Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Five British citizens have been seized in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The group, comprising a finance expert and four bodyguards, were captured from the finance ministry by kidnappers wearing police uniforms and driving police vehicles. The BBC is reporting that over 40 police vehicles were involved in the incident.

In separate incidents, at least 22 people were killed and 55 injured in a bus explosion elsewhere in the city, and at least 15 people were killed in a car bomb which injured a further 36, possibly more.

It is believed the four bodyguards are employed by Canadian GardaWord, a subsidiary of Garda.

Friday, June 30, 2006

New South Wales Police, in connection with the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, Tow Truck Authority and Centrelink (the agency responsible for providing income support) conducted random checks on tow trucks on Thursday. The checks were carried out in Bankstown, a suburb in Sydney’s South-West.

According to police, 50 tow trucks were pulled over during the operation, coined “Operation Hook” between 8:30 a.m. AEST and 4 p.m. Of those, 26 were directed to report to a vehicle inspection facility for further investigation.

Police issued 70 infringement notices (fines) during the operation. 11 were for being unlicensed to conduct business as a tow truck driver or business, and 13 for having incorrectly secured loads. 17 vehicles were issued defect notices as part of the operation.

Tow truck operators (business owners) are required to make a payment of AUD$770 per year to the NSW government, while drivers are charged $152 per year for their licence. An additional charge for tow truck number plates of $292 per year also applies.

The maximum penalty for operators not being licensed correctly is $11,000 or 12 months imprisonment, drivers without the correct licence can be fined $5,500 or sentenced to 6 months.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Following the Pilkhana massacre which occurred February 25 and 26 leaving 74 dead and the inferno at the Bashundhara City shopping mall complex March 13 leaving seven dead, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said security measures are being tightened countrywide across Bangladesh.

Fire drills will be enacted at all key-point installations (KPI). Fire fighting systems will be examined by the fire brigade and the public works department (PWD) to ensure functionality. Security measures will be enhanced supplementing areas under private security such as at the Bashundhara City Complex.

The Fire Service and Civil Defence Department requires modernization and needs new equipment to fight fires past the sixth floor of buildings. The Fire Brigade says it needs turntable ladders, snorkels, foam-tenders, lighting units, emergency tenders, fireproof uniforms, and rescue ropes for fire fighting and rescue operations. Transportation to fires is also an issue due to narrow roads, low electrical wires and congestion.

The Bangladesh National Building Code requires fire fighting equipment installed in buildings over seven floors. This code is to be monitored by authorities to ensure compliance with the new guidelines and to make sure buildings are being maintained.

The Bashundhara City Complex opened Monday for shoppers two days after Friday’s blaze. A probe is underway to determine the cause of the fire and to assess structural damage.

Loss of life was minimized as the blaze broke out on a Friday, the beginning of the weekend in Bangladesh, so offices in the upper floors were empty. The lower eight floors are used for shopping and the upper floors are all Bashundhara Group offices.

The mall is valued at Tk 7.0 billion (US$100 million). It is not known if the complex is covered by fire insurance.

It is estimated that it will take over two years to rebuild the area damaged by flames which were burned down to a skeleton. Bashundhara City’s technical advisor, Latifur Rahman, estimated damages at Tk 2.0 billion (US$29m).

Only one television cameraman has been allowed in to film the burnt area. None of the 2,500 shops, cinemas or cafes were burnt by the inferno. The seventh and eighth floors still experience smoke damage, and there was water damage to merchandise.

A three member committee is currently investigating the cause of the fire which will consist of Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary of the ministry, representatives of the police, IGP Noor Muhammad, and fire brigade, Director General Abu Nayeem Md Shahidullah. The committee is required to report within the week with their findings. The forensics department is also sifting through the burnt remains.

The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries has also formed a committee which has begun interviewing witnesses and recording their testimony alongside the government committee.

It has been discovered that 150 closed circuit cameras were not being used when the fire started. Another mystery is why the mall fire fighting system has been found unused.

“In the shopping mall there is an ultra-technology elevator which runs even without electricity but we have found that locked,” Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary (Police) of the home ministry, said. “Why the fire burnt so fiercely is a matter to think. We have to see if there was any incendiary substance there. These matters seem to be mysterious.”

