It will probably take me two or three days to get to the UK, I will spend some time in and around London, and finally make my way south towards Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and long-forgotten friends.
My new website is almost ready, and am now just taking a step back from it for a couple of days before making it live. I will keep you posted on the move, even if this blog will still be available for some time.
As hinted at some time ago, I will soon make a transition from this blog to a new website that is better suited to my products.
Please bear with me while I undergo this process. It will take some time, especially because I am leaving for Europe tomorrow, and I will be mobile more or less all the time I'm abroad*. But it will happen. I also have another couple of projects and ideas up my sleeve that I am going to look at and develop in the coming weeks. As usual, stay tuned on this page — or through my Facebook NetworkedBlogs ap — for updates.
*A Rough plan is as follow: fly to London, then Italy, then drive to London, carry on to France and Spain, and from there back to Italy. Similar in a way to my trip last summer, but this time I'm setting off on my old Land Rover for very different reasons.
I am currently on a road trip around Southern Africa on my old VW Fox: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and back to South Africa. Make sure you keep an eye on my movements by visiting my travel journal. Stay Tuned.
A London Metropolitan Police officer "identified himself to his team leader as being potentially involved in the incident shown on the video footage", Euronews 24 reported today. Good news, the chap has shown to be a man after all — seven days and an incriminating video after the incident, as duly noted by the Scotsman.
On a slightly different note, off-beat watchdog Boing Boing has promoted theremix challange to raise awareness and counteract the ludicrous, new 'anti-terror' campaign run by the Met. The image above is an example of the mock posters, make sure you check the other ones, some of them are pure genius.
In a turn of events that is the dream of every newspaper editor, The Guardian has obtained a short video that shows a Police officer attacking a passer by minutes before he dies during London's G20 protests.
City of London’s newsagent Ian Tomlinson was walking home from work on Wednesday, April 1, when he found himself caught between riot Police and demonstrators near the Bank of England. After collapsing on the ground — and allegedly being succored by Police medics despite being “pelted with missiles believed to include bottles as they tried to save his life” as reported by Sky News — Tomlinson stumbled away and died of a heart attack soon after.
The incriminating footage is part of a dossier that The Guardian has put together and presented to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which also includes a collection of testimonies from witnesses. According to many commentators — see here, here, and here — the episode is only the last dramatic testimony of the way Police forces in the UK have recently been dealing with demonstrations trying to challenge estranged political and financial classes*.
Early Police statements did not acknowledge any misbehaviours committed by officers on the ground during the clashes, and, as the Sky News example mentioned above, mainstream media were quick to pick up the down-with-these-noglobal-rioters line. The worst of all was The Evening Standard**, which carried a (now) unfortunate double-page spread with a rather dramatic — but completely off the track — headline.
Fortunately, an amended article is now online here, and the ES actually carried this article on today’s edition.
Also, IPCC Commissioner for London, Deborah Glass, admitted that “witnesses” have reported Police involvement in the incident. “It is important that we are able to establish whether that contact had anything to do with [Ian Tomlinson’s] death," she said.
*See also what happened at the Nato Summit held in Strasbourg, France on April 4 as reported by Current. **London’s widest-distributed daily newspaper has recently been sold by its historical owner, Daily Mail & General Trust PLC, to Russian tycoon Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy. Strange as it seems it could be a much-needed boost to liberal journalism in the British capital — see here for details.
The last couple of days have seen a huge media reaction to this year’s event, and news items, blog posts, and commentaries responding to the increased public awareness could hardly be counted.
The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra perform a concert powered by bicycles, Cape Town, South Africa.
In South Africa, power utilty Eskom claims that electricity demand dropped 20 percent after 8.30PM, saving 400 tonnes of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. See here for more details.
Around the world, the Philippines topped the Earth Hour participation with 647 cities and towns, and in Ireland the equivalent of 700,000 lights went off for the hour. Toronto, Canada, saw a decrease of 15.1 percent in electricity demand, and for the first time the United Nations turned the lights off at their headquarters in New York. More data will surely be available soon here and here.
But the power of Earth Hour does not reside in its mere efficacy, and the number of energy saved will never be its ultimate goal, nor it would be enough of an environmental action if it were. As many critics were eager to point, switching lights off for an hour — no matter how lights you have in your house or how many people around the world actually do it — will not knock the global carbon emissions down. In fact, many (see also here) argue that if we account for all the energy spent to advertise Earth Hour, CO2 production actually goes up…and if we use paraffin candles, we won’t be doing a favour to the planet either, according to the Physical Insights.
Some extremists have arrived to the point of instituting counter-events such as Hour of Power — in which participants are encouraged to turn all their lights on — still believing that global warming is not a man-made threat. Fortunately balanced and constructive criticism can also be found out there, and here you’ll find a particularly good one. Here is another, if shorter, example.
The message sent was indeed a strong and clear one: change starts from small gestures. Symbols can be a powerful tool, even if they cannot actually righting wrongs overnight — nothing ever does that, not even the best thought-out government policies…especially those. Earth Hour may well be a tiny spec of dust in the massive sandpit in which climate change is dragging us, but is undoubtedly showing how millions of people can still be aroused behind a cause they believe in, and strive for a common goal they judge achievable, making them participants and co-creators of a more sustainable future.
If symbolism is all there was left to Earth Hour, I would still sign up to every newsletter, petition, and call to action that bore its logo. But maybe is also time for a renewed mass-participation in local and global politics. As Kim Carstensen, the leader of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative said in her post-event statement: “Last night’s message from the masses was loud and clear: Delay no more, real action now!” The message is directed to the world’s representatives who will meet in Copenhagen in December for the UN COP15 summit on climate change. And they are our representatives after all.
Congratulations to my friends at NEED magazine for scoring yet another editorial and marketing success by having a set of images from one of their recent feature stories published on TIME.com.
Specialists audiologists, who volunteer their time and skills to the Minnesotan-based organisation, visit and assist thousands of hearing-impaired people in countries stretching from the U.S. to Vietnam, delivering more than 50,000 hearing aids annually through more than 100 hearing missions a year.
It has been a year already…hard to believe but alarmingly true: time to prepare for the upcoming event then. …Many of you must have guessed that I’m not talking about my birthday, which I do not particularly care for, but a rather more important global happening: Earth Hour.
Earth Hour encourages public participation through small scale, individual actions: by switching off all lights and superfluous electrical appliances at home or at work for an hour, between 8:30 and 9:30PM local time on Saturday, March 28.
Created by the WWF and started in 2007 in Sidney, Australia — when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour — the event quickly spread to most major world cities, with hundreds of landmarks, thousands of organisations, and millions — 50 of them in 2008 — of people taking part. In a city like Bangkok electricity usage decreased by 73MWh, equivalent to 41.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Christchurch, New Zealand, reported a drop of 13% in electricity demand. (Source: Wikipedia on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Hour)
The goal in 2009 is to reach a billion participants: a billion votes, according to the organisers, for Earth, and against global warming, a powerful message for the world’s representatives who will convene in Copenhagen in December to discuss climate change at the UN COP15 conference.
Related possibilities are, as usual, infinite: environmental website TreeHugger for instance suggests that if Google were to switch from a white to a black homepage for good, it would save about 750MWh a year. See here for full details, and check this Google-powered search engine called Blackle. On a similar note, ecoIron, a blog that provides reports and commentary on all aspects of green computing and sustainable technologies in IT, calls out to all web designers to think about the environment in their work by using Energy-C, their low-wattage colour palette. So we won’t even have to decide between monotonous black websites and saving the planet.
I personally made my choice some time ago when I first launched this blog of mine, but to be honest I was more concerned about style and professional consistency than anything else…would I have swapped to white, maybe even only for a day, if that had meant saving energy and send a message at the same time? Probably. Would you? Or do you also think that this is only greenwash?
The important point here is to understand how change can be achieved through means that are rather effortless indeed. The simple gesture of switching your lights off for an hour has the power to show that several small individual actions contribute to the achievement of a much larger goal.
We can all do something: the future is in hour hands, or in this case, on our fingertips.
The moment I’m about to leave the sleepy grip of Italian winter an interesting controversy regarding freedom of thought, the mafia and the Internet giant springs unexpectedly up.
Just before the end of the year, articles in Italy and the UK sounded a note of alarm regarding the sudden proliferation of pages and groups praising former Mafia bosses such as Toto’ Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. Their creators were obviously eager to follow Facebook’s very own marketing device: a friend (of Cosa Nostra) is a fan.
International news organisations, blogs, and commentators quickly picked up the story, before it finally crash-landed back on Facebook — whose Italian operation has been the fastest-growing in 2008 with a whopping +961 per cent. Here it spawned a number of counter-groups that are now lobbying the network’s admin to censor these “Mafia apologists” and remove the pages they’ve created, or else they will leave Facebook en masse. Tens of thousands have subscribed to several groups and are now well on their way to top the 100,000 mark.
The biggest breakaway group — 58,000-strong at the time of publishing, up from 39,000 in only one day — has set an ultimatum for Sunday, January 18, and is asking its member to stick to it, noting that they represent a sizeable part of the 4.5 million Italian users — but not 10 per cent as the group’s creator claims.
Facebook’s bosses have so far excluded they will take any action, with spokesman Matt Hicks stating: “The controversy is not a good reason to proceed with the removal of the groups.” As noted in many wall posts, Facebook recently forbade the posting of pictures of breastfeeding women considering them too explicit, a decision that now seems even more controversial.
However, the really interesting aspects of the walls’ discussions is that they have not simply been one-way denunciations of ignorance and poor taste, but informed posts and replies about freedom of thought and expression in the age where king among mass media is the Internet. They asked questions such as: do we want the Internet to be free and unregulated so everyone can assert their own opinion? If so, are we ready to accept some that we may find inappropriate and offensive? If not, where do we draw the line, what is permitted and what isn’t?
Others pointed out that leaving Fecebook in protest against their somehow nonchalant policies will do the cause no good, completely leaving the scene to the Mafia enthusiasts — who care not a dime if the networking site ‘allows’ their opponents to set up anti-Mafia groups. And I feel to agree with this because I believe in total freedom of expression in any medium, mitigated, if necessary, by certain circumstances and the author’s own sensitivity. But also because I’ve done some maths: several groups praising Toto’ Riina and Bernardo Provenzano count, all together, 1,813 members — at the time of publishing —, a tiny spec of dust in the giant’s eye if compared to the overwhelming support mustered by their counterparts.
Below are a number of links referring to the on-going controversy as reported by various media outlets. Enjoy the read and feel free to join the debate.
Low clouds on the pass du Petit Saint Bernard between Italy and France. 
The town of Ettelbruck in Luxembourg under the rain. 
Local bar, Montreuil, France. 
Untitled, Montreuil, France. 
Sun rising over the ferry terminal, Calais, France.
Approaching Dover's white cliffs.
The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra perform a concert powered by bicycles, Cape Town, South Africa.
But the power of Earth Hour does not reside in its mere efficacy, and the number of energy saved will never be its ultimate goal, nor it would be enough of an environmental action if it were. As many critics were eager to point, switching lights off for an hour — no matter how lights you have in your house or how many people around the world actually do it — will not knock the global carbon emissions down. In fact, many (see also here) argue that if we account for all the energy spent to advertise Earth Hour, CO2 production actually goes up…and if we use paraffin candles, we won’t be doing a favour to the planet either, according to the Physical Insights.
© Andy Richter/NEED magazine
© Andy Richter/NEED magazine
Related possibilities are, as usual, infinite: environmental website TreeHugger for instance suggests that if Google were to switch from a white to a black homepage for good, it would save about 750MWh a year. See here for full details, and check this Google-powered search engine called Blackle.
