DNA analysis has confirmed that human remains found in an unspecified region of Iraq are those of missing Army Staff Sergeant Matt Maupin.

In a Sunday evening press conference, Staff Sergeant Maupin’s parents Keith and Carolyn said they were told of the news around around 1 p.m. Sunday.

“My heart sinks, but I know they can’t hurt him anymore,” Keith Maupin said.

Lt. Lee Packnett, an Army public affairs officer in Washington, confirmed that the Maupins were notified Sunday that their son’s remains had been identified. Packnett said an official statement about the identification would be released Monday.   ……more

KABUL, March 31 (KUNA) — Four NATO soldiers narrowly escaped a roadside bomb in northern Afghanistan on Monday, the military and local officials said.

The soldiers were on their way to a village, along with a doctor in Baghlan province when the bomb exploded. None of them was killed or injured, said a military spokesman.

He said the vehicle, in which the soldiers were traveling, was damaged and its windscreen was smashed. However, the soldiers were unhurt.

Roadside bomb attacks against foreign troops are becoming a common practice in Afghanistan where the Taliban militants are avoiding direct encounter with NATO and coalition forces for fear of air strikes.

... this one goes right to the heart of his posing as a New Politics candidate.

With Obama, it seems that we need to be constantly inquiring as to not only exactly what he believes, but also just when does he or did he believe it!

... this one goes right to the heart of his posing as a New Politics candidate.

With Obama, it seems that we need to be constantly inquiring as to not only exactly what he believes, but also just when does he or did he believe it!

BAGHDAD, March 30 (KUNA) — A US soldier died of wounds he sustained from a bomb blast in northern Baghdad on Sunday, bringing to 35 number of American forces killed in March this year.

The US army said the soldier, fighting with the MNF-Baghdad division, suffered from serious wounds he sustained when a bomb exploded near the vehicle he was in.

With this death, the number of US forces killed in Iraq since March 2003 rose to 4,008.

Meanwhile, the US army said six Iraqi policemen were killed in an ambush in northern Baghdad.

It added in a statement terrorists set an ambush against the Iraqi police force killing six of them and destroying their patrolling vehicle.

BAGHDAD, March 30 (KUNA) — The Iraqi government decided to lift the curfew in Baghdad as of Monday morning, the operations command of Baghdad Law Enforcement Plan said this evening.

The decision takes effect as of 6:00 am Monday, a senior police officer told KUNA here.

However, the curfew will remain in place as per vehicles only in Al-Shu’la and Al-Kadhemiya districts of Baghdad and the eastern city of Al-Sadr, the source pointed out.

The Iraqi authorities imposed a total curfew across the capital city Thursday evening in an attempt to contain the unrest coinciding with the clashes between the security forces and the Sadrist trend in southern Iraq areas.

Most of the readers here have been around the Internet and its pre-cursors for a while and are familiar with the groups that almost all commentors fall into. There are loosely 3 groups in increasing order of prevelance: those that want to add something to the conversation (constructors), those that have a strong contrary opinion (objectors) and those that just want attention (detractors).

This last group includes those that post abuse for its own sake, pick on small inacuracies or inflame easily provoked hot buttons. I tend to find this group is generally those looking to get noticed in some way. This "look at me" behavior presumably is geared to increasing status in the herd in order to improve the chances of mating. As a collective we have become reasonably good at filtering this out as noise which is the correct response.

What is of more concern is the constructors and objectors. In the main these groups are more likely to comment if they disagree with the post. Sometimes though these groups use the same language and techniques as the detractors. Whether this is a side effect of seeing that type of comment style so often I don't know, but I feel a contributer to this is an inexperience in some in constructing a persuasive argument. In most cases a bad argument is the same as no argument as most readers 'detractor filter' will put it in the ignore bucket.

It was in this context that a post from Paul Graham caught my eye. His disagreement hierarchy is a true geek masterpiece. While he does not offer specific methods of persuasion he categorises the forms a counter-argument can take into a scale which gives a guide as to the probability the point is at least intellectually honest. The scale runs from DH0 - Name calling, to DH6 - Refuting the central point.

