Sources close to the MMA world indicate that a November fight between Brock Lesnar and Randy Couture could be finalized as early as Tuesday of next week.
If a deal can be reached, the fight would likely take place in Portland's Rose Garden.
Sources also say that in a perfect world that the legendary Couture would like to have three more fights before he retires and those fights would all be for the UFC.
Lesnar vs. Couture would be an extremely intriguing match up if contracts can be worked out. One would assume that getting a deal done quickly after the Labor Day holiday would allow both fighters to officially begin their preparation within a few days.
It will also be interesting to see where the betting line starts and ends for this
one if it does happen. This match blows away the previously discussed Lesnar-Kongo fight and should do huge business on PPV. (Credit: JR)
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Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Drama, not doomsday, by Matthew Warren - The Australian - 28th August 2008
A forthcoming environmental apocalypse portrayed in a new television series should be treated as fiction, writes, Matthew Warren
BY Christmas Eve in 2012, no rain has fallen in Sydney for more than 200 days and, despite its new desalination plant, the emerald city has run out of drinking water. The effects of climate change have created the conditions for a ring of bushfires that surround the city, but authorities don't have enough water to put them out.
This is the plot synopsis for the Nine Network's new tele-feature experiment called Scorched, which will screen nationally in prime time on Sunday night. Promoters have hailed the production a "major television event" with an all-star cast, fake news broadcasts from authentic Nine newsreaders and a comprehensive supporting website.
"Mother nature is on the warpath. It's armageddon," the publicity kit modestly proclaims. Media previews have described the plot as "scarily plausible". Director Tony Tilse claims the idea of a city running out of water is "basically a true story, but it just hasn't happened yet".
Oh, really? Perhaps what is more scarily plausible is that the producers of the program didn't bother to speak to Sydney Water or the Sydney Catchment Authority before going to air. They would have discovered that even in the worst-case scenario, Sydney already has enough water in its huge network of catchments to meet demand until 2014. The city's new desalination plant will come on line by 2010 and will be able to supply 15 per cent of Sydney's demand, but has been designed to quickly double its capacity to a half-billion litres of water a day.
Scorched is the headline act in a wave of climate porn to hit Australia in coming weeks. In 2006, Britain's Institute for Public Policy Research reviewed media, government and activist reporting of climate change and found it to be confusing, contradictory and chaotic, leaving the public feeling disempowered and uncompelled to act.
Most notable was the tendency to use alarmist language, or climate porn, which offered "a thrilling spectacle but ultimately distances the public from the problem".
Scorched producer Kylie Du Fresne says the telemovie is not meant to be seen as a documentary, but admits "we were interested in blurring the lines between fact and fiction".
A water disaster of this magnitude is like being run over by a steamroller. It's possible, but only if you do nothing. Sydney Water spokesman Brendan Elliott says the plot is "truly a work of fiction".
Given it's Sydney Water's primary job to make sure the city doesn't run out of water in the face of population growth and climate change, it's not surprising they have a range of strategies to keep moving in the face of the steamroller. These include desalination, increased water recycling and increased conservation programs.
Water Services Association chief executive Ross Young says he is concerned the show might spark a wave of panicked callers to water authorities on Monday morning.
"It's very important that the program is clearly labelled a drama and not a documentary," he tells The Australian. "Even though the chances of climate change are significant, there are processes in place to manage the consequences.
"The bottom line is our cities are not going to run out of water."
Climate porn is the latest manifestation of infotainment that flourishes in the no man's land between fiction and nonfiction: dramas loosely based on factual events and the communication of often credible and important ideas and theories sexed up with an extra dose of dramatic licence.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles caused panic across the US when he broadcast a dramatisation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. Like Scorched, the radio broadcast used simulated news broadcasts to create an aura of authenticity; some of the program's six million listeners thought there was a Martian invasion in progress.
