Azra Ahmed :: Feeds

April 10, 2009

Occupation 101

A thought-provoking and powerful documentary film on the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unlike any other film ever produced on the conflict -- 'Occupation 101' presents a comprehensive analysis of the facts and hidden truths surrounding the never ending controversy and dispels many of its long-perceived myths and misconceptions.

via

Right America Feeling Wronged

On the day Barack Obama was elected the 44th President, more than 58 million voters cast their ballots for John McCain. In the months leading up to this historic election, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi (HBO's Emmy®-winning "Journeys with George") took a road trip to meet some of the conservative Americans who waited in line for hours to support the GOP ticket, and saw their hopes and dreams evaporate in the wake of that Democratic victory. These voters share their feelings about the changing America in which they live.

via

April 09, 2009

Machssomim

A shocking documentary about Israeli checkpoints in the Palestinian territories. They serve no security purpose for Israel since these checkpoints lay between Palestinian cities, which brings up the question...why are they there?

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Core Of Corruption: In The Shadows

Core of Corruption is a documentary film series which details a comprehensive investigation into clandestine intelligence operations and conspiracies. The project is surfacing exclusive whistle blowers, insiders and critical evidence for the very first time.

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Naked Science: Pyramids

How were the Pyramids of Egypt designed and constructed? Who hauled the billions of tons of stone to create them? Explore the myths and legends behind these magnificent and mysterious ancient structures.

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The Mountains of Mystery

A feature-length documentary from CFZtv, directed by Jonathan Downes and produced by Richard Freeman.

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Dangerous Companions

Real Tarzan Kevin Richardson, zoologist and animal behaviouralist, raises and trains some of the most dangerous animals known to man. To do this he does not use the common methods of breaking the animal's spirit with sticks and chains, instead he uses love, understanding and trust.

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The Most Evil In History - Countess Dracula

This is short documentary from the Discovery Channel on the most evil women in history. This episode covers Countess Bathory - also known as "Countess Dracula". She tortured over 600 young girls to death - often showering in the blood as it fell from their cages.

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The Plot to Kill Lincoln

Documentary that examines the death of President Abraham Lincoln from the assassination to the investigation. The program details the plot and the players and reveals the schemes that went awry in the assassination attempt. Secret service documents, congressman's diaries, old letters and deathbed confessions give insight to the investigation that followed. Features interviews with historians and the descendents of John Wilkes Booth and Dr. Samuel Mudd.

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Maxwell

Maxwell tells the story of the dramatic final months of the media tycoon's life. Patricia Hodge plays his beleaguered wife Betty, with Daniela Denby-Ashe as his secretary. Maxwell's world is collapsing. Cracks are appearing in his multi-billion business empire, his marriage is in difficulties and his weight has ballooned dangerously. He owns some of the world's best known media companies Macmillan Publishing; the New York Daily News and the Daily Mirror. But his obsession with both power and his great rival, Rupert Murdoch, is causing his downfall.With time running out he retreats to the heart of his web and sets about saving his skin. He is trapped and paranoid. His attempts to stem the tide of debts culminate in him stealing a billion pounds from his companies and their pension funds. But he is still hurtling towards disaster and, ultimately, death. Maxwell is a gripping account of how greed and ambition destroyed a man and led him to commit one of the world's biggest ever frauds. It also stars Ben Caplan as Maxwell's son Kevin and Dan Stevens as Basil Brookes. The film is written by Craig Warner, who was Bafta-nominated for The Queen's Sister. The 90-minute dramatisation is produced and directed by Colin Barr, who made The Secretary Who Stole £4million and The Lavender List.

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Teens' media literacy leading to mass political action

Well, it's not Twitter and Facebook but the cunning means through which over 10,000 young Moldovans managed to reach out to each other through the services.

By harnessing a unique tag for their protests it was easy for the mass to get together at the same place, same time, for the same purpose. My question: how many of Britain's young people would a) know about the existence of Twitter, b) know what a tag is and c) how they could use a tag to convene a protest or campaign?

It kind of puts into startk context the English Government's plans to 'teach Twitter' and the perhaps better-formed plans of the Scottish Government to include text messaging and social networks language in the fabric of language teaching and learning [pdf]. Read more on the NYTimes. Pic from Flickr's own blog post on the photos captured.

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: WebCT update on 15th April. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

via Twitter / edinburghmsc

Links for 2009-04-08 [del.icio.us]

Guitar Hero leads the way as Ollie introduces classes to 'edutainment' - Scotsman.com News
"It costs about £250 per school, plus a video game, for a whole term's work," says Karen Robertson, a quality improvement officer who works in information and computer technology for East Lothian Council. "Games are very relevant and motivating for children. And it's a real cross-curricular thing – a lot of schools have been using the Guitar Hero project (where pupils form their own virtual rock bands] in different lessons. They learn about geography by planning world tours, merchandising, even relationship building. A lot of bands would break up, then reform. "The way that we approach it is that the game is a type of stimulus – it's fun, it's something that they enjoy." Andrew Gibson, 12, who is in his first year at Musselburgh Grammar, says the fun factor makes him work harder
Sprint (software development) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sprints are organized around the ideas of the Extreme Programming discipline of software development. The sprint is directed by the coach, who suggests tasks, tracks their progress and makes sure that no one is stuck. Most of the development happens in pairs. A large open space is often chosen as a venue for efficient communication.
TweetyHall (TweetyHall) on Twitter
Getting politicians out of the Town Hall and onto the Tweets

via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

April 08, 2009

Dopplr's Matts on designing sites that no-one has to visit

Over on 38minutes, the creative community I helped create for Scottish and Northern Irish webpreneurs, I've been blogging a lot about what makes online services, communities, apps and APIs attract, retain and turn into some kind of value the interactions of the people out there.

