Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
The UK paper The Guardian carries a couple interesting pieces this week on the British company, The Press Association, or as it is know now, the PA Group. Essentially, it demonstrates that investment in creative people who can leverage digital technology can make money.
See ´´The new heart of British journalism´´ and “Service used by every paper makes only 1% of the money ´´
The new heart of British journalism
A sleepy Yorkshire town has become the hub of an international publishing operation
Martin WainwrightTuesday September 20, 2005
Guardian
Twice now, extraordinary things have happened to the sleepy market town of Howden – little more than a village on the rich, flat land where the river Humber is joined by the Yorkshire Ouse. The first time, in the 1920s when the local airfield became the centre of Britain's airship industry, ended abruptly with the loss of the R101 (and the then air minister) in a storm over northern France. The second time is now, and it shows no sign of collapsing at all.
Quietly over a decade, Howden has become one of the biggest centres of journalism in the country. More than 650 staff of the Press Association – well over double the organisation's workforce in London – occupy buildings scattered round the quaint streets, as if an Oxbridge college had dropped in. Editorial trainees are in the Bishop's Manor, a medieval roost with jumbo plasma TV screens in the fireplaces where the Bishops of Durham used to warm up after trekking down from the north-east. Guests from London stay in a redbrick Georgian manor house which looks like something out of Jane Austen.
The high command of PA Sport has the vast, curving top floor of a purpose-built office block which replaced the town's redundant police station and magistrates' court two years ago. From here, among scores of other sports information services, Premier League goals and match analysis are texted live to mobile phones all over the world.
Howden is the main laboratory for PA's expansion from a comprehensive and reliable news-wire into the structural support for newspapers, websites, television, radio and magazines. The guts of the service is produced elsewhere, by reporters at news events, parliament or sports fixtures, but the processing and ever more imaginative marketing go on in Yorkshire.
Tony Watson, PA's editorial director, a multiple award-winner and former editor of the Yorkshire Post, relishes the innovation. Outside his office on the ground floor, reporters' material is slimmed into Teletext bulletins (“An excellent subediting exercise,” he says. “The contents have to have exactly the right wordage to fill a line across the screen.”) On the next floor up, the same data is repackaged for listings and, with extra content, for breaking-news sections on websites, including the Guardian's. On the top floor it gets reprocessed again for sport.
Another section turns it into mini-bulletins for mobiles, text-only or with pictures. There are initiatives to expand it into digital TV, with a studio just opened and a specialist journalists' training course starting next month. Although PA has always been, and remains, modestly anonymous, its Howden super-office is starting to publish on a scale most editors must envy.
Touring the main building, Watson points out a wall pinned with national and international news pages from British local newspapers. Copy has always been provided for these by PA but now staff at Howden offer story choice and complete page layout too. A couple of those magazines dished out by rail companies are produced here with advertising and printing subcontracted to regional newspaper customers of PA. A canny use of partnerships has been part of the agency's growth. The editorial centre grew out of joint working with now vanished Westminster Press. PA Weather, which now sells its meteorology to road-gritting departments as well as the media, has just taken over the other, Dutch half of the joint operation.
Howden is now full up, says Watson, whose colleague Chris Buckley, managing director of PA Sport, takes over half the middle floor on Saturdays, when football needs 70 extra staff and the listings terminals are briefly unoccupied. There has been criticism about PA pay rates – this month the National Union of Journalists published a survey showing levels as low as £12,000 a year at Howden. But the size of the operation is buoying the flagging local economy, and vacancies are quickly filled.
And now there is India. By November, 50 staff will be backing up the Yorkshire operation in offices in Mangalore, on the south-west coast of India, which are also designed to be a jumping off point for further news and sport packaging overseas. “There's tremendous interest in British sport in Asia,” says Watson, describing automated systems in Howden which text or email results, as they happen, in Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin and many other languages. “But there's also a growing number of fixtures locally, which we can handle either for other markets or for the countries involved.”
Two recent deals see PA distributing German sports results in Germany and – from this autumn – selling South African premier league reports and results within South Africa. Mr Buckley says: “They're holding the World Cup there in five years' time and Fifa has recommended the data-processing system as a model for the rest of Africa.”
After the R101 tragedy in 1930, there was gloom in Howden when glamorous airship designers stopped coming from London. Today, the “Howden Flyer”, a direct, two-hour train service from London which stops at the town six times a day to drop off largely PA clients, is only going to get busier.
Dwight Hines posts an interesting opportunity to the IRE listserv:
“I am going to participate as an internet journalist in IBM's Project Serrano Beta program. If you read the material below, you will see that the beauty, or the absolute brute force ability of the system being developed by IBM is the capacity to search lots of data bases and integrate the information. It seems to me that this is ideal for those involved in investigative reporting at global or local levels, or criminal justice issues, who need lots of flexibility and crank power to draw information from all over. If you are interested in participating in the Beta program, please contact me. You will be able to define the system that you need, working with the IBM folks and other journalists. Obviously, the more different people and different media organizations participating, the more power the system will have. I don't think antitrust issues or intellectual property rights will be an issue until the system is working, but those are just two areas that will become important, along with differences in laws in different countries. This ain't gonna be your Gramma's google. Dwight Hines, I do not work for IBM nor do I take goodies from them in any way. Project Serrano Beta Programs: Enterprise search and Data modeling and integration design Project Serrano extends WebSphere(r) Information Integration with enhanced search and data modeling and integration design. It expands the source accessibility, functionality, performance, and localization of already robust information integration technologies — to help customers manage their growing information requirements in both structured and unstructured domains. Project Serrano Beta includes two programs: Rational(r) Data Architect will combine traditional data modeling capabilities with metadata discovery, mapping, and analysis, all organized by a modular project-based structure. WebSphere Information Integration (II) OmniFind Edition finds information stored across the enterprise in file systems, content archives, databases, collaboration systems, and applications. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/integration/beta.html ================== WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/integration/db2ii/editions_womnifind.htmlres and benefits Key search features include: • search results with sub-second response from enterprise content such as intranets, extranets, corporate public websites, relational database systems, file systems, and content repositories. • supported sources such as HTTP/HTTPS, news groups (NNTP), file systems, Domino(r) databases, Microsoft(r) Exchange public folders, DB2(r) Content Manager, DB2 Universal Database™ (DB2 UDB), DB2 UDB for z/OS(r), Informix(r), and Oracle databases. Documentum and FileNet support is provided through WebSphere(r) II Content Edition. • state-of-the art relevancy algorithms for corporate content. The new OmniFind Edition provides numerous technology and business benefits. It: • scales to millions of documents and thousands of users • fits easily into enterprise Java™ applications with appropriate security so that confidential information is not exposed • eases administration for quick set up • utilizes background analysis to minimize administrator tasks required to get high quality search results • provides highly relevant search results and the framework for richer text analysis • includes a seamless upgrade to WebSphere II OmniFind for WebSphere Portal customers who can leverage existing taxonomies for navigation and categorization, migrate rules for rule-based classification, and surface the same user experience through the WebSphere Portal Search Center”
From the Librarians' Index to the Internet….
GISc Resources for Hurricane Katrina
http://ucgis.org/Katrina/ http://lii.org?recs=027428 Subjects: * Geographic information systems * Emergency management * Hurricane Katrina, 2005
Friend Steve Guerin sends this from Santa Fe….
The Disaster Dynamics Project at UCAR looks timely:http://swiki.ucar.edu/dd/2
Check out the Hurricane Landfall gamehttp://swiki.ucar.edu/dd/71The Hurricane Landfall Disaster Dynamics Game is a four-player virtual strategy game about the interaction between natural disasters and urban planning. The game is computerized; it plays like a traditional physical boardgame, but there are simulation components that require significant computation. The game's architecture is client-server, with each player having her own computer.
Individual machines allow moves to be made in parallel and enable players to access private representations of the game state in addition to the public representation. The server is typically run on the instructor's computer, andwill also provide facilitation tools.
This seems to be the best tool we've seen to track individuals who may be unaccounted for following Katrina.
Lycos: Katrina Missing Persons Site http://www.lycos.com/katrina/With multiple small databases of survivors, we desperately needed one search engine that would search through all of them, and Lycos created one. The site lists all the databases it searches through. If you're aware of others, please fill out Lycos' form to add them.
Originally found on TechnologyReview.com
Posted by David Appell at August 30, 2005 08:48 AM in Biotechnology and Health Care.
“There's a very interesting article by John Ioannidis in PLoS Medicine, the free online journal. Most current published research findings might well be false, he says. There are several factors, and I think it's worth presenting them in detail:
1. Many research studies are small, with only a few dozen participants. 2. In many scientific fields, the “effect sizes” (a measure of how much a risk factor such as smoking increases a person’s risk of disease, or how much a treatment is likely to improve a disease) are small. Research findings are more likely true in scientific fields with large effects, such as the impact of smoking on cancer, than in scientific fields where postulated effects are small, such as genetic risk factors for diseases where many different genes are involved in causation. If the effect sizes are very small in a particular field, says Ioannidis, it is “likely to be plagued by almost ubiquitous false positive claims. 3. Financial and other interests and prejudices can also lead to untrue results. 4. “The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true,” which may explain why we sometimes see “major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention.”
1. Many research studies are small, with only a few dozen participants.
2. In many scientific fields, the “effect sizes” (a measure of how much a risk factor such as smoking increases a person’s risk of disease, or how much a treatment is likely to improve a disease) are small. Research findings are more likely true in scientific fields with large effects, such as the impact of smoking on cancer, than in scientific fields where postulated effects are small, such as genetic risk factors for diseases where many different genes are involved in causation. If the effect sizes are very small in a particular field, says Ioannidis, it is “likely to be plagued by almost ubiquitous false positive claims.
3. Financial and other interests and prejudices can also lead to untrue results.
4. “The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true,” which may explain why we sometimes see “major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention.”
“This ought to be an eye-opener…. The solution? More publication of preliminary findings, negative studies (which often suffer that fate of the file-drawer effect), confirmations, and refutations. PLoS says, “the editors encourage authors to discuss biases, study limitations, and potential confounding factors. We acknowledge that most studies published should be viewed as hypothesis-generating, rather than conclusive.” And maybe this will temper journalists' tendency to offer every new study as the Next Big Thing.”
Company: Space Imaging Industry: Satellite Image Data Location: Denver, CO, United States of America
State of Arizona to Use Satellite Images as Evidence in Lawsuit
DENVER,CO-– IKONOS satellite imagery has revealed alleged land clearing by a developer in Arizona. The State of Arizona is suing the Scottsdale developer for allegedly illegally bulldozing state and private land known as La Osa Ranch located northwest of the town of Marana, Arizona. Before-and-after satellite images of the area captured by Space Imaging’s IKONOS satellite show certain changes to the environment and will be used as evidence in the case. From a 423-mile-high orbit the satellite can see objects on the ground as small as one meter in size.
Marana’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department has been collecting imagery for the last three years to map its expanding boundaries, chart the town's recreational trail system and produce three-dimensional views of proposed developments to provide citizens a glimpse of what their neighborhoods will look like in the future. In mid-2004, Chris Mack, Marana’s senior geographic information systems specialist, discovered the imagery showed that the terrain had been altered at La Osa Ranch. The satellite images captured the alleged land clearing which included 700 acres over four miles from north to south. <more>
ADAM LIPTAK has a piece in this week's NYT Week in Review that is, we gather, a re-write of a forthcoming article in The Georgetown Law Journal. (We're not going to bother with the link because the article isn't posted.) In his story, “If the Law Is an Ass, the Law Professor Is a Donkey,“ Liptak writes, “The study…analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. “Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties.”
Liptak then continues for 600+ words fretting about the contributions to the Democrats.
Wait a minute. Go back to the phrase underlined above. Two-thirds of the law professors, apparently, didn't make any contributions at all. So where's the story here? Take a look at the graph and let us know.
It's taken an uncommonly long time, but IAJ co-director Steve Ross and his co-investigators at The Euro RSCG Magnet firm have finally posted some of the summary of their “Survey of Media.” Steve and Don Middleberg have been doing this for more than a decade, first just in the U.S. and internationally for the past few years. Some talking points: * Media appear mixed about blogs’ role in journalism Blogs have not yet infiltrated journalist reporting techniques but have become a source of information * Recent media scandals have challenged media trust New wave of high-profile journalist misdeeds are expected to take a heavy toll on the newsroom * Corporate scandals continue to thwart corporate credibility Journalists point to the lack of transparency for their loss in trust in corporations over the past year * CEOs may be regaining some stature with the media Journalists are more likely to turn to CEOs and consider their performance in their reporting than in 2003
From Gary Price's Resource Shelf: “Toxic Chemicals–United States–Databases Source: NLM New Version of TOXMAP Available “TOXMAP is an interactive web site from the National Library of Medicine that shows the amount and location of reported toxic chemicals released into the environment on maps of the United States. TOXMAP allows users to visually explore information about releases of toxic chemicals by industrial facilities around the United States as reported annually to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”
