Alex Bowyer // A British thirtysomething living in Montréal, Canada, with interests in people & society, technology, science fiction, films, travel and getting the best out of life.
Can also be found blogging at alexbowyer.blogspot.com and tweeting as @alexbfree.
Almost every piece of TV, movie, news or documentary footage you see has been edited to try and make a particular point. This video illustrates quite convincingly the power of editing and why you should hesitate to form judgements unless you're watching live unedited footage.
Here is a video of how technology that many people have in their home can be used in ways not intended by the manufacturer. This is interesting, but even more interesting is the wider trend this represents, as Johnny Lee describes - how the Internet and new media formats such as YouTube for video distribution can quickly spread ideas to thousands of people. Not just for persuasive purposes, but to do real good, allowing any teacher or parent to create their own interactive whiteboard using a Wii remote and some cheap hardware. Scientists are already starting to talk about how they can rethink the way research is done for this information-rich, hyper-connected age we live in. It's really exciting that scientists might finally have a way to directly explain their work to the public without having to go through journalists who don't always understand the science, or who are encouraged to take the most sensational angle.
Exciting times are ahead, I'm sure ...
A great visualization of global media scare stories over time - Swine Flu is measurably bigger than previous hyped stories.
Back before we left the UK, Mrs Alex and I (ok she did most of the work) digitized all our CDs and DVDs not to mention paperwork, recipes and all sorts of other documents to reduce the amount we had to take with us to Canada. Given we've also been living here in Canada without a TV for the last six months, we have accumulated plenty more downloaded movies & TV shows. We brought about 8 hard drives with us to Canada and our FreeNAS install media, and after 2 case upgrades, 2 additional green 1 Terabyte hard drives, 2 new 4 port PCI SATA cards and a beefier PSU, not to mention much consolidation of data from smaller, older IDE drives, I am pleased to announce our behemoth of a fileserver is alive.. Just short of 6 Terabytes of storage for our viewing and data storage pleasure! Hurrah! Now to get my Popcorn Hour media player which Alex bought me for my birthday working.. and then it's HD projector time (which is handy as we have just painted the walls in the lounge of our new apartment white which is just the right colour for projecting onto)...
I caught this very interesting interview with former PM John Major talking about how the state of the UK public debt is so much worse than we realise, and about the problems that the next government - whichever party it might be - will face. Government will have to raise taxes or cut spending, he says. He even proposes that government itself should be downsized, and mentions a very interesting idea to ensure that politicians are more in touch with "real life". They also discuss the problems of the loss of trust in Parliament as a whole following the expenses scandal.
I don't support Labour or Conservative myself, but I can't help but see parallels between the media criticism of John Major that led to his downfall and the similar media attacks on Gordon Brown of late. Gordon Brown strikes me as a shrewd economist who somewhat has his hands tied by public and media pressure. I hope he doesn't suffer the same fate John Major did, and I would like to think the British public could let people like Major and Brown do their job on their own merits. Sadly, with the media being as anti-establishment and influential to public opinion as it is, I'm not sure that can happen.
This YouTube version is viewable anywhere but stops before the end. For UK viewers the full interview is on iPlayer [43:00 minutes in]
This is a photo of the screen in Times Square showing the news report saying "People are gathering in Times Square and watching the big screen for the news of Michael Jackson's death". A very bizarre meta moment.
