Wednesday 21 December, 2005 at 9:07PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (1)

A little over a week ago I published an entry about the extreme ad saturation while watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on the ABC Family channel (a problem not restricted to this one movie or network by any means). During the last 1½ hours of the movie I noted down the ad times and durations - there was 30 minutes worth of ads and just under 1 hour worth of movie during that period. I mentioned at the time that there should be a law against that much advertising. I've since found out that there actually is a law, and it appears the network was breaking that law - and not for the first time.

Federal regulations stipulate that children's programming may contain no more than 10½ minutes of advertising per hour on weekends and 12 minutes per hour on weekdays. The movie in question was screened on a Sunday evening and would certainly be classed as children's programming - the fact the the channel itself is called ABC Family only further supports that. The total advertising during the the last hour alone was 20 minutes worth, almost double the legal limit.

An article in the Washington Post dated 22nd October 2004 reports that the FCC (federal communications commission) fined both the Nickelodeon and ABC Family networks for a total US$1.5million for - you guessed it - advertising violations.

Viacom acknowledges that Nickelodeon violated that regulation nearly 600 times over approximately 10 months, representing the equivalent of 1,021 extra 30-second ad spots. As part of its settlement, Viacom agreed to reduce Nickelodeon's ad inventory by the same 1,021 spots of 30-second duration over the next 10 months. I have my doubts that they did.

FCC regulations also prohibit a network from running ads for products associated with the programming being aired - in other words, you can't run a commercial for a SpongeBob SquarePants doll or video during a telecast of the 'SpongeBob SquarePants' cartoon series. Viacom reported that by its own estimate it violated that rule about 145 times during the same inquiry period. By its own estimate? Yeah ok, whatever.. we can probably double that figure then, heh.

ABC Family says it unintentionally placed ads for associated products in programming during 31 half-hour telecasts between July 2003 and July '04 - again, by their own estimate. You could be pretty safe in assuming that their estimate was a very conservative one.

Nickelodeon said in a statement that it was "extremely upset" to discover that it had exceeded its allotted commercial time (yeah I'm sure) and blamed "human errors and computer system problems that occurred in our commercial logging systems."

An ABC Family spokeswoman said in a statement that the error was the result of a computer traffic system "that did not read for notations regarding special children's advertising restrictions."

I see. And over a year later that is still a problem is it? Yeah right.

ABC Family added, "We derived no economic benefit from the error, as these commercials were never sold for placement in related shows."

Now that made me laugh. Nice one. Let's look at what I think she's really saying here: there was no additional charge for the commercial spots being placed in related shows (normally they charge more if an ad is aired during a related program on non-children's programming time - it's illegal to do it during children's programming), but you can pretty much guarantee there was still the normal advertising revenue generated, despite her deviously trying to insinuate there was no income at all without actually saying it. If there really was no income whatsoever generated, then that's exactly what she would have said, loud and clear.

The problem here is obvious - a slap on the wrist and a US$1million fine by the FCC is far outweighed by the revenue generated by the illegal advertising. How much so? Try this on for size:

Highly-watched programs can command rates in the millions of dollars. For example, a single 30-second spot during the 2005 Superbowl sold for US$2.4 million. Commercials during less-watched programs are more affordable, but the cost of those commercials may still run in excess of US$100,000 per 30-seconds.
source: Gaebler Ventures / Walker Sands Communications.

When you're looking at that kind of money, it seems pretty obvious that this 'accidental' infringement of FCC regulations is no accident at all - and really, to make the same 'accident' 1,021 times in a 10 month period, and then continue doing it a year later after being fined for it? Reality check.

Being conservative and putting in a figure of say US$50,000 per 30-second slot as opposed to the US$100,000 stated above, Nickelodeon's additional 1,000+ 30-second spots over 10 months amounts to over US$50million in advertising revenue, and that is purely for the time slots, not the making of the commercial. Going on the US$100,000 price tag quoted above, that total figure derived from illegal advertising now becomes US$100million. Does anyone seriously think a US$1million fine is going to make the slightest bit of difference in deterring these corporate giants from continuing with their illegal advertising saturation? Hell no.

If the FCC wants the networks to actually respect the law, then the networks should be fined at least the total amount of revenue generated from all the advertising that exceeded legal limitations, and then an additional fine imposed that is substantial enough that the network concerned won't risk trying it again in the hope that they don't get caught.

As it stands, the network execs must be laughing all the way to the bank, and the FCC gets a tidy little income to ligitimize their existance, and it is you and me, the people who pay for this service, that suffer for their corporate greed. Disgusting isn't it?

If you've noted similar excessive advertising, note down the times and report it to the FCC - you're paying for the network service - time to let these big network corporates know that they have certain responsibilities to their clients - we are, after all, the only reason their businesses exist.

final exams postponed by strike action

      Tuesday 20 December, 2005 at 6:11PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

The TWU (Transport Workers Union) started a full strike as of 12.01am this morning. I was supposed to have my last two final exams today, but they have been postponed because there is no public transport whatsoever, so many students had no way of getting there. Perhaps that's a blessing in disguise? Exams are postponed until the first day the strike is over, but if the strike is not over before Friday 23rd December, the remaining final exams will be held on Friday 6th January instead. Many people have booked trips out of NYC for the Christmas break, which means if the strike does end before the 23rd, a lot of these people wont be around to sit their final exams, so I'm hoping the strike does stay on until at least Friday, as strange as that may sound.

The strike is affecting almost everyone in NYC - IceQueen got a ride to work this morning with a colleague and it took two hours for them to get there due to the extreme traffic, a trip that would normally take about 20mins in a car. With no subways or buses running I guess it's not all that surprising that the traffic was so hellish. Many people have had no choice but to stay home.

nine-month-old terrorist

      Sunday 18 December, 2005 at 12:17PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

The brilliant DHS / TSA no-fly list strikes again - in this case the dangerous individual suspected of being a terrorist was a 9-month-old baby - apparently they train 'em young these days.

An article from Reuters reports that Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered her 9-month-old son's name was on the United States' "no-fly" list of suspected terrorists. "We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled," Zapolsky said, recalling the incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington in July. "The desk agent started laughing. ... She couldn't print us out a boarding pass because he's on the no-fly list."

Zapolsky said she was initially amused by the mix-up. "But when I found out you can't actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed."

This is just another example of how severely flawed the TSA's no-fly list is, and to make matters worse, once you're on the list you can never be removed. According to the TSA, more than 28,000 people have applied to the TSA redress office to get on the 'cleared list', which takes note of individuals whose names are similar to those on the terrorism watch list, but does not guarantee an end to no-fly list hassles (and does not remove their name from the no-fly list). The TSA does not reveal how many or which names are actually on the list, and complaints do not get names removed since they refer to suspected terrorists. The best innocent travelers can hope for is a letter from the TSA which the TSA says should facilitate travel, however John Graham, a 63-year-old former State Department official, said his TSA letter had not helped at all.

Perhaps they should give innocent victims a yellow Star of David to wear instead?

Nobody is safe from this victimization either - in addition to babies, the victims of mistaken identity on the no-fly list have included public figures such as Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts (there's some karma for you), Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

TSA spokesman Christopher White said the agency had seven people working full-time on processing applications to get on the cleared list. Wow really, seven whole people? gee.. Considering the number of applications, that works out to more than 4,000 complaints per redress officer. "We do take the cleared list very seriously, and it's also important for us to focus on the right people. It does us no good to focus on the wrong John Doe," White said.

So why is the TSA still harassing babies and US Senators when it's more than obvious they are not terrorists? The American Civil Liberties Union calls the no-fly list system unconstitutional, saying it treats people as guilty without a trial and unfairly deprives them of freedoms. It also says the system is an inaccurate and ineffective security method.

A big problem is that if a name is on the list, everyone in the US with the same name is stopped - regardless of whether they're a US Senator or a 9-month-old baby - and that's where this list becomes so ridiculously ineffective, particularly when the TSA refuses to remove names and continually victimizes innocent individuals who have already proved their innocence when boarding previous flights.

Peter Johnson, a retired bibliographer at Princeton University, said travel became 'hellish' after he discovered his name was on the no-fly list in August 2004. "I'm not sure if what's behind this is an effort to simply control people or if it's largely mismanagement and poorly conceptualized programming," Johnson said, adding a TSA official had told him there were more than 2,000 other Peter Johnsons in the United States who reported similar problems.

Sources estimate the no-fly list includes tens of thousands of names, if not more. How comforting.

