FAIR
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
THIS WEEK -- Join us for a FAIR event in NYC!
"The Big Picture on Iraq: What are media missing about the legality of war and the humanitarian impact?"
a talk by
Elisabeth Benjamin, New York Legal Aid Society, Health Law Unit
Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
Dr. Victor W. Sidel, past president, Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
Friday, February 28, 6:30 PM Housing Works Used Book Cafe 126 Crosby St (between Prince and Houston), New York Free and Open to the Public
For all the 24/7 coverage of the chances of war with Iraq, mainstream media say virtually nothing about the most basic fact of war-- people will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the bombing stops. The disconnect between reality and reporting is such that casualty estimates from the first Gulf War are rarely brought into news stories, even though they would provide invaluable context. Similarly, though media speculation abounds about what resolutions will pass the UN Security Council, little attention is given to big picture questions about the impact the Bush administration's tactics may have on the international rule of law. Please join FAIR as we try to cut through the media spin about war.
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Elisabeth Benjamin is founder and supervising attorney of the New York Legal Aid Society's Health Law Unit and serves on the Center for Economic and Social Rights' board of directors. She was a researcher with the CESR team that visited Iraq in January and issued the report, "The Human Costs of War in Iraq" (http://www.cesr.org/iraq/).
Michael Ratner is a lawyer specializing in human rights law and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He also teaches at Columbia Law School. He has devoted his career to opposing U.S. military interventions abroad and to defending dissident voices at home. He is co-author of "Against War with Iraq: An Anti-War Primer" (http://www.ccr-ny.org/).
Dr. Victor W. Sidel is distinguished professor of social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He was an advisor on IPPNW's report, "Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq" (http://www.ippnw.org/).
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This is the latest of FAIR's monthly media talks at Housing Works. Past topics have included media coverage of AIDS drugs and Africa, the "drug war" in Colombia, the Battle of Seattle, biotech, the Zapatistas, civil liberties after September 11, and more. All talks are free and open to the public.
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When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Felix on January 18, 2004 09:21 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Joshua on January 18, 2004 09:21 PMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Eli on January 18, 2004 09:21 PMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Emmett on January 18, 2004 09:21 PMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Emma on January 18, 2004 09:21 PM