Author: dave Page 12 of 75

It’s been awhile since I did much more than scan the headlines. But of course, I’ve been watching the coverage of the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath, like most people I know. Tonight the US and Canadian TV networks are giving over the airwaves to televised benefits. And we’ve all felt the wall-to-wall coverage that the quake has received.

While much of the media coverage has been exceptional – especially the first-hand accounts from reporters who were first on the scene, the coverage also raises questions about what gets coverage and when. What’s happening in the rest of the world?

Today, I came across this article by Rebecca Solnit on TomDispatch.com with the provocative headline In Haiti, Words Can Kill. It explores some of the issues I was thinking about – especially the response of the big US television networks. And you will want to look at another post by Solnit, called “When the Media is the Disaster,” for more on the subject.

They are provocative pieces. Talking about the way the event has been covered doesn’t do anything to diminish the scope of the tragedy that has unfolded in Haiti, nor does it cast aspersions on the people who are working so hard to help with the relief efforts. But it is worth considering the way that popular culture influences the news judgement of the media and how that affects the victims of the natural disaster.

Here’s a sample:

Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” — at a cost that can only have been obscene.

In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”). The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet. In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match.

In place of the world came endless stories of a tiny number of riveting rescues from the rubble (“miracles”) by international rescue teams — less than 150 saved when possibly tens of thousands of buried Haitians would not be dug out and conceivably up to 200,000 had died. Along with this went the usual self-congratulatory reporting about American generosity and the importance of American troops (they secured the airport!) in a situation in which aid was visibly not getting through, in which people were not being saved.

And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama: impending violence — even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other,help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share. It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting,” that would have been hard to tell.

Some of you may have already this article. I’m just catching up on my reading which slipped about over the holidays. But it’s one that I can’t resist pointing people to.

I’m an admitted Apple fan – there aren’t many of their products that I don’t like. (After all, I am the President of the Victoria Mac Users Group.) So I’m excited about the ongoing rumours
about the upcoming Tablet that Apple is working on.

I’ve heard lots of the rumours and that’s all they are – as John Gruber explains in this post there is no one who knows what is really going on, except the ones that are working on it.

Gruber, who writes the blog Daring Fireball, is well regarded for his thoughts on all things Apple and for computing in general. He’s always on my must-read list.

In this post, he delves into what is known, what isn’t known, and what he thinks will be known when the Table finally arrives. It’s a fascinating take on what’s going on by someone who likely has a better handle on things than most.

It’s a fascinating essay and it’s guaranteed to get your excitement level going – even if you’re not an Apple fan. Because it’s going to change the way we use computers.

Here’s the link

Boxing Day was the fifth anniversary of the Christmas Tsunami of 2004. With the fuss we’re experiencing over increased airline security and difficulties caused by it for travelers, it’s worth remembering that there are more serious things out there.

The Big Picture, one of my favourite photo blogs, looked back at the Tsuname, five years on, and had pictures of what is happening now in the countries where it caused such devastation.

Here’s the link.

Update: I had the wrong date originally. It was Boxing Day 2004, not Dec. 29.

In the wake of Christmas fun, you might have missed this story that appeared on Boxing Day.

Kim Peek, who was the inspiration for the character Dustin Hoffman made famous in Rain Man, died at the age of 58.

Peek’s story is fascinating and this obituary in the New York Times does a good job of telling it:

Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies.

“He was the Mount Everest of memory,” Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an expert on savants who knew Mr. Peek for 20 years, said in an interview.

Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.

“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.

Mr. Peek had an uncanny facility with the calendar.

“When an interviewer offered that he had been born on March 31, 1956, Peek noted, in less than a second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend,” Dr. Treffert and Dr. Daniel D. Christensen wrote about Mr. Peek in Scientific American in 2006.

They added: “He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.”

If you’re like me, you might be a bit confused about what exactly is everyone arguing about when it comes to climate change?

If you watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, things look pretty clear. But then you read a story demanding that Gore’s Academy Award should be revoked because the film is all smoke and mirrors.

For most of us, the debate becomes the story – not the facts or allegations themselves. Fortunately, there are people who like to get at the facts of the argument and present them in a way that we can understand.

Here then, from the Information is Beautiful website are the arguments for and against global warming, presented in a straightforward, well-researched and easily understood format.

UPDATE – Factcheck.org has looked closely at the “Climategate” issue in this article. Same conclusions.

– via Daring Fireball

I am fond of warning clients that we’re entering a new era – you can’t lie! If you do, you will be caught – if not now then later.

I argue that rather than “spinning” an issue, just tell the truth. Getting the true story out in your own words is always better than admitting it after someone else calls you out.

