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Announced at the end of yesterday's big Nexus 6 launch, the Nexus Player is Google's new living room media box - it's answer to the Apple TV and other set-tops like the Roku 3.

The tech giants have long been battling for control of our living rooms, and it's surprising to some extent that one product has not yet emerged with a significant share of the market.

In the Nexus Player, then, Google thinks it's finally found a product in which it can smuggle itself into your living room, supplying Netflix streams to your TV along with Android games and more.

It's a busy market place that Google is tackling here, and recent history is littered with failed attempts from all kinds of companies. Media boxes were once the obsession of hard drive manufacturers like WD, now it's tech giants like Google and Apple.

Google, you'll remember, has already launched the Chromecast in this area, and has in the past failed in its attempts with Google TV.

"Nexus Player is a home media player for streaming Netflix and playing games on your TV"

Have you heard? The DVD player is dead. The Blu-ray player is dead too. Physical media in the living room is dead.... more or less. The Nexus Player is the latest candidate to stake a claim on this post-disc world.

It's a puck-shaped device that plugs into your TV via HDMI and it's small - measuring just 120x120x 20mm, it's dinkier than a DVD, though substantially thicker.

Forgoing any kind of physical media playback, it's designed exclusively to stream and download video and music from both the internet and your own home network. So it's a Netflix player then - right?

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In Depth: Nexus Player: Everything you need to know about the Android TV box

Vladimir Putin: signed amendments that were whisked through the Russian parliament last month without public debate. Photograph: AP/Kirill Kydryavtsev

Vladimir Putin signed a new Bill into law yesterday that bars foreign companies from owning more than 20 per cent of Russian media outlets.

Coming as the Kremlin wages an information war with the West over the Ukrainian crisis, the restrictions will hurt international investors and limit the influence of outside broadcasters and publishers in shaping Russian public opinion.

Amendments to Russias media law placing a 20 per cent cap on foreign ownership of television, radio print and online media were whisked through the Russian parliament last month without public debate. Existing legislation limits foreign ownership of media outlets to 50 per cent, but applies only to television and radio.

With the exception of a few independent publications, Russian media has covered the protests in Kiev that led to the overthrow of Ukraines president Viktor Yanukovich in a negative light and portrayed separatist fighters in east Ukraine as the victims of government aggression. Russian officials and commentators frequently accuse the West of encouraging an illegal power grab that ushered in the new, pro-European leadership in Ukraine.

Russia is obsessed with controlling what is said about the crisis in Ukraine and its role in the conflict, according to Human Rights Watch.

Millions of Russians would be denied the fundamental right to information from a source of their choice as the restrictions on foreign media came into force.

Foreign companies affected by the new legislation include Nasdaq-listed CTC Media, which owns and operates three Russian television channels and a number of digital media assets.

Publishers of glossy magazines, including Germanys Axel Springer, the US Hearst Corporation, and Conde Nast, whose Russian-language editions of Vogue, GQ and Tatler are hugely popular, will also be forced to reduce their holdings in Russia.

Another victim will be Vedomosti, Russias leading business daily, which is part-owned by the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. A wave of anti-western sentiment sweeping Russia will allow the Kremlin to consolidate its grip on the media while punishing the US and European Union for imposing economic sanctions in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.

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Putin signs law restricting foreign ownership of media

China is changing its tactics when it comes to addressing the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. State media has shifted from a mainstream media and social media blackout of coverage for Hong Kongs Occupy Central movement, which has garnered support from thousands in Hong Kong and overseas, to a concerted, aggressive effort to flood local media with anti-Occupy criticism.

Today, the University of Hong Kongs China Media Project, a blog dedicated to monitoring the countrys relationship with media, pointed out that Chinas state-run news agency, Xinhua, flooded Chinas newspapers with a new report from Hong Kong, focusing on the disorder that has followed the protests and the perceived growing amount of opposition that Occupy Central is receiving. This particular Xinhua report represented 60 percent of todays Occupy coverage in Chinese media.

