Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar

Posted by Michael Arrington

I am now in possession of screenshots from Google’s long delayed new Ajax calendar application, which will be called “CL2″ (the CL2 login screen is here). It was only a matter of time before someone broke down and leaked these – as far as I know these screen shots are the first on the public web. Previous ones were almost certainly photoshopped fakes. These are real.

Om Malik also recently posted with some additional details and has been trying to track down more information. Now we have it.

Here is the default view of Google’s new CL2 Calendar:

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_05_16_a_brain.html

May 16, 2005
The Critics: Books

Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?

1.

Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans—at least, as measured by I.Q. tests—were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of change has subsided, test scores have continued to rise—not just in America but all over the developed world. What’s more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers and private schools. The middle part of the curve—the people who have supposedly been suffering from a deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless pop music—has increased just as much. What on earth is happening? In the wonderfully entertaining “Everything Bad Is Good for You” (Riverhead; $23.95), Steven Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture.

Malcolm Gladwell on the Freakonomics Paradox

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and, over the years, a collection of startlingly good New Yorker articles, has addressed on his blog the question of why he endorsed Freakonomics (by writing a blurb before it was published) even though its explanation of the 1990’s crime drop dismissed as a cause the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement put forth by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, put into practice in New York by Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton, and put into the public’s eye by Malcolm himself first in a New Yorker article and then in The Tipping Point. (Malcolm and Steve Levitt held a friendly debate on this very issue many months ago.) As usual, Malcolm’s writing is well-considered and entertaining. One thing to consider, however: the theory put forth in Freakonomics examined why crime had fallen all over the country, not just in New York, and one of the many arguments against “broken windows” as a major cause was the fact that such innovative policing wasn’t being practiced elsewhere—and yet crime was falling in those places as well. A smaller point to also consider: Gladwell left out one other major reason that, according to Levitt’s research, crime did begin to fall in the 1990’s: the waning of the violent crack trade.

• March 13, 2006 | 4:18 p.m. ET

Daily Made-up News (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS – Everybody who writes for a living ought to be subjected to one day in which they are written about. The results would be mortifying – and educational.

Today’s lesson in this subject should go to gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, his assistant Katherine Thomson, and their employers at The New York Daily News, who are guilty of taking quotes out of context in such an egregious manner — and ignoring an extraordinary conflict of interest for Ms. Thomson — that what they published wouldn’t have gotten past the editor of my 4^th Grade Class Newspaper.

In an interview with CSPAN that aired last night, I managed to compliment both my boss at MSNBC, network president Rick Kaplan, and our bosses at NBC and the parent company GE – Kaplan for his support of Countdown and the corporate types for never letting what might be their own personal ideologies get in the way of the news, or their corporate mission to make money.

Compliments. On tape. On television. And Grove and Thomson twisted them into negatives, into insults.

Grove wrote today: “BLOOD FEUD? MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann deeply distrusts the top brass at NBC and its parent company, General Electric, judging by his interview with C-SPAN’s grand inquisitor, Brian Lamb. ‘There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all,’ he claimed, without naming names. ‘Moral force and money often do not mix in the slightest.’”

Well, that’s a fantastic job of selecting quotes, draining them of their context, and trying to start trouble where none exists.

Here’s what I said, in full, according to the CSPAN transcript. The parts Grove and Thomson pulled, in their bush league attempt at journalism, are in italics.

“I haven’t met a lot of flying monkeys at NBC. I have met people who — and by the way, this is the great freedom and the great protection of American broadcasting, commercial broadcasting.

“We made a mistake in the ’20s. We let broadcasting in this country develop with commercial broadcasting taking the lead and all other kinds of information on radio or television secondary or tertiary.

“But the protection of money at the center of everything, including news to the degree that it is now, is that as long as you make the money, they don’t care what it is you put on the air. They don’t care. There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all. Anybody who knew anything about American history and stepped out at any point in American history and got an assessment of this presidential administration would say, yes, I don’t know how much they need to be criticized, but they need to be criticized to some degree.

“There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened. On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they are happy.

If my ratings went up because there was no criticism of the president of the United States, they would be happy.”

Brian Lamb then asked me “What does say about moral force?” I replied, “It says that moral force and money often do not mix in the slightest. They are often separate beams of light traveling through the universe, and you may have to jump off one to ride the other for a while.”

In short, I was praising NBC and GE for not – as Fox and other corporations do – letting their personal opinions override the assessments and inquiries of the people they’ve hired to do the news. In other words, they don’t mess with it. Far from “distrusting” – as Grove put it – the brass here, I actually trust them.

Shame on Lloyd Grove.

He also tried to make it personal. Last August he printed an exaggerated version of the kind of “the boss gets angry” moment everybody in every office in America has gone through. Grove happily wrote of Rick Kaplan yelling; he never wrote of Rick apologizing, nor of his support for the show.

