SacredFacts

links for 2007-09-29

• Comment is free: Get a life, Ally (Andrew Gilligan)
  AG on Campbell 4 years on. The comments reveal how deep the confusion is about what happened how and when
  (tags: gilligan Hutton Kelly Campbell)

Maggoty Apple?

"Once a business has to fight its own customers and users, something has gone horribly wrong. Just look at the music industry…"

Adriana Lukas on the modified iphone. Must be right.

Burma

The death of Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai - apparently shot at point blank range in Burma - illustrates two things. The continuing risks to journalists carrying out their work and the continuing growth in the importance of "user content" or citizen journalism. His death was caught on camera and smuggled out.

The Burma crisis must rank as the biggest international story yet for UGC - it's the primary means of knowing what's happening - or has been until the latest block on internet access. Here's Global Voices , the BBC's accounts from inside the country and the BBC Burmese service site, videos on YouTube, and the Wall St Journal on the issue.

Education 2.0

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, made a really good point at the Clinton Global Initiative:

He said the current education system of grades and exams puts people in competition with each other and is a top down command-and-control model. As the leader of one of the world's biggest IT companies he believes future education should concentrate on networking and collaboration - which will support greater innovation and cross-discipline creativity. It will also, he said, attract talent. Call it Education 2.0 then...

Groundport....

The delays at JFK airport in New York - one of the World's busiest - are now close to impossible. Unsurprisingly there are moves to limit flights there. Landing a week ago, we waited TWO HOURS on the ground between touching down and finding a spare gate to disembark. Leaving yesterday, there was more than an hour between pushback from the gate and take off. At one point the pilot announced "Good news we're now 20th in line - should be no more than 30 minutes or so". And this was midnight - hardly peak hours.

links for 2007-09-28

• Equality 'threatened by climate'
  David Miliband in first speech to UN
  (tags: miliband UN climate change)
• Newsnight, Government and Audience Clarify and Debate it Online
  (tags: web2.0 newsnight bbc participation)
• African mobile journalism project launches
  omplete packages, video footage and stills captured by the reporters on their mobiles will then be sold on to agencies, television stations, and newspapers to help finance the scheme. (HT Cybersoc)
  (tags: africa digital journalism)

Factoids

Being in New York in UN Week (when the General Assembly gathers) you pick up some interesting but random "facts". Not sure what to do with them, and can't guarantee am not guaranteeing their accuracy, but they're interesting nonetheless. Like:

- The number of people suffering from Alzheimers in the world will increase five fold by 2020. The last 15 year prediction greatly underestimated the increase.

- In 2003 there were no mobile phones in Afghanistan. Now there are six different services and 3 million subscribers.

- If the US, Russia, India and China were as efficient as Japan in terms of carbon emissions global greenhouse gases would be cut by 20%.

- The markets allocate more capital in one hour than all governments combined in a year.

- At current trends the entire polar ice-cap will have disappeared in 23 years.

- China's per capita GDP places it below the 100th country in the world. (Which I guess is another way of illustrating potential growth)

- A new coal powered energy plant opens every three days. In 20 years we will have produced more CO2 than during all previous human use of coal.

PS: And a great quote from Desmond Tutu: "Religion is like a knife. If you use it to cut bread it's good. If you use it to cut your neighbours arm off it's bad."

links for 2007-09-26

• The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy - Wikipedia,
  Book summary
  (tags: Israel USA)

Movies and the real world

I havn't read The Kite Runner in spite of multiple recommendations. But I did get invited to the movie premiere tonight. It's a compelling story of betrayal and redemption which stays with you. The film is beautifully shot - much of it in China masquerading as Afghanistan - but has an authentic feel to it. I hope it succeeds. My neighbour at the screening however was uncomfortable at how much of the recent history of failed states and world crises is being told through fiction. The Last King of Scotland being another recent and successful example among several. It seems to me as long as they are true to history and authentic in their representation using narrative to engage an audience in events they might otherwise ignore can only be a good thing.

A Tale of Two Cities

Both of them, New York. I woke here this morning to find the Daily News feeding an anti-Iran campaign with lurid headlines. Ahmadinejad arrived here last night to speak at the UN and at Columbia University.
The Dean at Columbia explained the invitation as an example of Free Speech and academic freedom adding that he would have invited Hitler to speak at the University if it had been possible. Freedom of speech is the right principle, but his clumsy example poured petrol on the fire and the New York tabloids exploded in his face. As a result, when Ahmadinejad arrived at Columbia, the University President felt obliged to introduce him with an uncompromsing attack - which apparently took the Iranian President by surprise.

Meanwhile, across town in the swanky Metropolitan Club, the publisher of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, was one of the delegates at the Global Creative Leadership Summit - a gathering of the great and good looking for creative solutions to the world's problems. The Daily News approach didn't figure prominently. Instead there was earnest debate about building bridges, understanding each others values, and the need for moderation not extremism. And along the river the UN General Assembly got underway with President Bush one of the first speakers - interpreted as a sign he increasingly recognises the UN has a role to play.