Will Knott

I’m going to foolishly make three predictions.

1. The number of Sun on Sundays (aka the 7th Day Sun, aka The Sun Of The World) purchased on its inaugural printing will be approximately equal to the number of the last edition of The News Of The World purchased.

2. The number for the second issue of the Sun On Sunday sold will be a good bit lower.

3. The LBC crew will be wondering why I’m not talking about this week’s topic, especially since its one of my suggestions this week. Sorry guys.

The call came from my Mum. “Will you buy me a copy”. This is the same request I received for the last edition of the News of the Screws. It’s not a paper that gets read in the house.

That is not to say that its never been purchased. Occasionally a CD or DVD was purchased with a free copy of the paper attached, but without the media bribe it, for us, remained on the shelf.

The numbers for the first issue will be trumpeted while its publisher remains under a legal cloud following its phone and computer hacking scandal continues. This is the scandal that prevented the Murdoch purchase of the remaining share of British Sky Broadcasting and lead to the closure of the Sunday paper that the new Sun is printing.

I did notice that the glossy “Fabulous” magazine that used to be bundled with the old title and continued to appear in the Sun On Saturday is now returned to a Sunday title. Back with the old.

One interesting thorn that will be pulled at is, will this new paper be treated as a new paper, or will it be smeared with the sins of the former title for a while? Time is going to tell this one. I guess that the April ABC figures will be the ones that show the greater truth. Unless, of course, they start attaching more media bribes I’ll be asked to collect.

Take care,
Will

UPDATE: 2012-06-07

Should have added this earlier but… “Rupert Murdoch confirms first Sun on Sunday sold 3.26m copies” and inside a later article “Sun on Sunday’s sale slips away“.

Ubuntu, as well as being a very good operating system translates roughly from the South African root (not sure which language, sorry) in to English as “pleasure derived from the good fortune of others”. Its direct counterpart is found in German, namely Schadenfreude; “the pleasure derived from the bad fortune of others”.

For the last two weeks, its been a guilty pleasure working its way through the UK after the shock and anger has subsided. All of this has been aimed squarely at Rupert Murdoch.

I’m actually writing about this due to asking about the Loose Bloggers Consortium (LBC) that Grannymar writes with. That and I need a deadline to work with. This week’s topic, nominated by Anu is “Guilty Pleasures”.

And for many in in UK at least, there is pleasure to be derived… let’s ask John Finnemore on the BBC’s “Now Show“…

If you have been living in a cave (or in a compound using only dead letter drops containing USB disks for news updates) for the last few years you would have missed the power of Rupert Murdoch and News International. This man owns media properties throughout the world (and a few satellites above it) most famously a stable of newspapers in the UK and Fox News in the US. The man has had power, power to undermine and control the thrones of power in very high places. Prime Ministers, arguably Presidents, but certainly congressmen and Senators and, if the allegations are true, police were under his sway. And now he is falling from grace because of a child called Milly.

Allegations that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked set off a chain of events which have brought Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to its knees, or at least crouching a lot. Today, he tried to stop the rot and anger by telling the Dowler family and all the other victims of phone hacking that he was deeply sorry.

He is currently facing investigations in the UK, and the allegations of possible hacking of the telephones of 9/11 victims and their families have sparked FBI and Senate investigations in the US. Its conceivable that News International, now a US based company, may either be broken up, or will be forced to shed all the Murdoch family members at its heart.

It turns out that hacking a mobile phone, in Ireland at least, is actually pathetically easy. You have to know your victims phone number, say 081-1234567. If you dial 081-5-1234567 you go directly to their voicemail, and can attempt a remote  login. Depending on the network the default password is 0000 or 1234. Given that most people dial in to their voicemail account from their registered phone, few people realise that there is a password to be changed and that they can access it from any handset. And if you can get hold of their phone, you can change the password in 20 seconds. Thanks to Brian Greene for the research (and he will never get to borrow my phone).

When someone generally disliked falls, you tend to find a few gleeful at the drop in power. Its a guilty pleasure.

But of course its not my guilty pleasure. Mine is the Transformers toys. I like the way they give you the impression of being one thing, guiding you one way, then uncovering that its something else. Or maybe slight of hand is my pleasure? Maybe. But its not as interesting as the still ongoing news story.

