March 29, 2011
The evolution of news to sensational entertainment is complete
Andrew Orlowski gives the media a damn good whacking over their deliberate panic-mongering:
Sensationalism has always been part of the popular media — but Fukushima is a telling and troubling sign of how much the media has changed in fifty years: from an era of scientific optimism to one where it inhabits a world of fantasy — creating a real-time Hollywood disaster movie with a moralising, chivvying message.
Not so long ago, the professionals showed all the deferential, forelock-tugging paternalism of the dept of “Keep Calm And Carry On”. That era lasted into the 1960s. Now the driving force is the notion that “We’re all DOOMED — and it’s ALL OUR FAULT” that marks almost every news bulletin. Health and environment correspondents will rarely be found debunking the claims they receive in press releases from lobby groups — the drama of catastrophe is too alluring. Fukushima has been the big one.
The Fukushima situation has yet to cause any measurable radiological health effects, and workers at the site were far less hard hit by the quake, tsunami and related events than just about anyone in the disaster zone, but nonetheless the nuclear story rapidly eclipsed the tens of thousands killed directly by the quake. TV’s reaction to the crisis shows how at odds it is with a more rational audience, those who know something about radiation, its consequences, and the human body’s capacity to absorb it and recover from it. The crisis for the media is that thanks to the internet, we can now all bypass these conduits for superstition and stupidity.
Thousands of people died in the earthquake and tsunami (28,000 at last report), yet the media coverage has been unrelentingly focused on Fukushima (where there have been no radiation-linked deaths so far). Surely things like this are scary enough to get equal coverage:
H/T to wormme for the link.
Update: Brendan O’Neill finds a perfect example of journalism:
In a post on the Channel 4 News website, Jon Snow, newsreader, Twitterer, cyclist and “pinko liberal” (his words), unwittingly captures the narcissism and ignorance that are fuelling Western fears over the Fukushima nuclear plant. Never mind the 20,000 who have died and the 200,000 who have been made homeless as a result of the tsunami — what Snow wants to know is what will become of the “dumping of radioactive material in sea water off Japan”.
“When will it pitch up off Cornwall?,” he asks. “Never? Do we know? Will it cause cancers? Will it kill eventually?” Perhaps he has a holiday home in Cornwall, in which case he might possibly be forgiven for thinking that the burning issue of Japan’s monumental tragedy is what impact it will have in St Ives.
Snow’s attempt to justify his navel-gazing obsession with the troubles at Fukushima (apparently he can’t get it out of his mind) is telling. Media coverage of the damaged nuclear plant has understandably “overwhelmed the continuing awfulness of the consequences of the natural disaster itself”, he says, because the natural disaster is “somehow more determinable than the unseen, unknown quantity of danger residing in the reactors, or outside them, in Fukushima”. In short, the natural disaster is too much of a done deal, a proven fact, whereas something far more tantalising lurks within Fukushima: dark, mysterious dangers, uncertainties, swirling unknowns that could unleash their fury at any moment against the unsuspecting Japanese and even us Brits.
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Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” announcement
Tired of moving your music from machine to machine? Feel constricted in your choices? Amazon.com thinks they’ve got an offering you won’t turn down:
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.
“We’re excited to take this leap forward in the digital experience,” said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon. “The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music.”
“Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” Carr said. “Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.”
Don’t get too excited, fellow Canadians: this is the .com company, not the .ca flavour. Since amazon.ca still can’t sell you MP3 tracks, I doubt that the Amazon Cloud will be available north of the border any time soon.
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“Steampunk” industrial machinery
This is a set of Hulett ore unloaders in Cleveland in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s shortly before they were finally retired. You can readily see how the Victorian imagination could lend itself to monstrous walking engines, given the huge mechanical marvels to be seen working along the dockside.
H/T to Robert Netzlof for the link.
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March 28, 2011
TEPCO still seems to be more a hindrance than a help over Fukushima
A report from Kyodo News shows that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is still not fully co-operating or providing all the information needed to clean up the Fukushima reactor sites:
While efforts at containing troubled reactors have not been making rapid progress at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, signs were emerging that Tokyo Electric Power Co., in the absence of a top officer, is losing its grip on accurately informing the public about risks from radiation.
On Sunday, the utility, known as TEPCO, announced in the morning that the concentration of radioactive materials of water found inside a turbine building adjacent to a rector housing was ”around 10 million times (that of) water in a normal reactor core” but later corrected the information, saying it ”made a wrong estimation.”
