just joined a cool flickr group. they have alot of candid banksy and thousands of other pics.

Graffiti Archaeology

Ferrari Offering Hot Laps To Fans At New Jersey to Benefit Children’s Charity

.

Millville, N.J. (August 24, 2009) - On September 18-20, Ferrari North America will provide spectators of their racing series with an opportunity to experience a Ferrari racing adventure “hot lap.”  

.

For a minimum donation of $100 to After-School All-Stars (ASAS), a national nonprofit that provides after-school programs to middle school youth, spectators can ride as a passenger in one of the racing Ferraris while a professional driver speeds around the 2.25-mile Thunderbolt Raceway at New Jersey Motorsports Park, reaching speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.  
.
Fans will sign up for the rides at the race track on the event days.
.
The Ferrari Challenge is a racing series designed to allow Ferrari owners to compete with one another on some of the world’s greatest racing tracks.  New Jersey Motorsports Park is the last stop in this six-race series and will also be the last opportunity for spectators to purchase hot laps until next season.

::sigh::
.

NYC skateboarding pioneer Andy Kessler dies at 48

 

By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 22 mins ago
.

interesting but whatevs at the same time…

D1GP USA Lays Down the Law – Team Orange Fined $17,500

from Wrecked by Wrecked Magazine

Wow, after reading the official D1GP USA statement about the D1GP Chicago event it makes Team Orange look even more out of hand. Apparently according to the PR sent out by Rich Goodwin Tanaka even injured a course worker in the process of “hissy fit.” Here is the quote from the release,

One of our pit workers was standing in front of Tanaka’s car with his arm out and hand up signaling to him to not move forward trying to get Tanaka to turn around and go back to his pit position. It was about this time Tanaka was informed of the Wang victory. Believing that the original call the run earlier was for a OMT, Tanaka and Team Orange then went berserk. Tanaka then pressed his car against the course workers leg and proceeded to continually rev his engine. Team Orange’s mechanic then slapped the course workers arm (he had up signaling Tanaka to not move forward) in an attempt to get him to put his arm down. This slap of the course workers arm was repeated no less than 3 times before the race starter told his course worker to get out of the way. At this time Tanaka hit the gas and performed a wheel spin (burnout) thus spinning the car around in obvious defiance over the decision by the judges and his team’s misunderstanding. As he did this he reached out of the car and gave everyone and obscene gesture, but as he was doing this he also clipped our race starter’s knee with his rear bumper and ran over his foot. An injury that required the EMT’s to assist our starter with his injuries.

We removed quite a bit of information between here in the end of the statement but you can read it all via a .pdf at the end of the post. Below we skip to Rich Goodwin’s statement and ruling on the matter. It calls for a season suspension of Kazuhiro Tanaka, stripping of season points, and a $10,000 fine! Kumakubo is fined $5,000 and was stripped of his points that he earned up to the top four forfeit in Chicago only. The mechanic who slapped the course worker is fined $2,500 for his actions. This brings a fine total to $17,500 for Team Orange. Something tells me we won’t be seeing them in D1GP USA anytime soon. Here is the official D1GP USA statement on the fine structure/ruling.

D1GP USA’s mission in 2009 was to produce the most unbiased and fair competition possible. It is this mission that allows us to not see nationality, experience, celebrity or the difference between a heavily sponsored team or privateer, but rather to see every driver on the same level.

We understand that Team Orange is the most famous drift team in the world and its drivers regarded as some of the best drivers there are, however that does not give them the right to expect to be treated differently and does not give them the right to act the way they did at this event, therefore the following penalties are imposed.

The Penalties in this matter are as follows:

1)    Kazuhiro Tanaka – Fine of $10,000 & loss of series points & suspension for the rest of the D1GP USA season.
2)    Nobushige Kumakubo – Fine of $5,000 & loss of event points in Chicago
3)    Team Orange – As a result of the team mechanic’s actions, an additional $2,500 fine

There has also many been many rumors surfacing regarding Ken Nomura’s conduct at the Chicago event. Thus far our investigation into the matter is not complete. We will continue to investigate and make a ruling later next week.

Source: www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/2009/D1GPUSA.ChicagoRelease.TeamOrangeFineDetails.pdf

(CNN) — Seven times world champion Michael Schumacher will make a dramatic return to Formula One as a replacement for injured Ferrari driver Felipe Massa.

Michael Schumacher will make a dramatic return to Formula One as a replacement for Felipe Massa.

The 40-year-old German, who retired from the sport in 2006, won five of his seven titles while competing for Ferrari, and has retained his links with the Italian manufacturer as a team advisor.

Schumacher told CNN: “The most important thing first: thank God, all news concerning Felipe is positive. I wish him all the best again.

“I met Stefano Domenicali and Luca di Montezemolo from Ferrari on Wednesday afternoon and together we decided that I will prepare myself to take Felipe’s place.

“Though it is true that my Formula One chapter has closed, it is also true that for loyalty reasons to the team I cannot ignore their current unfortunate situation. As the competitor I am I also very much look forward to facing this challenge.”

Schumacher’s spokesperson Sabine Kehm confirmed to CNN: “He is coming back pending medical exams and will be in the Ferrrari cockpit for the next race in Valencia on August 23 if those tests go well.”

Ferrari later confirmed Schumacher’s return in a statement: “Ferrari intends to entrust Michael Schumacher with Felipe Massa’s car for as long as the Brazilian driver is not able to race.

“Michael Schumacher has shown his willingness and in the next few days he will undergo a specific program of preparation at the end of which it will be possible to confirm his participation in the championship starting with the European Grand Prix.”

Rumors began to surface about Schumacher’s likely return on Tuesday, with Kehm telling CNN at the time: “There is no offer from Ferrari, but if they decided they need him, Michael would certainly weigh his options.”

Meanwhile, Massa has been moved out of intensive care at the AEK military hospital in Budapest, with his personal doctor convinced he will race again.

Massa’s rapid improvement since undergoing surgery on Saturday to repair a fractured skull following his crash during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, has prompted doctors to move the Brazilian to his own private room.

It means Massa is now off the critical list, although the 28-year-old will continue to be closely monitored by medical staff. Initial fears that the Brazilian may never drive again, due to concerns surrounding the sight in his left eye, also appear to have eased.

Ferrari spokesman Luca Colajanni told Press Association Sport: “The most important situation is that Felipe is out of intensive care and now in his own private room.

“He is speaking more or less normally and he has managed his first few steps so, from a clinical point of view, everything is going in the right direction.

“There are no issues for the time being, and although we are still cautious, he is getting better and better. The situation is improving all the time.

“There was some suggestion he would leave the hospital soon but he will remain in Budapest for as long as is necessary.”

Meanwhile, Massa’s own doctor, Dino Altmann, has told Italian sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport that he believes the Brazilian’s Formula One career is far from over.

Altmann said: “I have no doubt Felipe will race again. I’m sure of that. The situation is still delicate but I believe his life is not in danger anymore. From the beginning I felt the trauma wasn’t as extended as it was believed but the improvements he has made have gone beyond our wildest expectations.”

Altmann also believes fears surrounding Massa’s left eye, seemingly damaged after he was struck on the helmet by a suspension spring that had worked free from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn GP car, have eased.

“Stimulated by the physiotherapist, he showed he knows left from right and has full awareness of distance and depth,” added Altmann. “His eye has been opened, with care because it is still swollen, and he has said he can see. His vision has not weakened.

“He also gave appropriate answers in three languages: Portuguese, Italian, and English. That means the brain’s cognitive area is fine.”

Ferrari team principal Domenicali told reporters that he has been amazed by the rate of recovery, prompting him to return to Italy.

“It’s a fantastic improvement. Only days after the crash he’s made encouraging progress,” remarked Domenicali. “He recognised me, I greeted him and I brought him all the team’s and the fans’ warmth and support. He replied to me in Italian, after he had spoken to his family in Portuguese. He told me he can’t remember anything that had happened: that’s a good thing.

“The data is encouraging but in these situations it’s better to be prudent and take one step at a time. We want him to recover as soon as possible.”

Domenicali has confirmed there are no issues surrounding Massa’s return, with the seat being kept warm until he is fit again, although refused to comment on reports linking former world champion Michael Schumacher with a temporary return.

“I confirmed to him we are looking forward to his return soon, that the car is his, and that as soon as he’s ready he’ll be back with us once again,” added Domenicali.

last september, i posted about the madness of the uninformed…while i blamed wikipedia for many things, i am impressed that they quickly found and corrected the error…but it’s now a social responsibility they must make on their end.
.

.
article pulled from yahoo! news
.

Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote

.
Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press Writer
On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT
.
DUBLIN (AP) — When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
.
The sociology major’s obituary-friendly quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.
.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they’d swallowed his baloney whole.
.
“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
.
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
.
“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”
.
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called “a golden opportunity” for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre’s actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as “too good to be true.” But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
.
“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
.
“It’s worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he’d done, and it’s regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so,” she wrote.
.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote’s lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia’s own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information — as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances — and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
.
“I didn’t want to be devious,” he said. “I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they’re under.”

.
here’s my post…click for the full read
.

…obey, question humanity, marry and consume, stay asleep… how different was life before the internet?…with this new type of medium has come more responsibility than i realized. when i was in college, the internet was an information source you’d take with a grain of salt, it was known to be a high risk since you’d either get an F or kicked out for plagiarism…not to mention down 50 bucks for an essay some 7th grader wrote. but now things are different. much different. the more i hear about ‘responsible information’ the more it gets me questioning the things i read and what students today are really learning from.
.
it’s easy to assume the government plays gepeto for cnn, but what happens when we ourselves are dictating what potentially millions of people will read? for example…wikipedia. before powerzamcam, i taught 5th grade, learned more about the way we think in one year from 24 ten year olds than i did in 16+ years of education. about a quarter of all reports these kids handed in were direct off wikipedia…i’m not questioning the child’s sense to find information by the simplest means possible, but i am questioning the source…i read this on wikipedia’s ‘about’ page:

Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge; this means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link.

.
looks like everyone has the chance to play historian now. i read an article a couple weeks ago about a guy that lived and breathed new york, he was flipping out over the fact that the wikipedia article about nyc had numerous historical, factual, and geographical errors. he spent 2 days trying to confirm and update the article…how crazy is that…it took a new york citizen with the tenacity to challenge what he read about the city he loves to correct the information fed to millions of people. and if you don’t think it’s such a big deal…try googling new york city and see what’s in the top 3. something that’s been a factually wrong source was sitting at the top of the number one search engine on the internet! well at least it’s fixed and we don’t have to worry since it’s not world changing.
.
…but i guess this is already ‘existing knowledge’ so it’s got to be right.

.
don’t say i didn’t warn you…