Monthly Archives: November 2010

Can wind farms make light aircraft pilots fall out of the sky?

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In a recent post, Troppo’s Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what’s happening at the Australian?

In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain how wind turbines kill birds and why wind farms can’t be built close to airfields:

There is a common misconception that birds are sliced up by wind turbine blades, which appear to be spinning slowly but are actually travelling at speeds of up to 200km at the tip. In fact, birds die when they encounter the windshear and pressure changes caused by banks of wind turbines churning up the air. They literally pop and fall out of the sky. This is why there is a ban on wind farms being built near airfields, lest light aircraft pilots meet the same fate.

Lloyd seems a little confused. While there is some evidence that bats can be killed by a sudden drop in pressure caused by flying too close to the tips of a turbine’s blades, this isn’t how most birds are killed. Birds typically die after colliding with blades.

A study by Erin Baerwald, Genevieve D’Amours, Brandon Klug and Robert Barclay (pdf), reported that "Even if echolocation allows bats to detect and avoid turbine blades, they may be incapacitated or killed by internal injuries caused by rapid pressure reductions they can not detect." These pressure changes cause air in the bats’ lungs to expand leading the small blood vessels around the edges of the lungs to burst — a process known as barotrauma. But according to the researchers:

Birds are also killed at wind turbines, but at most wind energy facilities fewer birds than bats are killed, and barotrauma has not been suggested as a cause of bird fatalities.

As for the idea that pressure changes will cause light aircraft pilots to fall out of the sky like bats, this seems unlikely. According to Baerwald, the zone around the blade tips in which pressure suddenly drops is only a metre or so in diameter. The major reason wind farms aren’t allowed near airfields is because pilots might fly into them — especially at night.

Copy, paste and curse

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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you’ll have run into Tynt Insight. It’s the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes, Insight "is a service that breaks copy and paste."

But the annoying link is only the beginning. Tynt’s software (formerly known as ‘Tracer‘) also lets publishers know what visitors are copying. At Nieman Journalism Lab Zachary Seward writes:

Damn, that “read more” link again! In truth, it’s annoying, if not a dealbreaker, to find unwanted text attached to what you’ve copied. And the referral traffic from such links is, by all accounts, modest. But I’m much more impressed by Tracer’s backend, which allows publishers to see which pages — and, even better, which parts of those pages — are most frequently copied. In a creepy twist, Tracer also counts how many times text is highlighted on a page, even if the user never reaches for the [command] and C keys. (Or ctrl and C for PC types.)

I’m not sure precisely what that’s measuring, but it feels like engagement. Readers who are moved to copy a passage are likely sharing that content with friends — in an email as much as a blog

Insight threatens to do for web content what dial groups have done for political debates. Wherever campaigns have had enough money to pay people to listen to candidates speak and rate everything they say using a dial or keypad, leaders’ debates have degenerated into a string of pre-tested sound bites. No doubt some journalists will feel under pressure to write the kind of punchy sentences that readers like to post on blogs and email to their friends.

Elsewhere: At Reuters, Felix Salmon complains about the text FT.com inserts every time you copy and paste from their web site (someone should show Felix what happens when you copy and paste from the Financial Review).

At the end of his post, John Gruber has some tips on how to prevent Tynt from adding annoying text. Around the web there are tips on blocking Tynt on Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Why reporting matters

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There’s more to reporting than quoting from media releases or explaining statistics you’ve downloaded from the ABS — or at least there ought to be. And that’s why it’s so worrying to read this from Alan Kohler:

It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someone sitting at home can now read any press release, watch any press conference, or read its transcript, and examine any document anywhere in the world.

The lowest paid jobs in society are those that anyone can do, but can’t be bothered or don’t have the time, like cleaning or driving. The danger for plain reporting is that it will be increasingly seen in that light – as a service that anyone can do but can’t be bothered or haven’t the time.

If reporting was all about sitting in your pajamas pulling quotes from media releases then it really would be something anyone could do. But I’d always assumed that reporters did more than gather media releases from their inboxes and pigeon holes and google authoritative web sites.

Kohler argues journalism must go beyond reporting and explain what events mean. But in his recent post on the future of journalism, Ken Parish points out that "explaining what events mean is exactly what good bloggers do". What news-oriented bloggers usually don’t do, is get out from behind their laptops and confront the subjects of their posts first hand.

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The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957

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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media.  Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects.  It’s probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers are having turning a profit in the face of ubiquitous free online content, hence the Anti-Christ Murdoch’s mooted move to paywalls.

The recent Andrew Olle Media Lecture by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger generated a flurry of such navel-gazing. Jonathan Holmes, Alan Kohler and Annabel Crabb were among the more notable journalistic contributors.

There were occasional glimmers of insight buried in this morass of self-indulgent self-analysis, but not many.  For example, Alan Kohler observed:

The lowest paid jobs in society are those that anyone can do, but can’t be bothered or don’t have the time, like cleaning or driving. The danger for plain reporting is that it will be increasingly seen in that light – as a service that anyone can do but can’t be bothered or haven’t the time.

No-one is going to pay much for that, if anything, and advertisers have already discovered that they are in the driver’s seat with online media because there is a glut of inventory and it’s all measurable and accountable, unlike newspaper advertising.

To survive, therefore, journalism must add value – specifically it must impart meaning. It must do what its customers cannot do themselves, which is to explain what events mean, not just report them.

That observation gives rise to an obvious but important insight. As blog readers know, explaining what events mean is exactly what good bloggers do, and often much more meaningfully than MSM journalists.  To an extent one might even regard it as an unfair contest, because the blogosphere includes eminent academic and professional economists, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, statisticians, lawyers and contributors covering many other disciplines.  Sometimes, however, bloggers’ expert knowledge exceeds our ability to express ourselves succinctly and in terms accessible to a general audience.   That’s a point to which I’ll return a little later.

In this post I want to explore two other insights that I think are relevant to the future of journalism and newspapers, and then make some specific suggestions.

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Tony a briber?

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This NT story might bear watching for its possible national implications:

The Northern Territory’s attorney-general is seeking an investigation into claims Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his NT counterpart tried to bribe a candidate not to run in the 2010 federal election.

NT Attorney-General Delia Lawrie has tabled in the NT parliament her letter asking the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate allegations that Tony Abbott and NT Opposition Leader Terry Mills had offered Country Liberal candidate Leo Abbott a job if he withdrew from the election.

Ms Lawrie’s letter referred to a recent report in the Alice Springs News alleging the job offer came during a bitter party dispute over Leo Abbott’s candidacy due to his domestic violence record.

Lawrie cited section 326 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act as the provision that may have been breached.  It relevantly reads as follows:

(2)  A person shall not, with the intention of influencing or affecting:
…
(b)  any candidature of another person; or
…
give or confer, or promise or offer to give or confer, any property or benefit of any kind to that other person or to a third person.

Penalty:  $5,000 or imprisonment for 2 years, or both.

No doubt governments frequently make such offers to induce lame-duck MPs or candidates to walk away quietly, but they’re invariably done behind closed doors with only loyal insiders present.  However in the current situation there’s a disaffected former CLP Management Committee member by the name of Steve Brown who apparently claims to have been present during the phone hookup when the offer was made.  Brown is gunning for the political carcass of the party’s current parliamentary leader Terry Mills and seems prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve it.  Brown is rumoured to have significant support within CLP ranks in Alice Springs though less so in Darwin.

The possibility that these yokel machinations might even inadvertently pull down Tony Abbott as collateral road kill should not be completely discounted.  Some may remember that former NSW Liberal Premier Nick Greiner lost his job in not dissimilar circumstances in 1992, though corruption charges against him were later dismissed.  Terry Mills has kept his head down to date, and as far as I can tell the story hasn’t yet registered with the Canberra Press Gallery so Abbott hasn’t been questioned.

Missing Link Friday – 26 November 2010

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This week’s Missing Link Friday looks at who’s to blame for the toxic waste in your garage, asks whether car drivers and Tasmanians are paying their way and investigates the latest public policy fad — social investment bonds.


Help! Rich guys in top hats are filling my garage with stuff & poisoning third world children


Is your garage filling up with old tvs, dvd players and obsolete computers? Are you worried that if you send them to be recycled the lead and toxic chemicals inside will end up poisoning third-world children? At Larvatus Prodeo dk.au links to Annie Leonard’s latest video, The Story of Electronics. The video explains why these things happen and who’s responsible. It turns out that both you and the children are victims of greedy rich guys wearing top hats.

The rich guys in top hats are the CEOs of the companies who make that stuff that’s piling up in your garage. And the solution is to pester them with emails until they fix the problem in a way that allows us to keep buying their stuff without feeling bad about it.

While you’re at it, you might want to annoy your elected officials too. A few carefully cut and pasted emails might encourage them to pass laws that force the guys in top hats to behave decently. If you’re worried about the waste generated by all the lawyers needed to pass new laws, then you can rest easy. There’s a solution for that too.

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Fantasy marketing to those who fancy being at the top end of town

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This afternoon I returned home from a day out doing various things Kaggle, and on the stairwell was a fancy black, clear wrapped package. I thought it was some fancy bit of nonsense for their frequent fliers points. Well it kind of was. It was their latest special card. I’d be chosen to be invited – this kind of thing doesn’t happen to just anyone as the bumph was at pains to insist.

Inside an aluminium sheet which was the cover was a black mock ‘Centurion card’.  Just think I could get a centurion card. Anyway, the brochure was about ten pages one of which appears to my left. Then read on. (below the fold) ground control had pretty much lost contact with Major Tom by the end of it.

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Me on debt and infrastructure

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Well it’s not a new topic for me, but if anyone’s interested Lateral Economics got quite a bit of coverage for a study for Western Sydney showing that had the toll roads of Sydney been funded by governments rather than the private sector the NSW public sector would be worth over $4 billion more than it is now. Inside Story asked me to write it up, which I did and now Crikey like it and want to republish it. I wasn’t going to post it here, but there you are – if they like it, maybe you will – so go read it.

Then come back here and comment on it if you want.

Postscript: Ross Gittins takes up the story.