How Censorship Works in America

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 07:08:54 GMT

This article illustrates the worst fears of the story I wrote on this blog, called Iron Curtain vs Velvet Curtain.

World and America watching different wars: CNN vs. Al Jazeera: Seeing is often believing
By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor CAIRO, EGYPT [^]The Hamouda family is gathered around the TV, sipping sugary tea and glued to the pictures of captured US soldiers being interrogated by Iraqis on the popular Qatar-based satellite station Al Jazeera. "What's your name?" A terrified young female POW is asked. "How old are you?" The camera moves to her feet, which are bloody and bare. "Yieee!," cheers eldest son Ahmed, knocking over a fake geranium plant as he shoots up from the couch in excitement. "Show it how it is!" It is not that they are happy to see suffering, says Hellmy, the father, somewhat apologetically, as the camera weaves between several bodies. "But the other side of the story needs to be told." The gruesome video shown Sunday on Al Jazeera - reaching 35 million Arab-speakers worldwide, including about 20 percent of the Egyptian population - will probably never be seen by the average American TV viewer. In fact, American audiences are seeing and reading about a different war than the rest of the world. The news coverage in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, reflects and defines the widening perception gap about the motives for this war. Surveys show that an increasing number of Americans believe this is a just war, while most of the world's Arabs and Muslims see it as a war of aggression. Media coverage does not necessarily create these leanings, say analysts, but it works to cement them. "The difference in coverage between the US and the rest of the world helped contribute to the situation that we're in now,'' says Kim Spencer, president of WorldLink TV, a US satellite channel devoted to airing foreign news. "Americans have been unable to see how they're perceived."

That would be the rub of it, wouldn't it? I hear this jarring bell in my head, like I've heard a version of this story before. And I have. It was in the protestations in the former Soviet Union, protestations perhaps also by ordinary Russians who sometimes met American tourists, who may have claimed that they "did so" have a free press. As in, the US is the frog in the boiling water. What we see and hear is so tightly controlled by this time that people are turning to the Internet and the foreign press to find out if something different might be going on than what they are told, perhaps the way folks in Hungary turned to Radio Free Europe.

For example, most Americans, watching CNN, Fox, or the US television networks, are not seeing as much coverage of injured Iraqi citizens, or being given more than a glimpse of the antiwar protests now raging in the Muslim world and beyond. In the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia, by comparison, the rapid progress made by US led troops has been played down. And many aspects of the conflict being highlighted in the US - such as the large number of Iraqi troops surrendering, the cooperation between US-led forces and various Gulf states, commentary on America's superior weapons technology, and the human interest angles on soldier life in the desert - are almost totally absent from coverage outside the US. "Sure, the news we get in the Arab world is slanted," admits Hussein Amin, chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at Cairo's American University. "In the same way the news received in the US is biased." The view from Europe Some analysts note that European press ownership is less concentrated than its counterparts in the US, and is seen as providing more perspectives than either the Arab or American outlets. In Frankfurt, for example, readers have access to 16 different German language newspapers - many of which present different vantage points, which makes for a more lively and varied debate. European journalists also seem to ask different, more skeptical, questions of this war, often being the ones at White House and Pentagon press conferences to ask whether the invasion of Iraq has turned up any of the weapons of mass destruction that used to justify the invasion - even as their American counterparts repeatedly focus on such questions as whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead. Media watchers say the European press has tended to be more balanced than the US media in dealing with the war, in part because Europe is so much closer to the Muslim world. John Schmidt, a former reporter for the International Herald Tribune, who has just returned from Europe, notes that in Marseille, France, 30 percent of the population is Muslim. In Berlin, the biggest minority population is the Turks.

The truth is, American journalists don't know how much they embarrass themselves when out in the rest of the world. An exchange from CNN two nights ago is instructive. Aaron Brown in the middle of the night was talking to a NYTimes reporter at CentCom (CNN & NYTimes have a mutual agreement going on this war, with all their embeds, etc). The NYTimes woman at CentCom (seems like her name was... Jane Somebody?) was talking about the frustrations of working at CentCom, where information was so highly managed. Besides Aaron's somewhat surprise (he didn't say "It is?" but he did act a bit like, "Oh, they wouldn't lie to us there, would they?"), he also asked her what others in the press were saying. She gave him a frank appraisal of what a Lebanon journalist and friend of hers said in flipping around on all the sources they had--and it was clear her friend thought American coverage revealed itself as a propaganda wing for the US government, and at the very least, anything covered by the embeds was compromised. Aaron was like, "Oh, I get it," but at the same time, he sort of protested, like "what else can we do?" I'll give Aaron credit. He did cotton on to what the assumption about CNN was, but the pity is that he didn't operate with that basic knowledge set and guard against that judgment by the journalistic peers in the first place and work harder from the beginning to counter it.

"There are really two stories unfolding here, one is the war and its progress and the second one is the progress of world opinion," says Tom Patterson, a media expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "That second dimension is there in the American press, but it's clearly way underreported." For instance, American media outlets may report on the demonstrations in other countries, particularly if there are violent clashes. But they don't devote as many resources to covering in depth the growing anti-American sentiment - even among American allies - or its implications for the future, says Professor Patterson. [...] Interest in the war has been so high that Indonesia's TV7 began pirating Al Jazeera's signal shortly before the start of the war. The new station carries the Arab-language broadcast with simultaneous Indonesian translation. Though Al Jazeera is only shown from 10 in the evening until 11 in the morning an official at TV7 says the news department is receiving about 100 calls a day from viewers, up from "almost zero" before the US invasion began. The news broadcasts in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, have been tamer than the news in the Middle East, focusing on protests against the war at home, with official statements against the war from abroad. But they have also carried some stories sympathetic to US soldiers, including an interview with Anecita Hudson of Alamogordo, Texas. Mrs. Hudson says her son, 23-year-old Army Specialist Joseph Hudson, was one of the prisoners of war shown on Al Jazeera. She said seeing her son captured was "like a bad dream." Mrs. Hudson didn't see her son on American news outlets. She spotted him on a Filipino cable channel she subscribes to. She is originally from the Philippines.

If the 1991 Gulf War MADE CNN's name in the world (with the radical presumption, still present from Ted Turner's influence, that journalists would cover news as if they didn't have nationality, even with fighting pool restrictions and bullshit--CNN took a lot of heat back then for showing Baghdad's POV, even in a limited way. A lot of scholarship and analysis has been written about that seminal time). Will this Iraq war put Al Jazeera on the map in the same way? It surely isn't putting Fox News on the map. What is the compelling "MUST SEE" about Al Jazeera that makes President Bush watch it even as he eschews watching all other news coverage while out at Camp David? Could the first President Bush have done that in the Gulf War? I remember the stories from back in the Gulf War, of Pentagon Briefings and other pressers, where the people being briefed said, "Hey, I saw it on CNN just like you did. I don't have any other information beyond that." Now they would have to say that about Al Jazeera, wouldn't they?

"War is ugly by nature and we did not create these pictures - we are only there to reflect reality on the ground,"' says Jihad Ali Ballout, Al Jazeera's media relations head. "Truth is sometimes unpleasant and gruesome, and I feel distressed when people ask me to dress it up." Washington watches Al Jazeera The Bush administration sees Al Jazeera - the cable news channel made famous for its airing of Osama Bin Laden tapes - as having an anti-American bias. But, since the seven-year-old Al Jazeera has grown from six to 24 hours of daily programming and reaches more than 35 million Arab speakers around the world, including 150,000 in the United States, Washington seems to be attempting to work more closely with the network. The Pentagon offered Al Jazeera four choice spots for its reporters to be embedded with US military units and assigned it a special media liaison officer and both National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have given extensive interviews to Al Jazeera in recent days. Al-Arabiya and Abu Dhabi, two other 24-hour Arab-language stations, have received similar attention from the administration. Al Jazeera says that it has two of its correspondents "embedded" with US units - but the units in question are in Kuwait. It has no reporters with US troops directly participating in the invasion.

