Posted by: RFM on: October 21, 2009
I’ll be posting a little less round here than is my habit for the time being, because I’m doing NaNoWriMo for month of November, and because I actually hope to write more than the 50,000 word target, I am starting early. National Novel Writing Month is a new media tradition: just for the challenge, for no other reason, you can sign up and attempt to write an average of 1,667 words per day for the 30 days of November. Over 54,000 people have so far signed up for this year.
I don’t think I’m “cheating” by starting early, because I’m aiming for 70-80,000 words, so I’m trying to get 20,000+ in the bag before the end of the month.
My work-in-progress can be found here for time being: The Obald. Note to my students: like my music, consume at your own risk.
Posted by: RFM on: October 23, 2009
Year 13s, the coursework advisor has given the go ahead for your projects. There is also a checklist to help you keep the projects on target. Ask yourself these questions whenever you feel you’re getting off track.
Research Essay:
Here is the checklist for the production:
Posted by: RFM on: October 18, 2009
I’ve put something up on WeStudyFilm that was made by the Moving Image Arts students. Because it’s funny.
I’m sure the telephone mast doesn’t cause cancer. The school wouldn’t do that to us, would they? Would they? Don’t answer that.
Posted by: RFM on: October 17, 2009
You may have developed some awareness of the latest pitchfork-wielding Twitter flashmob. A homophobic column in the Daily Mail by Jan Moir has been greeted with upset and outrage all around. I won’t dignify her article with a link. After all, homophobia (and sexist double standards) are par for the course for the Daily Mail, and if anyone’s surprised by that they haven’t been paying attention.
The interesting aspect of this are as follows. On the one hand, the power of Twitter to organise is once again revealed. A few hash tags, and few re-tweets, and you have a fairly organised response. The Mail has been victim to this before – when Twitter users gamed one of their hateful online opinion polls by encouraging people to click the choice that most Mail readers would be opposed to.
Now Twitter has organised a response in the form of comments on the article, and in encouraging people to complain to the Press Complaints Commission, and that’s the other interesting aspect of this story.
Charlie Booker, writing for The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, ends his article with a link to the PCC.
It has been 20 minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I'm still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.
But if you read the comments to Brooker’s article, you come up against one of the peculiarities of media regulation. The print media is regulated – on a strictly voluntary basis – by the industry-funded Press Complaints Commission. The PCC is staffed by people appointed by the major publishers and has no legal power.
Believe me, the Daily Mail knows this – and exploits it to the greatest extent.
Not only is the PCC voluntary and legally toothless, but its own rules point out that only those directly affected by an article have the right to complain. In other words, if someone writes something untrue or unfair about a friend of yours, only the friend’s family have the right to complain about it. If the person being defamed – as in this case – is dead, only the family can complain. And if there is no surviving family? Nobody can complain.
Now, the objection to Moir’s article is that it is hateful and homophobic, and these are things that affect everyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, or other. It could be argued that everyone suffers when bigotry is given free rein in the press. But I wonder if the PCC will see it that way.
And I wonder how it is that after hundreds of years of newspaper publishing there still isn’t a proper regulator with legal power to deal with complaints?
Posted by: RFM on: October 16, 2009
It’s been an interesting and controversial week in the media.
On Monday, the Guardian published a mysterious article which said that they were unable to report an MP’s written question to a minister because a legal injunction prevented them from doing so. In other words, a law firm had stopped a British newspaper from even reporting on the proceedings of the British Parliament. They weren’t even allowed to name the MP or the law firm who issued the injunction.
This outrageous attempt to stifle the freedom of the press and the supremacy of Parliament was then foiled… by Twitter, as thousands of people joined in defending the Guardian’s freedom of speech.
What a lot of people knew, because it was an ongoing story (news value: continuity), was that the question to Parliament concerned the activities of Trafigura, an oil company accused of poisoning people by illegally dumping toxic waste in Ivory Coast. This fly-tipping on an industrial scale occurred in August 2006.
