feed on feeds - 2015/11/28 - items 0 to 15

theodp writes: The NY Times and others report that Bill Gates will announce the creation of a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund on Monday at the opening of the two-week long Paris Climate Change Conference. The climate summit, which will be attended by President Obama and 100+ world leaders, is intended to forge a global accord to cut planet-warming emissions. The pending announcement was first reported by ClimateWire. A spokesman for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to a request for comment. Let's hope it goes better than BillG school reform!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A suggestion for Brian Stelter for tomorrow's Reliable Sources show.

Find a linguist to do a quick study of reporting on the Colorado Springs shooter compared with the reporting on the Paris shooters, and tell us about the differences, if any in the language we use for home-grown terrorism.

In his or her opinion, what if the Colorado Springs shooter had been dark-skinned, would the language have been different? If he had been African-American? An immigrant?

What if he had been Muslim?

How different would the reporting have been?

My theory based on my own non-expert opinion is that we are far more tolerant of white American Christian terrorists.

BTW, please don't recruit one Republican linguist and one Democratic linguist. It seems like this is more of a scientific question, one that can be answered, without the usual indecisiveness and lack of conclusion of much TV journalism.

What if in the future we thought of blogging as a literary form?

If we taught courses in public writing on blogs?
Good use links.
Building community.
Different voices.
Style.
What if we had blog writer's retreats?
If we studied the kinds of tools that work best?
Connections with technology? (I would totally benefit from that.)
What if literary writing, like news writing, is going to be captured in silos like Facebook? Is this inevitable? A desirable outcome?

I was thinking -- we have writers retreats for people who write plays, for poets, maybe song-writers? Is online writing a dead-end (I don't think so) or will it be supported by traditions developed for other kinds of writing?

A coalition of Syrian rebel groups, including Nusra Front, make gains near strategic city of Aleppo.

At least seven dead, including two attackers, as suspected Boko Haram members target Dabanga in Far North Region.

An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica about the evolution thus far of USB as an enabling technology: Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a 'Universal' Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables. A casual search around the shelves by my desk shows that I've got at least 12 varieties, and that's not even counting serial and PS/2 adapters. What have you replaced with USB?