Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Annie Le, Dan Malloy, and Connecticut Politics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/20/2009 - 21:30In the latest Journal Inquirer, Chris Powell has written an interesting column entitled No ordinary murder; and paying for politics and Keith Burris has written a great column about Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy’s qualifications for Mayor. (I cannot find the Burris column online, so I cannot provide a link at this point.
In Mr. Powell’s editorial, he wisely asks, “Why is the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le an international sensation?” He asks, “Is it the police particularly or the government generally?... Is it the news media?... Or is the public to blame?” He goes on to explore the relationship between these. News organizations and the government respond to the demands of readers and constituents. There are old adages like “if it bleeds, it leads” and “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” come to mind.
Yet what is it that shapes public opinion and leads the populous to demand one thing or another? I have explored this a little bit in my blog post Outbursts. It is the news organizations and the politicians. We need news organizations and politicians that will help us all strive to be better people, to make better demands of our leaders and news organizations.
This leads nicely into Keith Burris’ column. Mr. Burris seems to believe that Mayor Malloy comes closer to this ideal than many of the politicians we see here in Connecticut. He portrays Mayor Malloy as a man who loves the nuts-and-bolts job of being a strong mayor, as a person who is more of a doer than a listener.
So, how do we elect our leaders? In the second half of his column, Mr. Powell talks about what needs to be done to address campaign financing issues here in our state. He suggests that
A system that was more in tune with democracy and that distributed public campaign funds more according to public sentiment might put fund allocation directly in the public's hands. That is, at the beginning of each election cycle people who have registered to vote could be told by mail that the state was ready to allocate to political candidates and organizations a certain amount of money in their name --- say, $30 per voter -- and given a checklist of the candidates and organizations who had registered for public campaign funds and pledged to obey the rules of public financing.
It is a noble idea, although I’m not sure that it would work on a practical level. I would be concerned about the cost of the mailings and the bureaucracy necessary to make such a program work. In addition, it is the early money that is most important and the system Mr. Powell describes most likely wouldn’t get the money to candidates until later in the campaign.
Another complaint of challengers in the political process is that they have a hard time getting the attention of the local news organizations. While it wouldn’t be as significant a fix as what Mr. Powell suggests, a starting point might be to provide a modification to the Electronic Campaign Reporting Information System (eCris). I would love to be able to subscribe to the SEEC Form 1 filings so that any time a candidate files to run for office, I would get an email notifying me.
With such a system in place, I could imagine a great service that the Journal Inquirer and other papers in our state could provide by posting information about the candidates in their area that have filed the necessary papers as soon as possible.
Can news organizations like the Journal Inquirer and politicians like Mayor Malloy raise the level of discourse in our state so that we can elect more effective leaders and deal more wisely with all the issue that face our state, from a high profile murder case like that of Annie Le to efforts to get the State government to spend its money a little more efficiently? I sure hope so.
Public, Educational and Government Access issues for CableVision CT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/20/2009 - 11:01In a previous blog post, I talked about two meetings happening on Monday. The first is the Sound View Community Media board meeting on Monday at 8:30 AM. The second is the Woodbridge Government Access Television Commission meeting scheduled for 6:00 PM. There are many issues that I hope will get discussed at these meetings and here are some of my thoughts on some of these issues.
Signal Reliability
Back in July, there some reports of the PEG channels going out sporadically. Cablevision was reporting that the signal was okay at the head office in Norwalk, but that perhaps there were problems in Milford. This was to be investigated, but I haven’t heard anything more on this.
In addition, various people reported problems with the PEG channels over weekends which seem to have been related to the video server that Sound View uses in their office in Bridgeport. Apparently, there has not been technical support available to address this issue and if the video server goes down over the weekend, it remains down until Monday. This is also still being investigated. It is not clear if the two different problems are related in any way.
SVCM Policies – Representatives of Elected Officials
Various people have contacted me for follow up on DPUC Docket 08-06-03 which encouraged SVCM to develop of Board policies to help prevent the problem which gave rise to the complaint. My recollection of the discussion from the previous SVCM board meeting was that they claim their policies preclude ex-officio board members representing the elected officials in the region from attending executive sessions.
I believe that they can legitimately make that part of their bylaws, but I also believe that it is a poor decision further alienating SVCM from the communities it is supposed to be serving. It is my hope that SVCM will make every possible effort to avoid going into executive sessions and consider making exceptions to this whenever possible.
I did note that I was the only representative of an elected official at the most recent SVCM board meeting and I believe that both SVCM and the municipalities in the region should make a concerted effort to get more representatives of elected officials to attend their board meetings. I have been in discussions with people from various towns to encourage better attendance of representatives of elected officials.