As he points out, this does not guarantee that the counter-point is cogent, rational or well formed but does give a simple turing test as to the likelihood it will be worth your time to consider. It is also a good guide for the person writing the comment or post as to where they are positioning their own arguments. All of this in a nice geek-friendly reference scale. Paul's article is worth reading and forwarding to those you know that have bad argueing styles.

Perhaps out of worry that the High Court will not find in his favour after tomorrow’s case or perhaps out of that deep-seated predisposition to change his mind more often than the weather, Ahern is widely reported as considering only giving sparse detail to the Dail tomorrow. I am not sure we would have known the difference to be quite frank, however it seems that discussions with Senior Ministers has confirmed (if such a thing is even possible at this point) in his mind that he should only give the bare minimum to the Dail and wait for his next Tribunal hearing.

There is a side of me that thinks some of Ministers would have to advise him of that course. Should he go and tell the Dail everything, after first stating he would not be doing so and getting his Ministers to defend such a course of action, he makes them look like prize clowns whose sole purpose is to do Bertie’s bidding and defend all sorts. By heading into the Dail and giving some degree of clarification, all those who wish to “see the tribunal’s proceedings respected” simply end up with a bit of egg on their faces.

This is hardly just a political judgement on their part, they are perhaps keen to see Ahern exert some degree of authority at this point. He appears absolutley incapable of controlling the agenda on this story and his tried and tested mechanism of “brass-necking it” hasn’t done him many favours so far. Perhaps most worrying of all is that the Dail may become a site of ongoing inquiry into what might be seen as questionable political practice. The process of a Tribunal has always been used to remove much of the political heat and sting from a bad news story. It places the problem at a distance from politics, carried out by judges with no legal standing other than finding facts. It is not a trial or a court proceedings, it doesn’t determine innocent or guilt. Most importantly, it takes a long time.

Moving the site of such an inquiry to a dedicated, well-financed Dail committee which would inquire and find in a brief time once a complaint was made to it would put the fear of God into many politicians. Allowing for the ongoign precedent of Dail challenges on the basis of his Tribunal evidence to continue may not be the desire of any who might be king. However it seems to me that there really is no choice on this one.

As I have stated above, Ahern is not in control of this story. He doesn’t know what is going to come at him next and he doesn’t know when. The next appearance on May 20 is nearly two months away, with a trip to Congress in between. That trip may be overshadowed by some tribunal leak or fallout from the High Court case. His position is being undermined by a drip-drip effect and a failure to respond with convincing stories to what emerges. Not giving a statement Wednesday is not only a smack in the face to the Dail, it is also giving a political hostage to fortune for six weeks. Those are gambles that Ahern has not been winning of late.

Back from the 10th edition of ZEMOS98, a festival of audiovisual culture titled this year Regreso al futuro, Back to the Future. I wish all the events i attend were as intelligently curated, carefully organized and stimulating as this one. The audience was great too. And extremely polite: they sat all the way through the talk i gave there in a spanish bastardized with franco-italian words and grammar.

Image from the workshop Control Sonoro

There were workshops, concerts, presentations, screenings and talks. One of the highlights of the week for me was Lisa Parks' talk. Her lecture was part of Critical Powers which invited thinkers and creators to share their views on the possible functions of utopia in an era of advanced Capitalism, the effects of technology changes on cultural process, or on the power of a public sphere.

Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context.

ZEMOS98 put a tiny extract of the presentation online:

And i'll add my notes:

Introduction

The lecture was articulated around two themes (Spying and Dreaming) and was a small compendium of the many topics she has been working on over the past few years, most of the material she presented is based on case studies but for lack of time she merely glossed over them.

Her first slide showed us a list of satellites that Spain has ownership on. Most are used for remote sensing. The first one (intersat) was launched in 1974, the latest DEIMOS in 2008 which will be used for disaster management. Parks stressed the importance of developing more literacy about satellites. We can name tv channels and websites by wouldn't be able to name satellites. Throughout history, hundreds of satellites have been launched into space.

