Would you like a peanut or a pistachio? That sounds rather like an election choice

14 10 2007

This post is titled in honor of one of my favourite cartoons, by Michael Leunig.

This year, the election will be a little different. Online media is going to have a stronger role than it has in the past. Politicians have been keen to try new ways of campaigning and even the political coverage is changing to meet the needs of the online generation. However, the tools have changed somewhat, but the policies are all pretty much in the dark ages.

The Australian Federal Election will be held on the 24th of November 2007.

Peanut
Liberal Party of Australia
Liberal’s YouTube Channel
John Howard’s opening speech – Right Leadership (transcript)

Pistachio
Kevin07
Labor’s YouTube Channel
[Waiting for Kevin Rudd's speech to be uploaded - New leadership doesn't including fast updates for the public] – [transcript when available]

Mixed Nuts
FederalElection.com.au – MyElectorate, Hot Issues, Rolling Debate, Blogs
Google’s Election 2007 – Follow Australian politics with Google’s map, videos, gadgets & more
For the Nut Intolerant
Leadership seems to be a key topic for this election, so here are some videos from thought leaders on the subject.
Dr Peter Ellyard – Futurist
Al Gore on Leadership in Global Warming
Barack Obama: Leadership On Energy

The truth is, we can’t afford to let the same old politics stand in the way of our future anymore.





MODM 6 – Come and join us at Federation Wharf for drinks and good company

30 09 2007

On October 4th, MODM 6 will again be at Riverland Bar. If you haven’t been to one yet, what are you waiting for?
Free drinks, attendees from all over Melbourne (and a few in town from afar) and a regular topic on Twitter.

If you create digital media or want to create digital media, come along, meet some people and get started.
Add MODM to your list of Events on Facebook
.

MODM 6 is sponsored by Simon Chen from Eight Black,





Alan Jones, inciting racial violence and the 2GB media whores

10 04 2007

The ACMA has linked Alan Jones to the Cronulla violence. The ACMA has found that 2GB and Alan Jones have breached the Commercial Radio Code of Practice in 2006, with their broadcasts on the Cronulla riots.
The regulator has ruled that both that and other broadcasts encouraged violence and brutality and were likely to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background on the basis of their ethnicity.
ACMA says while the issue being discussed was in the public interest, the comments were not presented reasonably or in good faith.
It has not announced what action it will take against the broadcaster.

Let’s hope that the ACMA hands out a serious monetary penalty, as well as removing the broadcasting license of 2GB. The days of media whores making money from inciting hate, violence and bigotry has to come to an end. I’d also like to see a list of advertisers who pay money to these people [Update: here it is - These messages of bigotry, violence and hatred are funded with the assistance of: Addbuild Additions, Blue Haven Pools, Dedes Restaurant, Doors Plus, Dyldam, Flying Fish, Health & Image, MBT Centre, Heart Check Medical Clinic, L.J. Hooker, Nature Bee, Nick's Seafood Restaurant, Nimbo Fork Luxury Fly Fishing Lodge, Officespace Australia Wide, P&O Cruises, Park Trent Properties Group, Premier Cabs Pty Limited, Sam the Paving Man, Switzer Financial Services, The Eye Institute, The Gazebo and Woolooware Shores Lifestyle Village, who all buy advertising from 2GB. Corporate Social Responsibility is more than a buzzword.], they’ll all be making my “do not buy from, ever again” list.
ALAN JONES: My suggestion is to invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at Cronulla railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive. The bikie gangs have been much maligned, but they do a lot of good things.
It would be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs. And wouldn’t it be brilliant if the whole event was captured on TV cameras and featured on the evening news, so that we, their parents, family and friends can see who these bastards are.
Australians old and new shouldn’t have to put up with this scum.
ALAN JONES: I’ve been a police officer for 16 years. And unfortunately the only language the Middle Eastern youth understand is a good hiding. I know it’s not politically correct, but until we’re allowed to discipline them with a good smack, these problems’ll get worse.
Police are too afraid to act due to the complaints system. If we were allowed to act the way we want to we could solve a lot of problems. The way I see it is, once you break the law you use your rights to be treated with respect.
These Middle Eastern people must be treated be treated with a big stick, it’s the only thing they fear. They don’t fear fines and they laugh at the courts.
ALAN JONES: Yeah, lets not get too, lets not get too carried away Berta. They’re not, we don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney. So lets not get carried away with all this mealy-mouthed talk about there being two sides, I can tell you.
Because my correspondence here, from mums and dads, I am inundated and I don’t hear people complaining about Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans.
I’m sorry, but there’s this religious element in all of this and we’ve got to make sure that we welcome people into our community but we welcome them in on certain terms and certain standards, and those standards are not being met.

