Jaimans’ IndiaBlog

So early on in the process of starting a community radio station, it is evident to me the transformation it is capable of bringing into communities and individuals. Here’s a story from “Media For Freedom” that is testimony to the power of CR.
Lucknow: 32 years old Kanshiram undergoes a complete transformation as he goes behind the microphone talking to his listeners on the Community Radio (CR). Formerly a bus conductor who used to ferry passengers to and fro from the remote village of Lalitpur, today he works as a radio jockey (RJ) at the newly set up community radio station here. “I can’t believe I am now a RJ broadcasting and anchoring radio programmes. It gives me an immense sense of satisfaction that I am doing something for the society. What makes it even more meaningful is the fact that I get to see the real issues through my work and and also provide solutions for it.” Read more »

Here is some news for the academic minded parents and schools: “…brain activity and brain development are enhanced by physical exercise. It now appears that exercise can help kids learn at school.”  Listen to the NPR story…

According to study presented to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) “students benefit both physically and academically from time devoted during the school day to physical activity”. Read this story…

Need more evidence? See this video by Stuart Brown at TED.  His research shows that “play is not just joyful and energizing — it’s deeply involved with human development and intelligence”.

Recommendation: Let them play! Influence schools and public policy (private colonizers?) to recognize this and create facilities for play in schools and in localities.

A study in the US has found that “TV ratings don’t accurately reflect the aggressive content found in shows popular among children — even cartoons”.

And what do you say to parents who take their 10-year-olds, 3-year-olds and even 9-month-olds to adult cinema? Not so long ago I left a late-night movie half-way because I found it disturbing/horrific… perhaps a little scary. But mothers with babies stuck to their bosoms stayed on…

Nobody seems to care that our daily newspapers are full of adult content. And kids’ programming on TV is interspersed with promos of late-night movies with loads of sex and violence.

I don’t have a problem with adult content per se, as long as media takes reasonable measures to keep it away from kids. The media is being completely irresponsible, but the day the government puts in a legislation mandating that they seek censor certificates for all their content, they will be the first ones to complain about government high-handedness.

The LIFE magazine photo archive (millions of photos), most never published before, is now available online, for free.

A teat for some of us (I still have old copies of LIFE magazine!). And we have Google to thank for it. I wish the images had better captions, and were better organized… but then I am glad that they are available at all.

So you can see gems like this or  or this (must enlarge and see).

LIFE magazine photo archive

Will the new Kindle read bed-time stories to our kids? Can it? Will it? Should it?

TV has proven its worth as a baby-sitter, across cultures! Social networking has effectively come to represent what we do using a browser and not what we do in our living rooms or parks and sports fields… This is a logical next step. Right?

The only loud objection one can hear is coming from the Author’s Guild of America. They don’t have a problem with the product… actually they suspect it may be very good. What they want is that the authors be sufficiently compensated for the audio rights being bundled into the Kindle 2.

Read the op-ed at the New York Times: The Kindle Swindle?
IHT says “The Kindle: Good before, better now”
Read about the open standards debate at wired

Professor Dan Fleisch set a new standard in after-sales service when he flew 600 miles on Christmas Day to hand-deliver his book to a buyer who had posted a comment on the Amazon web site that his copy of the book had missing pages.

Read the Telegraph article

Has it really? Is content being devalued because of the current economic conditions or is there a larger trend here? Have the accountant got it all wrong?

Read the Time article “Content, Once King, Becomes A Pauper”

The 2009 Online Advertising Attitudes report of UK reports that “22% of British consumers claim to only visit niche sites that are specific to their interests… A further 34% of British consumers spend the majority of their time visiting niche sites that are specific to their interests.”

Raising questions about the effectiveness of advertising on large portals and social networking sites, the report found that “26% of users never pay attention to the advertising on these sites and a further 36% rarely claim to pay attention to it.”

Media Week article

When White House press conference doesn’t invite correspondents from The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Time and Newsweek but president Obama fields questions from the correspondent from The Huffington Post, a news blog (or should I call it an Internet only news publication) it sure is a sign of change!

Read the New York Times article… 

Google is making its database of 1.5 million public domain books accessible from mobile devices for free. Amazon is working to make all its Kindle titles available on mobile devices.Random House Publishing has announced that will make books available for free for mobile devices. Penguin Group (USA) has started Penguin 2.0, again aimed for mobile devices…

Google already has a mobile version of Google Book Search…
Is the future of ‘books’ likely to be in our palms?

Google and Amazon to put more books on cellphones

2 book publishers announce mobile phone plans

Amazon in Big Push for New Kindle Model

Like the open source movement in software, an open source movements in the textbooks may be afoot. If this movement takes hold it will surely impact the textbook business, which is perhaps the only safe island in a sea of troubled publishing business.

The other question is what motivates people like Professor R. Preston McAfee to make their books available for free, when they could have earned a fair bit from it — $100,000 advance and more, according to a New York Times article (Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free)

Some sources for free textbooks:

Free Learning  http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/
MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/
Open Textbook  http://opentextbook.org/
WikiBooks  http://en.wikibooks.org/
Google’s Free Textbook Search http://www.freetextbooks.eu/

Please feel free to add to the list if you know of any more.

Kids who are exposed to too much screen time (TV, Computers, video games, iPods…) during their teen years are likely to display depression symptoms later. Science News article says:

“Exposure to more television and other electronic media during the teenage years appears to be associated with developing depression symptoms in young adulthood, especially among men, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry…”

According to Time magazine, novel podcasts, unlike audiobooks “are truncated into segments and may include ambient sounds, music as well a cast of voices playing different characters.”

“Evo Terra, the co-founder of Podiobooks.com, says 45,000 episodes are downloaded each day.”

If you are in the publishing business you may want to find out more…  at Podiobooks.com you can find and subscribe to audio book as well as novel podcasts.

Links:
Time Article
PodioBooks website

I’ve been hearing about Ideosync’s CR project in Lalitpur for a while now, but a news story finally suggests that they’re close to getting on air.

Here’s the full story.
Village Community Radio will give voice to people’s issues
10 January, 2009

“Community radio is the real voice of the people, it is a communication service that caters to the interests and needs of a certain area, its culture, craft, cuisine and above all social and development issues,” said Mridul Srivastava, the station director of ‘Lalit Lokvani’. Read more »

According to Elise Nordling, “The primary function of radio is that people want company.” Assuming that to be true, what kind of company do people normally want? Who do you and I like to talk to? To listen to? To someone who speaks our own language, perhaps. To someone who understands our world, and our lives, and the joys and sorrows and challenges that go into living each day. A mirror that we look into, sometimes admiringly, sometimes critically, but a mirror nonetheless. Read more »

Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale School of Medicine and his team spent more than 18 months studying some 173 researches conducted over the last 30 years on how media affects the lives of children – ‘…obesity, tobacco, drug and alcohol use, sexual behavior, low academic achievement and ADHD’.

Turns out that 80 percent of the research efforts show a ‘link between a negative health outcome and media hours or content’. The study says there is ‘…above average evidence to support the link between media exposure and drug use, alcohol use and low academic achievement.’ This research focused on television, music, movies…

We can wait for more such research to conclusively show that the same is true for web, social-networking sites, cell phones, and video games. Or we as parents can sit up and take notice…

Read the article at Washington Post

The Mumbai tragedy has once again highlighted how the radio can be the most effective medium of communication in the time of crisis, be it floods, earthquakes, war, or terror strikes. With electricity supplies cut off, televisions switched off, one of the most effective way to get the message across is the radio. CR activists have been arguing for emergency radio stations in Bihar for a while now, but their plea seems to have got buried in some file — at least till the next tragedy will strike our country, as it surely must.

It is imperative that emergency radio stations are made active across our country. Every child must grow up memorising its frequency. After all, we learn that to call the police, we need to dial 100. So, why not ensure that 100 FM is the emergency radio frequency across the country. In times of peace, which is slowly becoming dubious at best, the station can broadcast safety programs - be they traffic information, traffic safety, fire safety, how to deal with emergencies etc.

What are we waiting for? The next terror strike? The next flood? The next earthquake?

We’ve taken the next step. Ideosync is going to be TRF’s technical partner in setting up the community radio station, and handhold us at least for the first six months to get us ready for broadcast. Beyond that, we have to find a way to raise funds.

We begin work soon on doing the woodwork for the studio and procuring the transmitter and the studio and field equipment. Then Ideosync does two induction workshops (one in each of our target schools) to build a team of students who can be trained in programming.

Our community is very spread out - almost splashed out like big large drops. Read more »

At the risk of being taken seriously, I look forward to the day I can hear Lalu Prasad Yadav, our right honourable Railways Minister, coming on in between some truly ribald Bollywood numbers playing on an FM channel and saying, “Humka bhote dijiye! Phir mat boliyega ki yeh rail-gaadi nikal gayee.” (Vote for us. Later don’t say that you missed the train.”)

But the flip side of the goverment giving the in-principle go-ahead to political ads on FM channels could well be a hijacking of the airwaves.You can read the full story that was published in Mint on November 19, 2008 here.