Thanks Adam for finding this indelible image

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 07:41:51 GMT

war comment #1. Today's comment on the war in Irak: [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I'm addicted to this Kurdistan journalist's blog

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:04:30 GMT

This is Josh Kucera's weblog, called The Other Side. It is the first thing I've seen of the so-called "warblogs" that actually IS a warblog, meaning real reporting from a person ON THE GROUND in a dangerous place. More dangerous than I would like to think, as I watched on CNN tonight as air raid sirens went off about 40 km from Erbil. What Josh is doing is even more sobering to me when I hear that CNN has more than 600 journalists working in the Mideast, covering the Iraq war, but only DOZENS in Kurdistan. Most of the CNN folks are sitting tight in safe places, or places marked safe inside dangerous zones. I will have to quote in here the great post Josh did on the presence of the TV media in Erbil too. It is very funny. When I think of what the blog idealists promise with grassroots journalism in this social movement, I mostly hear talk talk talk. They say they scoop traditional media. They say they can blog things live. They show it by blogging their favorite tech conference. Whoo hoo. Here's a clue: it is a very small cadre of journos who actually spend all of their time covering tech conferences. Most of them are busy beating out their stories the hard way. Oh, and this post of Josh's below, about the exodus from Erbil? I read it on his blog several HOURS before CNN and other sources started filing their stories. I sat down at work that day, read Josh's blog, and then started in on my daily tasks with the tv monitor on near my desk as always. I didn't see this story cross until much later that afternoon. Not that traditional stories are what Josh's focus is on. He has to file those for money. In this blog, his accounts are personal, immediate. And I just think that is so fucking cool... Miasma

War Panic in Erbil. Today is the first official day of war panic in Erbil. Yesterday everything looked much like it has since I got here. Today many shops are closed, there are fewer cars in the street and people tell me their neighbors are fleeing the city for towns further towards the Iranian border. My translator's family all left for their hometown of Koy Sanjak, which is closer to the Iraqi lines but which they feel is less of a target. Shopowners are emptying their stores, putting their stuff in more secure locations in case there is looting during the war. Most people... [The Other Side]

Mercola.com: Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:29:21 GMT

It drives me utterly mad with lust. It makes me think about Marshall McLuhan and how the media shapes not only messages but also cultures that spring up, facilitated by such media. More on that below. Miasma, the pistachio-eater

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you[base ']ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

OK, I'd accept that as a good start! But soon I'd need more space. [G]

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

Again, I'd need more time. I'd have plasma screens rotating images on poster-sized screens in every room. By then we would be using wall-sized screens, so eventually I'd want more bandwidth too. I am ever the bandwidth pig, but even more so, for I become a digitally-driven Ansel Adams with an 8x10 view camera if you give me world enough and time.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

Surely the revolution in musical tastes, less overdetermined by playlists and rotations and scarcity and monopolies and more by choice will give us all great evolving and self-selected jukeboxes and the entire Library of Congress Library in audio books too. Great works of literature shall be our room wallpaper, as now I am listening to poetry collections from Audible. To each house a closet rack of servers, and to each house a good night! Not to mention peer-to-peer satellite-fed Net Radio from whatever house may choose to share with the peers it designates, or perhaps those peers who subscribe?

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Ooh, the bandwidth I could suck with wall-size video. I will soon run out!

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Hardly. We will have advanced home searching systems on par with Google. We will have new interfaces, new GUIs, new navigational metaphors. We will swim in VR and use the multi-layered approach of the software I saw demonstrated once called "Cloud." Oh for the infinite layering!

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson[base ']s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don[base ']t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can[base ']t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

[The Shifted Librarian] I think she means our brains will explode. Frankly, I can't wait. "Thus, if we cannot make our sun stand still, then we will make him run." Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress Miasma

a klog apart sees a future for moblogging

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 05:03:01 GMT

Where klogging meets moblogging..

How can I apply the work context to moblogging? I'm using the term as taking pictures using your mobile phone or mobile camera and posting them to a weblog with a time/date/location/permalink stamp. I guess I'm also making the 3-year leap of assuming video capture where we get snapshots today. Marc Canter comments on responding to Russell's thoughts on moblogging. I agree with everything said so far.

What makes moblogging novel?

