Everywhere in Copenhagen!

These things are everywhere. It took a week for me to see one with well deserved grafitti on.

Iraq suspends the licences 10 Satellite News Stations

Attention statisticians and undergraduates!

The BBC is reporting today that Iraq has suspended the broadcasting licences of 10 satellite news stations after a wave of sectarian violence swept (and is still sweeping) over the country. The sectarian lines in the greater part of Iraq are divided between Sunni and Shia muslims; Iraq has a Shia majority but while Saddam Hussein was in power, the Sunni majority were represented by his Ba’ath party and thus held all the power.

It would be interesting to see if this effective ban has an effect in reducing or increasing the violence across the country. In the BBC report the correspondent says that most of the stations are ‘Sunni-owned while Qatar-based al-Jazeera is perceived as more pro-Sunni in its Arabic-language reporting in Iraq.’

If the rates of violence reduce, what does this mean for societies around the world in times of crisis? 24-hour news is one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century, with effects that are as yet unclear – 24 hour news may or may not increase partisanship, paranoia, negative perceptions of the world, and lead to more unverified reporting, of the people who consume it in great numbers. But to what extent is this an effect of the actual phenomenon of 24 hour news, or is it simply a vector for manipulation that was more traditionally seen in the newspapers? I say this because one negative example of this culture that my mind leapt to was the United States, where you are either a Fox person or a CNN person with no apparent room for someone in between.

So in Iraq, they are suspending these 10 satellite news stations, but the report does not say if it is banning all satellite news stations. In any case, we can only wait and see what happens in Iraq for the period of the license suspension, which is not given in the report…

…In which I did finally start a Tumblr

A post a few months ago I considered beginning a tumblr in order to record some of the silly mistakes i see around a lot. So I did, and gave it the suitable tumblr-ish name and a theme with Helvetica font and block colours in.

I’ve found using it though that sometimes I do just want to share stuff without necessarily having errors in, it is difficult to stick to my proverbial mandate. I’ve also noticed that tumblr possibly destroys your attention span. It’s a twitter with pictures and humans are visual creatures, though also tumblr does not choke up Opera (at least, for me) as much as twitter does since its redesign. My attention span was only as long as my finger anyway, but I treasured what I had!

Tech update on unthink:
Sank like a stone in a unoxygenated lake. Pretty much all its PR occurred in two months (when I signed up for my trial) but it is now unreachable. I have not been emailed telling me about its unstatus as the unfacebook!

Alright, alright, I’m done now.

Seriously though, for apparently having 100,000 users, surely there’s some sort of business filing to be had in just disappearing off the face of the electronic earth with all your users information without so much as a peep.

So what should I try next? Pinterest?