Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Friday funnies, mostly | Sep 07, 2007 10:57

I guess it was inevitable that the local media hive-mind would decide that the most proper angle on APEC would be an alleged showdown between New Zealand on one hand and the US and Australia on the other over nuclear energy. Always with the trans-Tasman spats and the falling-out with America. I'm just not sure we matter that much.

But it would be nice if someone could go the extra mile and actually look at the arguments for the adoption of nuclear generation -- in general and in New Zealand -- as a response to climate change, and survey New Zealand's energy future. My impression is that nuclear power is a viable option in larger countries which lack sustainable energy sources and have very large nuts to crack, but does not make sense here. I'm sure there are people who can discuss this with some authority.

The Royal Society of New Zealand has a swag of stuff about energy. It seems to regard nuclear as an unlikely option for New Zealand, while (surprise!) Australia's Uranium Industry Council found nuclear generation to be a "plausible" option here, and Jeanette Fitzsimons outlined the reasons her party believes it is emphatically not an option.

It would be nice to hear a debate as lively as this one hosted in Australia by the ABC recently, and perhaps some balanced information about so-called Generation 4 reactors.

Turning to the giggles, Scoop's resident satirist Lyndon Hood has excelled himself with morphin' movies of our political leaders. Very good indeed.

Meanwhile, Simon Pound, of 95bFM's Sunday Breakfast with Simon Pound, reckons everyone got the wrong end of the stick with the Mike Moore-Jim Anderton battle:

The only way to really understand the Anderton/Moore fight is in the context of an 'MC Battle'. Seriously, with less swearing and even more arrogant bravado, that is what this is - - just check Moore's lines:

(set to MAD BASS)

There may be some truth in that,
But I'm not bored, as spun
I'm not writing because I'm bored,
I write because I can.
My columns are carried in six countries.
My last book was published in several languages and is in its third edition.
I've written more books than Anderton's read.

Booya! Take that, MC Anderton.

Or the simple character attacks that make the best battle songs:

Not many know that Norm Kirk kicked him out of the party when he was right-wing, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and with Roger Douglas, wanted to remove the unions from the party. Then he left again as a left-winger. I didn't support Jim when he was far right or far left.

On a personal note I did love one stanza:

"Another line is it's because I didn't get a Government job; I always knew I didn't have as much to offer New Zealand as Jonathan Hunt or Graham Kelly. I expect and want nothing."

Jay-Z would be proud.

Mad props to anyone who can make that tune.

Cool old Hot Chip remixes of Kraftwerk while you wait for the cool new Hot Chip remixes of Kraftwerk.

But it's time for another giveaway -- the biggest one we've ever offered, actually. And it's only available to readers in Auckland.

That's because the initial prize was a couple of tickets to the Home Show in Auckland next week, courtesy Microsoft, which has its Microsoft Digital Home set up at the show. (If you visit the show stand, you can go in a draw to win a weekend stay in the ultimate Digital Suite at the Westin Hotel, Auckland, in a "connected entertainment suite".)

But we kept lathering it on, and the prize is now, two tickets to the Home Show, a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and OneCare. That's more than $2000 worth.

All you have to do to be in is click the "Reply" button below and send an email with the subject line "Blag" by the end of the day, and be resident in Auckland (look, everyone else, we'll sort you out at some future point, okay?). Thereafter, an incorruptible autistic child will draw a winner and I'll be in contact by email with the lucky punter.

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Geeky Thursday again | Sep 06, 2007 09:14

At the Great Blend on Saturday night, Nat Torkington mentioned a social radio device being developed for the BBC. Well, here it is. It's called Olinda.

Olinda is a DAB (digital audio broadcasting) hardware prototype. The key concepts are outlined thus:

Radios can look better than the regular 'kitchen radio' devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we're using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step.

This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social 'now listening' site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme.

If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.

And just to round off the geek goodness, the hardware design will be made available on a Creative Commons-like attribution licence. Anyone can use it, so long as they note the BBC attribution and copyright somewhere in the device. Also: unlike some other fine BBC research ideas, it is being developed so not to spend two years at the committee stage before it's allowed to ship.

Mr Brown, safe home in Singapore, sent us the link to this rant from Fake Steve Jobs, in which he pronounces the doom of the TV corporates:

The producers of content don't like the TV network system but can't quite see the way across the divide into my digital world. Some musical artists, like Prince, are figuring it out, but they're isolated examples. Trust me, however, when I tell you that TV and movie people will figure it out too. These are not stupid people. And they are not un-greedy. Which means their desire for more money and more control and more freedom will lead them to apply their energy into figuring out how to get out of the plantation the TV networks have created for them. They will break free. Mark my words.

The talented ones will go first. Bad news for you, TV networks. You'll be stuck with the shittiest creators, the timid ones who don't dare cross the chasm. Your shows will get worse and worse. Your sitcoms will grow lamer, if that's possible. Your reality shows will grow stupider.