Climate disaster movies date back to the release of Soylent Green in 1973. The dystopian science-fiction film is set in a severely over-populated and overheated (as a result of climate change) New York in 2022 facing chronic food shortages. Charlton Heston plays a detective who discovers to his horror that the newest food substitute (Soylent Green) is made by reprocessing dead people.
Then in 1995, Kevin Costner starred in the box-office flop Waterworld, a kind of climate-change crisis meets Mad Max movie set in a futuristic Earth where the polar ice caps have melted and the few survivors sail around or live on floating islands, inevitably fighting with each other.
The most explicit climate porn may well be the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Released two years before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it grossed 10 times more at the box office. Melting ice sheets and glaciers caused the Altantic Ocean currents to stop suddenly, plunging the entire northern hemisphere into a deep snap-freeze. The film was derided by most climate scientists and highlighted the real problem with creating drama about the effects of climate change: in reality the changes are not sudden, but slow and insidious.
In a review, US paleoclimatologist William Hyde observed: "This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery."
But even a genuine attempt to explain the science, such as An Inconvenient Truth, sailed close to the wind at times in order to sustain the level of drama in what is basically a 90-minute lecture.
In one example, Gore made much of the devastating impacts of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans as a portent of increased natural disasters caused by a warming climate.
The main cause of New Orleans' flooding was a poorly maintained system of levees holding back the Mississippi River and surrounding lakes. But holding this aside, scientists are still arguing over whether Gore's claim is actually true. Despite predictions to the contrary, the two subsequent hurricane seasons on the US Atlantic coast were well below average.
Climate porn is not just constrained to the cinema. It is just as pervasive in the written form. One of the pioneers of the genre was US ecologist Paul Ehrlich with the 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Concerns about human overpopulation date back to English economist Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, who observed the exponential growth of the human population and grimly doubted the capacity of agricultural systems to keep pace. "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race," he wrote.
Ehrlich picked up the idea, expanding Malthus's concerns to include the unsustainable consumption of Earth's natural resources and the destruction of the environment.
While Ehrlich was widely regarded as a brilliant young scientist, The Population Bomb was more speculation than science, proposing three grim scenarios for the future, including a food war between China and the US, total nuclear annihilation and, on a more upbeat note, 500 million dying from starvation in the 1970s and '80s, including millions in developed countries.
It was a blockbuster, selling more than three million copies worldwide and catapulting Ehrlich into the public spotlight. On the lecture and interview circuit that followed, Ehrlich's warnings became predictions, bolder and more reckless. He predicted that a billion people might starve to death, including some 65 million Americans by the '80s, and that many key minerals would be nearing exhaustion point by 1985.
Curbing population growth is undoubtedly crucial in solving poverty and fundamental to reducing environmental damage. But while Ehrlich thrilled millions with his portents of doom, none of his headline projections have eventuated. The postwar transformation in global agriculture, known as the green revolution, developed new breeds of grain crops coupled with more targeted fertilisers and pesticides to radically increase yields.
The World Bank estimates the proportion of the world's population living in countries where per-capita food supplies are less than 9200 kilojoules a day has decreased from 56per cent in the mid-'60s to below 10 per cent by the '90s, during which time the world's population increased by more than two billion.
This week, Canadian writer on war and geopolitics Gwynne Dyer is in Australia to launch his latest book, Climate Wars. It's being promoted as "a terrifying glimpse of the none-too-distant future, when climate change will force the world's powers into a desperate struggle for advantage and even survival".
Dyer views the potential impacts of climate change - shifting agricultural production, reductions in freshwater supplies, crashing economies and large population movements - from a military and strategic perspective, and notes that most leading military strategists are already making contingency plans for what might happen later this century. He doesn't pull any punches: on the second page Dyer writes, "there is a probability of wars, including even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise 2 to 3 degrees Celsius".
He then constructs seven scenarios for the future, including the collapse of Europe and anarchy in the subcontinent by 2045, the emergence of a fortified border between the US and Mexico and the rise of eco-terrorism across the world by 2032.