The last post I wrote was a summary of some gems of wisdom in the two Matts (Biddulph and Jones) behind travellers' site Dopplr.com, lifted from the transcript of their talk at last year's dConstruct conference (you can listen along, too). Here are my own highlights that potential 4iP developers and those working on web-based services for young people might bear in mind as they develop their ideas and products:

On a web of data

"Find one bit of catalytic information that you can inject into a bunch of other arenas."

"Flickr is a mainframe. It's a big, giant machine that stores loads of stuff, and by storing lots of stuff in the same place, we get economies of scale out of it.

"And from there, we come to pretty much where we are now, which is having seen the power of combining massive amounts of information from many sources—the enormous, sort of easy group-forming power, the zero-coordination power of things like tagging, and linking, and all these things used properly—is we get to this realization of the original vision of the web, which is the web is not just a sort of teletext or view data system.

"It's a web of data. It was designed as that right from the start. And everyone's dear friend Tom Coates talks in wonderful detail about the way that we are now starting to design not just for our web sites, not just for that little bit you're seeing in your browser, but for the re-use of data, and realizing that data crosses the boundaries of sites. And sites open up access to that data and allow the easy recombination of it with other sites, are themselves benefiting from it.

"And to quote another of our—this is a friend's quote, a talk, by the way—another of our respected friends, Matt Webb. He's been talking recently about movement as a paradigm for the way the web is going. "So the web, when we started out, the web was a physical thing. You went to a site, you hang out on a forum. We had destinations, and people tried to build portals, places that could be almost physical sort of arcologies—places you could go and put your online life.

"And then we moved from this web page era into the era of web applications—the sort of the power-lifter, the Internet as magnifier of your individual capabilities—gives you superpowers and power-ups, and lets you do things over great distances, access knowledge that you can't immediately access from your physical environment.

"And that's the stuff that's evolving now. But as we are able to move from site to site, we get away from the arcology—the individual approach to sites. We are moving around sites, as is our data. And something that Matt said in a presentation recently, which I think is a really wonderful concept, is that your web service is a finite-state machine that executes on your users."

On distributable media

"A guy called Martin Lindstrom said, "The genius of a coke bottle is when it smashes into a thousand pieces, you still know it's a coke bottle.""

On delighters

"...Delighter is a world that I learnt from a guy who used to run the W Hotels in New York and in San Diego. And he used to say that delighter is a term evolved from the hotel industry or the hospitality industry. Where you put something into somebody's experience or into a room, but you do it in such a way that it creates nothing but absolute joy and delight.

"And the example that he used, which stuck with me for ages, was the rubber duck. If you go into a hotel room and there's a rubber duck already in there. You will go, "Oh, rubber duck. Cool." If you go into the hotel room on your second night there when you had been shopping all day and it's been raining. And you are naked and you really want to bat, and there's a rubber duck. You will be incredibly delighted. At least that's the theory. So we are always trying to find the rubber duck that we can put into the experience where we can.

"And one of the things that I really like about the logo is that, almost entirely dependably, people don't notice that the colors are changing until like two or three months in. And they go, "Oh! The colors are changing. Why are the colors changing?" And you set up all your vanity alerts on Dopplr on surmise and things like that. And they go, "Oh, just nice, the colors are changing" and, "Why are the colors changing?"

"So then we go and talk to them and say, "Hey, this is why the colors are changing. It reflects what you are doing around the world. And these are city colors that are referring to where you are around the world. They go, "Ah, that's really nice. I really like that."

"And then apparently another month later they go, "And you did it in the favicon.""

On the language of 'Friends'

"But the thing that's kind of bubbling up in my mind is that soon, we may have to kind of say this: that a lot of the reasons that we are tying up ourselves in knots is because of language. Because so much is tied on to the notion of friendship, the intimacy, the kind of transitiveness of friendship, what you're able to share, and what you wouldn't with certain people. And then how does that move to friends of friends?

"And all of the things that he was talking about—I mean, very fantastic things to be able to do with information. But using that word "friend" just kind of takes it to something in our monkey brain, kind of just goes, "Oh, I need to collect a dollhouse of friends, or I need to be very careful about how I handle this."

"So I'm kind of thinking very carefully about this at the moment. One of the things that we started off at Dopplr—when we started off Dopplr, we tried to keep to it—is that we never use the word "friend." We always talk about the informational relationship. We talk about the kind of switchboard pipe that you're connecting to somebody that you trust.

"And we talk about the information that's going, and we talk about the level of trust, and we talk about what's going to happen, but we don't judge whether that is your friend, your bank manager, your boss, your archenemy, whoever it is. And it just makes life a hell of a lot easier."

Really. Seriously. If you're making any kind of online platform in the coming months go and read/listen to it all. I'll be asking questions later... ;-)