The Peach Report

“Powering a Nation” honored at Pictures of the Year International Mar 8, 2010 | No Comments

Last summer, I served as Editor-in-Chief of the most fun project of all time, an interactive Web site called Powering A Nation. The site, which explores the crisis and challenges of energy in America, is an interactive multimedia project supported by the Knight and Carnegie Foundations.

On Friday, Pictures of the Year International selected the site for an Award of Excellence in the “Documentary project of the year” category. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the site! And congratulations to the other winning projects in that category, which were created by teams from Reuters, Media Storm and the Associated Press.

“Mining the mountains” honored at Pictures of the Year International Mar 4, 2010 | No Comments

I’m so happy to announce that a story I helped to shoot last summer, “Mining the mountains,” has won an Award of Excellence at Pictures of the Year International. Congratulations to my Powering A Nation colleagues Chris Carmichael and Monica Ulmanu, who led this story. (My role involved asking a few “bad cop” questions in the interviews, shooting the video for the protest sequence that begins at 4:38 and driving a tiny rented car at full tilt down narrow, potholed mountain roads.) Click here to see the engaging graphics that Monica created.

Some fun: an unfair test of Google Voice Feb 26, 2010 | No Comments

One of Google’s new tools is called Google Voice. Surely this service is part of company’s plot to make all of us cheerfully turn over our personal data*, but I signed up anyway.

The service is touted as a way to manage your phones and voicemails. I was intrigued by its transcription tool, which promised to transcribe my voicemails and send the text to me in an e-mail. As a journalist, I spend many hours transcribing the text of recorded interviews, and so I’m interested in auto-transcription technologies. I wondered how well Google’s robot typists would work, so I gave them a really hard test.

Using a friend’s cell phone, I called my voicemail and read aloud passages from literature’s great works.

First up was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The original:

When they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate herself as much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her employment the examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her since her being in Kent. They contained no actual complaint, nor was there any revival of past occurrences, or any communication of present suffering.

Robots:

when they were going on. I was a bit as it intending to exasperated or stop as much as possible. Okay, mister. Darcy shows for him limit the examination of all the letters switch Jean had written to her since her being in Kent they contain no actual complaint, nor was there any revival of past occurrences or any communication of presence of for a

Abominable. Google Voice can recognize “Mr. Darcy,” but renders “Elizabeth as “I was a bit”?

Clearly, Austen is a difficult selection. (I had trouble with her when I first tried to read “Emma” as a 13-year-old.) And English syntax has changed a bit since the book was published in 1813.

So I also tried the following books. You can judge Google Voice’s prowess for yourself.
(more…)

Youth activists speak out in Copenhagen Jan 29, 2010 | No Comments

In Copenhagen last month at the United Nations climate negotiations, I conducted short interviews with young people from all over the world. I was struck by how much the young people had in common – from Nigeria to India, from Australia to Sweden, it seems that youth climate activists want to send the same message.

Here are a few highlights from those interviews. You can view more at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s Heat of the Moment gateway.

Jamie Racine, USA

Anna Keenan, Australia

Linkesh Diwan, India