Thursday, 13 October 2011
Thailand Floods
I found the floods in Thailand pretty interesting to me because I am meant to be travelling there at the end of the year so hopefully by then everything clears up. This article I found in the New York times talks about all the other countries in Asia that have been affected by the typhoons and some of those countries I am also travelling to, so it may end up as very interesting trip. Here's the link Thailand Floods
BANGKOK — As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century bears down on Bangkok — submerging cities, industrial parks and ancient temples as it comes — experts in water management are blaming human activity for turning an unusually heavy monsoon season into a disaster.
The main factors, they say, are deforestation, overbuilding in catchment areas, the damming and diversion of natural waterways, urban sprawl, and the filling-in of canals, combined with bad planning. Warnings to the authorities, they say, have been in vain.
“I have tried to inform them many times, but they tell me I am a crazy man,” said Smith Dharmasaroja, former director general of the Thai Meteorological Department, who is famous here for predicting a major tsunami years before the one that devastated coastal towns in 2004.
The monsoon season this year has brought disaster to Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam as well as Thailand, where 283 people are reported to have died.
Thousands of people have been displaced as typhoons have battered the Philippines, and the country’s steep rice terraces of Banaue are reported to have been damaged by mudslides.
Floods have spread through Cambodia, where the city of Siem Reap is reported to be knee-deep in water, with floodwaters reaching the nearby temples of Angkor.
Thai officials are warning that, in the next few days, Bangkok could be inundated by a combination of heavy floodwaters from the north, unusually high tides and monsoon rains. People in some of the most threatened neighborhoods are building sandbag barriers around their homes and emptying shops of food, drinking water, batteries and candles.
Preparations in Bangkok have become frantic. About 45 miles of sandbags have reportedly been laid to reinforce a dike along the Chao Phraya River, which flows through the city. New flood barriers and drainage canals are being built. People are being told to stay alert.
As the water flows south from the inundated cities of Nakhon Sawan and Ayutthaya, with its submerged brick temples, the local news media have reported that 150,000 sandbags are moving south too, as soldiers truck them from one hard-hit area to the next high-risk point.
As the government rushes to protect some urban or industrial areas by diverting water from them, local officials have faced off over whose towns will be saved and whose will be sacrificed.
In Ayutthaya, two groups of villagers are reported to have battled over a dike that protected one side and condemned the other. As the unlucky residents dug at the dike to send the water toward their neighbors, a gunfight broke out, wounding one of the villagers. In some places, according to news reports, troops have been deployed to protect the dikes.
Among those stranded by floodwaters were 15 elephants, which climbed to the top of a wall a week ago to escape fast-rising water in Ayutthaya. They include seven mothers and their babies and a nine-year-old elephant known internationally for his painting skills with his trunk, said Ewa Narkiewicz, communications director for a group called Elephantstay, a nonprofit agency that cares for retired elephants.
“If proper help does not come soon, the mothers and babies are in grave danger,” Ms. Narkiewicz said. Each animal consumes up to 440 pounds of food a day, but the boats that could be used to ferry bananas, pineapples and sugar cane to them are busy rescuing stranded residents, she said.
Mr. Smith, the meteorologist, said the flooding situation this year had been aggravated by bad water management.
“They miscalculated the water levels and did not discharge water from the dams early enough in the rainy season,” he said. “The dams are almost full now, so they discharge the water at the same time, and all the discharge water comes down to the low-lying areas.”
Those areas become obstacles to the free flow of water, he said, as developers continue to extend their activities.
“They build their estates in low-lying areas that are supposed to be reservoirs,” he said, “and they throw up a dam or a dike, and they block the flow where the water is supposed to go in rainy season.”
Once the floodwaters reach Bangkok, they will pour into a city that has lost its natural defenses: a huge network of canals that have been filled in — or clogged with garbage — as the city has become an overcrowded behemoth.
“Our city plan is inefficient,” Capt. Somsak Khaosuwan, director of the National Disaster Warning Center, said by telephone.
“The weather hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “We always have more water in the rainy season. But if we don’t have integrated water management, we will face this problem again next year.”
Man and nature are increasingly estranged, he said, and their coexistence is becoming a battle. “This is the sign that we should preserve the forest,” he said. “We’ve hurt nature for a long time, and right now it seems that nature wants to pay us back.”
Man dies from Farm Accident
Only after doing this subject and always looking at the news you realise just how many people die from accidents everyday. Without fail everytime I go onto the online newspapers there are just an insane amounts of deaths which shock me every time. Here's the link for this story Death from Farm accidient
A farmer's son tried in vain to save his father when he was engulfed in flames when his ankle became stuck in a hay baler in western Victoria.
The 70-year-old Horsham man was fixing a problem with the machine when his ankle became stuck on Thursday afternoon.
He set fire to a hay bale to alert someone for help but was engulfed by the flames on the Dimboola property, police said.
His son came to his aid and also suffered burns as he attempted to free his father.
The 70-year-old suffered burns to 95 per cent of his body and was airlifted to The Alfred hospital in Melbourne in a critical condition.
He died early on Friday morning, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Police said the man had been driving a tractor, towing a baling machine and an accumulator, which groups the bales for later pick-up.
It is believed there was a malfunction in the accumulator and the farmer climbed into the machine to remove a loose bale.
He is thought to have triggered a sensor switch, which caused a bar to move and trap his foo
Lecture 10: News Values
What are News Values? Definition
- The degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story and the attention that is paid by an audience
Does News have Value to the audience?
- ‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And its only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead’
What are News Values?
1. Impact
a. “News I anything that makes a reader say, ‘Gee Whiz!’
2. Audience Identification
a. ‘News is anything that’s interesting, that relates to what’s happening in the worlds, what happening in area of the culture that would be of interest to your audience’
3. Pragmatics
a. Ethics – facticity – practice/practical
b. Current affairs - everyday
4. Source Influence
a. ‘Journalism loves to hate PR…whether for spinning, controlling access, approving copy, or protecting clients at the expense of the truth. Yet journalism has never need public relations more, and PR has never done a better job for the media’
- ‘News journalism has broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as ‘newsworthiness’
- Are News Values the same across different news services, countries and cultures?
- The answer is no because news values do vary across different services, countries and cultures
News Worthiness: The 12+ Factors
Newsworthiness: 3 Hypotheses
- The additively hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news
- The complementarity hypothesis that the factors will ten to exclude each other.
- The exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news.
- Another thought by Golding and Elliots (1979)
o Drama, Visual attractiveness, Entertainment, Importance, Size, Proximity, Negativity, Brevity, Recency
Newsworthiness: Reviewing Galtung and Ruge
1. The power Elite – Stories concerning powerful individuals organisation or institutions
2. Celebrity – Stories concerning people who are famous
3. Entertainment – Stories concerning sex, show business, human interest, animals, an unfolding drama, or offering opportunities for humorous treatment, entertaining photographs or witty headlines
4. Surprise - Sotries that have elemnt of surprise and or contrast
5. Bad news – Stories with particularly negative overtones, such as conflict and tragedy
6. Good News – Sotires with particularly positive overtones such as rescues and cures
7. Magnitude – Stories that are perceived as sufficiently significant either in the numbers of epole involve or in potential impact
8. Relevance – stories about issues, groups and antions perceived to be relevant to the audience
9. Follow-up - Stories about subjects already in the news.
10. Newspaper Agenda – Stories that set or represent the news organization’s agenda
Threats to Newsworthiness: Three Tensions
- Journalism/ Commercialization of media and social life
- Journalism/Public Relations
- Journalism Ideals/Journalism reality
Absolutely Beautiful Things
This is a blog site that my mother of all people found (who is a ridiculous rookie when it comes to anything to do with technology), it is an interior designer from New Farm who post who works on her blog. She also adds bits and pieces that she likes. I just found this interesting because my mum follows it and I didn't even know she knew what a blog was. Also that she is local Brisbanian and is using her blog to create awareness. Here's some of her stuff and a link to her blog Absolutely Beautiful Things Blog
The one above would have to be my favourite.
The one above would have to be my favourite.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Good Summer Drinks.
Ingredients
• 5 sprigs fresh mint
• 1 pineapple, peeled and cut into pieces
• 1 medium papaya, peeled and seeded
• 1 tbsp chia seeds (optional)
How to do
1. Press all ingredients through a juice extractor into a measuring cup
.
