered a core part of community building. But Yahoo wanted to manage all that itself with its existing departments. One of Yahoo's goals was to move from a system of notice and takedown, to prescreening all the content members posted before it went up online. Flickr saw this as both a costly time-consuming task and one that could very well violate its members privacy, especially when talking about private photos. The Flickr team scheduled a meeting and headed down to corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale for an hour long presentation to make its case. Halfway through the meeting, the vice president who oversaw customer care for Yahoo looked at his watch, announced he had another meeting, and left. It was an open fuck you.
For Heather Champ, who was Flickr's head of community at the time, the meeting was the beginning of the end. "I came out of that meeting knowing I couldn't continue in my role. I didn't want to stay and watch them dismantle everything we'd worked so hard to build."
By mid-2008, a year after the RegID debacle, it was clear to most everyone that Facebook was the big up-and-coming social network. What had been a plaything for college kids and high schoolers was suddenly the network your mom, your dad, your gym coach, and everyone else you'd ever met was sending you friend requests from. Microsoft was pumping money into it, and it was fast approaching 100 million users.
Inside Yahoo, which itself had a massive user base and multiple social products, some were already warning that it was going to be bypassed in social just as it had been bypassed in search.
"I spent years at Yahoo trying to signal the alarm that Facebook was going to take over the adult market unless we stepped in and used our existing social networks to fight back," laments one former Yahoo engineer who worked on products at both the parent company and Flickr. "Obviously this never went anywhere for a multitude of reasons."
Yahoo had already tried to buy Facebook in 2006?for a billion goddamn dollars. And failed. Two years later Facebook was too big to buy. The only way to beat it was to come at it from another direction with a better product. Yahoo's best hope for that was Flickr. But by then it was too late.
"Flickr wasn't a startup anymore," explains the engineer, "people didn't really want to work that hard to turn the entire product around. Even if they had, Flickr [was] very techie hipster, many didn't use or like Facebook and considered it bland, boring, evil, poorly designed, etc., and were certainly not ready to fast follow it. Emphasis was put more on how things looked, and felt, rather than on metrics and on what worked. The whole experience was very frustrating for me all around, as I slowly watched Flickr and Yahoo fade into irrelevance."
The Unstoppable Force And His Immobile Object
There's a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr's social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what's that, you don't have one? Exactly.
Flickr had a robust mobile Web site way back in 2006?before the iPhone even shipped. You could use it with your piece of crap Symbian phone, or the dinky screen on your Sony Ericsson T68i. But it was basically just a browser. If you wanted to get a photo from your phone to your account, you had to email it.
And then in 2008, something happened that made the mobile Web a sideshow altogether: apps. The iPhone's App Store ushered in a new era that changed the way we interacted. People didn't want mobile web experiences that required them to skip from a camera app, to an editing app, back to the Web and possibly even over to email to upload and share an image. They wanted an app that did all those things. The Flickr team understood that. Unfortunately they couldn't do anything about it.
"Flickr was not empowered to build its own iOS app?or any other mobile app for that matter," laments one former Flickr executive. "You had this external team with strong opinions as to what the app should do."
It was here that the missions of the two companies truly collided, according to insiders. The Flickr app was a top-down decision, driven by Yahoo Mobile and its leader, Marco Boerries. The team at Flickr was iced out.
Boerries had a grandiose vision for something called "Connected Life." It was to be a socially seamless mobile experience that brought all your Yahoo services together in the palm of your hand, and connected them with the desktop. It was nothing short of what Apple and Google and Microsoft are all trying to do today with their cloud strategies.
Boerries was a maniac. He'd built a word processing program called StarWriter as a 16 year-old kid, grew it into the StarOffice suite and sold it to Sun for $74 million in 1999. By 2004, he was running around Silicon Valley giving a demo that was literally making people gasp in wonder.
He would walk into a room full of investors, pull out his crappy flip phone, and take a picture of the room. Then he'd pocket it, open his laptop and refresh the app running on his desktop. Suddenly, the visitors in the room would be confronted with their own skeptical faces. It was automatic. He then explained that he could do the same thing with any other type of data?emails, phone numbers, mp3s, whatever. Anything you did on the phone would be seamlessly reflected on the desktop, and vice versa. Basically, it was iCloud.
Yahoo bought his company in 2005 for something in the neighborhood of $16 million, largely to buy Boerries. A month later, it would buy Flickr.
Boerries was a genius, and, by all accounts, a nightmare to work with. One of the most frank depictions of this comes from Kellan Elliot-McCrea, Etsy's CTO who, in a past life, was the chief architect of Flickr. On Quora, he writes:
"Marco Boerries was without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo "Connected Life" team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo. Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly."
The Yahoo Mobile team was onerously slow to get an app out the door. Although the iTunes App Store launched in July of 2008, Yahoo Mobile let a year slip away before it released an official Flickr app. When it finally did roll out the long-delayed beast in September of 2009, it was beyond disasterous. The early reviews on the iTunes App Store read like pre-alpha test notes of the world's worst software.
"Not enough functionality to be useful"
"it is SLOW and seems to slow down more with use"
"Was very excited about this app only to be let down. Hard."
"slow, buggy, terrible navigation."
"everything is painfully slow"
Among other problems, it wouldn't let you upload several photos at once, you had to go in manually submit them one at a time. It was downscaling photos to 450 x 600, murdering image quality. Users had to log in via Safari rather than in the app itself. It was striping EXIF data from photos as they uploaded?precisely the kind of thing Flickr's photo nerds wanted to see.
People. Fucking. Hated it.
The app landed like a pile of mud on a wedding gown. As one App Store reviewer put it, "For uploading to Flickr, this is really the worst app I've tried; you're better off just emailing photos direct from the phone in that respect."
It somehow managed to get Flickr's two key strengths?photo sharing and storage?completely wrong.
Possibly worst of all?at least from a business perspective?you couldn't sign up for a Flickr account from the app. (In fact, you still can't. It kicks you over to the Web to sign up with Yahoo if you want to register as a new user.) While other apps draw users into their Web services (think Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and notably Instagram) the Flickr app that Yahoo Mobile rolled out had no mechanism for that. It was not a recruitment tool. It was just for existing users.
"That was a big oversight," says Fake. That's an understatement. It was the mother of all fuckups.
Meanwhile, all manner of new apps were appearing that would not only snap photos for you, but process the images too. Things like Best Camera and Camera Bag were introducing consumers to the idea of applying automatic filters to their mobile photos. A little over a year after the Flickr app hit iTunes, another photography app came along that worked much like a quicker Flickr. It was called Instagram.
Today, it all seems too late. The iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr, but the feeling isn't mutual. Flickr isn't even among the top 50 free photography apps in iTunes. It's just below an Instagram clone in 64th place. By way of comparison, an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your photos is 23rd.
If you can't beat laser cat, you probably deserve to die.
What Next
Flickr's mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google's buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol's purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.
As a result, Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago. It's an Internet backwater. It's not socially appealing.
Recently, Flickr rolled out a "Justified" view, a way to scan your friends' recent photos where they are all placed together like puzzle pieces. It's similar to the way Pinterest lays out images. It's a dramatic, gorgeous way to look at photos?that mostly highlights how rarely many people update now.
As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.
This is anecdotal, sure, but I follow many of these same people on other networks (Path, Facebook, Instagram) where they tend to be very active. I see photos of the same people, with their same children and their same dogs?all looking a year or two older than on Flickr.
This justified view also serves to highlight just how many of my friends' photos are formatted in perfect squares?the tell-tale sign of an Instagram snap that's been exported. Many of my contacts' entire photostreams are made up of Instagram photos. In other words they are mere duplicate streams?with fewer comments and activity?of content that exists in primary form elsewhere. The only reason they are active on Flickr at all is because they automatically export there.
There are other signals as well. On Stellar.io, a favorites aggregator that tracks what people are linking on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, the latter's links fail to show up even daily in my stream. And of course, there is that damning Quantcast traffic chart.
Despite years of neglect, Flickr's miniscule yet highly talented team is trying desperately to right the ship.
Flickr began the year by killing off a slew of features that didn't really make sense?like Photo Sessions, a baffling feature that let you show real time slideshows of your pictures to other people that had Yahoo written all over it. It's also hustling to roll out many more, like that new Justified View and an Uploader that runs on HTML 5. It replaced its photo editor (formerly Google-owned and now defunct Picnik) with and HTML5 tool called Aviary, which lets people make changes to their photos without leaving the page and will play nice with tablets. It's showing pro members photos at 1600 and 2048 pixels now to take advantage of Retina Displays.
Flickr's product manager Markus Spiering notes that his team gets what it needs from Yahoo now. (Of course, you'd also assume he has to say that. But still.)
"We do have a lot of resources which are also within the main company. The people you see on the About page are the core team you see on San Francisco, but a lot of the horizontal development efforts are shared."
