The full explanation here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2011/06/changes_to_bbc_hd_channels_on.html

The new location here:
Satellite: Astra 2D tp.50
Frequency: 10,847MHz (vertical polarity)
Modulation: DVB-S2, QPSK
Symbol Rate: 23.0
FEC: 8/9

Mimei will give “Haey” (no “r” and no “v”, because they don’t exist in Japanese) a chance, if he passes the “All Nippon Manga Mouse Exam”, which consists of ten challenges, corresponding the ten Japanese particularities that this short story amusingly introduces.

The rat failed (1) exchanging business cards, because he didn’t receive Mimei’s card – her “soul” – with both hands and a respectful bow, or at least he picked his teeth with it… Harvey loved the (2) hot springs naked bath sessions, scoring a 9. He then got confused with “no paper” and too many buttons, in the (3) Japanese toilet, making a splash worth a 3. Things went from bad to worse, when he failed the (4) bullet train, leaving at 12:32 sharp, thinking that “trains never leave on time”, like in most countries.
The (5) tea ceremony was a sweet disaster, because Mr. Danziger offered him some sugar, which is wrong to mix with Japanese green tea.
Being a small mammal, he scored an 8 on the (6) subway “sardine like” experience, but couldn’t handle the chopsticks for the (7) Japanese food test, finding them only worthy for picking ear wax. He made his point when he questioned how would humans eat if they had to use proportionally big poles?, but Harvey was too nervous and that showed when he tried some FOO-goo and thought to have eaten the blowfish’s liver and been poisoned, because he felt a symptomatic “tingling” that can also happen with spicy food, in general – which was the case. He scored a 4.
On (8) he knew he should eat slowly and politely, but the Japanese noodles were so delicious that he devoured them noisily, which is surprisingly OK in Japan – that was a 10! That (9) samurai performance and his deep knowledge on the way of the Japanese warrior, showed as he mentioned “Tom Cruise as the last samurai” and bragged about his own black belt, worth a funny 9.
Harvey’s (10) karaoke exam was OK just enough, with a push from Ryu Goto, the violinist. In no time Harvey was in a manga story and receiving hundreds of job proposals!

This was an imangaginative story, effective in highlighting some Japanese ways in a very short time.

All the five inns know as “Kurikoma Gotou” suffered more or less serious structural damage, but the tragedy mainly hit the morale of the not so young owners, and this is where this TV program shines: it captures the people’s feelings and involves the viewer more than most fiction “dramas”, no matter their production budgets.

We first meet Osamu Miura, 55 years old, 4th generation owner, running the Yubama hot spring “Miura Ryokan Inn”, in the Hanayama District of Kurihara City. Back in 2008, his business had a 130 years history… Mr. Miura’s buildings were mostly spared to the earthquake’s devastation, but his “lantern inn” lost its source of water, so he must find a new hot spring, relocate, or quit. He finds a new hot spring by the river, 300 meters distant, but he is struggling, and the viewer sees it: without income, he starts working part time at a theme park; he then buys pipes and pipe insulators, but the water temperature still drops from 98C at the source, to half of that on delivery – ok for summer, not ok for winter.

Tsugio Sugawara, 67 years old, running the Shin-yu hot spring “Kurikoma-so Inn”, in the Kurikoma District of Kurihara City, is next and reinforces the suspicion that the “hot spring inn” business is not such a “business” – more a way of life. He does not have the 10 million yens required to fix his inn’s damages and is hesitant on taking debt.
Like Mr. Miura, he lost his hot spring and can’t find a replacement providing over 10 liters per minute, or above 35C.

The human side of this story leapfrogs when Mr. Miura, despite all his personal problems, admits being very worried with Akio Sugawara, of the “Kurikoma-so Inn”, based on the Komanoyu Hot Spring, where seven people were killed or unrecovered. Miura and Sugawara studied in the same high school (Miura was one grade higher) and were in the same mountaineering club, an activity where the participants’ lives can depend on each other and on a rope…
In 2009, Akio Sugawara visited “Yudate Ohkami”, built 20 years before, as the guardian god of the Komanoyu Hot Spring. He prayed there for a long time, in the freezing weather.

This gradual cadence that unveils from a faceless catastrophe to a specific set of victims, having in common not only being in the same “business”, but also sharing attitudes since young age, gives the documentary a touching realism.

After all the sorrow, the program shifts to “there will be sunshine after the rain” mode: five hot spring owners formed the “Kurikoma Gotou Restoration Group”, having Mr. Osamu Miura as their chairman. They made an appeal to the Mayor of Kurihara City (Isamu Sato) for financial support and, hoping for the best, they are positive and planning to reopen their inns, having received many support letters from all over Japan.

This is an emotional documentary that also calls the viewer’s attention to one interesting niche of the Japanese tourism industry.

Nowadays, people can access localized weather information, worldwide, with unprecedented ease, for example using the Internet. Some might ask: how is it possible? This NIKKEI report explained a bit of what is going on under the bonnet, with the help of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and WeatherNews Inc., a private company on the business of weather forecasting, owning a 24/24 TV and Internet channel.