Mall management has been asked to submit substances and items which would have been in the upper floors when the fire started. The fire erupted on the 17th floor and spread quickly to the two floors above and engulfed the three floors below. The aerial ladders belonging to the Fire Service and Civil Defence reached as high as the 13th floor of the 21-storey building.

Videos have been sent to the United States (US) for examination to assist in determining the cause of the fire and to help in the damage assessment. Experts from the US are expected to arrive soon.

Firefighters were brought to the rooftop of the 20-storey tower by helicopter. The only fatality in this operation was Baki Billa, a firefighter of Bashundhara City firefighting department, who fell when climbing down a rope from a helicopter to the roof of the building. Three other firefighters made the transition safely. At this same time, the chief security officer was safely rescued by the Bangladesh Air Force helicopter, a Bell 212. Six security officers of the complex also lost their lives.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Matt Hanson aims to raise £1 million to fund the production of a feature-length film which would be distributed freely via the Internet under a Creative Commons licence, all funded through 50,000 people each donating £25 to the project, which he’s called ‘A Swarm of Angels‘.

No stranger to filmmaking, Matt has produced numerous digital short films, a series of books on digital filmmaking and set up the digital film festival onedotzero, now in its tenth year. He wants to finally make a feature length film, and decided that it was better to turn to the Internet for help and funding rather than plod through the usual ‘development hell‘.

“I wanted to put into practice what I’ve been preaching as a film futurist for ten years, and the technology and Internet infrastructure has just really caught up with that vision now for me to put it into practice.”

The process is inspired by the ‘web 2.0‘ movement, using social and collaborative communities on the Internet. Matt doesn’t see the funding as coming from donations, but as people paying a subscription to become part of a ‘Swarm’. “Rather than the ‘many producer’ model, this is more of an ^[sic] ‘smart consumer’ model … members can help implement and bring their expertise into play, and so become more actively involved in the production.”

The project hopes to use professional actors and crew, but use qualified members from the swarm as much as possible. The cast and the crew, including any volunteers that get chosen, would be paid for their work on the film, with Matt suggesting that this is “a great way for people to get into the industry”.

Those members not directly involved in making the film can still participate in the process by discussing ideas on a messageboard, and having a vote on certain crucial decisions such as which script gets chosen for production. Asked how he would balance his own creative direction with input from members, Matt said “my vision will lead the project forward and define the parameters, but the Swarm can influence that, and indeed offer improvements or insights I might not think of alone”.

“Remember filmmaking is always a team effort – whether you are Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick or Jean Luc Godard, you promote people within the project that will complement and bring something extra to the vision of the film. Give it more life. With the Swarm we are making that process more democratic, and giving a wider range of people an opportunity to shine and have creative input.”

Members are promised a collector’s edition DVD of the end product and exclusive merchandise, but the main distribution of the film will be via the Internet, using ‘BitTorrent‘ and peer-to-peer networks. “Unlike many other filmmakers, I’m not wedded to cinema projection as the ‘be all and end all’ – I’m much more excited about people viewing remixed versions on their video iPods,” explains Matt.

The ‘remixing’ of the film will be possible thanks to it being distributed under a Creative Commons licence. Matt suggests that the ‘younger generation’ is more used to being involved with and interacting with entertainment, and points to remixes of the Star Wars films (eg ‘The Phantom Edit‘) as an example of these ‘mashups’. “At the end of the project I would love to have an event that showcased five wildly different versions of the film, different visions from people other than my definitive initial edit,” he suggests. The licence will be for non-commercial use only, however, and so commercial TV stations would still have to pay in order to screen the film.

The project is partly inspired by the success of ‘The Million Dollar Homepage‘, in which British student Alex Tew aimed to raise a million dollars to fund his university education, simply by selling advertising space on a single web page. The publicity surrounding the idea, coupled with the ‘viral’ effect of Internet users passing the page on, meant that he eventually managed to make himself the million dollars.

The success of these projects partly seems to depend on them being interesting and original enough to attract enough attention, and it’s often difficult to see how they could be repeated. Copy-cat versions of the million dollar homepage have so far failed to hugely take off. When asked about this idea, Matt responded “I already expect people to copy the model we are inventing with A Swarm of Angels – it’s a perfect way to create cult media, where the director gets more creative control and organically funds a project, and the fans of the project get more involvement within it. If the market gets too crowded with these projects though, then they’ll have to be packaged differently to stand out. But that’s what traditional film and media projects need to do anyway.”