[. . .]
On March 20, TEPCO said, ”There were no increases in radiation levels in adjacent areas.” But increases were logged in various parts of adjacent areas, prompting skeptical reporters to raise a series of questions at a news conference but TEPCO officials remained mum.
TEPCO has been giving a series of news conferences since Fukushima Daiichi got into trouble after the March 11 quake. Attending officials have not been able to provide satisfactory answers to a majority of questions raised, only repeating words of apology and, ”We will check it.” It has left the impression they are unable to reply to questions because they are not given enough information.
[. . .]
But on Saturday, it was disclosed that the company had not informed workers who suffered high levels of radiation at the No. 3 reactor unit about radiation levels of the place where they would be working. The government was also found to have not been informed.
Top government spokesman Yukio Edano expressed his displeasure, telling a news conference, ”We cannot give appropriate instructions unless accurate information is provided swiftly.”
TEPCO is allowed to monopolize the power utility market in Tokyo and surrounding regions by law. As the nation’s biggest utility, it has also been the key promoter of the nuclear power policy and one of the main employers of retiring bureaucrats.
Critics say the company lacks cost consciousness and apparently has no idea about what competition is. It is more like a bureaucracy rather than a business being run, they said.
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Radiation: the “Banana Equivalent Dose”
A link from wormme leads to this interesting article providing some basic information on radiation:
There is an interesting way of comparing different amounts of radiation, and we’ve now built up all the pieces to understand it. Nuclear physicists and safety engineers sometimes use a unit called the “banana equivalent dose.” This is basically how it’s calculated.
First you take a banana.
Like pretty well everything in nature, bananas are slightly radioactive. Because bananas concentrate potassium, they are more radioactive than a lot of other foods — natural potassium includes some part that is the radioactive isotope potassium-40. That means eating a banana, and thereby ingesting the potassium, adds a measurable radiation dose from the radioactive potassium-40.
Now, before you change to kumquats or something, it’s not much, and bananas aren’t the only source. Potatoes are another food that concentrates potassium. But it does mean we can usefully compare the total dose we get from a banana with other small amounts of radiation. The somewhat-joking term for this is the “banana equivalent dose,” or BED.
Okay, that’s the amusing part, but read the whole thing: it’s informative and non-sensationalized.
Part of the reason I’m posting links to articles like this is that there is a lot of misinformation on all things nuclear and the mainstream media is doing a flat-out terrible job of reporting.
I’ve lived within 10-20 km of nuclear power stations for more than a decade, and I’m not particularly worried day-to-day about the risks due to that proximity. I used to joke with visitors that we didn’t pay for electricity — the walls glowed after dark from the radioactivity. I stopped doing that when I realized people were taking me a bit more seriously than I expected.
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“How does it work, then? Basically they aren’t too sure”
This one sounds positively science-fictiony:
Boffins in America say they’re on the track of a backpack electro-beam forcefield device capable of snuffing out raging fires without any need for water, hoses or other traditional firefighting apparatus. Apart from portable applications, they raise the possibility that the new technology might replace building sprinkler systems with ceiling mounted conflagration-squelching zapper terminals.
“Controlling fires is an enormously difficult challenge,” says Dr Ludovico Cademartiri. “Our research has shown that by applying large electric fields we can suppress flames very rapidly. We’re very excited about the results.”
Cademartiri and his fellow boffins at Harvard uni have tested their flame-zapping gizmo in the lab, using a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a “wand-like probe”. This setup was apparently able to snuff out test flames “more than a foot high”. The team think that it should be possible to get similar effects with a less power-hungry system using 60W or less, raising the possibility of portable equipment.
So, not quite ready to snuff out the soaring flames of a major fire, yet.
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March 27, 2011
Rogers is actively throttling bandwidth for World of Warcraft players
In what isn’t really a surprise, Justin Olivetti reports on how Canadian WoW players have been suffering from deliberate throttling:
If you play World of Warcraft in Canada and were wondering why your connection seemed a bit slow, it turns out there may be a good explanation: Rogers Communications has been deliberately throttling the game across the country.
[. . .]
Rogers said that it was Blizzard’s use of BitTorrent to deliver updates that triggered the throttling, and said that customers who disabled this setting — as well as any other peer-to-peer applications — would not see a slowdown in speed. “Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution,” a spokesperson said.