What's left? You've already gutted your news divisions, which was a truly moronic move since that was the only place where you really could continue to add value. Your news shows will continue to devolve into not-really-news Fox-style argument shows where retarded bullies like Bill O'Reilly come on the air and shout at people because some gangsta rapper has a deal with Pepsi, or argue with straw men about whether we should put more troops into Iraq. Where once we had Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, we'll instead have John Gibson and Sean Hannity ranting about patriotism and calling people names. All heat, no light. Well done, TV networks. When you finally die, the world will celebrate. Because you'll deserve it. Totally.

Phew.

And, of course, the real Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPods: most notably, iPod Touch (an iPhone without the phone part, but with WiFi, web-browsing and wireless music purchase) and an iPod Nano with video. Mmmmmm twice.

The most interesting part of the iPod Touch launch is Apple's deal with Starbucks. You'll walk into a Starbucks (in a couple of US cities, initially) and your iPod will not only connect to the free in-house WiFi, it will show you what song is playing in the café at the time. You like, you poke your finger at the interface, and you buy and download right there. Leaving aside the fairly obvious drawback here -- having to set foot in a Starbucks -- it's a fairly striking example of the way that commercial radio is becoming irrelevant as a music discovery platform.

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Fabrication and humanity | Sep 05, 2007 09:52

Between David Cunliffe's statements on the radio yesterday and John Armstrong's column in this morning's Herald, it wasn't difficult to find the more recent Refugee Status Appeals Authority decision on the case of Ali Panah.

I'm not sure if I should link to it, but you may take my word that it is not positive. The authority found that the evidence he brought to his second claim was fabricated and that there was no credible evidence that circumstances had changed so as to put him at risk in Iran. As Armstrong notes, his evidence in his 2004 claim was rejected in its entirety. I am not leaving out any finding in his favour: there was none. The authority essentially regarded his evidence on two separate occasions as a pack of lies.

Sentiment informs me that someone who is so desperate to live here as to try and starve himself to death could be welcomed. But the idea that Panah has not received due process is unsupportable, and his supporters' claims yesterday that there were only "relatively minor and explainable discrepancies" in the two cases made by Panah are frankly ridiculous.

I do admire the Anglican Church's decision to offer Panah shelter and support. It's striking the way that conservative Christians go missing in these cases: it's always the middle-of-the-roaders who do what Jesus would have done.

But we have a process: the same process that found Ahmed Zaoui's claim to be genuine. Apart from a ministerial decision on humanitarian grounds that would render the entire appeals process moot, it's hard to divine a basis for allowing him to stay in New Zealand. Armstrong concludes:

Mr Panah's supporters are already trying to shift the debate away from how he manipulated himself into his current predicament to whether, as a convert to Christianity, he will be safe if he is sent home.

Unless Mr Cunliffe can find a third country option, that will be a more difficult argument for the Immigration Minister to win as he can never totally guarantee something will not happen to Mr Panah. In that respect for the Government - and only in that respect - the Panah case could yet be Zaoui revisited.

Actually, I'm more put in mind of the case of the Sri Lankan girl, save that there are no politics to cloud the issue (which would presumably explain the absence of Judith Collins).

Meanwhile, Sydney goes into lockdown for the visit of an American president.

The Herald Sun's Securing the President story is interesting:

Further aircraft may follow Mr Bush with other support staff and military hardware to protect the president.

Foreign leaders are required to seek permission for their security staff to carry weapons in Australia but regardless of what permission is given, security experts say it is common for the leaders' guards to be armed.

Mr Bush will inevitably travel in convoy in a blast-proof, heavily armoured vehicle surrounded by other blast-proof, heavily armoured vehicles.

The delegations from the US, Russia and China are claiming sovereign immunity, meaning that quarantine staff will not be able to inspect their aircraft, while Helen Clark is one of five visiting leaders who will arrive on a normal commercial flight.

The SMH's news blog on the APEC shutdown has pages of comments from Sydneysiders, with quite a few demanding to know why the APEC meeting has not instead been inflicted on Canberra, which was, after all, created for this sort of thing.

Will the protestors be annoying? Probably. Some of the people who jammed Melbourne during the World Economic Forum meeting in 2000 were spectacularly arrogant, and the spokesman for the Stop Bush coalition was particularly irritating in his turn on Morning Report today.

But those are not reasons to halt lawful protest, and the police's attempt to have the right to such protest withdrawn by a court (yes, alright, the right to protest is not at stake; merely the right to protest anywhere near the people the protestors wish to address) is a bit creepy.

The self-described radical left has been planning for this since May. I hope no one does anything silly, even under provocation. It would be ironic if the protestors' eventual achievement was to help legitimise John Howard.

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Not Okay | Sep 04, 2007 10:42

The campaign against family violence that I'm part of launches at Parliament today. It's going to be quite odd turning on the TV and seeing myself eyeballing the camera and saying that it's "not okay", but I hope the campaign -- in which the likes of Sir Paul Reeves, Boh Runga, Ali Mau, Phil Gifford and Reuben Wiki appear -- has an impact. I do think there's a virtue in having real people deliver the message.

The risk, as a Herald story notes this morning, is that the campaign will be very effective, swamping relevant agencies with referrals. I hope the clear, basic message doesn't get lost in politics: that there are no excuses for family violence, and that it is okay to ask for help.

