STEALING OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEA, ARE YOU GUILTY ?

Happy holidays family. As the year comes to a close I wanted to leave you with an interesting post and being distracted by the festivities I found it difficult to focus to write a piece. I woke up this morning and found this gem in my LinkedIn box. It asked the question if we ever stole an idea from someone before?

My answer was of course, I certainly have but then hasn’t everyone done the same thing? I have always maintained that no idea is original, its the execution that counts. All the ideas in the world had to originate from someone or something and no one man has ever invented something from scratch that was not influenced from another idea that they were exposed to. The execution of the idea is another matter. So for instance, Ford was said to have started the first car, but then over the years look at the amount of cars ,stemming from the same idea, that have been produced, all executed differently? That’s my point. Every idea will be an idea until the final result becomes an original. But apparently it is not as easy as that and a court of law will think differently. My solution is to show at least 15 differences in the execution and you will not have a problem with your idea, in any court of Law.

The writer explores this phenomenon and sets your mind at ease with a scientific reason. Its good reading and I hope you share your thoughts on this interesting subject.

I would like to take this opportunity to personally extend THANK YOU for reading my blog and my thoughts. To those that have sent messages and comments I cannot thank you enough. Even if there is just one comment, I believe my post would have been worth the effort.

I extend to each of you a happy, eventful and a new year of countless possibilities. Never settle for mediocrity, and always have this one resolution, to be happy, exceedingly happy in everything you do, and everyone you encounter. Happy New Year family.

Paul

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Written by Adam
Chances are that at some point in your career, you’ve taken an idea from someone else. I want to know why.

There’s a clue in a story about one of the great bands of our time.

All good things come to an end, and by 1970, the beloved Beatles had decided to go their separate ways.

Within a year, George Harrison reached No. 1 with a solo song, “My Sweet Lord.” But his sweet time at the top was short-lived. Within a month, a lawsuit was filed. Harrison’s song had original lyrics, but shared a melody and harmony with the 1963 hit song by the Chiffons, “He’s So Fine.”

Was the Beatles’ lead guitarist guilty of plagiarism?

Judge Richard Owen, who happened to be a music aficionado, ruled that Harrison was guilty. But he said Harrison’s theft wasn’t intentional; it was accidental and subconscious.

Eventually, Harrison conceded that Owen was right. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So Fine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’,” Harrison wrote in his autobiography. “Why didn’t I realize?”

The psychologist Dan Gilbert calls this kleptomnesia: generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else. It’s accidental plagiarism, and it’s all too common in creative work.

In a classic demonstration, psychologists Alan Brown and Dana Murphy invited people to brainstorm in groups of four. They took turns generating lists of sports, musical instruments, clothes, or four-legged animals. Each participant generated four ideas from each category. Next, the participants were asked to write down the four ideas that they personally generated for each category.

Alarmingly, a full 75% of participants unintentionally plagiarized, claiming they generated an idea that was in fact offered by another member of their group. And later, the participants wrote down four new ideas for each category. The majority wrote down at least one idea that had already been generated by another group member—usually the group member who’d generated ideas immediately before them.

Were they not paying attention? If so, then surely they’d have been just as likely to plagiarize from their own ideas. But that didn’t happen. While 71% of participants took credit for an idea that a group member had generated, only 8% generated one of their own previous ideas.

Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.

It’s especially difficult to remember the source of information when we’re busy, distracted, or working on a complex task. (Sound familiar in today’s workplace?) And the more our attention is divided, the less we notice who’s responsible for the ideas that get raised. This explains why people are most likely to take credit for ideas generated immediately before their own. When it’s almost their turn, they’re maximally busy trying to come up with a good idea, so they never really pay attention to the source of the ideas that come right before their own.

To combat kleptomnesia, psychologists recommend reducing distractions and cutting down on multitasking. It can also be useful to minimize exposure to similar work. For example, comedy writer George Meyer avoided watching Seinfeld while writing for The Simpsons (16 seasons!). “I was afraid I might subconsciously borrow a joke,” Meyer told me.

Had George Harrison taken these steps, he might have avoided a serious financial loss and heartbreak. At minimum, when generating ideas, it could be wise to identify a few existing ideas that are similar, scrutinize the overlap, and give credit where it’s due. Otherwise, in Harrison’s words, “We all tend to break each other’s hearts, taking and not giving back.”

