First floods, then dust storms, now fire - NSW North Coast braces for further troubles in 2009

Brooms Head fire on the Clarence Coast

By late yesterday afternoon, there were 18 fires still listed by the NSW Rural Fire Service on the North Coast - thirteen of these in the Clarence Valley, two in the Kyogle area, one in the Coffs Harbour district and one each in the Richmond and Tweed Valleys.

Heartfelt thanks to those Firies on the frontline and other emergency service personnel. They may be very busy this summer.

The Daily Examiner Clarence Valley fire photographs

NSW RFS fire safety information sheets - Prepare, Act, Survive

Bright winding ribbon discovered at edge of solar system - it's the Universe waving Earth goodbye

This week NASA announced the discovery of a bright winding ribbon within the heliosphere surrounding our solar system.

One jaded local (tiring of the uphill battle to get government to do something about actually reducing national, state and regional carbon emission levels rather than just talking around the problem) suggests that this ribbon is the Universe giving one last wave goodbye to an Earth choking to death on greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

A bit of Australian leaders trivia from the Internetz

Our Kev has now racked up at least 338 tweets on his Twitter account, KevinRuddPM.
He has about 444 pics up on the account's photostream at Flickr and around 661,787 Twitter followers listed.

By comparison Truffles has a credit of around 665 tweets on his own Twitter account, TurnbullMalcolm.

He's uploaded about 23 pics to Twitpic and somewhere in the vicinity of 16,514 Twitter followers are recorded.

Sorta mirrors the divide between percentage points in the opinion polls - Kev winning just by being in the chair and Truffles running furiously on the spot trying to catch up.

The ups and downs of online paywalls for an American small town newspaper

It is starting to look as though Rupert Murdoch is determined to hide much of the news content on his media websites behind paywalls, no matter how many times he's told that this is rather a bad idea.

He will not be the first to do so.

Here is The Newport Daily News June 2009 paywall pricing strategy courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab:

The 12,000-circulation Rhode Island newspaper is old school — it still publishes afternoons on Mondays through Fridays, with a morning edition on Saturday. Last month, the newspaper announced a new three-tier pricing structure for subscriptions. Want home delivery of the print paper? That's $145 a year. Want home delivery and online access? That's $245. And if you want just online access — to an electronic edition that duplicates the appearance of the print product — it's a whopping $345.

While some online content is still currently free on the website of this unashamedly parochial newspaper, there has been an initial significant drop in daily unique online reader numbers to a mere 500 - around a quarter of the former online readership.

What circulation growth there is appears confined to casual readership via the news agent (which may not survive adverse weather conditions normal in northern hemisphere winter months) which is rather mixed news for featured advertisers as its new circulation figures only roughly equate with where the paper was ten years ago.

The sudden fall in online readership saw The Newport Daily News offer readers (from outside the county) a yearly limited time online news subscription for about $129.

Taking advantage of the fact that online readership was up for grabs, a month after the paywall went up, Island Communications Inc. launched a free online news website, Newport-now.com.

This blog-style site presents its own version of local news but also pokes its tongue out at The Newport News by running a short daily sidebar rundown on TNN's major stories under the banner Other Headlines.

It does the weather and obits which are standard fare in print newspapers and, it is likely to attract those advertisers following any changing online allegiance.

Newport-now is not the only free local site out there - a celebrity gossip website is also available.

All in all, a rather unpromising scenario Australian regional newspapers might have to take into consideration if they foolishly decide to jump on the paywall bandwagon - there's always someone else ready to offer local news for free.

ETS?? What's an ETS?

Page 2 of Coastal Views on 9th October 2009

Page 10 of The Daily Examiner on 12th October 2009

Everyone is having a lend of us, right?

Centrelink Call Centre Blues: a true story

During a North Coast flood event a person I know rang Centrelink to see if he could fax his fortnightly Newstart form to the Grafton office instead of submitting it in person since he was cut-off by flood waters.

The conversation went like this:

Centrelink Call Centre: Sorry sir, you must present yourself to the nearest Centrelink office.

Newstart Recipient: I can’t get to Grafton because the roads are flooded.

Centrelink Call Centre: I will pull up the map of your area…………......
Sir we’re in luck. The nearest Centrelink office is in Yamba, you may hand your form in there.