Over 600 members have signed up to the ‘swarm’ so far, which Matt comments is already an early success, but 50,000 members in total will be needed in order to fully fund the £1 million budget. Matt suggests that getting to the next stage, of reaching 1,000 members, followed by the phase of getting 5,000 members, will be the hardest part, as after that the film will be more ‘tangible’. He expects to raise the full budget, but comments that if the fundraising stalls, “options will be presented by advisors and The Swarm, and based on some kind of consensus we’ll come up with the best option for moving forward.”

Traditionally, independent films are funded either through persuading wealthy individuals to invest, who sometimes are sometimes given ‘Executive Producer‘ credits, or through organisations like the UK Film Council, who award funds from the National Lottery. A tax credit for producers making small films in the UK was announced by the government in 2005, in a bid to give a boost to the UK independent film industry.

Matt says that the film will be “a thriller with soft science fiction elements”, which he says will suit his target audience. “But it will have an indie edginess to it, and be far more visually inventive than you would get with a ‘normal’ British independent feature.” Contributors to the project include artists The Kleptones, who will help with the soundtrack, comic book writer Warren Ellis and documentary filmmaker Grant Gee.

The Swarm of Angels project is online at aswarmofangels.com and costs £25 as an individual to become a member.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Pakistan has lifted a ban on the video-sharing website YouTube, which was said to be brought in after a video offensive to Islam was uploaded to the site. According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the offending material was in relation to a trailer for a film by Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician.

The PTA ordered the country’s 70 internet service providers to ban YouTube. However, their actions mistakenly blocked the site on other international ISPs, preventing many countries’ access to the popular site for around two hours.

Wilders is expected to release a movie about violence in Islamic culture. The film called Fitna would be set ‘inside’ the Koran, with a book frame surrounding the images and a mix of Koran verses with footage of executions and other violence in Islamic countries such as Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fear that the release of the movie might trigger a worldwide surge of violence. It is expected that the film will show the destruction of a Koran, which is “tantamount to heresy” in Islam, according to the FBI/DHS report. The Dutch Prime Minister has said that the movie has caused a serious crisis situation, with several Dutch embassies and companies abroad worrying about safety. Wilders has previously declared that the Koran should be banned, and he has compared it to Hitler‘s Mein Kampf.

The PTA has also blocked websites depicting the controversial cartoons of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper in 2006 that also sparked violence in the Muslim world. Some of the cartoons have recently been reprinted.

This is not the first time a country has moved to block YouTube. Turkey and Thailand both chose to temporarily ban the sites, as did Morocco which blocked the site after a video criticising the country’s treatment of Western Saharans was uploaded.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

On Wednesday, a team of over 200 scientists led by astronomer Tabetha Boyajian announced the mysterious dim-and-recover behavior of stellar object KIC 8462852, also called “Boyajian’s Star” or “Tabby’s Star,” is likely to be due to clouds of color-warping space dust and not a planet, another star or, as some astronomers have hypothesized, a giant structure built by a distant civilization.

“If a solid, opaque object like a megastructure was passing in front of the star, it would block out light equally at all colors,” Dr. Boyajian told the press. “This is contrary to what we observe.” And, in a separate statement, “Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure.”

The research team analyzed 22 months of data collected by an array of ground-based telescopes that covered many wavelengths of light. The study period lasted from March 2016 to December 2017, which included a number of decreases in brightness. The first dip started on the night of Thursday May 18. A robotic 14-inch Celestron telescope at Fairborn Observatory in Arizona watched Tabby’s star lose brightness by a dramatic 3% by Friday, confirming a prediction the star would undergo its unusual dimming events once every 750 days. Other major telescope projects and citizen astronomers confirmed these findings. That dip was complex and continued through to the following Sunday, after a brief rise in brightness over the weekend. It ended a few days later, with Boyajian and fellow astronomer and co-author of the recent paper Jason Wright discussing the phenomena with the public via Twitter: “will we have a flurry of dips to come? Stay tuned!”

