Archive for the ‘Media’ Category
You are currently browsing the archives for the Media category.
3
Dec
2010
Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet
I rather like the “A”, “Amer-kawh”, “and”, “for” and “great” bits.
1
Jul
2010
Torture and the media
Abstract from Desai, Pineda, Runquist, Fusunyan et al. (2010), emphasis mine:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been
the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers
with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and
sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early
1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered
waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was
torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on
the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By
contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to
waterboarding as torture.The New York Times called waterboarding torture or
implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so
in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as
torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding
torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more
likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is
the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with
a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or
implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States
was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in
91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only
11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.
15
Jun
2010
Bloody Sunday
Today, the Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday was published. You can read it in full here. British Prime Minister David Cameron summed up:
- No warning had been given to any civilians before the soldiers opened fire
- None of the soldiers fired in response to attacks by petrol bombers or stone throwers
- Some of those killed or injured were clearly fleeing or going to help those injured or dying
- None of the casualties was posing a threat or doing anything that would justify their shooting
- Many of the soldiers lied about their actions
- The events of Bloody Sunday were not premeditated
- Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein, was present at the time of the violence and “probably armed with a sub-machine gun” but did not engage in “any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire”
The inquiry ran for 12 years at an ultimate expense of £195M. Its findings have been widely greeted positively.
What I post today is not directly connected but certainly not unrelated: a debate — I use the term loosely — between Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times and members of the Wolfe Tones, an Irish rebel music band who have enjoyed a long, successful career. Fintan contends their music and their style of performing are inherently racist and filled with hate-speech, while the Wolfe Tones assert that… Well, that Fintan is lacking a sense of humour, that his knowledge of the history of The Troubles is lacking and that he shouldn’t be able to consider himself Irish.
While even after having watched it countless times, to me it is completely obvious who wins this farce of a “debate”, the Youtube comments tell a different story:
In any event, here is the “debate”, in full:
9
Jun
2010
Girl banned from using sign-language on school bus
From ABC News:
School officials have threatened a hearing-impaired girl with suspension if she uses sign language to talk to her friends on the school bus, the girl’s parents say.
But officials at Stonybrook School — which is not a school for the hearing-impaired — and district officials in Branchburg, N.J., apparently believe signing is a safety hazard. They have sent a letter to the Lesko family ordering Danica to stop using sign language on the school bus or risk a three-day suspension.
The March 30 letter from her principal that said Danica was “doing sign language after being told it wasn’t allowed on the bus.”
The Leskos may file a lawsuit over the sign language ban, claiming officials are violating Danica’s civil rights and violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“She has a hearing problem, and now she’s being punished for using sign language,” Mary Ann Lesko, Danica’s mother, told The Star-Ledger of Newark. “It’s absurd.”
A horrific story already, my heart sank to a new low when I read the closing paragraph:
Danica’s parents say she began losing her hearing last November, when a classmate allegedly shot a bottle rocket near her ear. They have already sued the Branchburg School District over that incident.
8
Jun
2010
Andy Irvine Live at the Embankment
Two noteworthy things I came across on TG4, our Irish language TV station, this weekend: An Crisis and Ar Stáitse. An Crisis is an excellent sitcom featuring Risteard Cooper of Apres Match fame which tells the story of the fictional government department “ACT” (An Chomhairle Teanga — The Language Council), seemingly based on An Gúm, being audited during the recession. Funny, clever and slightly absurdist, it’s well worth following.
On Ar Stáitse, remastered recordings of old concerts in Ireland are shown. I watched the Andy Irvine one and was absolutely blown away. This is Irish trad at its very best. Here it is in 4 parts, with my (probably slightly inaccurate) translations of the Irish that appears during the video.
4
Jun
2010
A Strange Echo from History
Acclaimed Filmmaker Adam Curtis writes of a strange echo from history, drawing parallels between the recent news from the Middle East and an attempt by members of a Zionist terrorist group in the 40s to try to break the English blockade of Palestine. He shares with us a documentary film from the BBC archives:
As you watch the film - it raises complex reactions and thoughts in your mind. But it is ironic that, although the two events are in many ways completely different, the Israelis are now preventing Palestinians and supporters of Hamas from doing what the Israeli defence organisation – the Haganah – tried to do over 60 years ago. From 1945 the Haganah, along with the Irgun, had been carrying out a terror campaign against British soldiers in Palestine. Then in 1947 they organised the Exodus operation as an attempt to break the British blockade.