Newstart Recipient: Does your map show a blue line between Iluka and Yamba?

Centrelink Call Centre: Yes sir.

Newstart Recipient: That line is called the Clarence River and it is in flood.

Centrelink Call Centre: Can’t you get a ferry or boat to go across the river?

Newstart Recipient: The ferry is closed because of all the trees and dead cows, not to mention flood water, coming down the river.

Centrelink Call Centre: Well sir, you will just have to go to the next suburb and catch the train.

Newstart Recipient: Iluka does not have a next suburb unless you count Woombah and to get there I have to cross another river called the Esk and it is in flood as well. The road is closed.

Centrelink Call Centre: Just go to your local train station.

Newstart Recipient: The nearest train station is in Grafton and to get there I would have to cross the Clarence River twice and travel along roads that are closed because of the flood.

Centrelink Call Centre: Please hold the line, sir. I will get my supervisor.

Then the above conversation was repeated.

The result of this was that the person was finally given permission to fax their form into the Grafton office – which then promptly recorded a breach of compliance and stopped the dole payments.

Today is 2009 Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Click on image to enlarge

15 October 2009 is Blog Action Day when the blogosphere is encouraged to post about and discuss climate change.

Over 5,000 bloggers in 125 countries are taking part according to the organisers.

Taking personal responsibility for your carbon footprint is a good way to start tackling climate change (see chart above), but by far and away the most important step one can take is to ensure that your local council, as well as state and federal members of parliament, know how important the issue is to you and your family.

Start demanding that all tiers of government stop talking and start acting on greenhouse gas reduction and climate change mitigation. Telephone, write, email, fax, tweet, post online today!

No I won't be Kindle-ing......

I've looked into the e-book phenomenon and I've decided that Kindle (or whoever else puts out a digital book reader in the future) won't be getting my custom.

In the first place, I know that a book in print on paper will not breakdown - as long as my eyes last out so will the book.

My eyes of course are important to me and I'm not sure that anymore peering at font on a bright background is good for these older orbs - or for younger ones for that matter.

If I drop a book when reaching for the loo roll it may curl its corners or even damage its spine, but that's nothing a little sticky tape won't cure - if I regularly drop a Kindle I might not have a workable screen for long. And if I drop it in the bath......

When I haven't got money for the latest bestseller, then my local library is sure to be getting a copy in for no cost to my good self. E-books aren't free.

Books don't need nasty parts like lithium thinga-me-jigs and can eventually return to the environment with less negative effect.

I have old discs and tapes which can't be used anymore because technology changed too fast - printed books can last hundreds of years. The family bible is now over 400 years old.

So Kindle away world - I'll continue to hobnob with real books.

Australian National Water Week begins on 18 October 2009 with a less than subtle hint on raiding coastal rivers: ACVP

From A Clarence Valley Protest yesterday:

Australian National Water Week begins on 18 October 2009 with a less than subtle hint on raiding coastal rivers

National Water Week is almost upon us and it is hard not to be a bit suspicious of this particular event as it seems to be primarily pushing the barrow of the big water utility companies.

After all, the week is co-sponsored by the 40 year-old Australian Water Association which identifies itself as Australia's peak water industry body, having the largest – and most broadly based – membership, connecting professionals around the country and across all water-related disciplines. AWA has over 4,000 individual, and 700 corporate members nationally.

Created water supplies of course mean money to many of these companies and not just as sources of drinking/agricultural water.

The multinational Maunsell AECOM which currently employs the AWA president Peter Robinson is in the business of:

• Land, sea and air transportation
• Hydro and geothermal power generation, transmission and distribution
• Mining and heavy industry
• Natural resource management and rehabilitation
• Buildings, infrastructure construction and management

The National Water Week website contains a resource page which should ring alarm bells for the NSW North Coast as it implies that a high percentage of freshwater could be safely diverted inland from coastal rivers and specifically mentions the Clarence River in Turning back rivers inland.

Definitely not a good look for National Water Week. Nor is it one that inspires confidence that the other co-sponsor, the Federal Government, really does understand the reality of coastal living or how hard local councils and communities work towards achieving water sustainability, though remedial water work on river systems and imposing permanent mandatory water restrictions in the Clarence Valley and voluntary permanent water saving measures in the Richmond and Tweed Valleys.

The Rudd-Conroy national plan to filter the Australian Internet, according to the Australian Computer Society

Chart from OrzeszekBlog
Click to enlarge

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has just released a report on the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the Australian Internet aka plan to implement a mandatory national ISP-level Internet filtering scheme.

Now it's no secret that ACS was and is generally in favour of the Rudd-Conroy plan, but even it felt compelled to point out the following blindingly obvious.

There are a number of issues that need to be addressed when it comes to the implementation of ISP based filtering, including:

• sites can easily be renamed and so the names will not match the black or white list;

• language translation (often automated) often produces mistakes and so international sites may not be filtered effectively;

• lists must contain domain names as well as IP addresses to be highly effective;

• not all applications work well with a proxy server and so the performance of the ISP can degrade;

• push technologies (such as RSS) often bypass the proxy server and deliver content directly to the user so circumventing the filtering process;

• not all users access the Internet via an ISP;

• many sites have mirrors and multiple URLs and if these are not included in the black list then the filtering process can be circumvented; and

• proxies can degrade ISP performance particularly during periods of high traffic – they become bottlenecks and can reduce Internet speeds;

• mandating or architecting a network so that all packets pass by a filtering point can create performance problems, duplicated traffic paths and may increase the bandwidth costs for ISPs.

The report also canvasses the real possibility of overblocking sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, and any other hosting site where users share the same basic URL.

The full ACS 2009 report with a few handy hints concerning methods of circumventing ISP-level filtering: TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS ON ISP BASED FILTERING OF THE INTERNET.

Cattle kindergarten duty

To my relief I managed to have some success on cattle kindergarten duty.
The calves hung around me till it was time for the mid-day feed, then they scampered back to their respective mothers and I headed home to avoid the afternoon shift.

We'd filled in the morning weeding wild cotton bush, a job that has to be done preferably before flowering finishes and seed sets.

The calves were very interested in the concept of pulling something out of the ground and not eating it, one of the small things their mothers had obviously forgotten to teach them.
They sniffed the growing mounds of weeds with interest. Some taste tested the plants and soon decided that it did not taste good.

The more adventurous discovered that there was good grass where the cotton bushes once stood and took full advantage.
It didn’t take long before they were all feeding around in the area cleared of weeds.

It soon became apparent that calves can eat grass quicker that one lone human can weed cotton bush.
Luckily we were near the dam, I went for a swim and the calves paddled and played chase on the bank.

By 11am we were under the trees on the north side of the dam, the calves had their naps as I dried off in the sun with young Arnold Bully lying next to me contentedly chewing cud.
I think he is proud of his surrogate mum.

Featured drawing from Simon Streatfeild's The Animator

If you are reading this you might be one of Ruperty Pooh's "flat-earthers"

News Corporation put out a press release of its master's words on the occasion of

the World Media Summit in Beijing, China.

Here are the really funny bits from Rupert Murdoch's speech:

"Too often the conventional media response to the internet has been inchoate. A medium once thought too powerful has often seemed impotent in the past few years. Of course there should be a price paid for quality content, and yet large media organizations have been submissive in the face of the flat-earthers who insisted that all content should be free all the time. The sun does not orbit the earth, and yet this was precisely the premise that the press passively accepted, even though there have been obvious signs that readers recognize the reality that they should pay a price. There are many readers who believe that they are paying for content when they sign up with an internet service provider, presuming that they have bought a ticket to a content buffet. That misconception thrived on the silence of inarticulate institutions which were unable to challenge the fallacies and humbug of the e-establishment. The value of content has been volatile in the past decade but we are entering another decisive phase in which device makers are again courting the creators of content. I have sensed that shift in recent days during my travels in Japan and South Korea where I met some of the world’s leading electronics manufacturers. These companies don’t want their customers to be served a diet of digital dross, and yet that will be the inevitable consequence if the worth of content and creativity are not appreciated. The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph. "

Today is the start of Anti-Poverty Week 2009 in Australia and still Rudd, Swan & Macklin haven't acted against September pension increase grab by the states

This week across Australia people and organisations are observing Anti-Poverty Week 2009 which has as its main aims:

• Strengthen public understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty and hardship around the world and in Australia;
  
• Encourage research, discussion and action to address these problems, including action by individuals, communities, organisations and governments.

