neonascent

NEWS.com.au has a story on the premium Australian’s pay for products.

Having come over from Europe, I am certainly acutely aware of differences. For example the australian Internet and Telecommunications products and services are all hugely inflated compared to EU.

Having lived in England though I am also aware of the media mentality of scandiliingly pointing out what is cheaper on the other side of the channel, but ignoring what is cheaper at home.

Middlesbrough is a small town in the North East of England. In what seems like a tribute to George Orwell, the council have just installed CCTV cameras fitted with speakers. As the enthusiastic press manager tells us, it will greatly help create a safer Middlesbrough:

“For example, if an operative now sees someone dropping litter, they can tell them to pick it up”

The press release continues, detailing how it will drastically reduce instances of Thoughtcrime.

Princeton university has conducted tests on US electronic voting machines that were used in the last two elections (Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine), and found them to be (extremely) vulnerable to viruses and vote maniplulation software.

This should be absolutely no surprise what-so-ever. These machines are effectively PCs, and show less security precaution than the average Internet café computer. They are set to boot from flash memory, and presumably were not provided with malware/virus checking tools at the toll this would take on voter trust. (ie accepting the possibility of viruses is opening a can of worms).

In the Princeton demonstration video the demonstrator is careful to emphasise the criminality of the virus loader, and also the fact that what we are watching is a simulated election, but I think this is a pointed comment. I get the impression they are understating the importance of this research for interlectual impact - the audience realises themselves how easy it would be to apply this to a real election.

In a BBC News article covering Bush’s 9/11 remembrance ceremony I spotted reference to “his so-called war on terror”. I find it darkly amusing that it has taken official reports of zero link between Sadam and Al Qaeda, civil war in Iraq, continued fighting in Afganistan, etc. to change the BBCs line from “The War on Terror” to “[bush’s] so-called war on terror”.

The UK security site The Register reports that the Centrelink database was “routinely searched for personal reasons by government agency employees”.

There were 790 security breaches at government agency Centrelink involving 600 staff. Staff were found to have inappropriately accessed databases containing citizens’ information.

The Centrelink database is the planned repository for Australian “Access Card” data (in effect a National ID card under a different name). Though workers have been identified and sacked regarding this security break, the investigation to catch them took two years.

It is likely that once the stakes are higher, more targetted and mallicious use of the database than simple fraud and curiousity will arise.

The BBC reports that Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian teenager abducted and kept captive for 10 years of her, life mourns the death of her captor. The journalist is quick to point out that

Police suspect she may have been suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome” - a condition where some abductees gradually begin to sympathise with their captors.

Of course, we cannot be allowed to entertain the idea that a “normal” or “positive” emotional attachment developed from such a criminal scenario as abduction! I think it’s interesting to examine the psychoanalytic explanation for Stockholm Syndrome, as presented in its Wikipedia entry:

According to the psychoanalytic view of the syndrome, the tendency might well be the result of employing the strategy evolved by newborn babies to form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult in order to maximize the probability that this adult will enable - at the very least - the survival of the child, if not also prove to be a good parental figure.

With the institution of Family touted as the foundation of a civilized society, it would be devastating to concede that it is based on simply an evolved survival instinct - familiar bonds being a throwback to psychological necessity. However, I don’t think it should really come as a surprise that this is so. Natacha’s situation brings us up against the uncomfortable question of what makes an emotional response valid - was Wolfgang Priklopil an Abductor or Father?

Wolfgang Priklopil […] effectively brought her up. He provided her with clothes, food, helped her with her studies.

Two points that could be raised to disqualify the similarity between Natascha’s so-called Stockholm Syndrome and a socially accepted/validated parent-child emotional bond. One is that she is not genetically related. I would suggest that society is quite happy to accept love expressed within a foster family. A second, which has not yet been confirmed, is that there may have been sexual contact between the abductor and Natascha. Sadly this is not unheard of within a biologically related family unit, and significantly, the expression of loyalty, love, etc of a child within an physically/sexually abusive family is another locus of diagnosed Stockholm Syndrome.

I suggest that the Stockholm Syndrome categorization of any love and attachment within a socially unacceptable scenario is used to insulate “good love” from ‘bad love”. We would like to think that love towards someone who is abusive is the result of some “psychological condition” while the love within a (nice, atomic, idealised) family is out of choice. It is possible that I am being too critical of such double-standards however; while the emotional attachment known as love is a result of psychological evolution, the primacy and value of the family unit within our society is also the result of a much more recent social evolution.

The Raw Story reports on Bush’s apparent summer reading material:

He read Albert Camus’s The Stranger, triggering a discussion about existentialism with his aides. “He found it an interesting book and a quick read,” said Mr Snow. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism.”

This is ridiculous. I’m actually quite glad we’re not given a deeper insight into any of his conversations, as I’ve a feeling they’d be cringeworthy.

The BBC reports on a Center for Global Development report putting the Netherlands first in helping the poor. The Netherlands leads over other rich nations due to “generous investment and aid as well as measures to curb greenhouse gases”.

Other countries of note:

1. America gives the most aid, but this is the smallest in relation to the country’s economy. It is also noted that US aid is most often contingent on political or economic agreements such as the purchase of US goods.
2. The UK’s positive technology investments in developing countries are outweighed by their sale of weapons to “undemocratic governments”.
3. Japan ranks lowest out of the world’s 21 richest nations, in consideration of factors such as low aid, high import barriers and excluding immigration policy.

Boing Boing links to a local Reading paper’s article on an Anti-terror raid in connection with the recent “liquid” airline plot. The raid was on a small internet café that may have been frequented by someone involved? We can only guess.

The significance to me is that the road the café is on, Wokingham Road, used to be a habitual feeding ground for uni denizens such as myself. It’s in the centre of a high concentration of shared student houses, and at one time I had about 20 friends within a minute’s walk of this place.

It’s not often that Reading shows up in the Internation news!

The BBC reports on the obvious doctoring of Reuters news images from a Beirut photog.

Of course it is extremely likely that this is the tip of the iceberg, as the image that aroused suspicion is the worst use of Photoshop I’ve seen in a non-comedy print context.

It would be unbelievably naive to believe that no editing whatsoever goes on between camera and print. Even factually “truthful” images can be emotively weighed in one direction or another simply by altering the brightness.

To any photog visitors this is obvious: Aside from any digital manipulation, photography as an objective information source is simply an illusion. Framing (if not actual staging) of images is not only common practice; it is an unavoidable part of taking a photograph.

With regards to a common set of practices by organizations such as Reuters, there is no doubt a pragmatic choice made to accept compressed digital images in lieu of unwieldy raw format. With no knowledge of the division of labour within them, digital touch-up, cropping, and colour correction may well be the photog’s job prior to submission. However, it is possible to detect even sophisticated manipulation of images by analysing the digital file.

Failing this sort of policing policy on images, I guess the cynical take-home message for budding Photojournalists is not to neglect Photoshop skills in place of producing verity of content.