Monthly Archives: February 2020

They Documented the Coronavirus Crisis in Wuhan. Then They Vanished.

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Two video bloggers whose dispatches from the heart of the outbreak showed fear, grief and dissatisfaction with the government have gone silent.

Chen Qiushi, a self-declared citizen journalist, in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 4. His friends lost contact with him two days later.Credit…Chen Qiushi, via Associated Press

By Vivian Wang
Feb. 14, 2020

HONG KONG — The beige van squatted outside of a Wuhan hospital, its side and back doors ajar. Fang Bin, a local clothing salesman, peered inside as he walked past. He groaned: “So many dead.” He counted five, six, seven, eight body bags. “This is too many.”
That moment, in a 40-minute video about the coronavirus outbreak that has devastated China, propelled Mr. Fang to internet fame. Then, less than two weeks later, he disappeared.

Days earlier, another prominent video blogger in Wuhan, Chen Qiushi, had also gone missing. Mr. Chen’s friends and family said they believed he had been forcibly quarantined.

Before their disappearances, Mr. Fang and Mr. Chen had recorded dozens of videos from Wuhan, streaming unfiltered and often heartbreaking images from the center of the outbreak. Long lines outside hospitals. Feeble patients. Agonized relatives.

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The footage would have been striking anywhere. But it was especially so coming from inside China, where even mild criticism of the authorities is quickly scrubbed from the online record, and those responsible for it often punished.

The appetite for the videos reflects, in part, the shortage of independent news sources in China, where professional newspapers are tightly controlled by the authorities. Earlier this month, the state propaganda department deployed hundreds of journalists to reshape the narrative of the outbreak.

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But the videos also reflected the growing call for free speech in China in recent weeks, as the coronavirus crisis has prompted criticism and introspection from unexpected corners across the country.

Several professional news organizations have produced incisive reports on the outbreak. A revolt against government censorship broke out on Chinese social media last week after the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who had tried to warn of the virus before officials had acknowledged an outbreak.

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Mr. Fang’s and Mr. Chen’s videos were another manifestation of the dissatisfaction that the government’s handling of the outbreak has unleashed among ordinary Chinese citizens.

The Coronavirus Outbreak
What do you need to know? Start here.
Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus?
It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.
How contagious is the virus?
According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.
Where has the virus spread?
The virus originated in Wuhan, China, and has sickened tens of thousands of people in China and at least two dozen other countries.
How worried should I be?
While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.
Who is working to contain the virus?
World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.
What if I’m traveling?
The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.
How do I keep myself and others safe?
Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.
READ MORE
“When suddenly there’s a crisis, they want to have access to a wider array of content and reporting,” said Sarah Cook, who studies Chinese media at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States.

The disappearance of the two men also underscores that the ruling Communist Party has no intention of loosening its grip on free speech.

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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said last month that officials needed to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.” While Chinese social media has overflowed with fear and grief, state propaganda outlets have emphasized Mr. Xi’s steady hand, framed the fight against the outbreak as a form of patriotism and shared upbeat videos of medical workers dancing.

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More than 350 people across China have been punished for “spreading rumors” about the outbreak, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group.

Mr. Chen, a fast-talking, fresh-faced lawyer from eastern China, was already well-known online before the outbreak. He traveled to Hong Kong during the pro-democracy protests last year and disputed the Chinese authorities’ depiction of the demonstrators as a riotous mob.

The Beijing authorities summoned him back to the mainland and deleted his social media accounts, Mr. Chen told his followers later.

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But when the coronavirus led officials to seal off Wuhan last month, he raced to the city of 11 million, citing his duty as a self-declared citizen journalist. “What sort of a journalist are you if you don’t dare rush to the front line?” he said.

In his videos, which drew millions of views on YouTube, Mr. Chen interviewed locals who had lost loved ones, filmed a woman breaking down as she waited for care and visited an exhibition center that had been converted into a quarantine center.

He was blocked from WeChat, a major Chinese social media app, for spreading rumors. But he was adamant that he shared only what he himself had seen or heard.

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As time went on, Mr. Chen, usually energetic, began to show strain. “I am scared,” he said on Jan. 30. “In front of me is the virus. Behind me is China’s legal and administrative power.”

The authorities had contacted his parents to ask for his whereabouts, he said. He teared up suddenly. Then, his finger pointing at the camera, he blurted: “I’m not even scared of death. You think I’m scared of you, Communist Party?”

