Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Rape Case

 General, Media, Politics  No Responses »
May 212011
 

The news has been swamped with various items about the alleged rape of a hotel maid by Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the former head of the IMF). The alleged rapist has been paraded in front of the media wolves by the US authorities, vilified in the press with the stories containing the fig-leaf of the word “alleged”, and suffered worse in the “blogosphere”.

He has been effectively forced to resign from his job as the head of the IMF, and can pretty much say goodbye to his chances of becoming the next president of France.

Just the beginning of what he deserves, if he raped the hotel maid.

A gross injustice if he is innocent.

And as yet, we simply do not know if he is guilty or not. Despite those who believe in the old “no smoke without fire” saying, we need to wait until the trial before knowing if he is found to be guilty or to be innocent. Until his trial, he should be presumed to be innocent.

How On Earth Can He Be Innocent?

After all, the hotel maid has claimed he raped her, and identified him. Surely there can be no mistake. Actually there are a whole bunch of reasons why he may be innocent :-

  1. The maid was raped, but by someone else with a similar appearance. It is easy to imagine how a rape victim might be confused afterwards, and mistakenly accused Dominique. Perhaps it is not very likely, but it is possible.
  2. The maid is mentally unbalanced and imagined the rape. Again not that likely, but possible.
  3. Consensual sex took place, but the maid for whatever reason changed her mind after the event. Yes this does happen from time to time.
  4. The maid maliciously falsely accused him of rape. There are a variety of reasons for this, and the conspiracy theorists will like this one … if you wanted to get the head of the IMF “out of the way” because he was about to do something that would spoil your plans, there is pretty much nothing better than a false accusation of rape to do so.

None of this should be assumed of course … a woman has made an allegation of rape, and it should be treated as though it were true until it has been tested in a court of law. Indeed appropriate treatment (including counselling) could well result in additional information for a trial … whether it is supportive of the allegation, or refutes it.

How Can We Do This Better ?

At present, there is a presumably innocent man who has only just been released from prison into bail conditions that probably qualify as “house arrest”. His name is known, his family is known, and he has lost his job. All of this could happen to you whether or not you are likely to go out and commit rape (and women should note that this does include you!).

The victims of rape quite rightly get anonymity, but what about the alleged rapist ? If he or she is innocent, surely they deserve anonymity too ? Forget that you may be protecting a genuine rapist, at this point the alleged rapist is innocent.

Anonymity for an alleged rapist is the right thing to do. Difficult in practise to implement given that many will need to be kept in prison pending trial, and in cases of famous people like Dominique it may well be that their name escapes. But we should be trying to do the right thing even if it is difficult.

 

Super Injunctions, Twitter, and Old Media

 General, Media  No Responses »
May 092011
 

Today there is a lot of fuss about the information on just who has obtained a super injunction to prevent the publication of details of their sordid private life being “published” via a Twitter post. It is probable that the relevant Twitter post is just wrong, but more interesting than that is the reaction of the old media. And an apparent misunderstanding of just what Twitter is.

The old media is complaining that there is effectively two rules – one for them and a quite different one for Twitter users. Well, no it isn’t quite like that. The relevant Twitter user – if he or she is within the jurisdiction of a UK court – is just as guilty of breaching the injunction as an old media company who published the story themselves. In practice, it is not possible to stop a Twitter user publishing before being prevented from doing so – there are just too many Twitter users out there from stopping them.

What will be the effect of this in the medium term? Basically it means that the old media will not be able to make any money at the old meaningless “three people in a bed” story – they will still be able to sell newspapers with real news, but meaningless exposés of someone’s private life with no real public interest will be a lot less likely. With any luck. And good. The news is not made any better by knowing that celebrity X slept with gold-digger Y unless that celebrity is genuinely in public life and making a moral stand on such issues.

The funny thing is that people somehow think that this is a new “problem”. I can remember the Spycatcher issue way back in the day where a publisher was prohibited from publishing the autobiography of a former MI5 agent in England, but the book was widely available elsewhere in the world (including unbelievably in Scotland!). Although the mechanisms were different, the basics are the same – one group of people are not allowed to tell the story, but another are.

