Tuesday, 7 June 2011

The Bad Plus invited by the Frankfurt Radio Bigband 14/05/2011

Ethan Iverson (Piano)
Reid Anderson (Bass)
Dave King (Drums)
Frankfurt Radio Bigband directed by Jim McNeely

http://www.thebadplus.com/

France bans Facebook and Twitter from radio and TV

Bailey Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood: Final report published

Via the Department for Education website:

A six-month independent review into the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, which reports today, calls on businesses and media to play their part in ending the drift towards an increasingly sexualised 'wallpaper' that surrounds children.

Reg Bailey, Chief Executive of Mothers' Union, who led the independent review, has listened to parents' concerns about the barriers they face in bringing up their children. They are particularly unhappy with the increasingly sexualised culture surrounding their children, which they feel they have no control over. They singled out sexually explicit music videos, outdoor adverts that contain sexualised images, and the amount of sexual content in family programmes on TV.

Reg Bailey's recommendations are based on parents' concerns and are intended to support them, make sure their views are taken more seriously by businesses and broadcasters, and help children understand the potential dangers they face. They will put control back in the hands of families.

The recommendations include:

Providing parents with one single website to make it easier to complain about any programme, advert, product or service.

Putting age restrictions on music videos to prevent children buying sexually explicit videos and guide broadcasters over when to show them.

Covering up sexualised images on the front pages of magazines and newspapers so they are not in easy sight of children.

Making it easier for parents to block adult and age-restricted material from the internet by giving every customer a choice at the point of purchase over whether they want adult content on their home internet, laptops or smart phones.

Retailers offering age-appropriate clothes for children - the retail industry should sign up to the British Retail Consortium's new guidelines which checks and challenges the design, buying, display and marketing of clothes, products and services for children.

Restricting outdoor adverts containing sexualised imagery where large numbers of children are likely to see them, for example near schools, nurseries and playgrounds.

Giving greater weight to the views of parents in the regulation of pre-watershed TV, rather than viewers as a whole, about what is suitable for children to watch.

Banning the employment of children under 16 as brand ambassadors and in peer-to-peer marketing, and improving parents' awareness of advertising and marketing techniques aimed at children.

Download links to PDF versions of the Review document and Appendices 1-4 via the DoE website here

I need to read the Review more closely but first thoughts include: how will these recommendations be implemented; what is Mr Bailey's definition of sexualisation, does he really understand how the internet works, and isn't this just treating symptoms not causes?

[Via Bird of Paradox]

Monday, 6 June 2011

The Shame of Serbia

WTF???

Anti-Choice Movement Hits A New Creepy Low

CASSINI MISSION

Via

Bribery in India: A website for whistleblowers

Transport commissioner Bhaskar Rao has reformed his department with the help of ipaidabribe.com data

Imagine if you had to pay a bribe to see your newborn baby, get your water supply connected or obtain your driving licence. It's an everyday fact of life in India - but campaigners are now fighting back, using people power and the internet.

"Uncover the market price of corruption," proclaims the banner on the homepage of ipaidabribe.com.
It invites people to share their experiences of bribery, what a bribe was for, where it took place and how much was involved.
Launched in August, the site gives Indians a chance to vent their frustrations anonymously and shine a spotlight on the impact of corruption on everyday life.
"I did the driving test correctly but still the official said I was driving too slow, I realised his intention so gave him 200 Rupees and got the thing done," is a typical example of a posting.

The website was the brainwave of Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan, founders of a not-for-profit organisation in Bangalore called Janaagraha which literally means "people power".

"Bribery is routinely expected in interactions with government officials", Swati Ramanathan told me, "to register your house, to get your driving licence, domestic water connection, even a death certificate."
Having lived in the US and the UK for several years, they were dismayed on their return to see how widespread corruption had become and decided to do something about it.
"We are all also responsible because we end up paying the darn bribes because otherwise you can never get anything done in India.
"We said, 'It's not enough to moralise, we need to find out what exactly is this corruption? What's the size of it?'"
'High reward'
The website has evolved into a consumer comparison site where people can also get information and advice in different languages on how to avoid paying bribes.
One woman told me how she got round paying a bribe to register her mother's house.
"I went with all the paperwork and at first they looked through it and said, 'Oh, I think one of the documents is not up to date.'

"What I had been told at the website is that this is one of the excuses they make to take a bribe, and what we need to do is tell them, 'OK, give it to me in writing with your stamp and seal, and I will make sure I get these documents the next time so that I can get it registered.'"

