I was off enjoying myself last week - so apologies if you've already seen this - but I've just spotted that our photographer extraordinaire Dan Chung has tested out the video capabilities of the new Canon EOS5D MkII camera.

It's interesting to see how digital SLRs (increasingly prevalent among hobbyists, in my experience) can really start to compete on the video front too. Dan's video from the streets of Beijing is simple enough - as I said, just a test - but here it is in HD glory courtesy of Vimeo.

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guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsBobbie Johnson

A notable extract from today's report by Professor Gregg on welfare reform. The report was commissioned by the government.

...if lone parents had the same employment rate as the overall population some 300,000 children would be lifted out of poverty. Furthermore, the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among children aged 5-15 in families whose parents have never worked is almost double that of children whose parents are in low-skilled jobs.

Tory lead cut to 1%

Nationwide
State should help children communicate
Straw launches the ‘vests of shame’
Shoppers leave Tesco for rivals
Officials who failed Baby P are forced out

International
Obama unveils his new team
Europe hesitant, divided over Congo force
The ordinary heroes of Mumbai’s terror
Berlusconi sues his journalist critics

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Aaron

Charlie Brooker isn’t impressed with new “Community Payback” bibs for criminals sentenced to Community Service: an ill-conceived compromise between wonkish newspeak and a tabloid sound bite.

Chicken Yoghurt. Justin agrees it’s a crap idea. Mind you Just, it ticks all the right boxes (gimmicky, pointless, gimmicky, rightwing, gimmicky, cheap, gimmicky, short-sighted, gimmicky, idiotic, and let’s not forget - gimmicky).

Andrew R glances over the Green-affair and concludes that a lot of people are making themselves look very silly. Indeed, we don’t know jack, yet various blowhards on both sides continue to gush hyperbole and claptrap. [/imho]

Head of Legal takes a lawyerly approach the Green affair. Naturally.

Craig Murray pours cool water over the outrage. After all, what’s a few leaked policy docs when compared to a “Dirty Dossier” that fooled parliament into war? A measure of perspective, perhaps?

Daily Kos. “Plutonium Page” mulls over the “manufactured drama” after the appointment of Hillary C.

Dave Osler argues that the terror-attacks in Mumbai are a reminder that a settlement over Kashmir is long-overdue.

But a warning to Labour: if thousands of mothers end up with punishing benefit cuts because they can’t find work they feel fits their children’s lives, the outcry will be deafening. Erm, why? I do buy the argument that we should have a welfare safety net. The public provision of what people need to survive. But I don’t [...]Tim Worstall

Woolly Hutton wants to tell us all of the glories of Rhineland capitalism again. There is another approach, more widely used in mainland Europe and Japan. It is best illustrated by a story from yesterday’s Financial Times about the Reading-based Magal Group. Owner Gamil Magal wants a £1.5m loan from RBS to tide over his engineering [...]Tim Worstall

Hmm, George reads two papers drawing on the same evidence. He then decides that the one with teh catastrophic outcome must be the right one. And thus society must be turned upside down. He really doesn’t seem to get the economists’ point. That doing these things might (and at the speed that Monbiot is arguing they should [...]Tim Worstall

Gawker:
Media critic Michael Wolff's new book, The Man Who Owns the News, is excerpted in the London Guardian today. But it glosses over the details of a joke in particularly poor taste that the reptilian Newscorp billionaire told his Sun tabloid editor Rebekah Wade—who was was arrested a few years back for assaulting her supposed "hard man"* British actor husband—after "a few drinks in a posh London restaurant," about gay sex. "Seeing [Wall Street Journal publisher Robert] Thomson arrive, Murdoch whispered: "For God's sake, don't tell Robert what I said. He's a gentrified man ... very clever," it reads.
Also in the book, apparently (from Radical Royalist):
...Murdoch was devoutly anti-monarchy but that "the internal cash flow of News Corporation became highly dependent on The Sun's obsession with Diana".

The day Princess Diana died, in 1997, Mr Murdoch met a News Corp executive at a bar and got blind drunk. He was "mourning" the passing of a woman whose life had been a circulation bonanza.

*Heh. If it wasn't for that line, I would've quoted the Guardian itself.

Not quite sure this stacks up. If lots of people are having free (but safe) sex as the Terence Higgins Trust suggests, then there ain’t gonna be that baby boom….Tim Worstall

Submitted by Aleksandr K

      

This is a guest post by Greg J. Smith, a Toronto-based designer and researcher. Greg writes about design, visualization and digital culture on his personal blog Serial Consign.

A few weeks ago the second edition of the Visualizar workshop wrapped up at Medialab-Prado in Madrid. In curating the event this year, organizer José Luis de Vicente selected urban informatics as the focus of research and visualization development. Partially inspired by Cascade on Wheels (a project created at the workshop last year), the Visualizar mandate was in line with contemporary thinking about the city where the street is viewed as a platform and urban space is considered a DIY enterprise. Visualizar'08 brought together a range of programmers, designers, architects, illustrators and scholars to participate in a seminar on contemporary thinking about the city and then bunker down to "rapid prototype" seven visualization projects over a two-week period.