And that hated Yahoo-only login? Gone.
"We don't care so much about what kind of passport you have?a Google ID, Facebook," he says. "At the same time, we let you share your images to various places. There are a lot of solid and easy to understand privacy controls, and we see ourselves as the centerpiece.
"That's where we're pushing Flickr towards where it's a beautiful, photo centric experience. But whatever you are using, it gets your photos there."
Mobile is still a disaster. Flickr's iOS app, though improved from the one it rolled out in 2009, is still just awful. It still requires you to log into Yahoo via Safari, for example. And it doesn't offer even the most basic of photo editing or filters that seemingly every other camera app provides.
"I think I can honestly say that especially on iOS we need to provide a better Flickr experience in terms of our own app, but that's something we are working very hard on," says Spiering.
So let's say Flickr finally gets it together. Let's say it fixes its app, reinvigorates the community, and finally gets back on path. The question is: Is it too late?
It's under attack not just from Facebook and Instagram and, hell, TwitPic and Imgur (Imgur for fuck's sake!) but also the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, and Box.net. Not to mention Apple's iCloud and PhotoStream, Google's Picasa, and yes even Google+, which does automatic photo uploads from Android handsets in glorious full resolution complete with geotags and EXIF data.
A comeback doesn't seem likely.
Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo's steady march of incompetence doesn't bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.
Flickr's last best hope is that Yahoo realizes its value and decides to spin it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a final death spiral. But even if that happens, Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance. People don't tend to come back to homes they've already abandoned.
Flickr is still pretty wonderful. But it's lovely in the same way a box of old photos you've stashed under the bed is. It's an archive of nostalgia that you love dearly, on the rare occasion you stumble across it. You pull them out, and hold them up to the light, and remember a time when you were younger, and the Web was a more optimistic place, and it really was almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.
And then you close the box.
And you click over to Facebook, to see what's new.
Image: Shutterstock/Vince Clements
Source: http://gizmodo.com/flashback-how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-interne-508852335
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Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Nokia brings Lumia 925 for T-Mobile to CTIA 2013, we go hands-on
We've already spent some quality time with Nokia's handsome Lumia 925 and while it's no secret the company's Windows Phone flagship is coming to the US courtesy of T-Mobile, we'd never actually seen the carrier-branded model -- until now, that is. Nokia brought T-Mobile's version of the handset to CTIA 2013 where we took it for a brief spin. As you'd expect, the phone is identical to its global twin save for the operator's logo below the capacitive button and the radios which support T-Mobile's bands. Unfortunately, the Lumia 925 we played with was not final, so the software was off limits. In terms of hardware, it features the same 4.5-inch 1,280 x 768 AMOLED screen, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 1GB RAM and 8.7-megapixel camera with OIS. This is definitely one of Nokia's most attractive designs yet, and we're looking forward to getting our hands on a review unit soon. In the meantime, why not check out the gallery below?
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia, T-Mobile
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/UIZgIxGCBN0/
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Why won't he marry me? - News - Jamaica Gleaner - Tuesday | May ...
Q My boyfriend of three years wants us to move the relationship to another level. We have enjoyed each other's company. We communicate well and have few disagreements. We get on with each other. Our friends feel that we were made for each other. We are both professionals and he has rented a lovely apartment. I still live with my parents. My boyfriend wants me to become his live-in partner. My parents are against this move and think we should get married first.
A: It is acceptable to many couples to be involved in a live-in relationship. Some persons see it as a test run on marriage to ascertain whether persons are compatible. Some men believe they should wait until they own a house before they take a wife.
However, you need to consider the financial implications of living together. Will he expect you to pay half of the rent, or part of the rent? What portion of the expenses will you have to share? Will you be sharing health insurance? Will you be living free? And how will furniture, appliances, CDs, books, cutlery, pets etc, be split if there is a break-up? If things are bought after you move in, who owns what? Does he plan to buy a house with you before getting married? If you move in and you buy a house, make sure your name is on the title. Also consult your lawyer because your situation seems to suggest that tenancy in common would be your better option, especially if you want to leave your benefit to your parents. And remember that if you buy a house together and you apply for the mortgage together, then even after the break-up you are both responsible for the mortgage.
different protection
Despite changes to the law, unmarried live-in couples do not have the same legal protection as married couples. Certain protections and advantages that are legal only happen after five years for unmarried live-in couples. These are just a few of the practical issues to be resolved and discussed with your boyfriend. These challenges might change his mind to your position.
