Amazingly timely discovery over at Bldgblg: the BP sponsored game Offshore Oil Strike. The whole find is beautifully documented – go read.
Julian Assange preparing to speak at the CIJ summer school. Apologies for the phone quality shot...
As anyone who follows my Twitter feed will know I spent the weekend at City University taking part in a Summer School at the Centre for Investigative Journalism. I’d recommend any aspiring writer or seasoned hack to go next year (I will be) – it’s not often you get the chance to rub shoulders with Julian Assange, David Leigh, Mark Lee Hunter, Ben Goldacre and many more incredibly renowned journalists (like Paul Bradshaw, for example) and get the inside story on some of their best scoops.
I can’t begin to list the number of tips I’ve picked up for extracting stories from public and company accounts, analysing science stories, data encryption for protecting sources and so on. Perhaps the most important thing, though, was just a reminder to be more aware, all the time, of the importance of our writing.
Just be warned – it’s easy to get tempted away from the very useful classes on web scraping and datamining held by experts from ScraperWiki and Propublica in order to hear the incredible P Sainath speak about the (under-reported) mass suicide of Indian farmers or Paul Moreira tell you how he discovered that aid organisations couldn’t actually locate the 650+ schools they claimed to have funded in Afghanistan. You can watch that last video here. You really should.
It's a microscope, for a cellphone.
Yesterday Engadget carried a link about attaching an SLR-lens to an iPhone 4, but this is even cooler. An internally illuminated microscope that sticks over any cellphone camera.
According to Wireless Design Online, it’s been designed at UCLA with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is being used in field trials somewhere in Africa as we speak. There’s been a lot written about cellphone technology in development recently, from distributing HIV/AIDs test results via SMS to finding people trapped in the rubble of Port-aux-Prince, Haiti. This could be massive for low cost healthcare in hard to reach places.
I’ve been aware of Craig Murray‘s blog for a while now, but started reading it religiously as a result of some of his comments on Kyrgyzstan’s recent troubles. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about that part of the world, having worked as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. His conflict with the government about its refusal to recognise human rights issues was made famous in the book and documentary, Murder in Samarkand.
He’s well known to the British media, and yesterday published a series of letters obtained under the FOI Act that pretty much show the UK government was complicit in the torture terror suspects under his watch in Uzbekistan, and rejected his concerns as not appreciating “the broader picture”.
The letters were picked up by the international press, but not, complains Murray, by the UK media. Which is odd, to say the least.
An image that captions itself. Nice.
I’ve just got back from a very interesting presentation from Intel called ‘Screen Future: Shaping the future of TV’. It was a short session at the Millbank Tower with a small audience in which an impressive panel of people talked about what kind of entertainment we could expect on our Atom-powered smart TV’s of the future.
The most interesting panelist by a long way was Anthony Rose, former CTO of Kazaa, head of the BBC iPlayer project and now leading the charge for Project Canvas, the on demand delivery system being developed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, TalkTalk and BT.
Rose went into a good level of technical detail about how Canvas will work. One major influencing factor, he said, was that people used iPlayer in traditional, linear way much more than he expected In other words, demand for TV streams outweighed on demand plays of shows from earlier in the week.
The response in Canvas is to make use of multicast, a technology by which bandwidth for live feeds over IP can be dramatically reduced. At the moment, if 800,000 people watched England versus Slovenia in the World Cup over the net, the BBC’s servers and the internet backbone has to cope with 800,000 individual service requests and feeds. With multicast, only one stream is fed out into the internet and duplicated at each node, where it branches out to fill demand still using just one part of the total available bandwidth at any point.
In layman’s terms, it means that instead of 100 pieces of identical data arriving at your exchange because 100 people in your area are watching the footie, only one feed arrives at the exchange and is duplicated out only down those connections that want it. It sounds simple, but in internet terms it’s a bit like being able to have a two way conversation through your TV aerial. At the moment, it’s a criminally underused technology, so kudos to Canvas for planning it in.
The other interesting design point about Canvas that Rose talked about is that it will be designed as an instanced layer of software which can sit on any hardware which supports the API. That means set top boxes should always be able to run the latest version, years down the line. It’s also an open platform, and King is expecting indie developers to run with some ideas for building in layered information over the top of the Canvas system.
Not everything was shining good newsthough. Sir Michael Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the massive global advertising conglomerate, also spoke at the event and revealed the figures his organisation is using for planning the future. Platform owners, rather than content providers, will be the big winners, he said, and subscriptions will make up 60% of overall TV revenues by 2020.
So good news for Sky and News Corp, not so great for independent film makers or hard news organisations with a public service remit.
Sorrell also said that he expected more of his clients to get involved with content creation, citing Unilever’s involvement with the production of Ugly Betty in China. I think this was supposed to be positive news, suggesting that there are alternative revenue streams for us beleaguered “content providers” to explore, but it still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
On the brightside, though, Canvas is an exciting project which is being designed with the blurred distinction between TV, IPTV and social media in mind. Maybe we’ll be able to tune into the Demotix channel at some point in the future? That could work.
An impressive report from the Associated Press is up on the Guardian which describes a 70% turnout in the Kyrgyzstan referendum today. It seems incredible that the result is already known (and I rather suspect some people will ask questions about the speed of the count, given the circumstances) but there are heroic tales of how ballot papers have been taken to the refugee camps and workarounds to allow people to vote who lost their IDs in the fighting. Currently, the government is reporting 90% in favour of the new constitution – if true then it rather gives the lie to some of the theories about the violence two weeks ago being a popular action by Kyrgyz not in favour of reform.
There have been no reports of increased violence (although there are still, daily outbreaks on a small scale) designed to disrupt today’s vote. Credit is due to the Kyrgyz government for pressing ahead and making this happen peacefully, despite the odds.
- Images of the SOS signs painted on roads in Osh
If 400,000 people fleeing their homes doesn’t quite put the problems in Kyrgyzstan in perspective, how about this story of horror from Osh. Over 100 SOS signs have been spotted by satellites imaging the city. People desperate for help who still aren’t getting it.
Things are still developing fast. Amnesty International is calling for the government of Uzbekistan to stop forcibly returning people who fled during last week’s fighting in Osh and Jalal-Abat. It may be too late, as other reports suggest that most of the 100,000 women and children who crossed the border to flee the violence have already returned. (Men weren’t allowed over, the suspected reason being that Uzbek dictator Karimov didn’t want potential pro-democracy supporters on his turf.)
What that means is more people in the highly insecure camps on the Kyrgyz side of the border, or women and children returning to homes that are little more than rubble, where supplies are few and far between. Throw in more tensions around Monday’s referendum on political reform and it’ll be amazing if the country isn’t back in the headlines over the weekend.
I don’t know if they still have them, but several times in the past I’ve been to the US and noticed signs by the customs desks with say “Don’t joke with the officers, you will be deported”, or words to that effect.
Good to see, then, that our home grown UK Borders Agency can see the light hearted side of its work with this headline.
- See what they did there?
“Officers ‘takeaway’ staff from a Falmouth restaurant”. I’m glad for them that they aren’t so overwhelmed by the sensitive task of dealing with refugees that they can’t laugh about their work, eh?
Or maybe I’m not the one who should be being empathetic? Bringing up the fact that my brother-in-law was beaten up for being Asian just down the road from their and the idea that perhaps a more responsible attitude might be needed to deal with the tricky problem of race in Cornwall would just be a little bleeding heart, wouldn’t it?
I ventured into Balham last night to take part in top multimedia journalist & entrepreneur Adam Westbrook‘s first Future of News Bootcamp. It was conceived as a spin off of the larger Future of News meet-ups (which I’ve failed to actually attend any of), but with a small group of people. The idea being the group can focus on solid business ideas rather than just point out all the ways old media is dying.
The topic was a challenging one even in old media settings: is there a practical business model that can be built up delivering humanitarian/human rights/international development news?
The magic whiteboard. Now any room can be a flipchart.
And surprisingly, it turned out there just might be.
In the spirit of internet openness, Adam’s written his notes up in a blog post at his website which is well worth checking out.
The bootcamps are an excellent idea and I met five other really interesting journalists all with very different backgrounds: Deborah, Donnacha, Kat, Rebecca and Phil. I strongly recommend you go to the next one.
(Although I wish you better journey home than mine was yesterday. After massively delayed trains thanks to signal faults at Victoria, I got to a final change at Hove station around midnight to find there was a small fire on the line causing more delays…)
I missed this, but shortly after being sentenced, Zambia Post editor Fred M’membe was released on bail. I love this interview he gave outside Luska Central Prison gates – talk about not talking things lying down.
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