Digest – 18 July 2010

Oh, indeed.

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Alexia Golez on innovation, or lack thereof, in Ireland.

Slugger on the coping stone incident in which a police officer was injured during the Ardoyne riots. Related; JC Skinner on why ‘Orangefest’ is wrong. BBC Northern Ireland political editor, Mark Davenport, ‘groundhog day revisited’.

Short recommended read of the week; Colm McCarthy on the the post-guarantee events at Anglo. What frustrating week, documents released, media tells us what everyone said, documents become secondary. Sue-pwerb. Debate has ended up as a Noonan-said-but-Fianna Fáiler-said waste of time. utterly stupid. No debate about why all this information is only emerging now, after several further chunks going the banks’ way.

Also, Karl Whelan ‘serious questions about post-guarantee Anglo policy‘.

Two new geolocation systems for Ireland launched.

New political parties are like buses. Unkie Dave on Direct Democracy and Green Party ‘splinter group’ Fís Nua.

Puckstown Lane on Seanie Fitzpatrick’s loans.

WORLD

Long form recommended reads of the week; Michael Yon continues to write about his time spent in Thailand during the red-shirt protests earlier this year. His ‘Even As The World Watched’ series focuses on media coverage of the situation, with an on-the-ground perspective. Parts one two three and four have been published so far, all image-heavy. Interesting reading and viewing.

John Naughten on one of golf’s more interesting characters, the Royal & Ancient Rabbit.

Ezra Klein understands the [massive] importance of rushes, archive and historical records.

Building your own editorial brand; by Deborah Bonello on videoreporter.com

If you’re in the least bit entrepreneurial and want to be known for your work rather than just the media you work for, then the web is huge opportunity for you. Yes, you may have to work for free to build up a volume of content, but it’s a much better way to spend your time than sitting in a newspaper office as an ‘intern’ waiting for someone to throw you a bone.

You get to decide your stories, and how to tell them, and you’ll learn a mountain about how to do it better along the way. Start innovating and get out there – it’s a much cooler way to get noticed, not only by existing media owners (mexicoreporter.com got me a job at the Los Angeles Times and my current employer, the FT), but perhaps even by your own, possibly paying, audience.

Now get out there and get on with it.

Feature-length recommended read of the week: A brief history of visualisation.

OTHER

Documentary; ‘638 ways to kill Castro‘. Channel 4 has put its 4 On Demand service on Youtube. Smart; go where the audience goes. Three adverts then the content. Lots of great stuff on that channel.

Richard Feyman explains, in the most amazing way, how eyes and light work.

The Game

Interesting that Paddy Kelly talks about to property developers and bankers referring to ‘the game’ today.

In The Wire they also refer to ‘The Game’, except there it’s to do with an addiction to drugs.

…

“I’ll take ‘bot three or fo’ hunned… million…”

“All in the game, yo. All in the game.”

And in The Game, the king stay the king. “And the rest of the mothafuckas on the team, they got his back, and they run so deep that the king really ain’t gotta do shit”.

Bank inquiry PAC documents

The Oireachtas has published a set of documents released by the Department of Finance in relation to the bank guarantee scheme. This is on the Public Accounts Committee page. Unfortunately the Oireachtas published many as individual documents, and did not OCR them. To help anyone who wants to read the documents, I have combined them into two PDFs and OCRd them:





"To inform… strategies… over the coming years"

The Health Information and Quality Authority has found “significant and serious shortcomings” in the standard of foster care provided by the HSE. That issue cannot be understated given the number of deaths of children in HSE care in recent years. Also this week the story rolled on about dental care being cut back from medical care holders to save money.

Additionally, management of Merlin Park Hospital in Galway revealed plans to suspend all elective surgeries for budgetary reasons; “the proposal would see the cancellation of hip replacements as well as spine, shoulder, hand, foot and ankle surgery” according to the Times. Merlin Park is just the most recent hospital to curtail services to save money.

All that follows weeks of coverage about severe understaffing in A&E units throughout the country due to a mis-advised HSE policy relating to junior doctors’ rotations.

So it’s most interesting to see on the ETenders website that the HSE is seeking tenders for a nationwide “Employee Engagement Survey Consultancy”. Wonder how many surgeries or dental visits you could get for that. The brief says “the results of this consultancy assignment will be used to inform the organisation strategies in these areas over the coming years.”

Isn’t that what the top brass, through the use of a chain of command, are supposed to do?

Missing following Morris

Gerard Cunningham, author of ‘Chaos and Conspiracy; The Framing of the McBrearty Family’, is on the ball as usual; see his latest post about developments following the Morris Tribunal.

[…] Missing are “Gardaí from all ranks involved in investigative interviewing”, “civil liberties groups” and “a psychologist and a psychiatrist who may be able to assist in the formulation of policy towards those subject to various relevant vulnerabilities or disabilities.”

One of my favourite blogs, I recommend subscribing.

Anglo losses

Take a look at the last paragraph from the front page story of the Irish Independent today:

One of the biggest problems is that Anglo’s staff are mainly skilled in property lending, but the EU does not want the bank to build up a major exposure to that sector again.

Well clearly the staff were not “skilled in property lending”?

But read the headline and note the date: July 12, 2010. “Economic crisis: Final bill for Anglo may be €33.5bn”

This figure is likely far more. As Peter Matthews said on June 16:(start at 9.00)

That €22bn loss is actually €32bn, and perhaps if we add the Central Bank loan we might get closer to €43.5bn. But I ain’t no expert.