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Panic-mongers still hard at work over Fukushima
Lewis Page is less than impressed with the media’s ongoing coverage of the Fukushima reactor clean-up:
The situation at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan was brought under control days ago. It remains the case as this is written that there have been no measurable radiological health consequences among workers at the plant or anybody else, and all indications are that this will remain the case. And yet media outlets around the world continue with desperate, increasingly hysterical and unscrupulous attempts to frame the situation as a crisis.
[. . .]
Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.
So — basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.
Reporters clamoured to know more — in particular how could the water in the basement of the reactor building have become so radioactive — no less than “10,000 times normal”. One might note that in general radiation levels 10,000 times normal mean that you could achieve a tiny fraction of an extra percentage point of cancer risk by being exposed for a fortnight or so.
[. . .]
Then there’s the matter of the tapwater in Tokyo. Two days ago, levels of radioactive iodine-131 were found in the city’s water which were above the safety limit for baby milk calculated on the basis of a year’s consumption: in other words, if babies drank such water for a year constantly they would have a tiny, minuscule extra risk of thyroid cancer.
[. . .]
There was never any chance whatsoever that levels of iodine-131 in the tapwater would remain noticeable for a year, which is what would be necessary for any effects at all on the city’s babies. It was really quite irresponsible of the authorities to recommend that infants shouldn’t drink it. (One can’t help noticing that the first such recommendation reportedly came from the city authorities, belatedly followed by the national government. The Tokyo city governor is from the national opposition party and is facing a tough re-election battle. He had previously sought to use the Fukushima situation to cast his political rivals in a bad light over the deployment of Tokyo’s elite Hyper Rescue firefighters.)
I’d also recommend that you keep an eye on the World’s Only Rational Man for his professional take on what the media is currently panicking over at any given moment:
If modern “journalism” wasn’t the single most incompetent industry in human history we wouldn’t be pulling our hair out over this. Where’s the followup to the reports of Cl-38?
How freakin’ incompetent is the entirety of Big Media?!
You’ve had two weeks to learn a minimum about this subject you obsessively “cover”.
“But…but math is hard!” you whine? Then find some dad-gum folks who do this crap for a living rather than cultivate ivory tower media-hounds.
Sorry. Forgive the venting. Tired and P.O.ed.
Apparently going beddy-bye to the thought of runaway nuclear excursions isn’t warm milk and happy stories. Monsters Inc. could have stayed in the scaring business if they’d taken lessons from The Media.
This blogging day began with concern about neutrons. And so it ends.
I wish we still had reporters.
Because I hate journalism.
Once again, wormme is a radiological control technician, so he actually knows what the hell he’s talking about, unlike just about everyone “covering” the news.
Over-analyzing the Bayeux Tapestry
Chris Mellor looks at the Bayeux Tapestry from a data storage perspective:
The Bayeux Tapestry, the victor’s view of the events, was finished in 1077, ten years after it was begun, making it 934 years old. At 224.3ft long and 1.6ft wide the total surface area is 358.88sq ft.
Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.
From the writing point of view it took ten years for English (Saxon) seamsters, seamstresses or embroiderers to write this 2.429MB of data, which must be some kind of record. Assuming an eight-hour, 350-day working period for these ten years, that implies a write bandwidth of 10.84 bytes/hour; a spectacularly slow data rate in information transfer terms.
What makes it worse is that there were multiple parallel write heads — seamsters or seamstresses — and we could envisage a team of five on average, meaning each write head in this theoretical Bayeux Tapestry archiving model wrote at a rate of 2.168 bytes/per hour (17.344 bits/min). A truly amazingly poor information write bandwidth from our IT viewpoint, but a blur of flickering needles and fingers seen from the embroiderers’ seat.
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March 26, 2011
20 years of Blizzard
This is the 20th anniversary of the founding of Blizzard, one of the most important gaming companies in the industry.
Twenty years is a long time, and to illustrate how long (and make you feel old in the process), let’s do a little retrospective. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union, James Cameron’s Terminator 2 and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood ruled the box office, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was flying off toy store shelves everywhere following its August release.
Also in 1991, a software company known as Silicon & Synapse started its life by working on ports for other gaming companies before re-branding itself as Blizzard Entertainment three years later.