Another of her key interests is the visualization of satellites. We can have an everyday tactile contact with other technologies like mobile phones or television sets but our experience of satellites is very different. Right from the start as satellites are a highly specialized technology. They have to be constructed in clean room, protected from the rest of the world and they are launched in locations which are often closed off for security purpose. Once they are sent into orbit, most of us will never think about them again.

Parks then talked about the footprint of satellites. No matter how clearly defined the boundaries of nations can be, their space will always be crisscrossed by footprints from different satellites launched by various countries. Spain uses satellite technology to beam its signal to Latin America for example. That's what she calls "Nation Beaming".

Spying

1. The Corona Project

The Corona Project was a top secret program run by the CIA with the help of the US Air Force. One of them was hidden in Discoverer Spacecraft which contained biological experiments (to check how plants would withstand being launched into orbit). The project was top secret and involved a huge capital investment that the public financed without ever knowing about it.

Corona film recovery diagram

Of the 144 Corona satellites launched, 102 returned usable images.
The Corona satellites secretly monitored and gathered a huge amount of satellite data about USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia from 1960 until 1972.
The program was declassified by President Clinton in 1995 and he made the images collected available to the public.

Catch of a Corona capsule off of Hawaii (image)

The recovery of the images taken by Corona was quite remarkable. A mechanism would drop the film canister and drop it in the air. The canister would then be recovered in mid-air by a C-119 aircraft. If the recovery mission failed, the canister would deploy a parachute and be recovered on earth or on the ocean.

The Corona program was initiated during the Cold War to check if "the other" was developing new weapons. The satellites were thus used to develop an image intelligence which would help the government decide on their own internal and external policy.

Corona launch preparation shed in ruins (image)

The Corona facility are now in decay.

2. Satellite imaging and global conflicts

It's also important to discuss the relationship between orbit and earth in the age of image intelligence and see how remote sensing get integrated into news culture, how and when classified images suddenly make their way into our global media culture. More precisely the questions her research is focusing on are:

First case study: Rwanda

James Nachtwey, Survivor of Hutu death camp, Rwanda, 1994

Refugees International used aerial and sat images in 1996 to try to find and assist 1 million displaced persons. The combination of sat/aerial images was used as a medium that could uniquely visualize a "nationless social body". The organization understood how these images could capture better than any other medium the displacement of a moving mass of people who have nowhere to go.

Many satellite images have to be inscribed with caption, without them the images lose their significance, they look like abstract paintings. We need to be directed to read these images.

Pressured US to release sat images to draw world attention to a conflict that was being ignored by the international community.

Second case study: Bosnia, July 1995

Satellite photo of Nova Kasaba mass graves.

US was boasting to have real time visibility over the war theatre - Information Dominance
Srebrenica is US-protected, highly monitored and as such regarded as a "Safe Haven".
US State Department released sat images of alleged mass graves in Srebrenica 6 weeks after the massacre occurred.
Sat evidence of atrocities released after the fact, rather than during the act. The US State department claimed that the problem was that volume of sat data was to plentiful.

Case study 3. Colin Powell and Irak, 2003

Slide 12 of Powell's address

Powell presented sat images in his address to the UN Security Council to make the case for a US-led war against Irak, alleging they contained "undeniable proof" of Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction.

From Lisa Parks vantage point the case raises a real problem as Powell not only plagiarized a PhD thesis but, more crucially, the whole story undermined the credibility of any future use of sat images by US official in a global forum.

Satellite images are digital images and have thus no physical reference, they are generated by a series of 0 and 1. Yet they are useful. One shouldn't embrace them as state truth but as a field of investigation. The 3 case studies highlight how much has changed in the US after the Corona programme.

