I've heard of using the headlights of ambulances and police cars to light up a landing area for helicopters during medical evacuations but how many vehicles would you need to light an entire runway? Well, according to the BBC, around 300 should do it.
On 2 April 2013 residents of Contamana, a remote town in eastern Peru, used the lights of around 300 motorcycles and motorcycle taxis to light up the local airfield runway so an emergency medical flight could take off.
Doctors had decided to evacuate a 31-year-old woman and her new born daughter, along with a 17-year-old boy with a possible case of leptospirosis, to a hospital in Pucallpa. By the time the flight was organised, darkness had fallen and the pilot couldn't take off as the airstrip at Contamana doesn't have any runway lights.
A local radio station put out an appeal asking motorcycle taxi drivers to go to the airstrip and light the runway so the plane could take off. Peruvian news outlet El Comercio reported that the flight landed in Pucallpa without incident.
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Sunday, 7 April 2013
Saturday, 6 April 2013
The OmniMirror: Shopping and Social Media
Brisbane-based entrepreneur Yazz Krishna has taken the "selfie" or self portrait to the next level. His company Fives Faces has developed The OmniMirror, an in-store interactive camera system that allows shoppers to take photos of themselves in different outfits and then upload the photos to their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get feedback from friends and family.
The OmniMirror is being marketed as a device that ''blurs the lines between shopping in-store, online and social media''. All of the photographs are branded with a special border of the store's choice and Mr Krishna estimates that by using social media in this way, each photo has the potential to reach over 10,000 people. The OmniMirror also allows users the chance to sign up for store news and updates, go on-line and search a company's website and can even be configured to show videos of a store's latest advertising campaign.
The OmniMirror is being marketed as a device that ''blurs the lines between shopping in-store, online and social media''. All of the photographs are branded with a special border of the store's choice and Mr Krishna estimates that by using social media in this way, each photo has the potential to reach over 10,000 people. The OmniMirror also allows users the chance to sign up for store news and updates, go on-line and search a company's website and can even be configured to show videos of a store's latest advertising campaign.
Friday, 5 April 2013
Journalism Fundamentals
This week in our journalism lecture we looked at some writing fundamentals. Marie talked about information attribution and the dangers using anonymous sources and discussed the nuts and bolts things such as spelling, punctuation and grammar.
In their book 'Blur: How To Know What's True In The Age Of Information Overload', authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenthiel tell a wonderful story about a journalist named Homer Bigart. During military press briefings in Vietnam, Bigart would ask countless seemingly dumb questions before going out with military units into the field. Other less experienced journalists would return to Saigon and file stories recounting the official version of the events, but Bigart's stories were different. The answers to his seemingly dumb questions, now on record, along with his own eyewitness accounts enabled him to refute the official line on how the war was progressing. The book quotes Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam who described Bigart's style as "portable ignorance" and William Prochnau, who said of Bigart, "He shows up knowing little and then finds out everything".
In their book "All The President's Men", Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward detail the tremendous difficulties they had using anonymous sources in their investigation of the Watergate Scandal. Unless two independent sources confirmed their information, they wouldn't use the material.
We also looked at a video called Caine's Arcade and had to write a story using the inverted pyramid style, where all the pertinent information of who, what, when, where, why and how is contained in the first few lines. After 17 years as a paramedic, figuring out what to write in a short report isn't usually too much of a drama, however in our tutorial, we had to interview a classmate and write a 500 word article based on that interview. What I've discovered is that knowing what to ask in an interview when you don't have time to prepare is difficult. In the ambulance service I had a safety net, we ask standard questions for each type of case. If you attend a patient who's had a fit, then you'd want to ask how long the fit went for, what it looked like, what happened before, what happened afterwards. Someone who's had a fall gets questioned about being knocked out, do they have dizziness or neck pain? For a patient with chest pain, you'd ask a different set of questions. What I'm finding now is that I often don't have a clue what to ask someone now it's not ambulance related. Until I gain some experience, maybe I can specialise and be an on-scene car crash reporter?
In their book 'Blur: How To Know What's True In The Age Of Information Overload', authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenthiel tell a wonderful story about a journalist named Homer Bigart. During military press briefings in Vietnam, Bigart would ask countless seemingly dumb questions before going out with military units into the field. Other less experienced journalists would return to Saigon and file stories recounting the official version of the events, but Bigart's stories were different. The answers to his seemingly dumb questions, now on record, along with his own eyewitness accounts enabled him to refute the official line on how the war was progressing. The book quotes Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam who described Bigart's style as "portable ignorance" and William Prochnau, who said of Bigart, "He shows up knowing little and then finds out everything".
In their book "All The President's Men", Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward detail the tremendous difficulties they had using anonymous sources in their investigation of the Watergate Scandal. Unless two independent sources confirmed their information, they wouldn't use the material.
We also looked at a video called Caine's Arcade and had to write a story using the inverted pyramid style, where all the pertinent information of who, what, when, where, why and how is contained in the first few lines. After 17 years as a paramedic, figuring out what to write in a short report isn't usually too much of a drama, however in our tutorial, we had to interview a classmate and write a 500 word article based on that interview. What I've discovered is that knowing what to ask in an interview when you don't have time to prepare is difficult. In the ambulance service I had a safety net, we ask standard questions for each type of case. If you attend a patient who's had a fit, then you'd want to ask how long the fit went for, what it looked like, what happened before, what happened afterwards. Someone who's had a fall gets questioned about being knocked out, do they have dizziness or neck pain? For a patient with chest pain, you'd ask a different set of questions. What I'm finding now is that I often don't have a clue what to ask someone now it's not ambulance related. Until I gain some experience, maybe I can specialise and be an on-scene car crash reporter?