You and your parents have different family values from your boyfriend and his parents. You need to discuss whether there are other moral issues on which you have fundamental differences.
It might be instructive that he is suggesting a live-in relationship because he sees no difference between marriage and a live-in relationship. If there is no difference, why does he not marry you? And that he wants a test run means he is not fully confident about the relationship with you.
Email:editor@gleanerjm.com
?
Source: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130521/news/news6.html
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Chinese, Indian leaders call for cooperation
NEW DELHI (AP) ? The leaders of India and China played down their recent border dispute and other tensions Monday, pledging to work together for regional stability and the economic growth of the world's two most populous nations.
Friction has been building between the Asian giants in recent years as they vie for regional influence and access to fuel needed to feed their growing economies. Li Keqiang's trip to India, his first visit abroad since becoming Chinese premier, seems intended to minimize those tensions.
The three-day visit is part of an outreach mission by the new Chinese leadership to large emerging economies aimed at balancing Beijing's fraught ties with the United States.
In that vein, Li ? and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ? sought Monday to focus on the opportunities for cooperation between their nations.
"Both the prime minister and I believe that there are far more shared interests between China and India than the differences we have," Li said at a joint news conference.
"Without the common development of China and India, Asia won't become strong and the world won't become a better place," he said.
The summit was far heavier on symbolism than substance. The two sides signed eight minor agreements. But both leaders insisted the cooperation was important, and they promised to build on it, announcing that Singh would make a visit to China later in the year.
"I shared with Premier Li my view that the rise of China and India is good for the world and that the world has enough space to accommodate the growth aspirations of both our peoples. To make this a reality, it is important to build understanding between our two peoples," Singh said.
"We agreed that both sides must work to strengthen greater trust and confidence, which, in turn, will permit much larger cooperation," he added.
But the two nations have deep disputes, including China's unwavering support of India's archrival, Pakistan. The presence in India of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile are a constant irritant to China.
China already sees itself as Asia's great power, while India hopes its increasing economic and military might ? though still far below its neighbor's ? will eventually put it in the same league.
While China has worked to shore up relationships with Nepal and Sri Lanka in India's traditional South Asian sphere of influence, India has been venturing into partnerships with Southeast Asian nations.
Even their $61.5 billion in trade last year was a source of tension because it was heavily skewed in favor of China. Singh said he spoke to Li about getting greater access to Chinese markets for Indian goods.
Their most volatile dispute remains their border disagreement, which led to a bloody war in 1962 and flared up last month, just weeks before Li's planned visit.
India said Chinese troops crossed the de facto border on April 15 and pitched camp in the Depsang Valley in the Ladakh region of eastern Kashmir. New Delhi responded with diplomatic protests and then moved its soldiers just 300 meters (yards) from the Chinese position.
The two sides negotiated a peaceful end to the standoff three weeks later by withdrawing troops to their original positions in the Ladakh area.
Li said they spoke candidly about the dispute. Both leaders said they agreed that preserving peace along the border was crucial to maintaining growth and asked mediators from both countries to work toward a framework for reaching a settlement.
During the talks, both sides agreed that Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon will visit China within weeks to discuss the border issue, Indian Ambassador to China S. Jaishankar told reporters. He said Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony is also scheduled to visit China soon.
Indian media reports said a border cooperation agreement under negotiation proposes a freezing of troop levels in the disputed border region as the two countries make efforts to settle the issue.
India says China is occupying 38,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) of its territory in the Aksai Chin plateau in the western Himalayas, while China claims around 90,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. The two sides have held 15 rounds of fruitless border talks over the past decade.
In a joint statement, the two sides agreed to cooperate on energy and environmental conservation and disaster management and to address their trade imbalance while trying to increase trade to $100 billion by 2015.
Li's Indian mission is part of China's broader international outreach intended to balance its relations with Washington.
"As the two largest economies of the world and the most important political powers of the Asia-Pacific region, China-U.S. relations in every respect still remain the pivot of China's foreign policies," said Wang Lian, an international relations scholar at Peking University in Beijing. But, Wang said, "as China's political and economic influence increase continuously, China needs to boost its bilateral and multilateral relations with developing countries so as not to totally rely on its relations with the U.S."
Chinese state media heralded Li's India visit with headlines that the "Dragon and elephant dance together" and coverage that emphasized common interests ? trade and regional peace ? and played down divisions.
