Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Our associate Vince Giuliano had some words of wisdom last week for the Innovation International Media Consulting Group and its audience in Cambridge, Mass. at the “WHAT'S NEXT: THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE” conference.
Vince's PowerPoint presentation (no audio) deals with basic trends likely to have profound affects on our lives over the coming 10 years – and key implications of these trends for newspaper companies. You can find it in HTML format on the new Electronic Publishing Group website www.epublishinggroup.com
This in from the Houston Chronicle via GIS Development online mag: “FEMA's official flood maps called obsolete
“As part of its management of the National Flood Insurance Program, FEMA maintains more than 90,000 maps to show areas where flood insurance is advisable and where construction would be risky. However, new developments in flood zones have generally rendered the maps inaccurate and obsolete. Faulty maps have a major impact on people and property owners. Local communities rely on these maps to help them limit construction within flood zones and to determine who can buy federal flood insurance.
“The inspector general's report raises serious questions about federal funding for the modernization effort, a $1.5 billion, six-year project that is intended to post accurate and easily updated digital maps on the Internet by 2010. The program already is behind schedule, and many state governments said that federal funding is far short of what they need to provide correct mapping information.
Source : http://www.chron.com
Maurice Tamman, of the Herald Tribune, Sarasota, Fl, posts to the NICAR (National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting) listserv:
“In recent months we’ve been experimenting with Google Maps APIs to bring dynamic maps to our coverage. (Last month we used it to illustrate how Florida property tax system creates crazy inequities: www.heraldtribune.com/saveourhomes/)
“Late last week, we slammed together a hurricane damage entry and reporting system for the six Southwest Florida counties, from the Keys to Manatee County. Users can zoom to a neighborhood and either view reported damage or report damage. (www.heraldtribune.com/damages/)
“I’m not sure how much use it’ll get because the storm stayed so south of us. Still, I think it illustrates the flexibility of the Google system over more expensive GIS server solutions, especially for smaller papers.”
Good job in seeking to employ a creative application of existing tools.
NASA's hurricane site has posted some novel maps and graphics of Wilma, including some 3-D and animated illustrations of the “hot towers.” “The arrival of Hurricane Wilma on October 15, 2005, tied the record for most named storms in a single Atlantic hurricane season. Within just days Wilma went from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane status and broke the record for lowest pressure ever recorded inside a hurricane. New satellite observations show towering thunderclouds, sometimes called hot towers, that signaled the onset of intensification in this remarkable storm.“
An excellent article in today's Salon magazine provides a thorough assessment of the state of broadband access in the United States. The U.S. continues to fall behind other countries in broadband penetration. The problem, according to the article, stems from federal mismanagement of telecom policy and misrepresentation of the current levels of broadband access and quality.
The digital divide seems to widen with each advance in technology — even when a technology emerges that could make providing access cheaper and easier. The divide runs along familiar lines of class and geography (rural vs. urban), and the line between regions that can attract new businesses and residents and those that can't. It can also be seen as a divide between those with better access to news and information and those without access.
The article also puts in fresh perspective efforts by municipalities — San Francisco being the most recent and prominent — to provide broadband Internet services directly to their citizens. Telecom companies claim that this stifles the competition that can lead to lower prices and better quality. And yet most Americans have neither.”
GIS software discount for IRE members Return to IRE Training
Members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., qualify for discounts on geographic information system (GIS) software from ESRI, the publisher of ArcView. ESRI is offering ArcView GIS single use licenses at no charge to IRE members who agree to attend a GIS training event conducted by IRE and NICAR or ESRI. Purchasers must sign a three-year maintenance agreement with ESRI at a cost of $ 400 a year, with the first year's fee waived. ArcView, the GIS program most widely used by journalists, lists for $1,500. During the maintenance agreement period, purchasers will receive software upgrades and technical support.
