And now you too can waste your time in learning! Here are five videos about journalism, blogging, tweeting, collecting and sharing information, and how stuff is generally changing. In no particular order:

1. “The Arab World on the Front Edge of Media”, by Moeed Ahmad, head of New Media for Al Jazeera

Figuring out which tweets from the Iranian protests are true. Tracking falling bombs in Gaza using SMS and open-source mapping mash-ups. Releasing war footage under Creative Commons licenses. Moeed has a seriously interesting job, and speaks with great eloquence about how his small new media team fits into a huge global news organization.

2. Clay Shirky and Alex Jones discuss the catastrophe of lost newspapers

There is a strand of thought that says democracy is screwed because the newspapers are going away. Basically, newspapers are responsible for a huge fraction of the of the world’s factual news reporting, and their business model just exploded. Paper is going away, but online advertising is only about 10% as lucrative because there’s much, much supply. Shirky does an amazing job explaining the economics of what’s happening, and why he thinks it’s a problem. You can find similar content in his famous March 2009 article, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” if you don’t want to sit through the hour. Either way, Clay is not an optimist.

3. Jay Rosen speaking… somewhat… slowly… about how bloggers gain trust online.

The talk is called “If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn’t. So Let’s Get a Clue” (text version.) He begins with a nifty introduction about the relationship between the “closed” newsrooms of traditional journalism and “open” journalism of bloggers. They’re not the same thing, he says. They produce different products. And then much about “blogging ethics”, which he defines as the practices through which bloggers gain the trust of their audience. In the spirit of the link economy, here I can do no better than blockquote a recent post from Blackfive. Rosen would have wanted it that way.

Here are his 10 key ideas for social media:

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

4. Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for Journalism

This presentation is awfully pretty. And it needs to be, because he’s speaking about a lot of numbers. He assumes that the traditional city newspaper collapses. Can an ecosystem of blogs plus a “New News Organization” sustain a profitable business? He runs the numbers, and releases the spreadsheets openly at newsinnovation.com. Bottom line: an online ad-supported news ecosystem does seem financially viable, employing about the same number of journalistst. It just won’t look anything like a traditional newspaper, and will operate on 10%-15% of current newspaper revenues (and employ many fewer people).

5. The Yes Men throw a pretend press conference, dressed as the American Chamber of Commerce

I adore The Yes Men for keepin’ it real. Here they pretend to be the US Chamber of Commerce, reversing their position on global warming (saying that Chamber now thinks it’s real.) A guy from the real COC bursts in half way through, and hilarity ensues. The best part is, Fox News ran the story on air, before quickly correcting it.

I’d like to thank The Yes Men for reminding us that mainstream journalism lacks appreciation for the absurd. Online media doesn’t. That would certainly explain the success of Gawker, anyway.

LOL! Worth staying with it until the end.

Other references I’ve found today in trying to understand what the hell the US government is doing:

Jeffrey Sachs (possibly best known as the author of The End of Poverty) discusses Geithner’s asset buying plan here: 

There are countless preferable and more transparent courses of action. The toxic assets could be sold at market prices, not inflated prices, making the bank shareholders bear the costs of the losses of the toxic assets. If the banks then need more capital, the government could invest directly into bank shares. This would bail out the banking system without bailing out the bank shareholders. The process would be much fairer, less costly, and more transparent to the taxpayer.

And I have finally, finally found a detailed, clear, and well-documented primer on how we got into this mess in the first place. In fact it’s an entire online supplementary chapter to Stanford Professor Charles Jones’ macroeconomics textbook. It clearly explains basic concepts like bank balance sheets, liquidity crises, the role of the federal interest rate, leverage, etc. and goes through a detailed history of the last two years from a macro-economic point of view. Lots of graphs too, the recession in pictures! Highly recommended.

(click for larger)

That’s right. It’s a VW bus body with a half of a classic VW bug grafted on top as a moon-roof. In funky Lemon Yellow. Holy crap.

From the front you can see the attention to detail. The spare tire is strapped on front by a nautical helm. The paint scheme is elegantly simple except for the inscription “mashallah” which means “luck” in Turkish. A plush ornament hangs from the rear-view and all the windows are, of course, curtained and tassled. (I assure you the interior is similarly shaggy, with Turkish carpets and deep brown plaid upholstery.)