To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, in alphabetical order: AKANKSHA (Anki), ANU, ASHOK, CONRAD, DELIRIOUS, GAELIKAA, GRANNYMAR, MAGPIE 11, MARIA, PADMUM and the GOM of LBC, RAMANA SIR.

This is just a quick note in what is rapidly (and that has got to be the wrong word)  becoming a monthly boot about today’s big news story; the rescue and extraction of the Chilean miners.

After 69 days the thirty three men are slowly being brought to the surface. Seeing their families in person for the first time in over two months. Soon they will have daylight on their faces.

There will be problems ahead of them. Both psychological aftermath from being underground along with physical health problems, and having to deal with becoming unwittingly famous national heroes.

But in the meantime, there is joy. And this is the music that came to mind from that feeling.

I got a late enough phone call telling me that it seemed that Michael Jackson had died. The vagueness of the call and the fact that there was a panicked family search on for keys (if you’ve met the family in panic mode you will have heard how loud panic is) I asked if I could call back.

Keys found, call made.

Yup he’s dead.

I’ll admit that his death will not bring out non-existent stories about being a fan for years or the extreme sadness felt. I didn’t know him, as much as I didn’t know Farrah Fawcett. I knew of them, but I didn’t know them. I sort of feel sorry for their families who I don’t know.

Oh course, knowing of them meant that I has a tune almost of his going through my head. Go Home Productions did a mashup of “Rock With You” and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and that’s what played.

And here it is.

some RSS readers may have to click through to see the embedded video

Having said all that, I was surprised to hear that it was the number one news story on the radio, every front page and that the searches for news on the singers death slowed the internet to a crawl.

Shouldn’t there be a bigger, non-celebrity related  news story?

This is a cross-post to Culch.ie but I’ve embedded the video mentioned below.

Once I loved Big Brother . Note, there is no number following that title.

The first Big Brother .

The most interesting thing about the first Big Brother was how different the contestants were when compared to the crop over the last eight years. Few of the contestants were fame hungry. No one really knew if it would work… it was a very expensive experiment.

As a group it seems that many of the first contestants are, well, not working. Some are still working somewhere in media (usually quietly behind the scenes now). True, none of them found the dizzying heights of fame as the most famous looser of Big Brother, Jade Goody , but few people let alone reality show contestants have.

Then again, one the the first contestants, Mel is responsible for the Big Brother “eye” logo . Its her eye.

If the first year was a test, the second year was a fine tuning exercise and the third year seems to be the brass ring that Channel 4 have been searching for ever since.

The problem with Big Brother is… its boring. Nothing can really happen. Its mostly people sleeping (along the way Big Brother introduced a “no sleeping during daylight hours” rule and will play alarm clock noises at dosing contestants. Yes folks, it eventually got that bad) and talking. True, occasionally bickering and insulting each other. Add in a bit of metaphorical back stabbing and you have the basis of a soap. But a soap is better acted and paced.

Which is funny if you think about it. The contestants are usually those that want to be famous. Every contestant now knows what is going to happen, but they still line up and go for it. Big Brother isn’t a talent show (so no dreams and or surprise performances) but a group of people (supposedly) being themselves for a number of weeks.

But a funny thing happened along the way. It started to get ignored.

The explosion of racism on Celebrity Big Brother 5 in 2007 meant that the TV show was being played out on international headlines. That summer’s show (Big Brother 8 ) was a quieter affair. You know how big a TV show is from the amount of coverage it gets off the TV. Susan Boyle made this year’s Britain’s Got Talent a “must watch” show, if for nothing else but the the ability to talk about it afterward. Who wants to talk about Big Brother, until there is an explosion anyway. Not literally. There have already been too many bomb scares in that house.

The biggest thing about Big Brother 9 was not Big Brother 9 but the Big Brother zombie based TV series Dead Set , parts of which were filmed at a Big Brother 9 eviction. No doubt there are jokes to be made about Davina McCall being a great zombie.

And Big Brother 10 is about to burst on to our screens.

Whoop-de-doodle-do.