Ultimately, Beijing hopes that making common cause with India and the other big emerging economies will help them rewrite the rules of the U.S.-dominated international order. Li's boss, Communist Party chief Xi Jinping, made his first overseas trip to Russia and then to South Africa for a summit of those new big economies, the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
In an interview with the Xinhua News Agency, Chinese Ambassador to India Wei Wei said Beijing and Delhi are working together on climate change, world trade rules and revising the international finance system. The cooperation "shows the two countries' crucial role on major issues of global governance," the ambassador was quoted as saying.
Li is to visit Pakistan, Switzerland and Germany after leaving India.
___
Associated Press researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed to this report.
___
Follow Ravi Nessman on Twitter at twitter.com/ravinessman
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-indian-leaders-call-cooperation-101050969.html
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How to Help: Midwest storms
There's a reason that many eyes were on Plaza Towers Elementary as Moore, Oklahoma began to assess the damage from a deadly, devastating tornado that blasted through the town Monday evening?and killed at least 51 people: the school was leveled, with dozens of children still inside. And so far, some of the most emotionally charged news has emerged from the story unfolding there.?
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/how-to-help--midwest-storms-182314098.html
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Monday, May 20, 2013
Kotaku Here Is a Real PS4 Teaser Video | io9 How the Runaways Movie That Never Happened Helped to Fu
Kotaku Here Is a Real PS4 Teaser Video | io9 How the Runaways Movie That Never Happened Helped to Fuel Iron Man 3 | Gawker Taylor Swift's Award-Winning Reaction to Justin and Selena Kissing | Jalopnik The Ten Craziest Single Seat Road Cars
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Obama urged to make economy a bigger, bolder topic
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Five months into President Barack Obama's second term, allies and former top aides worry that his overarching goal of economic opportunity has been diminished, partly drowned out by controversies seized upon by Republicans in an effort to weaken him.
The former White House insiders, including longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod, say Obama needs to make his case anew for government's role in expanding education and innovation and to give, as Obama put it in one of his early seminal speeches, "every American a fighting chance in the 21st century."
Among their suggestions is that the president deliver a major address, perhaps at a commencement, that once again places his economic vision at the center of his agenda and speaks to what continues to be the overriding concern of the American public.
Instead, absent major legislative victories, Obama's second term has become a series of small actions overshadowed by a trio of recent troubles over the administration's response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, the IRS's targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records as part of a leak investigation.
"The hardest thing in the hot house of Washington in weeks like this is to get above the maelstrom and really define major issues in your own terms," Axelrod said. "They need to find big platforms, whether it's congressional addresses, commencement speeches, high-profile interviews or a combination of those things and others."
As these Democrats see it, there has been an arc of Obama addresses that have spelled out the challenge and the hope of attaining the American Dream, from a 2005 commencement address at tiny Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., to his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., in late 2011, and that the time for another one is now.
Over the last two weeks, Obama has been trying to draw attention to his job-creation ideas with small events in Austin and, on Friday, in Baltimore. The daytime visits have been coupled with modest executive initiatives that tend to garner local media attention but get lost in Washington's attention to the contentious issues of the moment.
"There does seem to be a risk of getting bogged down in noise," said Jared Bernstein, who was part of Obama's economic team when he served as Vice President Joe Biden's chief economist. "He doesn't need to get out to talk about Benghazi and the IRS and the budget deficit. He needs to talk about investment in the nation's productivity."
Obama has called for more government spending on education, public works projects, and research and development and has proposed paying for it largely with higher taxes. But after letting one tax increase on the rich pass at the beginning of the year, Republicans have steadfastly refused any further tax hikes and have resisted Obama's spending plans. The result has been a fruitless search, at least so far, for a "grand bargain" to trim the nation's long-term debt.
In the face of Republican-led investigations in Congress and with some conservatives even suggesting impeachment proceedings against the president, some Obama advisers say that boldly elevating the economy would create a sharp contrast and emphasize their belief that Republicans are overplaying their hand. They note that as dissatisfaction with Washington has grown, Obama has continued to hold a substantial edge over the Republicans in Congress.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that creating jobs is the top priority of Republicans, too, but "we're also focused on holding this administration accountable" about what happened in Libya and with the IRS.
If Obama has a single long-term governing priority, it is a deep-seated belief that advances in technology and globalization have translated into a significant consumer benefits but have also eroded middle-class gains. "The result has been the emergence of what some call a 'winner take all' economy, in which a rising tide doesn't necessarily lift all boats," he wrote in his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope."
