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I've never actually seen Firefly - can someone enlighten me?
You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com |
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Jerry Springer opera tour goes on despite prosecution threat.
Theatres across Britain have united in defiance against a threat of prosecution from an evangelical Christian group to save the national tour of the controversial musical Jerry Springer the Opera.
Christian Voice, which organised street vigils on the evening of the BBC broadcast of the opera in January, successfully petitioned to have Arts Council funding of the regional tour axed after damning the show as "blasphemous".
It sent letters to theatres up and down the country which said: "We are at this moment preparing charges of the criminal offence of blasphemy for service upon those responsible for broadcasting the show on BBC2, and those responsible for staging it at the Cambridge Theatre. Should any regional theatre stage Jerry Springer the Opera this autumn, we shall be looking to prosecute them as well."
Now we know where Muslims got the idea from!
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Rather belatedly, I refer to the death of David Hall, Director of the Town and Country Planning Association for some 30 years and a thoroughly nice man.
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Listening to the Today programme this morning, I heard an interview with Tim Wade, one of those 'honoured' for their part in the rescue of people caught up in the Tube and Bus bombings in London. I use the 'quotes' deliberately, because while it is absolutely right that the efforts of Mr Wade and his colleagues should be recognised, the awful interview - "are you nervous about going to the Palace" and similar cr#p made me cringe.
If I was in Mr Wades position and a republican - or even simply someone who didn't subscribe to the media nonsense surrounding the doings of Mr and Mrs Windsor and their brood - I would be furious that the only way to have my actions recognised would be to take part in such a mockery. The snobbishness of the so-called honours system is appalling - the subtle distinctions between the various grades of knighthood, the various 'Orders' of the British Empire are manifold.
I wish there was an alternative - but unfortunately all the ones I have come across so far have too many overtones of the Hero of Socialist Labor.
Any ideas?
Edit: I was also going to write something about the always reliably vomit inducing Thought for the Day - which was particularly nauseous today - and the dreadful Charles Clark but in the end gave up - some things are beyond parody.
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In a recent post I quoted this:
Rather than expect people to visit somebody else’s online space to share their views or debate issues, more and more people will share their own views through a personal space, weblog or wiki with the expectation that these can be cross-posted or syndicated to other places that would like to share them. People should own their own contributions and express them in their own voice - it should be up to the consulting organisation to do the leg-work to aggregate these contributions by going to the people, rather than vice versa.
I've been playing with wikis for a while, using PBwiki, and I used to visit Ecotone when it was active, but I have never used it for any serious purpose. Now in a naked attempt at promotion, which I freely acknowledge, those nice people at PBwiki have offered to double my wikispace it I post about them here. You can tour their site or sign on and play as I did.
There is a serious point to this of course. The availability of extra space gives me a chance to think about slightly more complex possibilities. I also believe that the greater the variety of tools available, whether blogs and wikis or photologs (like flickr), the more likely it is that they will permeate into the wider community and give the standard member of the public the chance to have their say in their own words.
I'm working on something at the moment which could bring some of these ideas together in a public consultation. If it is going to work I have to be able to do it myself because I am in no way a programmer - I stopped doing that when I sold my BBC Micro. Anything that depends on complex tools simply won't work. I'm hoping to adapt an idea from Village Design Statements that I know has been used elsewhere in other ways (here and here for example).
I'm looking for funding for a bundle of disposable cameras (or better still some digital compacts) to give out to 'ordinary people' so that they can then take pictures of what matters to them. The current context for me is our local town centre, but it could be health, being young in this town or anything . The idea is to upload the pictures plus writings by local people to a wiki or perhaps to a photolog and enable a debate around those images and writings. A wiki would be better in many because it can take all forms of comment in formats not predetermined by others, but the downside is that with no structure it can be hard to find your way around. It is important that this doesn't take place in isolation - it has to be tied in with other things to give everyone as many ways in tot he discussion as possible. We could also for example set up an online forum, hold 'cafe conversations', exhibitions of the photographs, invite letters in the local paper, do guided walks, have a market stall. We could look at the history of the place - and therefore at why it looks and operates as it does today. The Urban Tapestries project might be another option
I'm quite excited by the possibilities, but also slightly daunted. Most public consultation activity does one thing - it almost certaintly isn't enough and it may indeed be the wrong thing, but by and large it is easier, especially for time pressed and/or cash strapped local authorities or voluntary groups. The approach I'm thinking about is multi-stemmed and much more complex. I haven't even begun to think about how we might collate what comes in...
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It appears that I am 1,874,404,735 seconds old and was born in the Year of the Dog.
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“Most research into why participation is not generating the hoped-for results and levels of engagement points to three key groups of issues:
- Conventional 'top-down' approaches to participation do not overcome the feeling of powerlessness that many participants experience, nor the political, economic, cultural and technical barriers to participation.
- People are much more likely to get involved if they think something tangible and worthwhile will come out of it, which is why it is better to support independent organisations run by people themselves.
- Capacity building to support empowerment and participation is lacking, especially among excluded groups - but this does not mean turning people into professional service users.”