On the side we find the name of this righteous vehicle: the One Way Goreme (say it  GOR-ray-me, the town where it rolls.)  Naturally, the Volkswagen company didn’t build this — Germans were never so funky.  This makes it a Turkish homebrew, but note the genuine VW hubcaps — a classy nod to the OG.

Nice, kids, nice.

We do deserve better; I for one don’t particularly enjoy squatting in the bushes. The World Toilet Organization agrees, and sponsors World Toilet Summits and World Toilet Expos, “wherein all toilet and sanitation organizations can learn from one another and leverage on media and global support that in turn can influence governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies.” They also started the first World Toilet College, providing training in toilet design, maintenance, school sanitation, disaster sanitation, and implementation of sustainable sanitation systems.

Okay, you can snicker now. I know I am.

This would be even funnier if it wasn’t actually serious — human waste is a major disease carrier if not handled correctly, and an awful lot of people are still just pooping on the ground or in the river. But let’s not dwell on negatives; in the carefree spirit of World Toilet Day, I thought I’d briefly discuss, and show some pictures, of the types of toilets I’ve encountered in various parts of the world. Travel yields many surprises, and, astonishingly, there were places where I had to learn to wipe my ass all over again. (“Don’t you know how to use the three seashells?” indeed.)

France
France uses mostly Western-style flush toilets, though they used to have many more squat toilets, and you’ll still encounter them in public washrooms outside of Paris. The Morlaix train station in Brittany– I remember it well. I was 19, naive, and on another continent for the first time in my life. I walked into the stall and might have actually said “what the fuck?” out loud when I saw only a porcelain basin set into the floor. That was a day of firsts: the first time I ever rode a high speed train, and the first time I ever experienced a toilet from another culture. The next day was no less revolutionary: I discovered a bidet in my cheap Paris hotel.

Thailand
Squat toilets, as is usual in Asia. However, no toilet paper. This was my first “three seashells” moment. The answer is that rubber hose connected to the faucet. Which is also why the floor is always wet, ewww. The squat toilet may  flush automatically with a lever or button; otherwise, you just run more water down the hole. Western toilets are nonetheless common in the cites and becoming more so, Public washrooms in, e.g. malls will have a combination of both western and squat toilets in different stalls, while fancier places such as nice hotels might have Western toilets only.

India
Not a good country for toilets. Almost universally squats, of course, and almost universally not the kind that flush. This a country all about buckets. The bathroom is a nasty little humid, smelly room where the floor is always wet. If there’s plumbing, there’s a faucet to fill the buckets, which are these days invariably cheap made-in-China plastic, typically red or green. In the really rural areas, there often isn’t plumbing. This means that someone has actually hand-carried the water into the bathroom for you, filling up the buckets at the river or the well. You better not use it all before tomorrow, lest you have nothing to flush with in the middle of the night. This precious water is also used for washing your ass and your wiping hand (the left) and also for bathing, which is performed by squatting on the floor and pouring water over your head.

Of course if you’re very poor (like several hundred million people in India) you just bathe in the river. Here are some people without toilets:

Indian Trains
I truly love the Indian train system. I do not love indian train toilets. Pee +  moving train = nasty. Also, the toilets are just holes onto the tracks. Between every pair of rails in India there are two stripes of old dried shit, one for the bathroom on either side of the car. Lest ye judge, European trains used to be engineered exactly the same way.

United Kingdom
No real surprises here, in the country that invented the water closet. However, you’ll still a lot of the classic elevated cistern design — works the same, but the tank is overhead. Cheerio.