More opportunistic. Like your mobile phone, you'll have image capture with you 24/7. Snap as opportunity strikes.
More ubiquitous. Low cost means everyone will have moblogging devices. Your workforce. Your customers. Your consultants and advisors. Your investors.
More real-time. Digital flow-through means that events are captured and published in near-realtime.
More collaborative. The ability to swarm on an important or interesting event lets you form a rashomon and blind men with elephant composite view.
More organized. The 2004 generation of moblogging gadgets will have the royal trio of ID, date/time, and location. Thumbing a few keywords for topical context feeds search engines.

Enjoy a psychotic split with me. Imagine that you work in ...

MarCom.

With mobile cams and vids you can roll your own ethnographic studies. Watch buyer behavior in real time. Correllate with sales statistics by location.

Help sales teams. Enhance your CRM profiles with photos of major account contacts, meetings, facilities.

Moblog sales and promotional events. Create immediacy, share results, and broaden event reach.

Accounting and Logistics.

Nothing compares to eyeballing where the rubber meets the road. Moblog inventory. Moblog your customer, supplier, and partner operations. When combined with RFID tags, this may be the first time you visualize your supply chain.

Due dilligence? Get more done, faster, when you assess personnel, plant, products, and other assets.

Operations Analysis and Industrial Engineering.

Document processes, the better to understand them. Photograph bottlenecks and other contraints, the better to fix them.

Record how people really work, the better to help them understand their own processes.

Competitive Analysis.

Shop the competition and share the results before you get back to the office.

You're WalMart investor relations: marshall 10,000 small investors to show the competition all across the country.

Field Operations.

A field view. Add moblogging to everyone who drives a company van to install, measure, or repair things. Let them document their routes, their visits, the problems they encounter. Makes for better watercooler conversation. Helps the next gal to visit that customer.

Education and Knowledge Sharing.

Informal moblogging can ease personnel transitions. With experience, they can enhance the role of blogs as knowledge repositories.

Project Management.

A picture is worth a thousand GANTT charts. When your projects aren't virtual, moblog your status reports.

Real world experimentation will prove or disprove these applications. I can't wait to start.

[a klog apart community]

[a klog apart]

Randomentality.com: a very fine photoblog

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 04:40:25 GMT

Gotta give a "Me, Too" here, as this is outstanding work. I like it very much and wish the web hadn't decided to hiccup on my DSL while I was going through it, or I would have gone through the entire site. Miasma What an interesting photoblog!.

I love how Kevin puts a group of related photos on his randomentality blog as one post. Each group conveys an idea, an emotion, a sensibility. Often subtle, sometimes poignant. This is thinking visually in a deep, rich, and personal way. It goes beyond iconography. And the collections, posted four or five times a month, reveal something of Kevin's inner life passage.

[a klog apart]

Note to self: Get MacBibble when I can afford that Nikon D1 or Fuji FinePix I lust after

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 05:58:25 GMT

MacBibble 3.0 gains speed, new features [MacCentral]

Nominations for Photobloggie Awards Close Jan 26, 2003

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 04:31:45 GMT

"The First PhotoBloggies" [Daypop Top 40] Who is eligible? For these awards, a "photoblog" is a webpage with dated entries that has a posts images to their site. Sites that post images infrequently are also eligible, but due to the nature of the awards, they will be at a disadvantage since there are many photo bloggers that post images on a regular if not daily basis. Only sites that post their own original images are eligible to be nominated. Only sites that have existed during the year 2002 are eligible for the awards. Any sites that have been dicontinued are also eligible, but not photoblogs that have started this year, 2003.