"My background is 30 years in the strategic field and I look at this stuff, and the potential for huge disruption to internal relationships and international relationships to me looks enormous," Dyer tells The Australian.
"There is a range of possibilities here, that's why these scenarios are not mutually independent, each one is a free-floating possibility, and they depend on the amount of change that you have got. But that basically is a question of dates."
Dyer says discussing the consequences of events such as the potential drying out of the Indus River, which is crucial for the Pakistani economy, is important because it is an inevitability if the planet keeps warming.
"I don't imagine people reading this book will be empowered or disempowered to the extent that it will make a whole lot of difference to the balance of outcomes," Dyer tells The Australian.
"I'm not a pessimist. I don't think these are foregone conclusions. We are on a large highway and there are any number of exits off this highway that we could take and avoid the bridge that's out down the road.
"But (there are) no guarantees that any of them will be taken, and further down the highway very bad things will happen if the exits aren't taken."
Matthew Warren is The Australian's environment writer.
BY Christmas Eve in 2012, no rain has fallen in Sydney for more than 200 days and, despite its new desalination plant, the emerald city has run out of drinking water. The effects of climate change have created the conditions for a ring of bushfires that surround the city, but authorities don't have enough water to put them out.
This is the plot synopsis for the Nine Network's new tele-feature experiment called Scorched, which will screen nationally in prime time on Sunday night. Promoters have hailed the production a "major television event" with an all-star cast, fake news broadcasts from authentic Nine newsreaders and a comprehensive supporting website.
"Mother nature is on the warpath. It's armageddon," the publicity kit modestly proclaims. Media previews have described the plot as "scarily plausible". Director Tony Tilse claims the idea of a city running out of water is "basically a true story, but it just hasn't happened yet".
Oh, really? Perhaps what is more scarily plausible is that the producers of the program didn't bother to speak to Sydney Water or the Sydney Catchment Authority before going to air. They would have discovered that even in the worst-case scenario, Sydney already has enough water in its huge network of catchments to meet demand until 2014. The city's new desalination plant will come on line by 2010 and will be able to supply 15 per cent of Sydney's demand, but has been designed to quickly double its capacity to a half-billion litres of water a day.
Scorched is the headline act in a wave of climate porn to hit Australia in coming weeks. In 2006, Britain's Institute for Public Policy Research reviewed media, government and activist reporting of climate change and found it to be confusing, contradictory and chaotic, leaving the public feeling disempowered and uncompelled to act.
Most notable was the tendency to use alarmist language, or climate porn, which offered "a thrilling spectacle but ultimately distances the public from the problem".
Scorched producer Kylie Du Fresne says the telemovie is not meant to be seen as a documentary, but admits "we were interested in blurring the lines between fact and fiction".
A water disaster of this magnitude is like being run over by a steamroller. It's possible, but only if you do nothing. Sydney Water spokesman Brendan Elliott says the plot is "truly a work of fiction".
Given it's Sydney Water's primary job to make sure the city doesn't run out of water in the face of population growth and climate change, it's not surprising they have a range of strategies to keep moving in the face of the steamroller. These include desalination, increased water recycling and increased conservation programs.
Water Services Association chief executive Ross Young says he is concerned the show might spark a wave of panicked callers to water authorities on Monday morning.
"It's very important that the program is clearly labelled a drama and not a documentary," he tells The Australian. "Even though the chances of climate change are significant, there are processes in place to manage the consequences.
"The bottom line is our cities are not going to run out of water."
Climate porn is the latest manifestation of infotainment that flourishes in the no man's land between fiction and nonfiction: dramas loosely based on factual events and the communication of often credible and important ideas and theories sexed up with an extra dose of dramatic licence.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles caused panic across the US when he broadcast a dramatisation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. Like Scorched, the radio broadcast used simulated news broadcasts to create an aura of authenticity; some of the program's six million listeners thought there was a Martian invasion in progress.
