Barack Obama wins election for second term as president

President Barack Obama handily defeated Gov. Mitt Romney and won himself a second term Tuesday after a bitter and historically expensive race that was primarily fought in just a handful of battleground states. Networks project that Obama beat Romney after nabbing the crucial state of Ohio.
The Romney campaign's last-ditch attempt to put blue-leaning Midwestern swing states in play failed as Obama's Midwestern firewall sent the president back to the White House for four more years. Obama picked up the swing states of New Hampshire, Michigan, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Ohio. Florida and Virginia are still too close to call, but even if he won them, they would not give Romney enough Electoral College votes to put him over the top. The popular vote will most likely be much narrower than the president's Electoral College victory.
The Obama victory marks an end to a years-long campaign that saw historic advertisement spending levels, countless rallies and speeches, and three much-watched debates.
The Romney campaign cast the election as a referendum on Obama's economic policies, frequently comparing him to former President Jimmy Carter and asking voters the Reagan-esque question of whether they are better off than they were four years ago. But the Obama campaign pushed back on the referendum framing, blanketing key states such as Ohio early on with ads painting him as a multimillionaire more concerned with profits than people. The Obama campaign also aggressively attacked Romney on reproductive rights issues, tying Romney to a handful of Republican candidates who made controversial comments about rape and abortion.
These ads were one reason Romney faced a steep likeability problem for most of the race, until his expert performance at the first presidential debate in Denver in October. After that debate, and a near universal panning of Obama's performance, Romney caught up with Obama in national polls, and almost closed his favoribility gap with the president. In polls, voters consistently gave him an edge over Obama on who would handle the economy better and create more jobs, even as they rated Obama higher on caring about the middle class.
But the president's Midwestern firewall--and the campaign's impressive grassroots operation--carried him through. Ohio tends to vote a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole, but Obama was able to stave off that trend and hold an edge there over Romney, perhaps due to the president's support of the auto bailout three years ago. Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan all but moved to Ohio in the last weeks of the campaign, trying and ultimately failing to erase Obama's lead there.
A shrinking electoral battleground this year meant that only 14 states were really seen as in play, and both candidates spent most of their time and money there. Though national polls showed the two candidates in a dead heat, Obama consistently held a lead in the states that mattered. That, and his campaign's much-touted get out the vote efforts and overall ground game, may be what pushed Obama over the finish line.
Now, Obama heads back to office facing what will most likely be bitterly partisan negotiations over whether the Bush tax cuts should expire. The House will still be majority Republican, with Democrats maintaining their majority in the Senate.
The loss may provoke some soul searching in the Republican Party. This election was seen as a prime opportunity to unseat Obama, as polls showed Americans were unhappy with a sluggish economy, sky-high unemployment, and a health care reform bill that remained widely unpopular. Romney took hardline positions on immigration, federal spending, and taxes during the long Republican primary when he faced multiple challenges from the right. He later shifted to the center in tone on many of those issues, but it's possible the primary painted him into a too-conservative corner to appeal to moderates during the general election. The candidate also at times seemed unable to effectively counter Democratic attacks on his business experience and personal wealth.

Source: Yahoo! News by Liz Goodwin

Why Time Magazine Used Instagram To Cover Hurricane Sandy

 

If there was still any debate about whether serious photojournalism can take place in the context of camera phones and cutesy retro filters, it’s over now.

To document the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the northeast, Time magazine turned to Instagram, a.k.a. that iPhone app your sister-in-law uses to document her creative table settings. And the results were impressive.
As the storm closed in on the coast Monday morning, Time’s director of photography, Kira Pollack, rounded up five photographers from the region and gave them access to the magazine’s Instagram feed. The photographers it sought out – Michael Christopher Brown, Benjamin Lowy, Ed Kashi, Andrew Quilty and Stephen Wilkes — are all heavy users of the Facebook-owned social photo platform.
Using Instagram as the primary outlet for breaking news coverage was an experiment, Pollack says, but one motivated by necessity. “We just thought this is going to be the fastest way we can cover this and it’s the most dirct route,” she says .”It’s wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is a trend, let’s assign this on Instagram.’ It was about how quickly can we get pictures to our readers.”

  Time’s photography blog, was “one of the most popular galleries we’ve ever done,” says Pollack, and it was responsible for 13% of all the site’s traffic during a week when Time.com had its fourth-biggest day ever. Time’s Instagram account attracted 12,000 new followers during a 48-hour period.

One of Benjamin Lowy’s photos even ended up getting selected for the cover, although it’s one of three covers Time is running this week. (Outside the northeast, readers will see one of two election-related covers.) While the level of resolution isn’t perhaps what might be achieved with a camera, says Pollack, “It reproduced beautifully. There’s almost a painterly quality to it.”
On his Tumblr page, Lowy describes his conversion from traditional photography to mobile phone photography this way:

For years, I have worked with bulky digital cameras, always mindful of the technical maneuvers from setting the shutter speed and aperture to editing and toning on a computer screen. In the last few years I have discovered that my iPhone has allowed me to capture scenes without feeling that I am once again on the job. To “point and shoot” has been a liberating experience. It has allowed me to rediscover the excitement of seeing imperfections and happy accidents rendered through the lens of my handheld device.

The ease of digital manipulation that apps like Instagram allow, with their prettifying filters and antique effects, gives pause to some purists, who feel such transformations run counter to the documentary spirit of journalism.”I think that’s alway a conversation in photojournalism and a very important one,” says Pollack.
She thinks about that, and also about the surrender of editorial control that comes with giving photographers access to the magazine’s branded feed.  Her answer to those issues: “You have to pick the right photographers.”













Source: www.forbes.com

Google Wallet simplifies online payments

Using the Google Wallet application to make in-store purchases on a smartphone is yet to catch on but using it to make online shopping easier for mobile device users could be the key to its widespread adoption.

Using smartphones and tablets for online shopping is a frustrating experience for many consumers. In fact the latest figures from SeeWhy and reports from Gartner estimate that up to 97 percent of mobile shoppers give up on online purchases because sites are not optimized for smartphones and the amount of information customers need to provide is easier to enter on a full-sized computer keyboard rather than via a touchscreen.
Google Wallet aims to alleviate this pain by simplifying the process down to three steps from upwards of 17 information fields. As the application already holds billing address details and credit and debit card numbers, when Google Wallet users visit a site that supports the technology, they can click on the ‘Pay with Google Wallet' button.
This will launch the Google Wallet application and allow users to select which card they want to use and which address the purchase should be dispatched to.
The new feature, officially announced on Thursday, is currently only supported by US-based e-commerce sites 1-800-Flowers, Rockport.com and FiveGuys.com, but Google promises that more sites are in the process of adopting the feature.
Initially conceived as a replacement for credit and debit cards and as a system for ushering in the age of mobile payments and Near Field Communication, Google Wallet has so far failed to make a huge impact. This is due in part to the fact that there are currently fewer than 70 smartphone models on the market around the world that support near field communication (NFC, the technology that allows smartphone users to tap their handsets on a payment terminal rather than swipe a card to make a payment) and because merchants have been very slow to invest in the technology needed to accept point of sales payments via smartphone.
Over recent months, Google has been adding additional features to the service such as web-based micropayments, so that people whose phones do not support NFC can still use it. By turning Google Wallet into a secure and simple means of shopping online with a mobile device, Google may have just found a way of bringing the service into the mainstream.

 Source: ph.news.yahoo.com by AFP Relax on Sat, Nov. 3, 2012