(The news report above is from a WJW, channel 8, a Fox-affiliated television station in Cleveland, Ohio. You can view the security footage by itself on YouTube, posted there by The Akron Beacon Journal)

The officer involved in the incident, deputy Jason Kline, alleges in his report that the prisoner, David Malcolm, swung his head backward in an attempt to strike the deputy (i.e. a reverse head-butt), but judging by what I see in the video it seems more likely that he himself tugged on the prisoner’s T-shirt to create this impression.

After tossing Malcom against the wall Kline exclaims “Try to head-butt me again motherfucker” and Malcom responds “I didn’t head-butt you man. I didn’t head-butt you“.

A sheriff’s report concluded ”it is unclear” whether Malcolm attempted to head-butt the deputy. A Use of Force Committee felt the deputy went too far and recommended the Sheriff consider disciplinary action against the veteran officer.

“It was okay on the first move to put him on the wall because of the head butting attempt,” the Sheriff told Fox 8 News, “But once he went past that my use of force committee feels he went too far.” Sheriff Alexander said he is recommending a 30 day suspension for the officer, a punishment for which the officer can and is expected to appeal through his union.

Footnotes

1. The WJW, channel 8, a Fox-affiliated television station in Cleveland, Ohio story
2. The Akron Beacon Journal story on the incident which includes comments from David Malcom’s attorney Robert Incorvati.

Martijn Kieft, Pieter van der Wielen en Chris Vijn onderzoeken op een actieve manier waar ons geld terechtkomt of waar het blijft hangen. Door zelf deel te nemen aan het economische verkeer ondervinden zij wie de winnaars zijn en wie de verliezers. Volg je de meute dan wordt je gepiepeld, dus wat kunnen de verslaggevers doen om handelaren, verkopers of bankiers te slim af te zijn?

Deze beschrijving is rechtstreeks afkomstig van de website van VPRO Goudzoekers maar geeft eigenlijk niet helemaal een goede beschrijving van wat het programma nou precies inhoud.

Lockdown is a television series appearing on the National Geographic Channel. The series offers a look into various issues related to the United States penitentiary system. The man in the picture above is Donovon Green, a guy in his late thirties who spent 14 years of his life in jail convicted of armed robbery. A team from National Geographic follows him around on his first 90 days of life on the outside.

While the premise seems interesting, the documentary itself is rather shoddy which makes it difficult to say anything useful about the whole situation. One can only hope that Donovon will manage to keep his spirit up and find a steady job.

Watching someone trip on an uneven sidewalk may cause a quick laugh – but it’s a different story when that person actually gets hurt from their mishap.  A new animated film short from Acme Filmworks and The Responsibility Project captures the dangers – large and small – of street construction.  In the film short, a workman is oblivious to the danger he causes as he drills away at a chunk of the road. Employees in a neighboring high-rise office building gather to watch as innocent pedestrians meet their fate as they walk over a dislodged stone in the sidewalk.

The situation suddenly takes a turn for the worst when an elderly man shakily begins his journey for the day and in doing so reminds the office what it means to do the right thing.

When the office workers see the elderly man they try to warn him of his impeding doom. However, the shakily elderly man notices the dislodged stone and when he carefully plants his feet on the stone he notices his shakiness is canceled out and for a brief moment he clearly enjoys his newfound discovery.

All in all, definitely worth watching.

The creators of the documentary travel to Iceland to try and answer the question: What happened? An economist, a philosopher, a comedian, a young activist, a fisherman and a coffehouse owner answer the question in their own way.

They also interview Eva Joly who, at the time, was employed as a special adviser by the Icelandic government to investigate the possibility that white-collar crime may have played a part in the Icelandic financial crisis.

You can watch the complete documentary online at the Tegenlicht website (most of the interviews are in English with Dutch subtitles).

CNN's video website

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Problem #1: When a video is done playing, all player functionality is disabled and after a few seconds the player automatically skips to the next video.

Solution: Don’t do this! Instead, keep all player functionality enabled (time slider, replay, share etc.) and allow the user to permanently configure the automatic skip behavior.

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Problem #2: The links to videos are not actual links but the very common <a href=”#” onclick=”…”>link</a> type.

The biggest issue with doing this is that it breaks a lot of functionality not directly related to the website itself. One example is that your visitors will be unable to easily copy links using the browser’s “Copy Link Location” functionality (to use on their blog for example), but one should also not forgot about all those other extensions and applications (think search engines) that depend on the ability to scrape links.

Solution: Add the real permalink as an href and override the default handler using JavaScript (see Problem #3). An added advantage of doing this is that navigating will still work even when JavaScript is disabled.

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Problem #3: JavaScript is used to change the playing video but the URL is not adjusted (you can get a direct link to the video, but you have to do this from within the Flash player and because of Problem #1 you have to do so before the video ends).

Solution: To adjust the link, but not reload the page, use an anchor to separate the parameters, i.e. http://us.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/10/30/kark.flooded.car.kark. These URLs can also act as your permalinks, you just have to handle everything after the # as a parameter. CNN actually only supports this behavior as you can tell by following the link above, so the only change that needs to be made is that the href’s need to be set correctly. The only problem with using this technique is that using real anchors becomes a bit problematic.

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Problem #4: There are no links to relevant resources.

You only get a title and a short summary of the video, e.g. “Doomed boy seen on camera”, “A store worker testifies about seeing the Kehoe brothers before they were savagely attacked.”. But this doesn’t tell you anything!

Solution: Actually include links to a news article, or multiple news articles.

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I made use of CNN’s feedback functionality to leave my comments on their video website, let’s hope they actually do something with it.