Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Fun while the banking system collapses | Sep 19, 2008 11:30

I was going to upload that "How the Subprime Crisis Really Works' Powerpoint file that's been viralling around, but someone's done the helpful thing and stuck it up on Google Docs so it can be viewed in a browser. It does contain strong language, but maybe strong language is required in times such as these.

Vodafone finally got its DRM-free MP3 downloads up -- well, $1.99 singles anyway, with $17.99 albums apparently to follow soon. I downloaded Dub Asylum's 'Smash Through' (LAME-encoded 256k MP3, no cover art) and Bloc Party's Mercury (256k MP3, cover art). I might even spring for duplicate downloads from iTunes to make the MP3-AAC comparison. The only way to pay for the downloads is to have a Vodafone account, but it's very slick if you do.

But hey! Amplifier has Dub Asylum's extremely choice cut of funk, 'My Sneaker Collection Weighs a Ton' as a free download this week. And it's a 320k MP3 with cover art. Go get!

Meanwhile, you don't seem to be able to buy it anywhere, so here's the MP3 of that Soulwax mix of MGMT's 'Kids'. If defines Big, Dumb Fun. Acrtic Monkey's Amy Winehouse cover doesn't actually suck either.

New Jenny Lewis album, Acid Tongue, out next week -- it's produced by Elvis Costello. There's a promo clip of the title track, and another one of her playing it live in LA last week. I love it already.

Peter Cox, the writer/creator of The Pretender, alerts us to the website of Future New Zealand, the party of the series' leader character, Dennis Plant. The new series launches (just in time for the real election campaign) at 10pm on Sunday evening on TV One, and new video will be added to the website as it goes along.

And because we need more videos of cats, Leo recommends Ninja cat comes closer while not moving, which is awesome.

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Oh, and I finally got around to working out the winners of our Stories" the Internet prizes. They are as follows:

Givanni Tiso for a nice account of how the net conquers the tyranny of distance.

Danielle on meeting The One on the Elvis Costello listserv.

Kyle Matthews for a story of an internet liaison that didn't go so well.

PaulM for a story of medical empowerment.

Nic Wise for an account (one of several) of the old days at Iconz.

Please contact me with your details, folks, and I'll arrange for you to be sent a kilo of Eden Coffee (please specify: beans, medium or espresso grind) and a copy of Keith Newman's New Zealand internet history, Connecting the Clouds. And the top prize -- a Nokia 6121 phone suitable for using on Vodafone's dollar-a-day mobile internet service -- goes to PaulM. Get in touch …

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The TVNZ 7 Internet Debate | Sep 18, 2008 10:02

You may have noticed that I'm participating in the TVNZ 7 Internet debate, which will air (and stream) live from Avalon next Tuesday evening from 9pm in association with Internet NZ. The first hour will be on TV and then it'll carry on online-only.

David Cunliffe, Maurice Williamson, Metiria Turei and Rodney Hide will debate internet-related issues under four broad headings -- Broadband, Convergence, Copyright, Cybersafety and "Digital Divide" -- and Sean Plunket will moderate. Fran O'Sullivan and I will ask questions and pass on live questions from viewers. There'lll also be a studio audience asking questions, a live IRC channel, questions submitted via Skype and online polls. Yes, it does sound complex.

Naturally, I'm interested in what correspondents to the country's cleverest discussion forums think, so feel free to post questions or outline themes you'd like to see discussed. You can pop over to the website for the programme for a few leads.

Meanwhile, the Media7 show on the sometimes uneasy relationship between journalism and academe is online now at TVNZ on demand. The Windows media clips are here, the podcast here here, and there'll be some YouTube action here soon.

The panel is Jim Tucker, the convenor of the mildly controversial media-and-diversity forum bankrolled by the Ministry of Social Development (we kick off with Simon Pound's report on the foum); David Cohen (who was also at the forum); and former editor of the Independent Jenni McManus, who is as forthright as ever. We cover, among other things, the frequently-expressed concerns of Karl du Fresne about People Who Pontiificate.

Jim covered events at the forum in his blog.

Karl du Fresne, who was a late addition to the panel, declared himself happy enough with the forum.

Some valid points were made, particularly in regard to the flawed Asian Angst story (the complaints about which were upheld by the Press Council). I squirmed at the brutal mauling Coddington got from people who were plainly unaware that she was present. She later stood up, identified herself and defended her story with commendable grace and dignity, and was given a fair hearing.

As best as I can recall (because I wasn't speaking from notes), I made the point that while Coddington's critics pounced on a fatal failing in her story relating to statistics, that didn't mean the subject itself should have been considered off-limits.

Of course not. And Keith Ng said so on Day One of the whole business:

I don't really buy into the idea that either N&S or Coddington are deliberately racist, or even that their motives were purely cynical and commercial (I suspect it was an important driver, though). I think that they wanted to ask whether Asian crime was a problem in New Zealand, and that the police concerns were a legitimate starting point … In a sense, I think they missed their own point. It could have been a legitimate story.

But perhaps we can now move on from a story published in 2006 and thoroughly examined since. I do actually think Deborah Coddington showed some guts turning up at the forum and giving an account of herself, and I'm inclined to contrast that with the invisibility of the editor who commissioned the story and wrote that cover line.

Meanwhile, Karl himself is back to moaning about Kim Hill, in this case for the crime of not having Bob McCoskrie or Garth McVicar on her show. Yes, of course, Because we never hear their voices in the media, do we?

I personally can't think of anything that would destroy the appeal of Kim Hill's show so much as it becoming an extension of the weekday rent-a-quote drone, and du Fresne's attempt to frame every programming choice in terms of the alleged political orientation of individual guests -- rather than whether they've written a good book, done some interesting research or can tell a joke -- is strained to the point where it seems reasonable to ask if he has a chip on his shoulder. In discussing an interview with Tony Simpson he maintains that:

Hill and Simpson circulate in the same arty/literary/media/academic/political milieu. They probably bump into each other at film festivals, book launches and exhibition openings. Wellington is, after all, an intimate little village, and the same people tend to pop up repeatedly on the book launch/film festival/exhibition circuit.

I would guess that Hill and Simpson are pretty comfortable with each other's views. So the atmosphere in the studio on Saturday sounded cosy, as it invariably is when Hill interviews people she approves of.

Preliminary questions about Simpson's childhood prompted the disclosure that he came from a working-class background, which made me wonder whether Hill's guests now consider this mandatory as a means of asserting their political credentials. Another of her recent guests, a writer whose name I forget, managed to squeeze in three or four references to his supposed working-class origins

Well, the Leader of the Opposition has been fond of the same thing, hasn't he? Whatever … I can't even be bothered conducting an ideological sniff-test on the last few weeks' Saturday morning rosters, because it just plays into the same old thing. It sometimes seems to me that (especially in his tub-thumping about the hopeless Clydesdale paper) that Karl is happy to champion mediocrity if it suits his purpose. But perhaps that's just me.

Any, folks, I digress. Hit me with some Internet Debate goodies.

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Telling Stories for Change | Sep 17, 2008 11:15

I was a little nervous ahead of my presentation to the Autism New Zealand conference on Saturday. I wasn't sure who the audience would be or what they'd want, and it took me a couple of days to nut out a speech based around video clips, including some from an interview with my son that we shot the week before.

In the end, it went pretty, and I think people appreciated seeing and hearing something different and direct. Ironically, where it nearly went off the rails was when I talked about Finn Higgins and rendered myself gulping and speechless with emotion.

Like most of us who enjoyed his writing here, I never met Finn in person, but on the basis of our short correspondence, I saw him as an example of what my own son could become; much as Finn recognised parallels between his own life and what I'd written about our struggle with the education system on Leo's behalf. The sadness of what happened to Finn, and the way he was let down by the system, hit me hard as I stood up there, because it felt personal.

I had been drawing the audience's attention to a small stack of A4 sheets in an adjacent room, entitled 'Finn's Story'. It is the work of Finn's mother, Dianne Standen, and it is important.

With Dianne's permission, I've published a slightly edited version of Finn's Story on the Humans blog. I'll follow that with Dianne's own story in a couple of days.

The conference was attended by specialists, educators, carers, parents, and of course people on the spectrum themselves (including the lovely Matt Frost of CSS Disability Action, who can come back and post on Humans any time he likes). I sensed that some people were carrying a heavy load. On the other hand, there was often humour: part of talking about autism is the in-joke.

I met Rachel Eady, whose battle to provide loving care for her brother Jonathan was covered in a fine story by Chris Barton in the Herald earlier this year. She had set up a small display with pictures and information about her brother, as the same table where Finn's Story was placed. It looks like she's not far off being officially granted care of her brother, but it remains a scandal that it's been too hard.

Our understanding of ASD conditions has advanced hugely in the past 15 years; unfortunately, the system is still catching up. It's by telling these stories that we make that happen.

PS: I finally worked out what do to with the Wordpress Visual Editor, which has seemed to make posting to Humans inordinately difficult -- turn the bloody thing off. Couldn't someone have told me that sooner?

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Crash and Contempt | Sep 16, 2008 10:55

The yardstick that brought home to me the magnitude of the Lehman Brothers collapse was actually contained in the August Vanity Fair story about the failure of another investment bank, Bear Stearns. In Bryan Burrough's story, Lehman is the potential suitor or saviour, the prim, prudent counterpart to the wild Bear.

Even a couple of months ago, it was unthinkable that Lehman Brothers could follow Bear down the gurgler. Now, it seems that nothing is so unthinkable, the Fed has no more money for bailouts -- and the markets are behaving accordingly.

Ours included.

In a post headed Ron Paul was Right, Andrew Sullivan says:

What we are dealing with in detail I am not professionally qualified to discuss (I'm not Sarah Palin, I know my limits.) But what we are dealing with in the grand scheme of things seems pretty simple. The US has been living beyond its means. The US has been spending and borrowing as if its economy were fiscally secure; and the demand for more and more from below combined with signals of total laxity from the top has led to a massive over-reach in terms of personal and public debt. In the end, gravity and reality count, whatever the Bush-Cheney propagandists want to insist.