IRE members must attend a qualifying training session within one year of entering the agreement with ESRI, which is based in Redlands Calif., and has been a regular exhibitor at the annual IRE and CAR conferences. Qualifying sessions are IRE and NICAR's Mapping Data for News Stories mini-boot camp, offered two times a year with the next scheduled for Jan. 6-8, 2006; an online ESRI Virtual Campus course, and ESRI classroom training.
For more information about IRE and NICAR training visit IRE Training . For more information about ESRI training see www.esri.com/training_events.html. IRE members can also purchase discounted extension programs, which expand the analytical capabilities of ArcView. The single-license cost for Spatial Analyst, 3D Analyst and Geostatistical Analyst is $1,500 each. That is a 40 percent discount off the list price of $2,500 each. To obtain an order form, please contact John Green, membership services coordinator for IRE, at jgreen@ire.org or 573-882-2772.
Kenneth Chang, of the NYTimes, had an interesting “Ideas & Treands” piece yesterday. He was writing about the evolution of standards and precision in measurement. Just how long is a meter — a REAL meter? There can be measurement of physical things, of course, like distance or weight. But perhaps journalists should be talking about the standard defintion of concepts such as “urban sprawl” or a “landslide victory.”
LOCKED in a vault in Paris is a cylinder about the size of a plum. Its mass is exactly one kilogram. It is the kilogram.
For 116 years, this cylinder made of platinum and iridium has been the world's defining unit of mass. It's an easy concept to understand.
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., announced last month significant progress toward supplanting this cylinder. Their concept is not so easy to understand.
It's a two-story-tall contraption that looks one part Star Trek, one part Wallace and Gromit. Briefly put, it measures the power needed to generate an electromagnetic force that balances the gravitational pull on a kilogram of mass.
“It's such a very complicated thing that's hard to explain,” said Richard Steiner, the physicist in charge of the project. He has been working on this “electronic kilogram” machine for more than a decade.
“That's what everybody kind of laughs at,” Dr. Steiner said. “They're all impressed it's such a complicated thing and then they ask, 'What do you need it for?' “
The general answer is that humans have always needed to quantify and standardize, to make their world more certain. Without a standard kilogram – roughly 2.2 pounds – how would scientists know their measurements of mass were accurate? Without a standard meter, how would a manufacturer make a ruler and know that it is precise?
More specifically, the high-tech kilogram is needed because scientists prefer a definition based on the universal constants of physics – something they could in principle calibrate in their own laboratories – rather than on an artifact sitting in a distant vault.
Another problem with the kilogram cylinder is that it is not necessarily unchanging. Over time, contamination might add smidgeons of mass, or cleaning might scrub away some atoms, leaving a lesser kilogram. Better, scientists say, not to have to worry about dust, dirt or disaster striking the Paris vault.
The kilogram, in fact, is decades behind the meter, which used to be defined as the distance between two scratches on a metal bar. In 1960, scientists defined the meter in terms of the wavelength of a specific orange light emitted by krypton atoms. In 1983, they redefined the speed of light to be exactly 299,792,458 meters per second, so a meter is now just the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second.
The newer definitions hark back to the original metric definitions, which were based on features of the natural world, not human artifacts. A kilogram was the mass of water filling a cube that is one-tenth of a meter on each side, or one liter of volume, and a meter was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, along the path passing through Paris (since it was the French Academy of Sciences that defined the meter).
Neither definition proved practical, and the French scientists botched their calculation of how much the Earth is squashed by the centrifugal force of its rotation, so the metal bar they made to represent a meter was off by a fraction of a millimeter.
It is also not easy to measure precisely a liter of pure water, which is complicated by impurities and gases dissolved in the water and by how water density changes with temperature and pressure. Instead, that platinum-iridium cylinder was established as the official definition, in 1889.
The search for standards began with the rise of civilization. Measures were needed, especially for commerce. At first, people simply used parts of the body. A cubit, for example, was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger – which differed from person to person, until an Egyptian pharaoh declared a cubit to be the distance from his elbow to the tip of his middle finger (and possibly the width of his palm).