Institutional Changes

The privatization sector is led by European companies:
1983 SPOT (Satellite Pour l'Observation de la Terre) begins selling sat images - 10 m resolution, meaning that an object 10 m long can be visible from space.
1987 Soviet company Soyuzkarta joins the game. They charge $500 to $800 for images of 5 m resolution, a price affordable for States or corporations.
1994 Clinton administration privatizes remote sensing in the US. The technology can no longer be used solely by CIA and the scientific but can be tuned into a profi-making industry.
The privatization of remote sensing occurs throughout the '80s and '90s.
In the 1990s Earthwatch and Space Imaging emerge and sell images of 1 m resolution.

Today the website of Satellite Imaging Corporation claims that they are the largest because they are the one who possess most satellite assets. They own a fleet of satellite, one of them moves makes a complete turn of the Earth in 90 minutes.

The commercialization of sat images has led to some odd uses and requests.

In 2001, Dan Bollinger, a fan of the tv program Survivor: Africa, sent a request to Space Imaging to acquire the image data over the Kenya location and share them with other fans of the show. The CBS facilities were discovered but the tv channel didn't want to see their production site exposed.

The images nevertheless traveled all over the world showing that satellite images are no longer a matter of security issue but are part of a broader visual culture.

Another case which illustrates the previous statement come from a campaign by KFC. The fried chicken company needed to re-design the brand and came up with the "Face from Space" in the Nevada desert, also known as the "UFO Capital of the World." The fast food company purchased an Ikonos image of the site and distributed it through global media circuits.

While satellites have historically passed over the earth to observe "naturally unfolding" phenomena, now events are staged precisely so they can be viewed from an orbital perspective. Remote sensing satellites are now being used to pitch products and address global consumers just as other media such as commercial television or the world wide web. More in this article by Lisa Parks: Obscure Objects of Media Studies: Echo, Hotbird and Ikonos.

Google Earth

Since 2005, Google Earth presents us with a "mosaic'ed" version of the world using satellite images coming from various sources. But while the logo of Google is always clearly visible on the images, no matter how blurry they are themselves, we are kept in the dark regarding the satellites used to compose these images. Google Earth is a great opportunity to educate the public about satellite but instead they do GE tends to almost erase the existence of the satellites.

Digital Globe provides date information for satellite images that are part of Google Earth using color-coded squares and "I" icons. By clicking on "preview," you enter a meta-browser featuring the single satellite image captioned with information about how to purchase it or others from Digital Globe. Digital Globe is thus providing date information as part of a marketing strategy. GE becomes a billboard.

(image)

Google Earth teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create the Crisis in Darfur mapping initiative which collects and diffuses visual evidence of the destruction in Darfur.

On the surface it looks like an admirable project but in several ways it missed the opportunity to represent the conflict in all its complexities. It uses tropes to represent African tragedy (images of suffering children carried by their mother). There is no visible effort of providing a political and economical education about the tragedy.

With the slide i pasted below, Lisa Park claims to demonstrate that earlier media news provided more opportunities for education:

Problems of GE Crisis in Darfur layer:
- obscure satellite imagery,
- represents the "past perfect", because it show what we monitored from space but didn't do anything about at the time,
- involves the branding of global conflicts (no matter how blurry the image, the Google brand is always conspicuous),
- exemplifies neoliberalism (David Harvey) and disaster capitalism (Naomi Klein),
- from CNN effect to Google Earth effect? In order to get world attention will an event have to appear on Google Earth?

What does it mean for a US corporation to reproduce foreign territory as they want and without asking permission (some nations actually complained that GE causes a serious security concern.)

In a nutshell:

The public remains relatively uninformed about satellites, their uses and their impact on everyday life even though citizens taxes subsidize satellite developments.

The second part of Lisa Parks was about The Dreamers, the artists who use and comment on satellite technology. I found this part a bit weaker (less documented and with errors in the orthography of the artists' names, happens to everyone of course but look quite bad on slides.) But here are a few notes:

"The Dreamers" encourage us to see and reflect about sat technologies and their potentials. they dare to experiment with satellites (traditionally seen as a heavy and highly specialized technology) and how they are used. Encourage us to think about who owns and control, satellites, orbital space and the spectrum. Develop uses that are not just about state security or corporate profits but about citizens' needs.