Based on this information, the no-fly list must easily take up thousands of additional hours of TSA labor every week with the time taken to verify the innocence of false positives, yet the TSA hires only seven people to process the 'cleared list'? Looking at this purely on a financial operational level, there is obviously a huge disparity here, yet the TSA continues to be obtuse about the whole matter. Actually this doesn't surprise me all that much - often paramilitary-style organizations do not allow room for common sense - you are not paid to think, and policy is policy no matter how utterly ridiculous it may be. The TSA certainly falls in to this category, unfortunately it is the general public that have to suffer for it - and the taxpayers who fund it.

too many commercials

      Sunday 11 December, 2005 at 11:30PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)  ::  trackbacks (1)

Unreal. We were watching a movie on tv tonight - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets if you must know - and I noticed that the commercials seemed to be coming thick and fast - so fast that I didn't really have time to get settled down from the last set of ads before another lot came along. At first I thought maybe it would drop off as we got further into the movie, but it didn't. After a while I decided to grab a pen and note down how long it was between ads and how long the ad breaks lasted (hey, I had to do something to fill in all these breaks). The results were shocking. I started timing at 9:30pm through to the end of the movie at 11pm. Here's how it panned out:

9:32 to 9:37 ads - length: 5mins
9:37 to 9:47 movie - length: 10mins
9:47 to 9:52 ads - length: 5mins
9:52 to 10:04 movie - length: 12mins
10:04 to 10:09 ads - length: 5mins
10:09 to 10:17 movie - length: 8mins
10:17 to 10:22 ads - length: 5mins
10:22 to 10:36 movie - length: 14mins
10:36 to 10:41 ads - length: 5mins
10:41 to 10:55 movie - length: 14mins
10:55 to 11:00 ads - length: 5mins

How bad is that? That's a whole half hour worth of ads for less than one hour worth of movie! What pisses me off even more is that we pay every month for this appalling service (cable tv subscription). If they really have to have that much ad saturation, at least play the movie for half an hour and then have a quarter hour ad break so viewers can try to enjoy the movie without the near-constant interuptions, for fuck sake.

The channel in question that ruined this movie was the ABC Family Channel - gee thanks guys. Maybe the ABC Family Channel should do some market research into their target audience - I'm sure all the parents out there really appreciate trying to get their kids to quiet down and watch the movie only to be hit with ad breaks every 10 minutes to get them unsettled again. Idiots. The sad thing is, many (if not most) channels aren't much better. If they tried pulling this kind of crap at movie theatres, patrons would be demanding their money back, yet it's ok to do it on television? There should at least be a reasonable limit on this kind of thing.

Oh, before someone mentions it, yes, there is pay-per-view cable tv, which I believe gives ad-free movies, but hey, we're already paying for cable, why should we have to pay more to watch what we're already paying for?

airline passenger shot dead in miami

      Wednesday 7 December, 2005 at 2:47PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Just flashed on the news moments ago a possible highjacking of a commercial airliner at Miami International Airport, Florida. There have apparently been shots fired by an air marshall onboard at the time, and at least one person has been taken away in an ambulance. Will post more as news comes to hand. There was mention of a bomb threat.

Update from FoxNews 2:45pm :

Miami - Shots were fired Wednesday on board an American Airlines jet that had landed at Miami International Airport, and at least one person was wounded, according to broadcast reports.The plane had just arrived from Colombia and was headed to Orlando. Television images from the scene show armed officers taking up positions around the plane.

Worth noting - the stock market has started to drop.

Update 3:20pm : more updates from FoxNews.. might be a nutcase..

A federal air marshal fired his weapon at an American Airlines passenger after claiming to have a bomb in his or her bag and running off of the plane, Homeland Security told FOX News. The marshal pursued and tackled the suspect on the tarmac after the individual reached into his or her bag. American Airlines flight 924 was arriving in Miami-Dade International Airport on Wednesday when the incident occurred. "The conditions [that would warrant an air marshal to fire his or her weapon] ought to be one where he has identified a threat to security" on the flight, Ron Goldman, aviation attorney and pilot, told FOX News. "We don't know if this was an accidental shooting," he said. Details surrounding the incident were not immediately clear, but footage showed medical personnel boarding American Airlines flight 924 with a stretcher and around 25 to 30 police vehicles on the scene. Sources told FOX News the person may have been 'unbalanced'.

Hmm.. if the passenger making the bombthreats was taken out on the tarmac (outside the plane in other words), it would seem that someone else must have been shot inside since thats where the medical personnel went with the stretcher..

Update 3:40pm : NYTimes has a bit more news..

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Doyle said after the plane had parked at the gate, a passenger indicated there was a bomb in their bag. The passenger was confronted by air marshals but ran off the plane, Doyle said. A team of air marshals pursued and ordered the passenger to get on the ground. The passenger complied, but was then shot while apparently trying to reach into the bag, Doyle said. American Airlines officials confirmed the shooting was on a jetway (the little bridge between the jet and the terminal).

The flight was American Airlines FLT 924 departing Miami for Orlando (after arriving from Colombia).