“Tabby’s star[…] went through a lot of very strange dimming events that got up to 22% dimmer during the Kepler Mission, and since then we’ve been eagerly awaiting another dip. And the reason that we’ve been waiting for that is that whatever is causing the star to get dimmer will leave a spectral fingerprint behind,” said Dr. Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, after the May event, now a co-author of the current work. “So if it’s a lot of dust between us and the star that’s passing by, it should block more blue light than red light. If there’s gas in that dust, that gas should absorb very specific wavelengths. So we’ve been eager to see one of these changes, these dips in the star, so we can take the spectra.” He also addressed space fans at the time via Twitter: “ALERT:@tsboyajian’s star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please!”

The primary mission of the Kepler project monitored more than 150,000 stars with the primary goal of detecting exoplanets. If a star gets dimmer but then recovers, a planet may have passed in front of it. But Tabby’s star has shown something else. An exoplanet can cause its sun to dim by perhaps 1% and not for very long. Some of Tabby’s dips have been this mild, but others have hit 20% and lasted weeks. It also tends to recover only partially, slowly showing a net dimming over the years.

The plethora of hypotheses behind Tabby’s star has made it a favorite among space fans and both professional and amateur astronomers. Space dust was one of the many hypothesized explanations, but if that’s the reason, its origin was and remains a mystery with stargazers speculating many giant comets could be on elliptical orbits or breaking up in front of it or the dips in brightness could be aftereffects of the star consuming a planet. Some even hypothesized alien civilizations might have been harvesting the sun’s energy using a Dyson sphere. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) devoted some observation time to Tabby’s star in the fall of 2016 as part of the Breakthrough Listen project. No radio or laser pulse signals were detected.

“This latest research rules out alien megastructures, but it raises the plausibility of other phenomena being behind the dimming,” said Dr. Wright. “There are models involving circumstellar material — like exocomets, which were Boyajian’s team’s original hypothesis — which seem to be consistent with the data we have […] some astronomers favor the idea that nothing is blocking the star — that it just gets dimmer on its own — and this also is consistent with this summer’s data.”

This study is a departure from many previous works in that it relies heavily on the work of citizen scientists, volunteers who help examine the great quantities of data produced by NASA’s Kepler mission. The follow-up observations after the Kepler project were funded by a $100,000 Kickstarter to continuously monitor Tabby’s star. The unusual behavior of Tabby’s star was discovered in 2011 by volunteers for the Planet Hunters citizen science project, which was implemented to search for planets in the Kepler data.

“It’s exciting. I am so appreciative of all of the people who have contributed to this in the past year — the citizen scientists and professional astronomers. It’s quite humbling to have all of these people contributing in various ways to help figure it out,” Dr. Boyajian said in a statement.

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Volunteers and interested people could visit the Belgian Indymedia headquarters in Brussels on Sunday during their second open door day. Around 50 people came to hear about the organisation’s evolution during 2007 and what’s coming up for 2008. A book about citizen journalism, with contributions from both mainstream journalists and several alternative media experts, was also presented. And the Indymedians mingled, with loungy Creative Commons music in the background.

Indymedia.be was founded in 2000, only a few months after Indymedia’s inception at the alter-globalist protests at the World Trade Organisation‘s summit in Seattle. This made them the first Indymedia on the European mainland. The Independent Media Center’s trademark is politically left, social reporting. The initial growth was slow, but during 2007, the organisation grew to around 110 regular contributors, with the first steps towards regional groups in Brussels and Antwerp. The public today could also visit the brand new media centre with new equipment. And although readership has increased exponentially to around 7000 visitors per day (and with it, server costs), finances have not, leading to a fund raising campaign.

Several projects during 2007 aimed to increase the quality of the articles; research projects such as those on the Belgian elections and formation crisis centred on social issues, where the mainstream media itself recognised that the political debate was often monotonous and lacking content.

Nevertheless, bringing analysis and background will continue a challenge during 2008. During the photographer’s workshop, the possibilities for photo documentary and photo-based interviews vs. simple photo reporting were illustrated as an alternative to bringing “just a bunch of pictures from another street protest.”

As a central player in the field of alternative media in Belgium, Indymedia also wants to stir the debate about participatory journalism. This has led to their first ‘media reader’ about the topic, and the creators hope more versions will follow.