The JMA collects data from meteorological satellites and, every 10 minutes, polls 1300 weather stations, across Japan, measuring wind direction, daylight hours, rain quantity and temperature. Most data is fed into a super computer that outputs a “numerical weather prediction”, and then refined by human operators who, using their personal experience can make revisions to the automatic forecast, refining its accuracy. Tadashi Kikuchi says their accuracy is “86% or 87% that it will rain next day”.

Comparing JMA to WeatherNews is a bit like comparing machine vs humans… because the most interesting tool on WeatherNews’ portfolio is their network of supporters: people who input data. This data can be pictures taken with mobile phones, written weather reviews, and more objective metrics, gathered by handheld devices that the company provides to the supporters, in order to measure air pressure, humidity, temperature and more, at their locations. On average, 5000 messages/day are received. On busy days, the value might escalate to 20000 messages.

Accurate weather information is critical to many businesses and safety:  for example, convenience stores can tune their supply of umbrellas and food, roads can be opened/closed, and even health measures can be taken depending on weather forecasts – Ryoji Miyashita spoke about the correlation between heart attacks, temperature and air pressure: the lower the temperature, the more the body tries to retain heat, by pressuring blood vessels, increasing the odds of damaging clogs; the less the air pressure, the less pressure on blood vessels, eventually allowing them to over expand….

The NIKKEI report then switched to a brief interview with Akio Mimura, Nippon Steel Corporation’s chairman. He was brilliant on framing together economic vectors such as the Japanese domestic market, population growth (or lack of it), globalization, international competition, ecological production and technology. A decade ago, the company was the world’s #1 steel producer with an annual output of 100+ millions tons. Since the mid 1990s, Nippon Steel stagnated on volume, while China took the lead, now producing 500+ millions tons.
On technology, the Japanese still are the best: their production process is 20% less aggressive on CO2 emissions, because 85% of the consumed heat is regenerated. Thus, their strengths are “green” and “tech”. But, because of deflation and a stagnant domestic market, the only way the company can grow is by exporting – globalization is the way and a strong yen could be a problem.

This was a very interesting report, covering many contemporary issues in a short time.

For Portugal and UK, discount 1 hour: for example, Jeff Bridges will be at 13:00 – 1h = 12:00.

11:00 Charlie Rose with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus & Michael Specter

12:00 Charlie Rose with Andrew Ross Sorkin

13:00 Charlie Rose with Jeff Bridges, Scott Cooper and Maggie Gyllenhaal

14:00 Charlie Rose with Kroll Founder Jules Kroll & Novelist Gore Vidal

15:00 Charlie Rose with James Cameron

16:00 Charlie Rose with Director Jason Reitman & Father Filmmaker Ivan Reitman & Carey Mulligan

17:00 Charlie Rose with ????

18:00 Charlie Rose with Lee Daniels and updates from Copenhagen

19:00 Charlie Rose with Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk & Walter Isaacson

source: http://www.bloomberg.com/tvradio/tv/schedule_uk.html

“Blessing of the Mountain – Mt. Chokai – the mystery of nature” is a 45 minutes documentary about Mt. Chokai – the highest mountain in the upper Tohoku region, climbing up to 2236 meters above sea (of Japan) level. This is not a strictly geographical approach: the documentary covers one year of the mountain’s natural cycle and its great influence on the people who live nearby, evidenced by their millenarian traditions! The first minutes sing the mythological story of an ogre that lived “with one foot on the top of the mountain, while the other reached to the sea” feared by people until the day that it was exorcized and replaced by a blessing god. “En-nen Chokurairo Mai” is the name of this 1200 years old song.

Mt. Chokai can be a harsh place: nearly all the footage captures a strong wind and, depending on the season and on the altitude, its unique ecosystem has to cope with conditions ranging from 30 meters of snow to 10000 ml of annual precipitation. Water is the key element, in all its possible stages – the documentary links its parts via water.

The “forest of Agariko”, a forest of beech trees, is a formidable display of natural adaptation: each tree alone is able to store 8 tons of water and to grow leaves twice bigger in the North than in the South, because of the better lighting conditions. This forest dresses from green to red (spring to autumn), then undresses from red to gray (autumn to winter). Time lapsed captures of this continuous change are wonderful to watch, but the documentary is more prone to close-range shooting, with plenty of zoom-ins on leaves and flowers, somehow less effective than the “big picture” frames.

The villagers at the foot of Mt. Chokai cultivate rice. Each rice field must be flooded with an average of 6000 tons of water, but quantity isn’t a problem. The issue is the water temperature: below 10 Celsius, rice won’t grow properly. The viewer then learns about a could-not-be-more-natural technique to address this: stones were pilled at the bottom of the river, to “gentle and warm” the water. Although no emphasis is given to the machinery that the farmers use, the video footage shows some specialized devices – tradition and modern practicality coexist.

Mt. Chokai is of volcanic origin, with eruptions on record as fresh as in 1974… 30 km away from the mountain top, underwater, the sea bed testifies to both the region’s volcanic nature and water abundance, with water gushing from the sand! In winter, it is calm underwater and the viewer learns about this part of the ecosystem: about how fish lay here their eggs, about oysters and fishermen, and the plankton that will feed all the upper food chain.