Climate disaster movies date back to the release of Soylent Green in 1973. The dystopian science-fiction film is set in a severely over-populated and overheated (as a result of climate change) New York in 2022 facing chronic food shortages. Charlton Heston plays a detective who discovers to his horror that the newest food substitute (Soylent Green) is made by reprocessing dead people.
Then in 1995, Kevin Costner starred in the box-office flop Waterworld, a kind of climate-change crisis meets Mad Max movie set in a futuristic Earth where the polar ice caps have melted and the few survivors sail around or live on floating islands, inevitably fighting with each other.
The most explicit climate porn may well be the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Released two years before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it grossed 10 times more at the box office. Melting ice sheets and glaciers caused the Altantic Ocean currents to stop suddenly, plunging the entire northern hemisphere into a deep snap-freeze. The film was derided by most climate scientists and highlighted the real problem with creating drama about the effects of climate change: in reality the changes are not sudden, but slow and insidious.
In a review, US paleoclimatologist William Hyde observed: "This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery."
But even a genuine attempt to explain the science, such as An Inconvenient Truth, sailed close to the wind at times in order to sustain the level of drama in what is basically a 90-minute lecture.
In one example, Gore made much of the devastating impacts of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans as a portent of increased natural disasters caused by a warming climate.
The main cause of New Orleans' flooding was a poorly maintained system of levees holding back the Mississippi River and surrounding lakes. But holding this aside, scientists are still arguing over whether Gore's claim is actually true. Despite predictions to the contrary, the two subsequent hurricane seasons on the US Atlantic coast were well below average.
Climate porn is not just constrained to the cinema. It is just as pervasive in the written form. One of the pioneers of the genre was US ecologist Paul Ehrlich with the 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Concerns about human overpopulation date back to English economist Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, who observed the exponential growth of the human population and grimly doubted the capacity of agricultural systems to keep pace. "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race," he wrote.
Ehrlich picked up the idea, expanding Malthus's concerns to include the unsustainable consumption of Earth's natural resources and the destruction of the environment.
While Ehrlich was widely regarded as a brilliant young scientist, The Population Bomb was more speculation than science, proposing three grim scenarios for the future, including a food war between China and the US, total nuclear annihilation and, on a more upbeat note, 500 million dying from starvation in the 1970s and '80s, including millions in developed countries.
It was a blockbuster, selling more than three million copies worldwide and catapulting Ehrlich into the public spotlight. On the lecture and interview circuit that followed, Ehrlich's warnings became predictions, bolder and more reckless. He predicted that a billion people might starve to death, including some 65 million Americans by the '80s, and that many key minerals would be nearing exhaustion point by 1985.
Curbing population growth is undoubtedly crucial in solving poverty and fundamental to reducing environmental damage. But while Ehrlich thrilled millions with his portents of doom, none of his headline projections have eventuated. The postwar transformation in global agriculture, known as the green revolution, developed new breeds of grain crops coupled with more targeted fertilisers and pesticides to radically increase yields.
The World Bank estimates the proportion of the world's population living in countries where per-capita food supplies are less than 9200 kilojoules a day has decreased from 56per cent in the mid-'60s to below 10 per cent by the '90s, during which time the world's population increased by more than two billion.
This week, Canadian writer on war and geopolitics Gwynne Dyer is in Australia to launch his latest book, Climate Wars. It's being promoted as "a terrifying glimpse of the none-too-distant future, when climate change will force the world's powers into a desperate struggle for advantage and even survival".
Dyer views the potential impacts of climate change - shifting agricultural production, reductions in freshwater supplies, crashing economies and large population movements - from a military and strategic perspective, and notes that most leading military strategists are already making contingency plans for what might happen later this century. He doesn't pull any punches: on the second page Dyer writes, "there is a probability of wars, including even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise 2 to 3 degrees Celsius".
He then constructs seven scenarios for the future, including the collapse of Europe and anarchy in the subcontinent by 2045, the emergence of a fortified border between the US and Mexico and the rise of eco-terrorism across the world by 2032.
