Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2009

The oddity of PJTV, Bloggingheads, etc.

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Chris Taylor asks a question that has bothered me too:

Why would you duplicate the worst aspects of the medium?

I need somebody to explain the appeal of PJTV and Bloggingheads.tv. I thought this whole “citizen journalism” thing was about bringing greater depth, detail and context to the news the major media cranks out into the airwaves. Taking the time to write from a specialist’s perspective, to fill in the background that a beat reporter would not even realise they are missing. And all of that married to the ability to receive and remark upon news stories and opinion, anywhere there is a wired or wireless net connection.

The move to try and push this discourse into video from text is ridiculously misguided. The most compelling video isn’t watching two talking heads debate the issues of the day; if it were, the local candidates debates during elections would rival strip clubs for popularity and revenue-generating possibilities. Compelling video is watching the events occur, unfiltered; not having a vacuous talking head try to interpret the events long after they have actually occurred.

Exactly. I rarely watch online videos of the PJTV/Bloggingheads type, partly because I find them generally boring and partly because they take up too much of my time. If I’m web surfing on my lunch break, I don’t want to devote ten or twenty minutes to watching talking heads . . . I’ve got limited time, and the spoken word is far slower than reading the same information in text form.

Worse, sometimes the talking head is someone whose writing I appreciate . . . but their onscreen personality detracts from the message they’re trying to communicate. There’s a reason the mainstream media have tended to feature certain kinds of presenters for their news and opinion programs: they’re able to communicate in pleasant well-modulated voices, they appear dignified on camera, and dress well. They don’t fidget, they don’t twitch or scratch their noses . . . they’re performers in a specific kind of professional performance. Bloggers generally do not fit this profile at all: they’re writers and thinkers, not performers. And it shows.

New cult

Filed under: Humour, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:42

Lore Sjoberg has a new religion to offer:

There are many strange religions in this mixed-up, modern world — Discordianism, Pastafarianism, the Church of the Subgenius — but one of strangest and most popular is the Cult of the New.

People will pay more than twice as much to see a first-run movie compared to seeing it in a second-run theater or renting it and watching it at home. They’ll pay $50 for a videogame that will clearly be a $20 “greatest hits” game before too long.

They buy novels in hardback, comic books in their original run rather than waiting for the anthology. And then there are all those people paying $600 for video cards that, six months from now, will cost less than the shiny, full-bleed folding pamphlets currently being used to advertise the hardware.

It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.

QotD: Canada and freedom of expression

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

Some Canadians are rather touchy about criticism from Americans regarding freedom of speech in Canada. The irony of this touchiness is that the Canadian Supreme Court has based its free-speech jurisprudence, at least in the context of antidiscrimination concerns, in large part on the theories of left-wing American academics such as University of Michigan professor Catharine MacKinnon. The Canadian left has a penchant for importing left-wing ideas from the U.S. and elsewhere, adopting them as public policy, and then accusing anyone who objects of being "anti-Canadian" because these policies somehow define Canadian identity. I like Canada a lot myself, but I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws.

David Bernstein, “Touchy Canadians”, The Volokh Conspiracy, 2003-12-05

“Controllers have a heightened sense of vigilance . . . post-9/11”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Maybe I’m just being hyper-critical here, but an aircraft being out of communication with air traffic control “over two states” does not equate with the claimed “heightened sense of vigilance”. Especially as “worried officials alerted National Guard jets to go after the airliner from two locations, although none of the military planes got off the runway”:

A report released by airport police Friday identified the pilot as Timothy B. Cheney and the first officer as Richard I. Cole. The report said the men were “co-operative, apologetic and appreciative” and volunteered to take preliminary breath tests that were zero for alcohol use. The report also said the lead flight attendant told police she was unaware of any incident during the flight.

The pilots, both temporarily suspended, are to be interviewed next week by investigators of the National Transportation Safety Board. The airline, acquired last year by Delta Air Lines, also is investigating. Messages left at both men’s homes were not immediately returned.

Investigators do not know whether the pilots may have fallen asleep, but NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Friday that fatigue and cockpit distraction will be looked into. The plane’s flight recorders were brought to the board’s Washington headquarters.

Voss, the Flight Safety Foundation president, said a special consideration was that the many safety checks built into the aviation system to prevent incidents like this one, or to correct them quickly, apparently were ineffective until the very end. Not only were air traffic controllers and other pilots unable raise the Northwest pilots for an hour, but the airline’s dispatcher should have been trying to reach them as well. The three flight attendants onboard should have questioned why no preparations for landing were ordered. Brightly lit cockpit displays should have warned the pilots it was time to land. Despite cloudy weather, the city lights of Minneapolis should have clued them in that they had reached their destination.

NWA188_flight_path

I don’t know how involved a discussion has to be to get you to ignore your duties for that long, but if I were in charge of either air traffic control (ATC) or inteceptor aircraft for central North America, I’d be asking very pointed questions of my subordinates. A large commercial passenger aircraft should not be out of contact with sequential ATC points without some alarms being raised . . . yes, it could be communication equipment failure, but after 9/11, any unexpected communications failure with commercial aircraft should have raised red flags. The reported lack of scrambled interceptor aircraft implies either bureaucratic incompetence or criminal negligence.

As one or two people have pointed out, the flight was headed into non-critical airspace (Wisconsin, then Ontario), so perhaps the perceived need to scramble fighters was lower than if the flight profile had deviated toward Chicago or somewhere “important”.

Update: Doug Church of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association provides a clarification in the comments.

Update, 13 November: FAA indicates that air traffic controllers should have alerted NORAD much earlier than they did.

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