Eideard

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Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories. “It’s like the best of both worlds,” said the novelist in an interview with the Observer. “You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control.”

The new work, to be called The Next People is being made for Showtime, a US cable TV network. The plot will be based in factual science, Rushdie said, but will contain elements of the supernatural or extra-terrestrial. Although filming is yet to begin, a pilot has been commissioned and written. It will have what Rushdie described as “an almost feature-film budget”.

Showtime has announced that the hour-long drama will deal with the fast pace of change in modern life, covering the areas of politics, religion, science, technology and sexuality. “It’s a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people,” said Rushdie, 63, best known for Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. “It’s not exactly sci-fi, in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it, but there are certainly elements which are not naturalistic,” he said in the interview, which will appear in full in the Observer later this month.

The idea that Rushdie might create a television show came from his US agents who suggested that he would have more creative influence than with a feature-film script.

“They said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole.

“If you want to make a $300m special effects movie from a comic book, then fine. But if you want to make a more serious movie… I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight’s Children…”

Rushdie agreed that “my writing has always had elements of the fantastical” but said that he was drawn to television by the comparatively high status of the writer in the process. “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee. In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

“You have control in the way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, West Wing was Aaron Sorkin,” he explained.

Rushdie said that he is also considering doing much of the writing for an ensuing series alone. “Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.”

Looking forward to the work. If he and his associates can bring alive something with quality of Battlestar Galactica and Caprica – something with the depth of character of Damages – he’ll prove his point.

SALTILLO, Mexico — The Zetas have the run of the prison in this industrial city 190 miles southwest of Lardeo, Texas, in what is known as autogobierno or self-rule. It dates back decades and forms of it exist in correctional facilities the world over.

But self-rule has become more of a problem in Mexico recently as prison populations swell with suspects detained in the ongoing crackdown on organized crime and the country’s drug cartels seize power behind bars.

The most recent prison report from the National Human Rights Commission shows self-rule on the rise. Drug cartels and their affiliated gangs are among those increasingly seizing control, say prison observers…

Security experts such as Vicente Sánchez, professor at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana, say self-rule exists mostly in state-level facilities. It took hold over the past four decades due to corruption, neglect and underfunding, he says, as prison mafias got involved in everything from peddling drugs to charging for the right to sleep on bunks.

“It’s an expression of the enormous corruption that there is in these kinds of public security fields,” he says.

David Ordaz, investigator at the National Criminal Sciences Institute, of the Attorney General’s Office says the cartels want to maintain their status and replicate power structures formed on the outside. Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, ombudsman for the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission in Ciudad Juarez, says that wardens have cut deals with prison mafias over the years – mafias now controlled by the cartels.

Self-rule, he says, “Means having total control over an inmate population,” along with “the ability to communicate with the outside without restrictions…”

Los Zetas…now operate stores and charge the inmates to use workshops. They even opened a strip joint that serves shots of whiskey under the Los Zetas brand.

Does anyone think the war on drug gangs will get anywhere when the rest of the corrupt infrastructure of Mexico remains untouched? Time in prison is spent resting up for the return to action.

The first clinical trial for a vaccine against the most widespread strain of malaria, Plasmodium vivax, is now under way at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, near Washington DC. The BBC’s Jane O’Brien speaks with those heading the trial and individuals who are being bitten by infected mosquitoes to help further the research.

US army medic Joseph Civitello admits that becoming deliberately infected with malaria – one of the world’s deadliest diseases – is “definitely nuts”. But without such volunteers, it would be almost impossible to test a new vaccine aimed at protecting the military overseas and preventing some of the estimated 300 million cases of malaria that occur every year.

First Sgt Civitello is part of the world’s first clinical trial of a vaccine against Plasmodium vivax – the most widespread strain of malaria…

“It was weird because I did this knowing I was going to get sick,” says Sgt Civitello. “Fortunately I’m in a hotel room with doctors and nurses nearby and not out in the woods somewhere.”

Unlike most of the other volunteers in this unique trial, Sgt Civitello wasn’t given the test vaccine.

He’s part of a small control group – a human yardstick – needed by doctors to confirm that all the study participants have been infected. And as predicted, about 10 days after being bitten by mosquitoes in a laboratory, he displayed all the symptoms of malaria…

Twenty-seven other volunteers in the study had been given varying doses of the vaccine for several months prior to infection…

Then, at the beginning of November, they were bitten by mosquitoes imported from Thailand and infected with Plasmodium vivax malaria…

He adds: “What we do here plays a critical, pivotal role in the fight against malaria. Without this model of challenging the human body with malaria, we would be unable to effectively develop and figure out whether a vaccine works or not…”

RTFA for the details, the methodology, the human story of the volunteers for this first trial.