The BBC started reporting on the contents of the cargo in May this year, and were immediately sued by Carter Ruck, the law firm acting for Trafigura. Trafigura, by the way, had already kind of admitted liability in the case by paying $100 million to the Ivory Coast government.
In September, the Guardian reported that it had seen internal emails (pesky new media again) which indicated an attempt by Trafigura to cover up the extent of the contamination, and their knowledge about the dangerous nature of the cargo about to be dumped.
In a well-timed piece of satire, the The Daily Mash is suggesting that Carter Ruck might now sue everybody on Twitter, the Post Office, and anyone who looks at them funny. Snip:
He added: “As for Trafigura, our clients have stated consistently that they only ever intended to poison the west African coastline with 400 billion gallons of shit in a perfectly legal way.”
Nikki Hollis, a Twitter from Grantham, said: “OMG Im going 2 b taken to the fkn cleaners! Nu shoes or legal advice – wat 2 do?!?”
Meanwhile Twitter’s ability to reshape the democratic agenda was further underlined today with “trending topics” including chocolate milk and paranormal activity, as well as a campaign demanding Lily Allen makes another album full of nursery-rhyme cock.
In other news, elsewhere on the internet, Ralph Lauren were being embarrassed by the web site Photoshop Disasters, who spotted a model in an advert whose head was bigger than her pelvis. Instead of apologising for distorting the female body image even more, Ralph Lauren got their law firm to issue a take down notice to the site, claiming breach of copyright.
If they’d understood the copyright law at all, they might have noticed the bit about “fair use” when it comes to criticism. While Google (hiss) complied automatically with the takedown notice, the far more legally aware BoingBoingers came out fighting, publishing even more criticism of Ralph Lauren, and encouraging people to re-Photoshop the model to make her look like a normal human being.
In a final act of complete stupidity, Ralph Lauren chose that week of all weeks to fire the model in question for being “too big” to wear their clothes. As BoingBoing points out, the model is 5′10″ and 120lbs (1.77m and 54.4 kg). In other words, she’s two inches shorter than me and weighs about 40 kilos less. But still too fat for Ralph Lauren, apparently.
Posted by: RFM on: October 12, 2009
Classy.
“These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly,” said Lagerfeld in an interview with the magazine Focus. The designer, who lost a lot of weight himself when he went on a strict low-carbohydrate diet several years ago, added that the world of fashion was all to do “with dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women”.
via Karl Lagerfeld says only ‘fat mummies’ object to thin models |
Life and style |
guardian.co.uk
.
Posted by: RFM on: October 11, 2009
You know you love it.
Posted by: RFM on: October 11, 2009
Smart phones defy slowdown (Canalys press release: r2009081).
These industry-wide figures are being widely reported and they show the enormous leaps Apple have been making in the smartphone market (smartphones being the ones with extended, computer-like functions). They’ve gone from 2.1% of the global market in Q2 2008 to 13.7% of the market in the same quarter 2009. From 700,000 shipped products to 5.2 million.
While Nokia and RIM (who make the Blacknerry) are holding up their end, it’s the “others” that are being hurt by Apple’s success: down from 12 million units to 8 million over the year. So Apple’s gain of 4.5 million sales is more or less the others’ loss.
Nokia are still very strong in Europe, Middle East, and Asia (EMEA) – scroll down in the story to see those figures. Apple have 13.6% of the EMEA market.
Posted by: RFM on: October 8, 2009
Interesting article in the Guardian about Google News and how difficult it is for Google to link to news, apropos of our discussion on how Google works the other day (that link takes you to an explanation from the Google Guide).
But one returns to that problem about news sites: the rules of journalistic production are not compatible with Google’s algorithm, based on the link culture of the web. And even though Maile Ohye, Google’s developer programs technical head, has said that in news searching Google values the original source which broke the story first, Google News shows something different.
.
One thing Google wants to do is recreate the experience of picking up a newspaper — where you might notice a story you wouldn’t necessarily have searched for, just because of its position on the page. This is called serendipity, and it’s the same reason libraries with books are better than libraries with computers: you never know what you’re going to discover by accident.