Indonesia
In Indonesia we have the Mandi. The Mandi is a room, and it is also a cistern. The Indonesian bathroom is a small room with a concrete or tiled floor (fancy!) with a squat toilet set into it, and a big tiled cistern along one wall. This cistern, usually rectangular, is the Mandi proper. You extract water from it with a scoop, using only your clean right hand, and pour it over your backside and your wiping left hand. The geometry of this manuever confused me for weeks. Fortunately, I eventually found signs in a friendly tourist restuarant named “Bedudal” (click to enlarge and read the very helpful text)

Nonetheless, Western-style toilets are slowly appearing in Indonesia, and the locals are every bit as confused by this as a Kansas housewife facing her first bidet. The problem is the squatting habit: squatting on the seat of a Western toilet just leads to nasty. Also, the squat fixture is set into the ground and is a drain, so you just throw water at it to clean it, but this doesn’t work so well with a western toilet. The result is a mess, a stinking wet toilet seat that no one wants to sit on. It’s somehow reassuring to know that they’re just as confused by our bathrooms as we are by theirs.

Russia
Regular old Western-style toilets, and they use toilet paper. The only real hazard here is getting scowled at as you exit. There’s an inevitable old babushka who was waiting forever for that stupid foreigner to finish up. The Russians are not a happy people.

West Africa
There are squat toilets and western toilets and even the occasionally working flush toilet in the cities; outside of that, it’s buckets again. In the spring of 2007 I lived for a month in a little town in Northern Mali. The house was made out of dirt; let’s just start there. The bathroom had a little square stall in it, and once each day the woman of the house hand-carried water in buckets from the nearby well (only a few blocks). Like India, you squatted and poured water over yourself, and the “shower” drained through a hole in the wall directly onto the dirt street outside. The toilet proper was a latrine just outside the house; that is, a deep pit with a wooden lid over it, with a hole for pooping through.

Latrines are a relatively good arrangement, in that they are really quite sanitary. In many places, even in medium-sized towns, people just go in the river, like this man.

This sounds terrible, and it is– but even the sewage systems usually just dumped waste directly into the river. This would be bad in an industrial country, but it’s even worse when many people also bathe in the river. It spells D-I-S-E-A-S-E.

That Boat on the Niger River
I have to say that my favorite toilet ever was on a wooden cargo boat heading up the niger river. It was just a hole in the rear of the boat, by the tiller, but the view was marvelous, and there were two very friendly goats to keep you company.

Ethiopia
Ethiopia is not actually a desert, except for the eastern parts. Nevertheless, there’s not a lot of water. Per-capita daily water consumption is 20 litres, compared to over 200 for the United States. This means there’s not nearly as much flushing and washing going on as one would like. In the capital and the larger cities, water comes out of the tap. In smaller places, it’s typically stored in big cisterns filled every few days by the water truck. Everyone else carries it on their backs from the well. This, of course, is women’s work.

Anyway, toilets are squat type, where available. But rural Ethiopia is one of the poorest places in the world, and many, many villagers don’t have any toilets at all. Not even latrines. There are major development projects in this country just to dig latrines. This improves health by limiting the spread of disease, both by directly containing waste material and by reducing the number of flies, which are vectors for several unpleasant things (for example it’s suspected that they spread trachoma, which eventually makes you blind.) The required technology is not fancy by any means; a latrine is just a hole in the ground and a couple of  planks to squat over. Still, occasionally someone does get ambitious, dries clay in the sun, and constructs a genuine brick shithouse.

Oman
The usual developing world pattern: squat toilets, no toilet paper, wipe with your left. Then eat with your right! Like many ancient cultures, the traditional Middle East lacked both a) soap and b) utensils. This makes it very important not to confuse these two hands. And no, no one is left-handed.

Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal
Inside each stall was a pretty standard squat-with-bucket. But I have no idea where the water came from or where the poo went or how it was disposed of, because — here’s the thing — this at 4000 meters elevation, and the local temperature is well below freezing for most of the year. Ah, the mysteries of Nepal.

Japan
I’ve never been to Japan. My friend Nicole tells me that the toilets there break down into basically three types.

1. Squat toilet with flush
2. Western toilet with flush
3. Robot washlet

That’s right: ROBO-TOILET. I have no idea how this really works, but apparently it’s the height of comfort, sanitation, and good taste. Actually, it’s much more than style: toilet flushing is a major water consumer. Not only are low-volume toilets far more common in Japan, but some washrooms recycle the waste water from the sinks into the toilets. This is sustainability genius. It makes me absolutely certain that I live in a primitive culture, and so do you.