In everyday life, the most important corrective action may involve training ourselves to focus not only on what was said, but also who said it. As the psychologists Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen, and Guglielmo Calvini put it, “May the source be with you.”

***

Adam is a Wharton professor of management and psychology, and the New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. He intentionally stole this post (with permission) from a Wall Street Journal blog that he wrote. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://www.giveandtake.com

9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CUBA YOU WERE AFRAID TO ASK- from THE VOX

I thought I would re-post this lovely article on the Cuba Relations between the US and Cuba. It gives those of us born outside of the embargo era a quick but detailed understanding of what happened, who were involved and the results that continued until 2014. It gives the reader an amazing insight of political one upmanship on both sides of the isle. In the end this is 2014, and policies dreamed and concocted 50 years ago seems anachronistic in today’s thinking. It is the right thing to do. Lets hope Congress does the same, even limited end, but it must change.

Article taken from The Vox. 

9 questions about Cuba you were too embarrassed to ask

The US and Cuba announced a historic deal on Wednesday that will take major steps toward ending their 50-plus years of hostility. President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, spent 18 months negotiating the deal in secret.

This is a huge moment for Cuba, for President Obama, and for the US-Cuba relationship. But you might reasonably be wondering why this is happening now. How did things get so bad between the US and Cuba in the first place, and why has that lasted for such a long time? What does today’s deal actually mean for the future of these two countries? What follows is a guide to your most basic questions about the US and Cuba.

1) What is the US-Cuba deal?

President Obama announces the historic change in US Cuba policy (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty)

The deal between the US and Cuba is three things.

First, it’s an exchange of concessions: the US will roll back parts of its economic embargo on Cuba, Cuba will allow greater internet freedom, both countries released some prisoners, stuff like that. The terms of the deal are not, in themselves, revolutionary. The embargo is still in place, and so is the travel ban, meaning US tourism to Cuba is still largely illegal.

Second, it’s the beginning of a sure-to-be-difficult fight between President Obama and anti-Cuba hardliners in Congress over whether Obama can change America’s 50-year-old policy of official hostility to Cuba. Obama can only do so much without Congress’ help, and the politics of this issue are divisive, even if public opinion favors Obama’s ambition to re-open relations.

Third, and most importantly, this deal is a way for the US and Cuba to announce that they are done being enemies. The official diplomatic term for this is “normalize relations,” which basically means to become friends. That is the most important part of this story, and it is truly historic. The story of how the US and Cuba came to be such enemies, and stayed that way long after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, is a fascinating and complex one — and one that is widely misunderstood.

2) Why have the US and Cuba had such a hostile relationship for so long?

Officially, the reason is the Cold War, and it’s the explanation you’ll most commonly hear. There is much more to it than that, but here is the Cold War explanation:

Cuba became an ally of the Soviet Union shortly after Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 Marxist revolution; the US was not happy about having a Soviet military proxy 90 miles from Florida. Cuba was afraid that the US would try to violently overturn Castro’s revolution, and the US did in fact attempt this several times in the early 1960s. Castro even invited the Soviet Union to put nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter American aggression, sparking the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the US tried to block the Soviet ships carrying the warheads.

Those four years spent on the precipice of full-blown war settled into a sort of miniature Cold War between the US and Cuba, one that was a proxy for the larger US-Soviet Cold War and lasted right up until 2014.

The fact that the US-Cuba Cold War so outlasted the “real” Cold War, which ended in 1989, should be your first hint that there is much more going on here.

3) So the US-Cuba conflict isn’t about the Cold War?

Fidel Castro, then a Marxist rebel, in 1957 (Universal History Archive/Getty)

There are two other less-understood forces that have kept tensions going for so long. In some ways, the US-Cuba conflict actually goes back to before the Soviet Union even existed.

First, America’s hostility toward Cuba has been driven, in large part, by domestic politics: since 1980, when 125,000 Cuban exiles landed in Florida and changed electoral politics forever, the peculiarities of the American political system have made it important for presidents to oppose Castro if they want to get elected. (More on that below.)

