Journalism is About Telling Stories That Make a Difference?

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Muller

E-bay founder, billionaire and philantropist Pierre Omidyar’s new enterprise First Look Media has been described in a short video clip and one wonders what is so new that dedicated investigative individuals like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras or New York University professor Jay Rosen want to join. After all, the project looks quite big with “multiple digital publications”, a “flagship site covering news in politics, entertainment and sports”, “digital magazines” with its own “look and feel”. That it wants to bring back to journalism what has been lost? That writers, reporters and producers work together with visual designers, fact checkers and editors is something any serious media outlet is doing? For instance, when it comes to former blogger, now journalist, Glenn Grennwald, isn’t it about responsibilities of content? I doubt whether Greenwald, who has made clear both at Salon.com and The Guardian that he alone decides what he was going to blog, fast and as far as we know, well-investigated, would accept the production of “powerful stories presented in compelling packages.” Freedom to travel, legal protection and new and innovative technology, is that a new concept? Legal protection by The Guardian has not prevented Glenn Greenwald from getting stuck in Brazil.

In fact, Journalism is more than telling stories. In democracies, it is the fourth estate. Uncovering and criticizing what governments do and what they are not supposed to do.  “Telling stories that make a difference” is not enough.

28 January 2014 @ 7:35 pm.
Last modified January 28, 2014.
Posted in Journalism | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

German Television Interview With Snowden

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Muller

Update below.

http://vimeo.com/85155619

Whether German television channel ARD intentionally hid its interview with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden Sunday night is not clear. That it was immediately taken off its media center so that interested viewers who had missed the broadcast could not watch it afterwards is quite conspicuous. The in principle harmless interview was later leaked by LiveLeak. ARD (a consortium of the public-law broadcasting institutions in Germany) has a mandate to inform, not to hide in deference of Transatlantic sensitivities. That phone calls and internet activities of 80 millions Germans (well, much less given the fact that toddlers do not do phone calls yet and  and pensioners have still an aversion to go online) constantly surveilled by NSA’s mass surveillance is the scandal, not Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tapped mobile phone.

“There is no question that the U.S. is engaged in economical spying,” Snowden claimed mentioning German company Siemens. That should have been substantiated by an inquiring interviewer. In general, there was not very much new in the interview, maybe except that Snowden claimed that he had applied for asylum not only in Germany or France but in the UK as well. Maybe that was a glitch but the interviewer did not dig deeper.

28 January 2014 @ 6:55 pm.

Update 31 January 2014. Vimeo had to delete the video and gave the following explanation:

Sorry, “Edward Snowden’s First Television Interview (ARD/Germany)” was deleted at 3:41:53 Fri Jan 31, 2014.

Vimeo has removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by NDR claiming that this material is infringing: Edward Snowden’s First Television Interview (ARD/Germany).

You may still see it on the LiveLeak site here.

Posted in Germany, surveillance, USA | Tagged , | Leave a comment

By Compass and Straightedge

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Muller

Update below.

Readers may have noticed that I have attributed considerable recreational time on this blog to conceive and convey quasi-periodic patterns on ancient Islamic buildings. Following a first visit of Esfahan’s Darb-i Imam shrine in the old city in late 2007 and comparing the patterns with those on the celebrated western iwan of Esfahan’s Great Mosque, a more common tourist attraction which I had opportunities to admire numerous times before, I had always asked myself: How have they done that?

Lu and Steinhardt (2007), in their famous paper in Science magazine, had frankly rejected any possibility of creating complicated geometric designs with tesserae by compass and straightedge. They had offered instead a solution using so-called girih tiles (or, by other authors, prototiles) which can, with some attention, be identified on all kinds of tesselation in Iran and elsewhere: a decagon, a rhombus, a so-called bowtie, and an elogated hexagon.

When in Esfahan, I had noticed frequently reconstruction work on either building. There were no signs of girih tiles used for that purpose. Unfortunately, I had no time to ask for respective workshops but got the impression that something must be wrong with Lu and Steinhart’s solution.

al Ajlouni a

That construction of complicated, even quasi-periodic, tilings is in fact possible with compass and straightedge, even more than 900 years ago, has recently been shown by Rima A. al-Ajlouni (2012), see [pdf], an assistant professor at the College of Architecture of Texas Tech University, in Lubbock. A decagonal, quasi-periodic tiling (not exactly a Penrose tiling) which can be found at two different portals of the Darb-i Imam shrine and the Great Mosque in Esfahan (and, in essence, also on the somewhat disputed Gunbad-i Kabud in Maragha, Iran) is constructed from a framework of nested decagrams originating from a seed unit, a decagon. It grows based on the Fibonacci sequence and serves as the underlying basic grid for the quasi-periodic pattern. The positions of star units are entirely determined by the intersections of the network of nested decagrams. Connecting formations are formed by overlapping main units. The pattern can be grown infinitely by using the resulting cartwheel pattern as new seed unit.