Thursday, 4 April 2013
What's Your Poison?
I'm always happy to help out with bad alcohol purchases. I don't mean hangover bad, I mean those drinks marketed and packaged so well that they look fantastic in the bottle-shop but when you actually get them home and try them, you wish your taste buds had been surgically removed at birth. Get a really bad one and you'd do it yourself with a pair of pliers.
Cyndi is one of these shoppers. Mostly she sticks to her tried and true favourites but once in a while she'll see a new product and give it a try. Usually she'll have picked a winner but sometimes she'll get a dud, which is where I come in (I'm still talking drinks here by the way!). Her misfortune is my good luck, though my liver might have cause to disagree. It means I get to work my way through her unwanted purchases. I have to admit that this time even I'm struggling. Belgian cider with red fruits certainly isn't a Holmes family favourite. I suspect that it's sweet enough to bring on diabetes, the sugar is already giving me a headache and I've only had two. Still, I'm not a quitter and we've got plenty of Panadol, so I think I'm set for the night. Cheers!
Cyndi is one of these shoppers. Mostly she sticks to her tried and true favourites but once in a while she'll see a new product and give it a try. Usually she'll have picked a winner but sometimes she'll get a dud, which is where I come in (I'm still talking drinks here by the way!). Her misfortune is my good luck, though my liver might have cause to disagree. It means I get to work my way through her unwanted purchases. I have to admit that this time even I'm struggling. Belgian cider with red fruits certainly isn't a Holmes family favourite. I suspect that it's sweet enough to bring on diabetes, the sugar is already giving me a headache and I've only had two. Still, I'm not a quitter and we've got plenty of Panadol, so I think I'm set for the night. Cheers!
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Interested in Interest Groups?
This morning the ABC News website has a story about union lobbying, here's a link. Qld government seeks to curb union lobbying
Queensland's Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek doesn't like that under existing workplace agreements, a school principal was allowed to use a work email to ask workmates to lobby the Premier over the Gonski education reforms. He has now written to regional education directors demanding that campaigning be done out of work hours.
Queensland's Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek doesn't like that under existing workplace agreements, a school principal was allowed to use a work email to ask workmates to lobby the Premier over the Gonski education reforms. He has now written to regional education directors demanding that campaigning be done out of work hours.
Tuesday, 2 April 2013
A Brief Campus Tour
After five hours in the music lab, I'm really not sure my techno track is any further advanced than it was last week. I add a new bit and it sounds OK, but then I play it with what I've already got and it sounds...less OK. A lot less OK. Will.I.am and The Black Eyed Peas won't be worried that's for sure.
Today I thought I'd add some photos to the blog to show any non-JCU readers around the campus. There's no photo of the Nursing Block where I have political science and music media lectures, just imagine a pile of ugly bricks and you're there.
Today I thought I'd add some photos to the blog to show any non-JCU readers around the campus. There's no photo of the Nursing Block where I have political science and music media lectures, just imagine a pile of ugly bricks and you're there.
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| The School of Creative Arts. |
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| The front door of my torture chamber (not just visual media, the sound labs are in there too). |
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| The entrance to the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library. |
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| I've no idea what this building is or what happens in there. |
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| The Multi Media Journalism building. |
Monday, 1 April 2013
Consequences
Just a short post today. Well, that's the plan, I sometimes get carried away on a rant, as you know. I just wanted to follow up on a few things that I've blogged about previously and to share a couple of links for those of you who may be interested. Our lecturer Marie says we have to consider the wider impact our stories can have, and I think that these illustrate her point.
After my Is nano a no no? blogpost, here's an article from The Age. Apparently fear about nano-particles in sunscreens is causing Australians to give up on sunscreen altogether. Sunscreen fear a risk to health
Maybe it's me, but I think I'm seeing a link between the silliness of a story and the outrageousness of the comments that follow it. This is a follow-up to the story I blogged about on Friday, Commenting on Comments The usual public support for ambulance officers seems to have changed after the story's portrayal of them complaining about not being able to eat lollies and drink soft drink. After reading this story will someone decide that driving a person with chest pain or severe bleeding to hospital is better that waiting for an ambulance? Ambulance dispatchers do their lolly over eating ban
The library socks are packed and in a few hours I'll be on my way to Townsville for this week's uni, either swerving around the potholes or sitting at the various roadworks. I must say I do agree with the woman in The Cairns Post the other week who, when asked what was the worst part of the Bruce Highway, answered "the bit between Brisbane and Cairns."
After my Is nano a no no? blogpost, here's an article from The Age. Apparently fear about nano-particles in sunscreens is causing Australians to give up on sunscreen altogether. Sunscreen fear a risk to health
Maybe it's me, but I think I'm seeing a link between the silliness of a story and the outrageousness of the comments that follow it. This is a follow-up to the story I blogged about on Friday, Commenting on Comments The usual public support for ambulance officers seems to have changed after the story's portrayal of them complaining about not being able to eat lollies and drink soft drink. After reading this story will someone decide that driving a person with chest pain or severe bleeding to hospital is better that waiting for an ambulance? Ambulance dispatchers do their lolly over eating ban
The library socks are packed and in a few hours I'll be on my way to Townsville for this week's uni, either swerving around the potholes or sitting at the various roadworks. I must say I do agree with the woman in The Cairns Post the other week who, when asked what was the worst part of the Bruce Highway, answered "the bit between Brisbane and Cairns."
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