Voice of change or lifestyle bibles: Blogs flourish in 2015
NASA suspends launch of InSight mission to Mars
PARIS: Thought to be on the wane a decade ago, blogs in 2015 are alive and well as a powerful voice driving change in politics, human rights and lifestyle choices across the globe. In some parts of the world, they are the only vehicle to raise taboo topics, often with dire or even deadly consequences for the authors. In mainly Muslim Bangladesh, hardline Islamist militants hacked to death four atheist bloggers and a publisher in the past year for writing what they consider heretical material.
Blogging has become a massive phenomenon in the impoverished country in recent years, with bloggers, some of whom attract tens of thousands of followers, dealing with issues considered no-go zones for the mainstream media. “Bloggers are the biggest challenge for the evil forces in the country. For telling the blunt truth without hesitation, the bloggers are becoming the targets of these bad people,” said top blogger Arif Jebtik, who himself has been threatened by Islamist militants for his writings.
“It is easier for the bloggers to reach a general crowd with sensitive issues such as politics, religion and human rights over the Internet, since the national media sometimes has censorship and tend to avoid focus on these topics,” said Imran H Sarker, head of Bangladesh Online Activists’ Network (BOAN). Bloggers-with their ability to reach vast audiences CHICAGO: NASA has suspended the March 2016 launch of its InSight mission to Mars because of problems with a key scientific component, the US space agency said Tuesday. The next launch window will not occur until around May 2018 and NASA said it does not yet know if it will be able to continue with the mission given budget constraints.
The InSight lander was set to delve deep beneath the Red Planet’s surface in order to discover how the solar system’s rocky planets formed. “Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
“We push the boundaries of space technology with our missions to enable science, but space exploration is unforgiving, and the bottom line is that we’re not ready to launch in the 2016 window,” he said in a statement.
The problematic instrument is a seismometer provided by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), designed to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom. “It’s a hard blow,” CNES president Jean-Yves Le Gall said.
“This is one of the risks of the job. The good news is that our system was able to discover the problem when it was still here on Earth.” NASA said the decision to delay follows unsuccessful attempts to repair a leak affecting the device, which requires a vacuum seal around its three main sensors to withstand the harsh uncensored-have been a thorn in the side of authoritarian regimes elsewhere around the globe, with Saudi Arabia’s Raif Badawi among the most famous examples. The outspoken advocate of free speech was arrested in 2012 on charges of “insulting Islam” through his writing, and has since been convicted to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, sparking international outrage. He received the first 50 lashes in January and subsequent beatings have been continuously postponed. Blogging in the kingdom “is not very popular... because we can get into a lot of trouble,” says Eman Al-Nafjan, who has written the “Saudiwoman’s Weblog” since 2008 (http://saudiwoman.me/).
In Ethiopia, six bloggers from the Zone 9 (http://zone9ethio.blogspot.com) website were arrested in April 2014 and charged with terrorism. Two were released in July and four were acquitted of the charges in October. Around the world, the blogosphere remained vibrant in 2015, with some 76 million sites on Wordpress and 360 million on Tumblr.
Shift to lifestyle in West
In the West, lifestyle blogs on everything from fashion to food to travel have continued to grow in popularity in 2015, even as political blogs have been ceding ground to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Take the case of Sarah Dawalibi, a passionate traveller conditions of the Martian environment.
A leak discovered earlier this year, that prevented it from retaining vacuum conditions, was successfully repaired, and the mission team “was hopeful the most recent fix also would be successful.”
However, the instrument once again failed to hold a vacuum during testing on Monday in extreme cold temperature. “It’s the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built,” said Marc Pircher, Director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre. “We were very close to succeeding, but an anomaly has occurred, which requires further investigation. Our teams will find a solution to fix it, but it won’t be solved in time for a launch in 2016.” The relative positions of the planets are most favorable for launching missions from Earth to Mars for only a few weeks every 26 months, according to NASA’s statement.
“For InSight, that 2016 launch window existed from March 4 to March 30,” the space agency said. “A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: NASA remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars,” added Grunsfeld.
While the InSight launch is important, Grunsfeld said the suspension “doesn’t affect the sequence of any other missions.” Plans to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s remain “on track,” NASA said. NASA is currently working on three Mars missions with the European Space Agency and plans to send another rover to Mars in 2020. — AFP who in 2009 decided to start a blog to keep her friends and family in France up to speed on her adventures around the world. Six years later ‘Le Blog de Sarah” (http://www.leblogdesarah.com) has become a veritable reference bible in the country, with some 30,000 people reading it each month.
“People have more confidence in a blog than in a travel magazine,” says Dawalibi. “Lots of readers ask bloggers for advice.
They have a feeling that they know you, since when you blog, you reveal quite a bit about yourself.” Blogsshort for web logs-appeared in 1999 with the Blogger site, which for the first time allowed people to create a website without knowing programming codes. By the mid-2000s, blogs became the centre of debate on the web, before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter in 2004 and 2006, respectively.
“With the surge in subscribers to Facebook and Twitter, the prominence of blogs begins to decline as the number of users on these social media platforms increase,” says Antoinette Pole, a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey and a specialist in political blogs. “Currently, much more discussion and debate occurs through Facebook or Twitter. While blogs still exist, their popularity indeed appears to have waned over the last 3-4 years. That said, their utility is in their ability to provide greater depth, almost akin to a website. And, still some genres of blogs remain popular.”
Most of the traditional media, including AFP, have also waded into the blogosphere, giving their reporters and writers a chance to write more personal takes on their work and postings. “I started blogging in 2002 on a lark, inspired by some other sites I was reading and to spare my friends, who didn’t always share my interests, from having to listen to me talk endlessly about books and politics,” says Maud Newton, who in 2002 launched one of the first literary blogs (http://maudnewton.com ) “I was astonished when, within a year or two, it began to be mentioned and cited in publications like New York Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Evening Standard, The New Yorker, and so on.
“Over the years, my blog led to my writing for many newspapers, magazines, websites, and hybrids of these. Eventually I became a columnist for the New York Times Magazine.”
Standing out in the blog crowd - since anyone and everyone can create their own blog, thousands are created every day - depends on the genre.
“If you are a food, fashion, or travel blogger then the images on your blog are critical,” says Pole. “This is a major draw for blogs of this ilk.” “In contrast, if you’re discussing sports or politics or even literature, images probably are not as important, so the writing becomes paramount.”— AFP