This is the crap they are supporting with their advertising money. 2GB is getting rich on the pain and suffering of others.
EMMA ALBERICI: While the Authority did find that the issue being discussed was in the public interest, it found that those comments were not presented reasonably and in good faith.
In its findings, ACMA noted that this is the third time that 2GB has been found in breach of the vilification provision of the Code in the last six months, for broadcasts in the past two years.
Announcers Malcolm Elliot and Brian Wilshire were also found to have breached Clause 1.3 of the Code, which says that a licensee must not broadcast a program which is likely to incite or perpetuate hatred against, or vilify, any person or group on the basis of a number of attributes including ethnicity.

In a separate matter, Jones is facing 12 months jail and/or a fine of up to $5500 for naming on air a child witness in a murder trial.
Hopefully Alan Jones will join the other media whore who went to prison for their contempt of the legal process, Derryn Hinch, who commented on a case before the courts, creating prejudice in a running trial.
Fines of such a low figure are ridiculous, given the purported six figure salaries earned.

“They don’t fear fines and they laugh at the courts.”

Sound familiar? Naming a child witness in a murder trial and asking bikie gangs to beat up ethnic kids at a beach is the worst kind of media rubbish. It will be interesting to see if the Today morning show continues to keep Alan Jones’s “daily editorial comment” [Update: not only did they keep him on, they let him defend himself as his daily comment]. Is John Howard going to continue to appear on Alan Jones’ show?
Read the findings – Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) MR35/2007

[Updated 21st April 2007: Well it appears crime really does pay in Australia for the media whores at 2GB - a $1000 fine and nine month good behaviour bond for Alan Jones, $3000 fine for Harbour Radio and $4000 fine for the Telegraph. Nice to see our justice system protected. I'm sure witnesses will feel secure giving evidence while under age as long as Alan Jones is on a good behaviour bond. His actions could easily have resulted in the murder of the juvenile witness in a murder trial. He's not sorry, he's telling regulators to get stuffed! Alan Jones needs a stint in jail, not a slap on the wrist. You're responsible for your actions Alan Jones, take some responsibility for them like a grown man.

On another note, the following advertisers are *still* giving their money to 2GB, these messages of bigotry, violence and hatred are funded with the assistance of: Addbuild Additions, Blue Haven Pools, Dedes Restaurant, Doors Plus, Dyldam, Flying Fish, Health & Image, MBT Centre, Heart Check Medical Clinic, L.J. Hooker, Nature Bee, Nick's Seafood Restaurant, Nimbo Fork Luxury Fly Fishing Lodge, Officespace Australia Wide, P&O Cruises, Park Trent Properties Group, Premier Cabs Pty Limited, Sam the Paving Man, Switzer Financial Services, The Eye Institute, The Gazebo and Woolooware Shores Lifestyle Village and have recently added Parklea Markets and Robemaker to their list of bigotry supporters. Do you think these two new advertisers have brought in more money than the fines took out? Way to go ACMA, you've sold our airwaves out, hope you're getting a cut.]