I should disclose that I’ve had these discussions with people from Milford and that I am actively working to support a candidate that is running against the current mayor. SVCM is particularly difficult for me in that I end up wearing many hats and I have to be careful about properly respecting each role.
SVCM – A Satellite Office
Also in the DPUC ruling on docket 08-06-03, they wrote: “The Department would advise SVCM to carefully consider setting up a satellite Public access studio to address the needs in the Milford/Orange/Woodbridge area.”
I have not heard anything about this and hope to get a chance to discuss this with members of the SVCM board. I do believe that a satellite Public access studio would be of great benefit to public access and should seriously be considered by the SVCM board.
Digital Slamming
Cablevision is moving the public access channel from an analog signal on channel 77 to a digital signal on channel 88. While over the air broadcast signals have all moved to digital, this is not the case for cable signals and many people still watch analog cable channels on old analog televisions. Cablevision had offered to help with people losing signal as their favorite channels went digital, but not everyone is aware of that and the help appears to be temporary. Because of this, the move from analog channel 77 to digital channel 88 may make it harder or more expensive for some people to access the public access channel, with the overall move to digital, this may only be a temporary bump.
Nonetheless, it is an important issue to keep an eye on, since there is a growing problem with cable companies moving PEG channels from a low channel number where people may find the channel via random surfing off to very high numbers, a sort of digital Siberia, where people are much less likely to randomly find the channels.
In addition, I’m told that The League of Women Voters of Litchfield County is studying the issue of diminished access to some channels, including PEG channels and others.
On a broader basis, I’ve been told that the Alliance for Community Media and Dearborn, MI filed a petition with FCC last January, primarily complaining about AT&T's delivery of PEG programs, but also asking for redress on digital slamming by both Comcast & Cablevision.
ACM-NE Video Festival and Workshops
On Saturday, November 7th the Northeast Region of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM-NE) will hold a Video Festival and Workshops at the West Hartford Town Hall. Currently the planned tracks for the workshop are on Advanced Production Skills and Public Policy, Grassroots Organizing and Lobbying.
So, those are the issues that I'm looking at right now. If you live in the Fairfield, Bridgeport, Milford, Stratford, Orange or Woodbridge area, and have other thoughts for these meetings, please let me know immediately.
In addition, no matter where you live, let me know your thoughts on public access television in your area and the issues you are seeing.
Exploring Digital Tuners and Cablevision IO Digital in CT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/19/2009 - 20:24On Monday, I will attend two different meetings dealing with the Public, Educational and Government Access channels in an area served by Cablevision in Connecticut. One of the issues that is likely to be discussed is the movement of PEG channels from an analog cable signal to a digital cable signal.
When I first heard about this, I was surprised. It had not occurred to me that when all of the broadcast channels moved to digital in the United States this year, that so much of the cable broadcasting remains analog and that moving channels from analog to digital would be an issue. However, the concerns about moving analog cable channels to digital channel signals remains as much, if not a bigger issue than we saw with the move from analog to digital broadcast signals.
I don't watch a lot of television, and currently when we watch television, it is on an old analog TV tuned to channel 3 which gets its signal from a cable box. I never paid a lot of attention to what is coming in on the cable prior to the cable box.
However, this is a concern for others. Some people have multiple televisions in there homes. They may have a cable box in the living room, but other rooms are simply getting whatever they can for remaining analog signals off of the cable for televisions in other rooms. As channels move to digital on the cable, they are no longer available to these other televisions, unless upgrades or new equipment is purchased.
It turns out that I have a digital receiver that I can use to receive either broadcast or cable television signals and make them available on PCs. I have a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick. This is a tuner on a USB stick that receives analog, ATSC and Clear QAM channels and allow them to be viewed, or recorded on a PC.
Initially, I had used it to record programs during the Presidential elections. Yet in discussions preparing for meetings on Monday, I figured I should dust off the old TV Tuner stick and try to get a better sense of what is going on with the signal coming in on my cable.
Initially, I had connected the TV Tuner stick to my laptop running Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I've had various problems with Vista since then, and it will no longer recognize the TV Tuner stick, or any memory stick for that matter.
My next thought was to try it on my Linux laptop. Searching on the web, I found a few references to the stick and Linux. As best as I could tell several people had modified the Linux kernel to add a device driver for the stick and it seemed like maybe a third of them were successful. It really looked like too much work for the weekend.