Second, Cuba’s hostility toward the US is less about the Cold War than you might think. Castro’s anti-Americanism was couched in Communist rhetoric, but in many ways he was much more driven by anti-imperialism. He saw his revolution as part of a struggle against the US and its attempted domination of Cuba that was older than the Soviet Union or Communism.

In this Cuban view, the Cold War was just a chapter in the Cuban struggle of resistance against US imperialism, which is why the US-Cuba conflict outlasted the Cold War. It’s also why Castro is such a hero to many Latin Americans, who have long seen Castro as the vanguard of resistance against an imperial US trying to meddle with or control their countries. There is no question that, during the Cold War, the US did do a great deal of meddling in Latin America, supporting horrific right-wing dictators and militias, often against Soviet-backed left-wing dictators and militias (and sometimes against democratically elected leftists).

But Cuba was different: during the 1800s and early 1900s, many American politicians explicitly argued that the US should become a European-style imperial power, and Cuba was almost always where they said US imperialism should begin. Before the Civil War, legislators from southern states badly wanted to buy Cuba from Spain (it had been a Spanish colony for centuries) and annex it as a new slave state. In 1854, many of them issued an official manifesto trying to force President Franklin Pierce to make the offer, and to declare war on Spain if it said no.

The Civil War stopped that from happening. But, in 1898, Cuban political activists launched a war of independence against Spain — and the US joined the war on their side. The Spanish Empire was collapsing, sparking a debate within the US about the country’s place in the world: should America take Spain’s place as an imperial power, seizing Spanish colonies, namely Cuba,for itself?

At first, anti-imperial Americans won the debate, passing the Teller Amendment, which promised to support Cuban independence and not annex Cuba. But pro-imperial Americans soon prevailed, passing something called the Platt Amendment. It said that if Spain lost the war, then Cuba would be nominally independent but dominated by the US, which would have the right to intervene militarily there whenever it wanted. That is how the US “leased” land from Cuba for its based at Guantanamo Bay, which it still owns. The US also annexed other Spanish colonies: Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The US had become an imperial power.

In the following years, the US invaded and occupied Cuba twice — in 1906 and again in 1912 — to put down rebellions. It had mostly acquiesced its imperial powers over Cuba by the time that Fulgencio Batista took power in a coup in 1934, but the threat of American invasion still hung over the island. That history is largely forgotten in the US, but it is remembered in Cuba, and in much of Latin America, as if it happened yesterday — and the embargo is often seen as a direct continuation of that imperial past.

4) Why does the US embargo Cuba, anyway?

President Kennedy addresses the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to global nuclear destruction (Keystone/Getty Images)

The US gradually rolled out the Cuba embargo between 1960 and 1962 (the embargo is a set of really powerful economic sanctions, forbidding almost all trade and travel between the two countries).

When Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy set up the embargo in the early ’60s, the official goal was to weaken Cuba’s government to make it collapse outright, or to make Cubans so angry about their economic suffering that they take down the government in a popular uprising. It was the height of the Cold War, and a Marxist revolutionary, Fidel Castro, had just taken power in a 1959 rebellion against Cuba’s pro-American dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Castro nationalized all American businesses in Cuba — taking them over without compensating their owners — and declared ideological allegiance to the Soviet Union. The US immediately set about trying to topple Castro; the embargo was part of that, along with some really ill-conceived assassination plots and, in 1961, Kennedy’s disastrous effort, known as the Bay of Pigs, to send CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cubans to invade the island.

The US eventually stopped trying to topple Castro by force, but it kept up the embargo as a means to weaken him until 1977. That’s when President Jimmy Carter let part of the embargo lapse, in what looked like a possible first step toward dropping it. The embargo had failed, after all, to remove Castro. President Ronald Reagan reinstated the full embargo when he came into office in 1980, as part of his global effort against the Soviet Union and its allies.

Something else happened in 1980. Castro tried to relieve some internal political dissent by briefly allowing Cubans to leave the country. As a result, 125,000 migrated to the US, mostly to Florida. Many of these new Cuban-Americans, like the political exiles who had fled in the 1960s and 70s, hated Castro for what he had done to them, their families, and their country. And they voted on that. By the time that the Cold War ended in 1989, Cuban-Americans had enough sway to make the embargo good politics. The fact that they are centered in Florida, an often-decisive swing state, meant that a presidential candidate’s hopes and dreams could turn on whether or not his Cuba policy was sufficiently anti-Castro.