Now onto the misunderstanding of Twitter itself. When someone “tweets” some item of news on Twitter, the company itself is not responsible – except to the extent that they are obligated to take it down given appropriate legal action. The person responsible for the content of the tweet is the tweeter themselves. The Twitter company themselves are no more responsible for the content than the newspaper delivery boy is responsible for what is in the newspaper.

Having said that, I believe that super injunctions are wrong. Injunctions to stop a story being published are all very fine, although they are relatively unobtainable for an ordinary person. And yes ordinary people do sometimes appear in news stories. But preventing the fact of an injunction stopping a story being published is wrong.

Does Breast Cancer Get Too Much Attention ?

 Media, Politics  1 Response »
Feb 072011
 

Sometimes it seems like breast cancer gets a little too much publicity in comparison to other cancers.; it seems that breast cancer gets 10 mentions in the media to every mention of prostate cancer; not to mention lung cancer which causes more deaths in women than breast cancer.

I’ll be using figures from Cancer Research UK to make the points throughout this posting …

First of all lets get the big figures out of the way. In 2008, breast cancer killed 12,047 women (and 69 men) in comparison to total deaths from cancer of 156,723 – “only” 7%; even excluding cancer deaths for men, breast cancer claimed 16% of all cancer deaths for women.

Lung cancer is the one that claims the most lives – 22% of all cancer deaths are from lung cancer, but we can ignore them because it’s the fault of those smokers. Although according to the Wikipedia article on lung cancer between 10-15% of all deaths from lung cancer are from non-smokers – probably all passive smokers.

After the two big cancers, we get prostate cancer which claimed the lives of 10,168 men, or 6,5% of all cancer deaths – not much behind the levels of breast cancer And just for those who aren’t paying attention, no there were no deaths amongst women from prostate cancer.

Including all deaths from gender specific cancers (and I’ll cheat and include the breast cancer figures for both men and women), male specific cancers account for 6.65% of all cancer deaths, and female specific cancers count for 12.5% of all cancer deaths. That is quite a significant difference, and significantly more than the figure of 7% for breast cancer deaths amongst women.

If you look at cancer as a whole, 52% of all cancer deaths were men, and 48% women. It’s relatively even despite the increased risk women run of dying from a female specific cancer. Of all non gender specific cancers, men had a higher number of deaths in 22 out of 27 different cancer categories.

So let us have a look at the figures from the media. Specifically counting the search results from the BBC News website :-

Search Phrase Number of results Percentage of mentions Percentage of deaths
“Cancer” 14401 100% 100%
“Breast Cancer” 2206 15% 7%
“Prostate cancer” 606 4.2% 6.5%
“Lung Cancer” 758 5.2% 22%
“Rectal Cancer” 40 2.7% 10.4%

I think it’s more than obvious that breast cancer gets a little more attention than the others. That’s not to say it gets too much attention – it’s the others that get too little.

Palin – Take Your Foot Out Of Your Mouth !

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 132011
 

Sarah Palin has recently made a speech on the recent shooting spree in Arizona where a congressperson was shot (and probably targeted by the shooter) in relation to the media noise about the aggressive and combative attitudes in US politics at the moment. In it she claimed the media was launching a ‘blood libel‘ against the right-wing in US politics in its criticism of the political debate.

Whether or not she has a point to make, the use of the phrase ‘blood libel’ here is grossly inaccurate and an example of exactly what the media is talking about. Blood libel is the phrase used to describe the hysterical accusations of anti-semites accusing Jews of sacrificing Christian children and draining the blood for some religious purposes – if it hadn’t been used as the excuse for slaughtering Jews throughout history, it would be ridiculous. I am hardly an expert on the US media, but I find it extremely unlikely that anyone from the US media is likely to hunt down any right-wingers, kill them, and drink their blood.

Sarah Palin’s remarks are merely a hysterical over-reaction to a perceived attack on the right-wing. To be fair I should point out that apparently others have used the phrase in US politics recently. Which just goes to show that US politics is little over-heated. Interestingly a conservative commentator has pointed out that the use of this phrase is an indication that Sarah Palin just isn’t of presidential material – presumably presidents are expected to behave and talk in a slightly more dignified fashion.

Did the US media attack the right-wing ?

The US media did comment after the shootings that there is a considerable level of aggression in US politics today, and used an example showing certain US congressional areas targeted with rifle cross-hairs which was published by the right-wing. This could be said to be unfairly criticising the right-wing except that the reason that example was used was that the congressperson who was shot (Gabrielle Giffords) had previously complained about that very publication in which she was targeted.

Personally I don’t believe the right-wing was specifically targeted in the various suggestions that US politics can be a little aggressive. There is a lot to be said for lowering the temperature in US politics – opposition, criticism, discussion and debate are all a part of politics and essential in any healthy democracy. But there’s no need to go too far, and throwing around inappropriate phrases like “blood libel” is certainly an example of that.

I have no doubt that there are Democrats who go too far too.

We have no way of knowing how much the current atmosphere in US politics had an effect on the shooter, and will probably never know. After all he is clearly a deranged individual and he probably doesn’t know himself. The naysayers who claim it had no effect have no way of knowing that. If it did have an effect, it does not make those making inflammatory comments responsible for these shootings – not even to the extent of inciting murder.

But the current state of US politics could have an effect on deranged individuals even if it did not in this case. As such it is worth considering whether toning it down is worthwhile. Say “she’s an idiot” rather than “she’s a traitor”, say “he should be fired” rather than “he should be put in the chair and the switch thrown”. It doesn’t ruin the debate and it might just save someone’s life – isn’t that worth it ?

Streaming Media Stutters

 Computing, Media  No Responses »
Jan 052011
 

Becoming increasingly popular are various forms of streaming media services – Last.FM has personalised radio stations I can tune into on my phone, the BBC has their iPlayer which allows me to catch up on BBC TV (or radio) programmes I’ve missed, and my film rental service even has a streaming service that allows me to watch films without being worried about discs being mailed to me. All very cool of course, and it’s even quite handy but there are a few problems that need to be solved before streaming services can beat having the real disc – compact disc for music and blueray for films.

We sometimes look at these services under the best of conditions and rarely consider how they would work under the worst of conditions.

Firstly there is the quality issue. Whilst streaming music may well approach the quality of CDs, films and other forms of video are a long way from being of the same quality of the discs – sometimes not even getting close to the quality of DVDs when Bluerays are the quality to aim for. Sure it is no big deal – the convenience of online streaming makes up for the quality to a certain extent, but it does not replace the need for quality.

Secondly, reliability is an issue. Not only does streaming media (even audio) have a tendency to stutter to the point where listening or watching becomes unbearable, but sometimes streaming services just crash through being overloaded – very frustrating when it is half-way through a film. In theory most of our network connections have more than enough bandwidth to support streaming media – at least audio. In fact my own network connection is good enough for streaming video with just the occasional stutter – maybe just once an hour – and of course the occasional stutter may well because of other activity on my network. I do after all have people visiting my “server under the stairs” for blog postings and photographs on a regular basis.

However my wireless network is sufficiently bad that even streaming audio can get very bad in the evening. Not the fault of the streaming media companies that I live in a very dense environment with lots of wireless “noise”, but it still means that I tend to avoid using wireless networking except on devices where there is no choice. And on those devices I have sometimes been forced to put them away, or switch to using 3G.

It would be helpful if media streaming companies allowed people to buffer larger amounts of the media stream to assist in this. I would not mind waiting 10 minutes for a buffer to fill up to ensure that I could watch a film all the way through without stuttering. Or indeed wait 60s for an audio stream to buffer.

On the subject of media servers crashing, it is a little hard to see what can be done about this. The obvious thing is that streaming media companies need to be very careful about the code they write (or buy) to increase reliability. Software always has bugs, but increasing the importance of bug destruction would be very wise. Less obvious is to measure how reliable the media servers are at various loads, and limit the load to the level they can support reliably.

A message saying “please wait for an available film slot” is better by far than trying to start playing a film only to have it drop out half-way through!

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