That’s one of the reasons I like this time of year when people start compiling their year-end lists of things. One of my favourites is Regret the Error which tracks the media’s screw-ups over the past year.

See which ones you remember and think about how things could have been handled differently.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

What is it about spam that keeps it coming back, time after time?

“Do people really fall for the stuff that comes across their computer screen” is a question I’m asked a lot. Anyone who uses a computer will end up seeing a lot of crap that they didn’t ask for and often have no idea why they’re getting it.

The simple answer is that no, the people that sent those messages don’t really expect anyone to buy their organ enhancer, or the pills that will do miraculous things. They just want to grab your attention for a split second – just long enough to slip a mailicious bit of software into your machine, so they can use it without your knowledge to send other people the same messages.

Those programs are called Trojan Horses (see this Wikipedia article for an explanation) and they’re the computer hackers basic building blocks.

But I didn’t start this post to tell you about how malicious software might end up on your computer, although it’s a fascinating area for study. What I was wondering was whether any of you are starting to see more and more spam appearing on your Skype connections?

I’ve been using Skype for many years and I rarely had problems with receiving unexpected contacts from people I didn’t know. I’d leave the program running in the background on my computer and pretty much forget about it.

But just lately, it seems that I’ve been spending a lot of time blocking meaningless contact messages from companies and people that I know nothing about. Many of these messages offer to sell me something, or invite me to visit their website to register for something.

I’m not sure what’s going on. I suspect that following up on any of these offers would be a bad thing, as it always is in these cases. But every so often, it seems that a spammer somewhere figures out a way to get past the usual filters and starts flooding the Internet with junk. Sooner or later, the blocking software will catch up with them and we won’t see any more of that particular piece of spam. But more will take its place.

I’m noticing this increase today because I so rarely see much spam anymore. I run all of my email, both incoming and outgoing, through Google Mail, which seem to have the most efficient spam filters I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

I’ve been using Google as a route for my email for several years now and I’ve gotten used to never seeing a piece of spam for weeks on end. That doesn’t mean I’m not receiving them. It’s just that Google’s filters are good at weeding them out of my inbox. Just today, I went and checked my Spam folder. I’ve received over 4100 items in the last 30 days. Today, I appear to have received almost 100 new ones, many of them two or three times.

But here’s what’s even more impressive. I’ve been checking my spam folder every day for about a week and I have yet to find a single piece of legitimate mail in there. Whatever kind of magic algorithms Google has cooked up to separate the good from the bad, it’s working. And I continue to be impressed.

If you’re getting more spam than you’d like, you should give serious consideration to routing your mail through Google’s servers. It’s a good way to stop spam. And as a bonus, you always have a complete backup copy of every email you’ve received, sent and deleted for as long as you’ve been sending that mail through Google. And you can find anything in seconds by using their tremendous search function.

If you’d like to set up your own version of spam-free email but you don’t know how to use Gmail, drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how easy it is to set yourself up.

If you’re like me, you like to read the details about news stories after the initial fuss has died down. Walking through the whole thing with a talented guide is always interesting and usually ends up helping with your own writing.

Perhaps you came across a recent story that got a bit of buzz in the mainstream media. The story was called Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages, by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler. It appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The bulk of the story is behind the paywall.

The gist of the story is that according to some research done as part of a doctoral thesis, Wikipedia is losing editors at a tremendous rate. That’s how the story played out in most papers that carried some version of the story.

Doc Searls is one of those media guides I mentioned. In a blog post yesterday, he looked at the initial story and then dug deeper. He also went through a lengthy analysis prepared by Wikipedia itself that put the findings into context.

He winds up his piece with a bit of a personal note by telling us about his own experience as a Wikipedia editor.

It’s a great read and by the end of it, I feel like I have a better idea of how the story developed and what it really means. I like that.

Who are the people who help you find the story behind the story?

The election in Honduras is going ahead on Sunday, Nov 29, although what it will accomplish is very much up for debate.

For background on the vote from the mainstream media, here’s a report from Reuters.

For a more opinionated piece, read Rick Arnold’s comments. Rick is the coordinator of Common Frontiers Canada, which is one of my long-time web clients.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at the hard-working folk who donate their energy and time to educate the rest of us about North (and now South) American Free Trade.

Common Frontiers is part of a delegation of observers that are on the ground in Honduras right now, filing reports back to Canada. It’s a scary and exciting place to be and their reports are good reading.

You can find the daily reports in a special section I’ve created at www.commonfrontiers.ca/Honduras.

Let me know what you think.