So, on to plan B. I hooked up the TV Tuner stick to Kim's desktop computer. It is running Windows XP and managed to get the software to eventually run on the desktop.
The next problem was finding the PEG channels. I did a scan and found hundreds of digital channels. However, many don't seem to work. They are probably encrypted, and most of the channels that did work ended up with names like 821.916 instead of anything useful. However, it turns out that 821.916 is what the tuner calls the channel. This channel is at a frequency of 171 Mhz. It is a Digital Mpeg2 channel with service ID 916, Original Network ID 0 , Transport Stream Id 48431, PMT PID 38 and PCR PID of 36. It turns out that this is the Government Access channel.
Given that the tuner handles both ATSC and QAM, I don't know if this is ATSC or QAM encoding. The educational channel is 821.915, same Frequency and video standard. The service id is 915, the original network id is 0, the transport stream id is 48431, the PMT PID is 41 and the PCR PDI is 39. The Public Access Channel is 821.912. You can probably guess everything except the PMT PID and the PCR PID which are 87 and 72 respectively.
I also mapped out other channels. CSPAN is 891.2 at 627 MHZ. Transport Stream ID 48154, PMT PID 231 and PCR PID of 121. CT-N is 105.3 Frequency 681 Mhz, Transport Stream ID 48404, PMT PID 167, PCR PID 107. As one other reference, WCBS-HD is 2.1 at 759 Mhz, service Id 702, Transport Stream 600, PMT PID 1065 PCR PID 1056.
If anyone else is using ATSC or QAM tuners in Cablevision Connecticut area and want to compare notes, I can gather more of this information and share it and would be very interested in hearing your experiences.
As a final note, it appears as if you can now buy Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Sticks for about $50 at various places online. It looks like a good way to get add HD television reception, at least for some channels on some PCs.
What does this all mean for Monday? I don't know. I'll explore it and see what comes up at various meetings.
Outbursts
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/17/2009 - 08:06Have you ever watched an elected official on television and gotten so mad that you could throw a shoe at him? Have you ever disagreed so strongly with an elected official that you wanted to shout out “You Lie!” at them? Have you ever felt so strongly about an awards show that you wished you could rush up on the stage and try to tell everyone why your favorite musician is so much better? Have you ever watched a sporting match and wanted to give the referee a piece of your mind? Have you ever wanted something so badly, you could kill for it? Have you ever wanted to just scream, WTF?
Today will be a long day of meetings. It is five thirty in the morning as I arrive at the local train station. On the radio, NPR is doing a tribute to Mary Travers, who just died of leukemia. Earlier this year, Irv Stohlberg, a noted local politician and good friend, died of leukemia. Another friend is currently fighting a difficult battle with leukemia and all of this, together with the beauty of Peter, Paul and Mary’s music puts me into a pensive mood.
The sky is turning from the dark of night to the deep dark blue of early morning. Across the street from the train station is the New Haven Police Department. The area is lit up brighter than day with portable lights and white or blue camera trucks and their crew crowd the area.
Even here you see the pecking order. Closest to the steps to the police station is a CNN truck. It is flanked by trucks from NBC and CBS news. Then are the affiliate trucks up from New York, further out are trucks from the Connecticut affiliates, and off to the side is a truck from a local news outlet.
Burly men are going through the motions of setting up tripods and running wires. Attractive young women talk dispassionately near the trucks about the segment they will soon be taping. They are all waiting to go live with the latest breaking news in the case of Annie Le, the graduate student who was murdered a week and a half ago. If it bleeds, it leads.
Mary Travers voice, singing, “It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to be so in love with you and so alone” rattles in my mind. I think of Jonathan Widawsky, the fiancé of the murdered graduate student. What must he be going through his mind right now? What about the murderer? What led him to kill Annie? What must he be feeling right now? Did he ever read Crime and Punishment? Did he want something so badly, he killed for it? I fight back a tear for all of this, for the friends of the victim, even for the killer, and perhaps especially for everyone who covers this as just another story, something to boost the ratings.
Yet all of this causes me to take a step back. Are there more outbursts these days, or have things gotten that much worse? If they have gotten worse, why is it? Is there something more stressful about living in this Post 9/11 world struggling through an economic meltdown? Have we simply lost our ability to moderate our emotions and the ability to react appropriately in difficult times? If so, why is it? Has the loss of inhibition as we anonymously scream at one another online added to the problem? Have the cable news shows which have replaced informed discourse with pundits yelling at one another added to the problem?
I leave the media circus as I head to the train. I just want to scream, WTF?! Yet I know that it wouldn’t do any good, and would perhaps just add to the problem.