The first, opening night, show will generate media coverage. It always does. However how much of that coverage will still be there the following week. If on July 1 you approached a random man or woman on the street and asked them to name one of this years contestants, (barring an Irish contestant, Ray Shah got his local radio show partly from Big Brother) I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to tell you their name. Ratings are down for Reality shows in general at the moment, and the series mean ratings for Big Brother are on a decline .

Regardless of that Channel 4 does to the show, unless the contestants themselves are appealing, I don’t see a hugh surge in ratings yet.

As for the title, its actually from the “Literally” series of spoof videos for “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. But it applies. The series has slowly turned. I’m not too sure its turned for the better.

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• Will enough people watch Big Brother? (guardian.co.uk)

Michael O’Brien, former councillor and Mayor of Wexford(correction May 27) Clonmel attended the RTÉ programme Questions and Answers on 25 May 2009 and, after Minister Noel Dempsey, the sponsoring minister of the Ryan Commission report in to Child Abuse allegations spoke, Mr O’Brien spoke to the minister and to the panel.

I’ve done the transcript of the video clip below mainly because audio indexing does not work that well for video clips. And video clips have a habit of disappearing off the web.
The other reason is that this clip seems to be the turning point for a lot of discussions. And possibly some action.

—

—

—Start of transcript

Mr. Chairman, I’m surprised at the minister there now.

First of all Mr Minister (directed at  Minister Noel Dempsey) you made a bags of it in the beginning by changing the judges. You made a complete bags of it at that time, because I went to the La Foy commission and ye had seven barristers there, questioning me and telling that I was telling lies, when I told them that I got raped of a Saturday, got a merciful beating after it, and then stuffed…

… he came along the following morning and put holy communion in my mouth.

You don’t know what happened there. You haven’t the foggiest, you’re talking through your hat there. And you’re talking to a Fianna Fáil man, a former councilor and former mayor you’re talking to, that worked tooth and nail or you, for the party that you’re talking about now. Ye didn’t do it right, ye got it wrong.

Admit it.

And apologize for doing that. Because you don’t know what I feel inside me. You don’t know the hurt I am.

You said it was non-adversarial.

My God.

Seven barristers.

Throwing questions at us.

Non-stop.

I tri.. attempted to commit suicide, there’s the woman who saved me from committing suicide,  on me way down from Dublin, after spending five days at the commission. Five days I spent at the commission. They brought a man over from Rome, ninety odd years of age, to tell me I was telling lies.

That I wasn’t beaten for an hour, non-stop by two of them.

By two of them.

Non-stop from head to toe without a shred of cloth on my body.

My God minister.

And could I speak to you (comment directed to Leo Varadkar, Fianna Gael), and ask your leader, would you stop making a political football of this.

You hurt this when you do that.

You tear the shreds from inside our body.

For God’s sake, try and give us some peace.

Try to give us some peace and not to continue hurting us.

That woman will tell you how many times I jump out of the bed at night with the sweat pumping out of me. Because I see these fellas at the end of the bed with their fingers doing that (gestures) to me. And pulling me in to the room, to rape me, to bugger me and bate the shite out of me. That’s the way it is.

And you know what?

You know what, sometimes I listen to the leader of Fianna Fáil. I even listened to the apology. T’was mealy mouthed, but at least t’was an apology.

At least t’was an apology.

The Rosminians said in the report, they said they were easy on us. The first day I went to them. The first day to Rosminians in my home which is Ferryhouse in Clonmel, ’cause its the only home I know. He said “you’re in it for the money”.

We didn’t want money.

We didn’t want money. We wanted the pr…  someone to stand up and say “yes, these fellas were buggered, these people were ra…”

Little girls. My daughter, oh sorry, my sister. A month old when she was put in to an institution. Eight of us from the one family, dragged by the ISPCC cruelty man. Put in to two cars, brought to the court in Clonmel. Left standing there without food or anything, and the fella in the long black frock and the white collar came along and he put us in to a van.

Not a van, a scut truck, I don’t know what you call it now. And landed us below with two hundred other boys. Two night later I was raped.

How can anyone…

You’re talking about constitution. These people would gladly say “yes” to a constitution to freeze the funds of the religous orders.

This state, this country of ours, would say “yes” to that constitition if you have to change it.

Don’t say you can’t change it.

You’re the governement of this state. You run this state. So for God’s sake stop mealy mouthing. ‘Cause I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of it.

You’re turning me away from voting Fianna Fáil which I have done from the first day that I could vote. Because. And you know me. You know me Mister Minister. You’ve met me on a number of ocassions. So you know what I’m like.

— End of transcript

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• The shameful 800 (willknott.ie)
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The words “Counselling services available” (closely followed by counseling services swamped, contact telephone numbers below) barely cover the horror of the “endemic” abuse suffered by children in Irish Catholic institutions over 60 years. The report details 800 abusers (both men and women) who were given approval by Irish society in their abuse. This is not the complete figure. A separate report about abuse in the Dublin region only is also due.

The full report, all five volumes of it, took nine years nine years to compile and while covering a period of six decades and finding thousands of boys and girls that were terrorized by priests and nuns, it dosen’t show the full picture. Public opinion at the time refused to believe the victims. The victims were vilified while the abusers took their lauded place in society. The victims left, be it through suicide, or through emigration.

The 800 figure is also wrong. Many others knew, and turned a blind eye. Refused to believe that those given the task to watch their morality could be the depraved ones.

To cap off the offense, the victims and the families were not allowed in to the press conference, which gave very little detail in the prepared speech, and permitted no questions.

It took a long time for the stories to emerge, and while the church is still respected by some, others find its protection if the abusers unforgivable (including those to “admire the bravery of the abusers“). I suspect that its the truth coming out behind these tales which have helped the numbers of regular church goers to dwindle.

Its also a national, and international news story now.

RTÉ News – Sexual abuse was ‘endemic’ in institutions

Irish Times – Audio analysis and summary of abuse report

Irish Times – Children exposed to ‘daily terror’ in institutions – Includes audio of Patsy McGarry outlining the report’s main findings

Irish Times – Anger over exclusion from briefing

Irish Times – Systematic abuse in State institutions laid bare

Channel 4 – UK – As a damning report is published into “endemic” abuse suffered by children in Irish Catholic institutions over 60 years, Carl Dinnen accompanies a former resident as he returns to a” reformatory school”. (Includes video embedded above)

Channel 4 – UK – Jon Snow talks to Colm O’Gorman, the Executive Director of Amnesty International in Ireland, who was a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by a Catholic priest as a teenager. Includes video embedded here. Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video.

Twenty Major – So what happens now?

Twenty Major – Institutional Abuse report

Granddad – Suffer little children

A growing list of other takes on the subject from Irish Blogs

BBC News – UK – Irish abused ‘cheated of justice – Victims of child abuse at Catholic institutions in the Irish Republic have expressed anger that a damning report will not bring about prosecutions.
Includes video of Victims spokesman John Kelly giving his reaction to the report

BBC News – UK – In quotes: Irish media have been giving their first reactions to the damning inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland.

The full Comission Report

Volume three includes the witness statements, and chapter 14, about lay teacher abusing and being defended by the Department of Education,  got extensive reviews on today’s Morning Ireland.

Shocked but sadly not surprised,
Will

The HSE offers a free National Counselling Service for anyone who has suffered childhood abuse on 1800 235 234.

The related Connect service, for out of hours contact, is on1800 235 235 from the Republic of Ireland (freephone)  00800 235 235 55 from Britain and Northern Ireland (free from landlines).
www.connectcounselling.ie

Dublin Rape Crisis Centre operates a 24-hour helpline on 1800 77 88 88.

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• Critical report due on child abuse in Irish Catholic schools (guardian.co.uk)
• Thousands abused in Catholic schools in Ireland (guardian.co.uk)
• Ireland’s Church Abuse Scandal (madhavgopalkrish.wordpress.com)
• The Church and child-rape (timesonline.typepad.com)
• Wall of silence about 60 years of child abuse still not entirely broken down (sluggerotoole.com)
• Child abuse: the full story at last? (sluggerotoole.com)
• Some wounds never heal (osocio.org)

Update: 1pm May 21 2009
Irish Times Opinion piece  – Mr Justice Ryan’s report does not suggest that this abuse was as bad as most of us suspected. It shows that it was worse. It may indeed have been even worse than the report actually finds – there are indications that “the level of sexual abuse in boys’ institutions was much higher than was revealed by the records or could be discovered by this investigation”.

