A Media Presentation and Space Geekery

[twincityhacker]

We had an intersting public speaker at school today.  And for once it was more intersting than just "getting out of a class" interseting, because they were talking about the media influece. 

The presenter was from the "New Mexico Media Literacy Project", and he chatted about various types of advertsing for an hour and a half.  Evedently, the project was started by an guy who worked in televsion news and though the quality of the news had gone down in the 50 years he worked in broadcasting.

So we went though a few ads step by step to see how they mislead to make their products seem better or than people need thier products or to build brand loyalty.   And how both political ads that they showed us lied, or at least extreme exagerations. Adn how marketing ads cant' lie, but can commit exgagerations, and poltical ads can out and out lie.

My favorite lines out of the whole show was that that the teen girl magizines front covers were anti-therpy, and that the little girl was being used to get millions of dollars   from each person who has a Visa card.  And that 5 companies (Disney, Viacom, Universal, AOL Time Warner, and Rudolph Murdock News Corperation) control all of youth culture, and 80% of adult culture in the US. 

And since I'm all media today, here's a story from the <i>NY Times</i>. I was going to copy  from AOL news, but though that the <i>NY Times</i> article was better. 

Space Capsule Crashes in Utah
By KENNETH CHANG and MARIA NEWMAN

Published: September 8, 2004

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah, Sept. 8 — A NASA capsule bearing precious atomic specimens that Hollywood stunt pilots were prepared to catch as it came into earth's atmosphere crashed into the desert this morning after a parachute that was to slow its fall failed to deploy.
The capsule had been carrying bits of solar matter painstakingly collected over two years that could provide scientists with clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Television footage this morning showed the capsule, an inflated disc slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, hurtling through the air like a runaway hubcap, then crashing into the desert.
In a few moments, as the probe lay half-emerged in the hot sand, its round casing cracked open, investigators approached gingerly, circling the probe before they began taking photographs.
"Clearly something has gone wrong here," Chris Jones, director of solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which managed the mission, said in a NASA TV broadcast of the landing.
At a news conference a few hours later, NASA scientists said the canister containing the space matter had received some damage when the capsule, which fell at a rate of 93 miles an hour, hit the ground. Roy Haggard, the director of flight operations, said it was "quite surprising how little damage there was."
Mr. Jones, one of those at the news conference, said that NASA would be conducting a series of reviews to determine what if anything will survive of the science that the Genesis probe spent years collecting. He said contingency plans had taken into account the possibility of a crash at reentry.
"It turns out, that because this being one of the most possible, but of course remote, outcomes, it does have procedures to recover the science so we can learn from this mission and feed that information back into future scientists," Mr. Jones said.
The plans for a derring-do capture had enlisted the help of two Hollywood stunt pilots who had practiced their mission for five years after military pilots declined to attempt the rescue. The pilots of the two helicopters were prepared to use a giant hook to latch onto the probe's parachute as it slowly descended to earth.
The probe's cargo is the first extraterrestrial material that NASA has brought back to Earth since Apollo 17 astronauts collected rocks from the Moon in 1972. Scientists hope the material will tell them about the solar system's primordial building materials of gas and dust that later turned into planets.
Mission managers had worried that even the impact of the capsule slowed by the parachute would have damaged the payload. Without the parachute, damage may have come to the capsule's plates, made of silicon, sapphire, diamond and other materials that had collected particles of solar wind in deep space. If the impact broke open the canister holding the plates, they would also be contaminated with Earth air.
"Whether we can recover any of the science from this remains to be seen," Mr. Jones said.
By Tuesday morning, Genesis had traveled to a spot within the orbit of the Moon. The 450-pound capsule containing the solar wind samples detached as scheduled from the rest of the spacecraft, which remained in space.
The return trajectory then appeared to be going smoothly. The helicopters took off at 9:25 a.m. en route to the midair rendezvous. Visitors and guests at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground here, watching the retrieval on large screens in a hanger, cheered when the images of the returning capsule appeared at 9:53 a.m. Over the next few minutes, the image grew bigger, showing a capsule spinning and tumbling.
The crowd fell silent and confused when the mission controller said, "ground impact."
If the rescue had happened as planned, when the capsule entered the Earth's atmosphere, traveling at 25,000 miles an hour, an initial parachute would have deployed at a height of 21 miles. It was not clear yet if that took place. A few minutes later, at an altitude of four miles, the main parachute, a winglike parafoil, would have deployed, and the capsule would have glided over the Utah desert.
Cliff Fleming, the pilot of the lead helicopter, was to make the first attempt to snag the parafoil with a 20-foot hook in the back of the helicopter. Mr. Fleming said that except for one deliberate miss as a test for the other pilot, Dan Rudert, he successfully caught the parachute in every practice run.
"We did not ever miss one," Mr. Fleming said on Tuesday. "I feel quite confident."
If the parachutes had functioned properly, the pilots would have had enough time to make four attempts to capture the capsule before it hit the ground.
Dr. Donald S. Burnett, the mission's principal investigator, said on Tuesday, "By recovering that composition with Genesis, we will be able to compare the starting composition of all planetary materials with what they are today."
Launched in 2001, the probe traveled 930,000 miles to a point where gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun cancel out. There, it deployed 55 hexagonal plates made of a variety of materials, including silicon, sapphire and diamond and waited as bits of solar wind — charged atoms, traveling about a million miles per hour, that the Sun continually spews out — embedded themselves in the plates.
After 850 days of collecting, Genesis packed up in April and headed back toward Earth. The mission cost $260 million.
Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York for this article.