2600 News: photographer arrested for taking pictures of vice president's hotel

Sat, 07 Dec 2002 07:51:05 GMT

As a news photographer myself, I gotta say this is damn chilling if the anecdote is true. I copy sections here simply in the interests of spreading awareness. Miasma

"photographer arrested for taking pictures of president's hotel" [Daypop Top 40] An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing. Maginnis told his story on Wednesday's edition of Off The Hook. Maginnis's morning commute took him past the Adams Mark Hotel on Court Place. Maginnis, who says he always carried his camera wherever he went, snapped about 30 pictures of the hotel and the surrounding area - which included Denver police, Army rangers, and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who works in information technology, frequently photographs such subjects as corporate buildings and communications equipment. The following is Maginnis's account of what transpired: As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found himself confronted by a Denver police officer who demanded that he hand over his film and camera. When he refused to give up his Nikon F2, the officer pushed him to the ground and arrested him. After being brought to the District 1 police station on Decatur Street, Maginnis was made to wait alone in an interrogation room. Two hours later, a Secret Service agent arrived, who identified himself as Special Agent "Willse." The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act. The Secret Service agent tried to make Maginnis admit that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror and mayhem." When Maginnis refused to admit to being any sort of terrorist, the Secret Service agent called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty pinko faggot." After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was allowed to make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news desk. This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding cell. Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with no explanation. He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his confiscated possessions. He was told that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was being held as evidence.

PoMo Performance Art for Surveillance Cameras

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 05:48:22 GMT

So much culture-jamming to do, so little time. Hey, at least I was able to comply with "Buy Nothing Day." I had to work all day. Taking pictures of surveillance cameras would have been a cool way to spend "Buy Nothing Day." Miasma

Privacy News from Wired News - Record the Lens That Records You.
Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto associate professor of political science, wants people to grab their cameras and hit the shopping malls Dec. 24 and participate in World Sousveillance Day.

Surveillance means "to view from above." Sousveillance means "to view from below."

On the day before Christmas, at noon, local time, all over the world, Deibert wants citizens to "shoot back" at surveillance cameras -- not with guns, but with cameras of their own. Participants are to head out, in disguise, to their favorite malls and public spaces, and photograph all the security cameras they find.

Deibert warns that photographing security cameras will quickly cause large men wearing navy blue blazers and two-way radios to place their hands over your camera lens. Photographers may even be escorted off the premises.

Which is exactly the point. Deibert hopes World Sousveillance Day will "raise awareness about the increasing pervasiveness of all forms of surveillance in today's hypermedia society."

[ ... ]

Paula Kelliher, marketing director of the upscale Galleria Mall in White Plains, New York, warns that photography, especially of surveillance cameras, is not permitted on mall property.

"It's not really in the best interests of our customers," she said.
[Privacy Digest]

Phil Wolff is the guy to listen to again. I may argue, but good stuff

Tue, 19 Nov 2002 04:37:32 GMT

Information Convergence. Phil Wolff has some interesting speculations about the future of blogging in his post titled From .blog to converged client." An excerpt:

"Blogging is a form in transition.

Personally, I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later.

Watch it change:

as more people blog from their foto-mobiles
as devices start to blog ("My car's day")
as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming
as Sims characters start to blog.

Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge.

Source: evanwolf group, 2002....

We're on our way. Blogging tools are starting to interact with email and sounds. PIMs are managing contact information across multiple applications. Community and collaboration features are as critical to games as traditional gameplay.

I'm calling it: 2003-2005 will see many clients converge, weblogs among them. The challenges? Immense. The rewards? Many and rich. The fun? Deep and lasting." [a klog apart]

Lots of implications. Lots of opportunities, especially for people that specialize in organizing information. Like, say, I don't know... librarians.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Where is Kai Krause? What is he doing? And what does New Zealand have to do with it?

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 04:29:14 GMT

Like many others, I am obsessed with following the doings of Kai Krause. Waiting for more brilliance. Miasma Where is Kai Krause? What is he doing?.

He is in Byteburg, Germany. (I thought that was a made up name.)

Here is the skinny by Macuarium's Ripo (in Spanish, in Googled English):

He may be working on collaborative blogging, focusing on usability for writers.

See also the Swiss NZZ Online article (Google translates Kai Krause as "dock ruffle") for more detail.

Kai is one of my design heroes, a pioneer in direct manipulation of things on screen. Knowing Kai and friends are playing with word processing, something so fundamental and universal, makes my toes tingle with delight.