The opportunity to make a broad shift toward the economy might have presented itself this week, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the budget deficit for 2013 will be $642 billion ? lower than estimated and half of the record $1.4 trillion hit during Obama's first year in office. Instead, that bit of news was overshadowed by the IRS, Benghazi and AP phone record controversies.
Armed with a lower deficit number, some of Obama's liberal critics say he should abandon efforts to reduce deficits and focus exclusively on jobs.
"They should declare victory," said Lawrence Mishel, president and CEO of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. "Making the big policy and political project the grand bargain has been digging us in a deeper and deeper hole."
White House officials say the time to pause and deliver the type of major address that connects Obama's policies to his core beliefs is when it has the possibility of making a major impact. For now, they say, their economic tour across the country is better suited to the moment.
"What we think that these tours do is add another dimension to the argument of what we're trying to get done with Congress," White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri said. "That this is not just about budgets, this is about steps that Congress can take legislatively and the president can take unilaterally that will create jobs and help middle-class families."
How to emphasize Obama's jobs agenda was a subject Thursday during a meeting between top White House aides and outside Democratic operatives, many of whom had worked for Bill Clinton's administration. They had been called by Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough to consult and offer ideas on how to respond to the most recent uproars. Among those attending were such Clinton aides as Paul Begala and Mike McCurry.
"What the president can do is make decisions about what he wants to talk to the American people about," said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who also attended Thursday's meeting. "And my view is, as someone who spends time sitting in focus groups listening to voters, what's at the top of mind with them is the economy still."
___
Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-urged-economy-bigger-bolder-140833020.html
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nIcE Tv}}}} Watch John Cena vs Ryback Live Last Man Standing ...
John Cena WWE Championship at WrestleMania & it is a question now is it will come to a quick and unceremonious end at Extreme Rules ?
Schedule:
Date: Sunday May 19, 2013
Time: 8PMET or 5PMPT
Venue Scottrade Center
City St. Louis, Missouri
John Cena (c) vs Ryback
Live on PPV
If Ryback has his way may defit Cena & become the WWE Champion. The fight is going to be held on Sunday May 19, 2013 at Scottrade Center
City St. Louis, Missouri.This last man standing match as exciting as this first-time singles contest would be under ordinary conditions, the title bout is made all the more intriguing by its personal overtones and Ryback?s claim that he is looking to break out of The Champ?s sizable shadow, not to mention the dangerous addition of Last Man Standing rules. In such matches, there are no disqualifications, count-outs, pinfalls or submissions. The only way to win the match is by incapacitating your opponent to the point he is unable to answer the referee?s count of 10.
So Watch & enjoy John Cena vs Ryback Live Last Man Standing Match at Extreme Rules 2013.
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Zeigler House Inn: Gals, Guys, Couples: Summer Packages to ...
SAVANNAH Georgia (May 18, 2013) ? Tap into both sides of Savannah?s personality -- genteel to quirky -- with lots of fun in between.?
Innkeeper Jackie Heinz at Zeigler House Inn -- a popular 7-suite bed and breakfast inn in downtown Savannah -- makes it easy. The stately inn on the prestigious Jones Street is an insider?s social hub for fun-ready tourists! ?The tour package deals are a great idea for last minute getaways ? whether for an affordable honeymoon, first anniversary gift or 50th anniversary trip, romantic getaway in the southeast, historic sightseeing in the Deep South, local food travel, discovering what?s on the Georgia Coast back roads, a mini reunion with siblings or college friends, or gals? getaway, ? states Jackie.?
Zeigler House Inn, Savannah GA USA
A B&B member of Romantic Inns of Savannah
email innkeeper@ZeiglerHouseinn.com
Toll Free 866-233-5307
Local Telephone 912-233-5307?
Innkeeper Jackie Heinz at Zeigler House Inn -- a popular 7-suite bed and breakfast inn in downtown Savannah -- makes it easy. The stately inn on the prestigious Jones Street is an insider?s social hub for fun-ready tourists! ?The tour package deals are a great idea for last minute getaways ? whether for an affordable honeymoon, first anniversary gift or 50th anniversary trip, romantic getaway in the southeast, historic sightseeing in the Deep South, local food travel, discovering what?s on the Georgia Coast back roads, a mini reunion with siblings or college friends, or gals? getaway, ? states Jackie.?