The Catholic League reaction – The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower.

Part of this post is for a Tuesday Push that is, namely Decisions for Heroes, and partly for a push that should be, Kildare Street.

Decisions for Heroes is a project that Robin Blandford has been working on for a while. And talking about it. In fact I assumed that the product has been launched a few months back. I was wrong; today is launch day.

And he’s built something amazing – technology that will help rescue teams save more lives. Its essentially a project management tool combined with an incident reporting mechanism that’s able to monitor team histories and readiness and raise alarms for expiration or under manning conditions.

What makes it different is that it is designed for a particular niche; rescue teams. Are the exercises and training reflecting the actual calls? Or the actually locations? Are there enough cliff climbers on-call this weekend? Are there certifications that are about to run out? This kind of thing actually saves lives. Its been studied, over 1,800 rescuers from Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, and Australia helped to trial and shape the development of the software. But one stands out. Robin is a volunteer member of the Irish Coast Guard (a cliff rescue climber to be precise) so he has seen first hand what is needed, and what is the most useful way to get that information across.

I’m sure that the basis of D4H can be used in more business-like settings, or indeed in logistic based industries.

And from saving lives, we move to a performance management technology that may cost the careers of a few politicians.

Created by John Handelaar Kildare Street is, almost simply a database. A database of what is being said in both Houses of the Oireachtas, by whom, when, how often and the complete text of what they say so it can be parsed for content. Based off the UK project, theyworkforyou.com, you can keep an eye on your favourite politician, or all the politicians in a constituency, or even when a particular word or phrase is spoken in the Dáil or Seanad Éireann debates or in written answers or questions to the Dáil.

There are a few bugs still in the system (it is a beta and since Irish addresses are vague it can misidentify a constituency, particularly when one side of a road is in one constituency, and the other side is in another constituency. It happens), and there is up to a 24 hour delay between the speech in the chambers and the text of the speech hitting the system (not a fault with the system but with the source; debates.oireachtas.ie.

Its useful to find out which TD or Senator has stayed quite all along (the records go back to 2004), and finding out how they actually voted on subjects of concern to you. Then you can challenge them when they call around asking for your vote.

Do challenge them. Right now, I’m wondering if there is a version for the MEPs.

Two people who should be praised for being heroes and making a difference.

Will Knott

I’ll admit that I don’t travel that much. If I did then I would be looking in to getting a MaxRoam chip and account. MaxRoam is the brainchild of Pat Phelan and Cubic Telecom, and its a sim chip that lets calls be routed through local numbers and VOIP for the international sections of the call.

It also means that you can have multiple local phone numbers in different cities around the world.

But, until recenty it was mostly for voice (not sure about texts). About two weeks ago they struck a deal with Qik. This deal, called Qik Roam, is a Qik-branded SIM that users can user for cut-price calls and data.

The announcement goes…

The partnership with Cubic Telecom will see Qik give its users the opportunity to purchase Qik-branded SIM cards enabling them to stream video live from all corners of the planet – without coming home to an astronomical phone bill. The Qik SIM also provides massive savings on voice calls, email, web browsing and texting while they travel. Under the tagline “Go mobile, not broke,” Qik is offering its users a simple, inexpensive way to share live video no matter where they are.

This is something I should have posted sooner, but other things got in the way. I know Pat through the Cork Open Coffee and I haven’t met anyone with as much passion as he has.

Hoping things get even better,

Will Knott

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From the fevered brain of Rick O’Shea, comes the story of a boy, a blog and an open grave.

no that’s wrong. Its Rick’s fault, he had an idea. A group pop culture blog, and he asked a few people to join in.

And for some unknown reason, he asked me.

I’ll admit that I have a shed load of tracks to review and put up there, but I’m also going to be posting about the impacts of technology on culture, and the impacts of culture on technology.

I need to thank a few people to get this going. So Thanks to to AJ, Rick, Darren, Sinead and Pedro for doing all the heavy lifting in getting the systems running. And a lot of the early posts (oops).

Now, I just have to write.

take care,

Will Knott