As Stewie Griffin says in “Family Guy” – “Oh, here we go.”

From Lloyd and Thomson’s column today:  “When Lamb asked about MSNBC President Rick Kaplan dressing him down last August for a commentary about Peter Jennings that featured a graphic account of Olbermann spitting up blood, the “Countdown” host explained that Kaplan ‘is a very emotional, very high-strung, gigantic man, also a very squeamish man. … He just was squeamish about blood.’”

I was – as the CSPAN transcript again points out – complimenting Rick Kaplan, and explaining what happened, something Grove never attempted to do. All of this had followed my cancer scare, when a benign growth had been removed from the roof of my mouth, leading me to do a commentary about how even if smoking isn’t going to give you cancer, the often bloody mess that ensues from its benign results is bad enough. Again, here’s what I said, with the selective edits by Grove and Thomson in italics:

“So I come back the following Monday to do a commentary on this, and Peter Jennings finally passed away and we did most of the show about Peter Jennings. And then at the end, I said, if somehow Peter Jennings’ death has not convinced you, let me tell you what happened to me in the roof of my mouth.

“We were premiering a new 9:00 show that night and Rick, as the President of MSNBC, is a very emotional, very high strung, gigantic man, also a very squeamish man, was very surprised to hear, even though it had been discussed before, I was talking about spitting blood into a garbage can and all the rest of this stuff.

“And he was – he was mortified. He just assumed everybody would be terrified by what I was saying, change the channel, and here we have the premier of this new 9:00 show that I would have just ruined, and he was yelling and he was yelling uncontrollably.

“And a couple of days later, after he calmed down, he was apologizing to the same degree of giant-sized gestures and such. He just was squeamish about blood, that was all it was.”

Brian Lamb then asked, “So it wasn’t an attack about you?” I answered “no, not at all.” “Or on you?,” he asked. “No, Rick – if he’s not the biggest fan of the show within NBC, he’s doing a very good impression of it. No, he’s been completely supportive of the show, all the way through.”

There’s one more element in play here that should worry the editors of The New York Daily News. Grove’s lackey, Katherine Thomson, used to work here at MSNBC, and her departure did not exactly bring tears from her ex-colleagues. Last week, an awful item appeared in the column in which she helps Grove shovel manure about the personal lives of two producers at another NBC broadcast. The producers aren’t famous, they aren’t public figures, and a freshman student in J-School somewhere would question why they were subjected to public scrutiny.

But they were.

In a column partially written by a woman who recently left the company for which they – and I – work.

So, on top of disgraceful de-contextualizing quotes, there is the issue of a bald-faced conflict of interest.

We’re naming Thomson and Grove tonight’s Worst Persons In The World. That is scarcely sufficient for their journalistic recklessness. They should be fired.

Comments? Emaildocument.write(““); document.write(“KOlbermann”+”@”+”msnbc.com”);KOlbermann@msnbc.comdocument.write(‘‘);
Watch Countdown each weeknight at 8 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV

http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1067

 

March 12, 2006 Keith Olbermann MSNBC Host, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” Q&A Podcasts

Watch the Program
More Information

Info: Keith Olbermann is the host of the MSNBC show “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”.

 

Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners.
C-SPAN uses its best efforts to provide accurate transcripts of its programs, but it can not be held liable for mistakes such as omitted words, punctuation, spelling, mistakes that change meaning, etc.

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Keith Olbermann, this is one of your quotes from the past: ”My ego has always operated on all cylinders.”KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST, MSNBC’S ”COUNTDOWN”: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

OLBERMANN: And your point on that being what?

LAMB: But why would you say that?

OLBERMANN: Because it’s true. I think it gives people an insight into not only what I’m doing, but also my business and the things that are necessary. It’s what would ordinarily be personality disorders in other fields can be useful, productive things for society if you channel them correctly and if you acknowledge them.

So I, you know, say a lot of things like that.

LAMB: When did you discover you had an ego?

 

Supreme Court Justice Reveals Death Threats

By GINA HOLLAND, AP

 

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WASHINGTON (March 16) – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor have been the targets of death threats from the “irrational fringe” of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.

The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:

 

Karl Rove I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Condoleezza Rice Stephen Hadley Andrew Card Alberto Gonzales Mary Matalin Ari Fleischer Susan Ralston Israel Hernandez John Hannah Scott McClellan	Dan Bartlett Claire Buchan Catherine Martin Jennifer Millerwise David Wurmser Colin Powell Karen Hughes Adam Levine Bob Joseph Vice President Dick Cheney President George W. Bush

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Why has Lori Klausutis’ Death Been Swept Under the Rug?

This article is the first in a series on t r u t h o u t which will present the known facts and raise some questions about this strange and tragic case.

Part I: Congressional Aide Found Dead in Congressman’s Office
By Jennifer Van Bergen

t r u t h o u t | January 4, 2001 – Remember the news back in July that Lori Klausutis, an aide to U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough (R-FL), was found dead in the congressman’s District Office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida?