The illegal gathering called Occupy Central has entered its 15thday, with large amounts of people still assembling in Admiralty, Mong Kok and other areas, the report, which appeared in the Beijing Daily, said. Various quarters of Hong Kong society have urged the occupiers to leave the streets immediately, allowing the lives of city residents to return to normal.

The report, published in Chinese on various platforms, goes on to explain that since Oct. 3, over 60 events and meetings planned by the government have been canceled, delayed or relocated, also adding that in upcoming weeks, over 80 events have been scheduled with at least a dozen already being rescheduled or canceled.

Instead of taking reports from Xinhua, the Global Times offered a handful of its own critiques that undermine the impact of the movement -- for instance, an op-ed titled Occupy Central Will Not Go Down In History, Only Notoriety. In a separate article, the Global Times pinned the movement on Western influences and demanded accountability in what Chinese media perceive as criminal behavior by the people.

Who is providing black money for it? the article asks. Which people should be held criminally liable?

As the movement reaches the three-week milestone, the shift in offensive criticism is not surprising, some experts say, and is geared toward winning Chinese over by placing increased attention on the economic consequences and social disruption of the protests.

Theres a recognition that the government cant completely stem the flow of information from Hong Kong to the mainland, so its better [to] try to control the messaging as much as possible, Dr. Michal Meidan, associate fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and director the policy institute's China Matters, a research and advisory group, said in an interview. Playing up the chaos that could ensue, the inconvenience caused to daily lives and businesses, as well as the role foreign governments (especially the U.S.) are playing resonates with public onion.

The Global Times adopted this narrative as early as Oct. 4, when an article published said that the work behind the Occupy Central movement bears the shadow of the West. Chinese media bases these claims on the argument that protesters were encouraged by foreign grant organizations like the Madeleine Albright-founded National Democratic Institute and the National Endowment of Democracy.

Media chatter and conversation inside the so-called great firewall has been drastically limited compared with the coverage in Hong Kong -- or anywhere else in the world. Aside from heavy-handed control over state-run media, Chinese Internet censors unsurprisingly have blocked the phrase Occupy Central, along with other related search terms, and photos on the ground from social media sites and applications such as Weibo and WeChat.

See the article here:
Chinese Media Floods Mainland News With Anti-Occupy Hong Kong Coverage

Telling youths who are juggling multiple electronic devices to "focus on the task at hand" may not always be good advice, according to research to be presented by two high school students on Saturday, Oct. 11 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference & Exhibition.

Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer, seniors at Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Ore., will present their study "Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The Impact of Media Multitasking on Cognitive Control in the Adolescent Mind" from 1-1:30 p.m. in Marina Ballroom Salon E at the San Diego Marriott Marquis.

Contrary to popular belief that multitasking leads to poor performance, the young researchers found the opposite is true for adolescents who spend a lot of time switching between media devices and tasks.

"Maybe practice really does make perfect," Ms. Ulmer said.

"In our current multimedia environment, there are people who are multitasking at an exceedingly high rate, and the reality is that they may have become really good at it," Ms. Caulfield added.

To study how media multitasking affects adolescents' ability to process information, the young researchers recruited 196 females and 207 males ages 10-19. All participants answered questions about their daily media habits and completed the Stanford Multitasking Media Index, which assesses how often a person multitasks (e.g., texts, instant messages and emails at the same time).

Participants then completed tests to assess their ability to switch between tasks and to focus on a single task. They were randomly assigned to complete these tasks sequentially with no distractions (non-multitasking) or simultaneously with auditory, visual and cognitive distractions such as responding to emails (multitasking).

Results showed that those who scored low on the media multitasking index spent an average of about 20 minutes a day multitasking. They also averaged about 2.5 hours of homework per day and were multitasking 0.08% of this time. Meanwhile, those who scored high on the multitasking index averaged more than three hours per day of multitasking. They did homework for about 3.5 hours a day and juggled multiple tasks for more than 50% of this time.

