This segment is a few months old, but creative hacking is pretty timeless.

How ‘gesture technology’ like Microsoft Kinect will change the way we live | Need to Know

Here’s a term you may not have heard yet — but we can just about guarantee that you will. It’s called “gesture technology” — using our body movements to control a computer. No keyboard, no mouse. It may represent a major leap in how we will communicate in the digital world. It might sound like just another way to sell gaming devices, but this story is about how gaming technology is being used to change the way we live.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Much of the PBS system is watching KCET closely to see how it fares without the PBS “icon” series shows to keep an audience. While cutting deals like this one makes headlines, taking a look at the daily program schedule leaves me really underwhelmed with the offerings. Five hours of cooking shows each weekday? Still, I’m hoping for the best.

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KCET-TV in $50-million deal for new local shows

Since KCET-TV Channel 28 left the PBS network in January, one big question was how the newly independent public station could find unique programs to replace network shows like “Charlie Rose” and “Sesame Street.” Now it’s hoping to take a big step toward that goal with an entrepreneurial partnership that could be worth as much as $50 million.

The station announced today that it will team with Dominique Bigle, a former Walt Disney Co. executive and the founder of an Encino-based visual-effects and production company called Eyetronics Media & Studios, to produce and acquire original series about Southern California. KCET says it hopes to start producing the first five shows by the end of the year and will add staff to do so.

Bigle is the son of Armand Bigle, who helped oversee Disney’s expansion into Europe. In an interview, KCET chief Al Jerome said he met Bigle through Steve Unger, an executive recruiter, and the pair had been talking for months about a deal.

The KCET programs will celebrate “the vibrancy of Southern California’s people, places, and culture, as well as its history,” the station said in a release. While not offering titles or specifics, executives said the shows will cover such topics as food, technology and entertainment. Details will be forthcoming in several weeks, they added.

KCET left PBS in January after months of disputes over dues and other issues. Many of the programs the station has aired this year are either reruns, such as the old British crime series “Prime Suspect,” or general-interest news shows from overseas providers, such as Al-Jazeera or Japan’s NHK. 

The deal is KCET’s largest cash infusion for new programming since a $50-million partnership with oil giant BP and other donors led to a “A Place of Our Own,” a nationally distributed series for preschool caregivers.

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“We had to learn — and we have to keep reminding ourselves — to start by listening to the community and sometimes leave the camera at home,” said Nashville Public Television President Beth Curley about the station’s Next Door Neighbors project. Pictured: scene from Next Door Neighbors program about the city’s Somali refugees.

Rules of Engagement 1

New mindset requires new habits: listen, earn trust, partner-up

The professionals who work to engage public media groups in their communities are still learning what it takes. In a series of articles, associates of the Wisconsin-based National Center for Media Engagement will lay out what they’ve learned. Executive Director Charles Meyer begins the series. Continued…

 

I heard Bill McKibben describe this first…this article on 2011′s extreme weather ends with sobering statistics on how our human-warmed atmosphere is leading directly to heavy flooding and snowfall. Those of us who dealt with high water this year had better get used to it!

The year 2011 has begun with a remarkable number of high-impact floods world-wide, and much of the blame for this can be placed on the current La Niña event occurring in the Eastern Pacific… When one combines the impact of La Niña with the increase of global ocean temperatures of 0.5°C (0.9°F) over the past 50 years, which has put 4% more water vapor into the atmosphere since 1970, the result is a much increased chance of unprecedented floods. A 4% increase in atmospheric moisture may not sound like much, but it turns out that precipitation will increase by about 8% with that 4% moisture increase. Critically, it is the extreme rainfall events that tend to supply the increased rainfall. For example, (Groisman et al., 2004) found a 20% increase in very heavy (top 1%) precipitation events over the U.S. in the past century, and a 36% rise in cold season (October – April) “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile–1 in 1000 events. These extreme rainfall events are the ones most likely to cause floods.

Bill Shireman brings a less-than-typical view from the conservative camp. I share his interest in seeing a show as thoughtful as “Firing Line” return to public media. Perhaps he should anchor it?

If we defund PBS, should we defund commercial media, too?

I have been struggling in recent weeks with the conservative attack on public broadcasting.

As a fiscal conservative but a social libertarian, I can see plenty of reason to put a stop to taxpayer-financed radio and television. The libertarian in me instinctively fears government-supported media: doesn’t that just lead to political capture? The fiscal conservative in me wonders why we should waste taxpayer dollars on PBS, with today’s superabundance of media outlets. And the capitalist in me loves the innovation and diversity generated by a wide-open, unsubsidized, competitive media marketplace.

But the realist in me — the one that actually listens to both commercial and public media — sees something different. Today, public broadcasting offers far more important and thoughtful programming, and is far less politically biased, than its commercial counterparts.

Why would public and commercial media be so different? It mostly comes down to the incentives that drive the two.

Commercial broadcasting depends on advertising. And advertisers depend on people who buy things. People buy things most readily when they are feeling impulsive — when their basic drives for sex, love, power, and chocolate are tickled. Therefore, commercial broadcasters select programs that trigger peoples’ impulses.

Take a look at what draws mindless eyeballs in commercial media these days. “Reality shows” lure us with the seven deadly sins — every one of them celebrates lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, or all of the above. “News” has morphed into Glenn Beck on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left, which feed on the fear and anger of their viewers by bashing their respective political enemies as a bunch of idiots. True, perhaps, but not very introspective or enlightening.

Lust, greed, fear, anger, and rage — these are the impulses that draw us to the commercial networks. Then, once we’re captured, the networks toss us into a advertising lion’s den, for a series of 30-second “words from our sponsors.” Those spots, you may have noticed, don’t sell us with words — they bypass our cortex and take their case directly to those same basic animal drives, to sell us fast beer (sex), fast food (gluttony), fast money (greed), and fast cars (sex, gluttony, greed, plus envy).