In conclusion
Toilets are important. Not only are they a critical piece of sanitation infrastructure, but many of the world’s toilets are exceedingly nasty. I’ve never bothered to photograph my least favorite toilets of all time, but that’s probably because I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We in the west with our flush toilets and toilet paper and sparkling shower stalls are the exception; the rest of the world thinks a bathroom is a wet, smelly place, when they have a bathroom at all. A good toilet means you probably have a very good quality of life, so enjoy yours. Happy World Toilet Day!

“Yeah, hi. I think we have a problem with last month’s bill. The amount due is, let’s see here, $140 million dollars.”

“What line is this, sir?”

“This is for Mars Phoenix. You know, the rover?”

“I’m sorry sir, I’m not a sports fan. Let me check on that for you; yes, that’s right, I’m showing an outstanding balance of $143,212,700. And nine cents.”

“Uh… that’s not right.”

“Is there a specific problem with your bill, sir?”

“Yes. Look. We signed up for 20,000 minutes per month of doppler ranging, and unlimited data, for $210,000 per month. Last month’s bill is obviously wrong.”

“Let me see… ah… It looks like you you went over your maximum download limit. Says here you downloaded close to eighty gigabytes last month. Wow, sir, what was all that data if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Images from Mars! We’re NASA, man. The Mars science program generates torrents of data.”

“I’m sorry sir, but we don’t support bittorrent over our network. It’s against your terms of service.”

“What? It’s not bittorrent, it’s… never mind– and what the fuck? How can you go over usage on an unlimited data plan?”

“That was the introductory offer. Unlimited for the first six months.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No sir. If you examine your contract…”

“Listen. Listen carefully. In June we switched all our Mars spacecraft to Verizon because you assured us would be cheaper than our Deep Space Network. Simplify operations, one easy bill to pay, family discounts for multiple spacecraft, that sort of thing.”

“We pride ourselves on operating the best network in the solar system, sir.”

“Then how can my bill be five hundred times what we signed up for?”

“Well, excess data is sent at SMS rates, sir.”

“SMS… rates?”

“Yes sir. I see have a package of 400 messages included in your monthly service. After that, messages are charged at 20 cents each.”

“Each?”

“Yes, 20 cents for each 160 characters.”

“For 160 characters… so… for eighty gigs… ah yes, I see now: you’re insane. Look, I’m a telecom engineer, I know it doesn’t cost that much to get data from mars, okay? Your SMS rates are simply made up. They have nothing to do with reality.”

“If you’ll examine the terms of service…”

“And if you’ll just examine– what? No. Fuck! We just lost the rovers! We had five bars and now the call’s been dropped entirely. What happened?”

“Just a moment sir… I’m checking on the connection… ah, it looks like your rover went over the crater rim. I’m sorry sir, but we won’t have any coverage in the Hellas Basin until August 2009.”

Nonetheless, McCainFreeWhiteHouse.org is pretty damn funny.

(As with so many cool things, my friend Brendan brought this my attention.)

TURN ON LIGHTS

You cannot see the light switch.

GROPE FOR SWITCH

You walk along the wall with your hands. Fortunately, there is nothing to trip over in your empty apartment.  You find a switch.

FLIP SWITCH

Nothing happens. Have you an account with Pacific Gas & Electric?

CALL PG&E

You have no phone service. Have you an account with AT&T?

EXIT APARTMENT

You are outside the building. Have you your keys?

YES DAMNIT

Just asking.

WALK TO CORNER STORE

You just moved to the neighborhood, so you don’t know where the corner store is.

WALK DOWNHILL

You walk two blocks and discover a light commercial neighborhood. There is a sign for “Last Chance Sundries”

ENTER STORE

You are in a cluttered little corner store. Cartons of surplus dog biscuits are stacked along one wall. The proprietor is a small but formidable troll woman.

ASK FOR CHANGE

The troll glares at you and says nothing.

BUY DOG BISCUITS

You don’t have a dog.

BUY THEM ANYWAY.

You hand over $9.67 for a carton of expired dog biscuits. This leaves you with $0.33 in change.

