If a similar foul-up were to take place in an American general election that would be a loss of 4,000,000 votes. Thats like having every single voter in the state of Georgia disenfranchised. Not even the harshest or most misinformed critic of the American electoral system accuses the US of such a massive foul up, intentional or not. In view of this, it seems that the time and thought you so generously gave to our election might be better spent tending to your own knitting. .

Brightcove closes consumer doors. What happens to Aftermix?

Brightcove announced that they're dropping the consumer side of their video platform to focus on the larger parters and their content. They've been extremely successful getting new partners and as Josh Catone notes, they weren't fully into the consumer side of things to begin with. But it's a shame to see. Steve Borsch makes a great point about the difficulty that smaller fish have when looking at a video platform. My question was what will happen to Aftermix, a psuedo-consumer play that allowed people to mix up videos, photos and music then distribute them. It was associated with the .tv property.

So what does the future hold for Aftermix especially as the video-editing/mashup space heats up with things like Adobe Premiere Express? It sounds like it will be back in some form.

Johnson Announces An Extra 4,000 Midwives For The NHS, UK

The total value of the package will be around £3,000.

Alan Johnson said:

"The number of births in England is rising. To keep pace with this increase and to improve the quality of care to mothers, we will recruit an additional 1000 midwives on our wards and in our communities by 2009, rising to around 4000 by 2012.

"Many of these extra midwives will be new to the profession, but there are also former midwives whose expertise could be brought back to the NHS given the right support. This is why we will make up to £3000 worth of support available to each returning midwife, providing free training and financial support while they study.

"In January I announced extra funding of £330m over three years for maternity services. Trusts will have access to this additional money from April to invest in expanding the workforce."

Dame Karlene Davis, General Secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said:

"I welcome Alan Johnson's announcement which represents a recognition of the need to increase midwifery numbers.

Apps: Adobe Premiere CS3 Pro 3.1.1

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 3.1.1 ($15) video editing and production application. The new release includes Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) compatibility updates and important bug fixes. It is highly recommended for all Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 users. Requires Mac OS X v10.4.910.5 (Leopard), 1GB of RAM for DV; 2GB of RAM for HDV and HD, and 10GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation). [Download - 54MB] Jisho 2.2 ($15) Japanese-English dictionary. Jisho 2.2 brings improved zooming functionality allowing an infinite amount zoom into characters, results sorting, and other enhancements. Among the enhancements to Jisho 2.2 beyond infinite zoom and results sorting include a new 512x512 Leopard friendly icon, an updated eSellerate framework, and including searches done via the service to the search history.

Rob Legato advances motion-capture technique

With Bob Zemeckis' "Beowulf" currently in theaters and James Cameron's "Avatar" now filming in New Zealand for 2009 release, the art of performance capture is finally making its next evolutionary leap. Left behind are the dead-eyed elves, robotic movements and murky teeth of the first performance capture feature, "The Polar Express."

Visual effects master Rob Legato, who put the first motion-capture humans on the deck of the Titanic and pioneered a new mo-cap technique for "Avatar," is an ardent believer in harnessing the technology within -- not apart from -- the live-action realm.

The VFX maverick has quit working for major FX houses like Digital Domain, where he spent six years supervising effects on such pics as "Apollo 13" and "Titanic." A passionate believer in the do-it-yourself approach, Legato is no longer willing to stay within the corporate confines of VFX behemoths like Digital Domain or Sony Imageworks, where shots are so rigidly pre-planned, storyboarded, pre-approved and budgeted that any changes down the line cost serious extra money.

2006 audit didn't fix problems

The purchasing-card program provides commercial charge cards "for purchases that otherwise would have been purchased and paid for by other means, such as petty cash, or through issuing a purchase order and check," according to the most recent audit by Walls, who works for County Commission and was helped by the state comptroller's office.

CinemaElectric to Present at Merriman Curhan Ford & Co.'s Annual IP ...

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- CinemaElectric (Pink Sheets:CINM), a world leader in "made for mobile" programming , today announced that Adam Levin, Chief Executive Officer, will present at the 2nd Annual Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. IP Video Conference today at 10:30am This event will be held at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, 125 Third Street.

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The ultimate sacrifice

A new play, One Night in November, which opens at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre this week, dares to suggest that this might have been the case.

Playwright Alan Pollock was a schoolboy in Coventry in the 1970s - just as postwar boom was turning to bust - when he first heard rumours that Churchill was forewarned but did nothing. "I was stunned," recalls Pollock. "We all were. That wasn't the story as we'd always been told it. It didn't fit with our idea of ourselves, the plucky Coventry that had picked itself up after the blitz. We were the Phoenix City and proud of it. But the rumours came at a time when the city was no longer feeling confident about itself. Factories were closing down. It made us wonder whether the city had been considered expendable - and if that was why the fire, ambulance and air-raid protection services hadn't been warned."

Drawing on this sense of grievance, the play is a love story about a young Coventry woman, Katie, whose chance encounter with language specialist Michael turns to love.