I see the Herald is still gamely encouraging us to take Mike Moore's columns seriously. I'm sure John Armstrong actually has better things to do with his time, but he has dutifully written up Moore's latest work:

Mike Moore has fired a further broadside at Labour's hierarchy, accusing his critics of "Orwellian doublespeak" and "Nixonian paranoia" and denying he has become a traitor to the party he once led.

Of course, when you actually read the column it's even more random than the first one:

The attacks were Orwellian in their doublespeak, and Nixonian in their dark paranoia. One line spun that is about promoting Phil Goff, who I also sprayed in the article, was pure Nixon. I haven't spoken to Phil in a year. Unfortunately. Documents have come to me instructing familiar names to ring talkbacks and write letters to the editors.

I think Moore sees himself as the after-dinner raconteur, when he's actually more like the embarrassing uncle at the wedding.

If you haven't already seen it, here's the imagery for John Ballinger's iPhone hack. It only took him six hours to render his iPhone capable of connecting via Vodafone. Meanwhile, new iPods coming, including a multi-touch model.

ScienceBlogs notes a dubious record from this year's Atlantic hurricane season. Only three other years have registered more than one Category 5 storm. And this is the first season where the first two storms to reach hurricane strength have gone on to hit Category 5. The second hurricane, Felix, also holds the record for shortest time for an Atlantic storm to intensify to Category 5 strength. See the watch Felix grow movie.

This is gorgeous: a cover of Primal Scream's 'Higher than the Sun' by Bat for Lashes, Fionn Regan and Maps, as part of a BBC radio session: both MP3 and YouTube clips.

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Done and Blended | Sep 03, 2007 11:47

If I say so myself, I am quite a good judge of talent. And I'm so glad I went with my hunch and did what we had to do to keep Mr Brown in the country long enough to have him appear at last week's Great Blend events.

He was probably a bit better in Wellington, where he was standing at floor level and closer to the crowd, but I think everyone who heard him got the point of Mr Brown. He has harnessed the personal power of the internet, stuck his head above the parapets and declared: "I am Singaporean -- but in my way, not in the way you tell me I have to be."

I think that in the long run, he'll be considered a cultural hero there.

We got better use out of Dr William Cooper in Auckland than in Wellington, where the panel format -- not aided by AV problems -- was a bit lumpy. I knocked off a 30-minute onstage interview with him in Auckland, before he had to catch his plane, and I'll hopefully have that for you as part of this weekend's Public Address Radio.

We largely covered the themes of last week's New Futures conference: rights issues; the internet and TV merging in various ways and where the money is going to come from.

Interestingly, although Vodafone's revelation at the conference that it has launched an "adult" channel in Vodafone Live made headlines last week, everyone seems to have missed TV3 programe director Kelly Martin's comment at the same event that Media Works also isn't ruling out an adult channel as one of its Freeview offerings.

Also of interest: last week, Steve Maharey introduced a proposed change to the Broadcasting Act that would allow NZ ON Air to fund content apart from broadcast programmes -- ie: mobile or internet stuff -- as a "secondary" activity. My guess is that that will mostly mean funding cross-platform features for certain programmes.

Oh, and another story that hasn't made headlines: the Beehive website was hacked a couple of weeks ago. For about five hours in the middle of the night, it was displaying the infamous goatse image as a trophy. A screenshot exists, but don't expect to see it.

Anyway, back to the Blend: My head's still spinning from the music I got to hear on Saturday night. The crucial Warriors game thinned out the crowd a bit for the L.E.D.s, but everyone who stayed got to hear a great band. Their onstage line-up is bass, drums and two vintage Korg synthesisers. Afterwards, I asked Blair from the L.E.D.s why I kept hearing guitars on their album and he told me that there are guitars on the album, just not on stage. Ah.

Afterwards, a bunch of us walked over to the PR Bar on Ponsonby Road for what turned out to be a very special evening. Bill Direen was playing a gig with a pick-up band in a lounge-sized room at the bar. It was magnificent.

Bill's songs are carefully-plotted and literary, but he moves almost instinctively within them; they're alive to possibility. And he took requests. "Play 'Red Sky'!" I yelped from the back. They played 'Red Sky'. They played 'Wanganui with a White Face', 'Inquest', 'Bedrock Bay' and 'Moderation' (more than once, I think). I've had an extraordinarily demanding past three weeks, with a bit of ill-health to complicate things in the middle, and I was in the mood to relax. Yes, I was a bit drunk, but I was very, very happy.

APN's Gordon White had a wee bit about the Wellington Blend on his new person blog site, and Jarrod and Jo also had coverage and Don Christie and Robyn Gallagher had nice things to say.

Thanks so much to everyone who appeared, helped or just came along. I think I'll have a rest now …

Meanwhile, is this the cleverest way ever to give a nudge to a name suppression order?

And why is someone betting billions of dollars on world stock markets tanking just before September 21? Is that when the US bombs Iran? Is there another terrorist attack looming? Or is this just a random manifestation of market chaos?

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