Regardless of assurances, knowledge of the history of precedent testing, you never feel quite confident of the outcome especially when – as in this study – you’re assured you are part of the control group. The last human trial I volunteered for was a double blind; so, none of us knew who was part of the control and who was getting the vaccine for the disease under test.

More than 100,000 people have paid to go behind the Times and Sunday Times’ new online paywalls but visits to their websites have fallen by about 87%.

Times Online was registering about 21 million unique users a month to its front page earlier this year but the figure fell to 2.7 million last month…

Times editor James Harding said the papers were “hugely encouraged“…

The subscription figures have been eagerly awaited by publishers and advertisers since the two papers went behind an online paywall four months ago…

BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas said many people in the industry had been sceptical about the paywall move, and that there would be intense analysis and debate over the significance of the figures…

The interviews with Rupert Murdoch flunkies toe the party line, e.g., anything for “free” is economic suicide. Someone really must explain that to Google or, say, Saatchi & Co..

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As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.

Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.

A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.

But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes…

Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once. By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for as many as 65 after that. Even the Air Force’s top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, says it could soon be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data…”

RTFA. So far the best tools for interpreting the data stream remain the eyeball and the human brain.

If anything, the military stands the best chance of learning how to handle the technology – from ESPN. The folks in those trailers parked outside an NFL game have already figured out how to handle multiple data streams. Play by play.

The Commerce Department has unveiled the first 77 “smart grid” standards aimed at removing a major barrier to the implementation of digital grid technologies.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology draft report (pdf) highlights 31 standards with “relevance” to smart-grid development and another 46 standards as “potentially” applicable to the smart grid.

“Central to this report is cybersecurity,” Secretary Gary Locke said at the GridWeek conference in Washington, D.C. “We need to do it right, but we cannot take forever because everything else depends on the foundation of our cybersecurity efforts.”

While NIST has held three workshops that drew more than 1,500 participants to work on the initial standards, the agency will also collect comments for 30 days on the draft report. After that, NIST will release the final standards report, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will decide which standards will be authorized, as mandated by the 2007 energy bill.

NIST plans to release the final “phase 1.0″ report by the end of the year.

Some of my favorite skeptics from the gene pool of do-nothings, know-nothings, at the big blogs on the hill will now have a chance to spend the next few months whining. Anything to perpetuate inaction.

No doubt the cybersecurity tasks referenced above are already moving to stricter codification. This can prove to be a useful test.

Seminarians on a class outing in India

Young men willing to join the priesthood are plentiful in India, unlike in the United States and Europe. Within a few miles of this seminary, called Don Bosco College, are two much larger seminaries – each with more than 400 students.

As a result, bishops trek here from the United States, Europe, Latin America and Australia looking for spare priests to fill their empty pulpits. Hundreds have been allowed to go, siphoning support from India’s widespread network of Catholic churches, schools, orphanages, missionary projects and social service programs.

At least 800 Indian priests are working in the United States alone.

But these days the Indian prelates have reason to reconsider their generosity. With India modernizing at breakneck speed, more young men are choosing financial gain over spiritual sacrifice.

“There is a great danger just now because the spirit of materialism is on the increase,” said Bishop Mar James Pazhayattil, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, as he sat barefoot at his desk, surrounded by bric-a-brac mementos of a lifetime of church service. “Faith and the life of sacrifice are becoming less.”

Some of the forces contributing to the lack of priests in Europe and the United States have begun to take shape here.

All of which are truly positive forces. India is moving into the 19th and 20th Centuries. And conscious of what the 21st Century has to offer. Why stay stuck in the 14th Century?

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New satellite data revealed that air pollution controls during the Beijing Olympic Games did have a positive impact, leading to sharp decline in certain pollutants, U.S. scientists said this week.

During the two months when air pollution restrictions were in place, levels of nitrogen dioxide in Beijing’s air plunged nearly 50 percent, Jacquelyn Witte, an atmospheric scientist NASA, told the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Their analysis of data from NASA’s Aura and Terra satellites also showed levels of carbon monoxide in Beijing’s air fell about 20 percent during the period, Witte reported…

Such models are important for understanding the integrated Earth system and aiding policymakers considering ways to reduce pollution.

The reports will also provide guidance for longer-term solutions both for local officials in Beijing and cities with similar problems – and national administrations that commit to solving environmental degradation.