See a presentation by Dr. Ajlouni on her discovery here.

22 January 2014 @ 7:15 pm.

 

Update January 23, 2014. A reader had pointed to a public lecture which was given at the Middle East Association on 27 April 2007 by R. Henry of the British Museum in London, where a workshop in Esfahan is pictured and the creation of tenfold symmetrical patterns with compass and unmarked straightedge demonstrated. There are no girih tiles involved.

Posted in Art, Iran, Islam | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Moon Illusion

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Muller
Stereogram of a landscape modified to include identical moons in each half-field. By fusion an impression is created that the left moon is closer and smaller than the right moon (Kaufman and Kaufman 2000)

Stereogram of a landscape modified to include identical moons in each half-field. By fusion an impression is created that the left moon is closer and smaller than the right moon (Kaufman and Kaufman 2000)

Not only when having lived in the Middle East a couple of years ago, then interested in how beginning and end of Ramadan was actually determined, I have always been a moonwatcher. I remember vividly my first lunar eclipse when at the tender age of 6 or 7. My late father had woken me up and showed and explained the event. When having moved beyond the Arctic circle in 2007, I noticed the phenomenon of one or two full moons in the months November, December and January which won’t set but circulate, in big waves, above the horizon. A small compensation for the long and dark winter when sun won’t rise at all. It was amazing that not every local was aware of a circulating full moon.

Tromsø is surrounded by several up to and more than one thousand meters high mountains, and when the full moon is close to the jagged horizon, in warmer colors due to borrowed sun light refraction in the denser atmosphere, the human eye perceives it huge. Much huger than when it is in the zenith in cold clear winter nights. It can easily be shown that the different size of the moon when it is close to the horizon or up in the sky is just an illusion, the moon illusion. The moon’s angular size is the same.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Guilt of Pope Benedict

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Muller

When Benedict XVI resigned from his papacy in February last year it was clear that it was not soley due to advanced age and overall frailty. Today, the Vatican admitted that the former pope had defrocked almost 400 priests in just two years, 2011 and 2012, for child abuse. Federico Lombardi, spokesman of the Vatican, had initially denied a respective AP report but had later to retract that statement.

After an avalanche of cases Benedict has probably realized that there is no other way than to resign from his post, due to personal involvement. Still in September 2013, Benedict had denied, in an open letter to Professor Piergiorgio Odifreddi, that he had covered-up abusive priests. In fact he has.

“All the issues I have discussed thus far have been part of a serious dialogue, for which, as I’ve said repeatedly, I am grateful. The situation is quite different in the chapter on the priest and on Catholic morality, and even more different in the chapter on Jesus. As for what you say about the moral abuse of minors by priests, I can, as you know, only note it with deep dismay. I have never tried to hide these things. That the power of evil penetrates even to this point in the interior life of the faith is, for us, a suffering which, on the one hand, we must endure, while on the other hand, we must at the same time do everything possible so that cases such as these never occur again. Nor is it a reason for comfort to know that, according to the research of sociologists, the percentage of priests guilty of these crimes is not higher than in those found in other similar professions. In any case, this deviant behaviour should not be ostensibly presented as a filthy crime which only exists in the Catholic Church.” (Emphasis added.)

That is not enough. A common argument in the Catholic Church is that child abuse is not more prevalent among priests as it is in the general population. Benedict is even more conservative when he compares priests with “similar professions”. But which profession does he mean? Teachers, sport trainers? As homosexuals are largely overrepresented among priests simply because of the fact that it would be easier to hide one’s sexual orientation in a closed organization of men where celibacy is an absolute requirement, pedophiles may be overrepresented as well since interaction with the congregation includes daily contact with teenagers of both sexes.

Regardless of the simple fact that the Catholic Church has the highest moral demands in particular as regards all matters of sexuality, defrocking is not enough. Child abuse is a most serious crime, in contrast to homosexuality. The former has to be prosecuted not covered-up. Benedict is an accomplice. May his successor Francis be wise and give criminal pedophiles over to our justice systems.

18 January 2014 @ 7:39 pm.

Last modified January 18, 2014.

Posted in Christianity | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment