THE FIFTH ESTATE AND AN SBS DOCUMENTARY IN SEPTEMBER / 596

Gillian Findlay, Bob McKeown, Hana Gartner, Linden MacIntyre

The Fifth Estate has a lengthy record of confronting ethical issues and doing it well. It is a form of journalism and the stories that are tackled have a high risk factor. That is, the people whose stories are told have faced and may still face profound consequences. They voluntarily provide information because they cannot evade the compelling conviction that the stories are too important to remain silent. These are brave people and fortunately Fifth Estate producers and directors are determined to treat these subjects with care.

This September, CBC’s Fifth Estate will air a documentary concerning Shaken Baby Syndrome. To that end, a crew were in attendance at last weekend’s Conference on Evidence Based Medicine and Social Investigation. The venue was advantageous for the producers because Dr. Chris Van Ee and numerous other experts were presenters and were willing to be interviewed.

MASHUP Data Integration and More.

Where have I been? I learned a new word today but the word has been around for a long time. CBC Online Radio menu introduced me to the word this morning as it promoted an audio show that airs tonight at 7:30 pm on Radio One. The promo says “Canada is a country of mashups. People from different cultures find themselves living and working together here — bumping into different values, assumptions and different ways of doing things.” Did you notice how I gave credit for this quotation?

This is the universal symbol for mashup.

So much of what I write and what I paint is mashup. How I think is mashup, come to think of it. When I write a blog post for GPS, I typically have an idea, develop it and add expressions and images I have accessed from internet sources. Invariably the product is mashup. If I use artists' images I source them with credit. I even do that with some photographic images. I have even asked permission for use of some of these. Where I quote verbatim I source the writer. In the mashup universe, giving credit is a lost courtesy, even though some will say it is a legal requirement. This is under constant debate.

So I pulled up the Wikipedia definition for Mashup and learned about four mashup genres.
1. Mashup (digital), a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.
2. Mashup (music), the musical genre encompassing songs which consist entirely of parts of other songs. The basic idea of a mashup is that you take samples of existing content (audio, video, text), and put them together into something new.
3. Mashup (video), a video that is edited from more than one source to appear as one
4. Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source.

More mashup tomorrow and the next day, and maybe as long as I do this, because apparently I don’t have an original thought in my head.
Sorry for the long delay between posts. I was trying too hard to be original.