When asked to complete the study tasks, high media multitaskers were better at filtering out distractions but performed worse when made to focus on a single task. Low multitaskers were less able to filter out distractions but focused better on single tasks.

"We must emphasize that most people performed best when focused on just one task," Ms. Caulfield said. "However, there was a group that provided us with an exception to that finding -- the high media multitaskers."

More:
Some adolescents adept at media multitasking, Research by high school students reveals

Never has the Indian media - at least the English-speaking media - managed to so spectacularly lose control of the national conversation.

With a few notable exceptions, many of them independent journalists, the media appears to have given up any pretence at directing news editing and trying to arrive as close to truth as possible. It is behaving, instead, like a school of herring, flashing from one point to another, changing direction in a split second - millions of individuals reacting like one single organism twitching in response to some stimulus. Narendra Modi in the United States? Swachh Bharat? Firing on the Line of Control? Journalists pounce on each either fawningly or defensively, and drop it as soon as the next thing comes up. There's insufficient insistence on an answer, on follow-up, or on contextualisation.

The greatest casualty of the 2014 elections has been nuance, the death of which was long foretold by a cultural aversion to challenging authority without enmity, and, therefore, a long history of poor standards in critical thinking. The brightest students in the world tend to be Indian, and yet, paradoxically, amount to a country that holds rather dim conversations with itself.

2014 has left us a quiver of large, emotive words such as "patriotism", "culture", "society", "pride" and "hurt" - each invoked unexamined and undefined, as if they were words of last resort. The media keeps trying to prove its own credentials in the context of these terms, thereby merely getting jerked around in a conversation that is not of its making.

The Constitution is the best of all our books, holding within itself the possibility of all other books, including all the holy ones, and the ones we keep trying to ban. It holds within itself the possibility of all religions and all cultural practices and individual rights, and the possibility of adjudicating any clashes between those three things. It even holds within itself the possibility of constructive amendment of itself. It is an inclusive, generous, pluralistic, secular document that already holds many, if not all, the answers to our dilemmas. It is the lodestone to which we should be returning again and again, not merely in the courts, but in our own individual thinking and private and public discussions.

Nowhere in that document does it say that India is a Hindu country. Nowhere does it imply that criticism of an individual or official or government amounts to offence or lack of patriotism; nowhere does it suggest that you should be arrested for an act in the nature of a Facebook "like" or for not standing up for the national anthem. Freedom of expression continues to be protected. An official can either "swear in the name of God" or give god the go-by and simply "solemnly affirm".

Patriotism is an allegiance to the vision set down in the Constitution. It is that document, and that vision, to which elected leaders swear allegiance when they take office. If anything should be a clinching argument, the Constitution should be. Nationalism is the fairground mirror version of patriotism - an extreme, distorted, grotesque thing that bears little resemblance to the original.

The prime minister's strategy is to direct the conversation - or, as we've seen in his entirely complicit silence in the face of an emboldened, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-led or RSS-backed Hindu right taking over educational policy and institutions with a view to stamping out secular pluralism - to allow the amplification of a certain kind of ugly, untruthful, divisive conversation. But if he's going to do that, he should be doing it on his own, via state-controlled radio and television broadcasts. The free press oxygenates conversations, and there is plenty of scope in the free press to remind him of the oath he swore to "bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established", and to remind the nasty fringe elements, all loudly self-professed patriots, of what is in that document.

We should be holding governments to the oaths they swear. Why are we allowing an informal socio-cultural grey market to determine the agenda and make the conversation about small squabbles located in flawed or irrelevant principles? The media needs to return to its basic functions: keep a critical eye on all, give credit where credit is due, and measure governments against their constitutional duties not against political affiliation or a zero-to-10 charisma chart.

Originally posted here:
Mitali Saran: Married to the mob