Update 4:00pm : Latest news is that the passenger making the bomb threat, a 44-year-old U.S. citizen, was shot dead. A witness said that the man frantically ran down the aisle of the Boeing 757, his arms flailing in the air, and that a woman followed, shouting, "My husband! My husband!" The passenger, who indicated there was a bomb in the bag, was confronted by air marshals but ran off the aircraft. The marshals pursued and ordered the passenger to get on the ground, but the man did not comply and was shot when apparently reaching into the bag. Authorities did not immediately say whether any bomb was found. Another passenger said she heard the woman say her husband was bipolar and had not had his medication.

ocean changes

      Tuesday 6 December, 2005 at 1:20AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

I mentioned in an entry a couple of days ago about global warming and changes in ocean currents (in particular the gulf stream) leading to cooling rather than warming in Europe, so while I'm taking a break from study I thought I'd post more about it (the article I read this in came from the BBC news website a few days back).

A British research project called Rapid, which aims to gather evidence relating to potentially fast climatic change in Europe, found that changes to ocean currents derived from the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic are weakening and bringing less heat north, and as a result may cool European weather within a few decades. Their conclusions, reported in the scientific journal Nature, are based on 50 years of Atlantic observations.

The key is the Gulf Stream. After it emerges from the Caribbean, it splits in two, with one part heading north-east to Europe and the other circulating back through the tropical Atlantic. As the north-eastern branch flows, it gives off heat to the atmosphere, which in turn warms the European landmass.

By the time it reaches the northern latitudes around Greenland and Iceland, the water has cooled so much that it sinks towards the ocean floor, a process known as overturning. This cooler water heads south, forming the return stream of a conveyor belt. The complete cycle sees warm water coming northwards on the ocean's surface, and the cold water returning hundreds or thousands of metres underwater, as pictured.

Florida-based scientists monitoring the northwards-flowing Gulf Stream have found it has remained roughly constant over the last 50 years, however NOC researchers (National Oceanography Centre at Britain's Southampton University) concentrated on the colder water flowing south, and found that over the last half century these currents have changed markedly.

"We saw a 30% decline in the southwards flow of deep cold water," said Harry Bryden (NOC), "And so the summary is that in 2004, we have a larger circulating current [in the tropical Atlantic] and less overturning." [and less heat then delivered to European shores]

The concept that the North Atlantic conveyor may well reduce in intensity or even turn off altogether was the basis behind the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow'. What happens is that as Arctic ice melts and Arctic rivers flow faster - trends which have both been documented - the northern oceans become less saline. Less salinity means a lower density - the waters then cannot sink, so the conveyor weakens. Computer models have predicted that if it turned off completely, Europe would cool by perhaps four to six degrees celsius. The NOC experiments provide the first observational evidence that such a decrease of the oceanic overturning circulation is well underway already. There is also the additional issue that the extra heat left circulating around the tropical Atlantic could have major impacts on weather systems in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America.

The NOC researchers admit that the case is not yet proven. The analysis involves only five sets of measurements, made in 1957, 1981, 1992 and 1998 from ships, and in 2004 from a line of research buoys tethered to the ocean floor. Even if the trend is confirmed by further data, it could be down to natural variability rather than human-induced global temperature change. A decade ago Professor Schlesinger from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a leading expert in models of climate and ocean circulation, showed that the North Atlantic conveyor undergoes a natural 70-year cycle of strengthening and weakening, however the measurements from this latest research are out of phase with this cycle, indicating that the NOC team has probably come up with a link to human-induced climate change - the slowing down of the southward return more or less constitutes a 'smoking gun'.

happy 12th birthday amber

      Monday 5 December, 2005 at 5:44AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Wow I can't believe Amber is turning 12 today! Amber I hope you're having a great day - I miss you heaps! Hope you like the present.

first snowfall of the season

      Sunday 4 December, 2005 at 11:29AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (2)  ::  trackbacks (1)

Yup, the first snowfall of the winter arrived in the early hours of this morning and is just tapering off now - there's a few inches or so accumulated, and apparently we're in for a bunch more on Monday night and into Tuesday. This is pretty early for snow to this extent - usually if we even get snow in early December, it's only a light dusting that melts off within hours, but not this time it seems. The weather forecast predicts low temperatures (near zero celcius or below) right through into next weekend, so the snow may be with us for a while. That just reminded me of an article I read last week on the BBC website about global warming causing changes in ocean currents (the gulf stream) which will actually lead to cooling rather than warming in Europe and I guess the northern hemisphere - I'll post about it during the coming week if I have time.

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