Like the invasion of Iraq, for which the US is still paying; like the massive Bush tax cuts, which were never matched by cuts in spending but combined with massive increases in spending; the home-ownership-as-speculation bubble eventually hit the reality this country's leadership has for so long denied.

Or, as one of our readers put it overnight:

Conservatives rejoice in their idiotic cultural politics while the institutions that comprise American power are diminished and eclipsed.

I'm down the with Sullivan-Ranapia doctrine. Could these people get over their culture war and their novelty VP candidate and start acting like old-fashioned conservatives? Their chump champions have been wandering in the wilderness for eight years and the world is a bit scared.

Meanwhile, there were interesting statements as Fairfax Media and Dom Post editor Tim Pankhurst faced contempt charges over the reporting of the contents of the affidavit that police presented in order to gain the search warrants used in last year's "terror raids". We could already strongly suppose that the copy of the affidavit leaked online in November came from one of the accused, Jamie Lockett. And yesterday the solicitor-general all but declared that Lockett was the source of the copies received by the Dom Post, its reporter Phil Kitchin, TV3 and the herald on Sunday.

I think this needs reiterating: the document was not leaked by police, but given to the news media by one of the defendants.

This speaks to the way that the more conventional activist types caught up in the police investigation almost immediately began distancing themselves from Lockett: he was hard to line up with the high-minded image of themselves the others were looking to project.

I understand that these people all have a right to a fair trial, and that right was clearly endangered by the publication of evidence that would be inadmissible in the arms charges they have wound up facing. But the defendants and their supporters were also making extraordinary claims on their own behalf, and with no evidence to be publicly presented until next year (a judge this month suppressed all reporting of depositions hearings) the issue of the public's right to know is not inconsequential, especially in a case which will straddle an election in which several parties have taken strong positions on the matter.

If Pankhurst and his employer are not successful in their defence, it would worry me if the court were to apply a very harsh penalty.

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We also predicted the election date ... | Sep 15, 2008 12:18

As you read here last week, Vodafone New Zealand has today launched MusicStation, the music subscription service debuted last year by Vodafone UK.

The platform was created by a company called Omnifone. I've tried the service, and it works. It works better if you have decent 3G coverage, but once you have actually downloaded all you can eat from a very large catalogue, you keep and play that music for as long as you pay the subscription.

Folks used to such niceties as cover art and high bitrates might find it a little wanting, but I'm not sure if the target market cares all that much about those things, and MusicStation does have inbuilt social features -- so you can share playlists with friends, and tastemakers (the group Primal Scream has a nice playlist up at the moment) can also provide music discovery cues.

There are two major differences between the local implementation of MusicStation and the British one. The first is that the local service is significantly cheaper: $2.50 a week versus £1.99. The second -- and this is good -- is that it's accompanied at launch by a separate service selling 256kbit/s DRM-free MP3 downloads that you can keep, and play on your iPod. As far as I can tell, this is is a first for Vodafone anywhere.

Those cost the current market rate: $1.99 per single track, or $17.99 per album. Unfortunately, the Vodafone Music site where they'll be sold is advising us to please check back tomorrow.

I've been in Christchurch all weekend at the Autism New Zealand conference, and I'll write about that tomorrow, but for now (like you needed it) the headline of the new New York Times profile on Sarah Palin -- Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes -- underlines what anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty should acknowledge: John McCain's running mate has cheerily abused pretty much every little bit of power she's ever had:

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials …

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

She's a vindictive nutjob and a liar who has relentlessly pursued personal vendettas through official office.

On a happier note, I enjoyed a crystalline day in Christchurch yesterday, strolling around the Botanical Gardens, visiting the art gallery -- I intended to just check in on 'As there is a constant flow a light', a painting that almost makes me tremble when I stand close to it, but got the wonderful bonus of Daniel Crooks' video installations, which brilliantly explore time and space -- having a beer out at Sumner and catching up with schoolfriends I haven't seen in many years. (None of them can remember John Key either.)

I also bonded with strangers in pubs over football this past weekend. I watched the brilliant test match between the All Blacks and the Wallabies on the big screen at Sullivan's in the Christchurch CBD (I was afterwards reminded that the Christchurch CBD is a far more unnerving place than, say, K Road at night -- or any time, really) and there was just enough time to watch the Warriors snatch a staggering NRL finals win over the Storm, before rushing onto the flight home last night. In the end, sport matters less than many other things, but when it's like that -- gee, it's fun …

PS: This week's Media7 looks at the sometimes uneasy relationship between journalists and the organisations that train journalists, and includes Simon Pound's report on the media-and-diversity talking shop organised by the Ministry of Social Development, where the journalists had to invite themselves. The panel is Jim Tucker, David Cohen and Jenni McManus. If you'd like to come along to The Classic tomorrow evening, hit reply and drop me an email to say so.

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