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TV tells CO2-emitting children to die early

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ABC's Planet Slayer

Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at “what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!”

It’s one of a number of interactive features that “Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinational-bashing (well, maybe a little…). Just fun and games and the answers to all your enviro-dilemas,” ABC claims.

The site is aimed at 9-year olds. However even a “virtuous” rating (e.g. not owning a car and recycling) is outweighed by eating meat, or spending an average Aussie income – with the result that many 9-year olds are being told they’ve already outstayed their environmentally-compliant stay on the planet.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC … depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?” asked Senator Mitch Fifield in the Herald-Sun.

The state-sponsored broadcaster (why is that not a surprise?) defended the morbid quiz, with ABC managing director Mark Scott insisting “the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues.”

Which is eco-speak for frighten them witless. However, as the excellent science blog Watts Up With That points out, the site clearly breaches Australian broadcasting guidelines on “harmful or disturbing” content.

Meanwhile, the site’s designers are revelling in the controversy:

“Thank God for outraged senators – you can’t buy publicity like that,” PlanetSlayer’s “creative director” Bernie Hobbs crowed to the New York Post.

So how, according to ABC, does one appease the vengeful Death God, Gaia?

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Rationing: the UK’s parallel currency

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Environment Minister Hilary Benn again rebuffed calls this week for WW2-style energy rationing to return to the UK. He was responding to a Select Committee report urging ministers to issue 45 million Britons with an energy trading “credit card” – a mammoth techno-bureaucratic exercise costing several billions of pounds a year to operate.

What’s interesting is how the normal parliamentary business was turned upside down.

Usually, it’s ministers who propose batty and unworkable legislation, and fail to cost it, while select committees are supposed to scrutinize the proposals: picking apart the logic and bogus cost estimates. But in this case the select committee in question – the “Environmental Audit Committee” – is positively evangelical about a return to rationing. Perhaps not surprisingly, ministers are wary of committing electoral suicide, or at least, not in quite such an obvious fashion.

Benn said his department DEFRA had made its own enquiry, which unlike the watchdog’s investigation, included costs. A rationing scheme would cost between £700m and £2bn to set up, he said, and between £1bn and £2bn a year to operate he said.

“In essence it is ahead of its time,” the minister said Tuesday. “The cost of implementing it would be quite high and there are a lot of practical problems to be overcome.” Front bench Tories are equally wary.

So what are the MPs proposing?

The ration, or “personal carbon allowance” or PCA, is a measure of an individual’s energy usage, either at home or traveling. Such usage is capped, and “further emissions rights will simply not be available,” the Committee says. You may choose between a holiday, and turning on the heating. Points win prizes, however, and frugal individuals would be rewarded financially from the creation of an internal market.

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Microsoft hands Google the future of digital books

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While Bill Gates now holds a lucrative monopoly on digital images, his successors don’t see the same prosperous future for the digital word. Microsoft is withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitisation project and will cease to scan books, the company said on Friday. It’s abandoning its Live Book Search venture – a curious decision, … Read more

Technorati knocks itself out. Again

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Technorati, the comically inept search engine, has redesigned itself again – knocking itself out in the process. The site was down when bloggers checked in yesterday. More importantly, the latest redesign is a tacit admission that it’s given up on its original mission – indexing the world’s weblogs. Technorati now claims to present “zillions of … Read more

How Free Press breaks the citizens’ network

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In 2003 the journalist Ron Suskind captured one of the quotes of the decade when he cited an unnamed Bush administration official as saying:

“When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

On the web today, “political activism” has become a virtual reality game that anyone can play, whoever you are. To succeed, a campaign need not be reality-based at all: it can generate its own fictional cause, complete with symbolic heroes and villains. Eventually the “campaigners” bump into physics, or economics, or real electors – who may have different, more urgent priorities – and the “campaign” vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

But what’s interesting is the real world consequences of the virtual campaign can be the complete opposite of the campaigner’s stated goals.

For example, have a look at this exchange with Ben Scott. Ben is a policy director at Free Press. The outfit describes itself as a “national, nonpartisan organisation working to reform the media”. A goal is a media more responsive to citizens, and more accurate too.

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Mozilla phancies doing a Phorm

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The Phorm bug is spreading. The idea of collecting a user’s browsing history and flogging that data doesn’t just appeal to ISPs. The Mozilla Foundation, the people behind the Firefox browser, want some of that action too. The Foundation is officially a tax exempt non-profit – but still manages to pay its chairperson $500,000 a … Read more

One Laptop Per Child: it’s a con, says former exec

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The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It’s all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Ouch.

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“Wake up and smell the Doritos™” – Terry McBride

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Copyright is over, and musicians should make themselves as pretty as they can for big brand advertisers, says top music manager and label boss Terry McBride.

McBride’s Nettwerk Music manages artists including Avril Lavigne and the Barenaked Ladies, and it’s been an indie label for over 20 years. He’s put his thoughts into a Music Tank report published today, and a keynote at Brighton’s Great Escape music festival.

It’s an upbeat vision of the future that eulogises free music, mash-ups and corporate sponsorship. It’s just not a vision of the future everyone is going to welcome – for example, Billy Bragg, who warned against corporate-flavoured feudalism here recently.

Last night Terry was named Music Manager of the Year by his peers. So we caught up with him today ahead of the keynote, to find out where the RIAA scourge thinks the money’s going to come from.

In the report, entitled “Meet The Millenials“, McBride writes –

“Discovery of new music in the digital economy will be synonymous with consumption”. The money will come from ad-supported music services and subscriptions.”

He predicts:

“Premium data services will be the new format of chic within social connections of friends and like-minded individuals”.

“Price will be a fluid definition and more indicative of a response to demand and freedom to use the file after purchase. The definition of what is ‘free’ and what is ‘paid’ will merge, and become a relative point of view.”

That’s one to remember when your landlord knocks on the door, demanding the rent.

“You might think I’m two months behind,” you’ll be able to say, “But that’s a relative point of view.”

Actually free music will become “an upsell technique for other music related products, e.g. concert tickets, clothing, music or artist branded physical products,” reckons McBride. The recorded music helps establish a larger commercial presence. And don’t forget micro-monetisation of P2P recommendations, he writes.

So let’s hear it from the horses mouth. Show us the money, Terry!

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Top-slicing the Beeb: Clueless execs get busy

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Some quangos, like jellyfish, seem to be able to reproduce asexually. It’s what they live to do. What this means is that without any contact, parthenogenesis occurs and they simply spawn off a little version of themselves, which may grow as large as its parent. Britain’s uber-regulator Ofcom, I learned this week, definitely falls into this class. I just hadn’t realised how badly it longs to plop out lots of baby Ofcoms.

Ofcom recently proposed that the BBC should share the licence fee with commercial rivals. But with one exception, none of the commercial rivals actually want this to happen – which leaves Ofcom keenest of all on the idea.

At the Westminster Media Forum debate on Wednesday, executives from the top of British TV management discussed the regulator’s review into Public Service Broadcasting, in which “top-slicing” the licence fee is The Big Idea.

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