[a klog apart]

I'm getting off on this History Channel show 'The Ship'

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 07:09:01 GMT

The reviews said it was cheese and not as exciting as reality shows, but not as historical as documentaries. Well, screw them. I HATE reality shows and love documentaries, but besides that, I'd give my right arm to be one of those people on that ship having that adventure, re-enacting Capt Cook's voyage in the Endeavor around the coast of Australia. WANT TO BE THERE WANT TO BE THERE WANT TO BE THERE! The idea of having to work on a ship like that, eat the food, pull on the ropes, all of us slack-assed weenie First Worlders. This is just so bad-ass cool! I thought I'd hate it when they stopped on shore and ate real food. Thought, what cream puffs. But then watching it, the dude said, hey, we just went ashore and are foraging for food among the native population. That was good for a laugh, and I thought, yeah, I'd probably be doing the same thing right along with them. LOL. I am such a weenie ass. Miasma

While I'm Dreaming of Pie in the Sky

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 01:51:58 GMT

Hasselblad H1 & Kodak 645H sample. Photokina 2002: EXCLUSIVE: We have managed to get a sample from Kodak Pro's new DCS 645H mounted on a new Hasselblad H1 medium format camera. The sample was taken in a studio environment and measures 4072 x... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

Dreaming of Glass I Can't Own

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 01:48:06 GMT

OK, so I bad-mouth zooms and never got over not being able to afford a Nikkor 300mm 2.8 in the '80s. Now I want the big glass 400, but if I were getting zoom glass, one of these would be nice. Sigh. I don't shoot sports anymore anyway. Don't know what my problem is. A 105mm F2 like I used to use at work in Arkansas would suit for stuff I do these days. Miasma

Sigma introduce three new big zoom lenses. Photokina 2002: In addition to the huge interest surrounding the SD-9 Digital SLR Sigma has also introduced three new big zoom lenses at the Photokina show. These are the APO 80 - 400 mm F4.5 - 5.6 ES OS, APO... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

Just Watched Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 02:20:01 GMT

I just had sort of a stupid thought, and my brain is half empty, but maybe I can pull it together. I've just lately been paying more attention to films that come out of Australia and New Zealand and thinking about why I like them more than ones sanitized for the US. This is all probably pretty obvious. So hopped over to Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) and compared the covers of "Romper Stomper" and "American History X." Basically same covers. "Romper Stomper" is much grittier and more disturbing, but on the other hand, I did love "American History X." Then there is "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and "To Wang Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar." Really no comparison, an obvious knockoff. The question is, why is the knockoff watered down so much? In a class by itself is Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures." Did anyone try to knock that one off? (Hint, "Lord of the Rings" is probably the wrong answer, but maybe not) I don't have an answer here, so anyone reading, feel free to contribute. I am a zombie today. If I could figure out the answer I'd probably then know why I have this strange desire to work with writers and artists and filmmakers and media designers Down Under. Until then, I'm stuck sweating it out. Miasma <----doing the CanCanCan with Baz Luhrmann

Cellar Image of the Day

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 18:17:33 GMT

I found this image at "Cellar Image of the Day" It got it from MSNBC. 9/23/2002: The Jolly Rubino leaks "This week's MSNBC collection had this just awesome shot of: A South African chopper hovers over the Italian-flagged ferry, Jolly Rubino, as it is seen Sept. 14 stranded onshore, as oil is leaking from a crack in its left side into the waters of the Indian ocean, some 155 miles north of Durban, at Saint Lucia. The 190 meter-long ship, which has some 1,100 tons of fuel, 225 tons of gas fuel and hazardous chemicals on board, started leaking its cargo, putting the untouched World Heritage area under serious pollution threat."

Whoa! DeJa Vu to my previous post!

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 23:25:21 GMT

Today I met John Robb, and now either I am channeling him or he may be channeling me. What fun! LOL. Miasma

NYT. The difficulties in moving the music business online isn't really about copyright theft. It is mostly about business models: who gets paid when you move from a pay-per-sip system of CDs (scarcity) to a pay-per-subscription system of online downloads (abundance). The problem is that ownership of music is a convoluted mess, and everyone who has a stake wants to take the lion's share at the expense of all others.