5) The US embargo failed to topple Castro. Why has the US kept it going anyway?

Cuban-Americans march in Miami in support of Cuban pro-democracy dissidents (Joe Raedle/Getty)

To understand that, it’s not enough to just say that supporting the embargo will help presidential candidates win Florida. You have to go back to President Bill Clinton’s first term, when a handful of decisive events set the embargo in stone for the next 20 years.

When Clinton came into office in 1993, lifting the embargo seemed obvious. The Cold War was over, and, in any case, the embargo had failed to remove Castro. But the Cuban-American community, which had grown prosperous since 1980, believed that Castro was moments from falling (Communist regimes across the world had collapsed in 1991 and 1992) and pressured Clinton against any show of lifting the embargo, for example, by generating fatal Congressional opposition to a Cuban-American State Department nominee who appeared to favor an opening. By 1996, Clinton had given up, and it became political conventional wisdom that the embargo was unopposeable.

But in those four crucial years from 1993 to 1996, neither the Cuban-American lobby or the Cuban-American vote, as important as they are, fully explain why the embargo continued to survive. Rather, the decisive event came in 1996.

That February, Castro’s military shot down two private planes flown by members of a refugee organization that had reportedly previously dropped fliers over Cuba, and four Cuban-Americans were killed. The shootdown outraged Americans and moved popular and political opinion against opening relations. The following month, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Helms-Burton Act, which restricted the president’s ability to end the embargo without Congressional approval and essentially promised to keep it in place, even if it didn’t work.

Popular support for Helms-Burton was so strong that Clinton signed it, even though the law limited his own authority over Cuba policy. Pushing the bill was a politically brilliant move by Cuba hard-liners, including the Cuban-American community, but it could not have happened without Castro’s decision to shoot down those two planes — and the moment of widespread American outrage against him that it had sparked.

In explaining his decision to sign the bill, Clinton later wrote in his memoir: “[It] was good election-year politics in Florida, but it undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes in Cuba.

“Soon, thanks to the US-Cuba deal, you will finally be able to legally kick back with a Cuban cigar and a glass of Cuban rum, both long banned, while you listen to this. It turns out that Cuban cigars aren’t just popular because they’re banned, they really are better — it’s been confirmed by actual scientific studies.

6) Why is all this — the embargo, the century of hostility — changing now?

There are a few reasons. With the Cold War over, Cuba is no threat to the US, and the US, having given up its imperial ambitions in the 1930s and its anti-Castro plots in the 1960s, is no threat to Cuba. The events of 1993 to 1996 delayed the end of the embargo, but it was probably inevitable.

Also, within the US, popular opinion has turned sharply against the embargo. People just don’t fear Cuba or Communism anymore, and they would like to go on vacation there. Even among Cuban-Americans in Florida, public opinion now supports, if very slightly, lifting the very embargo that community has spent decades lobbying to keep.

It’s not that the political exiles changed their minds. Rather, there is a new generation of Cuban emigres to the US, who traveled here for economic reasons — to work and to send home money — rather than political reasons. This generation is focused less on hating Castro and more on helping their families. They would like to be able to travel back to Cuba more freely and send more money home to the US.

And then there’s the fact that the embargo was always a dumb policy. It was not going to topple Castro, nor was it going to improve human rights in Cuba. The embargo is 1960s thinking in a 2010s world, and you can see that in the way that US policy toward Cuba is at tension with itself. The US wants to promote internet access in Cuba, for example, as a way to raise the standard of living, the flow of information, and public pressure for democratic change. But the US government’s own embargo makes that really hard to do, which is why you have fiascos like “Cuban Twitter,” in which the US secretly tried to create a Cuban social network to sow dissent.

Finally, Cuba needs to change — and its leaders know it. Since Raul Castro took over from his ailing brother Fidel in 2008 (Fidel is still alive but appears to be suffering from possible dementia), he has been quietly seeking some sort of detente with the US like the one just announced.