It was hardly convenient to borrow the pharaoh's arm to measure a bolt of cloth, so a piece of granite was carved and declared the official cubit. Other people would make their own cubit rulers, usually out of wood, based on the granite standard.
The same idea underlay the standards for the kilogram and the meter – a cylinder and a bar, respectively. “Those were not bad standards at the time,” said John L. Hall, a scientist at the Institute of Standards and Technology and a winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, who helped refine the definition of the meter two decades ago. “But they're kind of hard to duplicate and disseminate.”
Dr. Steiner's team with its two-story contraption has now fixed the mass of a kilogram to 99.999995 percent accuracy. To satisfy the international body that sets measurement standards, they probably need to raise that last “5” to an “8.”
As science measures ever tinier bits of the universe, measurement must become more precise. If scientists can define units in terms of constants like the speed of light and the charge of the electron, then they can better study whether constants really are constant. “It's a much more serious question than it appears to be,” Dr. Hall said.”
The concept of Power Law distributions is attracting growing interest, especially among folks in the Complexity and Complex Adaptive Systems communities. For journalists, some of the math involved is somewhat more complex than the elementary descriptive statistics we deal with, but it's not that tough to grasp the implications of research probing Power Laws as they apply to various phenomena.
Here's a perspective on global warfare that might prompt some deep contemplation for journalists.
Original source: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/09/wars_new_equili.html
“In technology, particularly in information based systems, advances can occur almost overnight. This likely applies to warfare as it becomes more information-based. As in technology, patterns and methods of warfare tend to stay within bounded equilibria depending on the type of war being fought. When an improvement arrives, the equilibrium point changes and warfare undergoes a rapid shift.
One of the ways to measure a equilibrium point was first demonstrated by Lewis Richardson over 50 years ago. He calculated that the distribution of casualties in conventional wars follow a power law distribution. Updates to his work show that this pattern of distribution continues to hold.
In a new paper by Johnson, Spagat, and others called “From Old Wars to New Wars and Global Terrorism,” ( PDF) — http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/physics/0506213/ — the authors demonstrate that a new pattern of war is emerging. To do this, they analyzed the frequency-intensity distributions of wars (including terrorism) and examined their power law curves. They found that conventional wars had a power law exponent of 1.8. An analysis of terrorism since 1968 found that the exponents were 1.71 (for G7 countries) and 2.5 (for non-G7 countries). This makes sense, conventional wars and G7 terrorism are both characterized by periods of relative non-activity followed by high casualty events (highly orchestrated battles). Non-G7 terrorism is a more decentralized and ad hoc type of warfare characterized by numerous small engagements and fewer large casualty events.
Here's where the analysis gets interesting. When the author's examined the data from Colombia and Iraq, they found that both wars evolved towards the coefficient for non-G7 terrorism (although from different directions). This finding doesn't fit the prevailing theories of warfare. A conventional understanding of fourth generation warfare , such the one posited by Thomas Hammes in the Sling and the Stone posit that 4th generation warfare began in earnest with Mao. However, within Mao's formulation (and Ho Chi Minh's variant), guerrilla wars are but a prelude to conventional war to seize control of the state. The power law for these wars should, based on this theory, tend towards the coefficient we see for conventional wars. In fact, we see the opposite. Guerrilla wars in both Colombia and Iraq have stabilized at a coefficient far from conventional warfare.
This has broad implications for 4th generation warfare theory — which clearly dominated the types of wars we saw in the latter half of the twentieth century. The patterns of conflict we see today in Colombia and Iraq are a break from the previous framework (which may be an example of punctuated equilibrium). Unlike the previous models of guerrilla wars which sought to replace the state, these new wars have moved to a level of decentralization that makes them both unable to replace the state and extremely hard to eliminate. Is this new evolutionary equilibrium a fifth generation of warfare? It is extremely likely. This new form of warfare, or what I call open source warfare, is what this site (and my book) is dedicated to understanding.”