78 Women more important than Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan

8 03 2007

Jane Addams: Won the Nobel Peace Prize and was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement
Frances Allen
: Won the Turing Award
Michèle Alliot-Marie: French Minister of Defence
Christiane Amanpour: Chief international correspondent for CNN
Maria Asunción Aramburuzabala: Mexico’s richest woman (Grupo Modelo, makers of Corona beer) Tabitha Babbit: American tool maker who invented the first circular saw used in a saw mill in 1813. She was a member of the Shaker community in Harvard, Massachusetts
Lotte Bailyn: Professor of Management (Organization Studies Group) at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the MIT Workplace Center
Emily Greene Balch: American academic, writer, and pacifist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 (the prize that year was shared with John Mott), notably for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
Marina Berlusconi: Chairman of Italy’s largest magazine publisher, Mondadori
Anita Borg: Received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Presidential Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology, Founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology, started Systers (an e-mail list) and tech conference Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The Anita Borg Prize is named in her honor, as is the Google Anita Borg Scholarship
Ana Patricia Botín: Chief executive of Spain’s Santander Investment
Shona Brown: Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google
Linda B. Buck: American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She and Richard Axel won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on olfactory receptors.
Pearl Buck: First American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
Ho Ching
: CEO of Temasek Holdings
Carla Cico: CEO of Brasil Telecom
Helen Clark
: Prime Minister of New Zealand
Catherine ‘Cady’ Coleman
: Mission Specialist Astronaut
Eileen Collins
: Space Commander
Gerty Radnitz Cori
: Together with her husband and Bernardo Houssay, received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947 for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down and resynthesized in the body, for use as a store and source of energy. In 2004, both were designated a ACS National Historical Chemical Landmark in recognition of their work that elucidated carbohydrate metabolism.
Marie Curie: Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in radioactivity, the first two-time Nobel laureate (the only one in two different sciences), and the first female professor at the Sorbonne Irene Joliot-Curie: Jointly with her husband, Irène was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry of 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with most Nobel laureates to date
Luisa Diogo
: Prime Minister of Mozambique
Gertrude Elion
: An American biochemist and pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Hitchings and Sir James Black
Dianne Feinstein: Senior U.S. Senator
Doris Fisher
: Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
Louise Fréchette: United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Centre for International Governance Innovation
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court
Whoopi Goldberg: Won an Academy award, a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Golden Globe
Tarja Halonen: President of Finland
Salma Hayek: Academy Award-nominated Mexican actress, Daytime Emmy-winning director, and a film and television producer
Fumiko Hayashi: CEO of Daiei, President of BMW Tokyo
Susan Desmond-Hellman: HBA Woman of the Year, Head of product development at Genentech
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: British founder of protein crystallography. She pioneered the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the determination of the structure of penicillin, insulin, and vitamin B12 for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, after 35 years of work, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. She is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field of X-Ray crystallography studies of natural molecules.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper: Developed the first compiler for a computer programming language
Karen Elliott House: Won a Pulitzer Prize, Publisher of the Wall Street Journal
Lynne Greer Jolitz: Founder and Chief Technology Officer of ExecProducer a pioneer of Massive Video Production, and realtime Internet video production and deployment
Susanne Klatten: German billionaire
Neelie Kroes: European Commissioner for Competition
Chandrika Kumaratunga: President of Sri Lanka
Aung San Suu Kyi: awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a repressive military dictatorship (Myanmar/Burma)
Christine Lagarde: Trade Minister of France
Ada Lovelace
: Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing
Shannon Lucid
: Awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor
Mary Ma: Chief Financial Officer of Lenovo
Wangari Maathai: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace
Maria Goeppert Mayer: Received the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, becoming one of the two women to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics (the other being Marie Curie)
Marissa Mayer: Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google
Mary McAleese: President of Ireland
Barbara McClintock: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; to date, she has been the first and only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category
Angela Merkel: Chancellor of Germany
Rita Levi-Montalcini: An Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of growth factors. Today she is the oldest living Nobel laureate
Ann Moore: CEO Time Inc.
Sandra Day O’Connor: Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Lubna Olayan: CEO and chairperson of the Olayan Financing Company (Saudi Arabia), spokesperson for women’s rights in the Middle East
Judy Olian: Dean of UCLA Anderson School of Management and is the John E. Anderson Chair in Management
Rosa Parkes: Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement
Natalie Portman: Golden Globe-winning, Academy Award-nominated Israeli-American actress
Penny Pritzker: Chairman of the board, Classic Residence by Hyatt and TransUnion; billionaire
Xie Qihua: Chairman, president, Shanghai Baosteel
Queen Elizabeth II: Queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Saint Kitts and Nevis
Queen Rania: Queen of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Condoleezza Rice: United States Secretary of State
Joanne Rowling: Author of the Harry Potter books
Soraida Salwala
: Created the world’s first elephant hospital
Sheryl Sandberg: Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google
Olympia J. Snowe: Senior United States Senator from Maine
Joan Steitz: RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award, National Medal of Science, a molecular biologist at Yale University, famed for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights such as that ribosomes interact with mRNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by snRNPs, small nuclear ribonucleoproteins which occur in eukaryotes (such as yeasts and humans) -
Bertha von Suttner: Austrian novelist, radical pacifist, and was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
Yulia Tymoshenko: Prime Minister of Ukraine
Vaira Vike-Freiberga: President of Latvia
Meg Whitman: President and CEO of eBay
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard: German biologist, who together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their research on the genetic control of embryonic development
Oprah Winfrey: the richest African American of the 20th century, the most philanthropic African American of all time, the world’s only Black billionaire for three straight years, most influential woman in the world
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
: Co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique
Wu Yi: China Vice-Premier
Khaleda Zia: Prime Minister of Bangladesh
Maria Zuber: the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she also leads the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids.

This list is not about why these women are more important than Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, it’s about the imbalance in the mainstream media coverage of women. Why is there more coverage of celebrities than science? Why are there more “news” stories about makeup than medicine? Where are the older women newsreaders? Why are ratings more important than reality? Why are “women’s magazines” dumbing down? Aren’t they dumb enough already? For International Women’s Day 2007, I’d like to see the mainstream media make an effort to produce content of substance.





Top 5 – My Five Favourite Podcasts for 2007

1 03 2007

So far, my top five podcasts in 2007 are:
G’day World – The Podcast Network
Geek News Central – Tech Podcast Network
The Global Geek Podcast – The Podcast Network
Distributing The Future – O’Reilly Media
U.S. Senator Barack Obama – Barack Obama








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