Castro, just like anyone else, can look at nominally communist countries like China and Vietnam and see that they have transitioned to quasi-free-market economies successfully. And, for years, he has been reliant on donations from the oil-rich Venezuelan government to keep the Cuban economy afloat — something that appears more unreliable all the time as Venezuela’s economy and political system teeter on the end of collapse.

7) I hear that Fidel Castro is a monster who did lots of terrible things. Is that true?

Fidel Castro giving a 1971 speech in Havana (Keystone/Getty Images)

Oh yes. Dropping the embargo is the right thing to do, and the US has a long history of doing bad things in Latin America and Cuba, but none of that should in the least bit forgive the Castro regime’s atrocious record on human rights.

Cuba, to be clear, is a dictatorship. Cubans have very few political rights or freedoms. The country has lost restricted free speech, punished political dissent severely, and for many years systemically persecuted and imprisoned certain groups, particularly gays and lesbians, often in terrible conditions.

According to Freedom House, Cuba has the most restrictive press censorship in the Western Hemisphere and is the only country rated “not free” in the Americas. All official media is owned by the state and controlled by the government. Dissident bloggers are regularly arrested. According to Amnesty International, protestors are regularly arrested and detained without trial. The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba says there were over 6,000 arbitrary detentions of human rights activists in 2013.

Once in jail, detainees face harsh conditions. “Prisoners often slept on concrete bunks without a mattress,” according to the State Department’s human rights report on Cuba, “with some reports of more than one person sharing a narrow bunk. Where available, mattresses were thin and often infested with vermin and insects.”

8) But this deal means that Cuba is going to become a freedom-loving capitalist democracy now, right?

Downtown Havana (ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty)

That’s the idea: that opening up Cuba’s economy to outside investment and tourism will help liberalize the country more broadly, as the flow of ideas, money, and people helps along preexisting Cuban desires for greater freedoms and rights. That’s also why one of the American conditions for the recent deal is that Cuba will allow wider internet access, thus encouraging the growth of a grassroots political culture.

But it’s tough to say whether this will work. While the deal will likely liberalize Cuba’s economy, there’s nothing in it that actually requires Cuba to become one iota less authoritarian, and it’s not clear that economic openness will lead to democracy. The record of communist countries that have opened up is mixed. When the US normalized relations with the Soviet Union, that opening helped along internal political reforms that turned the country into a free-market democracy, however briefly.

China and Vietnam, on the other hand, liberalized their political systems a tiny bit when they opened their economies, but have so far largely maintained single-party authoritarian rule. Cuba’s ruling political class, presumably, would rather be like China than like Russia.

It may ultimately come down to what the aging Castros, and the wider ruling class that supports them, want to do. Dictatorships that have wanted to liberalize, either because they thought it was the right thing to do or under internal pressure, have tended to be successful. Dictatorships that want to hang on at any cost are often successful, or plunge their countries into chaos trying.

One thing is for sure, though: maintaining the embargo and the official policy of US hostility was not going to bring democracy and freedom to Cuba.

9) I skipped to the bottom. What’s going to happen next?

The immediate ramifications are going to be a touch more trade and travel with Cuba (though most US tourism is still illegal), the opening of a US embassy in Havana, and the start of what will surely be a difficult but interesting period of renewing US-Cuba relations.

There will also be a political fight in the US, and especially Congress, over whether to end the embargo outright — something that only Congress can do. That fight will surely coincide with the Republican presidential primaries. While supporting the embargo is GOP orthodoxy, and many Republican leaders oppose Obama’s policy, national popular opinion has shifted in favor of ending the embargo. And at least one leading Republican — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — supports the opening. How the Cuba policy fight plays out within the GOP over the next two years could help shape how American politics, and American policy, change toward Cuba.

But the largest effect, and the most important, will almost certainly be within Cuba itself. The Castro government will have to adjust, if slowly, to a new world and to ending the enmity with the US that has defined Cuban politics for half a century. What that means for the future of Cuba and its people will surely be one of Latin America’s most fascinating stories in the coming years and decades.

EMPIRE- THE NEW “ROOTS” OF THE 21st CENTURY

Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) and Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) go head to head for the EMPIRE this January on FOX!

Nothing is more empowering, more enlightening, more entertaining or more encouraging than to see a series dedicated to the talents of African Americans in a vastly all white viewership. Empire The series will become the #Roots of the 21str Century!

THIS IS CUBA, THIS IS OUR COUNTRY, THIS IS OUR HUMANITY.

“Today, the United States is taking historic steps to chart a new course in our relations with Cuba and to further engage and empower the Cuban people,” the White House said in a written statement.

The beautiful City of Havana

The news today that after over 50 years the US is to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba is not only  welcome news of political weight but good regional and humanitarian news for the millions of Cubans estranged from their families. It  is good for the region as another one of our countries have a direct line of communication with arguably the biggest open market in the Western hemisphere. More trade, more open economy, more exchange of ideas, more jobs, more progress.

Humans, although the most intelligent of the specie are also the most stupid at times. Our emotions complicate the simplest of situations which is often aligned to our prejudicial and political interest. I expect to hear the emotional outcry of the Cubans in America holding fast to their vitriol, hoping it will somehow change anything and everything in Cuba. Their poison is only killing them. Imperialism has not worked. Sabotage and Non-communication has not worked. Cuba has withstood the resistance from the US and their blood money for 50 years. I have always maintained, a leader has to do what he has to do. Cuba needed Castro. Cuba needed its revolution. It has made them more resilient and  given them powers they did not think they have. The world has changed and continues to change. So too must be US embargo. It is nothing but an Emotional political non-starter accomplishing nothing.

Breaking the Hear No Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil deadlock is not only sensible politics, if there is such a thing, it is also the right politics. Change is often a bitter pill to take, but like all pills unless taken the pain never ceases. The people of the Hemisphere welcomes this decision and now watch as the US Congress does the right thing and lift the law of strangulation and oppression that has only oppressed its own people and granted the millions that have taken the desperate trek by boat and land a road filled with thorns and the uncertainty of survival.

Change can only take effect if the deliverer and the receiver both taste the same fruit from their embrace. Cuba is seen as a Communist state by many but to me it is much more; it is a country of 11 million people deserving more, deserving to share and exchange all they have to give. I have visited Cuba 11 times in 5 years and not once have I experienced a country of fear. So too are millions of people that visit as well. We all can’t be wrong. Cuba is more than  politics. It is a country  that is desperate to to say to the world, This Is Cuba, This is our Country, This is our Humanity. Open the floodgates of freedom and watch the miracle begins.

CAPTURELAND…SHORT FILM with ACADEMY ACCLAIM

A friend sent me the link to this shot movie and it took me 2 days ti watch it but after seeing it I can tell you I am so pleased to have watched the movie. Captureland, directed and produced by Nabil Elderkin was shot over 2 days, with a miniscule budget from his own pocket, entirely  casted with Jamaican actors in the beautiful Port Royal locale. The movie was inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela and the music of Jamaican reggae artiste Chronixx . It is beautiful, period. As a matter of fact it is breathtakingly beautiful, well acted, beautifully photographed and presented. It takes the viewer into the life of the rastafarians , their hopes and dreams but it also takes you to your own sense of purpose, your own Africa, your own Heaven and like the rastafarians you will be tempted to watch the movie again and again, hoping that one day you too can sail away into the sunset, heading for your peaceful place.

Ratings: EXCELLENT

CAPTURELAND

A short film by Nabil Elderkin inspired by the words of the late Nelson Mandela, and the song ‘Capture Land’ by Jamaican artist Chronixx. Captureland was shot in early November 2014 in the very welcoming and historic community or Port Royal, Kingston – Jamaica.

Presented by Montblanc, Capture Land was made as part of The Power of Words series. In partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, this initiative inspires filmmakers to explore the written legacy of influential figures as a source of story and using film as a tool of education. In its inaugural year, the series will look at the teachings and writings of Nelson Mandela as inspiration for story.

 

 

HOW TO RECORD POLICE OR ANY ENCOUNTERS WITHOUT BEING OBVIOUS

Found this interesting article on gadgets and apps that can assist you with recording any incident, event or whatever. Article from http://www.policestateusa.com/.

Technology is a double-edged sword.  It has enabled the government to become more intrusive than ever with its online spying capabilities.  However, cheap and discreet recording devices make it much more feasible to hold cops on the street accountable.

Police State USA encourages holding government officials accountable but advises everyone to research the laws in their own states regarding secretly recording audio conversations (Read more: The Reporter’s Recording Guide).  Encounters with police officers in public generally do not fall under such restrictions, particularly after the recent court decision in Illinois.

Here, we intend to look at the technologies that facilitate that recording.

Streaming App for Cellphone

Ustream is a cell phone application that allows a user to begin recording video and audio — and simultaneously stream the data to an online account — at the click of a button.

If you are in a tense situation with the police, click the app button and the rest is done automatically.  While running, it doesn’t look like a streaming app.

The video files will then be available online when viewing the user’s Ustream account.

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Preserves video even if cell phone is confiscated.
• Does not give obvious clues that the app is streaming.
• Reputable app with product support.
• Video/audio quality correspond to user’s phone capabilities.

Cons:

• Internet uploads depend on having a sufficient phone signal.
• May not be compatible with certain phone operating systems.
• Presence of a cell phone will always draw suspicion of recording.

(Read more about Ustream)

Clippable Surveillance Camera

The Veho MUVI Micro camera is popular among sports enthusiasts and those with the need for versatile recording options.  With a convenient clip, it is wearable on clothing or attachable to conspicuous objects — such as a vehicle sun-visor.

Its size and cost make it easy to acquire and keep nearby.  With the largest micro-SD card, the device can record 3 hours of video.  It even has a surveillance option which allows it to sit idle for 36 hours and then begin recording upon noise activation.

The major drawback is that if the camera is confiscated, the files do not have the benefit of being stored to an internet account.  The device is obviously a camera, but it is harder to detect at only 2-inches long.

Pros:

• Affordable price.
• Tiny size. (2.17″)
• Inconspicuous.
• Clippable.
• Surveillance capable.
• Easy to keep with you.
• Useful even if there is insufficient cell phone tower signal.
• Medium quality video.
• Reputable product/company.

Cons:

• Has the appearance of a camera unless hidden or masked.
• If device is lost, evidence is lost.
• Lower quality audio.

Purchase Keychain Camera:  Veho MUVI Micro Camera
Purchase External Memory:  Sandisk 16 GB MicroSD

Discreet Keychain Camera

This tiny recording device looks just like a vehicle remote-starter that might be found on your key chain. It’s an inconspicuous option for video and audio recording that is unlikely to be seized by police. To recover the video, the device must interface with a computer at a later point.  The video is stored on a removable memory card.  The price is unbeatable, and with a large micro-SD card it can record for 2.5 hours.

Even if an officer confiscates a a keychain from someone, it is unlikely to be determined to be a recording device and will more than likely have its evidence intact after the keychain is returned.

Pros:

• Low price!
• Tiny size.
• Discreet.
• Easy to use.
• Always with you.
• Unlikely to be confiscated.
• Useful even if there is insufficient cell phone tower signal.

Cons:

• Not easy to aim when the keys are in the vehicle ignition.
• Lower quality video/audio.
• If device is lost, evidence is lost.
• Cheap import item;  Little/no product support.
• Mixed product reviews.  “You get what you pay for.”

Purchase Keychain Camera:  YKS 808 Keychain Camera (Under $10)
Purchase External Memory:  Sandisk 16 GB MicroSD (sold separately)

Discreet Pen Camera

Stick this “pen” in your pocket for discreet video/audio recording.  It’s another inconspicuous option for documenting interactions with public servants that is unlikely to be confiscated.  To recover the video, the device must interface with a computer at a later point.  The video is stored on a removable micro-SD memory card.

Similar to the keychain camera or other discreet recording devices, this item is unlikely to be confiscated.

Pros:

• Low price!
• Tiny size.
• Discreet.
• Easy to use.
• Easy to keep with you.
• Unlikely to be confiscated.
• Useful even if there is insufficient cell phone tower signal.

Cons:

• Lower quality video/audio.
• If device is lost, evidence is lost.
• Cheap import item;  Little/no product support.
• Mixed product reviews.  “You get what you pay for.”

Purchase Pen Camera:  Hidden Pen Camera (Under $10)
Purchase External Memory:  Sandisk 16 GB MicroSD (sold separately)