"The moment I said that, they backed off and said, 'No, no, it's OK, we will pass it through.'"
So far, nearly 10,000 bribe experiences have been reported across 347 cities and 19 government departments.
As the numbers mount, Swati Ramanathan hopes the website will become a powerful tool for shaming government departments into tackling corruption.
"There is so little risk to being corrupt in our country and so high a reward," she explained.
"The moment you change the equation and you make it riskier, the reward becomes less. You make it riskier by making it public."
Hurt pride
One of the website's early successes has been with the State Transport Department of Karnataka, which was repeatedly cited in bribe reports - prompting transport commissioner Bhaskar Rao to invite the I Paid A Bribe team to present their findings to his staff.

"I wanted to use that website to cleanse my department," he said.

"If I try to do things on my own here, I may run into rough weather... But the evidence on this website gives me some internal support to bring about reforms."
"People in the office are realising that if they take money, it definitely is not something just between the giver and the taker. It is spreading out of this room, and now across the globe, on the web.
"So everybody in the world gets to know that this office is not a good office and institutional pride is hurt."
The website team helped Bhaskar Rao's department to identify the procedures most prone to corruption.
Twenty senior officers have been cautioned, and technology is now being introduced to minimise the opportunities for bribe-taking.
For example, driving licences can now be applied for online, making the status of each application transparent to everyone involved.
Driving test bribery was a tougher problem. Bhaskar Rao turned to a local IT company to come up with a solution. The result: the world's first automated driving test centre opened in Bangalore this year.
Drivers register for the test using a smart card and have to negotiate their way around a paved driving track fitted with electronic sensors. Their progress is recorded electronically.
They also have to complete a screen-based test of their knowledge of the Highway Code. All opportunities for bribe-taking and bribe-giving have thus been removed.
Not surprisingly perhaps, there was some initial opposition from driving inspectors to the introduction of this automated test centre.
But it is now conducting up to 200 tests a day and has become a source of pride. And, they say, there are now a few better drivers on the Indian roads.
Solving the problem of bribery in India is not going to happen overnight. But ipaidabribe.com shows that ordinary people can be turned from the victims of corruption into part of the solution.
Mukti Jain Campion @'BBC'

♪♫ Neil Young - Change Your Mind (The Complex Sessions)

An interview w/ Sophie Brous (Program Director of the 2011 Melbourne International Jazz Festival)

Transcendental Sounds

Jamie xx - Far Nearer/Beat For

♪♫ The Spicey Satanists - Ebannaw

War on drugs has also become a war on free thinking

Does A.A. Need God?

A long-standing rift in the A.A. rank and file broke into the open over the weekend as Toronto’s two atheist/agnostic Alcoholics Anonymous groups were thrown off the official city list. The Greater Toronto Area Intergroup, the local A.A. coordinating organization, voted to remove the two groups from the published directory of meetings, and from its website. The Toronto Star said the city’s two secular groups, named Beyond Belief and We Agnostics, kicked up the fuss by adopting a rewritten version of the famous Twelve Steps, removing all references to “God” that appear in Bill W.’s original version. “The name of God appears four times in the Twelve Steps,” writes the Star’s Leslie Scrivener, “and echoes the period in which they were written—the 1930s.” But rewriting the basic tenets of A.A. as preserved through the years did not sit well with many A.A. members. “They [the altered Twelve Steps] are not our Twelve Steps,” said an AA member who was at the meeting of the Intergroup that delisted the two groups. “They’ve changed them to their own personal needs.”
It's well known that A.A. dynamics vary widely, and many A.A. meetings over the years have ended with a group recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “That has obviously stopped in all but hard-core groups, the A.A. member told the Star. “We welcome people with open arms.” We think that is the right approach, but banning the groups is an odd way to welcome them. “I’ve tried AA meetings and I couldn’t get past the influence of right-wing Christianity,” said another prospective member. Serving these drinkers is the goal of the atheist/agnostic groups.
“God as we understood him,” as it says in the Third Step, has been a stumbling block to many throughout A.A.’s 75-year history. Thinkers from Carl Jung to Gregory Bateson have seen in A.A.’s higher power not Godhead, but rather a recognition of processes beyond a single individual—the power of the many, compared to the power of one. The group itself becomes the “higher power,” in many cases. Is it time to officially admit that it's possible to be secular and sober in A.A.? Writer Joe Chisholm sent us this quote by A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson, from the A.A. Grapevine of April, 1961: “In AA’s first years I all but ruined the whole undertaking with this sort of unconscious arrogance. God as I understood Him had to be for everybody. Sometimes my aggression was subtle and sometimes it was crude. But either way it was damaging—perhaps fatally so—to numbers of non-believers.”
Here are two examples of the changes in the Twelve Steps that got Beyond Belief booted out of the Toronto A.A. circle:
Step Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Adapted version: Came to accept and to understand that we needed strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity.
Step Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
Adapted version: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the AA program.
Dirk Hanson @'The Fix'