Print journalists often ignore audio (and video) content when researching a story. Partially there is the “medium bias” at play (i.e. “Hey, I work in print, so that must be the most important source.”), but that bias also has something to do with the lack of search tools and the difficulty of getting those audio words into a transcript that can flow into text. Still, there is gold in those sight-and-sound files for a reporter who can find them and take the time to extract the ore. The always helpful blog “PI News Link” run by Tamara Thompson posts the following: “A new form of audio files called podcasts, so named because they can be downloaded from the Internet to a portable digital listening device (such as an iPod), are searchable through many search engines. Yahoo has just rolled out their podcast search. A keyword search of “legal” returned Involuntary Manslaughter: A Double Standard?, a broadcast with the editor of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. The Podcast Search Service catalogs a more extensive collection of websites with podcasts, searching terms within the site title or description. Pod Spider includes international audio files. Individual podcasts are beginning to be tagged, which will enable the searcher to uncover specific relevant audio files.”
A posting today announcing an academic chair at the University of Central Lancashire Department of Journalism seems to indicate that someone in the industry there is starting to ask the right questions and seeking to leverage the strengths of the profession and its academic counterpart. In a time when the U.S. journalism establishment is just contributing to academic redundancies (see “Columbia and CUNY Get Grants in Journalism“), UK Publisher Johnston Press is asking if there might not be a better way to think about, understand and deliver journalism. From a press release: “SPONSORED CHAIR IN DIGITAL JOURNALISM DEVELOPMENT ” The University of Central Lancashire Department of Journalism is to join forces with major UK Publisher Johnston Press in an exciting new initiative that aims to exploit the benefits of new and emerging digital technology. The three-year collaboration, worth around *200,000, includes the future appointment of the Johnston Press Chair in Digital Journalism Development at the University. Tim Bowdler, Chief Executive of Johnston Press, said: “The rapid evolution of digital technology presents huge opportunities and challenges to traditional media companies. “Through the newly established Chair in Digital Journalism, Johnston Press is delighted to partner with the Department of Journalism and to give added impetus to its already well recognised commitment to exploring new forms of factual content creation, production and dissemination. “Johnston Press is determined to take maximum advantage of the new opportunities which digital developments present and our partnership with the University will undoubtedly further this aim.” In post by January 2006 and funded by Johnston Press, the Chair will form the cornerstone of the partnership between the two organisations. UCLan will also fund a research assistant to assist the Chair in drawing up a research strategy that defines new approaches/methods to: • the exploration of digital applications for content acquisition (e.g. multi skilled reporters and reporting technologies) • the exploration of digital applications for content production (copy flow, editorial management and logistics in the multi-media newsroom of the future) • exploring digital applications for content dissemination, including multi-media content converged onto one dissemination platform (e.g. the Web); but also the simultaneous dissemination of content on multiple platforms (e.g. hard copy, the Web and mobile) Major implications Head of the Department of Journalism Mike Ward said: “By the end of this decade, it’s forecast that there will be up to 1.5 billion computers connected via high-speed broadband and another 2.5 billion phones with more processing power than today’s PCs. This will undoubtedly have major implications for journalists and publishers alike. “UCLan’s partnership with Johnston Press, which combines the expertise of one of the top journalism departments in the country with one of the UK’s major regional newspaper groups, presents us with a unique opportunity to investigate, challenge and inform development and debate in digital applications. “The fruits of the partnership will be relevant, accessible and forward-looking analysis. Together we will produce materials for teaching, knowledge transfer and further research.” ________________ \_ Alan Rawlinson \_ Course leader, MA in Online Journalism \_ University of Central Lancashire \_ www.ukjournalism.org \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ agrawlinson@uclan.ac.uk \_ alan@rawlinson.co.uk \_ 01772 894757 \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_”