Mt. Chokai is home not only to unique life – like the “chokai-fusuma” plant – but also to unique visual experiences, like its artificial light unpolluted night sky and the “great visionary”: the long, long mountain shadows that project themselves on the Sea of Japan, on summer evenings. This documentary captured a lot in its 45 minutes, but I felt that even better photography and/or higher resolution was sometimes needed, to properly capture such human and natural beauty.

The “willing hands” series is about Japanese people who bring help around the World. This help isn’t necessarily, or directly, money. We live in the “Knowledge Economy”, meaning that for the leading countries, such as the U.S.A. and Japan, Knowledge has become the main production factor, demoting Capital and Labor. It is easy to understand that having better knowledge regarding some process can guide to a higher efficiency in resources consumption, or to some other quality gain, and that the Knowledge per se can be translated to money, by its licensing, for example. Hence, sharing Knowledge is sharing wealth. What may be not so immediate to understand is that one individual alone can share relatively simple procedures and still have vastly reaching effects – meet Seiichiro Murakami and the “Himono” Japanese process to dry fish.

For three years, the seventy years old Japanese Seiichiro Murakami travelled to Negombo, southern Sri Lanka, to teach how to dry fish, using the “Himono” approach. Sri Lankans have their native process, but is too salty and less hygienic, when compared to the “Himono” style, in which it is very important to cut the fish open using the knife “not like a saw”, but like a delicate slicing tool. It is also important to drain all the blood and then soak the fish in salt water. To do this properly requires lot of practice.

When Siichiro Murakami visited Rani – a former student, making a living of dried fish – he found that she wasn’t doing it exactly as he had taught. More importantly, he understood why not and adapted his news lessons to better fit the Sri Lankan reality. It happens that a structure to lift the fish off the ground may be too expensive for Sri Lankans…
 
Along the years, Murakami learned and adapted the “Himono” course to include lessons on how to build relatively inexpensive support meshes, on how to dry fish with wood ovens (because of Sri Lanka’s long rainy season), and on nutrition basics, for example to raise awareness about the relation between salt and diabetes. This conscious adaptation did bring people together.

In 2008, the “Himono” master travelled to Sri Lanka with his wife. He met knew students, many recruited by the previous ones and he wasn’t surprised with their 30 minutes delay for the first session: “time and punctuality are elastic concepts in Sri Lanka”.
3 years, 350 students, their gratitude messages album and examples like Chandralatha, a woman who perfected the Japanese style dried fish and has been supporting her family on that diet, are reasons for Murakami to be proud.

This documentary is interesting, entertaining and touching. It is interesting to learn about the “Himono” process and its regional variations and alternatives. It is entertaining because real people always perform like believable “characters” in a story. It is touching, because it shows that knowledge sharing can still happen on a very basic level.

This documentary will last 24 hours… I’ll try to record it from its ASTRA satellite stream, but everyone can watch it online:

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Comprendre-le-monde/24hberlin/Le-projet/2806118.html

http://www.satcodx2.com/

Since I mostly tune the Astra 2 array, from western Europe, my starting point is:

http://www.satcodx2.com/0282/eng/

In relative terms, the satellite spectrum is mostly crowded of crap transmissions, like sales, x-rated phone services and religious brain washing. In absolute terms, there still are hundreds of high quality channels at the reach of my antenna. On the Astra 2 array, the gold goes for the (BBC + ITV)’s Freesat service.

What is Freesat?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freesat

What exactly is freely available?

The Channel 4 programmes:

http://www.channel4.com/tv-listings ,

the BBC channels:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes ,

and ITV’s:

http://www.itv.com/channels/

All these can be really GOOD!

Muitos não compreendem quão excelente é o Bloomberg. Só ao cabo de uns dias de visionamento comparativo com outros canais é que fica evidente que não se pode viver informado sem ele. Não existe nenhum canal, nos pacotes ZON ou MEO, que se aproxime da qualidade do Bloomberg. A informação Bloomberg é abundante, diversificada, rigorosa, permanente, realtime, *muito* bem realizada, e de cariz globalizado, com manhãs [predominantemente] Europeias, tardes [predominantemente] Americanas e noites [predominantemente] Asiáticas, com entrevistas em directo a algumas das pessoas realmente sapientes e/ou influentes, e sem recurso a técnicas de poeira-para-os-olhos, como pares de locutores a chutarem entre si a leitura de assuntos dos quais nada sabem e não querem saber, estilo CNN.

O Bloomberg também tem programas especiais e fins-de-semana temáticos, por exemplo dedicados ao negócio da Arte e ao empreendedorismo, com casos concretos de empresas de HOJE.

Agora vejo o Bloomberg [USA] pela Internet. Basta uma procura por “Bloomberg online tv”, para descobrir URLs para a emissão a 200 kbps. Se não fosse a Internet, seria o obscurantismo.

Como se escreve em “Freakonomics”, “o Sol é o melhor detergente”. A Internet é o Sol da Economia do Conhecimento.