If you don’t, that’s because the news came and went in the blink of an eye.

Wait. Did you get that? A congressman’s aide. Dead. In the congressman’s office. No witnesses.

And the media were all but silent.

While the Condit/Levy story ran rampant in the national press for weeks on end, the Scarborough/Klausutis story got barely nine lines in the Associated Press and only one line in The Washington Post.

Does it make you wonder?

Wait until you hear the rest of the story. It has all the elements of a good murder mystery.

* The congressman (an ardent and vocal supporter of G.W., by the way) resigns only six months after re-election, just prior to his aide’s death. The reason: amid rumors of marital infidelity, the recently-divorced husband wants to spend more time with his sons.

* A medical examiner who had his license revoked in another state. Why? He lost it falsifying autopsies.

* The medical examiner’s supervisor had contributed thousands of dollars to the congressman’s election campaign.

* Contradictory reports about whether there is a visible head injury or not.

* A medical conclusion that contains several inconsistencies. First, that Mrs. Klausutis, who was a marathon runner, died of a cardiac arryhthmia. Second, that although she had suffered a fractured skull and a “contracoup” bruise on the opposite side of the brain, the injury could not possibly have been caused by a physical assault.

* Then there’s the question of whether the office was locked and the lights were on. One report says the door was locked and the lights were off; another report says the door was unlocked and the lights were on.

* And if all this weren’t enough, there’s the scientist husband who does high level weapon design work for the Air Force.

These are only the more obvious elements of the case. And this is not newsworthy enough for the press?

To be fair, the local press, the Northwest Florida Daily News, thought it was newsworthy for a few weeks. They published several short but good pieces and made a public records request for the police and medical reports. However, after the paper published the autopsy findings — which concluded that Lori Klausutis fainted, fell and hit her head on the desk — which effectively closed the police investigation, the paper had little more to go on. Furthermore, some local citizens accused the paper of “sensationalizing” the story. So, the story died.

In fact, however, the news stayed alive on various message boards on the internet and two intrepid journalists did do some excellent research which was published online, but amazingly, no major paper or television network even mentioned the story. Why?

That question is perhaps unaswerable. But it should be raised, along with all the many other questions that arise in this case. This series intends to review the facts and raise these questions.

“Absolutely no evidence of foul play”

Mrs. Klausutis was found dead in Rep. Joe Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach office at about 8:10 a.m. on July 20 by Juanita and Andreas Bergmann, who claim they had an appointment that morning with Rep. Scarborough to facilitate Mr. Bergmann’s application for a green card. Mr. Scarborough, however, was still in Washington, D.C. and flew home only later that day.

The day after Mrs. Klausutis was found, the police said there was no evidence of “foul play or trauma to her body.” The following day, having performed his autopsy and while waiting for the results of blood tests, Dr. Michael Berkland, the medical examiner, told the press that there was “absolutely no evidence” that Lori was “a victim of ‘foul play.'” By July 26, although Berkland had still not received the toxicology results, which he noted would likely play a key role in determining whether Ms. Klausutis had died of natural causes or accidentally, Berkland stated that he had “ruled out homicide.” While he said he didn’t think that suicide was a likely scenario either, he stated that he was also investigating it as a possibility.

Finally, on August 6, Berkland released the autopsy. Oddly, although the police had originally stated that there were no signs of trauma, Berkland acknowledged that Klausutis had sustained a “scratch and bruise” on her head which had been noted in the original death investigation. His explanation for having lied to the press was to “prevent undue speculation” about the cause of death.

Berkland determined that Lori, an avid runner who ran fivemiles a day, had a prolapsed mitral valve which caused a sudden cardiac arrhythmia — an irregular heartbeat — which in turn caused Lori to faint “in midstride,” and hit her head on the desk. How Berkland came up with this theory is unknown since the medical report contains no description of the death scene, no diagram of the location of the body, or its posture or appearance as Berkland first observed it on the morning of July 20th..

Early on in the investigation, there were rumors that Ms. Klausutis had suffered from previous health problems, but her family issued a statement contradicting this.

Thus, in the very first chapter of this story, several questions arise. How could a healthy, physically fit, 28-year-old woman suddenly “faint” of a previously undetected heart problem? How could the police, with no witnesses, and knowing from the outset that Ms. Klausustis had sustained a bruise to the head, determine that there was no evidence of an attack? If Rep. Scarborough had an appointment with the Bergmann’s, why was he still in Washington, D.C.? Or was he? Why did the police and medical examiner lie to the public about the existence of visible signs of head trauma? They lied to the public so easily. Could they have lied about other things, as well? Given their later reluctance to pursue the case or release any information whatsoever about it, this lie may indicate a less-than-honest handling of the case.

Next issue: Part II: “Regular Joe” and “Little Miss Mary Sunshine”

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