Shooting Wide Open

The Guardian has a great interactive photo-based feature that deals with the consequences of climate change through the portraits and stories of people in various countries whose lives and livelihoods are or will be potentially affected. (via Duck Rabbit)

Earlier in the week, the US had been quibbling about promises implied by nuances in the text:

“I regret to report we have been unable to reach agreement,” John Ashe of Antigua, chairman of one negotiating group, reported to the full 193-nation conference later Wednesday morning. In those overnight talks, the American delegation apparently objected to a proposed text it felt might bind the United States prematurely to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, before the US Congress acts on the required legislation. US envoys insisted, for example, on replacing the word “shall” with the conditional “should.”

Wasn’t this exactly the type of thing that the US delegation pushed for in previous summits? There is a book about negotiations of climate change treaties in which it is revealed that the oil lobby was meeting with the delegation and writing the talking points for them. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the title of the book, having lost it in the computer crash with all my notes for a paper on climate change that I had done in past years. Isn’t this, in fact, how the Bush White House tried to water down scientific language?

And now we hear that they’ve agreed on a deal that “is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change.” Well then, what the hell was the point? Have they seen the predictions made by the business-as-usual model?

It is clear in health care, it is clear here, that the control corporate lobbies have over government is beyond out of hand. There needs to be some serious electoral reform to change the two party voting system to a platform-based one and to institute legal accountability for politicians who make promises. What has made more and more sense to me is that at the least, taxpayers should be able to directly determine where a certain percentage of their taxes go. With the technology we have now, this is wholly feasible. That, however, does not solve the problem of bills and initiatives still being written by specialized professionals. This is a helluva time to be dealing with all this stuff.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead was blogging about being in Copenhagen, and look at this photo he posted of a part of the hall:

Pretty ironic decor for an environmental summit.

Pictory is a newly launched site that features single-photo stories. Captions are mandatory. The themes tend toward the personal at the moment, but I wonder if they will be more specific or issues based if the site attracts enough interest in the future. At any rate, it’s a twist on the conventional photo essay. I am, however, curious about the idea of having multiple photographers contribute to one cohesive photo essay instead of seeing one person’s vision of a subject. Though the themes aren’t focused enough for my tastes, it looks like there’s a lot of room to grow and develop.

Incidentally, the first location-based theme is San Francisco, so if any locals want to take a crack at a submission, you’ve only got until the 9th. For the procrastinators out there – when on the 9th? It’s not clear, so better play it safe and submit on the 8th! Is it just me or does the 1000+ px requirement indicate that virtually everyone browses photos on a 17″+ monitor these days? Some of the photos don’t fit on my laptop screen.

(via Marc Feustel of Eyecurious)

Speaking of the Innocence Project, I read this and it stuck in my craw. It is a reminder of how important it is to have journalists researching, questioning and challenging rather than just quoting and straight reporting. In a month-old New Yorker, there is Todd Willingham’s story: he wakes one night to find the entire house on fire, tries to get into his kids’ room and fails, stumbling out just before the fire reaches what’s called flashover. Witnesses report his attempts to get back into the house. Later, they change their testimony in light of arson investigators’ conclusion that he set fire to the house in order to kill his children. He is convicted and executed, but not before a concerned pen pal does some leg work and consults a munitions expert turned arson consultant who, days before the execution, submits a report to the state of Texas claiming that the arson investigators were full of shit and he is an innocent man. No dice. Willingham is treated like a child killer in prison, his ex-wife refuses to bury him next to the kids. What a nightmare.

It turns out until the mid ’90s we didn’t really know anything scientific and confirmed by experiment about fires. Read on. (Hurst is the expert, Vasquez and Fogg are the arson investigators.)

In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.” After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity.

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.”

The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

The article is really worth checking out.

Taryn Simon

This in from the Times:

For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates.

But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves. Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.

We’ve all heard this line of argument against bloggers, but journalism students? A little ridiculous. Hell, maybe nobody’s a journalist – we’ve all got that self-promotion ulterior motive. All kidding aside though, that would be an interesting study to commission.