(MSA Note:  The solar material is going the same place that the 1972 moon rocks are going: The Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas.  You wouldn't see much space material, if any, if you went there because there secured four stories below ground in a vault.)

So right now NASA isn't have the greatest of luck with it's probes lately.  The ones that just stay in orbit are fine, it's just that the probes and rovers that have been going smoosh on Mars and now on Earth.

Comments

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

Okay. Story time. In Canada, we have our own media companies that fight for control of culture among themselves and against or with American companies. The big names include Bell Globemedia, CanWest Global, Shaw Communications, Rogers Communications, etc.

My ex-university, McMaster, is a very big school in medical science. One of the big things in the medical programs is that researchers do not meet with representatives of drug companies. That would effect the end research, right?

Well, the communications/media programs were sponsored by CanWest Global and they let us know it. That alone should have been warning that not all the pieces of the puzzle added up. I was also scolded in class for suggesting that the media control of compaines like CanWest Global was leading to a monopoly in the Canadian media.

But the funniest/stupidist (I can't decided which) issue came about after a presentation some person in power at CanWest Global made at the university. He apparently came out and discussed the current state of news reporting.

News has been going downhill for years. This guy (I've forgotten the name) blamed the school for turning out poor media students and blamed the students for their general lack of skills. According to him, this was what was causing CanWest Global to suffer in the news reporting department.

Hmmm... a company dumps a load of cash at a school, creates an environment where you can't speak out against the funder and then whines about the end product. Even I can do the math with that one.

And people wonder why the news media sucks this days.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

What I don't understand how they just didn't make the media studies clases into the perfect way to crank out workers for their company.

The student pays the company to be trained, and the company hires the ex-student for low pay and they don't have to pay for the worker to be trained because they already trained the worker. Plus they know what the worker has experince in and what knowlage the worker has because they gave the worker that experince and knowlage.

But all of this require common sense, and I don't know if it would actualy work in the real world.

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

What I don't understand how they just didn't make the media studies clases into the perfect way to crank out workers for their company.

The Canadian education system is faulted in a way that such a process cannot happen. In short:
University = learning knowledge
College = learning skills

There are a few oddballs, like myself, that have been educated on both sides of the fence, making us super freaks or something. But for most part, it's limited to the two streams. You wouldn't get model workers from a university program because it's not a place for skills training. You would get a bunch of people with the ability to spew out theories of Innis and McLuhan, but don't know what to do in a control room.

I also think that someone would pick up on a company assimilating students. Media education is very sad right now, so who knows?

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

The Canadian education system is faulted in a way that such a process cannot happen. In short:
University = learning knowledge
College = learning skills

So they ARE diffrent things. Okay. I thought a universtiy was just a group of collages.