On Feb. 6, Mr. Chen’s friends lost contact with him. Xu Xiaodong, a prominent mixed martial arts practitioner and a friend of Mr. Chen, posted a video on Feb. 7 saying that Mr. Chen’s parents had been told that their son had been quarantined, though he had not shown symptoms of illness.

Unlike Mr. Chen, Mr. Fang, the clothing salesman, was fairly anonymous before the coronavirus outbreak. Much of his YouTube activity had involved producing enthusiastic videos about traditional Chinese clothing.

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But as the outbreak escalated, he began sharing videos of Wuhan’s empty streets and crowded hospitals. They lacked the slickness of Mr. Chen’s dispatches, which were often subtitled and tightly edited. But, as with Mr. Chen’s videos, they showed a man growing increasingly desperate — and defiant.

On Feb. 2, Mr. Fang described how officials had confiscated his laptop and interrogated him about his footage of the body bags. On Feb. 4, he filmed a group of people outside his home, who said they were there to ask him questions. He turned them away, daring them to break down his door.

In his final videos, Mr. Fang turned explicitly political in a way rarely heard inside China, at least in public. Filming from inside his home — he said he was surrounded by plainclothes policemen — he railed against “greed for power” and “tyranny.”

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His last video, on Feb. 9, was just 12 seconds long. It featured a scroll of paper with the words, “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”

Despite the worldwide audience for Mr. Fang’s and Mr. Chen’s videos, it is hard to know how much reach they had domestically, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both men relied heavily on YouTube and Twitter, which are blocked in China.

But unlike the torrent of grief and anger online in response to the death of Dr. Li, news of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s disappearances has been swiftly stamped out on Chinese social media. Their names returned almost no results on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, on Friday.

Still, Ms. Cook said the power of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s videos, as well as the reporting done by professional journalists in Wuhan, should not be underestimated.

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She pointed to the Chinese authorities’ decision this week to loosen diagnostic requirements for coronavirus cases, leading to a significant jump in reported infections, as evidence of their impact.

That decision might not have come “if you didn’t have all these people in Wuhan sending out reports that what you’re hearing is an underestimate,” Ms. Cook said. “These very courageous individuals can, in unusual circumstances, push back and force the state’s hand.”

Mr. Fang, in one of his last videos, seemed struck by a similar sentiment. He thanked his viewers, who he said had been calling him nonstop to send support.

“A person, just an ordinary person, a silly person,” he said of himself, “who lifted the lid for a second.”

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Elaine Yu contributed reporting.

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past misconduct is likely to continue and that the estate assets and the interests of the beneficiaries must be protected.

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The executor has not appreciated, and does not appreciate, the responsibility of his position as executor, or the necessity of due and prompt fulfilment of the duties thereof

Mahalo

SIGNATURE:
Clifford "RAY" Hackett www.rayis.me RESUME: www.rayis.me/resume

I founded www.adapt.org in 1980 it now has over 50 million members.
$500 of material=World’s fastest hydrofoil sailboat. http://sunrun.biz

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 1:31 PM Ray Hackett <3659745> wrote:

Mahalo

SIGNATURE:
Clifford "RAY" Hackett www.rayis.me RESUME: www.rayis.me/resume

I founded www.adapt.org in 1980 it now has over 50 million members.
$500 of material=World’s fastest hydrofoil sailboat. http://sunrun.biz

past misconduct is likely to continue and that the estate assets and the interests of the beneficiaries must be protected.

Leave a comment

Mahalo

SIGNATURE:
Clifford "RAY" Hackett www.rayis.me RESUME: www.rayis.me/resume

I founded www.adapt.org in 1980 it now has over 50 million members.
$500 of material=World’s fastest hydrofoil sailboat. http://sunrun.biz

1million solar panels

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One million solar panels! If only we knew where they were…
Published on 12/02/2020, 6:00am
Comment: Pinpointing solar panels and knowing exactly where the sun is shining can cut carbon emissions by reducing the need to keep fossil-fueled generators on standby

Solar farm, Lostwithiel, south-west England (Photo: Robert Pittman/Flickr)

By Dan Stowell and Jack Kelly

How much solar energy is being pumped into the electricity grid right now? No-one knows! Not even the government, nor even the operators of the electricity grid.

The UK ranks seventh in the world in installed solar capacity – behind China, US, Japan, Germany, India and Italy, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2018 data.

Official UK figures tell us there are now over one million installations of solar photovoltaic (solar “PV”) panels. On people’s homes, on businesses, in community-owned projects.

