A.P. Executive doesn’t know his company has a YouTube channel

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As A.P. tools up to become the RIAA of the print business, here’s how it’s shaping up.

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

Frank Strovel, an employee at the radio station who tried to talk some sense into the A.P. executive Twittered yesterday:

I was on the phone arguing w/ AP today. We were embedding their YouTube vids on our station’s site. We’re an AP affiliate.

And then added:

They asked us to taken them down. I asked, “Why do you have a YouTube page w/ embed codes for websites?” Still… they said NO…

The making of little monsters

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Brooding on the shocking attack on the two kids in Edlington, I came on this characteristically wise article by Nicci Gerrard, who has done more than her fair share of thinking about evil and savagery (she sat through — and wrote about — the West trial, and, later, the Soham murder case). Here’s part of what she writes today in the Telegraph about the Edlington case:

This distressing story follows an intense scrutiny of childhood; it seems like an apt and ghastly demonstration of the anxiety that has been expressed by think-tanks, children’s charities, teacher associations and cultural commentators. The teenage gangs in inner cities; the increasing knife culture; the angry 19-year-old who lashed out and killed the boy in a bakery; the shocking case of an 18-year-old youth who, when in foster care, raped the two-year-old in the family and abused the nine-year-old; the extensive survey earlier this year that expressed a widespread anxiety about the state of the nation's children and the fact that childhood ends too quickly; the finding that a teacher suffers a violent attack almost every school day; the growth in childhood obesity, in teenage and pre-teenage binge drinking, in under-age sex and under-age pregnancies – there is a sense of a growing crisis in childhood, certainly a crisis in the way that we think of children.

On the one hand, we sentimentalise them, on the other we are scared of them. We idolise them and scapegoat them. We want them to be young and innocent, unblemished by hard and mucky life for as long as possible, and we want them to grow up, flooding them with adult expectations and media images, encouraging them to be sexualised way before their own desires, pushing them through the hoops of exams, forcing them out into the harsh realities of adult life. The way that the attack in South Yorkshire has already been characterised in the media is a neat example of this cultural dichotomy: the so-called “devil brothers” versus the “regular” boys and “pals” who were out on a harmless fishing trip; the unnatural versus the natural, and indeed, in a wider context, evil versus good.

But evil is too easy, too comforting. Children are products of their environments and monsters are not born but made. It is no surprise at all that the two boys in Edlington were in care. Such cases almost always happen on the fringes, the extreme edges of a society. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-olds who led the two-year-old James Bulger down to the railway embankment by the hand, kicked him, then battered him to death with bricks and an iron bar, came from deprived families. So, too, did Mary Bell who strangled Martin Brown the day before her eleventh birthday, in May 1968, and then two months later, strangled the three-year-old Martin Howe to death (her mother was a prostitute and often absent; Mary was forced to engage in anal and oral sex with men from the age of five)…

The flight of the bumble bee

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In my Observer column last Sunday I wrote that “It’s said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly.” My friend Sean French (who is very hot on urban legends and memes generally) picked up on this and emailed me this link, which restates the theory that when you take in consideration the bee’s wingspan along with its weight it is aerodynamically impossible for it to generate enough lift. But it seems that

in 2005 with the assistance of high-speed cinematography and mechanical models of the bee’s wings, scientists were able to put this perplexing mystery to rest. As it turns out the bee flap its wings an amazing 230 times per second, much faster than smaller insects. Their analysis revealed sufficient lift was generated by unconventional combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, along with a very fast wing-beat frequency.

The site also included a link to this video, which shows a bee doing its stuff as captured by a high-speed camera:

Google vs songwriters

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Very interesting blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones.

neither Google – YouTube's owners – nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed “a rubbish deal” – at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that’s because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy – oooh two or three years back – and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.

Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic – and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.

Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for – and demanded a rate 50 times higher.

Later on, Rory cites research by Credit Suisse which claims that Google is losing about $440 million a year on YouTube. It can’t last, folks — enjoy it while you can.

Schmidt: Google loves newspapers — honest

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Damp squib department. According to this NYT report, the anticipated bunfight failed to materialise.

SAN DIEGO — It had the makings of a high-tension face-off: Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, spoke Tuesday at a convention of newspaper executives at a time when a growing chorus in the struggling industry is accusing Google of succeeding, in part, at their expense.

Any open controversy reverberated little more than a soggy newspaper hitting a doorstep. Mr. Schmidt’s speech closing the annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America here was a lengthy discourse on the importance of newspapers and the challenges and opportunities brought about by technologies like mobile phones.

His speech was followed by polite questions from industry executives that only briefly touched upon a perennially sore point: whether the use of headlines and snippets of newspaper stories on Google News is “fair use” under copyright law or a misappropriation of newspaper content.

“I was surprised that the publishers really let Google off the hook,” said Jim Chisholm, a consultant with iMedia Advisory, which advises newspaper companies around the world. “While Google News generates a lot of audience, ultimately, the question is going to be who is going to make the money out of that: Google or the publishers.”

Video reveals police attack on man who died at G20 protest

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Amazing footage showing what appears to be an outrageous, aggressive unprovoked attack by a police officer.

Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton-wielding police officer in riot gear, dramatic footage obtained by the ­Guardian shows.

Even if it cannot be shown that Mr Tomlinson’s death was directly caused by this attack, it looks like GBH to me. It’ll be interesting to see how the Met/City of London Police try to avoid responsibility.

Interesting case also of citizen journalism?

LATER: Interesting blog post linking the Tomlinson case to that of Blair Peach who was killed just 30 years allegedly by a blow from one of the Yard’s ‘Special Patrol Group’.

In Peach’s day there were no hand-sized video cameras available to record the action. Today, media is much more immediate and many people carry camera phones capable of recording video. This means that any untoward action by the police during the G20 action was very likely to arrive in the public domain, just as the Guardian’s video showing the assault on Tomlinson has.

This begs the question of why the police were acting in such an aggressive and violent manner when they knew full well their actions were likely to be captured on film and beamed worldwide? The answer, to me, is simple: The police have too many bad apples in their barrels, people who are not in the job to protect people but actually prefer to bully them. They especially like to bully people who they see as ‘not one of them’. In other words, people who don’t share their often extreme views. This is a dangerous situation. It is especially so because the police force has been given many extra powers under the guise of ‘the war on terror’. Now, we are seeing them using these powers to terrorise.

I’m sorry to be a cynic but I do not believe that the policeman who was involved in Ian Tomlinson’s death will ever be brought to justice. Nor will the police aggression be reigned in as there seems to be absolutely zero political will in the leading parliamentary parties to bring their hunting dogs to heel.

Footnote: The Coroner’s verdict on Peach was “death by misadventure”.

How are we doing?

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We ain’t seen nothing yet, if this analysis by a former IMF economic adviser and a TCD economics professor is to be believed.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

The historical comparison with stock markets is also interesting: