On January 1, 2010, the flooding that affected much of São Paulo state destroyed much of São Luis do Paraitinga, a historic mountain town. I passed by there a few days later, on January 6, and spoke to some residents about the flooding, which destroyed countless homes and toppled the town’s main church.
Worldfocus has partnered with Pearl World Youth News, an initiative of Daniel Pearl Foundation and iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) to bring voices of young reporters from around the globe to our viewers.
Bruna Santos, a 17-year-old student from Brasilia, Brazil, produced a short video about child labor in Brazil.
In the accompanying text, Santos discusses the plight of children who work on the streets selling candy and other goods to supplement their parents’ income.
Child labor in Brasilia is becoming more common day by day. Children work mostly on the streets selling candies, flowers, stickers and other small items. Some perform services, such as watching over cars or washing them in public parking lots. Others shine shoes. Brasília has 2 million inhabitants and is the city with highest per capita income in the country, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Research by the Federal Policy Department shows that about 7,512 children are now working on the streets.
Most of these children come from low-income families, and their parents do not have a steady job or do not make enough money to take care of their children. So, the children work on the streets to help buy food and pay for bills….
Wesley Pereira, 12, and his brothers, Walisson Pereira, 14, and Wellington Pereira, 16, sell candy at a busy downtown intersection for nine hours a day. They have been working at that intersection for more than a year, said Wesley. They earn about 150 reais ($68 US) a day, but must spend 60 reais ($28 US) of that to buy candy for the next day, they said.
Worldfocus producer Channtal Fleischfresser spoke with Santos about her experience making the piece.
Why did you decide to do a story about child labor?
I had to choose from a number of issues: student politics, child labor, and other areas, and I was the only representative from Brazil to deal with child labor as a subject.
Here in Brazil, we often see children asking for money at street lights, washing cars, selling stickers or sweets. I thought it would be interesting to show other people. When most people think of child labor, they think of kids in sweatshops, not selling things on the street.
Did you have trouble getting the children to speak to you?
We interviewed three kids and one who was afraid of being identified because he thought his parents would beat him. My teacher and I went through several drafts of the piece to avoid exposing the kids too much.
Did you write the piece in Portuguese or English?
I wrote a draft in Portuguese and then wrote it into English with the help of my teacher, Claudia Batista.
Have you already decided what you want to do professionally?
I decided two years ago that I wanted to be a journalist. I’ve always liked to read and write, and I started looking for people who worked with this. I’m sure it’s what I want to do.
How long have you been working with iEARN?
I’ve been working with them since the beginning of 2009. It’s very interesting, because in addition to using a different language, [English,] you get to meet lots of different people, and see different perspectives you didn’t know about before.
This post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org
In recent years Google Maps have become a go-to source for web-based mapping. They provide visualizations of virtually any location on Earth to varying degrees of detail, depending on the region. But as Google has gained a foothold in markets around the world, adapting its versions to different countries and languages, an inevitable problem has emerged: how do you delineate international boundaries when they are disputed by multiple countries?
This caused problems for the tech giant earlier this year, when its Chinese characters mislabeled an area called Arunachal Pradesh, which is under Indian administration.
While a simple solution to border disputes would be to stick to internationally recognized demarcations, Google has taken things a step further. Rather than risk antagonizing disputes among its partner countries– each with its own market potential– Google has customized its maps according to different countries’ official positions on their versions of its Maps application.
“This does not in any way endorse or affirm the position taken by any side,” according to a Google spokesperson, “but merely provides complete information on the prevailing geo-political situation to our users of global properties in a dispassionate and accurate manner.”
Take, for example, the Chinese version of Google Maps:
The disputed boundaries between India and Pakistan are indicated by dotted lines. But the border with China (to the northeast of India) is nevertheless solid.
Consider, then, the Indian version of the same region:
Here, it appears the only disputed area lies between Tajikistan and China, to the north of India. Indian territory itself, including the western part of Kashmir which is often attributed to Pakistan, is not in question. Furthermore, the area between China and India, which in China’s version belong to China, now lies within Indian territory.