They generate energy for their owners, but they can also generate excess electricity which is deposited into the National Grid network for others to use. Fantastic.

Exactly how much electricity, you might ask? No-one knows – most electricity grids were designed in the previous century when there was no need to measure “reverse flow”, meaning electricity coming back into the grid from your home.

This has consequences for the climate. In the absence of exact measurement/prediction of solar energy input, fossil-powered generators need to be kept running, inefficiently, so they can take the strain when the network is underpowered.

UK climate diplomacy ‘already happening’ for Cop26 despite leadership vacuum

So even if we were getting 100% of our power from renewable energy, we would still need to keep a few gas generators running but turned down, in case clouds happen to drift over many of our solar panels all at once.

If we could measure the solar contribution – or even better, if we could forecast it just four hours in advance – we could have much less fossil fuel burning as a backup. Forecasting for the present or a very short time ahead like this is sometimes called “nowcasting”.

It could save approximately 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year in the UK alone. Rolled out worldwide, it could save on the order of a hundred million tonnes per year by 2030.

Here’s an animation which illustrates the rhythm of solar generation, and how dramatically it is affected by cloud.

The video covers June 2019, and as well as the clouds you can see coloured dots, each one representing a PV installation which has made public what it’s generating. When a dot is bright white/yellow, it’s outputting close to its peak capacity.

So to predict/measure solar electricity power, what do we need to know?

First, detailed maps of cloud cover, like a weather forecast in extreme detail.

Second… we need to know the geolocations for all those solar panels. The government knows approximately how many they are, because owners of large PV installations have to register in order to feed energy into the grid.

But that’s only the large ones – only two-thirds of the country’s PV capacity.

But for those registered systems, at least, the government knows the locations, right? Well, not so fast. There’s address data, but that’s not quite the same as knowing exactly where to drop a pin in a map, as you’ll know if you’ve used GPS navigation in the countryside.

The biggest error we found in the official geolocations is for a solar farm inside a large Ministry of Defence site in Wiltshire. The geolocation in the data takes us to the front gate for the military site – not to the solar farm, which is 2 kilometres away.

So what can we do? How can we find the location of a million solar panels, a million needles in a haystack?

We’re developing machine learning methods to detect solar panels from satellite images. That could help. But to get that working well we need good quality training data, so it doesn’t solve the problem in itself.

Instead, we’ve found an amazing resource in the power of crowdsourcing, and in particular in the existing “open data” community of OpenStreetMap.

If you’re not familiar with OpenStreetMap – it’s a worldwide community of people creating the best and most detailed map data of the world, a lot like Wikipedia does for encyclopaedic information.

And just like Wikipedia, it’s radically open: the “copyleft” licence lets you download everything the users have created, and do all kinds of things with it.

Image credit: Russ Garrett’s Open Infrastructure Map

We made a call to the OpenStreetMap UK community to help us find solar PV installations, and they did amazing work.

Over the course of a few months, a couple of hundred volunteers spotted solar panels in the streets, or in aerial imagery, and added over 120,000 installations to OpenStreetMap’s geographic database.

We need your help… Climate Home News is an independent news outlet dedicated to the most important global stories. If you can spare even a few dollars each month, it would make a huge difference to us. Our Patreon account is a safe and easy way to support our work.

How many do you see, on your regular route to work, or school, or town?

A really important part of this is the openness and community aspect of it. The data, created by “the crowd”, are there for you or anyone else to use.

We’re still aiming to get as many of the one million as possible.

Do YOU know of solar panels near you? If so, here’s a really simple way to get them added to the map:

1. Visit openstreetmap.org

2. Use the search box (top-left) to find your local area – and zoom in close so you can see details such as buildings.

3. Right-click and choose “Add a note here”.

4. Type in some notes. Make sure to mention solar or PV in your text. It can be really helpful to add description such as “solar PV on the third house along this street”.

If you do this, you’ll be leaving a public note, and an existing OpenStreetMap user will come along and turn it into map data. But if you like, you can dive right in and edit OpenStreetMap yourself. (Just remember: don’t copy any information from Google or other commercial maps – there’d be copyright issues.)

Together we’ve found the exact location for hundreds of thousands of solar panel installations. Here’s to finding hundreds of thousands more!

Dan Stowell is a lecturer and Turing Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and Jack Kelly is a founder of Open Climate Fix, which uses computers to fix climate change.

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