USE PAYPHONE

The payphone costs $0.35.

FIND PENNIES

There are no pennies here. The drunken gnome sleeping on the sidewalk probably picked up all the loose change.

OFFER BISCUIT

You wave the mouldy dog biscuit under the gnome’s nose. He blinks unsteadily, then snatches it out of your hands and wolfs it down. There are now crumbs in his beard.

ASK FOR TWO CENTS

The gnome growls at you. I think he’s hungover.

GIVE HIM ALL THE DAMN BISCUITS. I KNOW HE’S GOT TWO CENTS.

You give him your last biscuit. He wolfs it down, and walks unsteadily away, apparently satisfied. Something falls from his beard.

LOOK

It’s two pennies, of course.

CALL AT&T

You feed the change into the payphone and dial the operator, who directs your call to AT&T’s Muzak department. After a long time, you speak to a surly dwarf who agrees to set up service at your new address, if you bring to him the Ring of Zardoz.

AHHH!

Screaming at him doesn’t help.

GO HOME

You walk back up the hill to your apartment building. You notice that your car has been towed. Have you an Area J parking permit?

FUCK!

You wish.

GET PERMIT

You don’t know where to get it.

GOOGLE DMV

I see no internet here.

GO HOME

You close the door behind you in your new apartment. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Is it not just this act, in every sphere and on every scale, that makes the world a place I’d want to live in?

Apparently this was distributed to all J&J employees, perhaps in the hope that no one would sue for slipping on the immaculately maintained non-slip flooring. Let’s peruse, shall we? (click on any image for a bigger version)

Step 1: Watch your step! Humans are not naturally adept at level changes, because we evolved in the savanna, where it’s flat. Also, there are no stray power cords there.

Step 2: Height can hurt. As any mountain biker, knows, “going down is more dangerous than going up.” This is why there are non-slip treads on mountains.

Step 3: Health Helps! This man is exercising his arms so that he may walk safer. Also, you should not walk when you are stressed — after a bad day at work, it’s best to call a friend to come pick you up in a wheelchair.

Step 4: Don’t Do It! This one is really very reasonable, I think. There really could be a crocodile hiding in the grass. You know, in the savanna.

Step 4 again: Yes, there really are multiple pages on each one of these topics. Likewise, the authors felt it was important to discuss jumping down versus across. Sesame Street couldn’t have said it better.

Step 5: Wear the right shoes. In particular, wearing shoes at all is recommended. But I disagree — here’s to all our barefoot heroes!

Step 6: Hold on. Don’t ever carry something with more than one hand. That’s why we evolved with two: one to drag the zebra carcass, the other for the handrail.

Step 7: Fix it. It has long been known that the restroom needs to be closed with a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign until evaporation has made it safe to enter. Further, OSHA has now taken an interest in hazards in other phases, and is recommending labels on all objects in the workplace, with the standardized wording of “Caution: Solid Matter.”

The booklet concludes with the discussion “How Likely Are You To Fall?” on pages 38 and 39. Yes, that was 40 pages on how to walk. Whenever I’m feeling that the fall of Communism has the left the world with a shortage of absurdity, I like to imagine the production meetings for this book.

As an antidote, I present to you here a typical Southeast-Asian sidewalk, this one from Penang, Malaysia:

Note the many objects in the way of the sidewalk, which is bordered by huge gaping open sewers. Huge gaping open unsigned sewers! Nary a strip of caution tape in sight! Further, I assure you that just offscreen there are cars and pedestrians dancing senselessly, and a lack of good footwear. How do these people survive?

Actually, I find walking down the street in developing countries somewhat difficult, so don’t think I’m advocating for the open sewers approach. It’s just that– well, there’s got to be a balance here somewhere.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/too-safe-too-funny/feed 3 http://jonathanstray.com/shamanic-cheerleader-camp http://jonathanstray.com/shamanic-cheerleader-camp#comments Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:39:50 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=36 I don’t have another article on the mind ready right now — the shit doesn’t write itself, you know — and besides, it’s the weekend. On that note, I found the following flyer at the San Francisco Circus Center last week, which I now offer without comment.

Be sure to click on the image and read the text.