2. Stir to combine before serving
Straight A Smoothie
Ingredients
1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice (about 3-4 oranges)
1 small fresh peach
1/2 fresh nectarine
1 cup frozen banana
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 tsp maple syrup
1/4 cup ice
optional: 1/2 cup vanilla yogurt (soy)
How to do
Blend and serve!
Healthy Vegan Orange Julius
• 1 ½ cups almond milk*
• ½ cup orange juice concentrate
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla
• 6 ice cubes
How to do
Blend everything up in your high speed blender and pour into two glasses.
Lecture 9: Agenda Setting
Agenda Setting
What is Agenda Setting?
- is a theory but it is obvious
- The Pre-Amble: Social Construction of Reality
o An individual’s conception of reality is socially constructed through a process of communication used shared language
o Reality exists, but the way we come ti know it, talk about it and understand it is mediated through social life
o The media play a large role in ‘construction; or ‘mediation’ the social world as we understand
- The Four Agendas
1. Public Agenda – the set of topic that member of the public perceive as important
2. Policy Agenda– issues that decision makers think are salient
3. Corporate Agenda– issues that big business and corporation consider important
4. Media Agenda– issues discussed in media
- Defintion
o Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large
- Reality ‘Reality’ and ‘Media Reality’
- Two Basic Assumptions of Media
o The mass media do not merely reflect and report reality, they filter and shape it
§ No possible way that we can deal with all the information and events in the world
§ So they media takes little bits that they think are the important
o Media concentration on a few issies and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues
§ Currently we are interested in carbon tax but serious famine in Somalia (thousands are dying)
- Where did it come from?
o The Hypodermic Needle Model (1920’s Harold Lasswell)
§ The mass media injects direct influence into the audience
§ Limitations with this part of the theory it is all one way, non-thinking, biological uniformity of reactions
§ We act the same way and think the same way
o Walter Lippman (1922)
§ The mass media creates images of events in our minds
§ The pictures in our head are the things that we carry around of particular events
o Lippman – Propaganda
§ It is used as a toll to hep shape images in the minds of humans in support of an enterprise, idea or group.
§ Liquidate judgments, regain and innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted
o Lenny Riffensteing
o Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw
§ Surveyed those who were undecided on Nixon
§ Hypothesis – the mass media set the agenda by emphasizing specific details
Two main Types of Agenda
- First level
- Second Level
What it does?
- Transfers the issue salience from the news to the media public
- Transfer of issue salience for both issues and other objects such as political figures
- Elite media often set the agenda for issue in other media
Why?
- Because they can
- Noam Chomsky
The agenda Settin ‘Family’
1. Media Gate Keeping
2. Media Advocacy
3. Agenda Cutting
Media Gatekeeping
- the exposure of an issues
- What the media chooses to reveal to the public
- ‘How individuals control the flow of messages through a communication channel’
Media Advocacy
- The purposive promotion f a message through the media (e.g. health)
Agenda Cutting
- Most of the truth of the reality in the world doesn’t being represented
- Issues like AIDS but JB hair citu showed instead
- Because AIDS doesn’t get as much attention time in the media, the issue is cared about less
Agenda Surfing
- jumping on the bad wagon
- The media follows the crowd trends
- The media ‘srufs’ on the wave of topics originally mentioned in the opinion-leading media
- Bandwagon
Diffusion of News
- The process through which and important event is communicated to the public
- How, where, when news is released
- Who decides
- Wuite often the state government will release an important piece of news on a Sunday because Sunday is a slow news day
Portrayal of and Issue
- the way an issue is portrayed will often influence how it is perceived but the public
- Different media outlets with different protrayals can cause the public to formulate their own perception
Media Dependence
- The more dependent a person is on the media for information, the more susceptiple they are
- Examples are facebook, twitter
(end og family)
Strengths/Weakness
The 24 Hours news cycle
- Has changed the way things have happen in terms of the setting of agenda
- Arrived wit the cable channels
- Old School – realeased early in the morning then not released till 24hrs later
- Now – 24hr news, iPads, mobile phones with internet
- Now they have more than one primetime
- Media Agenda and Political Process
o Deciding what’s important
- Political Agenda Setting
o It is a two way street
What’s big at the moment?
- Carbon tax
- In the 80’s it was claaed greenhouse effect
o Talked about how earth was warming up
- Then called Global Warming
- Climate Change
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