These visualizations provide a range of strategies for representing urban space and address issues of mobility, perception, the environment and flows of information. Each of these interfaces is proof positive that urban cartography is rapidly evolving and (more importantly) open to reconsideration by a motivated citizenry. Although each of these projects is credited to a singular author or collective it has to be noted that this work was produced by groups of up to a dozen collaborators - more info on these teams is available at the site for each project. Input and guidance came from guest lecturers Aaron Meyers, Bestario, Fabien Girardin, Adam Greenfield and Juan Freire.

BCNoids (Marina Rocarols & Enrique Soriano)

Taking advantage of the data generated by Barcelona's community bicycle program Bicing, BCNoids aims to explore the movement of 6000 bikes across a network of 400 stations. Developed in VVVV, the research draws inspiration from Craig Reynolds' 1980s experiments with simulated flocking behviour and aspires to deliver "a tool for the analysis of human mobility patterns".

Ecovisualizacion-Ecoanalogizacion: Modelo de Ciudad Biocentric (Francisco Castillo)

Providing environmental information on agents which include synthetic chemicals, neurotoxins and bioaccumulative toxic substances, Ecovisualiacion is an interactive system for representing the levels of various pollutants. Working at multiple scales, this Processing application displays emissions from various EU capital cities (noting potential health risks), acts to "spatialize the dynamic behavior" of these substances and tracks concentrations at a molecular scale.

In the Air (Nerea Calvillo)

The city of Madrid currently tracks air quality through a network of sensors distributed throughout the city. This allows for the monitoring of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone at sites of traffic congestion and public interaction. In the Air uses this data to provide a (Processing-powered) realtime index of the air quality and a highly customizable interface for examining historical data. This visualization was simultaneously developed alongside a prototype of a diffuse facade - an experiment in using architecture as an ambient display for environmental information.

Much Ado About Nothing (Iván Huelves Illas)

Delving into the realm of subjective experience, Much Ado About Nothing utilizes noise pollution data from Madrid City Council to create virtual spaces in which to explore and discover the character and quality of sounds created at specific sensor stations. The resulting panoramic interface provides an immersive experience coupled with a graphic overlay that displays the intensity (in decibels) and source of each noise.

Murmur (Writing Academic English)

Finding inspiration in the question "Have you ever thought of urban space as seen through the eyes of the media?", Murmur proposes an alternate means of mapping Madrid. Fed by a stream of more than 600 RSS feeds, this Actionscript/PHP application creates several models for "media geography" which geolocate, aggregate and abstract the flow of information from major media outlets and the blogosphere.

Lazarillo GPS (Carolina Paola & Caluori Funes)

Maps are often founded on the misguided notion that their end-users are all equally mobile. Lazarillo GPS proposes a system for mapping areas of "cultural interest" in Madrid for the physically disabled. Armed with GPS receivers and disabled test subjects, the Lazarillo team went out into the city and conducted field research to serve as the basis for a custom notational system which maps accessibility in several tourist districts.

Cartography of the Strait 2.0 (Indymedia Estrecho)

Picking up on the momentum of the 2004 research project Critical Cartography of the Strait of Gibraltar, Cartography of the Strait proposes a visualization of the "migratory, economic, political and cultural flows" between southern Europe and northern Africa. This research saw the prototyping of a 3D environment for representing these sociopolitical flows which is currently under development.

Big thanks to Greg for the detailed recap of Visualizar. Subscribe to Serial Consign to read more from Greg.

LORD Mandelson has added the pathetic Lapland theme park to his list of businesses that must be saved.(author unknown)

Thinking about going back to school in a weak jobs market? Students face a plague of loan problems, less aid and higher tuition and fees.Nan Mooney, AlterNet

Have progressives been suckered into supporting a President who will really govern from the 'center-right'? The short answer is no.Robert Creamer, Blog for Our Future

The economy may go back up, but the decline in oil production can't be stopped. Does the president-elect know this?James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com

Even the government is now warning the US will face a world of greater dangers, more challengers and a paucity of reliable allies.Michael T. Klare, The Nation

The choices India makes now about the threat of terrorism will help determine what kind of superpower it will be.Juan Cole, Outlook India

The economy may go back up, but the decline in oil production can't be stopped. Does the president-elect know this?James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com

The economy may go back up, but the decline in oil production can't be stopped. Does the president-elect know this?James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com

The choices India makes now about the threat of terrorism will help determine what kind of superpower it will be.Juan Cole, Outlook India

For a month Wafaa Bilal lived in a cell with a paintball gun pointed at him, controlled by an internet audience who could shoot at him 24 hours a day.Gabriel Thompson, The Brooklyn Rail