"It's as if Franz Kafka designed this system and employed Rube Goldberg as his architect," said Rob Glaser, the chairman of MusicNet, which is part-owned by his company, RealNetworks, along with AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and the EMI Group. "It's full of tripwires."
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

McLuhan Would Be Proud: Porting Our Brains to Hardware

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 23:22:10 GMT

For as we all know, the page is an extension of the eye. The wheel, an extension of the foot...

Jon Udell mixes Kurzweil's technological predictions and the current demands of the MPAA. If by 2020 we can port our brain to hardware (or at least augment it), it's likely the MPAA will yell and screem about eyeballs and ears providing an "analog hole" that lets anyone who "sees" a movie or "listens" to a song record the experience (and potentially share it). All jests aside, this is part of the reason I find hobbling of computers so offensive. At this point, my computer is an extension of my thinking processes (it's just poorly connected). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I have this same difficulty with the IDEA of charging for ideas, ephemera. Performances, yes, I suppose, as an event. But what of the light that falls unmetered on your eyeballs? What of the sound that falls unheeded on your ears? Eye have lids to close, and I suppose copyright holders would have us close them if we choose not to pay the fee. Shall we also selectively stopper our ears to avoid a fee? But without listening, how would we know when to stop listening, and when to begin again? I think of this as a photographer who has a right to shoot whatever I see when I stand in public spaces. If I have a clear view of a ticketed-admission sporting event, may I shoot from my vantage point, say, a building overlooking Wrigley Field? Legally, I have the same rights as anyone's eyeballs upon which the same light is falling. Can I shoot through a chain link fence into a secret military installation? Some might stop me in this day and age, but light falling on eyeballs is light falling on my lens. Satellite dishes puzzle me too. I understand the decoders, but I see dishes as extensions of the ear. How does one meter the ear, when it indiscriminately catches what sounds fall on it? Ears have no lids as eyes do. The current debate about copyright takes me not just to the Sony court decision at the advent of VHS taping technology, but more so to the start of the graphical Web, with the small program Mosaic that shook the world just as Napster tried to do. Technology open and lying on the road, hidden in plain sight. FTP communities had been trading GIFs and other things since the earliest networks and BBSs. Remember when it was illegal to EXPORT Mosaic? Dangerous tech. Can the govt ban simple but dangerous tech? Mosaic messed up photographers. Not just Mosaic, but CD-ROM technology as well. No one screamed back then, but I was uneasy. I kept my stock images, hoping for future resales. And even in the early 90s, ROYALTY FREE CD-ROMs were coming out, disks bragging of thousands of images. To put out such a disk myself, with my lovingly created and sweat of my brow stock collection, I'd have thousands of hours and production material costs into it. With thousands of images on one CD, I'd be letting my best work go for less than two cents per image, with no hope of future royalties. Taking a fee so far under cost, survival would be impossible. Who can work on such economies? I saw the end of it then, and resigned to it early on. I kept my images, did not release them royalty free, even though my years of work had suddenly become worse than valueless, like fast food that depends on volume selling and sells for nearly always less than cost. Only large vendors and huge ventures could absorb such economics, not freelance photographers. Hacks, surely, could fill royalty free CDs with shit. And some of it would be studio posed crap that actually LOOKS better than a good bit of my raw and journalistic-styled early work. Only those at the very top could still play the royalty stock game, the Black Star shooters and the like. And art school shooters who could deal with the hyper-inflation of the gallery game, I suppose. The Pathetic Thing is that I can take a $9.95 royalty-free CD of stock images--MESS with the stuff in Photoshop in ways that I suppose hacks could not (darkroom work was always my forte) and do some of my best work, make some really unique and original stuff. The gall sticks in my throat to even buy that $9.95 CD. So I don't have any sympathy for Hollywood's fight against the force of interactive media. In order to enable graphical browsing, Mosaic copied graphical images to the machine with the browser, even if temporarily. That was a COPY. That was technically a violation of COPYRIGHT, just as much as Internet radio with its ephemeral playing of a song is a violation of copyright. Or digital movies, clips, and all other valuable properties that have the "entertainment industry" hyperventilating. You mean they are just noticing NOW? They could have figured it out when VHS became dominant. When Mosaic did with images what Napster does with sound. Opening the gates removes direct value from the scarcity model equation. You have to find other reasons to assess a value in something outside of the idea of creating value by hoarding and a metered gate. The economics shift. In the early 1990s recession, they called that "structural unemployment." Information economy pushes out the industrial economy. It meant as a photographer my work suddenly became extremely cheap. What do you do when your work loses its value, becomes like poetry, the thing no one will pay for, ever? When light and noise fall on eyeballs and ears. You discover the real reasons to value that work, outside of gates, gatekeepers, and scarcity models. You learn what value is. Miasma