Featured in Fodor?s 2013 Travel Guide, Zeigler House Inn affords a triple experience -- sultry Savannah paired with European heritage, and curated French themed sleep retreats. ?You?ll love escaping ... to your secret place in beautiful Savannah GA's historic district!? adds Jackie. Details for the new packages are found on the inn?s Savannah Bed and Breakfast Package web page, here. Simply scroll down that page link for package details.? Short details are below.?? Do more than wish you could stay in our Savannah B&B!? Take advantage of our inn?s lodging discount -- Savannah Summer rates for lodging, in effect July 15, 2013 ? August 29, 2013. You?ll love playtime in Savannah when the city is less crowded!Savannah Travel Tip:? When your travel dates are flexible, ask for recommended dates during some of the best events in Savannah, performing arts, and heritage festivals. Surprising ?must-do? happenings will double the reasons to travel to Savannah.
Let?s talk soon!
Jackie HeinzZeigler House Inn, Savannah GA USA
A B&B member of Romantic Inns of Savannah
email innkeeper@ZeiglerHouseinn.com
Toll Free 866-233-5307
Local Telephone 912-233-5307?
Source: http://blog.zeiglerhouseinn.com/2013/05/gals-guys-couples-summer-packages-to.html
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Sunday, May 19, 2013
Unified Backlash To Education Mandates Grows, Spreads
?It?s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,? wrote John Tierny in?The Atlantic? recently. ?I?m not an expert on revolutions,? he continued, ?but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.?
Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming ?revolution:?
- Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
- Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
- Voucher and other ?choice? proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.
Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals ?it?s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy ? which makes teachers? careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers ? has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.?
In a legislative view, the?Progressive State Network,?which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed ?a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.? The post on PSN?s website referenced Tierney?s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the ?parent trigger,? which enables private takeovers of public schools.These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.
The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it?s scaling up in intensity.
A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement
For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.
In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in?The Nation?reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism. From all corners of the country ? North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago ??students as young as eight years old?are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including?zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by?a high school student in Texas?that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in ?packets? rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning. In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led?prominent, headline-earning protests?to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing. In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their?social media and organizing skills?to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs. In?Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing. Students in?Philadelphia, Providence,?Rhode Island,?Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a?national scale. These student organizations? Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing. In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and even?joining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in?Tennessee?and parent trigger legislation in?Florida. Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year?s?Journey for Justice?effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.A Movement Getting More Recognition
Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.
That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten,?called for a moratorium?on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers? unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.
Long-time education journalist?Dana Goldstein?speculated on her blog that Weingarten?s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a ?coalition? of centrist-minded ? although mostly conservative ? wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.Her conclusion was that these differences represent a ?deep divide? among the political class about whether it?s a good idea to ?scare us into meaningful school reform.?
Another experienced education journalist,?Sam Chaltain?also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected,?Obama proceeded with ?a series of education policies that further entrenched America?s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.?Critics of those policies ?vented,? Chaltain explained, but ?policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.? But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, ?policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.?
Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had ?reached a tipping point.?
Similarly, veteran education reporter at?Education Week?Michelle McNeilobserved, ?Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.?McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is ?an institution that historically is slow to change,? and now it?s being ?forced to deal with so much change at once.? And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly ?about centralization or decentralization? of specific ?reform? efforts.
But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation?s education policy is not new. The ?polarization? is not ?obscuring? the issues ? as?McNeil contends ? it?s clarifying them. And the ?debate? over education has broken free from being an issue confined to ?fringes? and ?policy elites? to take its rightful place at the center of ?a growing, broader backlash.?
Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools ? whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named ?empowerment? policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests ? are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.
A Leadership Out Of Touch
The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in?Indiana, block parent trigger bills in?Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in?Texas. This unification of the grassroots with the??grass tops??in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.
Witness the recent confession from one of the movement?s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As?Valerie Struass?reported at her blog on?The Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a ?nightmare? of complexity.Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a ?testing industrial complex? and ?a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated ? that they?ll just make you suicidal.?
Vallas? newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by?Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the ?rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems? based on test scores. Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan?s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly?Alexander Russo?recently reported, ?Duncan described the trigger as ?an important tool? for parent involvement ? but not the only or even the most important one? ? whatever that means.Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.
Intensity Is Building
?Scared? or not, recalling Goldstein?s comment, activists driving protests against the nation?s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.
Later this month, for instance, teachers in?Chicago?are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent?doubling of college loan debt interest rates?? certainly an issue related to public education ? are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand ? widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.
The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.
Source: http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2013/05/unified-backlash-to-education-mandates.html
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Obama agenda seems to be weathering controversies
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Despite Democratic fears, predictions of the demise of President Barack Obama's agenda appear exaggerated after a week of cascading controversies, political triage by the administration and party leaders in Congress and lack of evidence to date of wrongdoing close to the Oval Office.
"Absolutely not," Steven Miller, the recently resigned acting head of the Internal Revenue Service, responded Friday when asked if he had any contact with the White House about targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for special treatment.
The president's re-election campaign?" persisted Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
"No," said Miller.
The hearing took place at the end of a week in which Republicans repeatedly assailed Obama and were attacked by Democrats in turn ? yet sweeping immigration legislation advanced methodically toward bipartisan approval in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure "has strong support of its own in the Senate," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a member of the panel.
Across the Capitol, a bipartisan House group reported agreement in principle toward a compromise on the issue, which looms as Obama's best chance for a signature second-term domestic achievement. "I continue to believe that the House needs to deal with this," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who is not directly involved in the talks.
The president's nominee to become energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, won Senate confirmation, 97-0. And there were signs that Republicans might allow confirmation of Sri Srinivasan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, sometimes a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.
Separately, a House committee approved legislation to prevent a spike in interest rates on student loans on July 1. It moves in the direction of a White House-backed proposal for future rate changes to be based on private markets.
Even so, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said, "It's been a bad week for the administration."
Several Democratic lawmakers and aides agreed, and expressed concern about the impact on Obama's agenda ? even though much of it has been stymied by Republicans for months already.
At the same time, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., voiced optimism that the IRS controversy would boost the push for an overhaul of the tax code, rather than derail it. "It may make a case for a simpler tax code, where the IRS has less discretion," he said.
Long-term budget issues, the main flash point of divided government since 2011, have receded as projected deficits fall in the wake of an improving economy and recently enacted spending cuts and tax increases.
Even before Obama began grappling with the IRS, the fallout from last year's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and from the Justice Department's secret seizure of Associated Press phone records, the two parties were at odds over steps to replace $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts. In particular, Obama's call for higher taxes is a nonstarter with Republicans.
Other high-profile legislation and presidential appointees face difficulties that predate the current controversies.
Months ago, Obama scaled back requested gun safety legislation to center on expanded background checks for firearms purchasers. That was derailed in the Senate, has even less chance in the House and is unlikely to reach the president's desk.
Republicans oppose other recommendations from the president's State of the Union address, including automatic increases in the minimum wage, a pre-kindergarten program funded by higher cigarette taxes and more federal money for highways and bridge repair.
In a clash that long predates the IRS controversy, Senate Republicans seem intent on blocking Obama's nomination of Tom Perez as labor secretary. Gina McCarthy's nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency is also on hold, at least temporarily, and Democrats expect Republican opposition awaits Penny Pritzger, Obama's choice for commerce secretary.
Rhetorically, the two parties fell into two camps when it came to the White House troubles. Democrats tended to describe them as controversies, Republicans often used less flattering terms.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., accused the administration of fostering a "culture of intimidation." He referred to the IRS, the handling of the Benghazi attack and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' "fundraising among the industry people she regulates on behalf of the president's health care law."
Two days later, Camp, a 23-year veteran lawmaker, opened the IRS hearing by calling the agency's actions part of a "culture of cover-ups and intimidation in this administration." He offered no other examples.
Rep. Trey Radel, a first-term Florida Republican, said in an interview, "What we're looking at now is a breach of trust" from the White House.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California offered a scathing response when asked if the controversies would hamper Obama's ability to win legislation from the Republican-controlled House. "Well, the last two years there was nothing that went through this Congress, and it was no AP, IRS or any other (thing) that we were dealing with."
"They just want to do nothing. And their timetable is never," she said of GOP lawmakers.
Similarly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave no ground on Benghazi, a dispute that increasingly centered on talking points written for administration officials to use on television after the attack last September in which U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
"It's obvious it's an attempt to embarrass President Obama and embarrass Hillary Clinton," he said of Republican criticism that first flared during last year's election campaign.
On a third front, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., resurrected legislation that would requiring a judge to approve subpoenas for news media communications records when investigating news leaks said to threaten the national security. It was a response to the FBI's secret, successful pursuit of Associated Press phone records in a current probe.
While Democrats counterattacked on Benghazi and parried on leaks, they bashed the IRS' treatment of conservative groups as improper if not illegal ? and warned Republicans not to overplay their hand.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-agenda-seems-weathering-controversies-072617076.html
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