Artists acknowledged in her presentation about satellite art and activism:
- Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz,
- Douglas Davis,
- Brian Springer,
- Marko Peljhan,
- Trevor Paglen,
and a special and enthusiastic mention of Aram Bartholl.

Last recommendations from Parks:

Image on the homepage showing Laika, a dog launched in orbit together with the satellite Sputnik II in 1957.

This state paid advertisement (tax payer expense for those who do not get it) was published today in page 5 of the El Universal sports section. It reads textually:


There is so much wrong in this add, so much threat that the mind of anyone should reel at the implications. But let's start by the beginning before any one thinks that this blogger is prejudiced: there is indeed freedom of expression in Venezuela, although increasingly threatened and occasionally limited. What is lacking everyday more and more is freedom of expression. And this has been building up for quite a while, with increasing refusal of the state to talk to anyone but "official" media, and effective freedom of information done with when RCTV was closed last June.

First, let's discuss the context of this add. This week end the IAPA/SIP organized its first of two yearly meetings, this one in Caracas. During last year referendum campaign the government tried to put all sorts of obstacles to the meeting been held anywhere in Venezuela. But the SIP said that they would come no matter what and that lodging would be found one way or the other (remember the latest round of governmental pressure over hotels when the Alejandro Sanz concert had to be canceled). So the SIP came and offered Chavez to open the meeting and expose to the SIP his point of view on the whole matter of freedom of expression in Venezuela and elsewhere. Chavez did not show up and did not even had the decency to refuse. No answer, period.

However the government sponsored a "counter meeting" a couple of blocks away from the SIP hotel. It was called "encounter against media terrorism", no irony intended. As it is becoming more and more the case, the effect of this counter meeting was rather negative to the state as it flopped badly. In fact, it more than flopped, something stressed when Marcos Hernandez of Reporteros por la Verdad, was given a right of response at the SIP and showed his low class, his partiality and his incompetence, not to mention the compulsive lies now the everyday talk in chavistadom. He threatened Mr. Natera, director of Correo del Caroni, a much attacked newspaper, with judicial action by accusing him of being a coup monger in front of all the SIP. That Natera was the spokesperson of the Venezuelan press for that meeting exposed clearly to the whole world better than anything else how threatened is now freedom of expression in Venezuela.

Of course, with his very tarnished image of Chavez was certainly not going to take a chair in a room where someone would dare to criticize him. If you look at the purges inside the all but still born PUSV, whomever might criticize Chavez, even behind closed doors, has been shut out of the chavista pseudo political party. These days Chavez has his paid agents to take the heat wherever needed. That the SIP did criticize much more than just Venezuela, the US was one of the targets, did not make a difference: Chavez wants to project an image of being above criticism even though everyday he is more deserving of it. The self righteousness of Chavez, and his thinning skin are everyday more obvious, as much as his bloated physique. however as he keeps insulting the SIP this one says that only Cuba has more limits to freedom of expression than Venezuela in the Americas.

Now to the add published above. It is very simple: it is a direct threat to El Universal as this add implies directly that El Universal of Caracas, the Venezuelan senior paper, is published at the sufferance of the regime. Its objective might have been to criticize the SIP meeting but in fact it achieves (willingly perhaps?) the opposite effect. Did the subconscious of the public official in charge of this add betrayed him/her?

So here we are, with a government that thinks highly of itself by permitting still some papers to publish. And there are some folks that still dare to defend such policies...

By the way, the SIP heard again about abusive cadenas and that about 80% of the Venezuelan air waves are now under direct or indirect control of the state. That is right, about only 20% of the airborne media is still independent. And this quote is worth posting:

"There is a President (Hugo Chávez) who is persistently attacking journalism and harassing and insulting the press. Journalism here is faced with serious restrictions, and when journalism is exercised under serious restrictions there is no press freedom,"

-The end-