It is absolutely essential viewing. Read his blog post and watch the documentary now.
12
May
2010
Boston.com Big Picture Cataloguer
I’m a big fan of The Boston Globe’s photojournalism series, The Big Picture. So much so, in fact, that I decided to dedicate a few hours this week to building a program that would not just download the entire series, but add caption metadata to each photo, since many are informative and look very nice in Picasa, for example.
Now, I’m happy that the application is stable enough to release to the world in the Code section of my website.
Since I don’t want people to be hammering The Boston Globe’s servers, I’ve made the script wait a fraction of a second between each request, and since I don’t want people to be able to disable this functionality, unfortunately only binaries will be available for the time being. Windows binaries are available already, OS X and Linux binaries to come in a few days.
Indeed, if those at The Boston Globe have a problem with how the program operates, they need simply contact me and we can come to an agreement, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that the program contacts their servers as little as possible.
Bug reports will be automatically submitted through this website too, but if you have any unforeseen problems (e.g. a crash or a hang), email me with as much information as possible (text describing the “Traceback” printed before the crash, what album/photo the program was working on, etc).
What can you do once you’ve got the entire 2GB collection of photos downloaded? Well, you can simply look through them at your own pace and comfort, or indeed choose to create a montage screensaver from them (although be warned – a screensaver that fades from a beautiful Antarctic landscape to a bloody photo of a victim of the war in Afghanistan might not be exactly what you had in mind.)
But in any event, hopefully it’ll be of some use. Enjoy!
17
Oct
2009
Don’t hold your breath for tolerance.
In the past week, Stephen Gately, former member of Irish boy-band Boyzone, died. Jan Moir of the Daily Mail wrote an incredibly repulsive article on the subject and Charlie Brooker responded indignantly.
Meanwhile, a Ugandan minister of parliament has proposed legislation to enforce a penalty of death for the “offence of aggravated homosexuality.”
Well then.
7
Oct
2009
Die Stimme des Klaviers
Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer currently residing in Berlin, has done something rather interesting: he made a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, then invented a mechanical piano player capable of reading notes in a very high time resolution from a computer.
The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.
<object width=”490″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
(Video in German with English subtitles)
While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!
1
Sep
2009
Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia to be fined for speaking their own language
Daniel Tencer has posted his English translation of an article in Gazeta Wyborcza from Warsaw, Poland, which describes a new law which imposes a fine of five to ten thousand euros for publicly speaking Hungarian in Slovakia:
Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia are planning to protest today in the city of Dunajska Streda against a law they say violates their basic human rights. Under a penalty of five to ten thousand Euros, as of today it will be a crime in Slovakia to use the Hungarian language in public places.
As the Hungarian weekly Heti Világgazdaság states, every Hungarian doctor in Slovakia will from now on be required to speak Slovakian with their patients, even ethnically Hungarian patients, even if neither party wishes it so.
[Explanatory note: There are 550,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia. They are there because after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in World War I, the Allied Powers drew the borders of Hungary in such a way as to marginalize the Hungarian nation. A full 3.3 million Hungarians were left out of Hungary, and have been living as minorities in Slovakia, Romania, etc. for the past ninety years.]
The protest marks the culmination of several nightmarish weeks in Hungarian-Slovak relations, during which time the Slovak government refused entry to the Hungarian prime minister, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences declared the new Slovak language law a violation of fundamental human rights.
It’s always a thorny issue when governments get involved in mandating and prescribing the use of language in their respective societies, but it’s surprised me that such an incredibly racist law brought in in Eastern Europe has gone almost completely unnoticed in the news media — especially when one considers the background to the Hungarians’ presence in Slovakia.
Edit: Ah. Literally minutes after I clicked “Publish” (I didn’t know my blog was that closely watched! ;) ), a story about this appeared in the third most prominant position on the BBC News website.