Finally, compare these two version to the standard version of Google Maps:
Here, all disputed boundaries are indicated by a dotted line.
These border disputes predate the Internet — and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Google has at least managed a temporary diplomatic resolution in cyberspace.
This blog post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org
Channtal co-edited this original piece for Worldfocus.
Shouts of “God is Brazilian” are sure to be echoing throughout Brazil today, as Rio de Janeiro beat out three other major cities — Tokyo, Madrid and Chicago — to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. The decision, which will make Brazil the first South American country to host an Olympics, was also a political victory for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who made a personal pitch to the Olympic committee Friday morning, just as U.S. President Barack Obama did.
Crowds in Rio danced and celebrated along the beachfront as the announcement was made.
Although doubts remain as to Rio’s ability to handle chronic problems such as lack of infrastructure, violence and pollution in time for the Games, most Brazilians, including Worldfocus producer Channtal Fleischfresser, were optimistic that the Olympics would bring jobs and prestige to the city.
This blog post originally appeared on Worldfocus.org.
Worldfocus producer Channtal Fleischfresser attended a German election party at the German Consulate in New York on Sunday and watched the results come in.
The event featured a panel discussion moderated by Garrick Utley, Chairman of the American Council on Germany, and featured panelists Klaus Peter Siegloch, bureau chief of ZDF German Television, Nikolaus Piper, Senior Correspondent for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Cathleen Fisher, PhD, of George Washington University.
Though the election results were expected, observers said the record low turnout suggests dissatisfaction with the current options in German politics.
This post originally appeared on Worldfocus.org.
In our second installment of our Worldfocus Google Earth tips, I’d like to demonstrate another workaround that helped us zoom in on a given region more effectively.
If you’ve ever tried to zoom in from a very high to a very low altitude on Google Earth, you will have noticed that it takes a while to process the zoom and adjust the resolution. In addition, on the broadcast we use color overlays on our wide views of countries, which we don’t need when we zoom in close on a city.
You can see the problem in this zoom of the island of Capri, off the coast of Naples, Italy:
A nice way we found to work around this was to create two maps: one of the wider view, and one of the close-up.
Once I export these two map moves, I bring them both into Final Cut Pro and dissolve them together. Take a look at this zoom into the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:
This post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org.
In addition to editing video and keeping track of the goings-on in Europe and Brazil, lately I’ve developed another pastime: learning how to use Google Earth, the alternately fascinating and infuriating global satellite technology.
Using the detailed mapping software, you can see into your own backyard – literally. You can look out across the Himalayas from the peak of Mt. Everest. But how to navigate Google Earth’s decidedly un-user-friendly customization settings to make them suitable for a television broadcast? That’s a different story.
An example: thanks to increasingly specific satellite imagery, we now have the ability to zoom into cities not only in the U.S. or Europe, but also in many African cities, where for a long time detailed satellite imagery was lacking.
The problem: as you can see in this most recent 2009 composite view of satellite images of Africa, the continent now resembles a 19th-century impressionist painting. Pixelated splotches of color dot the landscape, where some areas have much more satellite coverage than others.
Happily, we were able to figure out a solution to this dilemma. Google Earth has an underused “history” button, which allows the user to view satellite images from different dates in the past. (Naturally, the number of dates available depends on what part of the world you are looking at and how far away from Earth you are.)
So if I want to show a view of Africa, but want to see a clean view of the continent, without all the satellite clutter, I can simply select the earliest date possible on the “history” view – in this case 1930.
This won’t actually show you 1930s satellite views if there were none from that time, but in the absence of such satellite imagery, Google Earth will automatically default to a clean satellite view of the landscape. So with this simple work-around, we’ve gotten one step closer to implementing Google Earth on our broadcast. Stay tuned!
Watch this video for some more Google Earth history tips and an interesting visual comparison of how the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has shrunk over the years.
This post originally appeared on Worldfocus.org.