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March 24, 2011
China’s “sexy spies” score another intelligence goal
Strategy Page says that the Chinese are “probably the most enthusiastic, and successful, users of this technique these days”:
China is widely known to use sex to obtain secrets from foreigners, inside and outside of China. Four years ago, Japan uncovered a widespread Chinese effort to use sex to steal military technology. Attractive Chinese female intelligence agents in Japan were marrying members of the Japanese armed forces, and then using that access to obtain military secrets. The situation was complicated by the military attempts to keep these “embarrassing incidents” secret. The government was particularly anxious to keep the Americans in the dark about all this, since the Chinese apparently got their hands on Aegis anti-aircraft system technology via their sexy spies.
Actually, most of the Chinese agents don’t have to marry Japanese troops. Just putting out usually does the trick. In Japan, the military doesn’t get much respect, and many of the bases are in backwaters. So the troops are pretty lonely. It’s not unusual for Chinese women to be in the country, as many come, legally or illegally, looking for jobs. The set-up is perfect for using the old “honey pot” (sexual entrapment) routine to extract military secrets.
The military geeks are the most sought after, as these guys have access to the most valuable military secrets. Geeks tend to be least experienced with women, and most vulnerable to a clever, and shapely, Chinese spy. Military commanders are not sure if they have the problem under control, but now that the situation is out in the open, there will be more efforts to tighten up security. As the Japanese expected, the Americans were not amused. And the Chinese honey pot scandal was apparently one reason for refusing to sell F-22s to Japan. To make matters worse, part of the Japanese cover-up involved prosecuting the Chinese spies on immigration, not espionage, charges.
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Stone the CROWS: US Army’s next step to robotic combat
It may not herald a new droid army, but it’s a welcome development for front-line troops:
The Protec RWS is the key component of the U.S. Army CROWS (common remotely operated weapon stations). This idea of a remote control turret has been around for nearly half a century, but years of tinkering, and better technology, have finally made the remote control gun turret finally work effectively, dependably and affordably. This has made the RWS practical for widespread combat use. While some troops miss the greater feeling of situational awareness (especially being able to hear and smell the surroundings) you got as an old-school turret gunner, most soldiers and marines have adapted and accepted the new system. What it lacks in the smelling and hearing department, it makes up in terms of night vision and zoom. And it’s a lot safer.
CROWS is a real life saver, not to mention anxiety reducer, for troops who drive through bandit country a lot, and man the turret gun. You’re a target up there, and too often, the bad guys get you. Not with CROWS. The gunner is inside the vehicle, checking out the surroundings (with night vision, zoom and telephoto capabilities). CROWS also has a laser rangefinder built in, as well as a stabilizer mechanism to allow more accurate fire while the vehicle is moving. The CROWS systems (RWS, weapon and installation) cost about $260,000 each, and can mount a variety of weapons (M2 .50 caliber machine-gun, MK19 40-mm automatic grenade launcher, M240B 7.62mm machine-gun and M249 5.56mm squad automatic weapon). CROWS comes in several different configurations, based on weapon mounted and armor installed (light, at 74 kg/163 pounds, standard, at 136 kg/298 pounds and CROWS II, at 172 kg/379 pounds.) The heaviest version is usually used in MRAP (armored trucks) and has a better user interface, a thermal imager and sniper detection system.
By the end of 2006, there were about a thousand CROWS in service. There are now nearly 8,000. Many of the enemy fighters have seen Western or Japanese films featuring killer robots, and often think that’s what they are facing. The fear factor is real, and it helps. The accuracy of the fire, and uncanny speed with which the CROWS gun moves deliberately, is due to something few officers expected. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating computer systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements (and any firepower the enemy sends your way). But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger.
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Online security: compromised HTTPS certificates
Iranian hackers (or someone trying to cast blame on Iran) managed to get a number of HTTPS certificates issued under false colours:
On March 15th, an HTTPS/TLS Certificate Authority (CA) was tricked into issuing fraudulent certificates that posed a dire risk to Internet security. Based on currently available information, the incident got close to — but was not quite — an Internet-wide security meltdown. As this post will explain, these events show why we urgently need to start reinforcing the system that is currently used to authenticate and identify secure websites and email systems.
[. . .]
Comodo also said that the attack came primarily from Iranian IP addresses, and that one of the fraudulent login.yahoo.com certs was briefly deployed on a webserver in Iran.
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March 23, 2011
Breaking! New iPhone 5 features revealed!
Image from PC World article which is a bit more serious than the graphic might indicate.
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