Very Cool - Crime Maps: explore police stats with our interactive tool | guardian.co.uk

Crime Maps: explore police stats with our interactive tool

Last week's launch of the police.uk website clearly proved popular, perhaps excessively so. We teamed up with the engineers behind SpatialKey to build a richer interface on to December's crime data that lets you compare and contrast crime levels by location and type
How this interactive was made
Datablog: download the data

Great data viz tool - nicely done

Henry Jenkins: Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design Conference

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Check Henry Jenkins' blog for full deets on the conference:

TRANSMEDIA, HOLLYWOOD 2:
Visual Culture and Design

A UCLA/USC/Industry Symposium
Co-sponsored by
UCLA Producers Program,
UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
and
USC School of Cinematic Arts

Friday, April 8, 2011
James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
9:45 AM - 7 PM

Event Co-Directors:
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication

Very smart post 'On Parenting, Media, and Education' | DMLcentral

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Excerpt from DML Central:

By BEN WILLIAMSON February 14, 2011 - 10:15am

"Modern cinema can teach us how youth and media are widely understood in our cultures. Cinema, like works of literature and visual art, can represent and diagnose our widespread fears and fantasies about young people and about how we, as cultures, bring them up. Back 150 years ago, for example, Charles Kingsley’s moral fable The Water-Babies challenged child labor. Today, the journal "International Research in Children’s Literature" publishes scholarly analyses of how children’s literature can both help in children’s growing up and impose on them social and moral codes from the dominant culture. Similarly, analyzing the way in which childhood is represented in movies can help illuminate today’s cultural concerns with children’s growing up and the ways in which they are positioned by social and moral codes in the digital age.

Extreme Fears About Media and Learning

The award-winning Greek film Dogtooth, which is lined up for a 2010 Academy Award for best foreign film, is a seriously unsettling dissection of modern family life, parenting and adolescence. Superficially, it’s a movie about parents imprisoning their own children, a paranoid total fantasy of protection from a toxic outside world. Yet it’s also, more subtly, a movie about learning and media...."

Read the full post on DMLCentral

What the heck is 'uniquely Canadian' porn?: Never mind the iPad ... porn needs the Canada position | guardian.co.uk

In April it was announced that the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission approved the licensing of Canada's first porn channel. Known as "Vanessa", it will begin to air in October and will be required to adhere to Canadian content regulations, which mandate that programmes featured on the channel include "equitable portrayals" of the sexes and uniquely Canadian themes and settings. If it proves to be profitable, Vanessa could set the tone for the production of more culturally relevant and socially progressive pornography. If it's a flop, at least anyone out there with a Canada fetish will no longer have to subsist on decades-old Kids in the Hall skits.

Read the full article & ponder: what the heck will 'uniquely Canadian' porn be?