Everyone thinks it’s someone else who is influenced by advertising. And everyone is right. Few of us make any conscious choice to buy the stuff we see on TV — the preference to consume builds up unconsciously.

That’s mostly a good thing. Our core instincts have an ancient wisdom to them — they have helped keep us from dying out as a species for a half-million years. But they all depend on the most powerful survival tool at our service: our cerebral cortex — our thoughtful, conscious, and caring human selves. That’s the part of us that helps us choose when we should, or should not, follow our instincts.

None of this is an attack on free enterprise, or capitalism, or the marketplace. None is meant to condemn products that appeal to our impulses, or oppose commercial media. None of it reflects a Puritanical desire to rid society of the core instincts that help drive the survival of the species.

But the overwhelming onslaught of advertising leaves us impoverished, when it comes to thoughtful, humane programming. We need genuine choice in media. Right now, public broadcasting offers one important choice.

Yes, PBS can be irritatingly self-righteous, and reflects a left-of-center bias in both its tone of voice and its story selection. And I’m not sure how programs like NPR’s Car Talk or Antique Road Show improve my lot.

But PBS is fundamentally different from Fox or MSNBC, the conservative and liberal champions of commercial media. It is calm, thoughtful, measured, and introspective. It triggers not my passions and impulses, but my intellect. Even if I disagree — as I often do — I feel like I am more grounded and thoughtful when I listen to PBS.

I remember, forty years ago, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line was the most thoughtful political program on the air: a staunchly conservative, pro-free market program, on a liberal, publicly-supported network. Oh, how we need more of that.

PBS is a small, almost trivial counterweight to the power of advertising-supported media. If anything, we need more of it, not less. More important, probably, is that we think about the effects of commercial media more systemically — not to replace it, but to provide a genuine, self-supporting alternative, one that appeals not just to our base instincts, delicious as they are, but to our higher yearnings as well.

Follow Bill Shireman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Future500

Wow, knowing this, I can finally buy that Caribbean Island I’ve been looking at…

iStockphoto/CT757fan/Salon

Apparently Americans want to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because they think 5 percent of the federal budget goes to NPR and PBS. That was the median guess in a CNN poll released Friday. If that were true, Talking Points Memo noted, that would mean the CPB would receive $178 billion a year from the government. (And that’s not even counting what they get from Archer Daniels Midland and viewers like you.)

BBC, the largest broadcaster in the world, takes in $7.5 billion in income a year. If Americans were right, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have a bigger budget than every military on Earth besides our own. NPR would beat China in an arms race.

What would the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even do with that kind of money, besides continue to have a liberal bias and support the establishment of sharia law? We have some guesses:

• “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” would be broadcast live from a moon base.
• PBS would require a donation of at least $100,000,000 before sending you a DVD box set of a Fleetwood Mac reunion show.
• $250,000,000 gets you a genuine Thai silk tote bag filled with precious stones. And one DVD documentary on the making of “The Red Green Show.”
• “Frontline” would always be in IMAX 3-D.
• Robert Siegel and Neil Conan voiced at all times by Kiefer Sutherland and Morgan Freeman.
• Childrens Television Workshop would purchase the entirety of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in order to film Sesame Street live on location.
• Click and Clack would be androids.
• “Are You Being Served?” would be painstakingly digitally altered until funny.
• Terry Gross would conclude interviews by deciding if the subject lives or dies.
• Ken Burns documentaries would be produced with original footage obtained via time travel.
• Every home, office and classroom in the nation would have a radio that can be turned down, but never completely off.
• Juan Williams would be missing and presumed killed by an unmanned CPB drone.
• “And part three of our show: What do you do when your mega-yacht’s death ray disintegrates your mother-in-law? It’s David Sedaris on the best Thanksgiving ever.”
• Garrison Keillor could finally get that thing with his sinuses cleared up.

Both sides have claimed early victories in the case of documentarian Joe Berlinger vs. Chevron over access to the raw footage he shot for his expose “Crude” on Amazonian oil exploitation. I’ve blogged about the case and the filmmaking community reaction here.

On Thursday, the appeals judge ruled that Berlinger must turn over Crude footage that does not appear in any public version of the film’s release if it shows the counsel for the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio class action lawsuit against Chevron or any experts or Ecuadorian government officials involved in that case.

This is bad news for the plaintiffs in that case, and likely good news for Chevron. Thankfully, the court also found that Chevron had to use the footage strictly for legal defense purposes and could not use if for marketing or other PR purposes. But whether this decision means that filmmakers can rest assured that their footage is safe from similar “takings” is still pretty unclear.

As for the case’s potential use as precedence on non-confidential information and journalist’s privilege in the future, Floyd Abrams, the famed First Amendment lawyer representing the media amici, cautioned that a ruling alone is not enough grounds to gauge its future applications. “We have to wait for the opinion of the court to see how they applied the law,” Abrams said. “It’s too early to tell where we’re going in this area.”

Berlinger himself seems both confident that the court will ultimately uphold the narrowing of the original request and the difficulty of any court appeal to prevail:

Most appeals are unsuccessful and the appealing party has a lot to prove. I was very relieved the court seemed to be sympathetic to my primary concerns about the case. Nobody expects the decision to be completely reversed. Having covered the legal process, I know there are times you want journalists to be compelled. But it can’t just be a fishing expedition. If I knew I had any evidence that was exculpatory, I would want the footage to be turned over. But only if the First Amendment standards of true relevancy and exclusive access of information are met.