“At the heart of these issues is the question of power and where it lies. Regardless of the quality of techniques employed or facilitation provided, if a participation exercise consists of a powerful body (e.g. a government department) inviting limited submissions on pre-determined questions from the disempowered, then the power imbalance built into the consultation will cast doubt on the results. Power is derived most obviously from being able to choose and frame the questions and the type of language used; but it is also important to consider who is asking the questions, when and how they are asked, and of course who can answer.”
This quote I found via a very interesting article by David Wilcox on his web-site “Designing for Civil Society”. It is actually a quote from a book in the process of writing by Wilcox and Lee Bryant. You can read the full chapter here from which this further quote is taken.
Capacity building should be about network development and strengthening, rather than just individual interactions with service users. Even if organisations adopt open participation tools and methods, the absence of network development will mean they never get off the ground.
Personal ownership, agency and voice:
Rather than expect people to visit somebody else’s online space to share their views or debate issues, more and more people will share their own views through a personal space, weblog or wiki with the expectation that these can be cross-posted or syndicated to other places that would like to share them. People should own their own contributions and express them in their own voice - it should be up to the consulting organisation to do the leg-work to aggregate these contributions by going to the people, rather than vice versa.
* * *
What all these themes have in common is the question of power: in a networked world, power lies with the network nodes, not the centre. If we are to move beyond the traditional broadcast or portal model of e-government, or the staid forum-based approach of early e-democracy, then we must actively seek to increase the power and the capacity of the network for participation to succeed.
These comments are made in the context of e-democracy and the Internet, but they apply equally to the more conventional networks we try to build in our community planning activities. If we are ever to move beyond mere consultation, where people are invited to give their views on a limited set of issues that are fed back into a process that remains largely opaque and inaccessible to them, then we need to look to this sort of thinking for some lessons on how to do this in the real world. This will only work however if it is matched by a corresponding shift in behaviour of those in government, which means letting go and sharing power within a network of organisations, not clinging to the idea that only government, charities or companies have the answers and their ‘customers’ (or ‘clients’) are simply a resource to be managed.
“…if you look at what is happening in the commercial world, marketing specialists and some big corporations now recognise that that the best way to improve their products is to develop and maintain continuing conversations (http://www.cluetrain.org) with their customers in an attempt to genuinely involve them in customer support, product design and future direction.”
This idea of conversations crops up in two other articles, one by David Wilcox here, the other by Kevin Harris. As Kevin Harris points out getting people actively involved has its down side:
…[active community involvement] makes huge assumptions about people's readiness to commit to community action. But I've stood in community centres watching people come in to find out what's happening and see who can help them; and I know they will sense and avoid any situation where they might be pinned to the wall and coerced into being treasurer of this or that committee for the next four years. If your everyday life is a complex muddle of errant kids and dodgy health, malevolent housing conditions and unpredictable income, you're probably not up for a 24 month committee commitment. If you can see how it relates to your problems though, you might be up for collectively organising something where you can see a beginning and an end.
He has summarized his conclusions in a diagram that you can see here.
Boosting what I've called community confidence, local presence, and the frequency of conversations between residents will have a positive effect, I would argue, on getting sustainable community engagement (which of course has to be a rich mix of participatory opportunities, not a string of committees) and on community cohesion.
The outcome is what David Wilcox calls ‘more conversations, less committees’, which is used as the title for for this post. In that context, an organisation of which I am a Board member is hoping to pick up on the idea of People’s Cafes developed by the New Economics Foundation. I am also quite enamoured with the idea of ‘Study Circles’ and the use of storytelling.
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Photographs by Iraqi Civilians.
By now it is a truism that “The first casualty of war is truth.”
How is anyone to know what is going on? Which news source to believe: Al Jazeera? Fox? CNN? Both the New York Times and Washington Post recently apologized to their readers for the inadequacy of their pre-invasion period coverage.
US and other foreign journalists were “embedded” with American and British troops. Few were able to explore the Iraqi side of things.
Now it is unsafe for US journalists to walk the streets in much of Iraq. Few speak Arabic. In many situations reporting is prohibitively dangerous and difficult.
The Daylight Community Arts Foundation, a group committed to new forms of documentary, had the idea of providing Iraqi civilians with disposable cameras to get another, perhaps more tenable point of view. Why not ask the subjects what is going on, instead of making them the objects of a foreigner’s camera?
These pictures are a result of that experiment. They are glimpses from the inside. Ten people were given cameras in April and May. They were told: “This is an opportunity to show the American public what you want them to see.”
No one has found weapons of mass destruction. But in these pictures – taken from only ten rolls of film - there may be glimmers of another, more formidable weapon: understanding.
-- Fred Ritchin
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In response to this post by Brian Micklethwait about the Cream rerunion concert recently rebroadcast on TV I made this comment.
Disraeli Gears is also one of the greatest pop/rock albums ever! I have never understood however, how Ginger Baker could be so magnificent with Cream and so c##p afterwards. I saw him with his own band Airforce soon after Cream broke up and I have never been so disappointed. By and large drummers should never lead bands! (Gene Krupa and possibly Buddy Rich excepted)
[typos corrected]
I still don't know the answer, but I suspect that it lies in the fact that Cream were a real trio - not a backing group for one musician - while I have no idea who was in Airforce except Ginger Baker and I still can't be bothered to google it.
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Link: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory
As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
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