Over 100,000 Australian single pensioners (National Seniors statement to Courier Mail) will begin this week still worried that the Rudd Government has yet to make any concrete move to protect their recent $30 per week pension increase from the greedy grasp of state governments and community housing companies.

According to 2007 FAHCSIA data the majority of the 714,156 Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipients across Australia are single and don't own a home, so one would expect that these pensioners are significantly represented among single pensions who will lose 25% of the 2009 pension increase in late 2010.

DSP recipients are most heavily clustered in New South Wales which makes the Rees Government pension grab all the more distasteful - a fact these pensioners will possibly remember at the next election.

Etching from CAP Art Blog

Don't rubbish the environment

From the hinterland through to the beaches, the Clarence Valley is renowned for its natural beauty. It is an environment that provides us with a charming lifestyle. It is an environment that is admired, and oftentimes envied, by visitors. It is home to a diverse range of native animals.

It is vital that we care for what we have, and don't risk losing it, as has happened in other places. Throughout the world, areas that were once pristine are now overwhelmed by the rubbish in their environment - debris litters the roads and waterways; insidious chemicals hide in the soil and water.

We must ensure that does not happen here.

We must ensure that we do not see a re-occurrence of the tragic plight of this pelican on the Clarence River [© Gill Bennett].

What you can do:

Be mindful of your rubbish – don't leave it behind when you are out – don't let it escape with the wind.

Don't let chemicals get into gutters and drains – these all discharge into our waterways.

Participate in clean up programs.

Prevention is also better than cure – support programs such as the Yamba Chamber of Commerce project to eliminate plastic bags.

Do what you can to keep our environment clean – it is good for us and good for the wildlife.

Imelda Jennings Wildlife SOS

Guest Speak is a North Coast Voices segment allowing serious or satirical comment from NSW Northern Rivers residents. Email ncvguestpeak at live dot com dot au to submit comment for consideration.

Because Andrew Bolt brandishes a truncated graph, once more it's time to look at that global warming data again

On Sunday 11 October 2007 journalist Andrew Bolt was a guest on the ABC Insiders program and that gave rise to a post on his News Ltd blog on the same day.

In this post Mr. Bolt presented a graph which he thinks demonstrates that the world has stopped warming and hence there is no climate change going on.

Now that graph (left) apparently came via the Watts Up With That blog from information compiled by Dr. Roy Spenser an anthropomorphic climate change sceptic and supporter of the legitimacy of Intelligent Design Theory.

However, when one looks at NASA graphs of those same years placed within a longer time scale it is obvious that although there are 'plateau' periods the overall global temperature has been steadily trending upwards since at least 1880.
The report of the RSS graph (which relies on the same data as Spenser and Bolt) indicates that there are significant variations within those plateau and NASA points out that past plateau have been known to last for up to 9-10 years in living memory.

"Despite the fact it's been warmer and cooler at different times in the last 10 years, there's no part of the last 10 years that isn't warmer than the temperatures we saw 100 years ago." Josh Willis, NASA, 22 September 2009.

Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change

Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. [This is an update of Fig. 1A in Hansen et al. (2006)] January-September (9 months) mean is used for 2009 data.

(Last modified: 2009-10-06)

Our traditional analysis using only meteorological station data is a lin e plot of global annual-mean surface air temperature change derived from the meteorological station network [This is an update of Figure 6(b) in Hansen et al. (2001).] Uncertainty bars (95% confidence limits) are shown for both the annual and five-year means, account only for incomplete spatial sampling of data. January-September (9 months) mean is used for 2009 data.

(Last modified: 2009-10-06)

While Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) released this satellite derived global chart opposite for September 2009:

According to RSS, September 2009 was warm compared to normal with a global temperature anomaly of +.476 C. Keep in mind, the RSS temperature data covers the latitudes between 82.5 North and 70 South across the globe, so large areas of the polar regions are omitted.
Based on RSS data alone, September 2009 was the warmest month compared to normal since January of 2007 and the warmest September since September of 1998, when the anomaly was +.494 C.