Automakers' campaign against electric vehicles

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 04:49:19 GMT

Steal this car!. General Motors wants to take its pioneering electric automobiles off the road. But the geeks who drive them won't let go of the steering wheel. [Salon.com] [...] The EV1 drivers find themselves in the odd predicament of defending a vehicle that they don't own from a manufacturer who wants to kill it off. Seldon says of the recall: "It's a tragedy. Everyone I know who has leased it has been totally unwilling to let go of it. I'm convinced that GM didn't want the car to succeed." The EV1 driver points out that electric cars do not require the same kind of routine maintenance that combustion-engine cars and even hybrids do, like replacing mufflers, oil changes and smog checks.

Here's a link to the Toyota Rav4 EV that can still be purchased outright. Might try to think of a way to get my hands on one of these, eh? Toyota Rav4 EV, available only in California. Zero emissions. http://www.toyota.com/html/shop/vehicles/ravev/rav4ev_0_home/index.html Miasma

Superconductors RULE!

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 05:36:46 GMT

Why? Oh hell, I had a close encounter with superconductors in the '80s while working in PR for a university. We had the HIGHEST temperature superconductor in the world for exactly... two weeks. There I was, set to get my studio photos of floating ceramics over liquid nitrogen steam with red and blue gels freaking out the backdrop ON THE COVER OF "NATURE." My 15 minutes. Unfortunately, Podunk U had no security in its physics building. Nobody knows how it happened, but 2 weeks later IBM just "happened" to make a superconductor of nearly the EXACT formula of ceramic material as we had, but at a half a degree or so higher temperature, beating us out for the cover of "Nature." Sucks to be me sometimes, which is why there is such a bad smell around. Miasma ps Did I mention that Liquid Nitrogen rules too? It was more fun to play with than a busted mercury thermometer on your desk in grade school...

To Infinity and Beyond! The Physics of Superconductivity. Whilst its real-world applications are yet difficult to find, superconductivity may well prove to be one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. Herein we examine the physics behind this phenomenon, touch upon some of the applications we have developed thus far, and give some indication of the future development. Intended for the literate yet not necessarily technical audience, with no pictures or equations but plenty of links. [kuro5hin.org]

Miasma: Photography

How Censorship Works in America

World and America watching different wars: CNN vs. Al Jazeera: Seeing is often believing

Thanks Adam for finding this indelible image

I'm addicted to this Kurdistan journalist's blog

Mercola.com: Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

a klog apart sees a future for moblogging

MarCom.

Accounting and Logistics.

Operations Analysis and Industrial Engineering.

Competitive Analysis.

Field Operations.

Education and Knowledge Sharing.

Project Management.

Randomentality.com: a very fine photoblog

Note to self: Get MacBibble when I can afford that Nikon D1 or Fuji FinePix I lust after

Nominations for Photobloggie Awards Close Jan 26, 2003

2600 News: photographer arrested for taking pictures of vice president's hotel

PoMo Performance Art for Surveillance Cameras

Phil Wolff is the guy to listen to again. I may argue, but good stuff

Where is Kai Krause? What is he doing? And what does New Zealand have to do with it?

I'm getting off on this History Channel show 'The Ship'

While I'm Dreaming of Pie in the Sky

Dreaming of Glass I Can't Own

Just Watched Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper

Cellar Image of the Day

Whoa! DeJa Vu to my previous post!

McLuhan Would Be Proud: Porting Our Brains to Hardware

Automakers' campaign against electric vehicles

Superconductors RULE!