"My background is 30 years in the strategic field and I look at this stuff, and the potential for huge disruption to internal relationships and international relationships to me looks enormous," Dyer tells The Australian.
"There is a range of possibilities here, that's why these scenarios are not mutually independent, each one is a free-floating possibility, and they depend on the amount of change that you have got. But that basically is a question of dates."
Dyer says discussing the consequences of events such as the potential drying out of the Indus River, which is crucial for the Pakistani economy, is important because it is an inevitability if the planet keeps warming.
"I don't imagine people reading this book will be empowered or disempowered to the extent that it will make a whole lot of difference to the balance of outcomes," Dyer tells The Australian.
"I'm not a pessimist. I don't think these are foregone conclusions. We are on a large highway and there are any number of exits off this highway that we could take and avoid the bridge that's out down the road.
"But (there are) no guarantees that any of them will be taken, and further down the highway very bad things will happen if the exits aren't taken."
Matthew Warren is The Australian's environment writer.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Aunty puts five new channels online, by Miriam Steffens - The Sydney Morning Herald - 24th July 2008
ABC viewers can now watch television online, with the launch of an internet platform that streams five new ABC channels onto computer screens.
The service, called ABC iView, enables viewers to catch up on some popular programs they might have missed and to watch the latest news bulletins.
It also has a children's cartoon channel, a documentary channel and ABC Arts, with At The Movies, Painting Australia and other programs.
The digital push is designed to increase the ABC's audience. Its managing director, Mark Scott, said he wants to triple the broadcaster's number of TV stations and radio services over the next 12 years to increase Australian content and cement Aunty's place in the digital media age.
The ABC's head of television, Kim Dalton, said: "As Australians spend more time online and increasingly get some of their entertainment and information via broadband, we want the ABC to be there."
The network's existing stations, ABC1 and ABC2, are not streamed online, and it previously offered downloads of only some of its most popular programs.
iView, which is modelled on the BBC's iPlayer service, is available to households with a high-speed broadband connection.
The site delivers full-screen content through an in-built video player, so users can watch the channels or select programs and create their own TV schedule.
The service is free, but there are hidden costs. Program streaming guzzles up internet bandwidth, so viewers could breach their download limits and be charged extra fees by internet service providers.
Mr Dalton said the ABC was "very aware" of the problem and would warn users of the file sizes they were about to watch.
He said the broadcaster was trying to convince internet providers to exclude ABC channels from download limits and by last night iiNet had agreed.
(Credit: Fairfax)
Media Man Australia Profiles
ABC
Media Companies
Television
The service, called ABC iView, enables viewers to catch up on some popular programs they might have missed and to watch the latest news bulletins.
It also has a children's cartoon channel, a documentary channel and ABC Arts, with At The Movies, Painting Australia and other programs.
The digital push is designed to increase the ABC's audience. Its managing director, Mark Scott, said he wants to triple the broadcaster's number of TV stations and radio services over the next 12 years to increase Australian content and cement Aunty's place in the digital media age.
The ABC's head of television, Kim Dalton, said: "As Australians spend more time online and increasingly get some of their entertainment and information via broadband, we want the ABC to be there."
The network's existing stations, ABC1 and ABC2, are not streamed online, and it previously offered downloads of only some of its most popular programs.
iView, which is modelled on the BBC's iPlayer service, is available to households with a high-speed broadband connection.
The site delivers full-screen content through an in-built video player, so users can watch the channels or select programs and create their own TV schedule.
The service is free, but there are hidden costs. Program streaming guzzles up internet bandwidth, so viewers could breach their download limits and be charged extra fees by internet service providers.
Mr Dalton said the ABC was "very aware" of the problem and would warn users of the file sizes they were about to watch.
He said the broadcaster was trying to convince internet providers to exclude ABC channels from download limits and by last night iiNet had agreed.
(Credit: Fairfax)
Media Man Australia Profiles
ABC
Media Companies
Television
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