French, Chinese Satellite Images May Show Malaysian Jet Debris 103
Bloomberg News reports that "French satellite scans provided fresh indications of objects adrift in part of the Indian Ocean that's being scoured for the missing Malaysian airliner, backing up Chinese evidence as more planes and ships join the hunt. ... The developments rekindled prospects for a breakthrough in the mystery of Malaysian Air (MAS) Flight 370 after radar and visual scans failed to find objects spotted in earlier images taken from space. Searchers, bolstered by a growing fleet of international vessels, also want to locate a wooden pallet seen from the air to check if it could have come from the jet's hold."
And if you have your own database of recent photos to trawl through, the article says "The Chinese photo, taken March 18, is focused 90 degrees east and almost 45 degrees south, versus almost 91 degrees east and 44 degrees south for similar items on a March 16 satellite image, putting the object 120 kilometers southwest of that sighting."
Re:Headline writing (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm from Finland and that writing style always confuses me when browsing through the headlines.
Great comment.
In English headline writing, using 'headlinese' it's traditional to take liberties with the language that wouldn't normally be allowed. This dates back to newspapers, when the number of characters available to you for a headline might have been reduced due to the large typefaces or the desire to create impact to sell a newspaper - So you would have seen headlines like this one, or oddities like:
SATELLITES SIGHT DEBRIS: CHINESE
The tradition continues today, even though it's largely an online world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Evidence that media cycle is useless (Score:5, Interesting)
historically, the "without a trace" missing aircraft were much smaller, couple cases with 90 passenger the biggest I can find. so this is someone newsworthy just due to size of craft.
but it is amusing to see how people think all aircraft everywhere are continually "tracked by radar" (see, this website does that!), and they wonder why it takes days to go to a place where satellites have spotted debris
they've been trained by TV entertainment to think all problems can be resolved in one hour less commercials.
Normal situation (Score:4, Interesting)
Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation? Is there any part of the ocean where it is not possible to actually locate human debris such as wood pallets scraps of metal and such.
Remember: we still have tons (literally) of trash from the tsunami floating around out there.
Beyond that, why do ALL the media outlets take government statements such as "possible object", meaning the analysts can't agree that there is an actual thing there and the spot isn't just a light glare, and instead report "it could be a wing". From 'not sure it exists' to 'it could be the plane'.
This all seems like the Washington DC sniper investigation and the "white van" syndrome all over again.
Re:The word you're looking for is "and" (Score:2, Interesting)
That's a standard news-style headline. Not just for saving ink but for brevity (AFAIK).